This new study by David Darrow returns to “the peasant question” in Russia, reminding us that there is still much to be learned, despite the attention historians have devoted to this subject over the years. Darrow's is an intellectual history; his focus here is not on the peasantry itself, but on the history of ideas about the Russian peasant economy and the significance of these for rural policy from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. He focuses in particular on the peasant land allotment or nadel: the debates surrounding its significance, the numerous attempts to measure it and standardize it, and the policies designed to ensure peasants had sufficient access to it.

This study reveals an intriguing interplay between the prevailing discourse about the tsarist state's moral obligations to the peasantry and statisticians’ vigorous efforts to gather data on which to base reforms (and with which to evaluate their effectiveness). What eventually emerged was the notion that it was the state's obligation to provide peasants with land “sufficient” for maintaining their households and paying their taxes, and that this obligation could be quantified with some degree of precision.

But what constituted a “sufficient” holding? Sufficient for what or for whom in which circumstances? Darrow's account shows persuasively that neither state technocrats nor statisticians in the field had a very well-articulated sense of what they ought to be measuring, thus limiting the effectiveness of the data gathered for the policy initiatives that were subsequently based on them. These educated, urban elites were hardly well-versed in the ways of peasant life (never mind its many variations across the empire).

This does not mean, however, that statistics was itself the problem, as Darrow sometimes implies. He points out, reasonably enough, that contemporaries were obsessed with numbers and often quite gullible regarding their “scientific” nature. Furthermore, he notes that the measures generated—the “average” nadel, the “middling” peasant, the “median” household—were often inadequate to capture the economic reality of most Russian peasants. These are entirely valid points, but have no bearing on the value of counting and measuring as tools for appraising peasant standards of living. The culprit, it seems, was not blind faith in numbers, but the ignorance of political elites and statisticians about the rural economy. They were too ill-informed to frame suitable questions for quantitative research. As a result, they overlooked geographical variation, the importance of the wage economy, the presence of rural industry, the possibility of stratification within the commune, and the role of communal politics (to name just a few omissions). They focused instead on assigning concrete values to vague concepts like “sufficient,” using whatever numbers they could find. The result was a growing mountain of statistical data and an array of dubious measures, which “informed” policy decisions from Alexander II to Lenin and became embedded in the historical literature on the Russian peasantry.

Darrow's study suggests that the real problem, more than statisticians, was the role of the tsarist state in perpetuating enduring misconceptions of Russian rural society. When it went about abolishing serfdom, the state cloaked its own self-interest in moral terms—insisting it would provide peasants with sufficient land because this was the right thing to do and not because it wished to guarantee a viable tax base. If state officials had been clearer and more explicit about their goals, and had done a better job of measuring and defining quantitative parameters in advance of the reform, the question of “sufficiency” and peasant well-being might have been framed very differently. The corners cut by the state (for political and economic reasons) in preparing for emancipation—proceeding without a cadaster, putting landlords in charge of allocating land for peasants and of providing the data used to determine “sufficiency,” and retaining the commune—practically guaranteed that conflicts and confusions would arise later. The statisticians themselves appear to have followed the state's lead in their data-gathering zeal: counting and measuring whatever they could in a vain attempt to make vague notions precise. In the end, everyone brought their own questions to the numbers generated, and interpreted them as they wished. The dialectical relationship between data and reforms took on a life of its own: numbers generated without clear questions to frame them (or a clear sense of context) ultimately undermined the reforms that were based on them. This compelling story about the origins of elite attitudes regarding rural “norms” in the tsarist period thus simultaneously, if not explicitly, sheds interesting light on the origins of today's skeptical attitudes toward quantitative history.