In 1924, a leading Russian economist and sociologist of agriculture, Alexander Chaianov, enthusiastically declared:

“Suffice it to look now into the depth of the village to discover immediately this amazing process of economic fermentation (brozhenie) reconstructing our agriculture in a tempo unwitnessed before. …[I]n the prewar village, we had in general a passive population with rich material resources, now it is an active, self-conscious population, head and shoulders above what it was in the past, [but] with modest material resources.”^[1]

This optimistic assessment of the new economic man in the Soviet village is remarkable for being expressed not by a Bolshevik ideologist but by an expert, who only two years before had written about the insignificant results of the Soviet land reform for the peasant economy:

“We even tend to argue that the pedagogical significance of the revolution will become but the most important one in the history of our nation, among everything else left to us by the great days we are living through.”^[2]

It may be argued that in 1922 Chaianov was more outspoken, preparing to depart for a long-term research trip abroad and considering emigration, while in 1924 he was writing immediately upon his return to the USSR and attempting to demonstrate his political loyalty (hence his optimistic assessments). On the other hand, the two statements may not necessarily contradict each other, as in 1924 Chaianov praised the peasant initiative (perhaps a product of the pedagogical effect of the revolution), and only indirectly mentioned the general economic situation in the countryside. We still lack studies that directly engage the problem raised by Chaianov of the peasants’ changed attitudes and subjectivity under the impact of wars and revolutions. The book by Aaron Retish seems to be the first study addressing exactly this problem.
The book, published by Cambridge University Press, should be praised for its ambitious yet carefully crafted research design, subtle formulation of the main methodological focus, and broad engagement of the latest trends in historiography.
The author presents the book as “a study of how peasants experienced and helped guide the course of Russia’s war and revolution, and why in the end most agreed to live as part of the Bolshevik regime” (P. 1). Obviously, Retish chose the revisionist model of “nationalization” of the peasantry by James Lehning^[3] over the classical one by Eugene Weber, by focusing not on the institutional frameworks of transforming the rural population, but on the process of mutual projections and negotiations (“… I analyse the interaction between peasants and political and cultural elites as the modern revolutionary state developed in the countryside,” P. 2). Retish bridges the historical divide of 1917 by setting the chronological boundaries of his study as an incomplete decade of wars and revolutions, from 1914 to 1922. He also strives to deconstruct “scholars’ homogenizing perceptions of peasants in war and revolution” (P. 13) by focusing on one particular province (Viatka), with its ethnically heterogeneous population and variety of economic conditions.
Chapter One introduces readers to the region, as Viatka province meets the challenges of the wartime military and economic mobilizations. The author attempts to discuss a whole complex of economic, gender, ethnic, and social relationships and conflicts amplified by the war. Chapter Two is dedicated to the first months of the February revolution in the province, while Chapter Three continues the story into the summer and fall of 1917, when attempts were made to institutionalize the revolutionary nation. Retish specifically looks into various forms of representing peasant voices in party politics and through various institutions, both traditional (e.g., zemstvos) and newly created (e.g., in national elections). In Chapter Four, the initial sovietization of the village and the Bolshevik land reform are discussed as the process of peasants’ expressing and defending their new subjectivity of citizens. An attempt to present a multifaceted picture of the civil war in the village is made in Chapter Five, in which peasants face the social engineering of the early Soviet regime, the manifold counter-Bolshevik measures of the advancing and then retreating “white” governments (including the socialist Komuch and fairly monarchist Kolchak armies), and attacks by irregular bands of marauders and “rebels.” Chapter Six documents the restoration of the Soviet regime on the entire territory of the province, and the rise and fall of the kombedy campaign in the countryside. The story of the gradual encroachment of the Soviet state into the village society is continued in Chapter Seven, with its subsections focused on communist propaganda in the countryside, attempts to establish local chapters of the Communist Party, and outreach to the non-Russian populations of the province by the infusion of revolutionary and nationalizing discourses. Chapter Eight covers the last and most tragic episode of the long epoch of wars and revolutions – the famine of 1921, which resulted in dramatic losses of human lives and large-scale social dislocations in the Viatka region. According to the author, the famine also demonstrated the ultimate acceptance of, and reliance upon, the new Soviet state by the peasants. Retish concludes his book with a statement that resonates with Chaianov’s optimistic verdict that was cited earlier: as a result of wars and revolutions, “Peasant patriots became active citizens, with a sense of inclusion in a national civic and political enterprise” (P. 264). This conclusion almost literally repeats the initial hypothesis of the study as formulated in the Introduction (P. 2), and thus does not require an eight-chapter narrative in-between. Not unlike Chaianov, Retish does not substantiate his conclusion (otherwise, quite plausible) empirically: his argumentation is either irrelevant in terms of large theoretical generalizations, or based on incomplete or inadequate empirical data.
