Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  STEPHEN K. WEGREN

  PEASANTRY

  The original agriculturists of the northern Eurasian plain lived a communal, seminomadic existence, based on slash-and-burn cultivation. By the time of Kievan Rus, the defining characteristics of a peasantry were in already in evidence: an agricultural population bound by trade and tribute to a wider world, but in an incomplete and dependent way. Princes imposed taxes and compulsory services, but only with the rise of Muscovy (from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) were peasants enserfed- permanently bound to their lords or lands. Despite periodic revolts, this condition continued until 1861.

  Peter I inaugurated a campaign of Westernization that imitated European modes of life and government. Perhaps ironically, in an age when Western Europe was abandoning serfdom, these initiatives increased the exploitation, as well as the traditionalism, of Russian peasants. St. Petersburg’s Italianate palaces were built with conscripted peasant labor, and Russia’s new Western-style army and bureaucracy were supported by a range of new taxes, among them the “soul tax” that was now demanded of peasants on top of the dues they paid their lords. Exploitation, however, was often indirect. The village commune (obshchina) distributed lands and obligations among its members, serving as a buffer between peasants and the outside world.

  Although peasants generally regarded the cities and the Europeanized elite with suspicion, they were not totally isolated from urban society. Permanently bound to the soil, they could still depart temporarily to earn money in crafts, trade, or wage employment. In some provinces more than half the adult males engaged in work away from villages. A few even became millionaires.

  Peasant agriculture flourished among the Slavic (and mainly Orthodox Christian) population of the Russian Empire. During the eighteenth century arable cultivation expanded into the steppe grass1153

  PEASANTRY

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  – 4* Russian peasant women in the 1930s show their support for efforts to strengthen the collective farm system. © AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS lands of the south and southeast, and some serf-owners tried to introduce new crops and systems of cultivation into these regions. Most, however, left peasants to organize and cultivate the land according to traditional norms. Under communal tenure, which flourished among Russian peasants but not among Ukrainians and other non-Russians, each household received strips of land in many different fields. The number of these could be increased or decreased to match a family’s ability to work. Grains were planted in a fixed rotation, and crop yields were often disappointing, even in areas of higher fertility.

  Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1855) convinced its leaders to modernize, and the result was a vast array of reforms, foremost among them emancipation of the serfs in 1861. For the sake of social stability, former serf owners were generously compensated, retaining a substantial share of the land. Freed peasants had to reimburse the state for their land. The commune kept the job of distributing lands and tax obligations. This arrangement produced little innovation and less prosperity, though migration to Western Siberia during the later nineteenth century did offer some hopeful signs of change. At the end of the nineteenth century crop yields grew more rapidly than the population, and the Russian Empire became a major exporter of grain and other agricultural products.

  In the general census of 1897, the empire had a population of 125,000,000, of whom roughly three-fourths were legally classified as peasants, and an even greater proportion resided in rural areas. Peasant unrest was endemic, and in the revolution of 1905-1907 peasants rose up to confiscate private lands and drive off their former lords. Harsh punishment was followed by a new (“Stolypin”) land reform promoted by Prime Minister Peter

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  Stolypin, designed to replace communal tenure with private ownership, but the outbreak of World War I prevented its full implementation. In 1917, unrest returned. Private lands were seized and redistributed and manor houses destroyed. The village commune took on a new life.

  At this time peasants were roughly eighty percent of Russia’s population, impoverished, tradition-minded, and suspicious of outsiders. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik (Communist) Party tried to enlist them in its revolution, but needed their grain and labor power more than their goodwill. During the Civil War of 1917-1922 and later during the industrialization drive of the 1930s the Party resorted to confiscation and coercion. Poor and landless peasants were thought to be natural allies of the urban proletariat, but efforts to promote class warfare in the villages produced instability and food shortages. Under Josef Stalin’s leadership collective agriculture was forcibly introduced, but instead of producing efficiency it caused disruption and starvation, with the loss of millions of lives. After several years of turmoil peasants were assured the right to cultivate small private plots alongside their duties to the collective farm (kolkhoz). Throughout the following decades these plots produced a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s food.

