Russian homestead

Abstract

This text is rather specific. It is not scientific or publicistic article. The author undertakes attempt of elementary and conscientious systematization of peasant "voices from below". This work is a result of a three-year sociological expedition under the leadership of professor Teodor Shanin fited out in the beginning of 1991.
The author investigates the problem of prospects and resources of "market fate" of the modern homesteads. Today our society is forced to search for new resources of economic survival and social stability. It characterizes all spheres of social and economic reality including the existence of peasantry.
Time changes strategy and tactics of peasant everyday life and makes the village inhabitants to invent new combinational and multisystem's modes of the interaction of homesteads and market, the new forms of production, consumption, organization of labour. And very often well forgotten old is the new - already tested but stopped in its normal evolutional development. In such situation the appeal to the experience of the past is not so much interesting excurcion in cognitive aspect as a chance to raise useful layers of historical time in practice. Of course the history with its alive coupling of different circumstances is unreprodused. But unrealized resources inherent in historical experience continue to wait for cinditions of their creative development.
Thus the question concerning homestead as a subject of market (specifically foodmarket) turns out more wide problem of sense and forms of historical development of social groups and society on the whole.
Furthermore the following points are raised in the article. Where and how the peasantry moves? What conditions of its everyday survival and reproduction as special social group? What does the peasantry throws and what does it set to work on in the course of social and economic chanfes acquiring the form of system's crisis lately.