From: John Wilson
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 1997 16:47:10 -0400 (EDT)
Regarding John Marot's generally excellent review, I wish to elaborate a point made by Jeffrey Hornstein in his response. "Marot tends...to romanticize the mir as some sort of utopian communism," Horstein writes. Indeed, the fact that the peasants chose to stay with the mir in 1917 is not necessarily proof of its widespread "support" or that it "responded to the interests of the peasantry," as Marot claims. Perhaps it was simply a reflection of peasant resistance to innovation. In any case, we must ask specifically which peasants stood to benefit from the continuation of the mir, and the answer is those who controlled them.
Marot's reference to artels and the Stalinist state's resolve to "smash" them shows this quite well, even though Marot interprets the artels as manifestations of "civil society." Steven Hoch's book "Serfdom and Social Control" is helpful for refining notions of the supposedly democratic mir
. Hornstein's use of Germany as a point of comparison appropriately moves along the general argument over Stalinism. I would like to know where the debate now stands for the dozen "revisionists" who participated in the Russian Review discussion a decade ago.
John Wilson
Cornell U.
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