The Russian Revolution

3

Rural Russia

In the early 1900s, Russia was overwhelmingly rural. The peasantry constituted four-fifths of her inhabitants by legal status and three-quarters by occupation: the same proportion as in France on the eve of her revolution. Agriculture was far and away the largest source of national wealth. Russia’s exports consisted primarily of foodstuffs. The small industrial working class issued directly from the village and maintained close links with it. In terms of her social and economic structure, therefore, Imperial Russia resembled more an Asiatic country like China than Western Europe, though she considered herself a part of Europe, in whose politics she actively participated as one of the great powers.

To an extent inconceivable either in the West or in countries untouched by Westernization, Russia’s rural population was a world unto itself. Its relationship to the officialdom and the educated class was in all respects but the racial like that of the natives of Africa or Asia to their colonial rulers. The peasantry was hardly affected by the Westernization which had transformed Russia’s elite into Europeans, and in its culture remained loyal to Muscovite Russia. Russian peasants spoke their own dialect, followed their own logic, pursued their own interests, and viewed their betters as aliens to whom they had to pay taxes and deliver recruits but with whom they had nothing in common. The Russian peasant of 1900 owed loyalty only to his village and canton; at most he was conscious of some vague allegiance to his province. His sense of national identity was confined to respect for the Tsar and suspicion of foreigners.

Under assault from the Westernized intelligentsia, the monarchy came to regard the peasant as the bearer of “true” Russianness and it went to great lengths to protect him from the corrupting influence of the city. It institutionalized the cultural isolation of the peasantry by tying it to the village commune and subjecting it to special laws and taxes. It offered peasants few educational opportunities, and such little schooling as it provided it preferred to entrust to the clergy. It placed obstacles to the entry of outsiders into villages and forbade Jews to settle in them. At the turn of the century, the conservative establishment saw in the alliance of the Crown and the village the cornerstone of the country’s stability. As events were to show, this was a profound misconception. As conservative as the muzhik indeed was, his world outlook, his values, and his interests made him exceedingly volatile. Unlikely to initiate a revolution, he was certain to respond to urban disorders with a revolution of his own.

The life of the Russian peasantry revolved around three institutions: the household (dvor), the village (derevnia or selo), and the commune (mir or obshchina). All three were distinguished by a low degree of continuity, structural fluidity, poorly developed hierarchies, and the prevalence of personal rather than functional relations. In these respects, Russian rural conditions differed sharply from those found in Western societies and certain Oriental ones (notably Japan’s), a fact which was to have profound consequences for Russia’s political development.

The peasant household was the basic unit of rural Russia. In 1900, the Empire had 22 million such households, 12 million in European Russia. The typical Great Russian dvor was a joint family, with the parents living under the same roof with their sons, married and unmarried, and their respective families, as well as unmarried daughters. This kind of family structure was encouraged by Russia’s climatic conditions, under which the brevity of the agricultural season (four to six months) called for coordinated seasonal work by many hands in brief bursts of intense effort. Statistical evidence indicates that the larger the household, the more efficiently it functioned and the richer it was likely to be: a large dvor cultivated more land, owned more livestock, and earned more money per head. Small households, with one or two adults, either merged with others or died.¹ At the turn of the century, the largest number of Russian rural households (40.2 percent) had between six and ten members.² Despite their proven economic advantages, the proportion of large households kept on declining: to escape quarrels common in joint families, many peasant couples preferred to leave and set up their own households. The disintegration of large joint family households would accelerate in the twentieth century for economic reasons which will be described in due course.

Although the typical household was based on kinship relations and its members were most commonly connected by blood or marriage, the determining criterion was economic—namely, work. The dvor owed its cohesion to the fact that it engaged in disciplined field work under the direction of a headman. A son who left the village to make his living elsewhere ceased to be a member of the household and forfeited his claim to its property. Conversely, strangers (e.g., sons-in-law, stepsons, and adopted children) admitted into the household as regular workers acquired the rights of family members.³ Occasionally, households were formed entirely on such a voluntary basis by peasants who were not related either by blood or marriage.

15. Russian peasants: late nineteenth century.

The Russian peasant household was organized on a simple authoritarian model, under which full authority over the members and their belongings was entrusted to one person, known as bol’shak or khoziain. This family patriarch was usually the father, but the post could also be assigned, by common consent, to another adult male. The elder’s functions were many: he assigned farm and household duties, he disposed of property, he adjudicated domestic disputes, and he represented the household in its dealings with the outside world. Customary peasant law endowed him with unquestioned authority over his dvor: in many ways, he was heir to the authority of the serf owner. Since the Emancipation Edict of 1861, the bol’shak was also authorized by the government to turn over members of his household to administrative organs for punishment. He was the paterfamilias in the most archaic sense of the word, a replica in miniature of the Tsar.

The political and economic attitudes of Russian peasants had been formed in the first five hundred years of the current millennium, when no government inhibited their movement across the Eurasian plain and land was available in unlimited quantities. The collective memory of this era lay at the root of the peasantry’s primitive anarchism. It also determined the practices of inheritance followed by Russian peasants into modern times. It has been observed that in regions of the world where land is in short supply, landowners, both nobles and peasants, are likely to practice primogeniture, under which the bulk of the property is left to the eldest son. Where it is available in abundance, the tendency is to adopt “partible” inheritance, dividing the land and other belongings equally among the male heirs.* Even after agricultural land had become scarce, Russians continued to adhere to the old practices. Until 1917–18, when inheritance was outlawed, Russian landlords and peasants divided their properties in equal shares among male descendants. So entrenched was the custom that the monarchy’s attempts, launched under Peter I, to have the upper class keep its estates intact by bequeathing them to a single heir proved unenforceable.

The muzhik held most of his land as a communal allotment (nadel) to which he held no title: when the household died out or moved away, it reverted to the commune. But any land held by the peasant in private property outside the commune, as well as all his movable wealth (money, implements, livestock, seed grain, etc.), customary law allowed his heirs to distribute among themselves.

The practice of partible inheritance had profound effects on Russian rural conditions and, indeed, on many other seemingly unrelated aspects of Russian life. For as has been pointed out, the

transmission mortis causa [by reason of death] is not only the means by which the reproduction of the social system is carried out … it is also the way in which interpersonal relationships are structured.⁴

After the passing of its head, the household’s belongings were divided, whereupon the household dissolved and the brothers parted to set up households of their own. As a result, the dvor did not outlast the life span of its head, which made this basic institution of the Russian countryside exceedingly transient. In every generation—that is, three or four times a century—households throughout Russia broke apart and subdivided, much as do amoebas or other rudimentary biological organisms. Russian rural life perpetuated itself by a ceaseless process of fission, which inhibited the development of higher, more complex forms of social and economic organization. One dvor begat other dvory, which, in turn, multiplied in the same manner, like producing like and nothing new and different being given an opportunity to emerge.

The consequences of this custom become apparent when examined in the light of societies where the peasantry practiced indivisibility of property. Primogeniture makes possible a high degree of rural stability and gives the state a firm base of support in rural institutions. A Japanese sociologist thus compares the situation in Chinese and Indian villages, where primogeniture was unknown, with that in his own country, where it was prevalent:

Because the principle of primogeniture succession held in Japan, the ruling stratum of a village tended to be comparatively stable over the generations. This stability was lacking in China and India.… The Chinese rule of equal sharing [of inheritance] prevents the maintenance of family status, and the status changes from generation to generation. As a result, the village power center shifts, the leaders’ authority wanes, and no village-wide domination or status-subordination develops.… In Japan, lineally determined familism permeates the entire village structure; the main, or parent, house can easily perpetuate itself through the family inheritance system, and thereby acquire traditional authority. The family, clan, and village function together and promote unity. Thus, in Japanese rural society, the main-branch family, parent-child, or master-servant relationship influences to some degree all aspects of village social life.⁵

The observations here made about China apply to Russia: in both cases rural institutions were underdeveloped and ephemeral.

Several features of the peasant dvor call for emphasis. The household allowed no room for individuality: it was a collective which submerged the individual in the group. Second, given that the will of the bol’shak was absolute and his orders binding, life in the dvor accustomed the peasant to authoritarian government and the absence of norms (laws) to regulate personal relations. Third, the household made no allowance for private property: all belongings were held in common. Male members acquired outright ownership of the household’s movable property only at its dissolution, at which time it once again turned into the collective property of the new household. Finally, there was no continuity between households, and consequently neither pride in ancestry nor family status in the village, such as characterized Western European and Japanese rural societies. In sum, the Great Russian peasant, living in his natural environment, had no opportunity to acquire a sense of individual identity, respect for law and property, or social status in the village—qualities indispensable for the evolution of more advanced forms of political and economic organization. Enlightened Russian statesmen became painfully aware of this reality in the early years of the twentieth century and tried to do something to integrate the peasant into society at large, but it was late.

