The practice of land redistribution in 1917–1920 and its consequences (on the example of Dankov county of Ryazan province)

Исследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке фонда РФФИ в рамках научного проекта № 19-09-00061 А «Поземельные конфликты начального советского периода как индикатор трансформации крестьянской идентичности (1917–1920 гг.)».

Abstract

The land, as a leading resource of economic activity, has formed a certain attitude to itself from the peasants. This attitude, formed at the beginning of the twentieth century in a steady desire to eliminate private ownership of land, most acutely manifested in the agricultural mass of the small Chernozem center of Russia during the First World War and resulted with the February Revolution of 1917 in an open seizure movement. Chaotic redistribution in 1917 tried to put the land authorities of the new Bolshevik government under control. Conducting land redistribution in the Chernozem region during 1917–1920 did not lead to significant changes in the parameters of economic activity of the peasants, but, on the contrary, exacerbated and preserved the previous problems of the village. This article aims to trace the course of land redistribution in the provincial district and peasant reflection on this process on the basis of archival materials on the Dankovsky uyezd (county) of the Ryazan province. The new documents of the conflict commissions of the district land Department that are being put into circulation reveal the content of the peasant reaction to the course of agrarian transformations. The methodological basis of this research is the principle of historicism, comparative and statistical analyses, and content analysis.