Russia under the Old regime

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innumerable testimonies. Peasants showered with gifts exiles en route to Siberia, not from any sympathy for their cause, but because they regarded them as neshchastnye - unfortunates. In the Second World War, Nazi soldiers who had come to conquer and kill met with similar acts of charity once they had been made prisoners. In this un-abstract, instinctive human decency lay the reason why radical agitators met with such resistance when they tried to incite peasants to 'class war'. Even during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 rural violence directed itself against specific objectives: to wreak vengeance on a particular landlord, to seize a coveted plot of land, to cut down a forest. It did not aim against the 'system' as a whole, because the peasant had no inkling of its existence.

But this particular aspect of the peasant mind also had its detrimental side. Among the abstractions the peasant could not comprehend was law, which he tended to confound with custom or common sense. He did not understand due process. Russian customary law, enforced by village communities, recognized the accused person's confession as the most satisfactory proof of guilt. In the rural (volost') courts established in the 1860s to deal with civil offences and run by the peasants themselves, in the majority of cases confession was the only evidence submitted." Similarly, the peasant had great difficulty comprehending 'property', confusing it with usage or possession. To him, an absentee landlord had no rightful claim on the land or its product. The peasant would readily appropriate an object which he felt the legal owner had no need of (e.g. firewood from the landlord's forest), yet, at the same time reveal a very keen sense of ownership where land, livestock or agricultural implements of other peasants was concerned because these were required to make a living. The legal profession created by the Court Reform of 1864 was regarded by peasants as only another breed of corrupt officials: for did not lawyers take money to get people out of trouble with judges? Impatience with forms and procedures and inability to understand abstract principles, whether of law or government, made the peasant ill-suited for any political system except an authoritarian or anarchistic one. The Russian peasant shared with other primitive men a weakly developed sense of personal identity. Private likes and dislikes, private ambition, private conscience, tended to be submerged in family and community - at any rate, until he obtained an opportunity to make money on a large scale at which point acquisitive instincts came to the surface in their crassest form. Mir - the village commune - meant also 'the world'. The community restrained the unsocial impulses of the muzhik: the collective was superior to its individual members. Khomiakov once said that 'a Russian, taken individually will not get into heaven, but there is no way of keeping out an entire village'.17 But