Raufu Mustapha included in his M Phil option on The Sociology of Rural Societies, the debates on inequalities among the peasantry in Russia and in a Hausa village. Teodor Shanin entitled his book, The Awkward Class. Peasants do not fit the assumptions of conventional orthodoxies. They resist political plans of state actors. Outcomes in the Soviet Union were dispossession, state and collective farms, and famine. In Africa, ‘betterment planning’ provoked rural resistance to colonial and post-colonial rule; settlement schemes were social and economic failures. Marxists assumed that the ‘concentration of capital’ would displace peasant production. In The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) Lenin contested the argument that the ‘internal market’ would allow capitalism to develop. In 1907, he accommodated reactionary Prussian estates or ‘American!’ family farms. In 1917, a worker-peasant alliance ‘traversed a stage of bourgeois-democratic struggle of the peasantry as a whole against the landowner’ (Comintern, 1920). The 1920 theses distinguished three classes of large, middle, and (three sub-classes) of poor peasants, recognisable in the socialist literature on Africa: a ‘peasant bourgeosie, managing their lands with several hired labourers’; a ‘middle peasantry, able to hire outside labour’ and the ‘majority’ of poor peasants’, ‘hired labourers’ (‘seasonal, monthly and casual; and semi-proletarians’ The ABC of Communism tells us that ‘Large-scale capitalist methods have gained the victory over the methods of artisan production and peasant production‘. Use of land is ‘a matter for agricultural experts to determine’ (Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii, 1919). Assumptions and practices recur: ‘The first and absolutely essential thing to do, if we wish to use tractors for cultivation is to learn to live in proper villages’ (Nyerere, 1961). ‘Because it generates a common surplus, collective production is the only way of enabling the Mozambican peasant to pass to more advanced forms of work and to introduce mechanised production and the first forms of industrialisation in the rural areas’ (Frelimo 1977, cited First, 1982). Agricultural experts and international agencies share an authoritarian ethos of developing people who may ‘know their business better than they do.’ (Hill 1972). Confronted by demand for grain production and markets for the recovery of manufacturing, (Lenin’s) New Economic Policy turned its back on Lenin! Intraparty conflicts were between Bukharin and Probrazhenskii, and between A.V.Chayanov and L.N.Kritsman on Soviet industrial strategy and differentiation Russian peasants. Mustapha’s thesis follows and qualifies the rural economic anthropology, pioneered in rural Hausaland by Hill and Clough, who situate quantitative and qualitative research within sociologies of familial, social and economic relations and differentiation, religious affinities and moral values and complex interactions outwith their communities. Paul brings out cultural claims of ‘moral accumulation’; Raufu’s thesis the significance of a stratum combining access to financial and production resources with social and political connections. Both show the need to start from empirical evidence and appreciate intersections among complex elements that invite alternative perspectives.