The Peasants’ War : Russia’s Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy

During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population.In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasants answered the state’s call to arms, while the millions who remained at home donated labour and other resources to the cause.Within three short years these same peasants were refusing to pay taxes or turn over their grain, dooming the autocracy to collapse. The Peasants’ War argues that the experience of total war convinced peasants that the measure of a state’s legitimacy was its ability to safeguard the wellbeing of its subjects.When the autocracy failed to meet this standard, peasants rejected its authority by challenging four areas of wartime policy: the prohibition of vodka, the conscription of peasant families’ only workers, the redistribution of land belonging to enemy subjects, and the provisioning of the home front.The war awakened peasants to the reciprocal nature of the relationship between a state and its people.Colleen Moore