The strongest aspect of the book – its comprehensive and well thought-out research design – only makes painfully obvious its underresearched and insufficiently analytical character. It would be unjust to call the book “superficial,” but it is clear that proper research of the subjects and problems raised in the book would have required many more years of work. Anything less time- and effort-consuming results in today’s dominant format of “discursive analysis” (i.e., a close reading of a limited repertoire of mostly published texts), which cannot be applied to “hardcore social history” problems such as the sociopolitical evolution of the peasantry. Yet this is exactly what Retish attempts to do in his book. The grandiose plan to monitor the changing social, cultural, and political patterns of an entire social group (even within the boundaries of just one province, and over a period of just eight years) encounters very serious obstacles, both in terms of methodology and the amount of empirical data that should have been processed for a more adequate analysis. The author’s very selective usage of secondary literature helps to explain these flaws.
Methodologically, the major blow to the book is delivered by the author’s naive (i.e., uncritical and nonanalytical) application of two categories central to his study: “peasants” and “state.” Retish seems to believe that a distinctive group of “peasants” lived in Viatka (or elsewhere), and that they were basically the same people in 1914, 1917, and 1922. This is a typical example of mixing categories of analysis and categories of practice: “peasants” might be defined legally as a social estate before the revolution, or aggregated by economists to denote petty agriculturists, or identified in such a way by statisticians counting all village dwellers, but as a category of practice the term is no more informative than “man” or “woman.” A small thought experiment will make this point more clearly: the reader should substitute “women” for “peasants” in the text, for example, in the following sentence: “Despite the growing social tensions, many peasants continued to participate actively in citizenship activities and nation-building events, including elections” (P. 113). The meaninglessness of this phrase results from the absolutely abstract quality of those “peasants” (or “women”), who for the purposes of the book should have a whole complex of distinctive characteristics. It becomes even worse when the author attempts to describe intra-village conflicts, where some “peasants” (or “villagers”) attack or violate the rights of other “peasants,” their numbers and motivations unspecified, and it becomes clear that this term does not serve its purpose. Perhaps, a better knowledge of historiography would have informed Retish that it was not before the emancipation of serfs in 1861 that the peasant emerged as a universal category. As Mikhail Dolbilov, who studied the Reform of 1861 as a discursive event par excellence noted, it was the legislation that eventually constructed a holistic vision of the “peasantry.”^[4] The actual economic, social, cultural, ethnoconfessional, demographic, regional, and other varieties of petty agriculturists can be united by the common brand as “peasants” only in a most general sense that does not allow for any situational analysis.
The helpless conceptual language coupled with the elaborated research design inevitably invite the reader to think about the book’s first missing crucial component: the actual social structure of the Russian village. We do not learn from the book about the status of “Stolypin peasants” within the village (both those who separated from land communes and those who just modernized their crop rotation schemes). Did not membership in cooperative associations constitute a particular social group among the peasants? What was the role of education as a factor of groupness? How did the well-known phenomenon of “peasant nobility” (i.e., belonging to the most respectable families) contribute to village politics? What was the role of the very distinguished stratum of village elders? Each of these groups could react specifically to war and revolution, kombedy and Soviets – but what could be said about “peasants” in general? Retish did not conduct his own research on the problem, and completely ignores the rich sociological and historical traditions of peasant studies.^[5] This has left the book without a clear subject.
