It’s been a decade since I’ve read Pipes’ Revolution, through I’ve read his Soviet and Struve volumes since, I’m happy I reread his Rural Russia chapter, because it highlights a significant departure from communist scholarship, this chapter shows why the famine really happened. 
Ironically, Pipes echoes Eurasianism as it developed inside the emigre communities and late Soviet models. His assertion that the a Russian peasantry was asiatic or oriental like the Chinese because it was communal and lacked primogeniture soul likely not make it to press.
This is the biggest middle finger to Marxist history, Russia was extremely far from feudal peasantry, which Soviet historians repeated endlessly. Private cultivators were 68% of landownership. This meant that the peasantry was much more locally independent than say, manorialism.
The biggest overstepping the clueless intelligentsia and liberals ever did was assuming that they could maintain control over a peasantry that did not need them after they got rid of the central glue that was holding the country together, (the autocracy, church, and bureaucracy)
This was why peasant communes became independent or could switch alligences between shades of red, white, black, or green with such ease, without reasoning for alligence, which the liberals destroyed, they became states within the Civil War, and it’s why they became targets.
Collectivization was aimed at the class enemy of the kulak, and the kulak meaning extended to any wealthy peasant. What is unsaid as the kulak’s class enemy was the urban intelligentsia and the urban worker who he could stifle to feed himself and live for himself.
The Russian peasant in European Russia lived as densely as rural France or Scotland, but his cultivation techniques and population explosion left his production behind Western Europe. The (eventual) solution was to industrialize agriculture and move the peasants to Siberia.
Here is where we see Stalin so clearly take shape in the problems of the day. Imperial Russia has hundreds of selos and ex usadba towns, and what was to be done with them? Without WW1 and the Revolution, and with leadership, the expansion of Siberia could have been peaceful.
You could have had these hundreds of communities expand naturally into non agri sectors as well, and become patchworks of towns. Instead, we had the most ruthless urbanization in history that to some extent still is going on. That’s a industrial social solution via violence.
When I look at the future of American towns this is what I see going on. The Soviet liquidation of its rural classes was politically motivated out of the Russian Civil War and disloyalty to the state. American liquidation is economically extractive, but similarly political.
Another aspect of Marxist History in the Soviet Union was to talk about the landlord held land in comparison to the shrinking peasant allotments. But peasants were leaving for urban work, and the earnings of remaining peasants were increasing prior to WW1.
The Muzhik, now anachronistic and foreign to the Russian ear, was not divorced from his rural life by working in the locally sourced factory. If anything he became more politically indifferent and even less likely to care about who was nominally in charge. He was a free man.
Probably the best passage of old Rural Russia here.
The freeing of the serf’s had deprived the usadba/manor from reorganization of peasant life. Far from creating a more egalitarian landlord/peasant connection it encouraged absentee landordism, and perhaps dividing the Gentry and peasantry even further from one another.
Attitudes of the urban literati were fundamentally contemptuous of the rural Russian. They could not understand him, and so came to write him as a untermensch in their own language. Pipes himself embraces this notion of an asiatic Scytho-peasantry. @BasedBorzoi
@BasedBorzoi This obsession of the Liberals, the chief Anglophiles and Intelligentsia or pre revolutionary Russia with the form of law and justice as opposed to the practical subjective law of the countryside divorced them from it. The Anglophile or socialist could not abandon his rationality
@BasedBorzoi Pipes does not free himself from a clear negative outlook on the peasantry’s preferences for autocratic, strong, and popular rule, devoid of the weaknesses of the “intellectual” opposition. Pipes means to present this as a reason for the revolution’s “perversion” from liberalism.
@BasedBorzoi Witte, again the object of adulation, expresses his own shock at the developments inside the peasantry but again demonstrates the distance of the Kadet ideal from the actual reality of Russia.