  The Soviet Union became an urban industrial society, but its rural roots were poorly nourished. At the time the USSR ceased to exist, some twenty-five percent of Russia’s population continued to lived on the land, resistant (for the most part) to privatization or economic reform. See also: AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; ENSERFMENT; PEASANT ECONOMY; SERFDOM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. New York: Addison-Wesley. Robinson, Geroid T. (1932). Rural Russia Under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Company. Shanin, Teodor. (1985). The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  ROBERT E. JOHNSON

  PEASANT UPRISINGS

  Also known as “Peasant wars”; peasant uprisings in broad usage, were a number of rural-based rebellions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a typical form of protest in Russia against socioeconomic, religious, and cultural oppression and, occasionally, against political power holders.

  Peasant uprisings in the narrow sense belong to the period of serfdom. Most of them followed a significant worsening of the conditions of the peasantry. The four major rebellions of this period were led by: 1) Ivan Bolotnikov, 1606-1607; 2) Stepan (“Stenka”) Razin, 1667-1671; 3) Kondrat Bulavin, 1707-1708; and 4) the largest of all, by Yemelyan (“Yemelka”) Pugachev, 1773-1775. The leadership in each case was largely symbolic, as an inherent feature of peasant wars was anarchic spontaneity with little organization, subordination, and planning.

  The geographic center of the uprisings was in Southern Russia, between the Don and the Volga rivers and between the Black and the Caspian seas. However, they spread over wider territories and, in the case of the Bolotnikov rebellion, involved a battle in the vicinity of Moscow (which the rebels lost, in December 1606). The key initiative was played by Cossacks (Razin and Bulavin were Cossack atamans, and Pugachev a prominent Cossack as well). The rank and file included serfs and free peasants, as well as ethnic and religious minorities (e.g., Tatars in the Razin rebellion and Bashkirs in the Pugachev rebellion; ethnically Russian Old Believers in the Razin, Bulavin, and Pugachev rebellions). The Bolotnikov uprising, as part of the Time of Troubles, also involved impoverished or discontented gentry, some of whom, however, parted company with the rebels at a crucial stage. The religious and cultural aspect of the uprisings reflected discontent with top-down autocratic reforms along foreign patterns. Some also view the uprisings as a cultural response of the Cossack frontier to excess regulation by the imperial center.

  Rebel demands are known from their own documents (e.g., “Seductive Letters” issued by Razin) and government reports. These demands involved land redistribution, the change of peasants’ status from serfs to
Cossacks, and often the elimination of the privileged classes. None of the uprisings was directed against the institution of monarchy; some rebels allied themselves with contenders to the throne (e.g., Bolotnikov with one of the Pseudo1155

  PECHENEGS

  Dmitrys and then with another self-styled tsare-vich, Peter), while Bulavin and Pugachev claimed their own rights to the tsar’s scepter. On the territories occupied by rebels, peasants were declared free of servitude and debt, and Cossack-style self-rule was decreed. The uprisings were characterized by mass casualties and brutality on both sides. All of them were violently suppressed and their leaders executed; in the longer run, they may have spurred policy changes and reform efforts emanating from the top.

  The most famous Pugachev rebellion was distinguished by the fact that its leader claimed to be Tsar Peter III (the actual tsar was murdered a decade earlier, in 1762, in a coup that brought his wife, Catherine II, to power). He issued his first manifesto in this capacity in September 1773. Pugachev promised to give peasants “back” their freedom “stolen” from them by the gentry, making them into Cossacks. The army of his followers counted about twenty-five thousand people. This rebellion was the first one of the manufacturing era, and was joined by serfs laboring at the manufactures in the Urals. Its suppression was followed in the short run by the strengthening and further spread of the institution of serfdom, as well as the incorporation of Cossacks into the state bureaucracy. During the nineteenth century, peasant uprisings never rose to the scale of wars. A major uprising in 1861 in the Kazan region reflected discontent with the conditions attached to the emancipation of the serfs.

