Imagining the rational landscape in late imperial Russia

Journal of Historical Geography, 26, 2 (2000) 273–291

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0215, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Imagining the rational landscape in late imperialRussia

Judith Pallot

In 1906 an imperial edict launched a reform aimed at ‘rationalizing’ the system ofpeasant land holding in Russia. The reform was based upon western models ofindividualized farms and notions of efficiency that were alien to the Russian peasantry.In pursuing its vision of utopian transformation, the state reinforced elite views ofpeasant backwardness. Although the reform had limited practical impact, notionsof peasant backwardness, symbolized for the intelligentsia in the agrarian landscapeof strip fields and common pastures, survived the 1917 revolution.

2000 Academic Press

Introduction

In his book Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the RussianRevolution[1] the American cultural historian Richard Stites draws attention to theattraction of Russia’s rulers to projects of utopian transformation. When the Bolsheviksimposed their particular vision of a socialist utopia on the peoples of the RussianEmpire, they were drawing upon a long tradition of state-directed attempts to reordersociety according to a pre-conceived plan. Stites characterizes tsarism’s excursions intosocial engineering as the pursuit of “administrative utopia”. The tsarist utopian dream,Stites observes, provided an outlet for the “constructive imagination of organizers whowished to build environments and move and control people like men on a chessboard”.[2] Rationalism and geometry were the guiding principles of tsarism’s idealsocieties. The ‘militarization of the landed estates’, the ‘paradomania’ of Gatchina,Catherine II’s town planning and the police state each attempted, on different scales,to fashion a well-ordered society in Russia through the manipulation of individuals’use of space.[3]

One attempted project of utopian transformation was the Stolypin Land Reform(Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma).[4] This was a reform introduced in 1906 whichattempted to ‘individualize’ peasant farming by giving households the right to disengagefrom the land communes (obshchiny) of which they were members. The reform soughtto promote this change by providing for the transfer of legal title to land currentlyheld in communal ownership to peasant household heads and for its physical con-solidation into unitary holdings, the process referred to in this paper as enclosure.[5] Inmany respects, the Stolypin Land Reform was a standard modernization reform. Itsauthors were convinced that Russia was destined to follow the same path as the moreadvanced Western nations—that they were engaged in a “wager on history”.[6] But thereform was more than a working out of the liberal development project; both the

2730305–7488/00/040273+19 $35.00/0 2000 Academic Press

274 JUDITH PALLOT

premises upon which it was based and the methods used to implement it placed thereform, if not firmly within, then at least ‘on the margins of utopia’.[7]

The immediate circumstance of the reform’s introduction was the social, economicand political crisis of the 1905 revolution. This revolution had brought peasants andworkers throughout Russia into open conflict with the Tsarist state. It was putdown with force, but the state was forced to compromize with popular demands fordemocratization by founding the Duma, Russia’s first national representative assembly.For Russia’s peasants, at the turn of the century constituting some 80 per cent of theEmpire’s population, 1905 was the culmination of half a century of disappointedaspirations and a worsening economic situation. In 1861 Alexander II had emancipatedproprietal serfs granting them personal freedom and some land, but the land thepeasants received was less than they had hoped for and, moreover, it had to be paidfor in installments spread over a 49 year period. So long as their share of the redemptiondebt remained outstanding, peasant households were obliged to remain members of acommune. This latter institution was analogous to the open field village in Europe, butwith the difference that in Russia the community of peasants owned the land jointlyand exercized a broad range of fiscal and land-administrative functions. By enforcingmembership of communes, the Emancipation Statute effectively bound peasants to theland. In the decades that followed rural population growth, soaring land prices andhigh levels of taxation plunged the peasantry into debt. Industrialization, meanwhile,placed other pressures on peasant communities, exposing them both to the possibilitiesand corrosive effects of the market. Despite pockets of prosperity, land-shortage, hungerand famine were experienced by many peasant households in the last two decades ofthe nineteenth century.

Discussion about the solution to the ‘agrarian question’ (agrarnyi vopros) took placewithin the context of a broader debate between ‘Westernizers’ and their opponentsabout the appropriate path for Russian development.[8] Initially, there was a concensusof sorts that the agrarian crisis could be solved within the framework of the commune.By the end of century this position was challenged from within the Westernizer campby some government officials and agrarian specialists who insisted that the communehad ‘outlived its usefulness’ and, worse, that its continued existence was a hindranceto agricultural advance.[9] Even though the outlines of a policy designed to restructurepeasant farms ‘along western lines’ existed before 1905, it took the peasants’ assaulton landowner estates to swing oppinion in government behind land reform. However,the reform’s enactment in the immediate aftermath of revolution affected its characterand generated expectations of it that went far beyond those the initial enthusiasts forfarm individualization may have had, for not only was it now demanded of any reformthat it provide a solution to agricultural under-production, it also had to promote ruralsocial stability, avoid proletarianization, inculcate in the peasants respect for theprinciple of private property and lead to all-round spiritual and cultural advance. PetrStolypin, who as prime mininster was responsible for the enactment of the land reformlegislation, made these wider goals explicit in his speeches to the Duma about thereform; he promised to transform Russia’s peasants into “prosperous husbandmen”and “stable citizens of the land” and, moreover, to do this is a mere 20 years. The ruralutopia of Stolypin and his colleagues was populated by morally virtuous tillers of theland who through labour and the exercise of personal initiative would be able prospereconomically and, politically, would become a conservative bulwark against re-volution.[10] The land reform was often described by its supporters as the ‘SecondEmancipation’; 1861, it was argued, had resulted in only a partial liberation of thepeasant since it had replaced the tutelage of the serf-owner for that of the commune.

