The book is devoted to the study of Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries as a developing country, for which the peasantry is the most important factor in social transformation. Having considered the peculiarities of peasant households, peasant community and culture, having analyzed the arguments in disputes about the peculiarities of the internal differentiation of the peasantry between liberals, Marxists and populists, the author of the book puts the justification of his own model of multidimensional and multidirectional cyclical mobility of the Russian peasantry in the center of his analytical narrative, the validity of which is confirmed by various empirical data of zemstvo statistical and budgetary surveys.