The issue of developing international cooperation in the field of studying a number of important problems and aspects of the history of Russia is becoming increasingly topical. The history of the Russian/Soviet peasantry and agrarian relations occupies a special place in this series. This direction in the development of research, which overcomes the underestimation of this issue, characteristic of the past decades, has been quite clearly outlined in Russian historiography. This underestimation was directly related to the undivided dominance of the so-called theory of progress as the base of the methodology of historical research. Moreover, surprisingly, such dominance was equally characteristic of both sides of the clash of civilizations existing until the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Soviet political propaganda acted under the slogan: “Two worlds–two systems.” In relation to this, the positive experience of the international academic cooperation that took place during 1992–2000, which will be discussed in this article, deserves attention.

More than 30 years ago, a curious platform arose in Russia on which theoretical and ideological cooperation between the “two worlds” developed, and the areas of such cooperation outlined there are still being implemented in one way or another in Russian historical science and social science. We are referring to the work of the theoretical seminar “Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development” and the meetings related to it that were held regularly in 1992–2000 under the guidance of prominent historians V.P. Danilov (Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS)) and T. Shanin (University of Manchester, Britain). At the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, Western political circles were extremely interested in the former Soviet Union and its history, and Danilov was invited to the United States in 1991 to read a series of lectures at American universities on the problems of the history of the peasant community in Russia. He was not only a highly qualified and authoritative specialist on this issue but also headed the Department of the History of the Soviet Peasantry and Agriculture at the Institute of History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (later he became the head of the group on the history of agrarian reforms at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IRH RAS)). Among his fellow historians, Danilov was well known for openly dissenting from certain important aspects of the official Soviet doctrine. For example, in preparation for the publication of scientific articles and monographs on the history of collectivization, he opposed concealing and hushing up the rigidity bordering on cruelty and the numerous excesses that the local authorities committed in pursuance of the central directives on the implementation of this socioeconomic policy. He was also a categorical opponent of underestimating and belittling the role of the peasantry in the history of the Russian Revolution, being deeply convinced that many fundamental things related to the activities of city politicians were dictated by the last revolutionary peasant community.Footnote 1

During his lecture tour, Danilov discovered that many of his listeners were familiar with the contents of the monograph by the American scientist J. Scott The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and they were interested in the attitude of the Russian expert on this issue to the methodology that their compatriot applied in this study and the conclusions that he formulated as a result. Danilov honestly admitted that he was not familiar with this book, but he promised that he would study it attentively. He more than kept his word by organizing a seminar on “Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development.” Moreover, the discussions at the meetings of that seminar helped many of our colleagues and agricultural social scientists better understand what the “moral-economic” methodology is, in contrast to, say, Leninism on the agrarian-peasant question.Footnote 2 Danilov brought a copy of the book The Moral Economy of the Peasant from his American lecture tripFootnote 3 and handed it over to the author of this article with a request to read it carefully and make an abstract that would reflect the concept itself: what exactly the American scientist means in this case by the phrase “moral economy.”

In the process of this work, wading through the chapters of the Moral Economy, it was difficult to resist the sense that in this case we were dealing with a special general view of political economy, qualitatively different from those “political economies” of capitalism and socialism, which we were taught at the history departments of Soviet universities. Moreover, this view was clearly more suitable for the analysis of what was happening in the so-called third world than those formulas of “capitalist and socialist orientation,” whose bankruptcy had already become obvious by that time. This view clearly contained the possibility of understanding something very important about our country, bearing in mind its demographic and socioeconomic characteristics in the 1920s and even in the 1950s. Danilov confirmed this feeling by saying that in Soviet agrarian historiography there are quite a few works whose conclusions are similar to moral and economic generalizations, and that not only historians but representatives of other areas of the humanities wrote in a similar research logic, leading them to similar conclusions. Let us say that Scott is a sociologist and social philosopher, while his compatriot and predecessor R. Redfield, author of the monograph Little Community,Footnote 4 who used a similar research methodology and came to similar conclusions, positioned himself in the tradition of American social science as an anthropologist. In the former Soviet Union, as is well known, anthropologists were called specialists from a somewhat different sphere of the humanities. However, some Soviet agrarian historians, ethnologists, sociologists, and social philosophers by that time had been distinguished by the publication of works whose approaches and conclusions somehow echoed the system of generalizations that Scott’s Moral Economy contained. That is why Danilov decided to organize such a theoretical seminar to discuss the Russian-language abstract of Scott’s monograph, to which, in addition to historians, other social scientists would be invited.