Russian peasants lived in villages, called derevni, after derevo, meaning wood, of which they were constructed. Large villages were known as sela. Individual farmsteads (khutora) located on their land were practically unknown in central Russia: they existed mainly in the western and southern provinces of the Empire which had been under Polish rule until the eighteenth century. The number of households per village varied greatly from region to region, depending on natural conditions, of which the availability of water was the most important. In the north, where water was abundant, the villages tended to be small; they increased in size as one proceeded southward. In the central industrial regions of European Russia villages averaged 34.8 households, and in the central black-earth region, 103.5.⁶ Whereas in the case of individual households size meant prosperity, in the case of villages the opposite held true: smaller villages were likely to be better off. The explanation lies in the practice of strip farming. For reasons which will be spelled out below, Russian communes divided the land into narrow strips, scattered at varying distances from the village. In a large village, peasants had to waste a great deal of time moving with their equipment from strip to strip, often many kilometers apart, which presented special difficulties at harvest time. When villages grew too large to cultivate the land efficiently, the inhabitants either “hived off” to form new ones or else abandoned agriculture and turned to industrial occupations.

16. Village assembly.

At the turn of the century, central Russia consisted of tens of thousands of such villages, usually five to ten kilometers apart.

Compared with rural settlements in other parts of the world, the Russian village was loosely structured and fluid, with few institutions to provide continuity. It was the household rather than the village that served as the building block of Russian rural society. The principal village official, the starosta, was chosen, often against his will, at the insistence of the bureaucracy, which wanted a village representative with whom to deal. Since he could be removed by the same bureaucrats, he represented not so much the population as the government.⁷

The all-male village assembly, or sel’skii skhod, was connected with the commune rather than the village—institutions which, as will be pointed out below, were not identical. Composed of household elders, it met periodically to decide on matters of common concern and then dispersed: it had no other responsibilities and no standing organization. The absence in the village of institutional forms bears emphasis because it explains the extreme paucity of political experience in the life of Russian peasants. The Russian village could display great cohesion when threatened from the outside. But within its own confines, it never developed organs of self-government able to provide the peasants with political practice—that is, teach them to translate the habits of personal relations acquired within the walls of the household into more formal social relations.

The critical factor in the underdevelopment in Russia of a durable and functional village structure, the reason for the village’s fluidity, was, as in the case of the dvor, the absence of traditions of primogeniture. Compared with an English or Japanese village, the Russian village resembled a nomadic encampment: the peasant’s log cabin (izba), constructed in a few days and frequently destroyed by fire, was not much more durable than a tent.

The third peasant institution, the commune (obshchina), usually overlapped with the village but was not identical with it. Whereas the village was a physical entity—cottages in close proximity—the commune was a legal institution, a collective arrangement for the distribution among its members of land and taxes. Residence in a given village did not automatically confer membership: peasants without land allotments as well as non-peasants (e.g., the priest or schoolteacher) did not belong and could not take part in communal decisions. Furthermore, although the great majority of Russian communes were of the “single” type, which embraced one village, this was not universal practice. In the north, where villages were small, several of them sometimes combined to form one commune; in the central regions and even more often in the south, large villages would divide into two or more communes.

The commune was an association of peasants holding communal land allotments. This land, divided into strips, it periodically redistributed among members. Redistributions (peredely), which took place at regular intervals—ten, twelve, fifteen years or so, according to local custom—were carried out to allow for changes in the size of households brought about by deaths, births, and departures. They were a main function of the commune and its distinguishing characteristic. The commune divided its land into strips in order to assure each member of allotments of equal quality and distance from the village. By 1900, approximately one-third of the communes, mostly in the western and southern borderlands, had ceased the practice of repartitioning even though formally they were still treated as “repartitional communes.” In the Great Russian provinces, the practice of repartition was virtually universal.

Through the village assembly, the commune resolved issues of concern to its members, including the calendar of field work, the distribution of taxes and other fiscal obligations (for which its members were held collectively responsible), and disputes among households. It could expel troublesome members and have them exiled to Siberia; it had the power to authorize passports, without which peasants could not leave the village, and even to compel an entire community to change its religious allegiance from the official church to one of the sects. The assembly reached its decisions by acclamation: it did not tolerate dissent from the will of the majority, viewing it as antisocial behavior.*

The commune was largely confined to central Russia. On the periphery of the Empire—in what had been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ukraine, and the Cossack regions—most of the peasants tilled individually, by households, under a system known as podvornoe zemlevladenie. Here, each household held, either in ownership or under lease, a parcel of land which it cultivated as it pleased. By contrast, in northern and central Russia, the peasants held the bulk of their land in strips and cultivated it under communal discipline. They did not own the land, the title to which was held by the commune. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 77.2 percent of the rural households in the fifty provinces of European Russia tilled the land communally; in the thirty or so Great Russian provinces, communal ownership was virtually universal (97–100 percent).⁸ Membership in a commune and access to a communal allotment did not preclude peasants from buying land for private use from landlords or other owners. In the more prosperous regions it was not uncommon for peasants to till both communal allotments and their private land. In 1910, the peasants of European Russia held communally 151 million hectares and 14 million hectares in outright ownership.†

The origins of the Russian commune are obscure and a subject of controversy. Some see in it the spontaneous expression of an alleged Russian sense of social justice, while others view it as the product of state pressures to ensure collective responsibility for the fulfillment of obligations to the Crown and landlord. Recent studies indicate that the repartitional commune first appeared toward the end of the fifteenth century, became common in the sixteenth, and prevalent in the seventeenth. It served a variety of functions, as useful to officials and landlords as to peasants. The former it guaranteed, through the institution of collective responsibility, the payment of taxes and delivery of recruits; the latter it enabled to present a united front in dealings with external authority.⁹ The principle of periodic redistribution of land ensured (at any rate, in theory) that every peasant had enough to provide for his family and, at the same time, to meet his obligations to the landlord and state. Such considerations moved the Imperial Government at the time of Emancipation to retain the commune and extend it to some areas where it had been unknown. It was expected that once the villages had redeemed their land by repaying the state the moneys it had advanced the landlords on their behalf, the communes would dissolve and the peasants assume title to their allotments. However, during the conservative reign of Alexander III legislation was passed which made it virtually impossible for peasants to withdraw. This policy was inspired by the belief that the commune was a stabilizing force which strengthened the authority of the bol’shak, curbed peasant anarchism, and inhibited the formation of a volatile landless proletariat.

17. Peasants in winter clothing.

By 1900, many Russians had grown disenchanted with the commune. Government officials and liberals noted that while the commune did not prevent the emergence of a landless proletariat it did keep down the enterprising peasant. Social-Democrats saw it as doomed to disintegrate under the pressure of intensifying “class differentiation” among poor, middle, and rich peasants. A conference on rural problems convened in 1902, in the wake of recent peasant disturbances, concluded that the commune was the main cause of the backwardness of Russian peasant farming.*

But the peasantry itself held fast to communal forms of agriculture because it promised access to a fair and adequate share of arable land and helped maintain the cohesion of the household. If land allotments had shrunk considerably by 1900, the peasant could console himself with the hope that sooner or later all privately held land in the country would be confiscated and transferred to the communes for repartitioning.

The three rural institutions—the household, the village, and the commune—provided the environment which shaped the muzhik’s social habits. They were well adapted to the harsh geographic and climatic conditions in which Russian agriculture had to be carried out. But nearly everything the peasant learned in his familiar environment proved to be useless and sometimes positively harmful when applied elsewhere. Living in a small community, the Russian peasant was unequipped for the transition to a complex society, composed of individuals rather than households and regulated by impersonal relations, into which he would be thrust by the upheavals of the twentieth century.

