Resource allocation and agrarian class formation: The problem of social mobility among Russian peasant households, 1880–1930

The relationship between social mobility processes and the development of bourgeois social classes in the pre‐collective Russian peasantry has occupied an important place in recent discussion. On one level the discussion has concerned the ‘specificity’ of the peasantry; this is expressed in two quotations which preface the article. On another level discussion has concerned the use of agrarian statistics to establish the scale and significance of both class differentiation and of inter‐class mobility. It is argued below that the knowledge embodied in agrarian statistics can only be understood in relation to the theories of the statisticians. Theoretically reconstructed, the statistics throw new light upon the roles of underdevelopment and patriarchy in processes of class differentiation within the Russian peasantry.