Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State Surveillance and Accommodation under the New Economic Policy

by Hudson, Hugh D. , Jr.

• ISBN13: 9780230338869
• ISBN10: 0230338860
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book combines social and institutional histories of Russia, focusing on the secret police and their evolving relationship with the peasantry in the period leading up to collectivization. Based on an analysis of Cheka/OGPU reports, the book argues that the police did not initially respond to peasant resistance to Bolshevik demands simply with the gunrather, they listened to peasant voices. The police argued that compromise was possible, and that the peasants could be convinced to work within the Bolshevik construct of state and society. As time went on, however, local police agents increasingly saw themselves engaged in a war with the peasantry over control of grain and domination of local organs of power. As the focus shifted from objective economic factors to the putative influence of the kulaks, the only solution became to break the peasantry.

Author Biography

Hugh D. Hudson JR. is a professor of History at Georgia State University. His publications include Modernization Through Resistance: War, Mir, Tsar, and Law in the World of the Pre-reform Russian Peasantry; Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1937; and The Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century.

Table of Contents

State, Peasants, and Police to 1921 * Famine, Market Forces, and Ameliorative Actions, 1921-1923 * Lenin’s Death, “Face to the Countryside,” and Growing Police Fears, 1924 * Soviet Elections, Grain Crises, and Kulaks, 1925-1926 * Liquidation of Kulak Influence, War Panic, and the Elimination of the Kulaks as a Class, 1927-1929