There exists a widespread impression that before 1917 Russia was a “feudal” country in which the Imperial Court, the Church, and a small minority of wealthy nobles owned the bulk of the land, while the peasants either cultivated minuscule plots or worked as tenant farmers. This condition is believed to have been a prime cause of the Revolution. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the image derives from conditions in pre-1789 France, where, indeed, the vast majority of peasants tilled the land of others. It was in such Western countries as England, Ireland, Spain, and Italy (all of which happened to avoid revolution) that ownership of agricultural land was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, sometimes to an extreme degree. (In England in 1873, for example, four-fifths of the acreage was the property of fewer than 7,000 persons; in 1895, only 14 percent of Britain’s cultivated land, exclusive of Ireland, was tilled by its owners, the rest being leased.) Russia, by contrast, was a classic land of small peasant cultivators. Latifundia here existed primarily in the borderlands, in regions taken from Poland and Sweden. At the time of their Emancipation, the ex-serfs received approximately one-half of the land which they had previously tilled. In the decades that followed, with the help of the Land Bank, which offered them credit on easy terms, they bought additional properties, mainly from landlords. By 1905, peasant cultivators owned, either communally or privately, 61.8 percent of the land in private possession in Russia.¹⁰ As we shall see, after the Revolution of 1905 the exodus of non-peasant landowners from the countryside accelerated, and in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, peasant cultivators in European Russia owned nine-tenths of the arable land.

Notwithstanding their intent, by 1900 Russia’s communes could no longer assure their members of equitable allotments: over time, larger, stronger households had managed to accumulate more of them as well as to acquire most of the land bought by peasants for private use. In 1893, 7.3 percent of the communal households had no land.¹¹ These landless peasants, called batraki, were one of the four identifiable categories of peasants. The others consisted of peasants whose allotments were entirely communal (the great majority), those who had land both inside and outside the commune, and those (very few in number) who cultivated their own.* Peasants in the two last-named categories were sometimes labeled “kulaks” (“fists”). This term, beloved of radical intellectuals, had no precise economic meaning for the peasants themselves, being applied sometimes to the rich, those who employed hired labor, traded, and lent money, sometimes to the hardworking, thrifty, and sober.¹²

The physical distribution of land in the villages was exceedingly complicated, due partly to communal practices, partly to the legacy of serfdom. The pre-1861 Russian estate was not a plantation. The custom was for the landlord to divide his arable acreage in two parts, one of which the serf household cultivated for him, the other for itself. The halves were, as a rule, commingled. Under serfdom, the typical Russian village, especially in the northern and western provinces, consisted of a mosaic of long, narrow strips: the strips which the serfs cultivated for the landlord and those which they cultivated for themselves lay side by side. This arrangement, known as cherespolositsa, continued after Emancipation. Frequently, the land which the landlord retained as a result of the Emancipation settlement and now exploited with the help of hired labor remained wedged among the communal holdings. The land which the landlords subsequently sold to peasants, therefore, continued to be held and tilled alongside communal allotments, to the intense annoyance of communal peasants, who hated these private lots, which they called “baby-Ions” (vavilony) and wanted for communal distribution.¹³

Serfdom bequeathed yet another painful legacy. While allotting the emancipated serf generous quantities of arable land (about five hectares per adult male), the Emancipation Edict left pasture and woodland in the landlord’s possession. Under serfdom, the peasant had enjoyed the rights of grazing cattle and gathering firewood and lumber. These rights he lost once property lines had been drawn. Some landlords began to charge for the use of pasture; others collected tolls for letting peasants’ cattle cross their properties. At the turn of the century, one of the loudest peasant complaints concerned the shortage of grazing land. The peasant had to have access to adequate pasture—ideally, at a ratio of one hectare of pasture to two of arable, but at a very minimum one to five, below which he could not feed his cattle and draft horses.¹⁴ Much unhappiness was also caused by the lack of access to forest. In 1905 the most prevalent form of rural violence took the form of cutting lumber.

Russia was widely believed to suffer from an acute shortage of agricultural land. At first sight it may appear surprising that a country as large as Russia should have experienced land shortages (or rural overpopulation, which is the same). And, indeed, Russia had a long way to go to match the population densities of Western Europe. With 130 million inhabitants and 22 million square kilometers of territory, the Empire in 1900 had an overall population density of 6 persons per square kilometer. Even such a young country as the United States had at that time a higher population density (8 per square kilometer). And yet, while the United States suffered endemic labor shortages, which it met by opening its doors to millions of European immigrants, Russia suffocated from rural overcrowding.

The explanation of this seeming paradox lies in the fact that in agricultural countries population densities acquire meaning only by relating the number of inhabitants to that share of the territory which is suitable for farming. Viewed in these terms, Russia was hardly a country of boundless expanses. Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region.* But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.

Densities of this magnitude might have proven tolerable were it not for pre-revolutionary Russia’s extraordinary population growth. With an annual excess of births over deaths on the order of 15 per 1,000, Russia had the highest rate of natural increase in Europe.† The implications of such a rapid population growth for agriculture can be demonstrated statistically. In the Empire of 1900, three-quarters of the population was employed on the land. With an increase of 15 per 1,000 each year and a population of 130 million, 1,950,000 new inhabitants were added annually, 1,500,000 of them in the countryside. Allowing for the very high infant mortality rate, we are left with a million or so additional mouths which the countryside had to feed each year. Given that an average Great Russian household had five members and tilled ten hectares, these figures mean that Russia required annually an additional 2 million hectares of arable land.^‡

In Western Europe, the pressures generated by a somewhat smaller but still rapid population growth from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was solved in part by overseas migration and in part by industrialization. During the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the agrarian countries of Europe (e.g., Italy, Ireland, Austria-Hungary) sent much of their excess rural population to the Americas. The net outflow of overseas migrants from Western Europe between 1870 and 1914 is estimated at 25 million, which took care of approximately one-half of the continent’s excess rural population. Much of the remainder found employment in industry. Industrialization permits unprecedented levels of population density. For instance, Germany, which in the first half of the nineteenth century had been a major source of overseas migration, in the second half of the century, in consequence of industrial development, not only ceased to send people abroad but had to import labor. Some industrial countries attained staggering population densities: England and the Low Countries accommodated 250–270 inhabitants a square kilometer, or several times that of the most crowded areas of central Russia, without suffering from overpopulation. There can be little doubt that the ability of the Western countries, through emigration and industrialization, to relieve population pressures played a major role in enabling them to avoid social revolution.

18. Strip farming as practiced in Central Russia, c. 1900. The strips in black are cultivated by one household.

Russia had neither safety valve. Her citizens did not migrate abroad: they preferred to colonize their own country. The only significant groups to leave Russia were non-Russians from the Western provinces: of the 3,026,000 subjects of the Tsar who emigrated between 1897 and 1916, more than 70 percent were Jews and Poles.¹⁵ But as Jews did not engage in agriculture and Poles engaged in it in their own homeland, their departure did nothing to ease pressures on the Russian village. Why Russians did not emigrate is far from clear, but several explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps the most important cause was the practice of cultivating by joint families and in communes. Russian peasants were not accustomed to pulling up stakes and leaving for the unknown, except in groups. Although peasants were always on the lookout for fresh land, they never moved by families, as was common in the American West, but only with enough fellow peasants to set up a new commune, usually by villages or parts of villages.¹⁶ Second, living in a largely self-sufficient economy, they lacked money to pay the shipping fare. Third, they were convinced that before long there would occur a general repartition of non-peasant land in Russia and did not want to be excluded from it. Finally, living in a self-contained universe of Orthodox Slavs, on land hallowed as Holy Rus, little exposed to foreign cultures, Russian peasants found life among infidels hard to conceive.

Nor could Russian industry absorb significant numbers of excess peasants. In the 1880s and even more so in the 1890s, rapid industrial growth led to a rise in industrial employment: in 1860, Russia had 565,000 industrially employed, and in 1900, 2.2 million (of the latter, about one-half were factory workers).¹⁷ Using the same figures for households as above, this means that during the closing four decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Russians freed from dependence on agriculture grew from 3 to perhaps as much as 12 million. But with an annual accretion of 1 million rural inhabitants, it also meant that industry at best absorbed from the land one-third of the new population.*

Population growth without a commensurate expansion of arable land or emigration meant that the quantity of land available for distribution in the communes shrank steadily: the average allotment per male “soul,” which in 1861 had been 5.24 hectares, decreased in 1880 to 3.83 and in 1900 to 2.84 hectares.† The peasants compensated for this by leasing land. Around 1900, more than one-third of landlord land was rented by peasants.¹⁸ Even so, many peasants had access neither to land nor to regular employment.

