Problems of definition

The attempt to rigidly define peasant economic or class differentiation in the Soviet countryside was a will-o'-the-wisp, which consumed much effort on the part of the party in the course of the 1920s. It is fair to say that no successful resolution to this question was ever reached by the Bolsheviks due to the fateful dichotomy inherent in the Marxist analysis of the peasantry as a class. This was conceptually ambivalent and emphasised, in contradiction, the revolutionary potential and conservative nature of the peasantry, its group solidarity and class divisions based on the exploitation of poor peasant labour by the petty-capitalist farmer. During War Communism (1918–21) the party attempted to stir up class antagonisms among the peasants and turn the poor and middle peasants against ‘kulak exploiters’. The failure of this policy and the introduction of NEP revealed Lenin's pragmatism with regard to ideological questions, as he stressed the need to conciliate the peasantry. This circumstance was accurately encapsulated by E. H. Carr's dictum that: ‘It was no longer true that the class analysis determined policy. Policy determined what form of class analysis was appropriate in the given situation.’ A fundamental weakness in the investigations of peasant differentiation undertaken in the NEP era, and one which has been repeated in modern studies by Western scholars, was the conspicuous neglect of the regional dimension. In Siberia a combination of specifically regional factors contributing to acute peasant differentiation were revealed in all analyses of data gathered by the Kraistatotdel in the mid-1920s.