275LANDSCAPE IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

Now, with the Stolypin reform, Russia’s peasants at last could gain the freedom theyneeded to realise themselves as ‘whole’ human beings.[11]

The realization of peasant backwardness in the nineteenth-century agrarianlandscape

In her pioneering book on the image of the peasant in nineteenth-century Russia, CathyFrierson showed how the intelligentsia’s understanding of the peasant underwentchanges through the nineteenth century.[12] The decades after the Emancipation saw theintelligentsia grappling with the question of the nature of the peasant. Previouslyunderstood in their relationship with serf owner, peasants were now cast in a varietyof roles, as ‘teacher’, judge or ‘man of the land’. In Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the peasantappeared as a primordial being, bearer of deep truths, and in Uspenskii and Engel’gardtas indivisible from nature, part of and subject to the environment upon which theydepended for their livelihood. Towards the end of the century these images of theRussian peasant were challenged by new understandings which owed their origins toEnlightenment and liberal conceptions of rationality and progress which had begun todiffuse into Russia during the eigthteenth century. Among Russia’s intelligentsia, theunderstanding of the peasant as ‘primordial being’ began to be replaced by anotheressentialization—the backward and ‘benighted’ peasant—which recalled the pre-Eman-cipation constructions of serfs as ‘pre-human’ or ‘pre-historic’ beings. Pastoral rep-resentations of peasant life gave way to narratives that stressed the poverty andunremitting hardship of the peasants’ lives. The peasants were not bearers of ‘hiddentruths’—they simply constituted a ‘grey mass’ (seraia massa). Their benightedness had,furthermore, been exacerbated by capitalism’s rise and the penetration of market forcesinto the countryside which had transformed the majority into victims of exploitationby speculators and kulaks.

It was the image of peasant helplessness that informed much of the thinking aboutagrarian reform in the nineteenth century and provided the justification for stateintervention in peasant affairs. Peasants, it was argued, clearly could not be expectedto escape from their miserable situation using their own intellectual resources; theyneeded those with superior knowledge to show them the way. This dirigiste assumptionwas shared by intellectuals of all political persuasions and constituted the discursivefield in which the agrarian crisis was considered in late tsarist and early BolshevikRussia. Thus, whether what was advocated was rural co-operatives, enclosure orcollective farms, the need for an agency external to the peasants to take the lead inrural transformation was not questioned. In the case of the Stolypin reform, it wasland surveyors and land organizers (the executives in charge of local land reformagencies) who were given the role of showing the peasants how to overcome theirbackwardness.

The hegemony of the discourse about peasant backwardness affected the way theagrarian landscape was represented and understood by educated Russians. The physicalconfiguration of peasant land was ‘read’ for the clues it held to the peasants’ thought-processes and social organization, and academics and agrarian specialists identified andanalysed peasant land holding’s ‘characteristic features’. Certain of these were foundto be wanting from the point of view of scientific agronomy; backwardness, it transpired,was inscribed in the very landscape the peasants farmed. Cherezpolositsa, or landfragmentation, became the quintessential symbol of peasant backwardness and ofthe irrationality of contemporary farming systems in Russia. Initial interest in the

276 JUDITH PALLOT

phenomenon was fired by mid-century debates about the origins and ‘uniqueness’ ofthe Russian peasant commune, but economic concerns soon supplanted ethnographic.By the end of the century, strip cultivation was understood by educated Russians asproblematic for agricultural efficiency. Household censuses carried out by local authoritystatistical departments from the 1880s had been recording the average number of stripson peasant farms with the peasants in some provinces apparently holding their land in60 different parcels, and in others having to traverse miles to reach their most remotestrips. This degree of scattering was thought catastrophic for the future of Russianfarming by agrarian reformers. They made their objections to the land holding practicesof Russia’s peasants using the concepts and language of ‘scientific agronomy’, supportingtheir case with quantitative ‘proofs’ of the economic losses incurred because of stripfarming. K. Ia. Vorob’ev, addressing the prestigious Moscow Agricultural Society, forexample, listed the ‘seven problems’ of strip farming in descending order of importance,substantiating his points with precise numerical calculations. A household holding itsland in 33 separate strips, he calculated, would lose 2·5 per cent of its arable land inboundary furrows; multiplied across Russia this represented an enormous loss of landto productive use.[13] Professor A. Bilimovich, a well-respected agrarian scholar, produceda similar set of seven problems and P. M. Lokhtin, ten.[14] First order charges againstland fragmentation were that it wasted peasants’ time in needless journeys-to-work,consumed land in boundary furrows and headlands, resulted in fields that were tooremote to cultivate properly and prevented innovation because the spatial intermixtureof their land forced everyone to conform to a common cropping cycle. Second ordercharges included strip fields’ neighbourhood effects (the contamination of contiguousfields with weeds, compaction by trampling and furrow stealing), their negative impacton social relations in the village (strip fields were thought to be a source of disputesbetween neighbours), their association with ridge-and-furrow (which was believed tolower yields) and their unsuitable shape for modern machines. A final catch-all wasthat land scattering forced peasants to live together in villages and, thus, increased fire-risk and epidemics and contributed to the negative social pathology of collective living.

While academics produced proofs of strip farming’s costs to Russian agriculture,popular writers employed more colourful imagery to bring home the problem to thepublic: “what sort of idiot would a landowner be called”, enquired one commentator,“if he decided to buy an estate that consisted of the same number of separate parcelsas some of the peasants’ land?—for the peasants this just seems to be in the order ofthings”.[15] Another recalled the image of “a frivolous toy” that had entered his headwhen he first encountered peasant strip fields.[16] The landscape of strip fields was linkedthrough such narratives to peasant infantilism and ignorance. This linkage was evidenteven in the comments of the peasants’ traditional liberal and left wing allies. V. V.Vorontsov, populist theorist and defender of the commune, admitted that strip fieldswere an ‘unfortunate necessity’ brought about by the peasants’ striving to achieveequality in the land they held; scattering took place so that every family would haveaccess to equal portions of good, average and indifferent quality land. Vorontsovunderstood that equality between land holdings could be achieved in other ways (suchas by adjusting the quantity of land allocated to a household to its quality), but doubtedthe peasants’ ability to devise such alternative systems of equalization. He observedthat since German landowners “had not the wit” to think of consolidating their land,it was no surprise that this possibility had not occurred to the Russian peasant.[17]

Bilimovich, similarly, located the explanation for the peasants’ adherence to strips intheir ignorance noting that, “in many cases the peasants are simply unaware of the


possibility of a more rational distribution of their land; even less frequently do theyknow how to achieve it”.[18]

Peasant ‘ignorance of more rational alternatives’ was not the only message to beread in the landscape of strip fields; scattering was also associated with ideas about‘primitive’ peasant socialism. The belief that there was a link between strip fields andsocialism was particularly strong in Russia because of the existence of communal tenure(obshchinnoe zemlevladenie) which carried with it the right to redistribute land—inRussian, peredelenie or repartition. The intelligentsia was divided about the origins ofrepartitioning and about the current status of the mechanism, since, as investigationsshowed, there was great variability in the frequency with which communes repartitionedtheir land, why they did so and the consequences for equality in land holdings. However,there was agreement that one effect of repartitioning was that it intensified landfragmentation in the commune. One of the summary volumes of the commissionestablished by Sergey Witte at the turn of the century to investigate the state of Russianagriculture was authored by the future executive head of the land reform. It contains aclear statement of the supposed relationship between land fragmentation and repartition:

