Edelmen, Robert. Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia's Soutwest.

Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1987.

The sheer diversity of not only ethnicity, but also terrain, contributed to an Imperial Russia that
produced peasant movements of an equally diverse nature. Robert Edelmen's work, focused on the
southwestern provinces of Kiev, Podol'e and Volynia (also known as the 'Right-Bank'), seeks to
compare this area against that of other rurual provinces as well as address the issue of so-called
proletarian peasants (in this case workers in rural sugar beet factories) and their behavior during the
1905 revolution. The first two chapters review the (then) current research on Russian peasant studies,
with Edelmen supporting the belief that peasants were a diverse, rational choice actors capable of using
sophisticated techniques in order to secure their desires. Chapters three and four discuss in more detail
the demands and tactics used by peasants during the period around the 1905 revolution, noting the use
of diverse information streams, such as rumors spread at the market or newspapers read aloud to an
illiterate audience, to spur resistance and coordinate activity. The last chapter reviews the work's
arguments, concluding that landless laborers did little to incite peasant activity during the timultious
period and that wage-earning peasants not only created (for them) new forms of resistance in the
factory strike, but also led such movements. While Edelmen's work should be comended for the
progressive role it assigns Russian peasant agency with regards to forms of resistance, its dated
approach more often than not misses on the finer details of peasant motivations and beliefs, now better
understood thanks to the opening of sources after the fall of Communist rule.
One example of such datedness can be found in the description of peasant resentfulness towards
the nobility for the supposed egregious terms of land sale imposed with the 1861 emanicpation.
Edelmen states that in exchange for personal freedom and control over their own allotment of land,
“peasants had to give up a part of their land and compensate the nobility above and beyond the market
value of what were already inadequate holdings.” (82) However, as Alan Wildman's analysis,
published in the Carl Beck Papers, of land settlement agrements in Saratov and Orel demonstrate,
peasants possessed a very shrewed sense of the land deal's proposed and often pursued concrete goals
that balanced loan liabilities with land needs. There are similar issues regarding Edelmen's
interpretation of peasant 'naïve monarchism' as a defining feature of presented complaints; it is not that
Edelmen was incorrect, only that the dated material contained within simply did not have the benefit
future writings and soruce analysis brought to later peasant studies. Yet, if the reader is capable of
filtering out these older interpretations, Edelmen's work does provide an excellent analysis of how
peasant resistance behavior techniques drew upon both older models and new configurations,
evidenced by the emergence of the 'strike', as well as provide a general comparison between peasants in
the southwest and those located in other imperial territories.

Jeremy Antley
jantley@gmail.com