International round table “Russian peasantry and World War I”

The article covers the work of the International Round Table “Russian Peasantry and World War I” which was held on the 11th of April in Moscow by the Russian Association of Historians and Archivists. The round table was organized within the framework of the research project “The People and Power: Russian History and its Falsifications”. The proceedings include papers presented by more than 30 scholars from research journals, research institutions and universities of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. They also cover the essential content of the discussions held by the experts mostly dealing with different aspects of interaction between the peasantry and the authority, between the peasantry and political parties of the Russian Empire during World War I and in the aftermath of the war, including the revolution of 1917. The discussion was of interdisciplinary character, with many modern approaches and strategies in social science and humanities being applied, such as historical and anthropological, socio-cultural, socio-psychological, geopolitical, demographic, economic, sociological, politological, etc. A special attention is paid to changes which occurred in the peasants' lifestyle and in their consciousness as a result of military, modernizing and revolutionary novelties. Also the discussion involved the transformation of traditional rustic society into revolutionary masses, the militarization of peasantry, the emancipation of peasant women, social deviation, the escalation of old and new conflicts in the countryside. All this was said to have brought about a new political reality fraught with a revolution.