Natasha's Dance

5

In 1897 Russian society was engulfed in a storm of debate over a short tale. Chekhov's 'Peasants' tells the story of a sick Moscow waiter who returns with his wife and daughter to his native village, only to find that his poverty-stricken family resent him for bringing another set of mouths to feed. The waiter dies and his widow, who has grown thin and ugly from her short stay in the village, returns to Moscow with these sad reflections on the hopelessness of peasant life:

During the summer and winter months there were hours and days when these people appeared to live worse than cattle, and life with them was really terrible. They were coarse, dishonest, filthy, drunk, always quarrelling and arguing amongst themselves, with no respect for one another and living in mutual fear and suspicion. Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to

revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant. Yes,

it was terrible living with these people; nevertheless, they were still human beings, suffering and weeping like other people and there was nothing in their lives which did not provide some excuse.

The myth of the good peasant had been punctured by the tale. The peasant was now just a human being, brutalized and coarsened by his poverty, not the bearer of special moral lessons for society. The Populists denounced Chekhov for failing to reflect the spiritual ideals of peasant life. Tolstoy called the story 'a sin before the people' and said that Chekhov had not looked into the peasant's soul.⁹¹ Slavophiles attacked it as a slander against Russia. But the Marxists, whose opinions were beginning to be heard, praised the story for revealing the way the rise of the capitalist town had caused the decline of the village. Reactionaries were pleased with the story, too, because it proved, they said, that the peasant was his own worst enemy.⁹²

It may seem odd that a work of literature should cause such huge shock waves throughout society. But Russia's identity was built upon the myth which Chekhov had destroyed. The Populist ideal of the peasantry had become so fundamental to the nation's conception of itself that to question this ideal was to throw the whole of Russia into agonizing doubt. The impact of the story was all the more disturbing for the simple factual style in which it was composed. It seemed not so much a work of fiction as a documentary study: the Tsarist censor had referred to it as an 'article'.⁹³

Chekhov's story was the fruit of its author's first-hand knowledge of the peasantry. The villages around his small estate at Melikhovo contained many peasants who went to work as waiters or as other service staff in nearby Moscow. The influence of city life was clearly to be seen in the behaviour of those who stayed behind. Shortly before he wrote the story Chekhov had observed a group of drunken servants in his own kitchen. One of them had married off his daughter, much against her will, in exchange for a bucket of vodka. They were now drinking it.⁹⁴ But Chekhov was not shocked by such a scene. Over the years he had come to know the peasants through his work as a doctor. Sickly peasants came to Melikhovo from many miles around, and he treated them free of charge. During the cholera epidemic that followed on the heels of the famine crisis in 1891 he had given up his writing and worked as a doctor for the district zemstvo in Moscow. The gruelling work had acquainted him with the squalid conditions in which the poorest peasants lived and died. 'The peasants are crude, unsanitary and mistrustful', Chekhov wrote to a friend, 'but the

thought that our labours will not be in vain makes it all unnoticeable.'⁹⁵ Five years later, in 1897, Chekhov helped to collect the statistics for the first national census in Russian history. He was horrified by what he learned - that just a few kilometres from Moscow there were villages where six out of every ten infants would die in their first year. Such facts angered him, a 'small deeds' liberal, pushing him politically towards the left. On learning, for example, that the poor discharged from hospital were dying for lack of proper aftercare, Chekhov delivered a tirade to Yezhov, a well-known columnist for the right-wing daily Novoe vremia, in which he maintained that, since the rich got richer by turning the poor peasants into drunks and whores, they should be made to meet the costs of their health care.⁹⁶

Beneath all the din surrounding Chekhov's story there was a profound question about Russia's future as a peasant land. The old rural Russia was being swept aside by the advance of the towns, and the nation was divided over it. For the Slavophiles and the Populists, who saw Russia's unique virtues in the old peasant culture and community, the growing subjugation of the village to the town was a national catastrophe. But for Westernists, the liberals and the Marxists, who embraced the city as a modernizing force, the peasantry was backward and bound to die away. Even the government was forced to reassess its peasant policy as the influence of the urban market began to change the countryside. The peasant commune was no longer feeding the growing population of the countryside, let alone providing a market-able surplus for the state to tax; and as the agrarian crisis deepened, it became the organizing kernel of the peasant revolution. Since 1861 the government had left villages in the hands of the communes -believing them to be the bulwarks of the patriarchal order in the countryside: its own state administration stopped at the level of the dist rict towns. But after the 1905 Revolution the government changed its policy. Under Stolypin, Prime Minister between 1906 and 1911, it atempted to break up the village commune, which had organized the

peasant war against the manors, by encouraging the stronger peasants to set up private farms on land removed from communal control, and

at the same time helping those who were too weak to farm, or deprived of access to the land by the new laws of private property, to move as labourers into the towns.

