A People's Tragedy (20 page)

The
mir
could engender strong feelings of communal solidarity among the peasants, bound as they were by their common ties to the village and to the land. This was reflected in many peasant sayings: 'What one man can't bear, the
mir
can'; 'No one is greater than the
mir;
and so on.8 The existence of such ties can be found in peasant communities throughout the world. They bear

* Since there were no hedges between the strips or the fields it was essential for every household to sow the same crops at the same time (e.g. a three-field rotation of winter/spring/fallow), otherwise the cattle left to graze on the stubble of one strip would trample on the crops of the neighbouring strip.

witness not so much to the 'natural collectivism' of the Russian people, so beloved by the Slavophiles and the Populists, as to the functional logic of peasant self-organization in the struggle for survival against the harsh realities of nature and powerful external enemies, such as the landlords and the state. Indeed, beneath the cloak of communal solidarity observed by outsiders, fellow villagers continued to struggle between themselves for individual advantage. The village was a hotbed of intrigue, vendettas, greed, dishonesty, meanness, and sometimes gruesome acts of violence by one peasant neighbour against another; it was not the haven of communal harmony that intellectuals from the city imagined it to be. It was simply that the individual interests of the peasants were often best served by collective activity. The brevity of the agricultural season in Russia, from the thaw and the start of the spring ploughing in April to the first snows in early November, made some form of labour co-operation essential so that the major tasks of the agricultural cycle could be completed in brief bursts of intense activity. That is why the traditional peasant household tended to be much larger than its European counterpart, often containing more than a dozen members with the wives and families of two or three brothers living under the same roof as their parents. Statistical studies consistently highlighted the economic advantages of the bigger households (a higher proportion of adult male labourers, more land and livestock per head and so on) and these had much to do with the benefits of labour co-operation. The difficulties of small-scale peasant farming, which in the vast majority of households was carried out with only one horse and a tiny store of seed and tools, also made simple forms of neighbourly co-operation, such as borrowing and lending, advantageous to all parties.

Finally, there were many worthwhile projects that could only be done by the village as a whole, such as clearing woods and swamp-lands, constructing barns, building roads and bridges, and organizing irrigation schemes.

The village assembly, or
skhod,
where these decisions were taken, was attended by the peasant household elders and usually held on a public holiday in the street or in a meadow, since few villages had a big enough building to accommodate the whole meeting. There was no formal procedure as such. The peasants stood around in loose groups, drinking, smoking and debating different subjects of local interest, until the village elder, having mingled in the crowd and ascertained the feelings of the dominant peasants, called for the meeting to vote on a series of resolutions. Voting was done by shouting, or by standing in groups, and all the resolutions were passed unanimously, for when opinion was divided the minority always submitted to the majority, or, as the peasants put it, to the 'will of the
mir.
Romantic observers took this self-imposed conformity as a sign of social harmony. In Aksakov's words, the commune expressed its will as one, like a 'moral choir'. But in fact the decision-making was usually dominated by a small clique of the oldest household heads, who were often also the most successful farmers, and the rest of the villagers tended to follow their lead. The unanimity of the
mir
was not the reflection of some natural peasant harmony, but an imposed conformity set from above by the patriarchal elders of the village.

Some observers of peasant life (and this was to include the Bolsheviks) described these dominant patriarchs as 'commune-eaters'
(miroyeiy)
or 'kulaks'.* These were the so-called 'rich' and 'cunning' peasants, 'petty-capitalist entrepreneurs', 'usurers', 'parasites'

and 'strongmen', whom the rest of the villagers feared and whose greed and individualism would eventually lead to the commune's destruction. 'At the village assemblies', wrote one jurist in the early 1900s, 'the only people to participate are the loud-mouths and the lackeys of the rich. The honest working peasants do not attend, realising that their presence is useless.'9

But this too was by and large the outcome of looking at the peasants not for what they were but for the proof of some abstract theory, in this case the Marxist one. The dominant peasants within the village were, on the whole, the oldest patriarchs, who were often but not necessarily the heads of the richest households too. The late nineteenth-century Russian village still retained many of the features of what anthropologists would call a 'traditional society'. Although capitalism was certainly developing in Russia as a whole, apart from in a few specific regions it had yet to penetrate the village, where indeed the purpose of the commune was to limit its effects.

The domination of the peasant patriarchs was not based on capitalist exploitation but on the fact that, by and large, this was still an oral culture, where the customs of the past, passed down through the generations, served as a model for the collective actions of the village in the present and the future: 'Our grandfathers did it this way, and so shall we.'

In this sort of culture the old men were invariably deemed to be the most important people in the village — they had the most experience of farming and knew the most about the land — and their opinion was usually decisive. Old women, too, were respected for their expertise in handicrafts, medicine and magic. This was by and large a conservative culture. True, as the social anthropologist Jack Goody's many works have shown, there are ways in which an oral culture may produce an informal dynamism: since no one knew for sure what their grandfathers did, the peasant elders could remake tradition in every gener-

* The term 'kulak', derived from the word for a 'fist', was originally used by the peasants to delineate exploitative elements (usurers, sub-renters of land, wheeler-dealers and so on) from the farming peasantry. An entrepreneurial peasant farmer, in their view, could not be a kulak, even if he hired labour. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, misused the term in a Marxist sense to describe any wealthy peasant. They made it synonymous with

'capitalist' on the false assumption that die use of hired labour in peasant farming was a form of 'capitalism'. Under Stalin, the term 'kulak' was employed against the smallholding peasantry as a whole. Through collectivization die regime set about the

'destruction of the kulaks as a class'.

ation to fit in with their changing needs. But on the whole the peasant patriarchs had an inbred mistrust of any ideas from the world outside their own experience. They aimed to preserve the village traditions and to defend them against progress. The 'old way of life'

was always deemed to be better than the new. There was, they believed, a peasant Utopia in the distant past, long before the gentry and the state had imposed their domination on the village.

