The Early History of the Russian Peasantry

The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.