Many of the landless or land-poor peasants found employment as farmhands: they usually spent the winter in the village and at sowing and harvest time hired themselves out to richer peasants or landlords, often far away from home. These workers provided the bulk of the labor force on private estates and privately held peasant land. Others took occasional work in industry, while retaining their rural connections. In the villages, landless peasants had no status. Excluded from the commune, they took part in no organized life.

Many peasants whom the commune could not accommodate went to the cities on temporary permits in search of work. It is estimated that in the early twentieth century, each year some 300,000 peasants, most of them males, moved into Russia’s cities, looking for casual jobs, peddling products of cottage industries, or simply milling around for lack of anything better to do. Their presence significantly altered the character of the cities. The 1897 census revealed that 38.8 percent of the Empire’s urban inhabitants were peasants and that they represented the fastest-growing element in the urban population.¹⁹ In the large cities, their proportion was still higher. Thus, at the turn of the century in St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, 63.3 and 67.2 percent of the residents (actual, not those legally registered) were peasants.²⁰ In the smaller cities, these unwelcome guests were known as inogorodnye or “out-of-towners.” They were especially attracted to towns in the prosperous agrarian regions where agriculture was carried out by households rather than communally, such as the Cossack settlements on the Don and Terek rivers and southwestern Siberia.²¹ Here gathered multitudes of batraki, who cast avaricious eyes on the large, prosperous farms, awaiting the signal announcing the onset of the grand repartition.

In striking contrast to Western Europe, Russian cities did not urbanize the rural newcomers: it has been said that the only discernible difference between the peasant in the village and his brethren in the city was that the former wore the shirt outside and the latter inside his trousers.²² The peasants who flooded the cities, lacking in institutional attachments of any sort, without steady employment, their families usually left behind, represented an unassimilable and potentially disruptive element.

This was the essence of the “land problem” which greatly exercised Russians in and out of government: there was a widespread feeling that unless something drastic was done, and done soon, the countryside would explode. It was axiomatic among the peasants, as well as among socialist and liberal intellectuals, that the crux of the problem was land shortage, and that this difficulty could be resolved only by expropriating all privately held (non-communal) land. The liberals wanted large properties to be taken with compensation. The socialists preferred either the “socialization” of land which would place the arable at the disposal of the cultivators or its “nationalization” on behalf of the state.

But historians and agrarian specialists have cast doubts on the evidence of a severe agrarian crisis and the remedies proposed for it.

One of the principal arguments of those who held that the Russian village was in a state of deep and worsening crisis was the fact that it was constantly falling into arrears on the redemption payments (mortgage money owed the government for its help in procuring land for the peasants in the 1861 Emancipation settlement). The question has recently been raised whether these arrears really prove the impoverishment of the village.²³ Instead of making mortgage payments, the peasant steadily increased purchases of consumer goods, as shown by the rise in government revenues from sales taxes, which more than doubled in the decade 1890–1900. Citing this evidence, an American historian concludes:

If the peasants were the primary source of indirect tax income, then they must have been the major consumer of the goods taxed, that is, sugar, matches, and so forth. Therefore, since they could purchase nonagricultural goods, one can hardly depict the rural sector as ravaged by a ruthless tax system … Peasant land redemption arrears grew not because of an inability to pay, but because of an unwillingness to pay.²⁴

This argument is reinforced with evidence of a rise in peasant savings and an increase in farm work wages. It raises doubts whether the Russian village was indeed suffering from severe undernourishment as claimed by liberal and socialist politicians.*

Well-informed contemporaries, while conceding that the country faced serious agrarian problems, questioned whether these were caused by land shortages and whether the transfer of privately held, non-peasant land into peasant hands would significantly improve things. One such observer, A. S. Ermolov, a onetime Minister of Agriculture, formulated a cogent counterargument to conventional wisdom, the soundness of which subsequent events amply confirmed.²⁵ Ermolov held that one could not reduce all of Russia’s agrarian difficulties to the inadequacy of peasant allotments: the problem was much more complex and had to do mainly with the way the peasant tilled his allotments. The peasants deluded themselves, and were encouraged in their delusion by intellectuals, that seizing landlord properties would greatly improve their economic situation. In fact, there was not enough private land to go around: even if all privately held arable land were distributed among peasants, the resulting increase, which Ermolov estimated at 0.8 hectare per male peasant, would not make much of a difference. Second, even if adequate land reserves could be found, their distribution would be counterproductive because it would only serve to perpetuate outmoded and inefficient modes of cultivation. The problem with Russian agriculture was not the shortage of land but the antiquated manner of cultivating it—a legacy of the times when it had been available in unlimited quantities: “In the vast majority of cases, the problem lies not in the absolute land shortage, but in the inadequacy of land for the pursuit of the traditional forms of extensive agriculture.” The peasant had to abandon the habits of superficial cultivation and adopt more intensive forms: if he could increase cereal yields by no more than one grain per grain sown, Russia would overflow with bread.* To prove his point, Ermolov noted the paradox that in Russia the prosperity of peasants stood in inverse ratio to the quality and size of their land allotments, a fact which he ascribed to the need of land-poor peasants to pursue more intensive forms of agriculture. In central Russia, at any rate, he saw no correlation between the size of communal allotments and the well-being of peasants. Furthermore, the elimination of landlord estates would deprive the peasantry of wages earned from farm work, an important source of additional income. Ermolov concluded that “nationalization” or “socialization” of land, by encouraging the peasant in his traditional ways of cultivation, would spell disaster and force Russia to import grain. The author suggested a variety of measures resembling those that would be introduced in 1906–11 by Peter Stolypin.

Such voices of experience, however, were ignored by intellectuals who preferred simplistic solutions that appealed to the muzhik’s preconceived ideas.

At the turn of the century, Russian industrial workers were, with minor exceptions, a branch of the peasantry rather than a distinct social group. Because of the long winters during which there was no field work, many Russian peasants engaged in non-agrarian pursuits known as promysly. Such cottage industries produced farm implements, kitchenware, hardware, and textiles. The custom of combining agriculture with manufacture blurred the distinction between the two occupations. Peasants engaged in promysly furnished a pool of semi-skilled labor for Russian industry. The availability of cheap labor in the countryside, which, if not needed, could fall back on farming, explains why the majority (70 percent) of Russian workers held jobs in industrial enterprises located in rural areas.²⁶ It also explains why Russian workers failed to develop until very late the professional mentality of their Western counterparts, many of whom were descendants of urban artisans.

Russia’s first full-time industrial workers were serfs whom Peter I had bonded to state-owned manufactures and mines. To this group, known as “possessional peasants” (possessionnye krest’iane), were subsequently added all kinds of people who could not be fitted into the estate system, such as wives and children of army recruits, convicts, prisoners of war, and prostitutes.

The German economist Schulze-Gävernitz divided the 2.4 million full-time industrial employees in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century into four subgroups:²⁷

1. Peasants seasonally employed in local industries, usually in time free from agricultural work; they slept under the open sky in the summer and in the shops, near the machines, in the winter.

2. Workers banded in cooperatives (arteli) who hired themselves out and distributed among members the cooperative’s earnings. Housed in barracks furnished by the employer, they usually left their families behind. Because they did not lead a normal family life, workers in this group regarded their status as transient and usually returned to the village to help out with the harvest. Russia’s largest industry, textile manufacture, relied heavily on such labor.

These two groups constituted the majority of Russians classified by the 1897 census as industrial workers. They consisted mostly of peasants. The next two categories had severed ties with the village.

3. Workers who lived with their families. Because wages were low, their wives usually also sought full-time employment. They often resided in communal quarters provided by the employers, the living spaces of which were separated by curtains, with kitchens used communally. The employers also often provided them with factory shops and schools. This arrangement would be adopted by the Soviet Government during its industrialization drive in the 1930s.

4. Skilled workers who no longer depended on their employers for anything but wages. They found their own lodgings, bought provisions on the open market, and if laid off, no longer had a village to which to return. It is only in this category that the dependence of the worker on the employer, reminiscent of serf conditions, came to an end. Workers in this category were to be found mainly in the technically advanced industries, such as machine-building, centered in St. Petersburg.