The book’s second missing crucial component concerns the other side of the story: the state. What is the state? The question is anything but abstract in a book that covers the last years of the imperial regime, the succession of revolutionary governments, the contesting military administrations during the civil war, the rule of armed irregular troops, and the ever-evolving early Soviet regime. Retish never addresses the problem explicitly, but contextually we may deduce that he equates “state” with “authority.” This might be the perception of a “benighted peasant” (a notion Retish energetically dismisses), to whom agents of any authority could look the same, but such an equivalence undercuts any attempts by the author to study historical dynamics, and in fact the very process of state-building. Again, a survey of the theoretical literature on the problem of transitional and revolutionary statehood could have provided the author with a nuanced and complex model to analyze Russian realities, and (or) to offer his own model based on his own case studies. He did neither, which results in the actual equation of the imperial state apparatus with the warlord-like system of control over territories and resources characteristic of much of the civil war period. This makes his generalizations and analysis of empirical evidences quite unconvincing.
Thus, when discussing the pre-1917 period and peasants’ relations with the imperial state, Retish relies more on his intuition and authoritative generalizing texts than on any historical evidence. Claiming that “Local and provincial officials, sensitive to violations in established rituals of the peasant-state discursive relationship even during peacetime, were more wary of perceived threats of disorder, rebellion, and resistance during wartime” (P. 28), Retish refers in the footnote only to the books by James C. Scott and Ranajit Guha, which have nothing to do with imperial Russia in general, or Viatka province in particular. Likewise, his claim that “State and zemstvo administers (sic!)” viewed “the region’s linguistically Finno-Ugric Udmurts and Maris as economically and culturally immature” and feared “that the people’s shortfalls would threaten the war effort” (P. 34) receives no substantiation in the text. An important claim that the administration’s mistrust of “certain non-Russian populations in Viatka reflected Russia’s long-term move to a modern nationalizing state” (P. 39) is justified solely by references to generalizations offered by Peter Holquist and Eric Lohr, and not by any analysis of the local administrative discourse. The radical disconnection from the local historical context results in the bold hypothesis by Retish, that “the government” considered a de facto deportation of Viatka Tatars on the model of “the army’s isolating policies towards Jewish minorities living in the frontline zones” (Pp. 39-40). Not only does he present absolutely no evidence that any plans of ethnic cleansing were even discussed in Viatka (because “isolating policies towards Jewish minorities” amounted to nothing but deportations and demonstrative executions), it remains unclear how exactly the tsarist authorities could have planned to round up Tatars dispersed throughout the Viatka countryside (almost 5% of the population), and where to exile them.^[6] A “modern nationalizing state, using surveillance and scientific analysis to study and categorize its national populations” (P. 39) certainly could be expected to be entertaining such plans, but the absence of any empirical substantiation of the actual existence of the plans calls into question the book’s underlying methodological framework. Unfortunately, such important topics as the management of refugees or control over the POWs by the prerevolutionary administration of the province receive very sketchy coverage in the book.^[7] A few isolated accounts mention peasants aiding refugees or beating up POWs are presented outside any wider historical context or statistically valid assessments (Pp. 43–44). This leaves the question of the typicality of those social experiences open, and leaves the overall conclusion of the chapter unsubstantiated:

“…peasants made a clear distinction among the new denizens, between enemy foreign prisoners and national refugees. Peasants accepted refugees because they understood the inherent link between different social groups within an imagined community” (P. 45).

This may be quite true, but readers can only benefit if such generalizations are empirically validated. Furthermore, it would be interesting to learn whether peasants displayed any preferences in favor of, say, Jewish or Latvian refugees over Czech or Ruthenian POWs (as Slavic peoples constituted the bulk of the prisoners, especially in European Russia, particularly since Germans and Austrians were kept mostly in Siberia, considered less reliable than Slavs and Romanians).^[8] We learn that “the public joined the state to implement the nation’s duty to support soldiers’ families” as “a central expression of patriotism and support of the war effort” (P. 50), but nothing about the equally patriotic initiative to take away all benefits from the families of soldiers who capitulated without serious reason.^[9] One wonders how peasants responded to these actions of the state.