As is well known, the obshchina striving for equality tries to achieve this by allocatingsmall parcels in different parts of the open fields according to soil quality and location.The process causes scattering no less than does partible inheritance, and, moreover, itsinfluence is permanent, and systematic—every new repartition involving land equal-isation, leads to ever greater fragmentation and scattering in strips.[19]

As A. A. Rittikh’s observation indicates, land fragmentation was not unique tocommunes which repartitioned their land—it was found also in communes in whichhouseholds held their land in hereditary tenure (podvornoe zemlevladenie)—but whereverrepartitioning was practised the ‘rationalization’ of peasant land was thought to beespecially complicated; the problem of strip farming could not be solved without asimultaneous assault on repartitioning.

There were, of course, other quite independent criticisms of repartitional tenurewhich opponents of the commune were quick to make. Illegal wood felling and pasturingof livestock on the estates of the landed gentry were proof for the latter that thepeasants did not understand the principle of private property. Peasant militancy in thelast decades of tsarist rule thus led to increased support, even from the conservativegentry, for the idea of extending private property to peasant farmers on the groundsthat this would teach them respect for the property of others. The economic case forconverting land in the village from communal to private tenure also gained ground atthis time under the influence of Western ideas about the beneficial impact of permanentstewardship on the productivity of the land. Evidence of the apparent deleterious effectsof communal tenure on farming was at hand to support the case in the degradedcommon pastures belonging to many of Russia’s villages, frequent epidemics affectinglarge livestock and the poor quality of breeding stock—all believed to be a consequenceof common grazing—and surveys that showed that peasants stopped taking manureout to their land in the year prior to a repartition.

With hindsight and the benefit of revisionist histories of the European open fieldsystem, it is easy to contest these late nineteenth-century indictments of strip fields andcommunal property rights.[20] The fragmentation so reviled by Russia’s agrarian re-formers can alternatively be understood as one means by which households living onthe subsistence margin minimized risks to their harvest associated with localized hazardssuch as livestock trampling, locust swarms, hail storms and fire. Or they may have been

278 JUDITH PALLOT

a means of ‘oiling’ land exchanges between households engaged in the demographically-driven cycles of shedding and acquiring land, a diversified ‘portfolio’ of strips increasingthe number of potential customers. Furthermore, when viewed from the perspective ofthe peasant household rather than from the lofty heights of macro-level rationality,some of the secondary costs of land scattering can appear less of a liability thancontemporary reformers thought; boundary balks and headlands could be used fortethered grazing and for access, a long journey-to-work was only a problem to labourshort households and the narrowness of strips to the small minority of farmers withaccess to modern machinery. Repartitioning, on closer investigation, can also be shownto have had its beneficial aspects. It could be used to reduce the number of stripspeasants held—not just to scatter them—or to redesign the open fields in order toaccommodate a new, improved, rotation. It also could be used to promote careful landmanagement, such as when peasants were allowed to retain the strips they improvedfrom one repartition to the next or when bad farmers were ‘shuffled’ to the outerreaches of the commune to allow the best land to be concentrated in the hands of themost efficient farmers. At the turn of the century, there were few people among thosewho considered themselves experts on peasant farming in Russia who were preparedto take a ‘peasant-eye’ view of the prevailing land holding regime; the linkage betweenthe commune, socialism and backwardness was firmly entrenched in the public mindand had become difficult to dislodge. Since that linkage was, in turn, symbolized in thephysical disposition of peasant land, it was a small step to argue that the solution tothe economic and political problems of the Russian countryside lay in a radicalrestructuring of the farm landscape.

The well-ordered landscape

The Stolypin Reform consisted of a number of precisely drawn technical and legalmeasures. Laws, passed between 1906 and 1911, gave peasant heads of household invillages throughout Russia the right to take the land to which they were entitled in thecommune into their personal ownership and to seek technical and financial help togather their strips into fully integrated, or enclosed, farms.[21] Initially, in the November9, 1906, Imperial Edict on land reform, the change was conceived of as a two-stageprocess; first, the peasants would take their strips in the open fields into privateownership (ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’) and, having done this, they wouldgather these into an integral unit in a government-organized land settlement project(zemleustroistvo). Later, under the provisions of the May 24, 1911, Law on LandSettlement, the process of title change and enclosure were merged into one, althoughit remained possible for households to take out title to their strips without having themconsolidated. There was also a supplementary law passed on June 14, 1910, whichprovided for the automatic transfer of title on land belonging to households in communeswhich had not carried out a general repartition for 24 years. Laws also were passedwhich set up the administration needed to carry through the reform; land settlementcommissions, serviced by Ministry of Agriculture employees, were set up in all provincesand uezdy (sub-provincial regions) in European Russia, and a range of other provincialand local officials were recruited to the reform.

The farm landscape these various measures sought to fashion in Russia was intendedto stand in sharp contrast to the current landscape of strip fields and common pastures.Its iconographic form was the khutor landscape; a chequer-board pattern of enclosedfarms, each a perfect square, connected by a grid iron network of roads. Khutora were


fully integrated farm units in which all a peasant’s needs in arable, pasture and meadowland were satisfied within its boundaries. In the khutor landscape there would be nospaces for collective agricultural pursuits, dwellings and outbuildings would be dispersedand the village as a unit of settlement would disappear. The landscape of the reformers’imaginings was thus a well-ordered landscape characterized by physical partition andseparation with every farm occupying its own, clearly-defined, separate space. Farmersin this imaginary landscape would have little ‘horizontal vision’, but would themselvesbe subject to maximum ‘vertical visibility’ as they became easily identifiable targets forinvestigation, enumeration and improvement. Other reforms in late tsarist Russiasimilarly had the effect of subjecting peasants to a new classificatory order—theeducational reforms, zemstva household censuses and social agronomy[22]—but the landreform was unique in its manipulation of the peasants’ use of space to this end.Furthermore, the reform constituted a direct attack on the fundamental institutions ofpeasant society, such as commune and household. This iconoclastic element in thereform was the state’s answer to the involvement of the commune in mobilizing peasantsagainst the gentry in 1905. It provides a bridge linking the Stolypin Reform to therevolutionary utopias of 1917 and after.

