Rural Unrest during the First Russian Revolution

"This meticulous and detailed microhistory of peasant unrest in one southern province of late imperial Russia during the Russian Revolution of 1905 is a good example of the post-Cold War collaboration between the last generation of Soviet historians and American experts in Russian/Soviet history. As a graduate student of Leopold Henri Haimson, Burton Richard Miller began his archival research for this book in the Soviet Union as early as 1988–1989. Miller's research in Moscow was supervised by Ivan D. Koval'chenko and Leonid I. Borodkin. Haimson and his Soviet colleagues exposed Miller to the intellectual influences that would shape his doctoral dissertation (1992) as well as this book, which has grown out of that earlier research. Miller selected Kursk province as the most typical agricultural region of the Russian empire because it 'provided a good sample of incidents of agrarian revolt'. Using various statistical approaches, he emphasizes his theoretical preferences, explaining how Kursk province presented him "that setting in which the traditional agricultural orientations of peasant life, communal organization in closed villages and a high degree of cultural insularity could be expected to produce a context in which the 'little community' model and conceptions associated with the 'moral economy' frame of analysis"—American Historical Review

"The first attempt since Robert Edelman's 1987 Proletarian Peasants to examine the 1905 Revolution in the countryside. Set within the central agricultural region of Kursk province, it joins other studies that provide an important regional dimension to the study of agrarian protests in the broader revolutionary period of the early twentieth century and those that focus on provincial distinctions within imperial Russia. Clearly a labor of love. Using official state documents from the State Historical Archive of the Kursk Region, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of Justice, many of which appear to be abstracts of police reports, as well as published statistical materials, Miller reconstructs the diverse economic situation of a heterogeneous peasantry on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, the frequency and ebbs and flows of revolutionary activity in 1905 and 1906, the changing nature of the collective actions, and regional variations in the disturbances within the province".—Slavic Review