[A-List] Viktor Danilov

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Viktor Danilov

Bold historian and champion of the Russian peasantry

RW Davies
Wednesday May 26, 2004
The Guardian

In Soviet times, the historian of the peasantry Viktor Danilov, who has died
aged 79, fought censorship and bureaucracy. In post-Soviet Russia, he
opposed marauding capitalism. There were never enough hours in his day.
Typically, he was spotted on a Moscow Metro platform one Sunday morning,
holding a seminar with two research students as the trains roared by.

Born into a peasant family in Orenburg province, near the Urals, Viktor
joined the army in 1943 and fought in the Balkans as an artillery
lieutenant. One of the frontoviki who returned home determined to improve
their society, he took his first degree at Orenburg University in 1950, and
did postgraduate studies at the Institute of History in Moscow. Though given
some access to the official archives, he did not have the right to make
notes, so worked largely in secret, taking his PhD in 1955.

The resulting book showed the falsity of the official view that the
collectivisation of Soviet agriculture after 1930 had been adequately
supported by farm machinery. A 1958 article on rural land relations in the
1920s demonstrated the increased strength of the peasant commune after the
1917 revolution.

Viktor became one of the shestidesyatniki (people of the 1960s), a party
democrat. He was appointed head of the institute's department on the Soviet
peasantry and elected secretary of its Communist party group. He supported
collectivisation, but he and his colleagues used party archives to show that
Stalin had forced through the policy against peasant opposition. Viktor
argued that it should have been more gradual, drawing on peasant cooperative
traditions.

He completed a 798-page history of collectivisation in 1964, but on October
14, the evening Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power, Viktor was
instructed to return his proofs. His group fought a rearguard action, but
the book was not published and Viktor was dismissed from his posts at the
institute.

During the 20-year Brezhnev era, he was forbidden to work on the 1930s. He
nevertheless managed to publish, in 1977 and 1979, two volumes on the
peasantry in the 1920s, using a vast range of archival material, including
national and village tax and demographic data, social surveys, peasant
household budgets and chastushki (popular sayings in verse form).

The first book was translated into English as Rural Russia Under The New
Regime. In it, Viktor stressed the active role of the peasants in social
change, and rejected the view that Soviet agriculture stagnated in the
1920s. He showed that the peasant revolution against the landowners had
enabled the development of a rural economy based on family labour.

In those years, western historians were only able to meet Viktor in the
presence of a Soviet official although they sometimes managed to talk to him
clandestinely in a corner of the Lenin library. He was not allowed to travel
abroad.

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, however, he was reappointed to his old
job at the historical institute, and the opening of the official archives
enabled him to publish volumes of secret documents, which showed that for
five years after 1917 the peasants had sought independence from both White
Russians and Bolsheviks, and had temporarily forced the new communist regime
to adapt to their interests.

Since 1999, with the support of western historians, Viktor published five
volumes of Tragediya Sovetskoi Derevni (Tragedy Of The Soviet Countryside,
1927-1939), documenting the bitter struggle between Stalinism and the
peasantry. An abridged English-language edition is in preparation.

He welcomed the victory of freedom and the defeat of censorship, but was
bitterly critical of the post-Soviet regime for precipitating Russia into
the third world, describing these "catastrophic developments" as being
"directed by a dictatorship of the bureaucracy - the main legacy of
Stalinism".

He cited a striking incident from his own experience to support this claim.
In 1990, he had attended a high-level discussion with Gorbachev on
agricultural reform. A party official in charge had asked him if he favoured
land privatisation; after Viktor replied in the negative, he was not asked
to speak.

Through all these vicissitudes, he continued to live modestly in a cramped
flat on the outskirts of Moscow with his wife Lyudmilla, a distinguished
medieval historian, who survives him, as do his son and daughter.

· Viktor Petrovich Danilov, historian, born March 4 1925; died April 16 2004