Ruling Peasants by Corinne Gaudin - 9780875803708

Ruling PeasantsVillage and State in Late Imperial Russia\nAuthor(s): Corinne Gaudin\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Northern Illinois University Press\nISBN-13: 9780875803708, 978-0875803708\nSynopsis\nWho ruled the countryside in late Imperial Russia? On the rare occasions that tsarist administrators dared pose the question so boldly, they reluctantly answered that the peasants ruled. Historians have largely echoed this assessment, pointing to the state's failure to penetrate rural society as a key reason for the tsarist government's collapse.\n\n Ruling Peasants challenges this dominant paradigm of the closed village by investigating the ways peasants engaged tsarist laws and the local institutions that were created in a series of contradictory legal, administrative, and agrarian reforms from the late 1880s to the eve of World War I. Gaudin's analysis of the practices of village assemblies, local courts, and elected peasant elders rev.