In Search of the True West

by Esther Kingston-mann

Release Date: 21 December, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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Economics and the peasant commune in late Tsarist Russia

Under what is perhaps the most misleading cover I have ever seen is a study of late tsarist Russia's attitudes toward the peasant commune, and an analysis of the western economic influences on Russia prior to 1905. Kingston-Mann traces the western examples of England, France, Denmark, and Germany in their agricultural modernization and attitudes toward the peasantry, and shows how Russia's economists borrowed from these. Common to the western-oriented economists she looks at is an anti-commune attitude, viewing the basic peasant institution as backward, "asiatic," and an opponent to modernization. She also gives examples of thinkers and schools of though, from the Slavophiles to the later writings of Marx, that had a more positive view of the commune, but were largely suppressed or decried as romantic and reactionary by the anti-peasant "westernizers." Ending with modern parallels in contemporary Russia, Kingston-Mann pleads that contemporary advocates of Russian economic reform consider the effects of their ideas on the populace, and resist the drive to "over-westernize."

While her scholarship is very thorough, Kingston-Mann is too concerned with the attitudes and representation of the peasantry to consider their actualities, and the book suffers somewhat for this. There is little consideration of the entrepreneurialism and role of the serf and post-emancipation peasant. She also disregards the pro-commune attitude of the Tsarist government post-emancipation, and has little to say about the peasant oriented Socialist Revolutionary party. But aside from these objections, this book is a strong example of economic and intellectual history in late tsarist Russia.