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Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

The narrative of peasant unrest in Russia during 1905-1906 combines a chronology of incidents drawn from official documents, with close analysis of the villages associated with the disorders based upon detailed census materials compiled by local specialists. The analysis concentrates on a single province: Kursk Oblast, bordering the now independent Ukraine. In place of the general surveys of the revolution that dominate the literature, Miller focuses on local events and the rural populations that participated in them. Documents the degree to which the peasant community had been pushed onto the path of change by the end of the nineteenth century, how much the \"peasantry\" itself had become increasingly heterogeneous in outlook and occupation, and the rapidity with which these processes had begun to corrode the legitimacy of the older order. Miller concludes that unrest was concentrated mostly among peasant communities for whom the benefits the vital interactions between social unequals that had maintained a fragile social peace in the countryside had been radically eroded; he furthermore identifies the prominent role played by that spectrum of persons that retained their ties to their villages, but stood toward the margins of rural life.

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants’ nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agricultural laborers lagged behind provinces that primarily relied on free labor. The emancipation led to a significant but partial catch up. Better incentives of peasants resulting from the cessation of ratchet effect were a likely mechanism behind a relatively fast positive effect of reform on agricultural productivity. The land reform, which instituted communal land tenure after the emancipation, diminished growth in productivity in repartition communes.

\"Property rights\" and \"Russia\" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership.A Public Empirerefutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly,A Public Empireshows the emergence of the new practices of owning \"public things\" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects-rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics-should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property,A Public Empirelooks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing \"the public\" through the reform of property rights.

This article critically analyzes the assumption that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that, therefore, farmland values are bound to rise across the globe. It investigates the process of land value creation, as well as its flipside: value erosion and stagnation, looking at the various mechanisms involved in each. As such, it is a study of how the financialization of agriculture affects the process of land commoditization. I show that, for farmland to be turned into an asset, a whole range of conditions have to be fulfilled, presenting a typology of asset making in the context of farmland. Asset making, like commoditization, is a process of assemblage, and it is less straightforward and less stable than generally assumed. Further, I argue that ‘asset making’ is not a one-way process. The article is based on an analysis of global data on land values and the case of farmland investment in post-Soviet farmland (Russia and Ukraine).

We study the effect of changes in land tenure, launched by the 1906 Stolypin reform, on agricultural productivity in Imperial Russia. The reform allowed peasants to obtain individual land titles and consolidate separated land strips into a single privatized allotment. We present evidence that land consolidations enabled peasants to make independent production decisions from the village commune and take advantage of readily accessible technological advancements. In contrast, land titles decreased land productivity in the short-run, but the overall effect of the reform on land productivity was still positive.

... will challenge (and should transform) existing interpretations of late Imperial Russian governance, peasant studies, and Russian legal history. -- Cathy A. Frierson ... a major contribution to our understanding both of the dynamic of change within the peasantry and of legal development in late Imperial Russia. -- William G. Wagner Russian Peasants Go to Court brings into focus the legal practice of Russian peasants in the township courts of the Russian empire from 1905 through 1917. Contrary to prevailing conceptions of peasants as backward, drunken, and ignorant, and as mistrustful of the state, Jane Burbank's study of court records reveals engaged rural citizens who valued order in their communities and made use of state courts to seek justice and to enforce and protect order. Through narrative studies of individual cases and statistical analysis of a large body of court records, Burbank demonstrates that Russian peasants made effective use of legal opportunities to settle disputes over economic resources, to assert personal dignity, and to address the bane of small crimes in their communities. The text is enhanced by contemporary photographs and lively accounts of individual court cases.

This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the region lured by the fertile soils, while grossly underestimating climate which has had disastrous implications for farm viability and the environment. Comparisons with historical and contemporary literature on other regions (e.g. the US prairies and North Africa) suggest that the underestimation of climatic risks by newcomers is remarkably prevalent in resource frontiers.

This book intertwines two themes in medieval studies hitherto kept apart: comparisons of Latin and Orthodox Europe and the \"feudal revolution\" of the late- and post-Carolingian periods. The book broadens the debate by comparing texts written in \"learned\" and \"vulgar\" Latin, Church Slavonic, Anglo-Norman, and East Slavonic. From this comparison, the Kingdom of the Rus appears as a regional variation of European society. This suggests current interpretations overemphasize factors unique to the medieval West and overlook deeper pan-European processes.