Russia under the Old regime

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then the ties binding the inhabitants of a village and socializing them were intensely personal. The outside world was perceived through very clouded glasses as something distant, alien and largely irrelevant. It consisted of two parts: one, the vast, holy community of the Orthodox, and the other, the realm of foreigners, who were divided into Orientals (Busurmane) and Occidentals (Nemtsy). If foreign residents can be trusted many Russian peasants as recently as the nineteenth century did not know and would not believe that there were in the world other nations and other monarchs than their own.

The peasant was very conscious of the difference between equals and superiors. Everyone not in authority, he addressed as brat (brother); those in authority he called otets (father) or, more familiarly, batiushka. His manner toward equals was surprisingly ceremonious. Travellers to Russia were struck by the elaborate manner in which peasants greeted one another, bowing politely and tipping their hats. One of them says that in politesse they yielded nothing to Parisians promenading on the Boulevard des Italiens. To superiors, they either kowtowed (a habit acquired under the Mongols) or made a deep bow. Foreigners also commented on the peasant's gay disposition, readiness to mimic or break into song and his peaceful disposition: even drunk he rarely came to blows.

But when one turns from these descriptions to peasant proverbs one is shocked to find neither wisdom nor charity. They reveal crude cynicism and complete absence of social sense. The ethic of these proverbs is brutally simple: look out for yourself and don't bother about the others: 'Another's tears are water.' The socialists-revolutionaries who in the 1870s 'went to the people' to awaken in them a sense of indignation at injustice learned to their dismay that the peasant saw nothing wrong with exploitation as such; he merely wanted to be the exploiter instead of the object of exploitation. A leading agricultural expert, who had spent many years working among peasants, sadly concluded that at heart the Russian peasant was a kulak, that is, a rural speculator and usurer:

The ideals of the kulak reign among the peasantry; every peasant is proud to be the pike who gobbles up the carp. Every peasant, if circumstances permit, will, in the most exemplary fashion, exploit every other. Whether his object is a peasant or a noble, he will squeeze the blood out of him to exploit his need.18 And this is what Maxim Gorky had to say on the subject:

In my youth [during the 1880S-90S], I eagerly looked in the villages of Russia for [the good-natured, thoughtful Russian peasant, the tireless seeker after truth and justice which Russian literature of the nineteenth century had so convincingly and beautifully described to the world]. I looked for him and