Russia under the Old regime

J54

have been the true tsar come to reclaim his throne from an usurper. Their hatred was directed against the agents of autocracy, those two classes which, under the dyarchic arrangement then in effect, exploited the country for their private benefit. From his intimate knowledge of the peasant, Leo Tolstoy foresaw that the muzhik would not support moves to subvert the autocratic system. 'The Russian revolution', he noted in his diary in 1865, 'will be directed not against the tsar and despotism, but against the ownership of land.'

Desperately violent as he could be on occasions, in daily life the serf tended rather to employ non-violent means to have his way. He elevated the art of lying to great heights. When he did not want to do something, he played stupid; when found out, he feigned contrition. 'The peasants show the landlord almost in all circumstances of life the darkest side of their nature', complained Iurii Samarin, a Slavophile expert on rural conditions. 'In the presence of his master, the intelligent peasant assumes the pose of a clown, the truthful one lies right to his face, untroubled by conscience, the honest one robs him, and all three call him "father".'" This behaviour towards his betters contrasted vividly with the peasant's honesty and decency when dealing with equals. Dissimulation was not so much part of peasant character as a weapon against those from whom he had no other defence.

The authority of other men, onerous as it was, was not the only force constraining the peasant and frustrating his will. There was also the tyranny of nature on which he was so dependent - that which the novelist Gleb Uspenskii called the 'the power of the earth'. The earth held the peasant in its grip, sometimes giving, sometimes withholding, for ever mysterious and capricious. He fled it as eagerly as he fled the landlord and the official, turning to peddling, handicrafts, casual labour in the cities or any other work that would free him from the drudgery of field work. There is no evidence that the Russian peasant loved the soil; this sentiment is to be found mainly in the imagination of gentry romantics who visited their estates in the summertime.

If one considers the vice in which the peasant was held by the arbitrary will of his master and the only slightly less arbitrary will of nature -forces which he understood little and over which he had no control - it is not surprising that his fondest wish was to be totally, irresponsibly free. His word for this ideal condition was volia, a word meaning 'having one's way'. To have volia meant to enjoy licence: to revel, to carouse, to set things on fire. It was a thoroughly destructive concept, an act of revenge on the forces that for ever frustrated him. The literary critic Vissarion Belinskii, a commoner by origin who knew the muzhik better than his genteel friends, put the matter bluntly when he disputed their dream of a democratic Russia:

Our people understand freedom as volia, and volia for it means to make mischief. The liberated Russian nation would not head for the parliament but it would run for the tavern to drink liquor, smash glasses, and hang the dvoriane who shave their beards and wear a frock-coat instead of a zipun.16

Indeed, the handiest means of escape was drink. The Russian Primary Chronicle, in its account of Russia's conversion to Christianity, explains the Kievan princes' rejection of Islam by its prohibition of alcohol. Rusi est' veselepiti, ne tnozhet bez nego byti - 'Russians are merrier drinking - without it, they cannot live' - Prince Vladimir of Kiev is said to have told the Muslim delegates who had come to win him over. The story is, of course, apocryphal, but it canonizes, as it were, drinking as a national pastime. Until the sixteenth century Russians drank mead and fruit wines. Then they learned from the Tatars the art of distillation. By the middle of the seventeenth century drunkenness was so serious a problem that Patriarch Nikon and his party of church reformers sought to enforce total prohibition. Russians did not take vodka regularly, in small doses, but alternated between abstinence and wild abandon. Once a Russian peasant headed for the tavern-a government licensed shop called kabak or traktir, which dispensed no food-he liked to consume several glasses of vodka in rapid succession in order to sink as quickly as possible into an alcoholic stupor. A saying had it that a proper binge required three days: one to drink, a second to be drunk, and a third to sober up. Easter was the high point. At that time Russian villages, emerging from the long winter and about to begin the arduous cycle of field work, lay prostrate in a fog of alcoholic vapours. Attempts to combat drinking always ran into snags, because the government derived an important share of its income from the sale of spirits and therefore had a vested interest in their consu mption. At the end of the nineteenth century, this source was the largest single item of revenue in the imperial budget. The peasant of old regime Russia had what the older generation of anthropologists like Levy-Bruhl used to call a 'primitive mind', an outstanding quality of which is an inability to think abstractly. The peasant thought concretely and in personal terms. For example, he had great difficulty understanding 'distance', unless it was translated into so many units of versta, the Russian counterpart of a kilometre, the length of which he could visualize. Similarly with time, which he could perceive only in terms of specific activity. 'State', 'society', 'nation', 'economy', 'agriculture', all these concepts had to be filled with people they knew or activities they performed in order to be grasped.

This quality accounts for the charm of the muzhik when on his best behaviour. He approached other people free of national, religious or any other prejudice. Of his spontaneous kindness toward strangers there are