As this classification indicates, industrial employment, in and of itself, did not lead to urbanization. The majority of industrially employed Russians continued to reside in the countryside, where most of the factories were located, and retained close connections with their villages. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that they also retained a rural outlook: Schulze-Gävernitz concluded that the principal differences between Russian and Western European industrial workers derived from the fact that the former had not yet broken ties to the land.²⁸ The only significant departure from this pattern could be found among skilled workers (Group Four) who as early as the 1880s began to display “proletarian” attitudes. They developed an interest in mutual aid associations and trade unions, about which they had learned from foreign sources, as well as in education. The illegal Central Labor Circle, formed by a group of skilled St. Petersburg workers in 1889, was Russia’s first rudimentary trade union. The strikes of textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896–97 to protest working conditions were the earliest overt manifestations of this new spirit.²⁹

Despite the rural origins and outlook of the majority of industrial workers, the government eyed them with suspicion, fearing that their concentration and proximity to cities made them susceptible to corrupting influences. And, indeed, there was cause for concern. In the early 1900s, industrial workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow were 80 to 90 percent literate, which made them an inviting target for the propaganda and agitation of radicals, to which the rural population was quite immune.

The most difficult aspect of rural Russia to understand is peasant mentality, a subject on which the scholarly literature is quite unhelpful. There exist many works on the economic conditions of the pre-revolutionary peasantry, on its folklore and customs, but virtually no scholarly studies that explain what the muzhik believed and how he reasoned.³⁰ It is as if Russian intellectuals regarded the peasant mind as an immature specimen of the progressive mind (their own) and hence undeserving of serious attention. To understand the peasant mentality, one must have recourse to other than scholarly sources, mainly belles lettres.³¹ These can be supplemented with information gathered by students of peasant customary law, which provides an oblique insight into the peasant mind as revealed by the way he coped with problems of daily life, especially property disputes.³² Familiarity with this material leaves little doubt that the culture of the Russian peasant, as that of the peasantry of other countries, was not a lower, less developed stage of civilization but a civilization in its own right.

As has been pointed out, the world of the Russian peasant was largely self-contained and self-sufficient. It is no accident that in the Russian language the same word—mir—is used for the peasant commune, the world, and peace. The peasant’s experiences and concerns did not extend beyond his own and neighboring villages. A sociological inquiry into peasant attitudes carried out in the 1920s indicated that even after a decade of war, civil war, and revolution which had dragged the Russian peasantry into the vortex of national and international affairs, the muzhik had no interest in anything outside the confines of his canton. He was willing to let the world go its own way as long as it left him alone.³³ Pre-revolutionary literary sources similarly stress the absence among the peasantry of a sense of belonging to the state or nation. They depict it as insulated from influences external to the village and lacking in awareness of national identity. Tolstoy emphatically denied the peasant a sense of patriotism:

I have never heard any expression of patriotic sentiments from the people, but I have, on the contrary, frequently heard the most serious and respectable men from among the masses giving utterance to the most absolute indifference or even contempt for all kinds of manifestations of patriotism.³⁴

The truth of this observation was demonstrated during World War I, when the Russian peasant soldier, even while performing courageously under difficult conditions (shortages of weapons and ammunition), did not understand why he was fighting since the enemy did not threaten his home province. He fought from the habit of obeying: “They order, we go.”³⁵ Inevitably, once the voice of authority grew faint, he stopped obeying and deserted. Equal to the Western soldier in physical courage, he lacked the latter’s sense of citizenship, of belonging to a wider community. General Denikin, who observed this behavior at close quarters, blamed it on the total absence of nationalist indoctrination in the armed forces.³⁶ But it is questionable whether indoctrination by itself would have made much difference. Judging by Western experience, to bring the peasant out of his isolation it was necessary to develop institutions capable of involving him in the country’s political, economic, and cultural life: in other words, making him a citizen.

The majority of French and German citizens in the early 1900s were also either peasants or urban dwellers a mere generation or two removed from the peasantry. Until quite recent times the Western European peasant had not been culturally superior to the Russian muzhik. Speaking of nineteenth-century France, Eugen Weber draws a picture familiar to the student of Russia: large parts of the country populated by “savages” living in hovels, isolated from the rest of the nation, brutalized and xenophobic.* The situation was not much better in other rural areas of Western Europe. If by 1900 the European peasant had become something different, the reason is that in the course of the nineteenth century institutions had been created that pulled him out of rural isolation.

Using Norway as a model, several such institutions can be identified: the church, the school, the political party, the market, and the manor.† To these we must add private property, which Western scholars take so much for granted that they ignore its immense socializing role. All were weakly developed in late Imperial Russia.

Observers of pre-revolutionary Russia concur that the Orthodox Church, represented in the village by the priest (pop), exerted little cultural influence on the parishioners. The priest’s primary function was ritualistic-magic, and his main duty to ensure the flock’s safe passage into the next world. A. S. Ermolov, in discussing with Nicholas II the revolutionary unrest, disabused him of the notion that the government could rely on the priests to keep the villages in line: “the clergy in Russia has no influence on the population.”³⁷ The cultural role of the Church in the rural districts was confined to elementary schooling, which taught children to read and write, with bits of religious didacticism thrown in. Higher values—theology, ethics, philosophy—were the preserve of the monastic or “black” clergy, which alone had access to Church careers but was not directly involved in parish life. Because, unlike his Western counterpart, the village priest received little if any financial support from the Church and had no hope of making a career in the clerical hierarchy—this was reserved for unmarried, monastic priests—the vocation did not attract the best elements. The peasant is said to have treated priests “not as guides and advisers, but as a class of tradesmen, who have wholesale and retail dealings in sacraments.”³⁸

Before 1917, Russia had no system of compulsory education, even on the elementary level, such as France had introduced in 1833 and most of Western Europe adopted by the 1870s. The need for such a system was often discussed in government circles but it was never realized, partly for lack of money, partly from fear of the influence that secular teachers, mostly intellectuals with left-of-center political ideas, would have on peasant youths. (Conservatives complained that schools taught disrespect for parents and old people and made pupils dream of “far-off rivers flowing with milk and honey.”)³⁹ In 1901, Russia had 84,544 elementary schools with an enrollment of 4.5 million pupils, the administration of which was divided between the Ministry of Education (47.5 percent) and the Holy Synod (42.5 percent). In terms of pupils enrolled, the ministry enjoyed a clear advantage (63 percent and 35.1 percent).⁴⁰ This was hardly adequate for a country with 23 million children of school age (seven to fourteen years). Literacy, promoted by the zemstva and volunteer organizations, did make rapid progress, especially among males, largely because recruits with a certificate attesting to the completion of primary school served shorter terms of military service (four years instead of six): in 1913, nearly 68 percent of the recruits were said to be literate, but it is doubtful whether many of them could do more than sign their name. Approximately only one in five of these recruits had a school certificate qualifying him for shorter service.⁴¹ Neither the schools nor the private associations dedicated to the spread of literacy inculcated national values, because in the eyes of the government, nationalism, a doctrine that considers the “nation” or “people” to be the ultimate sovereign, was a threat to autocracy.⁴²

Until 1905, Russia had no legal political institutions outside the bureaucratic chain of command. Political parties were forbidden. Peasants could vote in elections to zemstva, but even in this case their choice was narrowly circumscribed by bureaucrats and government-appointed officials. In any event, these organs of self-government dealt with local, not national issues. Peasants could not even aspire to a career in the Imperial civil service, since its ranks were for all practical purposes closed to them. In other words, peasants, even more than the members of the other non-noble estates, were excluded from the country’s political life.

Peasants in Russia were not entirely insulated from the commercial marketplace, but the latter played a marginal role in their lives. For one, they did not care to eat food that they did not grow themselves.⁴³ They bought little, mainly household and farm implements, much of it from other peasants. Nor did they have much to sell: most of the grain that reached the market came from landlord estates or large properties owned by merchants. The ups and downs of the national and international commodity markets, which directly affected the well-being of American, Argentinian, or English farmers, had little bearing on the condition of the muzhik.

