TRACY MCDONALD. Face to the Village

Recent years have seen a spate of regional studies treating the development of the Soviet village during the New Economic Policy (NEP), on the eve of the Stalinist collectivization of agriculture. Tracy McDonald's book on Riazan province is an excellent contribution to this literature. Her aim is to explore the local reality, to take it as seriously, if not more seriously, than the center—the political actors and central state structures of Moscow. She aspires to breathe life into peasant life at the village and county (uezd) level. One of the study's leitmotifs is that peasants were not merely the mute subjects of an all-powerful center, but rather shaped state power as it was exercised in the countryside. Indeed, in many ways, McDonald argues, the peasantry was state power in the village, and this reality had a great impact on the way that collectivization was carried out at the end of the 1920s. This rich study has a great deal to say about the rural background to collectivization, and about the way that party leaders responded to, and were frustrated by, peasants' actions and attitudes.

Center (category theory) · Economic history · Face (sociological concept) · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rural area · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · European history and politics · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History