What remains completely unnoticed by Retish in the chapter dedicated to the pre-1917 period is the problem of the zemstvo–government dualism,^[10] and the main authentic social categories of the interrevolutionary Russian rural society: the “peasants” and the “three elements” that were in a position of authority vis-à-vis the peasants (government agencies, elected zemstvo boards, and specialists in zemstvo service). The imperial “state” with which Viatka peasants had to interact had at least those three faces that were often at odds and in direct conflict with each other. Both the government and zemstvos collected taxes, but distributed aid on very different principles,^[11] while the “third element” (rural professionals) had an agenda and ambitions of their own. Thus, the book provides no analytical model of the “point of departure” for the evolving peasant–state relationship in the prerevolutionary (if not prewar) period. This makes it difficult to assess the actual novelty or traditionalism of subsequent forms of cooperation or conflict.
When the revolutionary 1917 came, the dynamic yet distinctive social and political system of the imperial period melted down into a multifaceted and extremely fluid power field of competing loci of authority and unstable networks of solidarity. A case study of Viatka province could have added to our understanding of revolutionary politics, if more attention were given to a variety of authentic local voices. Instead, the book presents generalizing declarations, for example: “The February Revolution empowered zemstvo personnel and they glided into governmental positions vacated by the old order” (P. 64). The author does not support this claim either by a reference to the book by Alessandro Stanziani, who made this thesis central to his study,^[12] or by any local data. A contextual reconstruction of the engagement of agricultural specialists with the February regime falsifies this hypothesis,^[13]while firsthand accounts of zemstvo personnel leave no illusions about the status of the “third element” in the revolutionary village.^[14] The author further departs from any meaningful historical context by claiming that “The revolutionary state became a site of negotiations and contestation for social groups” (P. 65). What was “the revolutionary state” during 1917? On the grassroots level accessible to villagers, we see that some key institutions of the old state had been dismantled (e.g., the police). Others survived in a more or less reduced and modified form (e.g., the juridical system). Zemstvos were coming under rising pressure as villagers showed unwillingness to pay zemstvo taxes and more and more often began voting for the closure of local schools, agronomist precincts, and even medical centers.^[15] The central government existed in an ever-increasing state of dual authority (the much-studied strife between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet). Leaving the problem of some homogeneous or at least unanimous “social groups” aside, we have to question the very hypothesis of the state as a single conceptual or institutional phenomenon. When some groups appealed to the Provisional Government or its representatives, and others – to the Soviet and its regional agents, was there a single common public sphere or a space of “negotiations and contestation?” Retish does not discuss the problem of the revolutionary state even at this basic level of its structural divides, which leads him to all kinds of erroneous conclusions.^[16] The problem of the fractured or even disintegrating state also remains unnoticed in the book in its diachronic aspect, as a spreading paralysis of authority from spring to fall 1917: to Retish, it is not the state that changes, but its “discursive tone.”^[17]
The Bolshevik revolution made obsolete the last attempts to solve political conflicts through compromises and reaching a nationwide consensus, making the open civil war inevitable. This was as much a conscious choice as a mere recognition of the fact that Russia had become a failed state – one that could not function as a military power (the army was completely demoralized), preserve the integrity of the country (by 1918, many borderlands and even such “core” territories as Ukraine had announced their autonomy or complete independence), and maintain the basic social and economic order (with the remnants of the state apparatus all but ruined and discredited, be it the police or food procurement agencies). Slogans awarding to peasants all the land, to workers their plants, and to soldiers peace announced the liquidation of the old imperial state and its post-February editions. Russia was entering a new era of competing authorities based on direct and deadly coercion, both symbolically and actually conquering territories for their new states and deriving legitimacy from their right as conquerors (also masked by various legitimizing ideologies). In very general terms, this is how the Soviet state-building process and its challenges are perceived by this reviewer. Naturally, very different alternative visions have every right to be advanced by other historians. Unfortunately, Retish does not problematize the notion of the Soviet state at all – the degree of its rupture or continuity with the previous regimes, its structural limitations and advantages, and so on. “The state” just changed its name yet another time, the “Revolutionary state” (formerly “imperial”) becomes “the Soviet state:”

“The Soviet state played a crucial role… by establishing new laws and administrative organs that guided the redistribution process and acted as a mediator among the peasantry, helping to solve village quarrels. …Peasants willingly used the new Bolshevik state apparatus for their own internal disputes” (P. 145).

