1. Many of the main arguments in this paper were prepared for a seminar with Maureen Perrie at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Birmingham, in 1980. However, they have gained greatly from discussions with Esther Kingston Mann, Timothy Mixter and Stephen Frank at a conference on the pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry, which was held in Boston in 1986. For a more detailed analysis of the agrarian crises and peasant living standards in late imperial Russia, comparing the crisis of the 1890s with that of 1904–6, see ‘Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in Esther Kingston Mann and Timothy Mixter (eds) Peasant Economy, Culture, and the Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991).
2. The following and several of the subsequent figures are based on the calculations made in S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘Grain Production and Utilisation in Russia and the USSR before Collectivisation’ (PhD, University of Birmingham, 1980) vol. III.
3. James Y. Simms, Jr, ‘The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View’, Slavic Review, XXXVI (1977) pp. 379–80.
4. Ibid., p. 380, citing G.T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (London, 1932) pp. 95–6.
5. Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, part 2 (St Petersburg, 1902) pp. 640–47, cited by Simms, ‘Crisis in Russian Agriculture’, p. 382, from P.A. Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX–XX vekakh (Moscow, 1950) pp. 498–503. The originals were given with no regional breakdown and with no explanatory notes. The figures differ somewhat from the more detailed figures available in the ministry’s publications of the time.