Individualism and Collectivism: Measuring the Transition to Modernity in Tsarist Russian Peasant Society, Penza Province, 1913

Here I introduce an often-overlooked production factor, a vital one at that—human dignity as the determinant of human performance. The aspect of perceived personal human dignity that unleashes creative productive performance is a socioeconomic choice driven by the individual’s access to information and her or his ability to communicate and voluntarily organize. In a peasant society, spatial mastery and the acquisition of literacy and education are the means to the perception of human dignity, manifesting a structural change that heralds the transition to modernity. I support my argument empirically by presenting regressions of literate wage labor in relation to the population of Russian peasants in the post-emancipation transition of landholding (the dependent variable) from the collectivistic to individualistic. The changeover to individualism is a conceptual proxy for creative risk-taking that indicates a measure of reduced degradation. My data originate in the 1913 statistics of the zemstvo (rural self-government) of Russia’s Penza Province.