"Foreign colonies" and "military colonies" in Russia were intimately connected. In the 1810s, which was the booming period for both experiments, two brothers, Pavel and Andrei Fadeev, directed the two state chancelleries that ran these colonies. Some German colonists were settled in military colonies as role models. But military colonies evoked much resistance. In a series of cholera riots in the 1830s, soldiers and peasants killed hundreds of officers and doctors; the rebels received corporal punishments, usually by gauntlets that often led to death on the spot. The concept of Arakcheevism became a popular signification for acts of arbitrary, cruel rule; one can find instances of this word even in Lenin's writings, more than 100 years after Arakcheev's death. The promise of financial self-sufficiency was never fulfilled. In 1857, a few years before the emancipation of the
Figure 11: A cavalry training ring with a church, part of the military colony in Selishche, near Novgorod, built in 1818-25. Source: Wikimedia Commons
serfs, Alexander II disbanded the military colonies. The lands and works were transferred to the same Ministry of State Properties that was also administering the "foreign colonies."
Communes and Gauntlets
In the culminating scene of Aleksandr Pushkin's masterpiece, Evgenii Onegin, there is a peasant song, which is performed by young women while collecting berries for their mistress. They were forced, no doubt by the threat of lashes, to sing in a choir so that their mouths would be busy and they would not eat the berries: an "invention of rural wit," said Pushkin (1950: 3/66). In Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the seignior, Levin, finds a resolution to his existential problems in the ecstatic experience of collective, rhythmical scything with a group of peasants who accept him as a peer. It is not an accident that, in both examples, collective manual work was supplemented by an aesthetic activity - coerced singing while picking berries, or choreographed movements while scything. Though functional for specific forms of peasant labor, collective work was unusual. Still, the Empire treated peasants not individually, as they were most often treated in Europe, but in collectives.
When drafted into the army, which in the nineteenth century was all about collective movement, peasants were difficult trainees. Following the Prussian model, the Russian army practiced a highly specialized technique of scapegoating that consolidated the soldiers' collective. The soldier was dragged through the ranks of his colleagues, who beat him, one after another, with wooden rods of a standard length. A soldier who neglected this duty risked becoming the next victim of his community. Punishments were public not because the public watched the performance of an individual perpetrator, but in the deeper sense that these punishments were performed by a community of peers, with each member contributing exactly the same share of the punishment as the others. The death penalty was officially abolished in 1753, but running the gauntlet in the Russian Army often resulted in death. In 1863 the gauntlet was replaced with lashes, which were used as a supplement to the developing penitentiary system. As Foucault (2003) showed, public execution on the scaffold symbolized the power of the king. The gauntlet symbolized the power of the collective or, rather, the unity between the power and the collective.
In civil life, the peasant commune realized a similar function. It was publicly discovered by the Prussian official, August von Haxthausen, who visited Russia in 1843. He traveled into the heartlands with money and a translator provided by the Ministry of State Properties (Morozov 1891; Starr 1968). He went to the Volga to explore the German colonies there and interviewed some of the most radical Russian sectarians. His experience with the regular, Orthodox peasants was limited (Dennison and Carus 2003). But among them, he made the discovery that made him famous, the peasant commune which practiced regular repartitions of land among the peasants. The commune was "a well-organized free republic," wrote Haxthausen. In his Romantic vision, while the Russian elite lived westernized, petty lives that were based on private property and public corruption, the Russian peasant followed an entirely different tradition, hidden and hitherto unknown. Giving a racial interpretation to the concept, Haxthausen believed that the commune had its origin among the ancient Slavs. He found the same institution among the Serbs and believed that the indigenous Slavic population of Prussia also lived in the communes, before Germans arrived and destroyed them.
Widely practiced all over Russia, the commune remained unknown to westerners as well as to westernized Russians. One estate, the peasantry, lived in communes; other estates knew nothing about them, and the life of the gentry was particularly anti-communitarian. Haxthausen wrote that the peasants in the secrecy of their communal ways had already realized the "dreams of some of the modern political sects, particularly the St Simonians and Communists" (Haxthausen 1856: 132). Approaching the revolutionary year 1848, the word "commune" was in fashion; Haxthausen contrasted what he saw as the false French theories of communism to the true, noble Russian practice of the commune. As a conservative Romantic, a graduate of Gottingen, and a friend of the brothers Grimm, Haxthausen found in Russia precisely what he was looking for. No revolution, he said, would ever occur in Russia, because it had already been accomplished in a conspiracy shared by millions. Impressed by Haxthausen, Friedrich Engels started learning Russian, but Marx remained skeptical (Eaton 1980: 108; Shanin 1983). Engels referred to Haxthausen's discovery of the Russian commune in his famous The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1840) and even in the Communist Manifesto.
The first Russian review of Haxthausen's book emphasized parallels between his discoveries in Russia and colonial adventures in Africa and America with a healthy bit of irony:
Our educated people will find a lot to learn from Haxthausen's book. Many of its pages will seem like a perfect trip to the interiors of Africa or even to Eldorado. . . . Yes, dear gentlemen, Eldorado is in Russia. But in order to see it, you have to take away the blindfold that your governors tied around your eyes in your childhood and that, in your maturity, the exceptional reading of western books supports. ([Anonimous] 1847: 10)
Enthusiastically supported by various groups of Russian intellectuals, Haxthausen's discovery of the commune produced an unusual consensus among the public. In 1851, the French historian Jules Michelet compared Haxthausen with Columbus and the newly discovered commune with the New World. Bitterly, Alexander Herzen concurred that Russians had to wait for the German to discover their own treasure, the commune (1956: 301). But as with Columbus, arguments about priority soon emerged. Aleksei Khomiakov claimed that he had discovered the commune on his own estate earlier than Haxthausen. They actually met in May 1843, and this conversation was probably the most important source of Haxthausen's information about the commune (Bogucharsky 1912; Druzhinin 1968). Apart from the petty question of priority, Khomiakov and the Slavophiles concurred that the Russian commune was an ancient, noble institution that embodied the soul of the Russian people.