Russia under the Old regime

THE PEASANTRY

There was no recourse against such measures. Nor could anything be done to thwart well-meaning pomeshchiks who forced peasants to use unfamiliar farm machinery imported from abroad or to alter their routine of crop rotation. When the government of Nicholas 1, for the best of reasons, compelled some state peasants to set aside a part of their land for potatoes, they rebelled. From the peasant's viewpoint the master's motives were immaterial; good and bad intention alike appeared as an external will acting upon him. Unable to distinguish between the two he often repaid his would-be benefactors in a most cruel fashion.

Totally lacking in legally recognized personal rights, the peasant regarded all authority as by its very nature alien and hostile. He complied when confronted with superior strength, especially if it was applied decisively. But in his mind he never acknowledged the right of someone outside his village community to tell him what to do.

Rural violence was actually much less prevalent in imperial Russia than it is generally thought. Compared to most twentieth-century societies, the Russian countryside of the imperial age was an oasis of law and order. It is, of course, an easy thing to compute statistics of rural 'disturbances' and on this basis to argue a steady rise in violence. The trouble, however, lies with definitions. In imperial Russia any formal complaint against his peasants lodged by a landlord was classified by the authorities as a 'disturbance' (volnenie) whether it actually occurred or not, and without regard to the nature of the offence: refusal to obey an order, idleness, drunkenness, theft, arson, manslaughter and premeditated murder were indiscriminately lumped together. A catalogue of such occurrences resembles a police blotter and has about as much value in the computation of criminal statistics. As a matter of fact^the majority of the so-called peasant 'disturbances' involved not acts of violence but of ordinary insubordination (nepovinovenie).13 They performed the same function as do strikes in modern industrial societies and are equally unreliable as a gauge of social instability or political discontent.

Approximately once a century, Russian peasants went on a rampage, killing landlords and officials, burning estates and seizing properties. The first great jacquerie occurred in the 1670s under the leadership of Stepan (or Stenka) Razin, the second a century later (1773-5) under Emelian Pugachev. Both had their beginning on the periphery of the state, in land inhabited by Cossacks, and they spread like wildfire owing to the very weak administration in the provinces.There were no major peasant uprisings in nineteenth-century Russia, but two occurred in close succession in the twentieth, one in 1905, the second in 1917. A common quality of these major rebellions, as well as of the more localized ones, was the absence of political aims. Russian peasants almost never revolted against tsarist authority; indeed Pugachev claimed to