  Peasant guerrilla culture in Russia (as in some other countries) involved the operation of a parallel, or shadow community beyond the reach of the state, abruptly revealing itself in mass action. Guerrilla tactics followed by peasant rebels played a role in the twentieth-century revolutions (both on the Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik side), due to the numerical and cultural influence of peasantry (or recent peasants among urban workers and the intelligentsia). These tactics were also employed in defense against foreign invasions (the 1812 Patriotic War and World War II).

  Scholars emphasizing the continuity of peasant resistance over centuries view the revolutions of 1905-1907 and 1917 as a resumption of peasant wars, in a different socioeconomic environment. Some of them consider the 1917-1933 period as “the Great Peasant War” suppressed by Josef Stalin through artificially organized famine and collectivization of the peasantry. Peasant wars figured prominently in Russian folklore and modern arts. Alexander Pushkin, in characterizing a “Russian rebellion” as “senseless and merciless,” perpetuated the view of peasant wars as destructive explosions, characterized by savage brutality on both sides, after seemingly endless patience of the oppressed. Revolutionary democrats of the Populist tradition cultivated a heroic image of peasant rebels, while orthodox Marxists dismissed them as anarchists and enemies of the modernizing state. See also: BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; COSSACKS; DMITRY, FALSE; PEASANTRY; PUGACHEV, EMELIAN IVANOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Avrich, Paul (1976). Russian Rebels, 1600-1800. New York: Norton. Graziosi, Andrea. (1997). The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Longworth, P. (1973). “The Last Great Cossack Peasant Rising.” Journal of European Studies 3. Pushkin, Alexander. (1987). Captain’s Daughter. New York: Hyperion. Pushkin, Alexander. (2001). The History of Pugachev. London: Phoenix. Raeff, Marc. (1970) “Pugachev’s Rebellion.” In Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe, eds. Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Wolf, Eric (1969). Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper amp; Row.

  DMITRI GLINSKI

  PECHENEGS

  During the late ninth century, under the pressure from the Torky and Khazars, the Pechenegs, a nomadic Turkic-speaking tribal confederation, migrated from the Volga-Ural region and occupied the area stretching from the Don-Donets to the Danube. Like other nomads inhabiting the southern Russian steppe from around 965 to around 1240, the Pechenegs did not create a true state. Politically, they were united into eight tribal unions, each occupying one of the four provinces (running in strips from north to south) on each side of the Dnieper. Disunited, the Pechenegs never threatened the existence of the Rus state. The Pechenegs raided

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  PELEVIN, VIKTOR OLEGOVICH

  Rus territories and traded such items as livestock for goods unavailable in nomadic economies (grain and luxury goods). At other times, they acted as Rus allies in military campaigns, as in the 944 Rus war against Byzantium. From 980 onward, they likewise served as mercenaries in the conflicts between Rus princes. The Byzantines also used the Pechenegs to counter the Rus. Thus, in 972, while returning to Kiev from his Byzantine campaign, the Pechenegs killed Prince Svyatoslav, probably on the request of the Byzantines. The Pechenegs’ one major attack on Kiev was decisively repulsed by Yaroslav the Wise in 1036. Defeated and under pressure from the Torky, most Pechenegs migrated toward the Balkans, where they were massacred by Byzan-tine-Cuman forces in 1091. The few who remained joined the Rus border guards known as Chernye klobuky or Black Hoods. Until around 1010, the Pechenegs probably practiced shamanist-T?ri religion, but thereafter began to convert to Islam. See also: KHAZARS; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Golden, Peter B. (1990). “The Peoples of the South Russian Steppe.” In The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Golden, Peter B. (1992). An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harras-sowitz Verlag. Pritsak, Omeljan. (1975). “The Pecenegs, A Case of Social and Economic Transformation.” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 1:211-236.

