I would like to thank the Russian Research Center at Harward University for their support of this research.

1. See Simms, James Y. Jr., “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review 36 (September 1977): 377–398 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar interpretation of developments in the Russian countryside, see the significant and excellent work of Gregory, Paul R., for example, Russian National Income 1885-1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

2. See Simms, “Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” 394-396.

3. Chuprov, A. I. and Posnikov, A. S., eds., Vliianie urozhaev v khlebnykh tsen na nekotoriia storony Russkago narodnago khoziaistva (St. Petersburg, 1897) 1: viii Google Scholar; see also Robinson, Geroid T., Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 102–103 Google Scholar; Gatrell, Peter, The Tsarist Economy 1856-1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 102 Google Scholar. See Simms, “Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” 392, in reference to the traditional argument concerning falling prices.

4. See Gregory, Paul, “Grain Marketings and Peasant Consumption, Russia 1885-1913,” Explorations in Economic History 17 (April 1980): 158–159,CrossRefGoogle Scholar 162-163 for data indicating the relative importance of wheat to the grain market and 161 on the relative importance of spring to winter wheat.

5. See Lenin, Vladimir, The Development of Capitalism in Russia: Collected Works, 4th ed. (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960) 3:151 Google Scholar, and Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 78, on the peasants’ food budget.

6. See also Gregory, “Grain Marketings,” 153, who has similar findings, and Robinson, Rural Russia, 105-106. In aggregate terms Stephen G. Wheatcroft finds real wages improving through the 1890s; see his “The Agrarian Crisis and Peasant Living Standards in Late Imperial Russia: A Reconsideration of Trends and Regional Differentiation” (paper presented at the Conference on the Peasantry of European Russia, 1800-1917, University of Massachusetts, Boston, August 1986), 21, 27.

7. Only a small percentage of the total peasant labor force engaged in hired farm labor in any given year. Shanin, Teodor, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’ (London: MacMillan, 1985) 1:96, 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheatcroft, (“Agrarian Crisis,” 21, argues that such data are nonetheless insightful and “should not be lightly dismissed.” Wheatcroft also decries the use of generalizations based on aggregate data in the study of Russia’s rural economy because such data and trends “present a very misleading account of the economic environment in which the real peasant lived” (“Agrarian Crisis,” 27). He would prefer to disaggregate the data and ascertain the status of peasant well-being region to region rather than to base our understanding of the rural economy on generalizations about the peasantry in the fifty gubernii of European Russia. Specifically he argues that peasant livelihood was in decline in the Central Black Earth and Volga regions, that is, the area of the agrarian crisis. (“Agrarian Crisis,” 26-27) For the sake of argument, I will concede that this approach is valid for the study of peasant well-being, but it also changes the name of the game in midstream. It has been traditional for historians to talk about the peasants in general, for example, the peasantry, meaning all the peasants in European Russia, when discussing the agrarian crisis (see Simms, “Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” 378). Disaggregating the study of the Russian peasantry does not necessarily lead to disaggregating the agrarian crisis. Even if one concedes that certain areas of Russia were experiencing decline in the 1890s, does that mean that the agrarian sector at large was in a state of decline? Does the status of well-being in Appalachia represent the well-being of all rural inhabitants in the United States? As John Bushnell states, “no matter how intense the local agrarian crisis, peasants in those few provinces did not stand for Russia’s enormous and variegated peasant population” ( Bushnell, John, “Peasant Economy and Peasant Revolution at the Turn of the Century: Neither Immiseration nor Autonomy,” The Russian Review 47 [January 1988]: 79)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The regionalized approach to the data does not undermine the validity of looking at the economy as a whole. This view is shared by Gregory, Paul, who feels that Russia was a predominantly rural economy and that “aggregate real income is a reasonable proxy for rural real income” (Paul Gregory, “The Russian Agrarian Crisis Revisited,” in The Soviet Rural Economy, ed. Stuart, Robert C. [Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allen held, 1984], 23)Google Scholar. No one is arguing that neither poor peasants nor poverty existed in tsarist Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. If, however, generalizations about peasants and the rural economy at large are relevant to our understanding of the period, then aggregate data seems more to the point than does regionalized data, although both tell us something.

