major industrial crop was flax, sown in some western areas, and occasionally hemp and hops.
The Russians typically kept gardens, in which they raised cabbage (their major source of Vitamin C), cucumbers, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, peas, garlic and onions. The harsh climate was not favourable for raising fruit trees, but some Russians grew apples (as many as ten varieties). Much rarer were cherries, plums and raspberries. Mushrooms, berries and nuts were brought in from forests.[43]
As mentioned, Russian peasants lived in villages, not on isolated homesteads. The villages ranged in size from a few households to several dozen.[44]Water for drinking, washing and cooking was either carried from a river or brook or drawn from a village well. Each hut was enclosed in a yard (dvor) by a wooden fence.[45] There was no general system of'village planning' applicable everywhere. In some places the common ancestor's yard was in the centre of the village with those of his descendants surrounding it, in other places yards were next to each other facing a common 'street' in a land with neither streets nor roads that a modern person would recognise.[46] The peasant's garden might be in his yard, or outside of it.[47] The purpose of the fence was to keep the peasant's livestock from straying at night. In the daytime, the village's livestock were put out to pasture in a common meadow where one or more of the peasants tended the flock. A typical peasant had one horse for draught purposes, a cow or two for milk, cheese and meat, a calf (the horses and cattle were very small), occasionally sheep or goats, maybe pigs and some chickens which could be expected to lay less than one egg a week.[48] All of this provided a poor, monotonous diet occasionally enlivened by alcohol. Mead (near-beer) was a popular drink and at the end of the sixteenth century many peasants had from two to five hundred beehives, whence came the mead.[49] The origins of vodka are unclear. It was first mentioned in 1174, and probably came into its own as a popular commodity in the relatively prosperous second half of the fifteenth century.[50] Meat was rarely served in peasant households, but fish was much more common.[51]
Also in the yard was a privy, an outbuilding or barn for the livestock in cool weather, a grain drier, a threshing floor and a shed for storing agricultural implements, hay and grain reserves (including seed for the next growing season). The famous Russian bathhouse typically was not in a peasant yard (for fear of fire, for one reason), but close to a source of water, such as a pond, lake or river.
When it became bitterly cold, much (maybe all) of the livestock and food stores such as cabbage moved inside. The major structure inside every peasant hut was the stove, a structure built in one of the corners that occupied much of the room in the hut. It was built of rock and mortar and had three chambers for maximum extraction of heat. Had the Russian stove had a chimney, 80 per cent of the heat would have gone out of the chimney, so there was only a smoke hole in the back of the stove which vented the smoke into the room. The heating season was about six months of the year,[52] so that for six months of the year the peasants breathed a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and over two hundred wood-smoke particles that clogged their throats and lungs. The product was the infamous Russian smoky hut, one of the major features of Russian civilisation from the time the Slavs moved east into Ukraine in the sixth century, and then into the Volga-Oka mesopotamia in the eleventh- thirteenth centuries, down until the 1930s. The smoke was so dense that it left a line around the wall about shoulder-high, where the bottom of the smoke cloud hung. The air was so toxic that it disinfected the hut to the extent that not even cockroaches could survive. The Russians had a saying: 'If you want to be warm, you have to suffer the smoke.'17
Besides the stove, there were benches around the walls of the hut on which the peasants sat during the day and slept at night, on mattresses stuffed with hay or straw. Early tables were made of clay and immovable; movable tables made of wood date from the seventeenth century.18 Some huts had primitive stools, but usually there were no chairs or other furniture except a trunk (made of wood, leather, and/or woven bark, reeds and other materials) in which the peasants kept their extra and out-of-season clothing. There was a shelf protruding from one of the walls on which cooking utensils were kept. Clay pots were used for storage or mixing. There were typically three or four small windows (to prevent the heat from escaping) covered sometimes with mica (in huts of the more well-to-do), more often with parchment made of bull's bladder. (The huts of the poor had no windows at all.) The windows did not open, and during the coldest weather were covered over with mats to conserve heat. Also to conserve heat, the front door was low and narrow. Internal lighting, such as there was (and the peasant hut was always dark inside), was provided by splinters set alight or a burning wick in oil. Smoky, tallow candles were used first in the seventeenth century, and more expensive wax candles were used where there were many bees.19 Most huts had dirt floors, probably to facilitate cleaning up the excrement slurry during the coldest months when all the livestock as well as the peasant family lived full time in the hut.20 Feeding the livestock over the winter was a real chore. Supplies often ran out during the late winter or early spring, and the cries of the starving animals could be heard throughout the village. Some animals were so weak by spring that they could not stand and had to be carried out to pasture.
Thanks to the prominence of rye in the Russian diet, the nutritional state of the 'average Russian' was almost certainly better than one might have imagined. That does not mean, however, that Russian nutrition was ideal. One
17 Richard Hellie, 'The Russian Smoky Hut and its Possible Health Consequences', RH 28 (2001): 171-84.
18 D. A. Baranov et al., Russkaia izba. Illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia. Vnutrenneeprostranstvo izby. Mebel' i ubranstvo izby. Domashniaia i khoziaistvennaia utvar' (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1999), pp. 114-15.
19 Ibid., pp. 306-7.
20 Ibid. This volume is concerned primarily with the period 1700-1825, but much of it is relevant to the earlier period because traditional life changed very slowly. As this book notes, many huts did not have wooden floors even in the I920s-i930s (p. 55).
problem was an inadequate quantity of meat, caused primarily by the inability of Russians to winter sufficient numbers of livestock. Although the elite (clergy and laymen) had access to adequate quantities of fish, it is not clear that the 'average Russian' did. The quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables available to the 'average Russian' was also inadequate. Thus Russians well may have been deficient in Vitamin A, niacin, cobalamin, Vitamin D, calcium and selenium. These deficiencies almost certainly made the Russians' bodies function at less than optimum levels, made them susceptible to disease and diminished their energy levels. These factors, combined with the impact of the smoky hut, contributed mightily in making the Russian the shortlived, lethargic, marginally productive, minimally creative (original) person he was.
Peasant clothing was simple, nearly all of it home-made out of homespun wool or flax/linen, sometimes hemp. On his head the peasant wore a cap (kolpak) or felt hat (shapka). The woman wore a kerchief. The man's coat was a caftan (kaftan), a woman's coat or long jacket was called a telogreia, a man's tunic was called an odnoriadka and his heavy-duty winter coat a sheepskin shuba. A man's basic garment was a shirt (rubakha, rubashka) and trousers (porty, shtany); a woman's a dress (rubakha, sarafan or letnik). Both sexes wore stockings (chulki), linden bast shoes (lapti) in summer, ordinary leather shoes in less clement weather (bashmaki (men's) or koty (women's)), and felt boots (valenki) in snowy weather. Gloves (perchatki) and mittens (rukavitsy) completed the peasant outfit. Unmarried girls/women wore one braid, married women two. Women also wore earrings, beads and necklaces. Wealthy peasants, relatively few and far between, wore furs and expensive jewellery and their houses contained metal utensils and other items purchased in the market, even books.[53] Exhibiting wealth was risky, for the collective system of taxation provided an incentive for poorer peasants to shift their burden to the more prosperous.
43
N. A. Gorskaia et al. (eds.),
44
A. Ia. Degtiarev observed that around 1500 in the Novgorod region 90 per cent of the villages contained only one to five households:
45
A. A. Shennikov,
i993).
48
A. L. Shapiro et al.,
49
G. M. Karagodin,
50
Ibid., p. 45. Gorskaia opted for the sixteenth century (Gorskaia,
52
Richard Hellie,
53
A. I. Kopanev