Russia has long been viewed as fundamentally different from western Europe. This difference was not only among the main preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian novelists and social thinkers, but it has often been invoked by historians to explain the failure of economic reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also to account for the peculiarities of the Soviet experiment. This view of Russia as different has persisted and is now often adduced to explain the failure of the Russian transition to a modern democratic state. Thus the rule of law, for instance, has failed to take hold in post-Soviet Russia because it is a peculiarly western idea, while Russians have deeply rooted anti-legalistic attitudes. The transition to a market economy has faltered due to the incompatibility of western incentives and Russian culture. And parliamentary democracy has failed to take root because Russians have always preferred authoritarianism.

But which differences exactly are relevant here, and can account for such strikingly divergent outcomes? The most popular answer to this question, both inside and outside of Russia, and perhaps the most prevalent among historians, is that the differences in question here are ultimate and irreducible. They are rooted in folk memory and folk culture, and are reflected perhaps most obviously in the organisation of rural society before industrialisation. Russian peasants, this view holds, were culturally imbued with fundamentally different behaviour patterns from western or central European tillers of the soil.