8. Robinson, Rural Russia, 103; Gatrell, Tsarist Economy 74; Lincoln, W. Bruce, In War’s Dark Shadow (New York: Dial, 1983), 18 Google Scholar. See also Gregory, “Grain Marketings,” 144; Gregory, “Russian Agrarian Crisis,” 26; See Shanin Russia as a ‘Developing Society’, 146, 148, for a discussion of the tax burden.

9. Chuprov, and Posnikov, , eds., Vlianie urozhaev l:i, ii; Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ , 41 vols. (St. Petersburg: Brokhaus and Efron, 1893) 9:104;Google Scholar 18 poods was considered average consumption for one person in an average harvest year see Chuprov and Posnikov, eds., Vliianie urozhaev 1 :ii.

10. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 76.

11. I am not alone in this view; see Gregory, “Russian Agrarian Crisis,” 26.

12. Robinson, Rural Russia, 103; Mackenzie, David and Curran, Michael, A History of Russia and the Soviet Union, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Dorsey, 1987), 449 Google Scholar; Riasanovsky, Nicholas, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 431 Google Scholar. Bushnell, “Peasant Economy,” 81; Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’ 1:155.

13. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, 48. The last sentence in this quotation reflects the attitude that peasants are inherently dumb. Lincoln implies that when peasants rented horses to farm their land the cost of the horse was greater than the increase in productivity, with a net loss of income. Does anyone really believe that the peasant would engage in such a course of action for any length of time without changing? Peasants are not that stupid. Peasants may lack formal education, but they are not innately unintelligent.

14. See Hunter, Holland, “Soviet Agriculture with and without Collectivization, 1928-1940,” Slavic Review, 47 (Summer 1988): 205–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that a shortage of horses in the 1930s brought about a decline in productivity.

15. Finansov, Ministerstvo, Svod: statisticheskikh svedenii po sel’skomu khoziaistvu Rossii k. kontsu XIX veka. Vypusk 2 (St. Petersburg: V. Kirshbaum, 1903): 8, 9.Google Scholar

Finansov, Ministerstvo, Russia, Its Industries and Trade (Glasgow: Hay, Nisbet, 1901), 222 Google Scholar. Finansov, Ministerstvo, The Industries of Russia Chicago World Exposition, 1893 (St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo Finansov, 1893) 3:xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii. Svod, 2nd ed., 10Google Scholar; Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, 48-49. Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 431, says that by 1901 approximately one-third of peasant households owned no horses. In Little Russia—Khar’kov, Chernigov, and Poltava—twelve horses existed for each 100 inhabitants but 50 cattle; in the Novorossiik region (Bessarabia, Kherson, Taurida, and Ekaterinoslav) 23 horses for each 100 inhabitants and also 50 cattle. Not all of the cattle were draft animals.

16. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 100; Robinson, Rural Russia, 98; Finansov, Ministerstvo, Svod: statisticheskikh svedenii po sel’skomu khoziaistvu Rossii k. kontsu XIX veka, Vypusk 1 (St. Petersburg: V. Kirshbaum, 1902): 52–55 Google Scholar. See also Nifontov, A. S., Zernoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroipolovine XIX veka (Moscow: n.p., 1974), chapter 2, esp. 240–270 Google Scholar. Raymond W. Goldsmith, “The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860-1913,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (April 1961): 446.

17. Robinson, Rural Russia, 82.

18. One of my fonder memories from childhood is riding on a horse that my father borrowed from a neighbor to prepare our garden for planting. One horse was used to cultivate our garden and our neighbor’s.

19. “Beseda,” Trudy: Imperatorskoe vol’noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo 1 (January-February 1892): 134; Shanin notes that peasants plowed other peasants’ land, Russia as a ‘Developing Society,’ 151.

20. Svod 2:141 -142.

21. Robinson, Rural Russia, 110; Gregory, “The Russian Agrarian Crisis,” 22; Wheatcroft, “Agrarian Crisis,” 15.