Who knows? That way of life is dead. But in any case it was determined by the conditions of agrarian life in a climate in which the ground is only arable for 3-4 months out of the year. As is contemporary Russian rural life. BTW Russia had its largest grain harvest since 1913 in 2001.
There's been a good deal of historical reasearch into this, hasn't there? There is, for instance, Christine Worobec's _Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period_ which summarizes a good deal of work by others . What she describes is a paranoically suspicious "misogynist patriarchalism" with "severe penalties for deviant behaviour." David Ransel's _Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia_ describes infant and child care practices consistent with this. Are these descriptions accurate?
If they are, they presumably point to features that would be missing from a 'superior form of an archaic social type."
Ted