Among the ‘texts’ that can be read for the utopianism and iconoclasm of the StolypinLand Reform are the circulars and memoranda that passed from the reform centre toits local agents (the permanent members of land settlement commissions, land captainsand land surveyors) who were charged with the task of familiarizing the peasants withenclosure and providing them with the technical and legal means to gather in theirstrips. Local land reform agents received instructions from the centre about the sortsof changes they were supposed to introduce into the village, what they had to avoid,and how their efforts were to be prioritized. They were left in no doubt that the physicalseparation of peasant from peasant was the priority of the reform. The priorities werecodified in a supplement to the 1911 Law on Land Settlement as the ‘technicalinstructions’ which contained a list of enclosed farm types ranked in order of priority.There were two basic types identified: khutora, farms that approximated as nearly aspossible to a square and consisted of a single parcel of land incorporating a house andgarden plot; and otruba, farms consisting of a single parcel of land that was physicallydetached from the house and garden plot. These two types were further sub-dividedinto three and two sub-groups, respectively, according to the configuration of theland and degree of land use integration achieved. The instructions also containedrecommendations about how local agents should deal with a range of problems thatmight arise in partitioning land. Principal among these was the fate of common-useresources, such as permanent pastures, and the untangling of complex patterns ofexisting land use which made full farm integration difficult to achieve.[23]

The careful detail with which types of enclosed farm were distinguished one fromanother in the technical instructions reveals the importance the reform administrationattached to classificatory order. While some of the distinctions the centre identifiedseem of little relevance when viewed from the perspective of the potential for agrarianimprovement, they were significant in relation to the reform’s other aims. The rankings,for example, underscored the importance the reform organization placed on the physicaldispersal of peasant farms; thus, a khutor that failed to unite all types of farm landinto a single parcel—meadow, pasture and arable—was given a higher ranking thanan otrub that did achieve such full integration. Arguably, ‘scientific agronomy’ couldbe just as well served by the latter as the former, but what made it less desirable fromthe point of view of the land reform’s goal was that it left the peasants’ dwellings inthe village. The otrub type of enclosed farm, according to the instructions, was a last

280 JUDITH PALLOT

resort to be formed only when physical conditions made khutora difficult and preferablyimplanted in new settlements (otrubnie poselki) hived off from a parent village, ratherthan fashioned around the existing settled area.[24] In an early draft of the ‘technicalinstructions’, the formation of otruba other than in conjunction with the founding ofa new settlement had, in fact, been excluded from the list of acceptable types of enclosedfarms:

If it is impossible to form the first category (of khutor), then the second must be formed;but if the second is impossible then the third, and only when none of the enumeratedcategories of khutor can be adopted is it appropriate to resort to the otrub settlementsystem (posel’kaia sistema). With this latter system it is better to have as few householdsas possible in the settlement.[25]

Among the various types of enclosed farms that could be formed, only khutora wereprotected against further reorganizations. ‘Lesser’ forms were always at risk of beingincorporated into future projects designed to achieve a higher degree of land useintegration.

The instructions sent to land reform agents in the localities did not stop at dis-tinguishing between different general types of farm. Local agents were also apprized ofthe desirable shape and configuration of land on the new farms; no angle on a farmboundary, for example, was to be less than 45 degrees and the length-to-width ratio ofeach farm was not to exceed 5:1. The preferred position of the peasant’s dwelling waseven a matter for recommendation; it was to be in the centre of the khutor, “so thatthe farmer’s wife can call her husband for lunch”.[26] This was social engineering on agrand scale—no longer were peasants to take lunch together in the fields, they were toreturn home to their wives. The integration of land, such as pastures and scrub, intoenclosed farms by means of substituting one type of land for another was also a matterfor recommendation. Where such substitutions were resisted by the peasants, as theyoften were, local land reform agents were instructed that dividing the commons intodiscrete parcels, one for each household, was preferable to leaving them in collectiveuse. In 1915, P. P. Zubovskii, recently promoted head of the land reform administration,was arguing that it was better to postpone a land settlement project than allow peasantsto keep any land in common use.[27] Zubovskii’s predecessor, A. A. Rittikh, had beenmore inclined to compromise with peasant wishes, but, even so, he urged his localagents to divide the commons whenever circumstances suggested this was possible.[28]

An official review of the first four years of the land reform reaffirmed its priorities:

The most satisfactory land reorganisation is the consolidation of the peasants’ allotmentland (nadel) in whole villages into khutora involving the physical removal of the houseand garden plot onto new holdings made out for each household and including theland formerly under the settled area in the general redistribution.[29]

Visual representations of the well-ordered landscape

The elaboration of the details of the khutor landscape was in large part the brain-childof A. A. Kofod, a naturalized Dane who became head of the land reform’s inspectorate.It was he who drafted the instructions about land settlement ‘technique’ for localcommissions and, as head of the land reform inspectorate, he was able to influencepractice at the local level. Kofod was the author of treatizes on enclosure aimed at theeducated public, the peasants and local reform activists. One of the most widelydistributed of his publications was a pamphlet commissioned in 1907 by the reform


administration. Khutorskoe Razselenie (The Khutor System of Settlement), which wasproduced in half a million copies in the Russian, Lithuanian and Tartar languages,contained a clear exposition of the superiority of the khutor over other organizationaltypes of farms that was supposed to be easily comprehended by a peasant audience.[30]

Kofod’s general attitude to the work of the land reform can be summarized by hisaddress to an Imperial Free Economic Society seminar in 1909 when he argued, nowfor an academic audience, the case for a radical approach:

We can be absolutely sure. . .the more radical the land consolidation carried out, themore rapidly it will stimulate an improvement in the well-being of the population. . .thefewer the concessions we make to the demands of the masses to deviate from technicallyperfect enclosure, the more successful ultimately we will be, and the more the peoplewill respect the activities of the land reform commissions.[31]

The impact of Kofod’s ideas must not be exaggerated—his radicalism was not sharedby all his senior colleagues and land organizers and surveyors working with the peasantswere subject to a variety of influences, in addition to his. However, Kofod was theofficial spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture on all matters to do with the technicalside of land settlement and, as such, authored the reform’s public transcript. Wheneverquestions about the physical restructuring of peasant farms were raised in the publicarena, it was Kofod who provided the answers and explanations.