The manor was viewed by conservative Russians as the outpost of culture in the countryside, and some well-meaning agrarian specialists opposed the expropriation of landlord properties for distribution among peasants from fear of the cultural consequences. This fear may have been justified in the economic sense of the word “culture,” in that landlord estates were indeed operated more efficiently and yielded consistently better crops: according to official statistics 12–18 percent more, but in fact possibly as much as 50 percent.* The cultural influence of the manor on the countryside in the spiritual and intellectual sense of the word, however, was insignificant. For one, there were not enough gentry in the countryside: as we have noted, seven out of ten dvoriane resided in the cities. Second, an unbridgeable psychological gulf separated the two classes: the peasant insisted on treating the landlord as an interloper and felt he had nothing to learn from him. Tolstoy’s “A Landlord’s Morning” (“Utro pomeshchika”) and Chekhov’s village tales show the manor and the hut talking at cross-purposes, without a common language of communication: and where such a language was absent, there could be no transmission of ideas or values. A Frenchman who visited Russia in the 1880s saw the Russian landlord “isolated in the midst of his quondam serfs, outside of the commune, outside even of the volost’ in which he usually resides: the chain of serfdom broken, nothing else binds him to his former subjects.”⁴⁴

Private property is arguably the single most important institution of social and political integration. Ownership of property creates a commitment to the political and legal order since the latter guarantees property rights: it makes the citizen into a co-sovereign, as it were. As such, property is the principal vehicle for inculcating in the mass of the population respect for law and an interest in the preservation of the status quo. Historical evidence indicates that societies with a wide distribution of property, notably in land and residential housing, are more conservative and stabler, and for that reason more resilient to upheavals of all sorts. Thus the French peasant, who in the eighteenth century was a source of instability, became in the nineteenth, as a result of the gains of the French Revolution, a pillar of conservatism.

From this point of view, Russia’s experience left a great deal to be desired. Under serfdom, the peasant had, legally speaking, no property rights: the land was the landlord’s, and even his movable belongings, although safeguarded by custom, enjoyed no legal protection. The Emancipation Act entrusted his allotment to the commune. And although after 1861 the peasant avidly accumulated real estate, he failed clearly to distinguish it from his communal allotment, which he held only in temporary possession. In his mind, ownership of land, the principal form of wealth, was indissolubly bound up with personal cultivation and he had no respect for the property rights of non-peasants merely because they held a piece of paper granting them title. In contrast to the peasantry of Western Europe, the muzhik lacked a developed sense of property and law, which made him poor material for citizenship.

Thus, there were few bridges connecting the Russian village with the outside world. The officials, the gentry, the middle classes, the intelligentsia lived their lives and the peasants theirs: physical proximity did not make for the flow of ideas. The appearance (in 1910) of Ivan Bunin’s novel The Village, with its devastating picture of the peasantry, struck the reading public as something from the darkest ages. The book, writes a contemporary critic, “had a shattering effect”:

Russian literature knows many unvarnished depictions of the Russian village, but the Russian reading public had never before confronted such a vast canvas, which with such pitiless truth revealed the very innards of peasant and peasantlike existence in all its spiritual ugliness and impotence. What stunned the Russian reader in this book was not the depiction of the material, cultural, legal poverty—to this he had been accustomed from the writings of talented Russian Populists—but the awareness of precisely the spiritual impoverishment of Russian peasant reality; and, more than that, the awareness that there was no escape from it. Instead of the image of the almost saintly peasant from which one should learn life’s wisdom, on the pages of Bunin’s Village the reader confronted a pitiful and savage creature, incapable of overcoming its savagery through either material prosperity … or education.… The maximum that the Russian peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving, even in the person of those who rose above the “normal” level of peasant savagery, was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed …⁴⁵

The peasant, who knew how to survive under the most trying circumstances in his native countryside, was utterly disoriented when separated from it. The instant he left the village, his mir or world, ruled by custom and dominated by nature, for the city, run by men and their seemingly arbitrary laws, he was lost. The Populist writer Gleb Uspenskii, who rather idealized rural Russia, thus described the effects of the uprooting on the muzhik:

the vast majority of the Russian people is patient and majestic in bearing misfortunes, youthful in spirit, manly in strength, and childishly simple … as long as it is subjected to the power of the earth, as long as at the root of its existence lies the impossibility of flaunting its commands, as long as these commands dominate its mind [and] conscience and fill its being … Our people will remain what it is for as long … as it is permeated with and illuminated … by the warmth and glow of the mother raw earth … Remove the peasant from the land, from the anxieties it brings him, the interests with which it agitates him, make him forget his “peasantness”—and you no longer have the same people, the same ethos, the same warmth which emanates from it. There remains nothing but the vacuous apparatus of the vacuous human organism. The result is a spiritual void—“unrestrained freedom,” that is, boundless, empty distance, boundless, empty breadth, the dreadful sense of “go wherever your legs will carry” …⁴⁶

The outstanding qualities of the peasant’s mind, especially of one inhabiting an environment as harsh as Russia’s, derived from the fact that he lived at the mercy of nature. To him nature was not the rational abstraction of philosophers and scientists, but a capricious force that assumed the shape of floods and droughts, of extremes of heat and cold, of destructive insects. Being willful, it was beyond comprehension and, of course, beyond mastery. This outlook bred in the peasant a mood of acquiescence and fatalism: his religion consisted of magic incantations designed to propitiate the elements. The notion of a supreme order permeating alike the realms of nature and law had for the peasant no meaning. He thought rather in the archaic terms of Homeric epics in which the whims of gods decide human destiny.

Although he had nothing resembling the concept of natural law, the muzhik had a sense of legality rooted in custom. Some students of the subject believed that the Russian village had a system of legal practices that fully equaled that embodied in formal jurisprudence.⁴⁷ Others denied that Russian peasant custom had the necessary characteristics of a genuine legal system, such as cohesion and uniform applicability.⁴⁸ The latter view seems the more convincing. Russian peasants knew law (lex) but not justice (jus). This is hardly surprising. Self-contained and largely isolated communities have no need to distinguish between custom and law. The distinction first arose in the third century B.C.E. as a result of practical problems raised by Macedonian conquests which for the first time brought under one scepter scattered communities with the most diverse legal customs. It was in response to this situation that Stoic philosophers formulated the concept of the law of nature as a universal set of values binding mankind. To the extent that Russian rural communities continued to lead isolated existences they had no need for a comprehensive system of legal norms and were content with a mixture of common sense and precedent, settling their disagreements informally, much as do families.

This is seen in the fact that the rural courts run by peasants for peasants could show wild swings in their verdicts without revealing patterns. One student of the subject concluded that peasants viewed law “subjectively” rather than objectively, which really meant they knew no law.⁴⁹ Others conveyed the same idea by claiming that the muzhik acknowledged only “living law” (zhivoe pravo), judging each case on its own merits, with “conscience” as the decisive factor.⁵⁰ Whether or not one is justified in regarding such practice as falling within the definition of law, it is certain that the Russian peasant treated ukazy issued by the government not as laws but as one-time ordinances, which had the effect of forcing the authorities to issue repeatedly the same orders, or else the peasant paid no heed:

Without a fresh ordinance, no [peasant] will carry out [a previous directive]: everyone thinks that this directive had been given “for that time only.” An order is issued forbidding the cutting of birch trees for the construction of May huts. Where the order had been received, that year no birches were cut. The following year no order came out and the people everywhere proceeded to build May huts. A “strict” instruction is issued to plant birches along the streets. It is done. The birches dry up. The next year there is no directive, and therefore no one replants them: the district officials themselves forget all about it. The district official … reasons like the peasants that the directive had been given for that one occasion only.… It is time to pay taxes. One might expect everyone to know from experience that they must be paid when due, that they will not be omitted. And still, without a special and, moreover, stern directive no one, no rich peasant, will pay. Perhaps [it is thought] they will manage without taxes …⁵¹

This attitude toward law, as directives issued for no discernible reason and, therefore, binding only insofar as they are imposed by force, prevented the peasant from developing one of the basic attributes of citizenship.

The notion advanced by Slavophile and Populist writers that the muzhik had a system of law and, moreover, one based on superior moral principles was challenged by jurists and practicing lawyers. There are interesting remarks on this subject by an attorney who had much professional experience before the Revolution with peasant legal practices.

Liberal minds in Russia were infected with Romanticism and saw in customary law some sort of peculiarity of Russian life which, allegedly, distinguished Russia favorably from other countries.… Many people collected materials on customary law; attempts were made to analyze it and efforts of a rather feeble kind were undertaken to ascertain its norms.

