The most striking feature of the revolutions of the twentieth century which describe themselves as socialist is that they have taken place, not in the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe and North America as the predictions advanced by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century had assumed, but in predominantly peasant countries, such as Russia and China, whose industrialisation was only in its infancy. Any modern sociology of revolution must account for the fact that it is the land-hungry peasantry – numerically if not organisationally stronger than its ally, the industrial proletariat – which has guaranteed success for socialist parties in many areas of the world.

Although ultimate victory in 1917 went to the Bolshevik party, Lenin was not the first Russian socialist to appreciate the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Many of the Populists of the 1870s had considered that the transition to socialism could be made on the basis of the institution of the peasant commune, avoiding the stage of capitalist development. The failure of their ‘movement to the people’, however, and the apparent indifference of the peasantry to revolutionary ideas, discredited Populism in the subsequent decades, and industrialisation lent greater credibility to the Marxism of the rival Social-Democratic groups. A reassessment of the rÔle of the small agricultural producer came only at the turn of the century with the formation of the Agrarian-Socialist League, and the later formation of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party.