By coincidence, Teodor Shanin, a colleague of Danilov, was in Moscow at that time, who considered himself his friend and like-minded person. He was a professor at the University of Manchester and designated his scientific specialization as “historical sociologist.” In this capacity, besides other things that attracted his research interest, he was tirelessly engaged in the analysis of agrarian relations in Russia at different historical stages of the country’s development, not forgetting to formulate generalizations and conclusions. He was also a talented organizer of social science and at that time was captivated by the idea of founding the Russian-British University in Moscow, where the humanities and academic research in the field of social science would be combined. One of the results of Shanin’s energetic activity at that time was the creation of the so-called InterCenter, an abbreviation for the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Economic and Social Sciences. Danilov was invited to head one of the two departments that made up InterCenter, the Center for Peasant Studies and Agrarian Reforms (the second department, headed by Academician T.I. Zaslavskaya, was to direct its efforts towards studying the social structure of the Russian Federation). This appointment was more than welcome, because the seminar “Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development” could hardly have attained the quality that it actually acquired without Shanin’s active and interested participation together with InterCenter.

Professor Shanin greatly helped put together a representative interdisciplinary team of experts on the topic that was to be discussed at the first meeting, i.e., on the Moral Economy; moreover, a Russian-language abstract of Scott’s monograph was distributed among the participants of the seminar and a transcript was made of the discussion. The latter turned out to be very useful, since the governing body of the country’s leading academic journal on history, Otechestvennaya Istoriya, expressed its readiness to publish the discussion together with the abstract.Footnote 5 Since then, the journal has regularly published materials from subsequent workshop sessions.Footnote 6 More than once, the author of this article later had to meet colleagues belonging to the professional community of historians who said how important these publications were for them, how timely they provided assistance in better defining the theoretical and methodological approach to their own agrarian-historical research. Before proceeding to the presentation of the features of the “moral-economic” approach and the general view that it gives on some of the most significant events in modern Russian history, it would probably be appropriate to briefly comment on how important it is not to habitually lock ourselves into our own narrow specializations, but to improve interdisciplinary connections in search of new interpretations on the themes of native history.

The early 1990s was a time when many scholars in the humanities, including, of course, Russian historians, were morally prepared to abandon many things that made up the Soviet theoretical and methodological legacy, in the hope that the “West would help” to deal with the real rather than ideologized social science and the laws of its development. It was not that hard to understand this.Footnote 7 However, there was one thing in relation to this that was much more difficult to understand. The liberal (Western) version of the theory of progress was just as, if not more, helpless in explaining the meaning of many important events in Soviet history, as the Soviet version of the same theory, canonized by us as Marxism-Leninism, was obviously untenable by that time. This was no secret for the English scientist Shanin.Footnote 8 The outstanding American historian and social philosopher, the leading specialist in Russian history of the Soviet period, M.L. Lewin,Footnote 9 whose monograph Russian Peasants and Soviet PowerFootnote 10 was written precisely from the position of rejecting progressivism in all its variations and was discussed at the sixth meeting of the Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development with the active participation of the author of the book.Footnote 11 The use of that methodological approach to assess Russian historical events of the 20th century, which in this context is proposed to be called the moral economy, is the rejection of both versions of the high theory of progress, Soviet and anti-Soviet, in approximately equal measure.Footnote 12 It was based on this that it was possible to unite the efforts of not only historians but also social philosophers, culturologists, sociologists, and other specialists in the humanities who felt inclined to reject it.