All these attempts came to naught for a simple reason: there was in Russia no customary law, as there was in general no law for the peasants. Here it must be stated that … every volost’ and volost’ court had its own customary law.… As proprietor of an estate, I had … occasion to establish close contact with the rural population, which turned to me, as a specialist, with requests to resolve all kinds of disputes and misunderstandings in the realm of land ownership and property rights in general. I was commonly appealed to in matters involving divisions of family property. I had in my hands many decisions of volost’ courts, and notwithstanding the habit of making juridical generalizations, I was never able to detect the existence of some kind of general formula which even the given volost’ court would apply to concrete, frequently recurring questions. Everything was based on arbitrariness, and, moreover, not the arbitrariness of the court’s members, consisting of peasants, but that of the volost’ clerk, who awarded verdicts at his whim, even though the members of the court affixed their signatures to it. The people had no faith in the court. The verdict of a volost’ court was invariably seen as the result of pressures from one of the parties or of hospitality in the form of a bottle or two of vodka.… And when the case reached a higher instance, that is, the [volost’] assembly, and subsequently the guberniia office … then the scanty juridical knowledge which the members of the higher instances had at their command was powerless to cope with the arbitrariness, inasmuch as reference to customary law sanctified every lawless act. If this customary law could not be ascertained by specialists with professional training and determined to derive general norms from the practice of customary law—i.e., the decisions of the volost’ courts—then one can imagine what ignorance of laws and obligations prevailed among the population itself in all property matters and all those conflicts which had to and did arise every hour of the day.

Our one hundred million peasants lived, in their everyday life, without law.⁵²

One of the consequences of a poorly developed legal sense was the absence of the concept of human rights. There is no indication that the peasant regarded serfdom, which so appalled intellectuals, as an intolerable injustice: indeed, his often quoted statement to the master—“We are yours but the land is ours”—suggests the opposite. The peasant held “freedom” of no account. Under serfdom, bonded peasants not only did not feel inferior to freemen but identified with and were proud of their masters. The Slavophile Iurii Samarin observed that serfs treated free peasants with contempt as footloose and unprotected creatures. Some of them even viewed the Emancipation as a rejection by their masters.⁵³

Given a weakly developed sense of rights in general, the muzhik had no notion of property rights in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over things. According to one authority, Russian peasants did not even have a word for landed property (zemel’naia sobstvennosf): they only spoke of possession (vladenie), which in their mind was indissolubly bound up with physical labor. Indeed, the muzhik was not even able clearly to distinguish the land to which he held legal title by virtue of purchase from his communal allotment and from the land which he leased, all of which he called “our land”:

The expression “our land” in the mouth of the peasant includes indiscriminately the whole land he occupies for the time being, the land which is his private property …, the land held in common by the village (which is therefore only in temporary possession of each household), and also the land rented by the village from the neighboring landlords.⁵⁴

The muzhik’s whole attitude toward landed property derived from a collective memory of centuries of nomadic agriculture, when land was as abundant as water in the sea and available to all. The “slash-and-burn” method of cultivating virgin forest had gone out of use in most of Russia in the late Middle Ages, but the recollection of the time when peasants roamed the forest, felling trees and cultivating the ash-covered clearings, remained very much alive. Labor and labor alone transformed res nullius into possession: because virgin soil was not touched by labor, it could not be owned. To the peasant’s mind, appropriation of lumber was a crime, because it was the product of labor, whereas felling trees was not. Similarly, peasants believed that “he who cuts down a tree with a beehive in it is a thief, because he appropriates human labor; he who cuts down a forest which no one has planted benefits from God’s gift, which is as free as water and air.”⁵⁵ Such a viewpoint, of course, had nothing in common with the rights of property as upheld in Russia’s courts. No wonder that a high proportion of the criminal offenses for which peasants were convicted had to do with illegal cutting of trees. This attitude was not motivated by class antagonism: it applied as much to land and forest owned by fellow peasants. The belief that the expenditure of manual labor alone justified wealth was a fundamental article of faith of the Russian peasantry, and for this reason it despised landlords, bureaucrats, industrial workers, priests, and intellectuals as “idlers.”⁵⁶ Radical intellectuals exploited this attitude to denigrate businessmen and officials.

Such thinking underlay the universal belief of the Russian peasantry after Emancipation in the inevitable advent of a nationwide repartition of private land. In 1861, the liberated serfs could not understand why approximately one-half of the land which they had previously tilled was given to the landlords. At first, they refused to believe in the genuineness of such an absurd law. Later, after they had reconciled themselves to it, they decided that it was a temporary arrangement, soon to be annulled by a new law that would turn over to them, for communal distribution, all privately held land, including that of other peasants. Legends circulating in the villages had as one of their recurrent themes the prediction of the imminent appearance of a “Savior” who would make all of Russia into a land of communes.⁵⁷ “The peasants believe,” according to A. N. Engelgardt, who spent many years living in their midst and wrote what is possibly the best book on their habits and mentality,

that after the passage of some time, in the course of census-taking, there will take place a general leveling of all the land throughout Russia, just as presently, in every commune, at certain intervals, there takes place a repartitioning of the land among its members, each being allotted as much as he can manage. This completely idiosyncratic conception derives directly from the totality of peasant agrarian relations. In the communes, after a lapse of time, there takes place a redistribution of land, an equalization among its members. Under the [anticipated] general repartition, all the land will be repartitioned, and the communes will be equalized. The issue here is not simply the seizure of landlord land, as the journalists would have it, but the equalization of all the land, including that which belongs to peasants. Peasants who have purchased land as property, or, as they put it, “for eternity,” talk exactly as do all the other peasants, and have no doubt whatever that the “lands to which they hold legal title” can be taken away from their rightful owners and given to others.⁵⁸

The soundness of this insight would be demonstrated in 1917–18.

Peasants expected the national repartition of land to occur any day and to bring them vast increments: five, ten, twenty, and even forty hectares per household. It was a faith that kept the central Russian village in a state of permanent tension:

In 1879 [following the war with Turkey] all expected that a “new decree” would be issued concerning land. At the time, every small occurrence gave rise to rumors of a “new decree.” Should a local village official … deliver the landlord a paper requiring some sort of statistical information about land, cattle, structures, etc., the village would at once call a meeting, and there it would be said that a paper had come to the landlord about the land, that soon a “new decree” would be issued, that in the spring surveyors would come to divide the land. Should the police prohibit the landlord of a mortgaged estate to cut lumber for sale, it was said that the prohibition was due to the fact that the Treasury would soon take over the forest, and then it would be available to all: pay one ruble and cut all you want. Should anyone take out a loan on his estate, it was said that the landlords had gotten wind that the land would be equalized, and so they hurried to turn their properties over to the Treasury for cash.⁵⁹

Such thinking meant that the Russian village was forever poised to attack private (non-communal) properties: it was kept in check only by fear. This produced a most unhealthy situation. The revolutionary potential was an ever-present reality, in spite of the peasant’s anti-revolutionary, pro-monarchist sentiments. But then his radicalism was not inspired by political or even class animus. (When asked what should happen to the landlords who had been evicted from their lands in consequence of the “Black Repartition,” some peasants would suggest they be placed on a government salary.⁶⁰) Tolstoy put his finger on the crux of the problem when shortly after Emancipation he wrote: “The Russian revolution will be not against the Tsar and despotism but against landed property. It will say: from me, from the human being, take what you want, but leave us all the land.”⁶¹

In the late nineteenth century, the peasant assumed that the nationwide repartition would be ordered by the Tsar: in peasant legends of the time, the “Savior,” the “Great Leveler,” was invariably the “true tsar.” The belief fortified the peasantry’s instinctive monarchism. Accustomed to the authority of the bol’shak in the household, by analogy it viewed the Tsar as the bol’shak or master (khoziain) of the country. The peasant “saw in the Tsar the actual owner and father of Russia, who directly managed his immense household”⁶²—a primitive version of the patrimonial principle underlying Russian political culture. The reason why the peasant felt so confident that the Tsar would sooner or later order a general repartition of the land was that, as he saw it, it lay in the monarch’s interest to have all the lands justly distributed and properly cultivated.⁶³

Such attitudes provide the background to the peasant’s political philosophy, which, for all its apparent contradictions, had a certain logic. To the peasant, government was a power that compelled obedience: its main attribute was the ability to coerce people to do things which, left to themselves, they would never do, such as pay taxes, serve in the army, and respect private property in land. By this definition, a weak government was no government. The epithet Groznyi applied to the mentally unbalanced and sadistic Ivan IV, usually rendered in English as “Terrible,” actually meant “Awesome” and carried no pejorative meaning. Persons who possessed vlasf (authority) and did not exercise it in an “awe-inspiring” manner could be ignored. Observance of laws for the peasant invariably represented submission to a force majeure, to the will of someone stronger, not the recognition of some commonly shared principle or interest. “Today, as in the days of serfdom,” wrote the Slavophile Iurii Samarin, “the peasant knows no other sure pledge of the genuineness of imperial commands than the display of armed force: a round of musketry still is to him the only authentic confirmation of the imperial commands.”⁶⁴ In this conception, moral judgment of governments or their actions was as irrelevant as approval or condemnation of the vagaries of nature. There were no “good” or “bad” governments: there were only strong and weak ones, and strong ones were always preferable to weak ones. (Similarly, serfs used to prefer cruel but efficient masters to kindly but ineffective ones.⁶⁵) Weak rulers made it possible to return to primitive freedom or volia, understood as license to do whatever one wanted, unrestrained by man-made law. Russian governments took account of these attitudes and went to great lengths to impress on the country the image of boundless power. Experienced bureaucrats opposed freedom of the press and parliamentary government in good part because they feared that the existence of an overt, legitimized opposition would be interpreted by the peasantry as a sign of weakness and a signal to rebel.