The discursive layer of the book exists in isolation from the empirical data: Retish does not ask, where “the new Bolshevik apparatus” came from in the course of just a few months, but later he mentions “the flimsy local Soviet administration” (P. 175) that existed in the province in 1918. We learn that “peasants invited the Bolshevik state into their homes” (P. 162), but then that the state did not have “as much power as the decree imagined” (P. 165; the immediate question arises – why then should we look at Bolshevik legislation as an actual representation of the state and manifestation of its intentions and power?). “Bolshevik policies shaped peasant identities” (P. 238), while “the Soviet state and national leaders created a symbiotic relationship” (P. 237) – although there were a maximum of 4,500 party members and affiliates in all Viatka villages by 1921, and “only 1 agitator for 250,000 Udmurts” (Pp. 226, 234). Obviously, a discursive narrative of a “regular state” implying the presence of extensive apparatus, loyal cadres, and coordinated routine is at odds with empirical evidence of the actual performance and shape of the Soviet “state” (or “states,” as there apparently coexisted parallel hierarchies of authority^[18]).
The discursive layer of the book completely loses contact with reality in the concluding chapters: the general scheme advanced by the author implies a steady progress in peasant–state relationships. Already in 1919, “Peasants understood their duties in the system and saw how the state granted social entitlements to Red Army soldiers and their families” (P. 209); “hunger and war drew peasants and the Soviet state closer together” (P. 239). It is argued that already in 1919 the Soviet state developed policies anticipating the New Economic Policy (Pp. 218, 219) and was nothing less than “the emerging welfare state” (P. 262). Peasants eagerly embraced this state as conscious “modern citizens” (P. 264). Thus, the presented model envisions the direct evolution of the revolutionary state – through the Bolshevik state – to the early Soviet state, with its relatively low-key repressions and an array of “affirmative action” policies. This model required a combination of silencing and censorship in presenting historical materials. Thus, the author never even mentions the creation of labor armies in 1920 as a culmination of the war communism model of a coercive state and militarized society. Referring to a study by James Heinzen, Retish makes a case for the continuity of Soviet policies in the countryside, as “Narkomzem (the People’s Commisariat of Agriculture) extended tsarist-era zemstvo programmes and included a number of ex-zemstvo specialists” (P. 219). Little does he know about the decree of the Soviet government of January 25, 1919, “On the Registration and Mobilization of Agricultural Specialists.” This decree demanded that all citizens of the RSFSR with mid-level and higher agricultural education, all people whose work required any specific agricultural skills, everybody who had held managerial positions in agriculture for two years or more, and also all agricultural students in the last two years of their education register within a ten-day period under the threat of arrest.^[19]
The difference between the work of mobilized agricultural specialists and the activities of the pre-1917 “third element” is not greater, however, than the difference between the prerevolutionary system of food procurement at fixed prices and the Bolshevik practice of grain requisitions. The shared name (prodrazverstka) allows the author to lump the two practices together on the level of generalizations,^[20] although elsewhere he tells the factual story of Bolshevik grain requisitions and peasants’ resistance (Pp. 164-175 and passim) but without making equally far-reaching conclusions. We learn about the success of the Bolshevik agitation, about the traveling brigades and the agitation trains “led by the famous ‘Oktiabr’ (October)’ train stopped at each station” (P. 215) – but nothing about the fact that the train of the October Revolution (not “October”) with Soviet dignitary Mikhail Kalinin on board followed close behind the special train of the VChK, punishing deserters and counterrevolutionary elements.