In all his publications, whether for specialist or more popular audiences, Kofod madeuse of plans and diagrams of different types of land holding system to drive theargument in favour of radical enclosure home. These cartographic representations ofenclosure became central to the reform administration’s propaganda effort. His firstuse of enclosure plans was in a two volume book summarizing his researches among‘spontaneously formed’ khutora in the western provinces, Khutora on Peasant AllotmentLand.[32] In Volynia, Kovno, Vil’no, Mogilev, Vitebsk and Zhitomir provinces peasantcommunities had begun enclosing their land in the years prior to the enactment of theStolypin reform. In presenting his research, Kofod listed all the villages which hadenclosed their land and wrote a commentary on each. Some were accompanied by aground plan of the enclosures, which Kofod used to illustrate their technical strengthsand weaknesses. There were few enclosures that earned Kofod’s unreserved seal ofapproval. One of which he did approve was the enclosure into eleven khutora of theland of Trumpaitse village, Kovno, the ground plan of which, reproduced in Figure 1,is striking for its ‘economy’ of representation. The essential feature of peasant farms,this image argues, is their configuration—nothing else about them apparently matters.Most enclosures in the western provinces were, in Kofod’s assessment, deficient in somerespect, either because they failed to achieve a full integration of land use or becausethey resulted in ‘inappropriately shaped’ farms. Villages such as Froly in Vitebskprovince, reproduced in Figure 2, was a ‘neudachnaia razverstka’ (an unsatisfactoryreorganization).[33] According to Kofod, there were two problems with the configurationof land in the village; first, in order to remain in their existing settlement the peasantshad enclosed land so that it radiated out from each peasant’s dwelling in a star-shaped arrangement and, second, land that had been purchased by the commune wasconsolidated separately from the peasant allotment (nadel).[34] The resulting wedge-shaped khutora, each consisting of two land parcels, violated the principles of ‘correct’enclosure. Kofod claimed to have proof that such arrangements did not have the samepositive impact on farm improvement as when full integration into a square farm wasachieved:

282 JUDITH PALLOT

Figure 1. Trumpaitse village, Shavel’skii county, Kovno province. Map of khutora fashioned outof village land. Source: A. A. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’nykh zemliakh, Vol. I (St

Petersburg, 1905) 371.

On farms where land has been re-organised so that it abuts onto the peasants’ farmsteadsin the village—in other words, as found in most old enclosures (in the region)—nosubstantive improvements can be observed in the peasant farm economy. . .the positionof the peasant can even be worsened by such reorganisations.[35]

Such, for example, was Kofod’s verdict on the longitudinal and multi-parcel enclosuresin Radovicha village, Volynia, shown in Figure 3.

Kofod’s two volume description of enclosures in the western provinces was apainstaking argument for government intervention in enclosure; the message containedin the densely packed, repetitive, narrative and supporting cartographic representationswas that, left to their own devices, the peasants could not get enclosure right. Heattributed the tendency for the peasants to author defective enclosures either to their‘lack of development’ or to their attempts to avoid the cost of removal and reconstruction


Figure 2. Froly village, Vitebsk province. Map of khutora fashioned out of village land. Source:A. A. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’nykh zemliakh, Vol. I (St Petersburg 1905) 561.

of their farm buildings and dwellings at a new site outside the village.[36] He did notadmit the possibility that the peasants might have a legitimate preference for villageliving. Kofod was reluctant to apportion too much blame to the land surveyors whowere occasionally employed by the peasants to enclose their land:

The land surveyors must carry some of the blame for such inefficient reorganisations ofthe land—they should have been able to persuade the peasants against such inconvenientarrangements. But the main fault lies with the peasants themselves and with theirleaders, because the outline plans of the enclosure are already decided upon before thehiring of the land surveyors, who then have little opportunity to make more convenientkhutor farms.[37]

The vocabulary Kofod used to describe the western khutora was rich in binary opposites;enclosures were described as “correct”/“incorrect”, “convenient”/“inconvenient”, “satis-factory”/“unsatisfactory”; “good”/“bad”, “weak”/“strong” or, even, “dangerous” (vred-noe). There was no continuum of forms; enclosed farms were either correctly configuredor not. Even though Kofod was occasionally the butt of ridicule for his ‘liking forsquares’[38] and there were khutor sceptics at all levels in the administration, thevocabulary of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ forms was, nevertherless, internalized by thereform organization. Otruba which turned out to be by far the most common type ofenclosed farm to appear in the countryside after 1906 were never described in officialliterature as anything other than a lesser form of enclosed farm whose choice inpreference to khutora in any enclosure project had to be explained.

In a few places in Khutora on Peasant Allotment Land Kofod used the device ofjuxtaposing ground plans made of peasant land before enclosure with the ground plansof the same village after enclosure in order to demonstrate the improvement suchreorganizations could bring about. Such ‘before’ and ‘after’ plans came to occupy aspecial place in official publications on the reform; they conveyed a clear message of

284 JUDITH PALLOT

Figure 3. Rodovicha village, Vladimiro-volynskii county, Volynia. Map of Khutora fashionedout of village land. Source: Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’nykh zemliakh, Vol. I (St

Petersburg, 1905) 197.

radical transformation in the countryside, more eloquently, for being visual, than thetables of statistics which the administration also produced. The amount of publicityproduced to justify the land reform was unprecedented in the history of tsarist policy-making and was necessitated by the opposition to enclosure by the Ministry ofFinance.[39] It was important for the administration to win support in St Petersburg byshowing that the measures it was promoting in the countryside were proportional tothe severity of the agrarian crisis and that state involvement in the transformation wasa continuing necessity. Plans of villages contrasting the layout of fields before and afterthe intervention of the land reform agents conveyed both these messages in a direct


way. They gave the educated public the opportunity to ‘see’ for themselves the changesbeing effected in Russia’s villages. The comparisons were dramatic. ‘Before’ plansshowed a multitude of strips dividing the open fields and usually they picked out thestrips of a single peasant farmer so the reader could count for him or herself in justhow many parcels a peasant held his land in the commune. The khutor landscape ofthe ‘after’ plans was altogether more tidy; readers could see the orderly partition ofland into near square farms and observe the fate of the peasant’s land that had beenshown in the ‘before’ plan. The reader could also learn from these plans the year inwhich the transformation took place, sometimes the name of the land surveyor‘responsible’ for the enclosure and details of the number of households and area ofland involved.