The overall effect of these peasant attitudes was very deleterious for Russia’s political evolution. They encouraged the conservative proclivities of the monarchy, inhibiting the democratization which the country’s economic and cultural development demanded. At the same time, they made it possible for demagogues to play on the peasantry’s resentments and unrealistic expectations to incite a rural revolution.

At the turn of the century, observers noted subtle changes in the attitudes of the peasantry, particularly the younger generation. They were religiously less observant, less respectful of tradition and authority, restless, and somehow disaffected not only over land but over life in general.

The authorities were especially perturbed by the behavior of those who moved into the cities and industrial centers. Such peasants were no longer intimidated by uniformed representatives of authority and were said to act “insolently.” When they returned to the village, permanently or to help out with the field work, they spread the virus of discontent. The Ministry of the Interior, observing this development, objected, on security grounds, to further industrialization and excessive rural mobility, but, for reasons previously stated, it had little success.

One of the causes of changes in the mood of the peasantry seems to have been the spread of literacy, actively promoted by the authorities. The 1897 census revealed a very low level of literacy for the Russian Empire as a whole: only one in five (21 percent) of the inhabitants could read and write. But disaggregated the statistics looked considerably better. As a result of the combined efforts of rural schools and private associations, literacy showed a dramatic spurt among the young, especially males: in 1897, 45 percent of the Empire’s male inhabitants aged ten to twenty-nine were recorded as literate.* At this rate, the population of the Empire could have been expected to attain universal literacy by 1925.

Literate peasants and workers read most of all religious books (the gospels and lives of saints), followed by cheap escapist literature, the Russian equivalent of “penny dreadfuls”⁶⁶—a situation not unlike that observed in England half a century earlier. Yellow journalism emerged to meet the demand for the printed word. Access to publications, however, did not bring the mass reader into closer contact with the urban culture: “the vast majority of the lower-class readers in the countryside and in the cities … remained estranged, in their cultural sensibilities and in their daily lives, from the milieu of the intelligentsia and the intellectual world of modernist creativity.”⁶⁷

Growing literacy, unaccompanied by proportionately expanding opportunities to apply the knowledge acquired from reading, probably contributed to the restlessness of the lower classes. It has been noted in other regions of the world that schooling and the spread of literacy often produce unsettling effects. African natives educated in missionary schools, as compared with untutored ones, have been observed to develop a different mentality, expressed in an unwillingness to perform monotonous work and in lower levels of honesty and truthfulness.⁶⁸ Similar trends were noted among young Russian peasants exposed to urban culture, who also seemed less ready to acquiesce to the routine of rural work and lived in a state of powerful, if unfocused expectations aroused by reading about unfamiliar worlds.⁶⁹

All of which gave more thoughtful Russians cause for anxiety. Sergei Witte, having familiarized himself with rural conditions as chairman of a special commission to study peasant needs, felt deeply apprehensive about the future. Russia, he wrote in 1905,

in one respect represents an exception to all the countries in the world.… The exception consists in this, that the people have been systematically, over two generations, brought up without a sense of property and legality.… What historical consequences will result from this, I hesitate now to say, but I feel they will be very serious.… Scholarship says that communal land belongs to the village commune, as a juridical person, but in the eyes of the peasants … it belongs to the state which gives it to them for temporary use.… [Legal relations among the peasants] are regulated not by precise, written laws, but by custom, which often “no one knows.” … Under these conditions, I see one gigantic question mark: what is an empire with one hundred million peasants who have been educated neither in the concept of landed property nor that of the firmness of law in general?⁷⁰

*Jack Goody in Jack Goody et al, eds., Family and Inheritance (Cambridge, 1976), 117. Another factor affecting inheritance practices is the proximity of cities: Wilhelm Abel, Agrarpolitik, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1958), 154.

*Aversion to dissent seems to be universal among peasants: Robert Redfield notes that “villages do not like factions” (Little Community, Uppsala-Stockholm, 1955, 44).

†Calculated on the basis of figures in Ezhegodnik Rossii, 1910 g. (St. Petersburg, 1911), 258–63. Most of that private land was owned by associations and villages rather than by individual households.

*A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 2nd. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1914), 23. As early as the 1880s, Leroy-Beaulieu says that he met with universal disenchantment with the commune: Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, II (New York-London, 1898), 45–46.

*Under a last-minute provision inserted into the Emancipation Edict, a peasant who did not want to pay could take a fraction of the allotment due to him free of charge. Such allotments were called otrezki.

*Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, II (Stuttgart, 1891), 257–65. If one recalculates Ratzel’s figures, given in leagues, a country with Russia’s climate should support 23 inhabitants per square kilometer.

†Recent researches indicate that the population growth in pre-revolutionary Russia may have been even higher than believed at the time. The current estimate places the excess of births over deaths in 1900 at 16.5 per 1,000 and rising. In European Russia it is estimated to have been 18.4 (1897–1916) and in the Lower Volga region was high as 20: S. I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan in ISSSR, No. 3 (1980), 81. H. J. Habakkuk believes that partible (or “equal division”) inheritance promotes population growth in that it encourages marriage: Journal of Economic History, XV (1955), 5–6.

‡The government estimated that between 1861 and 1901 the rural population in the Empire grew from 52 to 86.6 million and that the annual accretion of rural inhabitants in the closing years of the nineteenth century came to 1.5 million: Alexander Kornilov in Josef Melnik, Russen über Russland (Frankfurt, 1906), 404. This was the figure used by Stolypin in 1907: see below, Chapter 5. The margin of error in all Russian statistics, however, is wide and these figures do not make allowance either for non-rural inhabitants or for infant mortality.

*There were also 7 to 8 million persons occupied in household industries (kustarnaia promyshlennost’), which operated largely to supply the peasants with consumer durables: P. A. Khromov, Ekonomika Rossii perioda promyshlennogo kapitalizma (Moscow, 1963), 105. The majority of the persons who worked in these industries did so at times free from field work and they continued to rely primarily on agricultural income.

†The reliability of these figures has been questioned, however, on the grounds that they make no allowance for peasants who had left the land for the cities and industrial centers although nominally still counted as members of the commune: A. S. Ermolov, Nash zemel’nyi vopros (St. Petersburg, 1906), 62.

*Ivan Oserow (Ozerov) in Melnik, Russen, 211–12. From the statistics provided by A. S. Nifontov (Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroipolovine XIX veka, Moscow, 1974, 310), it transpires that even after rising grain exports are taken into account, the amount of grain domestically available per capita in the 1890s was larger than it had been twenty years earlier; in other words, food production outpaced population growth. Cf. James Y. Simms, Jr., in SR, XXXVI, No. 3 (1977), 310.

*A. S. Ermolov, Nash zemel’nyi vopros (St. Petersburg, 1906), 2, 5. Russia, in fact, lagged far behind all European countries in agricultural yields. “Intensive” agriculture also meant adoption of technical crops, for instance, hemp and flax, which brought in more income.

*Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif., 1982), 3, 5, 48, 155–56. “La patrie,” the author quotes a French priest, “a fine word … that thrills everyone except the peasant”: Ibid., 100. On this subject, see further Theodore Zeldin, France: 1848–1945 (Oxford, 1977), II, 3.

†Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago-London, 1956), 42–64. In his study of the acculturation of the French peasantry, Weber lists as “agencies of change” roads, participation in the political process (“politization”), migration, military service, schools, and the church.

*Ermolov, Zemel’nyi vopros, 25. The discrepancy is due to the fact that official statistics counted as landlords’ property the land which they leased to peasants.

*Pervaia Vseobshchaia Perepis’ Naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g., Obshchii Svod, I (St. Petersburg, 1905), 56. Among females in the same age group, the proportion of literates was not quite 21 percent.