  ROMAN K. KOVALEV

  PEKING, TREATY OF

  The Treaty of Peking (November 14, 1860) confirmed and extended the territorial gains Russia had wrested from China in the Treaty of Aigun (1858). By its terms, the eastern boundary between the two empires was set along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. The Ussuri boundary gave Russia possession of what became the Maritime Province (Primorskii Krai). Vladivostok, the major city of the Russian Far East, was established in this territory, providing direct access to the Sea of Japan and through the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, the Treaty of Peking was the foundation of Russia’s attempts to become a Pacific power. The treaty also established, for the first time, a Russo-Chinese boundary line in the west (Central Asia) according to Russian demands, and provided for the opening of Russian consulates in Urga (Mongolia) and Kashgar (Xinjiang). The entire border was opened to free trade between the two empires.

  General Nikolai Ignatiev, appointed Russia’s minister to China in 1859, took advantage of the Second Opium War, an Anglo-French conflict with China, to advance Russia’s imperial interests. At a moment of supreme danger to the Qing court, whose capital Beijing the Anglo-French forces had already occupied and ransacked, Ignatiev offered his services as mediator to the beleaguered Chinese. He urged them to accede to the demands of the Anglo-French expeditionary force while promising to intercede with his fellow Westerners on behalf of the Chinese. In exchange for his services, which were actually superfluous, he demanded and received China’s acceptance of Russia’s own territorial, diplomatic, and commercial demands.

  By the Treaty of Peking, Russia became a full-fledged player in the Western imperialist assault upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and sowed the seeds of Chinese anger that matured during the twentieth century. See also: AIGUN, TREATY OF; CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Clubb, O. Edmund. (1971). China and Russia : The “Great Game.” New York: Columbia University Press . Mancall, Mark. (1971). Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paine, S. C. M. (1997). Imperial Rivals: Russia, China, and Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Quested, Rosemary. (1984). Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History. Sy
dney: George Allen and Unwin. Tien-fong Cheng. (1973). A History of Sino-Russian Relations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (reprint of Public Affairs Press, 1957).

  STEVEN I. LEVINE

  PELEVIN, VIKTOR OLEGOVICH

  (b. 1962), novelist and short-story writer.

  Born in Moscow to a military family, Viktor Olegovich Pelevin received his education at the

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  PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF NATIONALITIES

  Moscow Energy Institute and the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow). Praised and panned by critics ever since his work first gained public recognition during the early 1990s, Pelevin has been a controversial figure in the Russian literary establishment. Nonetheless, he is one of the most important figures in the world of post-Soviet letters. Pelevin is virtually the only serious writer in contemporary Russia to gain a wide readership, appealing in particular to the burgeoning youth counterculture.

  Pelevin’s works can be classified broadly as satire, but the author’s concerns are more cultural and metaphysical than political. His first short novel, Omon Ra (1992), tells the story of a young man who dreams of being a cosmonaut, only to discover that the entire Soviet space program is a government-perpetrated fraud masking the country’s inability to launch a single rocket. Pelevin’s second novel, The Life of Insects (1993), reveals the preoccupation with Eastern mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs that characterize both his subsequent novels and many of the short stories collected in The Blue Lantern (1991) and The Yellow Arrow (1998). His 1996 novel Buddha’s Little Finger combines an absurdist approach to Soviet cultural heroes with an equally ironic satire of Western popular culture (Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief appearance). In 1999 he published Babylon, which reflects his ongoing fascination with computer culture and virtual reality. Babylon is populated both by real human beings and digitally constructed simulacra, and the resemblance between the two is enhanced by Pelevin’s longstanding rejection of the traditions of Russian psychological realism. See also: SCIENCE FICTION; SOCIALIST REALISM