¹ See Simms, James Y. Jr, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review (Sep. 1977), 377–98, and “The Crop Failure of 1891: Soil Exhaustion, Technological Backwardness, and Russia's ‘Agrarian Crisis’,” Slavic Review (Summer 1982), 236–50,Google Scholar and Kingston-Mann, Esther, “Marxism and Russian Rural Development: Problems of Evidence, Experience, and Culture,” American Historical Review, 84 (10 1981), 731–52 for the most recent statements of the revisionist view.CrossRefGoogle ScholarClassic statements of the traditional position were first made by Lenin, V. I., The Development of Capitalism in Russia (first published 1899, Moscow)Google Scholar and Robinson, Geroid T., Rural Russia under the Old Regime (first published 1932, New York).Google ScholarThe position was strongly reinforced by the works of Gerschenkron, Alexander, “Russia: Patterns of Economic Development,” in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962)Google Scholar and Dubrovskii, S. M., Stolypinskaia Zemel'naia Reforma (Moscow, 1963).Google ScholarDespite their mature vintage, the works are still widely quoted. Something of the persistence and pervasiveness of their collective view is best indicated by the fact it is still used to define the limits of the problem for otherwise excellent special studies, such as those of Fedor, Thomas S., Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar and Anderson, Barbara A., Internal Migation During Modernization in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, 1980).Google Scholar

² Shcherbina, Fedor A., Krest'ianskie biudzhety (Voronezh, 1900). Unless otherwise indicated, all materials referenced in this paper come from this source. This material has been challenged by some investigators as unrepresentative. I reject this challenge for two reasons. First, the data and the patterns they reveal correlate almost perfectly with virtually all other materials I have consulted, including information from tax rolls and other censuses, data on markets, zemstvo programs, revolutionary activity, and so on. Second, the material is internally consistent to the point it permitted me to predict accurately economic behavior at the county level on the basis of provincial data and vice versa. These complex budgets were compiled by a number of different people over an eight-year period. Even if they had wanted to falsify the results, I do not believe this material could have been “rigged” with the degree of consistency just described in a precomputer age.Google Scholar

³ The seven counties are those ranked first, second, sixth, eighth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth in the provincial index of counties. They include two of the prosperous, two of the middle income, and three of the four poor counties.Google Scholar