The root cause of this transformation was the slow decline of peasant farming in the overpopulated central Russian zone. The peasantry's egalitarian customs gave them little incentive to produce anything other than babies. For the commune distributed land among the households according to the number of mouths to feed. The birth rate in Russia (at about fifty births per 1,000 people per year) was nearly twice the European average during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the highest rates of all were in the areas of communal tenure where land holdings were decided according to family size. The astronomical rise of the peasant population (from 50 to 79 million between 1861 and 1897) resulted in a growing shortage of land. By the turn of the century, one in ten peasant households had no land at all; while a further one in five had a tiny plot of little more than one hectare which could barely feed a family, given the primitive methods of cultivation used in the central agricultural zone. The communes kept the open three-field system used in western Europe in medieval times in which two fields were sown and one lay fallow every year. Each household got a certain number of arable strips according to its size and, because the livestock were allowed to graze on the stubble and there were no hedges, all the farmers had to follow the same rotation of crops. As the population grew, the strips of productive arable land became progressively narrower. In the most overcrowded regions these strips were no more than a couple of metres wide, making it impossible to employ modern ploughs. To feed the growing population the communes brought more land under the plough by reducing fallow and pasture lands. But the long-term effect was to make the situation worse - for the soil became exhausted from being overworked, while livestock herds (the main source of fertilizer) were reduced because of the shortage of grazing lands. By the end of the nineteenth century, one in three peasant households did not even own a horse.⁹⁷ Millions of peasants were driven off the land by crushing poverty. Some managed to survive through local trades, such as weaving, pottery or carpentry, timber-felling and carting, although many of these handicrafts were being squeezed out by factory competition; or by working as day labourers on the gentry's estates, although the influx of new machines reduced demand for them with every passing year. Others left the overcrowded central areas for the vast and empty

steppelands of Siberia, where land was made available to colonists. But most were forced into the towns, where they picked up unskilled jobs in factories or worked as domestic or service staff. Chekhov's waiter had been one of these.

New urban ways were also filtering down to the remote villages. The traditional extended peasant family began to break up as the younger and more literate peasants struggled to throw off the patriarchal tyranny of the village and set up households of their own. They looked towards the city and its cultural values as a route to independence and self-worth. Virtually any urban job seemed desirable compared with the hardships and dull routines of peasant life. A survey of rural schoolchildren in the early 1900s found that half of them wanted to pursue an 'educated profession' in the city, whereas less than 2 per cent held any desire to follow in the footsteps of their peasant parents. 'I want to be a shop assistant,' said one schoolboy, 'because I do not like to walk in the mud. I want to be like those people who are cleanly dressed and work as shop assistants.'⁹⁸ Educators were alarmed that, once they had learned to read, many peasant boys, in particular, turned their backs on agricultural work and set themselves above the other peasants by swaggering around in raffish city clothes. Such boys, wrote a villager, 'would run away to Moscow and take any job'.⁹⁹ They looked back on the village as a 'dark' and 'backward' world of superstition and crippling poverty - a world Trotsky would describe as the Russia of 'icons and cockroaches' - and they idealized the city as a force of social progress and enlightenment. Here was the basis of the cultural revolution on which Bolshevism would be built. For the Party rank and file was recruited in the main from peasant boys like these; and its ideology was a science of contempt for the peasant world. The revolution would sweep it all away.

Bolshevism was built on the mass commercial culture of the towns. The urban song, the foxtrot and the tango, the gramophone, the fairground entertainment and the cinema - these were its forms after 1917. Yet this urban culture was already attracting peasants in the 1890s, when its presence was first felt in the countryside. The village song was gradually being supplanted by the urban 'cruel romance', or the chastushka, a crude rhyming song which was usually accompanied by an accordion (another new invention) in the tavern or streets. Unlike

