For at least a generation, the dominant paradigm in which historians have interpreted peasants’ relationship with the modern state has been the late James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987). Overlooked or actively excluded by modern states, peasants have—according to this line of thinking—asserted themselves by engaging in “everyday” forms of resistance, such as foot-dragging, feigning ignorance, pilfering, and the like. For all its merits, Scott’s approach is ill-suited to understanding historical situations in which peasants felt strong and entitled vis-à-vis the state. This happened across Europe and much of the world during World War I as peasantries came to recognize that the war effort depended on them, both as the bedrock of conscript armies in mostly agrarian societies and as producers sustaining unprecedented war efforts. Colleen Moore’s excellent monograph examines the ramifications of Russian peasants’ “new sense of entitlement” (25) in the years 1914–17, which helped undermine the tsarist autocracy. Despite the diversity of peasant lives across the vast expanses of the Romanov empire, her impressive research in the archival records of four representative provinces in European Russia (Moscow, Kazan, Penza, and Tambov) reveals a broad commonality of peasant expectations and disappointments.

From early on, peasants were aware of their critical importance to the war effort and anticipated rewards in welfare benefits and land for fulfilling their duty. A 1912 law had already guaranteed state support to conscripts’ families, transforming “millions of peasants into state welfare beneficiaries” (34). Official propaganda valorized peasant men, who made up 75 per cent of Russia’s army, along with their families, whose herculean efforts would feed the fronts and the cities. A Kazan official glossed the prevailing rural attitudes best: “The realization that the defense of the fatherland is above all conducted on the shoulders of the peasantry, the realization that the ‘grey heroes’ are again the peasantry, and, finally the realization that the city could not possibly get by without the village with its grain and produce have produced a noticeable turnabout in the world view of the broad peasant masses, with which we need to reckon now and in the future” (181).

Moore provides persuasive evidence that the peasantry consciously accepted the burden that the state placed on them with the understanding that they would receive fair treatment in return. She thus disputes interpretations of Russia’s WWI underscoring peasant parochialism, lack of patriotic sentiment, or preoccupation with local moral economies. Perhaps too much is made of the claim that peasants demanded “an interventionist state” (9); her evidence could also support the argument that they simply wanted the wrong sort of intervention to end. Either way, Moore expertly analyzes several milestones in the autocracy’s incremental loss of legitimacy in peasant eyes. First, the tsarist regime, fearing a repeat of the drunken disorders that accompanied mobilization in 1904–5, prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol. The ban went into effect in July 1914 but was extended indefinitely two months later. Peasants regarded the measures as an attack on their way of life, which the state was supposed to safeguard. As looters in Tambov proclaimed, “We will take it for ourselves. The vodka belongs to the state and so do we” (64). Second, the September 1915 call-up of second-tier reservists, ending an old exemption for households’ sole male breadwinners, seemed calculated to exacerbate rural privations; especially since exemptions for industrial workers and policemen remained in place. Third, peasants grasped the spring 1915 decrees on the expropriation of land owned by “enemies” (German citizens) as license for their autonomous redistribution of agrarian land, targeting large estates or those who had “separated” from the repartitional commune. Moore shows that this process began well before the February revolution, putting many peasants outside the law. Fourth, peasants blamed the regime for being caught in a wartime price scissors: while price limits were imposed on agricultural products to keep food affordable, costs of essential manufactured goods like shoes were allowed to spike. The last straw was the October 1916 introduction of compulsory grain deliveries at fixed, artificially low prices (the hated razverstka). By early 1917, the tsar’s legitimacy in the countryside had eroded; the path to revolution was open. The Peasants’ War is a significant and original contribution to our understanding of peasants’ decisive, though still underappreciated, role in the upheavals of the twentieth century.