Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution

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As a Marxist, Lenin believed that peasants were petty bourgeois individuals and stubbornly denied the collective patterns of peasant political resistance. Yet at the same time, he embraced the peasant militance that so strongly contrasted with what he called the preference of liberal and radical intellectuals for 'a little drab, beggarly but peaceful legality'. This compelling account of Lenin's peasant strategy, which emerged out of decades of contradiction between Marxist dogma and the realities of Russian rural life, makes abundantly clear both the reasons for Lenin's success and the sources of future disaster.