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"Let us take it that there are about fifteen million peasant families in Russia, taking Russia as she was before the robbers deprived her of the Ukraine and other territories. Of these fifteen million, probably ten million are poor peasants who live by selling their labour power, or who are in bondage to the rich, or who lack grain surpluses and have been most impoverished by the burdens of war. About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved." Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov   "The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost and human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements. I am thinking in part of the determination, the dedication, the organization, the sheer hard work which in the last sixty years have transformed Russia into a major industrial country and one of the super-powers. Who before 1917 could have predicted or imagined this? But, far more than this, I am thinking of the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty per cent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population of more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture. Most of the members of this new society are the grand-children of peasants; some of them are great-grand-children of serfs. They cannot help being conscious of what the Revolution has done for them. And these things have been brought about by rejecting the main criteria of capitalist production—profits and the law of the market—and substituting a comprehensive economic plan aimed at promoting the common welfare." Edward Hallett Carr   "The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." Karl Marx   "I do not believe in our intelligentsia, it is hypocritical, false, hysterical and lazy. I do not even believe in it when it suffers and complains, for their oppressors come from the same womb. I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individual people, whether intellectuals or peasants. They are scattered all over Russia—educated people or peasants—they have strength though they are few." Anton Chekhov   "When Robert Browning describes the sound of a bird singing its song twice over, in order to 'recapture/The first fine careless rapture,' he is being a poet, trying to find the best poetic image; but when Chekhov, in his story 'Peasants,' says that a bird's cry sounded as if a cow had been locked up in a shed all night, he is being a fiction writer: he is thinking like one of his peasants." James Wood   "It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants—most of the people, after all, were peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks." Vasily Grossman   "Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled plowshares with moldboards. The lack of plows was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverize light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved, and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about A.D. 900. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals." William Manchester   "Pogroms aroused the murderous rampage of peasants, but they were instigated by the cream of Russian officialdom. The hounding and ultimate expulsion of Jewish students from German universities was abetted by the violence of their Aryan classmates, but it was the rectors who decreed that only full-blooded Germans could occupy the front seats." Cynthia Ozick   "As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action—or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets. These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety—alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a crucial analysis of increasing severity. The implication of this is not weakened but strengthened by the fact that the balance sheet is likely to be incomplete, perhaps even fundamentally wrong." Joseph Schumpeter   "The isolation of the peasantry from the rest of society was manifested at almost every level—legal, political, economic, cultural, social and geographic. The peasants inhabited three-quarters of a million rural settlements scattered across one-sixth of the world's surface. They rarely came across anything beyond the narrow confines of their own village and its fields, the parish church, the squire's manor and the local market. The village community was the centre of this small and isolated world. Indeed, the old peasant term for it (the mir) also carried the meaning in Russian of 'world,' 'peace' and 'universe.' The mir was governed by an assembly of peasant elders which, alongside the land commune (obshchina), regulated virtually every aspect of village and agrarian life." Orlando Figes   "The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manner of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and indecisive contests. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions." Edward Gibbon   "During the 'collectivization' of 1929-1932, an estimated one million peasant households were herded into boxcars, driven for days often with little food or water (the dead, mostly babies and the elderly, were thrown off the moving trains), and then unloaded to 'special settlements' (spetsposeleniya) in the frozen tundra, the swamps of the Russian Northeast, the Urals, or the bare Kazakh steppes. Most peasants—between six and eight million—died in what may well have been the greatest demographic catastrophe to hit Europe since the Middle Ages: the man-made famine of 1932-1933, following the 'requisition' by the state of all grain, including seed. The precise number of the collectivization's victims may never be known, with estimates ranging from the very conservative seven million to eleven million villagers, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, southern Russia, and the North Caucasus. (Ten years later Stalin would tell Churchill that ten million had died.) In 1988, the leading Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleymenov told a party conference that out of six million of his compatriots before the collectivization, three million remained." Leon Aron   "Children existed solely to inherit a man's trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That's all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven't a clue what he might do when he's older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will be meaningless—the world will be completely different. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience—past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless. Women are different, because they never get past the need to have someone to love—which is certainly not true of men." Michel Houellebecq   "In Mogul India at its zenith the power of the crown was overwhelming in relation to the upper classes. Lacking any secure property rights, the noble was, in Moreland's well-known phrase, either a servant or an enemy of the ruling power. The decay of the Mogul system freed the upper classes by tipping the balance in the opposite direction toward a polity of fighting local kinglets. Nevertheless the subsequent British effort in the eighteenth century to create on Indian soil a class of vigorous progressive squires similar to their domestic variety was a complete failure. Indian society has also failed to meet the second major prerequisite: a turn toward an appropriate form of commercial agriculture either on the part of the landed aristocracy or the peasantry. Instead, the protective umbrella of British law and order allowed population to increase and a class of parasitic landlords to skim off, together with the moneylenders, much of what the peasants did not eat themselves. In turn these conditions greatly inhibited capital accumulation and industrial growth. When Independence came, it arrived partly under the impetus of peasant yearning for a return to an idealized village past, which further limited and even dangerously delayed real modernization in the countryside." Barrington Moore   "Should we view peasant starvation as a source of 'investment'? Even if we did, collectivization and dekulakization lowered agricultural output dramatically. Stalin's policies did expand state procurement of grain, potatoes, and vegetables, but at breathtaking economic, to say nothing of human, cost. Collectivization involved the arrest, execution, internal deportation, or incarceration of 4 to 5 million peasants; the effective enslavement of another 100 million; and the loss of tens of millions of head of livestock. The industrialization and accompanying militarization began to revive the Soviet Union as a great power, a necessity for survival in the international system, but collectivization was not 'necessary' to 'modernize' a peasant economy or industrialize." Stephen Kotkin   "Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Morazán erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures." Garbriel Garcia Marquez   "In 1908 Lenin spoke of 'real, nation-wide terror, which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.' True to his beliefs, within a few years after the 1917 revolution, there were in Lenin's Russia 'censorship of the press, one-party dictatorship, mass terror, and even concentration camps.' Stalin's purges were prefigured by Lenin's war against the 'kulaks,' the more prosperous peasants: 'Merciless war against these kulaks!' he directed, 'Death to them.' To a cabinet member protesting his decree ordering summary executions, Lenin retorted, 'Do you think we can be victors without the most severe revolutionary terror?'" Bruce Thornton   "Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture with improved crops and high-intensity fertilizer allowed billions of people—Europe first, and then much of the rest of the world—to escape the Malthusian trap. Incredibly, living standards doubled or tripled worldwide even as the planet's population climbed from fewer than 1 billion in 1700 to about 7 billion today." Charles Mann   "Every culture exalts historical figures who have suffered for holding to their beliefs, resisting subordination, or opposing authority. A recurring theme in the epics of the Turkish novelist Yaşar Kemal is that of an outlaw whom peasants revere as a dauntless fighter against oppressive conditions that they themselves cannot resist. Likewise, the hero of a Hollywood Western is typically a free-willed man who stands apart from the crowd and refuses to accept injustice. A basic reason we consider uncompromising independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule. Another is that we all identify, at some level, with personal independence." Timur Kuran   "We are in the Vendée to exterminate this crowd of brigands who have gathered here. Many of them enrol the peasants by force, and tell them they will not die from a musket or cannon shot. They tell them plenty of other lies; well, let them get a hundred paces from me when I have my musket, and we'll see about not dying." François Bravy Benard