Fedotova A. A. “Cattle grazing is prohibited after the bison was killed in Białowieża Forest”: Woodland grazing as a traditional form of the peasant forest management in the long 19th century // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2022. V.7. №3. P. 55-88.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-3-55-88
Annotation
The article considers one of the key resources for peasants in Eastern Europe — wood pastures. Based on the new archival materials, the author shows that peasant communities, in the spirit of James Scott, consistently sabotaged the state efforts to ban woodland grazing. During the long 19th century, the state was strengthening control over many aspects of the rural economic life, which gradually made peasant conflicts with the state forest administration more acute. The author applies the casestudy approach to the relationships of peasants and local and metropolitan administration in Białowieża Forest. Its unique feature is a long history of the effective protection measures which facilitated finding sources on the topic. The research revealed the struggle for the control over forest resources between peasants and officials as experts in the ‘rational’ forestry. In the long 19th century, peasants used all available means of resistance: petitions to the authorities of all levels, sabotage of administrative orders, bribes to forestry personnel, and direct violations of orders. The decades of conflicts prove that peasant communities only partially followed the rules introduced by the state administration which tried to change the principles of forestry management to make forests more profitable and ‘rational’. The administration spent significant resources to control wood grazing but achieved very modest results in terms of both reducing the number of livestock in forests and collecting compensation for the damage from ungulates. In the second half of the 19th — early 20th century, there were the most important changes associated with the more consistent and strict control over traditional forest resources, especially in 1889–1915. The administration’s reactions to the peasant petitions were sympathetic and positive at the provincial and ministerial levels, which can be explained by the shortage of pasture and fodder and the general paternalistic sentiments of the government. The administration tried not so much to increase income from wood grazing as to ‘accustom’ peasants to the idea that forests were rather private or state than public property.
Keywords
Natural resources, Białowieża Forest, long 19th century, wood pastures, peasants, Russian Empire.
About the author
Fedotova Anastasia A., PhD (Biology), Senior Researcher, Saint Petersburg Branch, S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Universitetskaya Nab., 5/2, Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russia.
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Worobec С.D. The influences of A.V. Chayanov and Teodor Shanin on the English-language historiography of peasants in the Russian Empire // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №4. P. 8-31.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-4-8-31
Annotation
In the 1980s, various influences were at play in producing a groundswell of interest in the Russian Empire’s peasantries, not least of which were the works of A.V. Chayanov and Teodor Shanin. The interdisciplinary social history movement, which eschewed traditional political history and its focus on elites, arose in the 1960s. The initial interest in biographies of Russian revolutionary men and women and histories of the nascent Russian working class and labor movement in order to explain the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were suddenly supplemented and eventually displaced by an avid interest in peasants. The article examines the conclusions that the first-wave of scholarship on the peasantries of the Russian Empire produced. It shows how the ideas of Chayanov and Shanin remained dominant but were challenged by archival sources, histories on the micro- and regional levels, and attention to household tensions, gender issues, craft production and non-agricultural trades, growing literacy, as well as out-migration and return migration. By the mid-1990s, it became impossible to talk about a generalized autarkic, insular, cohesive as well as egalitarian Russian peasant society with traditional mores and customs that rebelled spontaneously because of its immiseration. The post-structural turn had furthermore begun to chip away at the veracity of statistics produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to question depictions of peasants which tended to emphasize their dark, primitive, and seemingly backward nature. Although this turn almost dried up interest in Russian peasant studies, a steady stream of historical works began to appear again in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We now have a firmer grasp of an economically and socially differentiated peasantry, the contours of the normal political accommodation that peasants made with the state (instead of always resisting it), and peasants’ utilization of the legal system to challenge their neighbors and family members. Furthermore, we know how a moral economy operated between the state and its peasant taxpayers and how and why zemstvo statistics produced Chayanov’s brilliant model of the dominant middling peasant household. At the same time, the agency with which Chayanov and Shanin infused the peasants has taken center stage in historical analyses.
Keywords
Chayanov, Shanin, peasantry, Russian empire, Russian peasant society, peasant household, peasant commune, traditional political history, post-structural turn, moral economy
About the author
Worobec Christine D., Distinguished Research Professor Emerita, Northern Illinois University. 1425 W. Lincoln Hwy., DeKalb, IL 60115-2828.
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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
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