As a result of social historians' desire to investigate nonelite groups, the historiography of the Russian peasantry has burgeoned in the last twenty years or so. Numerous studies on both the macro and micro levels have illuminated various aspects of Russian peasant life during serfdom, the postemancipation period, and the revolutionary era. Others have begun to document the systematic destruction of the Russian peasants' way of life during collectivization, and the peasants' stubborn resistance to that onslaught. It is therefore fitting for David Moon, a recognized scholar of the Russian peasantry in the last decades of serfdom, to write a book that synthesizes the latest scholarship, both Soviet and Western, as well as studies by prerevolutionary historians and observers. The numerous citations in each footnote testify to Moon's prodigious reading and mastery of the literature.