Of the many Russian examples on this subject, we present the following. By the middle of the second half of the 1950s, a new direction was clearly emerging in Soviet historiography on agrarian issues on the question of the level of development of capitalism in agriculture in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As one of the leaders of this direction, K.N. Tarnovsky, noted, by the mid-1950s, a number of regional studies appeared on the consequences of the Stolypin agrarian reform, which “showed the closest interweaving and interpenetration of semi-serfdom and capitalist forms of exploitation, an interweaving in which the former sometimes modify the nature of the latter, making them to some extent their own variety”.Footnote 13 Another leader of the new trend in Soviet historiography, A.M. Anfimov managed to publish in 1959 a convincing critique of Lenin’s early conclusions elevated to an absolute about the victory of agrarian capitalism in Russia as a fait accompli, which subsequently cost the historian dearly.Footnote 14 The “thaw” was over, ideological and theoretical discipline was put in strict order in the sense of a decisive return to the Soviet version of the theory of progress, and Soviet theoretical rules were rarely contradicted.

This example illustrates at least two important things. Firstly, the departure from orthodox Marxism (scientific communism) as the official ideology in the former Soviet Union took place exactly where it was supposed to: in the field of agrarian and historical research. The domestic communal-peasant reality did not fit into the canons of the theory of development and change of socioeconomic formations with its condition of obligatorily passing the capitalist stage of development on the way to the formation of an even more progressive socioeconomic structure. And secondly, both versions of the theory of progress known to the history of social science—Soviet scientific communism and Western market-liberal anti-communism—are equally removed from the historical reality in the agrarian-peasant question. After all, both of them reveal unity in the interpretation of the meaning and results of the Stolypin agrarian reform: humans have energetically and rather harshly promoted agrarian capitalism, since at that time it was socioeconomic progress, and it was successful in this regard.

At the end of the 1980s and start of the1990s, the dominance of Marxism-Leninism as a social and political ideology came to an end, and many Soviet historians, economists, sociologists, and publicists somehow painlessly switched to the positions of an alternative version of progressivism in this matter: Stolypin had a chance, which the Bolsheviks had not allowed to materialize.Footnote 15 Such mindsets were disseminated in the literature and the media on such a scale that the ironic word “Stolypiniana” appeared in expert circlesFootnote 16 by analogy with the Leniniana of the 1970s. There is nothing surprising in the fact that such a defection of the late Soviet ideological workers and their associates among social scientists were severely rebuffed by representatives of agrarian historiography, who were professionally familiar with the texture of the Russian peasant community of the early 20th century. They could see better than the others that this new ideology not only differed little from the previous one in this matter, but that it was moving even further away from historical reality.

“I will note,” Danilov wrote in one of his articles of that time, “that the excessive enthusiasm among Stolypin’s supporters has especially increased in our time. Statements about the colossal growth of agricultural production in the course of the reform, even about the doubling of grain production, are widespread in modern journalism … Historians repeatedly check and recheck the dynamics of agricultural production during the postreform period. The fact is that the average annual agricultural production in Russia did not increase, but decreased from 2.4% in 1901–1905 to 1.4% in 1909–1913.”Footnote 17

