“Moral economy” as a concept and P. P. Marchenya as its researcher

Abstract

Background. The theory of social progress that emerged in the 19th century was unanimously applied in Soviet historiography as a research methodology taking the form of “Marxism-Leninism” and (or) “scientific communism”. In the 1990s, we witnessed the energetic attempt to change that version of the theory of progress to the alternative one: anti-communism in politics and market liberalism in the economy. The irrelevance of this theoretical change when studying modern Russian history is nowadays more and more obvious as the anti-communist version of the theory turns out to be even less appropriate. The purpose of the article is to show what can and should be done about it. Materials and methods. Studying the published materials of interdisciplinary interregional and interna-tional theoretical seminars as strong attempts of many historians and specialists in other fields of social science to consider most important issues of the history of Russia in the twentieth century bypassing the dogmas of the both versions of the theory of progress is an important way of realizing this purpose. And one of quite possible ways of such bypassing is applying the theoretical standpoint of moral economy in historical research. Results. It is shown in what way the organizers of the scientific project “People and Power” Pavel Marchenya and his colleague Sergey Razin managed to follow the basic traditions of the theoretical seminar of the 1990s “Modern concepts of agrarian development” and in what respect the scholars involved in the project went further in the study of revolutionary trans-formations in Russian society at different stages of its development in the last century as well as at the present stage. The use of the “moral economy” approach is specially stressed. Conclusions. Historians may rather well do without using the very phrase “moral economy” however it is becoming increasingly difficult to neglect the need for a special methodologi-cal approach in modern social science when studying the history of nations of non-capitalist civilization. And these difficulties to a certain extent result from P. Marchenya’s and S. Razin’s dedicated work in organizing those brainstorming sessions within the framework of the project “People and Power”.

Keywords

• peasant studies
• theory of progress
• peasant revolution
• peasant mentality
• mass legal consciousness
• moral-and-value attitudes
• nep
• collectivization
• russian studies