Deserters from the Red Army during the Civil War: to the History of the Guslitsky Region in 1920
Aug 18 2023Posadsky A.V. Deserters from the Red Army during the Civil War: to the History of the Guslitsky Region in 1920 // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2023. V.8. №2. P. 36-45.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2023-8-2-36-45
Annotation
Based on the local historical data, the article aims at proving the importance of a wide range of factors in the analysis of the events of the Civil War in Russia. The author shows both the potential of local research for significant generalizations and the dangers of such extrapolation. In the studies of the Russian Civil War, cultural and historical features of certain regions are often ignored, although they were crucial for the new revolutionary life. The proposed issues are connected with a common phenomenon of that period — the peasants’ mass desertion and evasion from service in the Red Army. The article is based on the official correspondence of the Internal Service Troops of Soviet Russia. The events of the era of war communism strongly affected the cultural-historical micro-region with a rich history — the Guslitsy Old Believers. The author identifies at least three information layers in the presented description and concludes that during the Civil War, horizontal and vertical social relationships developed under the influence of both factors of internal confrontation and cultural-historical characteristics of the region. Thus, the research should focus on such features to reconstruct with a high degree of reliability both the situation of the Civil War and the social history of war communism.
Keywords
Local history, Russia, Civil War, Moscow Province, old believers, Guslitsy Region, Soviet power, desertion.
About the author
Posadsky Anton V., DSc (History), Professor, Povolzhsky Institute of Management — a branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Moskovskaya St., 164. Saratov, 410012.
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The issue of sources in the study of peasant uprisings (the case of the Rudnya settlement, 1918)
Jan 13 2022Posadskiy A. V. The issue of sources in the study of peasant uprisings (the case of the Rudnya settlement, 1918) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №4. P. 50-64.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-4-50-64
Annotation
The article considers a specific case of the peasant uprising in the large commercial settlement in the Kamyshinsky district of the Saratov Province at the initial stage of the Civil War in Russia. The author focuses on the investigative case against activists of the mass demonstration, and this source allowed to better identify the personal characteristics of the participants and activists of the uprising, describe their behavior during and after the outrage and defense strategies during the investigation. The personal features of the activists of the uprising, its course and development are considered based on the sources on the armed actions of the peasantry during the Civil War. The author argues that the most active participants of the armed struggle left their native places during uprisings. As a rule, there are no sources of biographical nature even in judicial and investigative materials, because personal data was poorly recorded by the representatives of political supervision. Therefore, the voice of activists is the most elusive, and the most active participants of peasant uprisings are poorly represented in the sources. Our ideas about the causes and dynamics of the peasant armed struggle are based mainly on the indirect and secondary evidence, which inevitably distorts the general picture and requires both archival and methodological searches.
Keywords
Peasantry, historical source, Civil War, Saratov Province, armed protest, uprising.
About the author
Posadsky Anton V., DSc (History), Associate Professor, Department of History of State, Law and International Relations, Volga Institute of Management —a branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Moskovskaya St., 164, v/g 2, 140012 Saratov.
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Oral history from below. Materials for the oral history of Russian peasants in the 20th century
Apr 28 2021Nakhimovsky A.D. Oral history from below. Materials for the oral history of Russian peasants in the 20th century // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2021. V.6. №1. P. 91-125.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2021-6-1-91-125
Annotation
The author analyzes the life stories of those Russian peasants who were old enough to remember collectivization. The large collection of such life stories recorded after 1990 is a rich source of materials for the oral history and other fields of study; however, this collection remains unsorted. Such scholars as the ethnographer Sergei Alymov, the sociologist Valery Vinogradsky, the linguist Leonid Kasatkin, and the historian Tatyana Shcheglova have done much work to collect these materials and to analyze them in different disciplinary perspectives. However, their descriptions remain completely isolated, and the author uses their publications to show the internal unity of their work and to explain that a single archive would be very useful for future research. After a brief introduction, the article turns into a chronological narrative of the Russian peasant history from 1918 to 1953, which consists of those key events/episodes in the lives of narrators that inevitably coincide with the key moments of history. In the comments to the narratives, the author describes the narrators’ psychological traits, their attitudes to the state, work and changes of fate, their connection with pre-revolutionary traditions, and their perception of the new reality.
Keywords
Civil war, NEP, collectivization, famines of 1932–1933 and 1946–1947, migration to the city, walking, court proceedings, infanticide, war, disabled veterans.
About the author
Nakhimovsky Alexander D., PhD, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department; Head of the Linguistics Program (retired), Colgate University. 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, New York, 13346 USA. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The small civil war: The events in the Penza Province at the end of 1921–the first half of 1922
Feb 17 2018Posadsky A.V. The small civil war: The events in the Penza Province at the end of 1921–the first half of 1922 // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2017. V.2. №4. P. 148-159.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2017-2-4-148-159
Annotation
This publication is a commented historical document from the fund of the special units’ headquarters. This document summarizes the events of several months (at the end of 1921 — the first half of 1922) in the Penza Province, which were determined by a sharp surge of banditry in a number of this province districts. The document describes in detail, with comments and notes, the stages of the struggle against banditry and its results favorable for the Soviet government. The comments assess the situation in 1921, and reconstruct the history of peasant uprisings in the Penza Province in 1918–1920 that expanded up to the half of its counties. The document reveals the motives of a relatively large group of peasants for participation in the bandit movement. The question is whether there were political motives or social hatred considerations in this movement criminal in form. The document describes the features of all types of peasant armed movements, such as the cluster of villages supporting the active core of rebels or bandits; and the ability of gangs to dissipate and restore strength for fight, etc. The author of the document shows that this active bandit movement was not described in detail in the reports of the State Political Directorate despite its dynamic development through a number of stages. The author emphasizes that the participation of some local peasants in the fight against banditry only strengthened the gangs, which indicates a significant potential for hostility within the rural society. The author of the document was a student of the Military Academy, and the document was probably his study assignment, which determines the historical value of this documentary essay on the history of special units of the Penza Province.
Keywords
history of the peasantry, Civil War, the Penza Province, banditry, special units
About the author
Posadsky Anton V., DSc (History), Professor, Povolzhsky Institute of Management — a branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 410012, Saratov, Moskovskaya St., 164.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Russian Peasant Studies. Scientific journal
Center for Agrarian studies of the Russian Presidental Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)
- Publisher: Delo Publishing, RANEPA
- Editor-in-Chief: Nikulin Alexander
- ISSN 2500-1809 (Print), ISSN 2949-2564 (Online)
- Founded in 2016
- Frequency: four issues per year (March, Jun, September, December)
- Open Access: All volumes and articles can be downloaded for free in the PDF format.
- Author fees: free of chagre
- Indexation: Russian Science Citation Index, Russian Science Citation Index Core, List of Journals approved by Russian Hihger Attestation committee (Ministry for Sciende and Education), Scopus, UlrichWeb Global Serials Directory, European reference index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIHPLUS), CNKI scholar
- Russian registration number: PI FS77-65824 27-May-2016
Hard copies of the journal can be purchased at the Delo e-store or by subscription in the "Press of Russia" Agency (subscription index - Т81017).
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