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, bonde
d 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.
The Russian Revolution Page 19
