On Missing the Point: A Rejoinder

In responding to G. Hamburg's comment, it is necessary to reiterate briefly the argument that I presented in my article on the crisis in Russian agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century. I began with the premise that scholarly opinion—contemporary, Soviet, and especially Western—espouses the proposition that peasant husbandry was experiencing a deepening crisis as the last century came to a close. Scholars have argued that peasant well-being was declining steadily, especially in the 1890s relative to previous decades. After providing a definition of what the term “agricultural crisis” means, I proceeded to analyze what I considered to be the crucial indexes used to support the crisis hypothesis.