Authors

Discussion

The concept of “economic backwardness,” especially the backwardness of the Russian empire’s peasantries, is a key component of claims that the empire’s rural economy was exceptional. The idea of the “rugged individualism” of American farmers plays a similar part in claims to an American exceptionalism. Through comparison, however, we can see that both “backwardness” and “rugged individualism” were similar impediments in the minds of elites seeking to manage and speed up farmers’ transition from subsistence to commercial production in order to meet the demands of urban society and integrate farmers into an emerging agro-industrial complex.

The paper compares the commercialization of butter production in both the US and Western Siberia to argue that elite employment of the “backwardness” trope in Russia and the US did not reflect the particularisms of each case, but rather a common frustration on the part of urban elites eager to speed the modernization of the dairy industry among rural producers. In the transition from subsistence to commercial farming, the “backward” peasant and the “rugged individual” farmer—icons of Russian and American exceptionalism respectively—had a lot in common.