Figure 4, which is typical of the genre, is taken from the anniversary volume, LandSettlement, 1906–1910 (Zemleustroistvo 1906–1910) which was produced by the reformadministration to celebrate the first four years of the operation of the reform.[40] Thiswas one of a large number of such plans contained in the volume, drawn from differentprovinces of Russia. The plans selected showed different types of enclosures; forexample, there were consolidations into otruba and enclosures in which householdswere allocated two parcels of land under different uses (usually arable and meadow) butno plans representing ‘incorrect’ star-shaped or longitudinal enclosures were included.Although it was difficult to represent the changes taking place in the countrysidephotographically, the 1911 volume did include photographs of the buildings located onenclosed farms. Without exception these were of newly constructed dwellings and barnson khutora or new otrubnie poselki. One pair of photographs was included in the volumeshowing two adjacent fields. In the first photograph, the land was being grazed byhealthy-looking cattle and had been recently cleared of stones; these were gathered intopiles ready to be carted away. In the second photograph, the land was strewn withstones, had a thin grass cover and no grazing animals. The administration was confidentthat the public would decode these photographs in the manner intended as they hadthe simplest of captions; the first was labelled “land belonging to a khutor farmer in StPetersburg uezd” and the second, “land belonging to the neighbouring ordinary peasantfarmer”. What the processes were that led to the differences between the fields andwho was the agent of these changes evidently did not require explanation.

The landscape of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ plans was not, of course, the lived-inlandscape of the peasants; the maps were part of a political discourse from which thepeasant were excluded. Indeed, as already observed above, the strip fields and communalforage land depicted in the ‘before’ plans constituted part of the justification for leavingthe peasants out of the process of determining their own future, just as were theexamples of the ‘defective’ enclosures Kofod ‘discovered’ in the western provinces. Theplans were representations of peasant land holding which, in the guise of scientificdisinterestedness, reflected the priorities and pre-occupations of capital city reformers;they were not representations that the peasants would have easily understood. Theplans of the open fields before enclosure, for example, privileged one phase in the cycleof annual use in order to drive home the point about land fragmentation—in reality,arable alternated between being used in strips by individual households and openedfor use as common grazing, and both stages were equally important to the peasantfarm economy. The ‘before’ plans also showed strips scattered over all three divisionsof the open fields when, typically, only two-thirds of the arable would be strip-farmedin any year. The strips shaded as belonging to an individual household, at best, showeda theoretically possible distribution; the actual distribution of strips in the use of anyhousehold was extremely fluid, as private land transactions and partial repartitions

286 JUDITH PALLOT

Figure 4. Ground plan of Novosel’ka Village, Toropetskii uezd Pskov province. (a) Beforeenclosure; (b) after enclosure.


invariably destroyed any symmetry achieved at the time of repartition. The fixity ofthe boundaries on the maps was alien to the peasants’ lived-in landscape also becausethe peasants customarily drew on a range of subsistence resources, such as state- orlandowner-owned forest, lying outside the legal boundaries of the commune. Meanwhile,the landscape features the peasants used to locate themselves which reflected theaccumulated knowledge of centuries of use were absent and the maps were also ‘silent’about the location of the principal symbols of the peasants’ collective life—church,market square, mill and cemeteries. The plans of enclosed villages reflected the elite’sview of the desirable social order in the Russian village and demonstrated the state’stechnical mastery of the environment as a result of the efforts of its land organizersand surveyors.

Exhibiting the reform

Writing about exhibitions of Russian peasant handicraft industries, Lewis Sieglebaumhas found that they were imbued with a sentimental nostalgia and conveyed messagesabout Russia’s encounters with modernity that were “mixed and even conflicting”.[41]

Not so the exhibits of the land reform that were produced for regional agriculturalshows and national exhibitions from 1909 as part of the reform’s publicity. As withthe written publications, the target of the ‘live exhibits’ was the educated public,although at local agricultural shows a fair number of visitors could be peasants. Landreform exhibits were generally similar—typically, they included maps and diagrams ofvillages before and after enclosure, examples of surveyors’ equipment, literature on thereform, scale models of enclosed farms and examples of produce grown on enclosedfarms.[42] The exhibits were a celebration of science, measurement and bureaucraticefficiency; they were designed to leave visitors in no doubt that the agrarian future ofRussia lay with a western-style, individualized system of farming and of the pivotalrole of professionals and specialists in the great work of rural transformation.

These emphases in the representation of the reform were obvious in the exhibitassembled in August 1910 for inclusion in an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary ofthe founding of the Tsar’s summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo. The land reform exhibitwas contained in a pavilion and an adjacent open-air lot. Exhibited in the pavilionwere the familiar diagrams and charts of enclosed farms, scale models of khutora (butnot otruba), plans of villages before and after enclosure, photographs illustrating howpeasant huts could be moved without having to be dismantled, land surveyors’ equipmentand a library with Kofod’s Khutorskoe razselenie translated into Tartar.[43] The lot nextto the pavilion was given over to a life-size replica of an ‘authentic’ khutor and officialsof the St Petersburg province land reform commission were on hand to answer thepublic’s questions. A reporter from Novoe Vremia, a newspaper supporting the reform,noted with satisfaction the ‘quality’ of these men; they were “young, fresh, strong withthe sun-tanned faces of people who spend their working life in the open air” peoplewho “have the contented air of the pioneers of a great era”.[44] Visitors to the exhibitwere able to see that it was these people—the specialists, not the peasants—togetherwith their scientific instrumentation who were the agents of transformation in thecountryside. Unfortunately for the reform administration, what should have been apropaganda coup was upset by the activities of an ‘investigative reporter’ from theopposition newspaper Rech’ who uncovered the ‘truth’ behind some of the exhibits ondisplay. The reporter wrote of a visit he had made to one of the khutora exhibited inplans at Tsarskoe Selo. Peasant Rokko’s khutor, it turned out, had no roof, no well

288 JUDITH PALLOT

and no rotation.[45] The story of Rokko’s khutor ran for some time in the nationalnewspapers. The Tsarskoselskii land reform commission was forced to issue a defence,which it did by claiming that the exhibit was of projected work on Rokko’s farm. Thisargument was difficult to sustain since the exhibit was labelled ‘completed’.[46] A moreimaginative defence was made in the newspaper Rossiia which argued that it was theexcessive modesty of the local land reform commission that was at fault:

