Reddit reviews The Russian Revolution

>...a romantic idea for sure...

Lynch mobs are a romantic idea?

I suggest everyone here read The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes. It's a painstaking, exhaustive history. There's nothing romantic about "KILL THE RICH!"

Try this

It’s not about just the Bolsheviks, but this was a fascinating book on the vast murder that took place in Eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s. Wash it down with something happy, I made the mistake of reading it back-to-back with this and became pretty depressed for a few weeks.

I would most recommend Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution, but Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 is a very close second. I have both and would almost recommend them equally.

Hope that helps!

Good lord, man.

There are histories of Russia from 1890-1980 all over the place and they broadly agree.

I'd recommend A People's Tragedy for a well-told history with solid historical foundations. One with more heft is Pipes' The Russian Revolution. Also, Court of the Red Tsar is a must-read on Stalin.

This is an interesting question but it falls into the realm of history.

You may want to go on /r/askhistorians and ask about Pyotr Stolypin's land reforms.

I will quote for you the relevant section of Richard Pipes' book which is the main book I've read on the subject:

>An initial step in this direction was a law of October 5, 1906, which accorded the Russian peasant, for the first time in history, civil equality with the other estates.47 It removed all restrictions on peasant movement, depriving the communes of the power to refuse members permission to leave. The land commandants could no longer punish peasants. Thus disappeared the last vestiges of serfdom.
Stolypin addressed himself concurrently to the issue of land shortage, increasing the reserve of agricultural land available for purchase by peasants and facilitating access to mortgage money. The Peasant Land Bank, founded in the 1880s, had already in 1905 received broad powers to provide easy credit to help peasants acquire land...


Different parts of the Russian empire had different agrarian sensibilities. In "Great Russia," most land was communally owned and there were not sufficient incentives to use the latest techniques, etc resulting in low productivity. In the Western part of the Russian empire (Poland, etc), there was much more private landholding and higher agrarian productivity. Stolypin wanted the same system for "Great Russia."

Here's Pipes again:

>How successful were Stolypin’s agrarian reforms? The matter is the subject of considerable controversy. One school of historians claims that they led to rapid changes in the village which would have prevented revolution were it not for Stolypin’s death and the disruptions of World War I. Another school dismisses them as a reform foisted upon unwilling peasants and undone by them immediately after the collapse of the Imperial regime

>In sum, slightly more than one communal household in five took advantage of the law of November 9. But this statistic ignores one important fact and, by doing so, makes the reform appear still more successful than it actually was. The economic drawback of the commune lay not only in the practice of repartition but also in that of strip farming, or cherespolositsa, which was an essential corollary of communal organization. Economists criticized this practice on the grounds that it forced the peasant to waste much time moving with his equipment from strip to strip and precluded intensive cultivation. Stolypin, well aware of the disadvantages of cherespolositsa, was eager to do away with it, and to this end inserted in the law a clause authorizing peasants wishing to withdraw from the commune to demand that their holdings be consolidated (enclosed). The communes, however, ignored this provision: the evidence indicates that three-quarters of the households which took title to their allotments under the Stolypin law had to accept them in scattered strips.62 Such properties were known as otruba; khutora, independent farmsteads with enclosed land, which Stolypin wanted to encourage, existed mainly in the borderlands. Thus, the pernicious practice of strip farming was little affected by the Stolypin legislation. On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, a decade after Stolypin’s reforms had gone into effect, only 10 percent of Russian peasant households operated as khutora; the remaining 90 percent continued as before to pursue strip farming.

Interesting question, but not economics.