the folk song, whose performance was collective and impersonal, these urban songs were personal in theme and full of individual expression. The folk tale was also dying out, as the new rural readership created by the recent growth of primary schooling turned instead to the cheap urban literature of detective stories and tales of adventure or romance. Tolstoy was afraid that the peasants would be poisoned by the egotistic values of this new book trade. He was concerned that these urban tales had heroes who prevailed by cunning and deceit, whereas the old peasant tradition had upheld moral principles. Joining forces with the publisher Sytin, a humble merchant's son who had become rich by selling such cheap pamphlets in the provinces, Tolstoy set up the Intermediary to publish cheap editions of the Russian classics and simple country tales such as 'How a Little Devil Redeemed a Hunk of Bread' and 'Where There Is God There Is Love' which Tolstoy himself wrote for the new mass peasant readership. Within four years of the publishing house's foundation, in 1884, sales had risen from 400,000 books to a staggering 12 million¹⁰⁰ - book sales that could not be matched by any other country until China under Mao. But sales declined in the 1890s, as more exciting books were brought out in the city, and readers turned away from Tolstoy's 'fairy stories' and 'moralizing tales'.¹⁰¹

For the intelligentsia, which defined itself by its cultural mission to raise the masses to its own levels of civilization, this defection was a mortal blow. The peasant had been 'lost' to the crass commercial culture of the towns. The peasant who was meant to bear the Russian soul - a natural Christian, a selfless socialist and a moral beacon to the world - had become a victim of banality. Suddenly the old ideals were crushed, and, as Dostoevsky had predicted, once the champions of 'the people' realized that the people were not as they had imagined them to be, they renounced them without regret. Where before the peasant was the light, now he was the darkening shadow that descended over Russia in the decades leading up to 1917. The educated classes were thrown into a moral panic about what they saw as the peasantry's descent into barbarity.

The 1905 Revolution confirmed all their fears. For years the intelligentsia had dreamed of a genuinely democratic revolution. Since the 1890s liberals and socialists had joined together in their campaign for

political reform. They rejoiced in the spring of 1905, when the entire country appeared to be united in the demand for democratic rights. In October 1905, with the Russian empire engulfed by popular revolts, the army crippled by soldiers' mutinies, and his own throne threatened by a general strike, Nicholas II finally gave in to the pressure of his liberal ministers to concede a series of political reforms. The October Manifesto, as these became known, was a sort of constitution -although it was not issued in that name because the Tsar refused to recognize any formal constraints on his autocratic power. The Manifesto granted civil liberties and a legislative parliament (or Duma) elected on a broad franchise. The country celebrated. New political parties were formed. People talked of a new Russia being born. But the political revolution was all the time developing into a social one, as the workers pressed their radical demands for industrial democracy in a growing wave of strikes and violent protests, and the peasantry resumed their age-old struggle for the land, confiscating property and forcing the nobility from their estates. The national unity of 1905 was soon shown to be illusory, as liberals and socialists went their separate ways after October. For the propertied elites, the October Manifesto was the final goal of the revolution. But for the workers and the peasantry, it was only the beginning of a social revolution against all property and privilege. The frightened liberals recoiled from their commitment to the revolution. The growing insubordination of the lower classes, the fighting in the streets, the rural arson and destruction of estates, and the mistrust and the hatred on the faces of the peasants which continued to disturb the landed nobles long after order was bloodily restored - all these destroyed the romance of 'the people' and their cause.

In 1909 a group of philosophers critical of the radical intelligentsia and its role in the Revolution of 1905 published a collection of essays called Vekhi (Landmarks) in which this disenchantment was power-fully expressed. The essays caused a huge storm of controversy - not least because their writers (former Marxists like Pyotr Struve and Nikolai Berdyaev) had all had spotless (that is, politically radical) credentials - which in itself was symptomatic of the intelligentsia's new mood of doubt and self-questioning. The essays were a fierce attack on the nineteenth-century cult of 'the people' and its tendency

to subordinate all other interests to the people's cause. Through this pursuit of material interests the intelligensia was pushing Russia to a second revolution, much more violent and destructive than the first. Civilization was under threat and it was the duty of the educated classes to face this reality:

This is the way we are: not only can we not dream about fusing with the people but we must fear them worse than any punishment by the government, and we must bless that authority which alone with its bayonets and prisons manages to protect us from the popular fury.¹⁰²

There was a general feeling, which the essays had expressed, that the masses would destroy Russia's fragile European civilization and that, come the revolution, Russia would be dragged down to the level of the semi-savage peasantry. Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg (1913-14) is filled with images of the city being overrun by Asiatic hordes. Even Gorky, a hero and a champion of the common man, succumbed to the new apocalyptic mood. 'You are right 666 times over', he wrote to a literary friend in 1905, '[the revolution] is giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome.'¹⁰³

