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Two Paths of Bourgeois Agrarian Evolution in European Russia: An Essay in Multivariate Analysis

1988; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/130504

1467-9434

Ivan Dmitrievich Kovalʹchenko, Л.И. Бородкин,

Russia and Soviet political economy

Academician Koval'chenko is doyen of Soviet quantitative historians and mentor of many of them.* While sheer volume of Koval'chenko's publications is due to his erudition and energy, some credit for increasing sophistication of his work should go to his collaborators and first of all to L. I. Borodkin, who was initially trained in information science. The article published here is culmination of a series, each more sophisticated than last, devoted to agrarian typology of prerevolutionary Russian provinces. The categorization itself holds no great surprises. It corresponds to authors' earlier findings and, in general, to common usage of social scientists. The importance of article lies in showing extent to which a province matches a particular and, more particularly, social and economic determinants of agrarian development of provinces and types of provinces. Like Selunskaia, Koval'chenko and Borodkin emphasize sway of peasantry in prerevolutionary agriculture; indeed, what they now call manorial-peasant type they once called simply type. Yet they also bring out viability, in some regions, of development on a manorial or Prussian basis. In analysis of kind they undertake, gains in sophistication mean losses in transparency, as more and more operations are performed behind scenes, usually in bowels of a computer.t One turns alrmost with relief to wearying rows of numbers in their appendix, which represent absolute values for each province that were point of departure for their analysis; one-third of rural population in Iaroslavl' Province was literate in 1897-there is a fact to sink your teeth into. Some years ago, Lawrence Stone wondered whether the sophistication of...mathematical and algebraic formulae are [sic] not ultimately self-defeating, since they baffle most historians. He went on to complain of the virtual impossibility of checking up on reliability of final results, since [one] must depend not on published footnotes but on privately owned computer tapes... t There is no reason to share Stone's disdain for what he cannot bother to understand. We can, however, share his nostalgia for an era, extending from time of Gibbon until very recently, when all historians could adhere to a common standard of verification. The humble footnote was basis of comity of scholars. Koval'chenko, Borodkin and their colleagues explain what they are doing with admirable patience, they share their data with rare generosity, but they are increasingly obliged to characterize their data and operations they perform rather than identify them, as historians used to do. We can directly verify their findings only by retracing step by step arduous path of data collection and analysis that they travelled. Perhaps lesson for historians is that humility and caution become ever more important as our methods become more complex.