A well-known Soviet historian, a specialist in the study of the diverse problems of the Stolypin agrarian reform, A.Ya. Avrekh, completed his last monograph shortly before his death in 1988, when the excessive enthusiasm had not yet had time to fully launch itself. However, he seemed to have foreseen this possible bias in historiography, and the conclusion he reached based on the scrupulous analysis of historical material on a wide range of problems of Stolypin’s policy appeared to be deliberately opposed to the upcoming panegyrics of Stolypin: “Many of our historians, infected with vulgar economic materialism, which they pass off as Marxism, believed and continue to believe that, if successful, Stolypin’s agrarian policy would have created in the country a pure farmer, on the one hand, and a pure proletarian, on the other. In fact, the decree of November 9, 1906, which became a law on June 14, 1910, did not create either one or the other. Instead of a farmer, a kulak was born with routine economic thinking, Asian methods of exploiting his fellow villagers, the minimal entrepreneurial initiative, political conservatism, etc., instead of a pure proletarian, a farm laborer with an allotment with all the ensuing qualities and consequences … The farmer created by Stolypin was very far from not only the American farmer but also from the French small-scale peasant. And there is no need to talk about a farm laborer with an allotment as an accelerator of progress.”Footnote 18 In one of Danilov’s publications, he remembers how this monograph by Avrekh was prepared for publication, how its content was deeply edited, and entire sections that did not meet the new ideological guidelines were deleted. Danilov then wrote a preface called “The book of A.Ya. Avrekh and modern Stolypiniana,” which, of course, was also rejected by the publishing house.Footnote 19

What, in fact, is the moral economic approach to assessing the historical events in our country? What does he offer instead of a decisive rejection of both versions of the high theory of progress? Scott writes about it this way: “I try to show how the fear of dearth explains many otherwise anomalous technical, social and moral arrangements in peasant society.”Footnote 20 He is convinced that attempts to consider the activity of the peasant, putting at the forefront his entrepreneurial interest or his place in the political organization of society, explain little about this activity. “If, instead of all this, we start with the desire of the farmer to ensure his very existence and consider his relationship with his neighbors, with the landed aristocracy, with the state from the point of view of how they contribute to or hinder the realization of this primordial peasant task, then many problems appear in a different light”.Footnote 21 [“To begin instead with the need for reliable subsistence as the primordial goal of the peasant cultivator and then to examine his relationships to his neighbors? To elites, and the state in terms of whether they aid or hinder him in meeting that need, is to recast many issues”].

The ethics of existence and subsistence, the ethics of “survival of the weakest” (subsistence ethic), this is the angle from which the scientist proposes to look at the main peasant problems: technological and social conservatism, rural egalitarianism, etc. Based on the extensive factual material reflecting the life in the peasant societies of the countries of Southeast Asia, he proves the high explanatory power of such a view. In particular, the figure of the landowner appears before our mind’s eye in a significantly different way in comparison with the image that the theory of progress painted in both of its above-mentioned versions. This is no longer so much a retrograde, an exploiter and a “class enemy”, as a fully fledged participant in certain socioeconomic relations, bearing his share of responsibility—and, as a rule, significant responsibility—for the existence of the peasants as their fundamental right. If we carefully look at the sources and specialized literature, to see what the peasants themselves think about things such as justice, equivalent exchange, and the moral obligations toward them of situationally rich fellow villagers, large land owners, and the state, and if we compare this with the meanings put into the word “exploitation” by the champions of classical social theories, we find a very significant difference.

Scott’s book, which became the subject of discussion at the first session of the seminar on Modern concepts of agricultural development, was not the first in the stream of scientific literature that marked the revival in the West since the early 1960s of that direction of research which for some time was interrupted there by the undisputed dominance of the theory of progress and which is indicated in the English literature by the phrase Peasant Studies, which means research on peasants and peasant societies. Shanin spoke about this at that meeting, directly pointing out the fact that the main cause and prerequisite for this revival was the deep crisis of progressive thinking and the loss of this global theory of its explanatory power, especially in relation to the countries of the so-called third world, to which this theory continued to impose some kind of orientation, while these countries, in turn, were experiencing a deep crisis that required more adequate theoretical explanations.Footnote 22

The English scholar stressed that by that time Western analytical literature had a good foundation in order to give Peasant Studies a second wind under such conditions, pointing to a number of serious studies, some of which were to be the subject of subsequent meetings of the seminar.Footnote 23 The authoritative historian and orientalist A.V. Gordon, an indispensable participant in all the meetings of that seminar, due to whom foreign experience in the field of Peasant Studies began to be integrated into the Russian-language research literature under the name peasant studies, quite reasonably pointed out how much word usage meant for the formation of a new direction of humanitarian research. “In general, this is a difficult question,” he said, “why one theory gains resonance, while the other is not perceived. It seems to me that the point is some kind of formula to which everything can be reduced. I even think that all the theoretical constructions of K. Marx would not have had such significance and become so widespread had he not given his formula in 1848 according to which the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle. Scott also has such a formula: “subsistence ethics.” This is the base on which the whole wheel turns: the basis, the superstructure, the value systems, the realities of community life, and the economy itself.

