The Soviet Agrarian Debate

This book, an examination of the debate among rural scholars, explores the controversy that divided social scientists studying the economy and society of the Soviet peasant during the 1920s. It also explores the theoretical orientation of the Agrarian-Marxists and their empirical work.

The first decade of Soviet cultural life was marked by a pluralism unmatched in the subsequent history of the USSR. In many fields of art and science, Party and non-Party "proletarian" and "bourgeois" intellectuals worked side by side, vigorously debating questions of substance and method. In this first major study of a Soviet field of social science in the post-Revolution period, Dr. Solomon examines the controversy that divided social scientists studying the economy and society of the Soviet peasant during the 1920s. The intellectual disagreements in post-Revolution Soviet rural studies were exacerbated by social, political, and professional differences among the contending scholars. The infighting between the groups was bitter. Yet in contrast to recent studies of other Soviet professions in the 1920s, the author finds that in rural studies Marxists and non-Marxists had much in common. Her findings suggest that the coexistence of the "old" and the "new" in Soviet rural studies might have lasted for some time had not external political forces intervened in late 1928, acting as a pressure on the field and eventually causing its demise.

Autorentext

Susan Gross Solomon received a doctorate in political science from Columbia University and is now associate professor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. Dr. Solomon studied at Moscow University in 1968-1969.

Inhalt

Preface -- The Problem and Its Setting -- Introduction -- Rural Social Studies in the 1920s -- The First Stage of the Controversy, 1923 to 1927 -- Organization-Production Theory -- Organization-Production Research -- Agrarian-Marxist Theory -- Agrarian-Marxist Research -- The Second Stage of the Controversy, 1927 to mid-1928 -- The Differentiation Debate -- Controversy in a New Key -- The Resolution of the Controversy -- Aftermath and Conclusion -- The Politicization of Rural Social Studies -- Reconsiderations -- Organization-Production Scholars -- Agrarian-Marxist (and Other Marxist) Scholars -- List of Research Reports -- The "Minions"