. . .if the Tsarskoselskii commission should be criticised for something it is its excessivemodesty. Usually at exhibitions the very best examples of things are shown off, but thelocal commission decided against just showing the best khutor knowing that comparedwith it, others in the exhibition would have no chance of winning the Emperor’s prize.[47]

Conclusion

The khutor landscape was, of course, unrealizable; when World War I broke out khutorawere still a rarity in the Russian landscape, although approximately eight per cent ofall peasant farms had had their strips consolidated in official enclosure projects andabout twenty per cent had been granted title to their strips in the commune. Themajority of the enclosed farms corresponded to the lower priority types of the officialschedule; they were otruba with incomplete integration of land uses, no dispersal fromvillages and the retention of commons for collective grazing. The administration’sreaction to the peasants’ rejection of khutora was not to jettison its radical vision ofthe well-ordered landscape but to modify its theory of farm evolution. ‘Incomplete’ orlesser forms of enclosure were retheorized as transitional stages in the formation of thekhutor landscape. The ‘grey mass’ of peasants, it was argued, had successfully beenconverted to the principle of land consolidation, but their understanding was not yetsufficiently advanced to recognize the need to dis-engage from the commune. In time,and with experience of the more independent type of farming possible on otruba, theywould come to realize the benefits of rejecting the vestiges of communal practice. BorisIurevskii claimed to have found proof of a progression from otrub to khutor amongfarmers in Khar’kov province who, a few years after the initial enclosure of their land,began moving their houses and farm buildings onto it.[48] Kofod, similarly, providedevidence of the transitional nature of partial enclosures in examples of post-enclosuredivisions of common pastures and in other examples of the ‘spontaneous’ trans-formations of otruba into khutora.[49] By 1916 the representation of otruba, and otherdepartures from the original model, as transitional forms of enclosed farm was firmlyentrenched in reform discourse.[50]

Some Western historians writing on the Stolypin reform have doubted the centre’scommitment to the khutor landscape, arguing that the administration gave higherpriority to the task of building bridges with the peasantry than pursuing the abstractgoal of khutorization.[51] Thus, when peasants’ resistance to khutora became apparentthe centre was prepared to compromize and ‘make its peace’ with the partial enclosures,otruba and other reorganizations that fell short of khutora. According to this line ofthought there existed ‘another reform’, different from the reform of the public transcript,in which state and peasants were working together to make moderate, but nonethelesssignificant, adjustments to existing systems of land holding. The empirical record ofthe reform shows that officials were, indeed, prepared to reach an accommodation withpeasant preferences for something less than khutora but it would be a mistake to takethis as evidence that a concensus had emerged in the Russian countryside in favour ofmoderate land reform. Partial enclosures, in reality, were often the best that both sides


could achieve in the circumstances of Russia between revolutions when the state nolonger had the authority to impose its will on the peasants, but the latter had not yetgained the political resources and confidence to resist the former absolutely.[52] In therevolutionary upheaval of 1917 enclosed farms that had been formed under the reform’sprovisions were reabsorbed into their parent communes.

The 1917 revolution brought a formal end to the operations of land reform com-missions, but the emphasis in agrarian policy had already begun to shift before warbroke out away from physical farm restructuring towards co-operation and agriculturalextension.[53] However, the particular ‘way of seeing’ the agrarian landscape typical ofthe Stolypin period outlived the reform; Bolshevism, it turned out, was no moreenamoured with strip fields and the commons than had been the authors of the Stolypinreform, only its solution to the ‘irrationality’ of the open fields was to modernize withinthe context of giant, collectivized farms rather than small-scale individual ones. In thedying years of the Soviet regime and in post-Soviet Russia the pursuit of farmindividualization by a new generation of agricultural reformers led to a short-livedrenaissance of interest in the Stolypin Land Reform.[54] The ‘rediscovery’ of khutorathree-quarters of a century after they were first promoted as the solution to Russia’sagrarian problems is testimony to the enduring power of the image of the rationallandscape over the minds of people who would transform the peasantry.

University of OxfordChrist ChurchOxford OX1 1DPUK

Note[1] R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian

Revolution (Oxford 1989).[2] Ibid., 19.[3] There is a large literature on utopianism in Russia. For other works on peasant utopias see,

B. M. Petenaude, Peasants into Russians: the utopian essence of war communism, SlavicReview 54 (1995) 552–570; K. Clark, The city versus the countryside in Soviet peasantliterature of the twenties: a duel of utopias, in A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites (Eds),Boslehvik Culture (Indiana 1985) and several of the essays in Russian History/Histoire Russespecial issue, Utopia in Russian History, Culture, and Thought: a Symposium 11 (1984).

[4] In identifying the reform as utopian I am in the good company of Michael Confino. SeeM. Confino, Russian cutomary law and the study of peasant mentalites, The Russian Review44 (1985), 35–44.

[5] The process of forming individual enclosed farms was termed uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo.It was different from group land settlement gruppovoe zemleustroistvo, also allowed underthe law, which involved the consolidation of a whole village’s land. The important differencebetween unitary and group projects was that the former necessarily involved the confermentof title, whereas the latter simply rearranged land within the context of communal tenure.

[6] The phrase is a play upon prime minister Stolypin’s description of the reform as a ‘wageron the strong’ peasant and was coined by David Macey, one of the reform’s principalWestern historians. See D. J. Macey, A wager on history: the Stolypin agrarian reforms asprocess, in J. Pallot (Ed.), Transforming Peasants. Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930:Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw,1995 (Basingstoke 1998) 149–173. Stolypin’s original words have been widely misinterpreted,especially by Soviet scholars, as meaning that the reform was disigned primarily for richpeasants. In fact, peasants across the socio-economic scale were supposed to benefit fromthe reform.

[7] The question of whether liberalism in the pre-revolutionary Russian context was utopian is

290 JUDITH PALLOT

discussed in C. Pape, On the margins of utopia? Zemstvo liberals and the peasant commune,Russian History/Histoire Russe, 11, (1984) 220–235.

[8] On the Westernizer versus Slavophile controversy see, A. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy(Oxford 1975).

