In the shadow of the factory: Peasant manufacturing and Russian industrialization, 1861-1914.

Abstract

An opposition between the "traditional" and the "modern" has formed a durable landscape for understandings of pre-revolutionary Russia. On this landscape, the peasant household and the market economy have stood far apart, isolated by the divide that separates custom from rationality, subsistence from accumulation, and stasis from dynamic change. This dissertation is about a practice--peasant ("kustar") manufacturing--that existed at the junction of these two spheres of social life. If the production processes of kustar trades were confined within households, the circulation of materials, goods and money, created broad networks, which sometimes extended beyond the borders of the Russian Empire. My work investigates the interaction between kustar trades and the market economy, explores the discourses about kustar industry produced by political and cultural elites, and, in so doing, reconsiders the relationship between tradition and modernity in late Imperial Russia. One part of the dissertation traces the histories of a number of kustar trades over the half century before 1914. Together, these chapters build an argument that explains the persistence of kustar trades in the face of mounting economic pressures in terms of a confluence between the "traditional" logics of patriarchy and subsistence, and the "modern" logic of profit. The personal dependence of producers upon others in their household and their village produced powerful constraints on individual autonomy. The unfree labor generated by such constraints combined with cost-cutting entrepreneurial strategies to maintain the economic viability of many kustar trades long after they had become technologically obsolete. The remaining chapters are about kustar production as an object of elite discourses and intervention. In the late nineteenth century, kustar production acquired an important place both within a conservative project to protect the stability of rural society and the integrity of an authentic popular culture, and within a broadly populist project to imagine and realize scenarios of non-capitalist economic development. In the two decades before 1914, these different "uses" for kustar industry combined to generate a sustained effort by the state and by local activists to transform kustar trades, via the establishment of networks of schools, warehouses, cooperatives, and other institutions.