^[21] But the most significant manipulation concerns the two decisive episodes in early Soviet history: the peasant war of 1920–1921, and the famine of 1921. Chronologically, the mass-scale uprisings preceded the horrible famine, which played a no less important role in taming the peasants than the ruthless military measures taken by the Bolsheviks. It is not so in the history presented by Retish: first he tells about the famine, or rather “famine relief efforts” (as the chapter’s title puts it) of 1921, then about the social dislocations produced by famine, and only then about the peasant unrests of 1920, as part of the section discussing “Resistance, relief, and responsibility.” On the one hand, the author hastens to inform us that “A partisan movement on the scale of Antonov or the Black Eagle never appeared in Viatka” (P. 253), and on the other hand, he explains the famine by “a series of meteorological disasters [that] befell the Russian countryside” between 1919 and 1922 “resulting in wholesale crop failure and massive famine” (P. 240). “Peasants were forced to eat their seed grain and slaughter livestock,” so given “the peasant subsistence farming of the time” no wonder “the rural economy collapsed” (P. 240). Who or what exactly forced peasants to eat their seed grain? This is certainly a rhetorical question for anyone interested in the history of famine, but Retish has actually provided enough information himself to answer it differently from old-time official Soviet historians. The data he mentions indicate that in Sarapul district the production of grain had fallen by a factor of 14 (!) between 1916 and 1921 (P. 240) – no climatic changes in modern Russian history had led to such drastic results, the worst crop failures are within 50–75 percent of the average.^[22] Furthermore, contrary to the logic suggested by the natural disaster theory, “the less fertile central and northern regions” (P. 15) “did not suffer as badly as the south from the famine” and even had surplus grain to share (P. 257). One would expect the traditional “southern breadbasket region” (P. 167) to perform better than the “consuming” northern districts that could not feed themselves even in good years. There is just one explanation for the opposite development: the systematic expropriation of grain followed the most cost-efficient scenario both during the Civil War and the collectivization of the early 1930s. The grain was collected primarily in the major production regions, and close to the railroads and other transportation roots. In the actual absence of any “scientific” methods of establishing the norms of requisitions, all the grain found would be taken.^[23]
Thus, the story of the civil war and man-made famine has been retold by Retish as a story of the historical rapprochement between the new modern state and the new peasant subjects united by the common cause. There is no mention of the self-sacrificial Pomgol initiative of the remnants of Russian obshchestvennost’ (all of whom would be arrested after August 21, 1921, after one month of its activity), and the fact that the government literally hijacked their work: “It was only in the autumn of 1921 that the Soviet central government organized a coherent famine relief operation” (P. 255). When starving peasants demanded that the authorities return the requisitioned grain (P. 254), Retish thinks that they requested “aid as a right of citizenship in the socialist nation” (Pp. 254, 262).
Politically, the author’s preference of a rigid theoretical model over local empirical data is easily understandable: from the outset, Retish wanted to challenge “the basic assumption that peasants dreamt of autonomy and held only limited political visions in war and revolution” (P. 2). He opposed the tropes of “benighted peasantry” and Bolshevik dictators manipulating the passive population, and searched for the roots of popular support of the Soviet regime. These ideological preferences can be wholeheartedly supported, but not the historical conclusions made under their impact. The main problem here is not ideology, but methodology: the most apologetic attitude to peasants or national minorities inadvertently acquires connotations of colonial-like indifference when a historian implies that all of them were “the same:” one set of common traits for the Udmurts or Tatars, another unified arrangement of collective will and reason for Russian “peasants.”

“Like almost all other non-Russian peasants, Udmurts and Maris clearly saw themselves as… Udmurt and Mari peasants recognized that they could… Non-Russian peasants embraced the opportunity of... Non-Russian peasants also learned to… National minority peasants also supported…” (Pp. 229, 234, 235).

This manipulation with aggregated entities apparently resulted from the author’s problem with writing a history of mass politics. For example, how many traditional narrative sources would count as a representative sample: Ten? One hundred? A thousand? Retish refers to several incidents illustrating his point here and there, and then suggests that all other peasants (or nationalities, or political groups) had the same opinion. Thus an insufficient pool of sources (for a large-scale social history) makes him appear to believe that all peasants are “the same.”