[9] The intellectual history of the reform from the Emancipation to its final enactment in 1906is discussed in D. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia 1861–1906: The Pre-Historyof the Stolypin Reforms (Northern Illinois 1987).

[10] S. P. Frank, Confronting the domestic other: rural popular culture and its enemies in fin-de-siecle Russia, in S. P. Frank and M. D. Steinberg (Eds), Cultures in Flux: Lower ClassValues, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton 1994) 74–107.

[11] The fullest elaboration of the rural utopia based on farm individualization, in fact, datedback to the 1880s to the ideas of P. A. Bakunin (a younger brother of the anarchist) whoenvisaged a rural idyll of enclosed farms in which man achieved an ‘inner whollness’ as aresult of toil on his own farm. See Pape, op. cit., 228–229.

[12] C. A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late-Nineteenth CenturyRussia (Oxford 1993).

[13] K. Ia. Vorob’ev, Drobnost’’ i chrezpolosnost’ zemel’ pri obshchinnom zemlevladenii, inTrudy s’’ezda deiatel’ei agronomicheskoi pomoshi mestnomu khoziaistvu, 10–19 Fev. 1901(Moscow 1901).

[14] A. Bilimovich, Zemleustroitel’nie zadachi i zemleustroitel’noe zakonodatel’stvo Rossii (Kiev1907) 10–1; P. M. Lokhtin, Kak sdelat’sia krest’ianam bogache (Kiev 1906).

[15] R. A. Leman, Kniga dlia krest’ian nechernozemnykh gubernii Rossii (Moscow 1908) 7.[16] B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroitel’nii smotr (St Petersburg 1912) 53.[17] V. V. Vorontsov, Progressivnye techeniia v krest’ianskom khoziastve (St Petersburg 1892)

498–499; 404.[18] Bilimovich, op. cit., 11.[19] A. A. Riittikh, Zavisimost’ krestian ot obshchini i mira (St Petersburg 1903) 38–39.[20] For a longer discussion of the rationality of the land holding system in the commune see J.

Pallot, Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917. Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Plan for RuralTransformation (Oxford 1999) Chapter 3. The principal contemporary Russian authors whowrote of the positive affects of repartitioning were Vorontsov, op. cit., and V. Orlov, Sbornikstatisticheskikh svedenii po moskovskoi gubernii. Kresti’anskoe khoziastvo, Vypusk 1 (Moscow1879).

[21] The detailed provisions of the reform and establishment of the administration are discussedin G. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize. Agrarian Reform in Russia 1861–1930 (Urbana 1982).

[22] On education reforms see B. Ekloff, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Cultureand Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley 1986); on gathering socio-ecnomic data on thepeasants, M. Echlin, The Statistics on the Russian peasantry in the nineteenth century(unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford); on social agronomy, Y. Kotsonis, MakingPeasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia 1861–1914(London 1999).

[23] J. Pallot, Khutora and otruba in Stolypin’s program of farm reorganisation, Slavic Review42 (1984) 242–245.

[24] Russkii gosudarstvennii istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter RGIA): f. 408, opis’ 1, 1909, no. 116,l. 441.

[25] Ibid., l. 214.[26] RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, 1914, no. 272, l. 61.[27] RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, 1914, no. 518, l. 14.[28] RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, 1911, no. 161, l. 12.[29] Zemleustroistvo 1907–1910, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg

1911) 41.[30] A. A. Kofod, Khutorskoe razselenie (St Petersburg 1907).[31] Trudy, op cit., 45.[32] A. A. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’noi zemle, Vols I and II (St Petersburg 1905).[33] Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora, Vol. I, 225.[34] The nadel was the land allotted to peasant communes from the lords’ demesne or the state

under the terms of the Emancipation settlement. It was covered by different laws withrespect to sale and purchase from land acquired on the open land market.

[35] Ibid., 213.


[36] Ibid., 140.[37] Ibid., 89.[38] This comment was made in 1909 by the academician B. D. Brutskus at a seminar of the

Imperial Free Economic Society. See Trudy vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva nos1–2(1909) 50.

[39] P. Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia(Basingstoke 1998) Chapter 4.

[40] Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg1911).

[41] L. Siegelbaum, Exhibiting kustar’ industry in late imperial Russia/exhibiting late imperialRussia in kustar’ industry, in J. Pallot (Ed.), Transforming Peasants, 38.

[42] According to Russkoe Bogatstvo peasants were paid to display their vegetables and otherproduce at agricultural shows. At one show in Simbirsk a variety of exotics was displayedincluding cauliflowers, tomatoes, french beans and leeks, seeds for which had been distributedto khutor farmers by the local land settlement commission. See Russkoe Bogatstvo 10 (1910)81.

[43] Katalog sostoiashchei pod vysochaishum ego imperatorskogo velichestva pokrovitel’stvom ts-arkosel’skoi 1710 iubileinoe 1910 vystavki, (St Petersburg 1911).

[44] Novoe vremia, 14 August (1911) 3.[45] Rech’ 21 September, (1911) 2; 8 October (1911) 5.[46] Rech’ 9 October (1911) 5.[47] Rossiia, 9 October (1911) 1.[48] B. Iurevskii, Chto dostignutno zemleustroistvom (St Petersburg 1912) 20.[49] A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 2nd ed (St Petersburg 1914) 155.[50] See Kratkii ocherk za desiatiletie. Komitet po zemleustroitel’nym delam (St Petersburg 1916)

22.[51] Although disagreeing upon when precisely the reforms’ authors backed off the idea of

khutora, both David Macey and George Yaney argue that the reform aimed at a much moregeneral rationalization of peasant land holding than argued in this paper. See Macey, Awager on history, and Yaney, op. cit.

[52] For this view of the reform see Pallot, Land Reform in Russia.[53] Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward (1999), op cit., argues that the land reform was

essentially abandoned by the government in favour of agricultural extension operatedthrough the zemstvos from 1910. A slightly different view that sees the land reform merginginto agrarian reform is developed by K. Matsuzato, Stolypinskaia reforma i rossiiskaiaagrotekhnologicheskaia revoliutsiia, Otechestvennaia istoriia 6 (1992) 194–200.

[54] For a review of the works see, D. J. Macey, Stolypin is risen! The ideology of agrarianreform in contemporary Russia, in D. Van Atta (Ed.), The Farmer Threat (Boulder, Colorado1993), 97–120.

Documents

Imagining the rational landscape in late imperial Russia