Of course, it was true that there were broader forces leading to the decline of this patriarchal world. The money economy was slowly penetrating into remote rural areas.

Urban manufactures were replacing the old peasant handicrafts. New technologies were becoming available to the enterprising peasant. Railways, roads, postal services and telegraphs were opening up the village to the outside world. Hospitals and schools, reading clubs and libraries, local government and political parties, were all moving closer to the peasantry. The growth of rural schooling, in particular, was giving rise to a new generation of 'conscious' peasant men and women — young and literate, thrifty and sober, self-improving and individualistic — who sought to overturn the old village world.

We can see it first in the fragmentation of the patriarchal household during the later nineteenth century. There was a sharp rise in the rate of household partitions following the Emancipation. Between 1861 and 1884 the annual rate of partitions rose from 82,000 to 140,000 households. Over 40 per cent of all peasant households were divided in these years. As a result, the average household size in central Russia declined from 9.5 members to 6.8. The peasants were moving from the traditional extended family to the modern nuclear one. Such partitions made little economic sense — the newly partitioned households, like the ones from which they had split, were left with much less livestock, tools and labour than before — and this was a cause of considerable anxiety to the tsarist government, which for moral and social reasons as much as for economic ones saw the peasantry's livelihood as dependent upon the survival of the patriarchal family. But it was the individualistic aspirations of the younger peasants that maintained the pressure for these partitions, in spite of their economic costs. Peasant sons and their young wives, fed up with the tyranny of the household elder, were breaking away to set up their own farms rather than wait until his death (when they themselves might be forty or fifty) to take his place at the household head. Their new farms might be small and weak but at least they were working for themselves. 'In the small family', explained one young peasant in the 1880s, 'everyone works for himself, everyone earns for himself; but if the family is large, then he doesn't end up with anything for himself.' The rate of partitioning was directly related to the involvement of the peasantry in off-farm employment as labourers. Once the younger peasants were earning wages there was a marked increase in disputes between them and their household elders over money and property. Peasant sons would refuse to send their wages home, or would set up their own farm rather than share their earnings in the household fund. They made the distinction between their own private earnings off the farm and the family's common property from its collective labour on it.10 It was a sign of their own growing sense of individual worth: 'I earn money therefore I am.'

The growing literacy of the younger peasants was another source of their aspiring individualism. Literacy in Russia rose from 21 per cent of the Empire's population in 1897 to 40 per cent on the eve of the First World War. The highest rural rates were among young men in those regions closest to the cities. Nine out of ten peasant recruits into the imperial army from the two provinces of Petersburg and Moscow were considered literate by 1904. These peasant youths were the main beneficiaries of the boom in rural schooling during the last decades of the old regime. The number of primary schools quadrupled (from 25,000 to 100,000) between 1878 and 1911; and well over half the peasant children of school age (eight to eleven) were enrolled in primary schools by the latter date.11

The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history — the English, the French and the Russian — all took place in societies where the rate of literacy was approaching 50 per cent. The local activists of the Russian Revolution were drawn mainly from this newly literate generation. Ironically, in its belated efforts to educate the common people, the tsarist regime was helping to dig its own grave.

Literacy has a profound effect on the peasant mind and community. It promotes abstract thought and enables the peasant to master new skills and technologies, which in turn help him to accept the concept of progress that fuels change in the modern world. It also weakens the village's patriarchal order by breaking down the barriers between it and the outside world, and by shifting power within the village to those with access to the written word. The young and literate peasant was much better equipped than his father to deal with the new agricultural technologies of the late nineteenth century; with the accounting methods of the money system; with written contracts, land deeds and loan agreements; and with the whole new world of administration — from the simple recording of clock-time and dates, to the reading of official documents and the formulation of village resolutions and petitions to the higher authorities — into which they entered after 1861. The status of the young and literate peasant rose as the market and bureaucracy filtered down to the village level and the peasant community relied more upon leaders with the skills which this new society demanded.

The written word divided the village into two generational groups. The older and illiterate generation feared and mistrusted too much education ('You can't eat books') and tried to limit its corrosive effects on the traditional culture of the village. They were worried by the urban-individualistic ways — the fashions and haircuts, the growing disrespect for peasant elders, and the dangerous political ideas —

which the young picked up from their reading. As an inspector of church schools —

who was clearly sympathetic to these concerns — wrote in I9II: The only thing observed [as a result of schooling] is a heightened interest in tasteless and useless dandyism. In many areas, the normal peasant dress is being replaced by urban styles, which cut deeply into the peasants' skimpy budget, hindering major improvements to other, far more important sides of peasant life . .. Family ties, the very foundation of the well-being of state and society, have been deeply shaken. Complaints about insubordination to parents and elders are ubiquitous. Young men and adolescents often verbally abuse their elders and even beat them; they file complaints in the courts and remove from the home whatever [possessions] they can. It seems that parents have lost all authority over their children.12

On the other hand, the younger peasants — and with the explosion of the rural population they were fast becoming the majority (65 per cent of the rural population was aged under thirty by I897)u — placed education at the top of their list of priorities.