Another important feature of Scott is the understanding of peasant societies and peasant cultures from the inside. This is what peasant studies were created for. If we look at the whole new time as a long-term interaction of industrial civilization and, if I may say so, peasant civilization, then I believe that the victory of industrial civilization is not final or irrevocable. At some stage, the need for survival should force humanity to take a closer look at the principles of the coexistence of man with the natural environment, which the peasantry worked out over the centuries. Even proceeding from this, we should take a closer look at the peculiarities of the internal development of peasant societies.Footnote 24

More than thirty years have passed since these words were uttered, and then, at the beginning of 1992, yesterday’s Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had to go undergo de-ideologization and feverish attempts by the new leadership of the country to uncritically and obediently perceive Western (universal?) values and patterns in the field of economic, financial, social, ideological-political, and moral organization. However, now these words of the Russian historian, social philosopher, and (by his own definition) historian of peasant studies are read as a prophecy. This is not only because behind them we can read the inevitability of the collapse of the unipolar world. A certain return to the characteristics and values of peasant civilization (I am certain that we can say so) seems to be inevitable. The author of this article at one time, having been imbued at these meetings of the seminar with the ideas of the moral economy (I think that this phrase, rather than subsistence ethics, will take root in the Russian-speaking academic space), prepared a report at an international scientific conference with the following title: “The peasant mentality as a backbone factor of Soviet society.”Footnote 25 In his heading, I was trying, as in a certain formula, to express my conviction that the evolution of Soviet society at all its stages was largely determined by the mental characteristics and values of the generations of people who inhabited this society. This idea is consonant with the quoted speech by Gordon and is one of the central ones for the published modern peasant studies.

Danilov, on opening the first seminar, said: “Let me state very briefly my attitude towards the concept of the moral economy of the peasantry. I like the ironic undertone of this definition. In fact, the moral economy ensures only the survival of a person at the level of a half-starved existence, at the level of simple reproduction, and, indeed, of all members of society (and therein lies its morality). The “immoral” economy of modern capitalism, however, provides a very high level of material well-being for society, although by no means for all of its members.

Of course, the moral economy is most in keeping with the time of a subsistence economy, i.e., the time of the precapitalist organization of society. This is repeatedly noted in his book and by the author himself. However, the properties and patterns of the functioning of the economy described by him persist for a long time and in the course of the commodity-capitalist transformation of the peasant economy, as long as it retains its natural features and properties. Our peasant economy remained like that until collectivization. Therefore, the concept of the moral economy can considerably clarify the behavior of the peasants, for example, during the period of the Stolypin reform, during the revolution and civil war, and under the NEP and collectivization. However, even after collectivization, peasant resistance to state violence, by and large, corresponds to what Scott described and presented as the natural properties of the moral economy. I dare to think that in this sense the peasant revolution in Russia (1902–1922), which was the foundation of all other social and political revolutions of that time, was entirely moral.Footnote 26

