Inventing a Soviet Countryside

Following the largest peasant revolution in history, Russia's urban-based Bolshevik regime was faced with a monumental task: to peacefully “modernize” and eventually “socialize” the peasants in the countryside surrounding Russia's cities. To accomplish this, the Bolshevik leadership created the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), which would eventually employ 70,000 workers. This commissariat was particularly important, both because of massive famine and because peasants composed the majority of Russia's population; it was also regarded as one of the most moderate state agencies because of its nonviolent approach to rural transformation.
Working from recently opened historical archives, James Heinzen presents a balanced, thorough examination of the political, social, and cultural dilemmas present in the Bolsheviks' strategy for modernizing of the peasantry. He especially focuses on the state employees charged with no less than a complete transformation of an entire class of people. Heinzen ultimately shows how disputes among those involved in this plan-from the government, to Communist leaders, to the peasants themselves-led to the shuttering of the Commissariat of Agriculture and to Stalin's cataclysmic 1929 collectivization of agriculture.

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James W. Heinzen's fine study of the Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem) focuses on the contradictory processes of Soviet state building in the countryside. Particularly important are Heinzen's insights into the activities of Aleksandr P. Smirnov, a major champion and theorist of the New Economic Policy. Smirnov and the Commissariat have remained relatively obscure to historians of the period who, while concentrating on the party, have underrated the complex relations between state commissariats, the Communist Party, and the population. . . . Heinzen makes effective use of state and party archives to detail the Commissariat's affiliation with the rightt wing of the party, emphasizing both the degree to which the right was entrenched in the state bureaucracy, and, paradoxically, its vulnerability even at the height of NEP. . . . Heinzen's clear, well-documented book makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on the early Soviet state.

The Slavic Review

No other book has taken so close a look at the arguements about peasant land use that were centered in the commissariat in this period. . . . Highly recommended.

Choice

This is an extremely valuable and well-researched account of an understudied aspect of Russian post-revolutionary history, skillfully weaving together institutional, economic and political history.

Revolutionary Russia

In coming to power and surviving a devastating civil war, the Bolsheviks faced the daunting task of working out and implementing ideologically inspired policies to transform the underdeveloped Soviet countryside. . . . Avoiding neat generalizations, Heinzen does justice to the complexity of the period that ended with forced collectivization, a purge of Narkomzem, and the Stalin faction's consolidation of power.

Donald J. Raleigh, University of North Carolina

Makes a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of the history and development of the Russo-Soviet state.

Don K. Rowney, Bowling Green State University

State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929

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312 Pages, 6.1 x 9.2 in.

February, 2004

isbn : 9780822961758

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