Not long ago Randolph Starn observed that the word “crisis” is a particularly ambiguous term which historians have not always used with the requisite care. “One historian's crisis lasts moments, another's decades, even eras; political, social, economic, mental, or moral crises are blurred by one historian's insistence on treating them discretely, while another lumps them together under the confusing rubric ‘general crisis.’ “ Starn's strictures about the abuse of common terminology and about the confusion resulting from such abuse deserve our attention, especially now that Professor James Y. Simms has asserted that Russian historians have been wrong in thinking that there was an agrarian crisis in the late nineteenth century.