In the memoirs of colonel Hans Von luck it says they found a village in Russia where the villagers didn't know about the Russian revolution. Was this a common occurrence?

by Fallout4please

From the book:

After about 50 kilometers we were out of the wooded area. Before us was a little village, which we ventured slowly to approach. They seemed to take us for Russians when we explained who we were an old woman approached us.

"Is it war?" She asked us. "What's our little father doing, the tsar?"

It turns out these people remained unaware of the Russian revolution, Stalin and our war with Russia. Here time seemed to stand still. Here there was no party functionary. We lingered in the village and tried to explained what had happend side Russia had lost her tsar.

International_KB

It's possible - Russia is a big country and Tsarist agriculture was notoriously pre-capitalist. But I'm sceptical. For a village not to know about the Revolution would be to have missed out on three decades of history, in particular two massive events that impacted the peasantry:

  • The Black Repartition of 1917-18 saw the division of noble estates amongst the peasantry and the re-drawing of plots within the village. This was the best thing to happen to the peasants since the abolition of serfdom; it was a big deal. It was also very much tied to the Revolution: it was Soviet decrees and bodies (however subverted by local interests) that legitimised these land seizures. (This would have had less impact in the western USSR/Empire, where the commune was less entrenched as an institution, but this was also one of the better connected and more market-orientated regions. Making it less likely that a village could exist in a time warp here.)

  • Secondly, the collectivisation drive of the 1930s was even more transformative. Without going into details, it entirely up-turned the old peasant world and corralled most peasants into state managed collective farms. By the time of the German invasion, some 90% of recorded peasant households (and virtually all of those in grain-producing regions) had been collectivised.

To my mind it's very unlikely that a peasant village could have somehow avoided even knowing of the above or the related chaos/coercion. Which is to say nothing of the fighting and disease that swept the country during the Civil War. And it remains so out of the way that no one finds it for decades... until a German soldier happens to wander by?

It's not impossible. But these were decades of repeated crises and convulsions in Soviet society and agriculture. In the more remote regions of Siberia... perhaps. In European Russia? Certainly I've heard of nothing like it.