In 1917 Russian peasants had a single overwhelming aspiration – land. The Bolsheviks recognised this and, badly needing peasant support, on the night after the October revolution issued the Decree on Land, which abolished private ownership of land and called for its general redistribution. Despite this initial congruence of interests, relations between the Soviet regime and the peasants soon began to go sour. This was partly because the peasant had always lived in a self-contained world (mir), and strongly resented the interference of ‘outsiders’. Clashes inevitably ensued as the Soviet regime was self-professedly interventionist, with ambitious plans for eliminating what it considered the ‘idiocy of rural life’. However, the main bone of contention was the state's forced requisitioning of grain during the civil war. The serious resistance which this provoked was one of the factors behind the introduction of NEP and free trade in grain.

NEP was in some ways a relatively golden age for peasants. Although they were obliged to pay taxes, which caused some resentment, otherwise they were left much to themselves. Communists ‘were rare birds in the countryside of the 1920s’ and the peasant attitude to the regime in this period seems to have been one of indifference, rather than hostility. Since peasants were under no compulsion to sell grain, and state grain prices were very low, they tended to produce just for subsistence, or else to hoard grain in the hope of pushing up prices.