The present paper seeks, by analysing the prigovors (resolutions of peasant assemblies), (a) to give a picture of the peasant movement in its diverse manifestations during the First Russian Revolution, and (b) to shed some new light upon the social consciousness of Russian peasants who gathered at village and regional (volost') assemblies (skhod). In accordance with the right of petition, which had just been granted them from above for the first time, Russian peasats sent a great number of the prigovors to the Tsar' and his officials during the spring and summer of 1905. In these prigovors, while demanding an agrarian reform, peasats often expressed their faith in the Tsar' himself. In this expression of faith to the Tsar' there was a possibility of their subordination to the tsarism. Simultaneously, influenced by Liberals, the Peasant Union began to organize a movement for the abolition of landed property, for reforms of the administrative system, and for improvement of people's welfare. The Union intended to back up its demands by compiling the prigovors at the peasant commune assemblies. During the period of "free days" (dni svobody) peasants also tried to reform their communities and to free themselves from governmental controls. They compiled the prigovors expressing their own revolutionary consciousness, which stemed from their own historical tradition. The Peasant Union, accordingly, expanded its network of subordinate organization in villages and districts. The defeat of the working-class struggle in towns, however, brought an end to the "free days" in villages, and preserved the peasants' faith in the Tsar'. Thus, the faith in the Tsar' turned into a "constitutional illusion" among those peasants who had such illusion, and they sent many prigovors and nakazes to the first two State Dumas, where their representatives received important assignment. By supporting the trudoviks' struggle in the first two State Dumas and by causing disturbances in villages, peasant movement retreated befor the reactionary tide of the First Russian Revolution.

View full abstract

One of the deficiencies in the study of the Kosaku Sogi (the Japanese peasantry movement) is that the researchers have never tried to clarify the following question ; Under what social and economic backgrounds did the Kosaku Sogi calm down ? Economic as well as social factors should both have been included as two of the crucial determinants in explaining the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi. If these very important points were overlooked, the conclusion would be somewhat distorted. The problem could not be depicted clearly either. This kind of deficiency is due to the misleading awareness of problematics by the previous researchers. They have over-emphasised, or mis-emphasised the importance of the question : Why does the Kosaku Sogi occur ? But they seldom inquired into how the relationship between landlords and peasants was changed after the Kosaku Sogi. Neither did they try to explain the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi. On the contrary, the aim of this paper is to try to find out the answers to the latter questions rather than to the former one. By doing this, we believe, we can get at the real historical significance of the Kosaku Sogi as clarify the relationship between the Kosaku Sogi and its contemporary government policies. In this case, the crucial point is that the limitation of the Kosaku Sogi was influenced by the inherent characteristics of the Capitalism in Japan. That is, firstly, before The Second World War, the autonomy of the peasants from their village communities was still very weak. Accordingly, the relationship between the landlords and the peasants turned out to be indirect and mechanical forms which resulted from the reorganization (co-operation relation) of their relationships. On this basis the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi became evident. Secondly, the levels of wage-increases demanded by the peasants during the Kosaku Sogi were limited by the level of the agro-daily-workers' wages in the labour markets of the neighbouring villages. The peasantry economy during the Taisho-Showa transitional period developed drastically, and the same time, the Kosaku Sogi lost its own raison d'etre alongside with this economic development. This paper concludes that through the Kosaku Sogi, the previously conflicting relationship between landlords and peasants entered into a new relationship of peace and co-existence by forming a "co-operational system" between them.

View full abstract