fn7 Warsaw established the first Ethnographic Museum in 1888. It was followed by Sarajevo in 1888, Helsinki in 1893, Prague and Lvov in 1895, Belgrade in 1901, St Petersburg in 1902, and Krakov in 1905.
fn8 Although, of course, it must never be forgotten that while many revolutionaries were Jews, relatively few Jews were revolutionaries. It was a myth of the anti-Semites that all the Jews were Bolsheviks. In fact, as far as one can tell from the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, most of the Jewish population favoured the Zionist and democratic socialist parties. As the Chief Rabbi of Moscow once remarked, not without his usual Jewish humour: ‘The Trotskys make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.’ (Melamed, ‘St Paul and Leon Trotsky’, 8.)
Chapter 3
fn1 At the age of twenty-three Gorky was beaten unconscious by a group of peasants when he tried to intervene on behalf of a peasant woman, who had been stripped naked and horsewhipped by her husband and a howling mob after being found guilty of adultery.
fn2 Since there were no hedges between the strips or the fields it was essential for every household to sow the same crops at the same time (e.g. a three-field rotation of winter/spring/fallow), otherwise the cattle left to graze on the stubble of one strip would trample on the crops of the neighbouring strip.
fn3 The term ‘kulak’, derived from the word for a ‘fist’, was originally used by the peasants to delineate exploitative elements (usurers, sub-renters of land, wheeler-dealers and so on) from the farming peasantry. An entrepreneurial peasant farmer, in their view, could not be a kulak, even if he hired labour. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, misused the term in a Marxist sense to describe any wealthy peasant. They made it synonymous with ‘capitalist’ on the false assumption that the use of hired labour in peasant farming was a form of ‘capitalism’. Under Stalin, the term ‘kulak’ was employed against the smallholding peasantry as a whole. Through collectivization the regime set about the ‘destruction of the kulaks as a class’.
fn4 The Russian word for red (krasnyi) is connected with the word for beautiful (krasivyi), a fact of powerful symbolic significance for the revolutionary movement.
fn5 Even in communes with hereditary tenure (mainly in the north-west and the Ukraine) it was hardly easier. There the household wishing to separate had either to pay off its share of the communal tax debt in full (a near-impossible task for the vast majority of the peasants) or find another household willing to take over the tax burden in return for its land allotment. Since the taxes usually exceeded the cost of rented land outside the commune, it was difficult to find a household willing to do this.
fn6 The one major exception was the peasant wife’s dowry and other personal effects (e.g. clothing and domestic utensils), which were regarded as her private property and could be passed on to her daughter.
fn7 Whereas the partitioning of household property was entirely controlled by local customary law, Stolypin’s new laws of inheritance came under the Civil Code. Cases concerning peasant inheritance of land were thus heard in the civil (i.e. non-peasant) courts — the first major instance of the peasantry being integrated into the national legal system.
fn8 For example, under customary law a peasant found guilty of tilling another man’s land was always compensated for his labour, though the bulk of the harvest went to the land’s rightful holder. The peasants, in the words of one observer, ‘looked on the right to own the product of one’s own labour on the land with an almost religious respect’ and by custom this had to be balanced against the formal right of land tenure (Efimenko, Issledovaniia, 2, 143).
fn9 This was partly the reason why peasants had so few scruples about perjuring themselves in court and, indeed, why they tended to sympathize with convicted criminals. It was common for peasants to give away food to gangs of prisoners as they passed through the villages on their way to Siberia.
fn10 This was connected with the religious belief of the peasants that to be poor was to be virtuous.
fn11 So, for example, a study in Tula province found that 62 per cent of the peasant households with four or more horses had partitioned their property between 1899 and 1911, compared with only 23 per cent of those with one horse (Shanin, Awkward Class, 83). Statisticians such as A. V. Chayanov believed that the life-cycle of the peasant household largely explained economic inequalities within the village. The newly partitioned household, consisting of a married couple and one or two children, tended to have only a small plot of land and very little livestock. But as the children grew up and began to contribute as workers to the family economy, the household was able to accumulate more land and livestock, until it partitioned itself. Chayanov argued that the statistical surveys used by the Marxists to show the economic differentiation of the peasantry were in fact no more than ‘snapshots’ of the peasant households at different stages of this life-cycle.
fn12 According to a survey of 1881, over 90 per cent of the workforce in textiles and 71 per cent of all industrial workers returned to their villages during the summer. The proportion declined towards the turn of the century as the urban workforce became more settled. Factories adapted to the situation by stopping work during the agricultural season, or by moving to the countryside. The government encouraged the latter, fearing the build-up of an urban working class. Only 40 per cent of the Empire’s industrial workers lived in the cities at the turn of the century.
fn13 The percentage of foreign shareholding in joint-stock companies rose from 25 per cent in 1890 to about 40 per cent on the eve of the First World War.
fn14 Here lay the roots of that peculiar Russian concept of kul’turnost’, the state of having good manners, rather than being well educated, as in the Western concept of the term ‘cultured’, from which it is derived. This etymological twist could only have happened in a country like Russia, which was struggling to rid itself of its peasant past and attain the external trappings, if not the deeper moral sensibilities, of Western civilization.
Chapter 4
fn1 Chernyshevsky’s novel was published while he was still in the Peter and Paul Fortress — only to be subsequently banned!
fn2 Lydia Dan’s father had a nice way of poking fun at these selfconscious radicals. Boys, he said, did not cut their hair on the grounds that they did not have time; but women cut their hair short also to save time. Women went to university on the grounds that this was a mark of progress; but men dropped out of the education system on the grounds that this was also progressive.
fn3 These peasant nannies and domestic servants would not even be called by their proper names but by a pet name such as Masha or Vanka. They were thus denied the most basic recognition of a personality.
fn4 It was a doctrine that Lenin was to follow. During the famine of 1891 he opposed the idea of humanitarian relief on the grounds that the famine would force millions of destitute peasants to flee to the cities and join the ranks of the proletariat: this would bring the revolution one step closer.
fn5 The ‘thick’ literary journals had a similar influence in the Soviet period with publications such as Novyi Mir, which had a readership of tens of millions. They were also vehicles for political ideas in a system where open political debate had been banned.
fn6 Dostoevsky, who had himself belonged to the Petrashevsky revolutionary circle in the 1850s, used this novel to attack the mentality of the revolutionaries, especially the nihilists. Petr Verkhovensky, its central character, is clearly based upon Nechaev. At one point in the novel he says that it would be justified to kill a million people in the struggle against despotism because in the course of a hundred years the despots would kill many more.