Peasants as "Poachers": Trust and Accommodation Between the State and the Village, 1914 to the Present

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In The Practice of the Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau made a seminal distinction between institutions' "strategies" determining the everyday life, and consumers' "tactics", i.e. their inventive readings of a monolithic set of norms. This panel aims to explore the practices of Russian/Soviet peasants confronted with state regulation and constraint throughout the XXth century. The diversity of the village populations allowed for simultaneous multiple tactics. Through the wars and the changes imposed on their relationship to the land and work, villagers individually and collectively developed tactics of accommodation that were essential to negociate a partly autonomous everyday life.

Sub Unit

• History: Russian and Eurasian, since 1924

Chair

• Colleen M Moore, James Madison U

Papers

• Trusting in a Second Chance: The Tactics of the Village Disabled Ex-Servicemen to Negociate Their Sortie de Guerre, 1914-1939 - Alexandre Sumpf, U of Strasburg (France)

• Between State and Village: The Court Bureaucracy and the Problems of Representing Soviet Values in the Countryside, 1921-1939 - Aaron Benyamin Retish, Wayne State U

• Muzhiki i portianki: The Peasant Soul and Substance of the Red Army, 1941-1945 - Brandon Schechter, Columbia / NYU

• Certificates of Merit (Pochetnye Gramoty) in Late Soviet Rural Communities: Between Performing Materiality of the State and Shaping Beliefs and Subjectivities - Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller, U of Zurich (Switzerland)

Discussant

• Christine Diane Worobec, Northern Illinois U