In our opinion, here we come to one of the many fundamental points related to the possibilities that the use of moral-economic and peasant studies of approaches to the analysis of the core and meaning of the most important pages of Russian history implies. The question is still central, most acute, and relevant: how many revolutions took place in the first two decades of the twentieth century in Russia and what was the main point of these revolutions? Is it because of the particular relevance of this issue that the journal Otechestvennaya istoriya refused to publish the materials of the 14th meeting of the seminar on Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development? After all, those gathered there discussed the article by Shanin, “Four-and-a-half of Lenin’s agrarian programs,”Footnote 27 which shows how Lenin’s beliefs on the peasant question evolved from the Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) to the Decree on Land (1917) and the Land Code of the RSFSR (1922). And this already ran counter to the new axiomatics of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, in which Lenin and his party comrades appear as completely amoral types who, by the force of ill will, blocked the path of the evolution to free enterprise and political democracy for the country and its people, which lay through the Stolypin reforms and the Constituent Assembly.Footnote 28 Probably, something like this was supposed to replace the Soviet canon at first, in which the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin with his Development of Capitalism in Russia, therefore managed to lead the proletarian revolution as an objective inevitability, because they possessed the “real” science about this revolution. The foregoing gives some reason to assert that such a straightforward formulation of the question of Russia’s revolutionary past was good enough for certain stages of its subsequent ideological and political development; however, today, in this respect, it is already time to start making corrections to what is written in the historical literature about the logic of the events of the peasant revolution of 1902–1922 in Russia.Footnote 29

The theoretical seminar on Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development was last held in early 2000.Footnote 30 However, its themes continue to be studied. In Russian agrarian historiography, there is growing interest in the problems of the peasant community, which, in the paradigms of both versions of the theory of progress, was considered a global, albeit, obsolete, phenomenon belonging to a fairly long history.Footnote 31 In peasant studies, the question is posed in a completely different way, and the studies of modern experts in the history and theory of the community confirm the deep rootedness of this institution in our society and its impact on modernity through mentality and culture.Footnote 32 Historians P.P. Marchenya and S.Yu. Razin, inspired by the experience and results of the work of that seminar in the 1990s, organized periodic meetings of the theoretical seminar “People and Power,” trying to give these “brainstorms” an interdisciplinary character. One of the three areas of this seminar was the topic “The Peasant Question in Russian and World History.”Footnote 33 Under the auspices of InterCenter, the annual international interdisciplinary symposium “Where Is Russia Going?” began to function in parallel with the agricultural seminar in 1993. Since 2004, this forum has been called the Ways of Russia and it is organized by the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (MVSHSEN), which was founded by the recently deceased T. Shanin, and which now deservedly bears the name Shaninka.

At the beginning of his report on the “Ways of Russia” in March 2013, a remarkable agricultural historian from Novosibirsk V.A. Ilyinykh used a remarkable figurative comparison:

The early 1990s was a blessed time for Russian agricultural historians. We received our own “religion,” peasant studies; our own “Old Testament,” the works of theorists of the organizational and production school of Russian agrarian science (A.V. Chayanova, A.N. Chelintseva, and others); our own “New Testament gospels,” the works of Shanin “Defining the Peasantry” and Scott “Ordinary Forms of Peasant Resistance”; our own “holy councils,” in the form of the theoretical seminar “Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development”; our own quotation book, the anthology “The Great Unknown” and the Patriarch represented by Viktor Petrovich Danilov.

The creed of historians of peasant studies of the 1990s was the conviction that the main object of our research—the peasantry as the bearer of absolute goodness—was “chosen by God.” However, this absolute good, as in any religion, was opposed by an absolute evil in the person of the Leviathan state, seeking to enslave or destroy the peasantry, as well as political and scientific forces, giving the state a theoretical base for the implementation of its anti-peasant course. And this absolute evil also has its own “religion”: the theory of progress.Footnote 34

It is hard not to see here an ironic invitation to a heated polemic about what constitutes peasant studies for specialists in agrarian and peasant problems and what does not. In our opinion, the scientific and creative activity of Il’inykh, including this speech on the central agrarian-historical theme of the twentieth century, collectivization,Footnote 35 gives a good idea of a possible answer to this question: peasant studies as a “new trend” in agrarian historiography is an escape from the politicization and ideologization of the history of agrarian relations in RussiaFootnote 36 in the way of a more careful analysis of historical events and research with a special bias for the cultural, everyday, mental, and psychological aspects of this issue.