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. S
peaking 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
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