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The early Soviet village was a site of remarkable vitality. This talk argues that peasant politics was dominated neither by backwardness, as Stalin feared, or heroic resistance, as modern historians emphasize. Instead, it was characterized by eclectic innovation and internally contested institution-building. How did the Soviet Union’s rural supermajority govern itself? Did peasant organizers resist, subvert, or enable Stalin’s vision of rural modernity?
This talk addresses these questions through a biography of the village organizer Maksim Lavrentevich Danilov. A Russophone Chuvash peasant, Danilov returned from the Red Army in 1923 to a village transformed by the revolution, civil war, and famine. Over the next decade, Danilov built cooperatives, reading groups, a Party cell, and, ultimately, the collective farm despite a rocky relationship with his superiors outside the village and his 1929 expulsion from the Communist Party. I argue that this apparently contradictory career, which transformed Danilov from victim to perpetrator and back again, encapsulates the generative but tragic rural politics of the early Soviet Union. The Soviet peasantry was more innovative, participatory, and constructive than is usually acknowledged. Danilov’s example thus encourages us to rethink the nature of peasant politics and the crucial role of rural people in creating the Soviet Union.
Gregory Martin is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union specializing in the peasantry. His book project, “With the Very Same Enthusiasm”: Institutionalizing Rural Revolution in Ilim-gora, 1921-1941, examines power and institution-building in the early Soviet countryside through a microhistory of the village of Ilim-gora. His article “Defiant Institution-Building: The Ilim-gora Village Court, 1936-1940” is forthcoming in Europe-Asia Studies. Dr. Martin’s other research interests include global histories of the peasantry and the Sino-Soviet relationship. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2025 and his BA from Yale in 2016.