This dark mood was captured in what must surely be the bleakest portrait of rural life in any literature: Ivan Bunin's novella The Village (1910). Bunin had experience of peasant life. Unlike Turgenev or Tolstoy, who were scions of the elite aristocracy, Bunin belonged to the minor provincial gentry, who had always lived in close proximity to the peasants and whose lives resembled theirs in many ways. Bunin saw the peasant as the 'national type' and his stories about them were intended to be judgements on the Russian people and their history. He had never had any illusions about the spiritual or noble qualities of the peasants. His diaries are filled with horrific incidents he had seen or heard about in the villages: a woman who was beaten by her drunken husband so that she had to be 'bandaged up like a mummy'; another woman raped so often by her husband that she bled to death.¹⁰⁴ Bunin's early stories dealt with the harsh realities of country life in the 1890s - a decade of famine and flight from the land. They are full of images of destruction and decay: abandoned villages, factories belching blood red smoke, the peasants old or sick. Here Bunin's village

was a realm of natural beauty that was being undermined and gradually destroyed by the new industrial economy. After 1905, however, Bunin changed his view of the village. He came to see it not just as a victim, but as the main agent of its own demise. The Village is set in 1905 in a place called Durnovo (from the word 'durnoi', meaning 'bad' or 'rotten'). Its peasants are portrayed as dark and ignorant, thieving and dishonest, lazy and corrupt. Nothing much takes place in Durnovo. There is no plot in Bunin's work. It consists of a description of the dreary existence of a tavern keeper who has just enough intelligence to realize the emptiness of his own life. 'God, what a place! It's a prison!' he concludes. Yet, as Bunin's tale implies, all of peasant Russia is a Durnovo.¹⁰⁵

The Village gave a huge jolt to society. More perhaps than any other work, it made the Russians think about the hopeless destiny of their peasant land. 'What stunned the reader in this book', wrote one critic, 'was not the depiction of the peasant's material, cultural and legal poverty… but the realization that there was no escape from it. The most that the peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving… was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed.'¹⁰⁶ Gorky wrote about The Village that it had forced society to think seriously 'not just about the peasant but about the question of whether Russia is to be or not to be'.¹⁰⁷

Like Bunin, Maxim Gorky knew what village life was like: his disenchantment with the peasantry was based on experience. He came from the 'lower depths' himself - an orphan who had survived by scavenging along the banks of the Volga river and roaming round the towns, a street urchin dressed in rags. Tolstoy once said of Gorky that he seemed 'to have been born as an old man' - and indeed Gorky had known more human suffering in his first eight years than the count would see in all his eight decades. Gorky's grandfather's household in Nizhnyi Novgorod, where he had been brought up after the death of his father, was, as he described it in My Childhood (1913), a microcosm of provincial Russia - a place of poverty, cruelty and meanness, where the men took to the bottle in a big way and the women found solace in God. All his life he felt a profound loathing for this 'backward' peasant Russia-a contempt that aligned him with the Bolsheviks:

When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid. It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life.¹⁰⁸

In 1888, at the age of twenty, Gorky had 'gone to the people' with a Populist called Romas who tried to set up a co-operative and organize the peasants in a village on the Volga near Kazan. The enterprise ended in disaster. The villagers burned them out after Romas failed to heed the threats of the richer peasants, who had close links with the established traders in the nearby town and resented their meddling. Three years later, Gorky was beaten unconscious by a group of peasant men when he tried to intervene on behalf of a woman who had been stripped naked and horsewhipped by her husband and a howling mob after being found guilty of adultery. Experience left Gorky with a bitter mistrust of the 'noble savage'. It led him to conclude that, however good they may be on their own, the peasants left all that was fine behind when they 'gathered in one grey mass':

Some dog-like desire to please the strong ones in the village took possession of them, and then it disgusted me to look at them. They would howl wildly at each other, ready for a fight - and they would fight over any trifle. At these moments they were terrifying and they seemed capable of destroying the very church where only the previous evening they had gathered humbly and submissively, like sheep in a fold.¹⁰⁹

Looking back on the violence of the revolutionary years - a violence he put down to the 'savage instincts' of the Russian peasantry - Gorky wrote in 1922:

Where then is that kindly, contemplative Russian peasant, the indefatigable searcher after truth and justice, so convincingly and beautifully presented to the world by Russian nineteenth-century literature? In my youth I earnestly sought for such a man throughout the Russian countryside but I did not find him.¹¹⁰