Peasants, Class, and Capitalism The Rural Research of L.N. Kritsman and His School

Working in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, L.N. Kritsman and his "Agrarian Marxists" studied the process of class differentiation within the Russian peasantry, examining the best means of identifying and measuring it and investigating how farms with different class characteristics varied in their relation to production and forms of farm organizations. Dr. Cox compares the findings of the Agrarian Marxists with some recent studies of peasant farming in the Third World, and argues that Kritsman and his colleagues produced highly original work which is of continuing relevance to research on peasant farming today.