A fascinating addition of Vanguard’s Studies of Soviet Russia series by Karl Borders, a Kentucky Quaker who spent three years in Russia between 1922 and 1925 as a field director for the Quakers’ famine relief work. Traveling the country side extensively and working with the newly establishing Soviet authorities in the NEP period, he wrote this invaluable document of his observations on the socialist reconstruction underway in rural Russian society.

Village Life under the Soviets by Karl Borders. Vanguard Studies of Soviet Russia. Vanguard Press, New York. November, 1927.

Contents: Editor’s Introduction, Preface, Bibliography, Terminology, What Went Before, The Village and the Villager, A Village of the Steppe, Ivan Ivanich at Home, The Family Wardrobe, Dinner Time, In the Barnyard, North and South, Communication, Land, The Inheritance, The Soviet Plan, In the Field, Pliable Land Laws, The Kulak, The Tractor and Collective Agriculture, The Commune, Artels, The Collective Under the NEP, Enter the Tractor, The Sovhuz, Government Education and Aid in Agriculture, Agricultural Schools, Agranoms, Agricultural Literature, Credit, Homesteading, Village Trade, The Market Place, The Consumers’ Cooperative, The Agricultural Cooperative, The Government Grain Buyer, Politics, The Village Mir, Soviet Organization, A Village Election, The Soviet at Work, The Communists at Work, Taxes, What Does the Peasant Think?, Social and Cultural Activities, The Church, The Narodni Dom, The Village Youth, The Little Red School House, The Village Doctor, Smichka, Some Conclusions.

PDF of full book: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.38/2015.38.Village-Life-Under-The-Soviets_text.pdf