Liberating the Muzhik from the Kulak-Shopkeeper: The Cooperative Movement, Peasants, and Food Supply in Russia during World War I

• In Event: Liberation through Cooperation: The Politics of Food in Early 20th-Century Russia

Abstract

During the war, agricultural cooperative associations assisted with food supply work in two important ways: by procuring food from peasant producers for the needs of the army, and by providing peasant consumers with access to necessary goods at affordable prices. In doing so, cooperatives professed to be protecting peasants from market exploitation and wartime speculation, and they attributed peasant suspicion of cooperative activity to peasant benightedness. However, by assisting the tsarist regime in its unpopular policy of purchasing peasant grain at fixed (below market) prices, the cooperative movement undermined its influence among the peasant population.

Author

• Colleen M Moore, James Madison U