Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2017 number

Was the Russian revolution at the beginning of the XX century an accident or did the crisis occur due to economic reasons? The traditional answer to this question states that the revolution was caused by the low living standard, poverty and constantly repeated hunger strikes. Peasant land scarcity and poverty were described by the greatest economists of the pre-revolutionary period. Soviet historians also considered the level of consumption in Russia to be extremely low, and, moreover, gradually dropping. Such position was originally inherent also to Western historiography, but in the 1970s, in the “cold war” climate a “revisionist school” appeared in the United States, whose representatives argued that the standard of living in Russia had been increasing, that the revolution was an accident. The article is devoted to criticism of the revisionist school works. The most famous representative of this school is P. Gregory, who estimated that the cost of grain left by farmers for their own consumption, increased by 51 % in 1885-1901. This result is referred to by many authors. However, the detailed analysis shows that in Gregory`s calculations there are a number of mistakes and in fact the growth was only 12 %, and in per capita terms there was a decrease of this indicator. The largest revisionist school representative in Russia is B.N. Mironov, who made an attempt to assess the level of food consumption at the beginning of the XX century. In addition to these calculations, the main Mironov’s argument is supposedly fixed by his computations increase of recruits in 1874-1913 years. However, in these Mironov’s calculations also a mistake was detected, and it turned out that in reality the growth of recruits decreased. Thus, the works of the revisionist school representatives do not give an adequate idea of the living standard in Russia on the eve of the revolution.