The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  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, i
t 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.

  4

  The Intelligentsia

  Nothing presents less of an obstacle than the perfecting of the imaginary.

  —Hippolyte Taine

  Whether the conflicts and resentments that exist in every society are peacef
ully resolved or explode in revolution is largely determined by two factors: the existence of democratic institutions able to redress grievances through legislation and the ability of intellectuals to fan the flames of social discontent for the purpose of gaining power. For it is intellectuals who transmute specific, and therefore remediable, grievances into a wholesale rejection of the status quo. Rebellions happen; revolutions are made:

  Initially, a rebellion is without thought: it is visceral, immediate. A revolution implies a doctrine, a project, a program.… A revolution under one aspect or another has intellectual lines of force which rebellions lack. Moreover, a revolution seeks to institutionalize itself.… That which characterizes the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution is the effort to initiate a new organization (in the absence of society!) and this … implies the existence … of “managers” of the revolution.