An even more serious methodological problem arises from the author’s analysis of peasants through their “discourse,” as a group that produces and sustains a public discourse and even engages in “peasant–state discursive relationship.” It is understandable that this is how the author solves the problem of the representativeness of his sampling (he reconstructs a common discourse applicable throughout the entire society), but this is just an abuse of the term. To produce a common discourse and partake in it, peasants had to join a common public sphere and operate with a common set of tropes and ideas, which would most likely require their immersion in the culture of the written word and mass press circulation. Different segments of Russian educated elite attempted to draw peasants into the sphere of public society and public discourses, but this process was in its first stages in the early twentieth century,^[24] and it is not even critically discussed in the book. Declarations of individual peasants, and even collective decisions of village gatherings, cannot be analyzed as direct manifestations of any “discourse,” in the same way that a representative selection of newspaper publications can be.
Obviously, there is a general problem of studying social groups that did not produce elaborated metanarratives of self-description. One way to tackle this problem is to look into stable repertoires of social gestures and practices as a particular language of self-expression. From this vantage point, it is more important not to look into the rhetoric of peasants, but to analyze their patterns of behavior. For instance, it becomes irrelevant how ardently peasants express their desire to join the revolutionary nation in petitions, but much more important to trace the dynamics of their land cultivation. The shrinkage of cultivated lands, the diminishing share of intensive, market-oriented cultures at the expense of basic cereals, and the overall primitivization of agricultural techniques would mean their practical withdrawal from any networks of horizontal solidarity and cooperation (i.e., nation). At the same time, a proliferation of rural cooperatives would indicate the rising initiative and self-determination of villagers (even if they support the seemingly traditionalist and parochial resolutions of communal gatherings).^[25] We may lack sources documenting the intimate self of peasants, but there is abundant research on the economic and social transformation of the Russian countryside between 1914 and 1922, both case studies and nationwide surveys.^[26] These sources allow scholars to build their arguments on more solid foundations than are possible using generalizing or even ideologically driven schemes.
Retish has written a book that should be credited for its comprehensive research design, a good acquaintance with the mainstream methodological literature, and considerable effort invested in research in regional archives. The combination of these virtues has made it painfully clear that after many decades of studies of the post-1917 period, the best historians of Russia still have no idea how the early Soviet state emerged after the collapse of the imperial state was followed by a series of collapses or nonstarter state-building projects (e.g., the history of the rise and fall of kombedy); what actually made peasants put off their passive and active resistance to manipulations from the outside; how the sphere of politics functions in the atomized society of the civil war. Over sudden, thanks to Retish’s book, what seemed to be a well-studied period emerged as a virtual tabula rasa. Our explanatory models simply do not answer these questions, or cannot stand up to testing by empirical evidence.
Of course, Retish cannot be expected to fill in this tremendous gap alone in a single book. Still, he could have been more attentive to the actual voices of eyewitnesses, rather than to the fashionable theories of his senior colleagues. His book not only fails to verify the enthusiastic assessment made by Chaianov in 1924, which was cited at the beginning of this review, but also offers little post factum consolation to a pessimistic Viatka observer. The Viatka cooperative instructor since 1913, former St. Petersburg librarian Alexander Gusakov, was shocked by the changes that took place in the Viatka countryside between August 1917 and March 1918: radicalized soldiers controlled life in the village, cooperative property was often seized and redistributed by peasants, and normal economic relations were all but paralyzed. Two months before his colleague from the Viatka province committed suicide after another business trip to Elabuga, where he was shocked by firsthand experience with early instances of “red terror,”^[27] Gusakov wrote:

“Cooperative activists lose all hope and energy, and feel bitterness from the thoughtlessness [nesoznatel’nost’] of the people.”^[28]
“All creativity comes only from visiting intelligentsia-cooperative activists. It has always been this way, and it is still so.”^[29]

This may be another discursive projection of the educated elite speculating about “benighted peasants,” but it will take more than rhetorical contrivances to prove that Viatka agricultural specialists who had spent many years in the village were simply exaggerating.