Religious life, in which women had the largest role to play, was an Orthodoxy (though Old Belief was strong in many areas of the country and sectarianism common) that complexly blended folk, magical and Church traditions. The timing and form of rituals and celebrations, belief in the pervasiveness of powerful unseen spirits and forces (God, saints, Satan, devils, sprites), reliance on holy men and women (from priests to folk healers), belief in the porous boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead and belief in the power of material objects to embody the sacred (relics, holy water, ritual gestures, icons, incantations, potions and herbs), all partook of both Orthodox traditions and what the Church and educated Russians sometimes called 'pagan' residues to create a lived folk Christianity (a vital, syncretic mix poorly captured by the notion of a 'dual-faith', or dvoeverie, in which an essential paganism was only superficially masked by a 'veneer' of Christian faith) that helped make the world meaningful to peasants and give them some measure of control.[35]
Evidence of profound changes in the experiences and expectations of peasants in these years is no less impressive. Most visibly, peasants were becoming increasingly engaged politically, especially in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. The abolition of serfdom had left peasants with only part of the land they believed by right belonged to them (it was a sacred verity that land must belong to those who work it), requiring peasants to pay rent or work for wages on the land of others. Noble landownership declined precipitously in these years, with peasant communes purchasing or leasing much of this land, and there is evidence that overall peasant poverty gradually diminished. Still, 'land hunger', as it was widely called, and the old dream of 'black repartition', the redistribution of all the land into the hands ofthe peasantry, remained stubbornly compelling, nurtured by both the relative poverty peasants felt and their notions of moral right. 'Disturbances' and everyday forms of resistance continued. In the midst of the national crisis of 1905-7, when the possibilities for change seemed high, peasants voiced their discontent and desires openly in petitions to the government and through new political organisations such as the All-Russian Peasant Union. They also took direct action, seizing land, taking and redistributing grain, pillaging landlords' property and burning manor houses.[36]
No less important, peasants were less and less a 'world apart', as they have sometimes been characterised, and more and more entwined in Russia's modern transformation. External changes facilitated this, though what most decisively altered peasants' everyday lives were their own actions and choices. After the turn ofthe century, the government moved towards removing some of the disabilities that marked peasants as a distinct and legally inferior social estate: collective responsibility for tax payment was ended in 1903, corporal punishment was abolished in 1904 and, in 1906, Prime Minister Petr Stolypin promulgated a reform that allowed individual peasants to withdraw from the commune and establish independent farmsteads, though relatively few did. Outsiders (educated reformers, teachers, clergy and others) were increasing in evidence in the villages, organising co-operatives, mutual assistance organisations, lectures and readings, theatres and temperance organisations. The rapid expansion of schooling and literacy and the massive rise in newspapers and literature directed at common people (the illiterate could hear these read and discussed in village taverns and tearooms) exposed peasants in unprecedented ways to knowledge of the larger world. Changing economic opportunities were especially important. Migration to industrial and urban work touched the lives of millions of peasants - the migrants themselves but also their kin and fellow villagers when these individuals returned to the countryside after seasonal or temporary industrial or commercial work, or at least on holidays, or after becoming sick or aged.
As peasants responded to these new experiences and to their own desires, everyday peasant life visibly changed. Many peasants, especially younger men and women who had been to the city, demonstrated new social mores (for example, in personal and sexual relations); began wearing urban-style dress, either bought in urban shops or hand-sewn on the model of pictures in magazines; and purchased, or at least desired, commodities such as clocks, urban furniture, stylish boots and hats, porcelain dishes and cosmetics. Especially for peasants able to experience life beyond the village (through work but also reading), this new knowledge stimulated new desires and expectations. What was said of peasant women who had worked in the city can be said of many individual peasants in these years whose lives were no longer confined by traditional spaces and knowledges: they were 'distinguished by livelier speech, greater independence, and a more obstinate character'. These changes brought pleasure, but also potential frustration and danger.[37]
Nation and empire
The fundamental question of Russian nationhood was also in flux, and under siege, in these years. As a political entity, of course, Russia was not a single ethnic nation but an empire that included large numbers of Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Turkic peoples, Jews, Roma (gypsies), Germans, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Armenians and many others, some of whom could claim histories of once having their own states and others who were discovering and inventing themselves as nations. Non-Russian 'minorities', based on native language, were already a slight majority in the empire at the time of the 1897 census.[38] The empire's national complexity was no less visible in the strong presence, despite many restrictive laws, of ethnic and religious minorities in urban centres, especially in business and the professions. But how was this imperial society understood? Historians have debated the utility of categories such as empire, imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, frontier and borderlands. At the level of state policy, certainly, it would be foolhardy to apply any single modeclass="underline" the treatment of Jews, Catholic Poles, Orthodox Ukrainians, Muslim Tatars or Uzbeks and 'pagan' Evenks, for example, was not uniform. Also, local policies, driven by imperial administrators and educators who often better understood local needs and possibilities, could differ from the policy directives coming from St Petersburg. And individuals were treated differently depending on their professions and their degree of assimilation. Most of all, as recent scholars have shown, state policy towards the empire's peoples, even in any single case, was 'enormously ambiguous, variable, uncertain, and contested'.[39]
On the one hand, the government of Nicholas II, and the tsar personally, actively promoted a renewed Russian nationalism that often had dire consequences for those defined as outside the national fold. Official images of the tsar's loving communion with his 'people' pointedly excluded non-Russian nationalities. Conversely, he blamed non-Russians (especially Jews) for the disturbances of 1905. For Nicholas II and his nationalist allies, it was time again to establish state and society on 'unique Russian principles', which meant 'that unity between Tsar and all Rus' ...as there was of old'. To speak of Russia as Rus', of course, was to offer up an idealised national past, a pure national Russia before imperial expansion or Westernisation, in place of the complex realities of Rossiia the empire.[40] In practice, the state had since the late 1800s been promoting an aggressive 'Russification' of non-Russian nationalities: insisting on Russian as the language of education and administration, promoting the settlement of ethnic Russians in the borderlands, supporting active Orthodox missionary work and building Orthodox churches throughout the empire, increasing quotas on Jews and some other groups in higher education, tolerating and perhaps even instigating anti-Jewish violence ('pogroms'), reducingthe representation of non-Russian national parties in the Duma and suppressing radical nationalist parties and demonstrations.
35
Ben Eklof and Stephen Frank (eds.),
36
Maureen Perrie, 'The Russian Peasant Movement in 1905-7', in Eklof and Frank,
37
Engel,
38
Of the entire population of the empire, excluding Finland, only 44.9 per cent spoke Russian (not including Belorussian and Ukrainian, though the census viewed these as sub-categories of Russian) as their native language. N. A. Troinitskii (ed.),
pp. i-9.
39
Robert Geraci,
40
Wortman,