The Moral Economy Reconsidered Russias Search For Agrarian Capitalism [Hardcover]

Sure to be controversial and spur debate, this book presents a powerful analysis of rural change to marketization and globalization. Using Russia as a case study, it examines the how the rural population responded to reform policies during the transition away from communism. Wegren draws upon extensive field work, survey data, interviews, and wide-ranging Russian language source material to investigate adaptive behaviours by different groups of the rural population. The differentiated and nuanced analysis sheds considerable light on debates over whether actors are motivated mainly by rational or moral considerations.Russia's Agrarian Question in Historical and Contemporary Context Why Peasants Adapt: Origins of Behavioral Change under Yeltsin How Peasants Adapt: Large Farms and Farm Managers How Peasants Adapt: Rural Households Effects of Adaptation and Sources of Rural Revival Peasants' Moral Economy and Implications for Russia's Agrarian Capitalism

Contrary to the doomsayers, Wegren finds a great deal of social change in the Russian countryside. This in-depth and very carefully crafted research project, covering more than fifteen years, shows that if we look at the actual behavior of farm managers and ordinary rural residents they are reacting to reform much like we would expect rational actors to do. This work provides us with some genuine hope for the future of rural Russia. - David J. O'Brien, Professor of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia

This is an ambitious and critically important reconceptualization of traditional theories of rural change and overturns our understanding of agrarian reform in Russia today. Rejecting conventional views of peasants and rural dwellers as isolated, conservative, collectivist, and anti-market, Wegren finds them to be individualistic, rational, adaptive, even opportunistic, and, when historical circumstances or government reformers have offered economically realistic alternatives and lã.