‘I’m twenty and I’m married. You can’t stop me.’ Young Boris Romanov looked round his family. His parents’ faces were ashen; his grandmother Arina was stony faced; and his fifteen-year-old sister Natalia was looking rebellious, as usual.
‘Wolf!’ Timofei roared. And then, almost pleadingly: ‘At least think of your poor mother.’
But Boris said nothing and Timofei could only look outside at the clamorous birds wheeling over the trees and wonder why God had sent the family all these troubles at once.
The Romanov family was small. Over the years, Timofei and Varya had lost four children to disease and malnutrition; but such tragedies were only to be expected. Thank God at least Natalia and Boris were healthy. Arina too, though she had never quite recovered her health from the terrible famine of ’39, was a source of strength: small, somewhat shrivelled, sometimes bitter, but indomitable. Together with Boris’s new wife, they all lived together in a stout, two-storey izba in the centre of the village. And Timofei, now fifty-two, had been looking forward to taking things more easily.
Until a month ago when, to his astonishment, Varya had told him that she was pregnant again. ‘I couldn’t believe it at first,’ she said, ‘but now I’m sure.’ And in reply to her uncertain look he had smiled bravely and remarked: ‘It’s a gift from God.’
Or a curse, he thought now.
For Boris had just announced that he was going to ruin them.
The Emancipation of the Serfs had changed the lives of Timofei and his family, but not much for the better. There were several reasons for this.
While the peasants on land owned by the State had received a moderately good deal, the serfs of private landlords had not. For a start, only about a third of the land had actually been transferred to the private serfs, the rest remaining with the landlords. Secondly, the serfs had had to pay for this land: a fifth in money or labour service, the other four-fifths by means of a loan from the State, in the form of a bond, repayable over forty-nine years: so that, in effect, the serfs of Russia were forced to take out a mortgage on their holdings. Worse even yet, the landlords managed to have the prices of land set artificially high. ‘And it’s not only those damned repayments,’ Timofei would complain. ‘It’s us peasants who still pay all the taxes too. We’re supporting the landowners as much as ever!’
It was perfectly true. The peasants paid the poll tax, from which the nobles were exempt. They also paid a host of indirect taxes on food and spirits, which were a greater burden on the poor. The net result of this was that, after becoming free, Timofei the peasant was actually paying ten times as much to the State for each desiatin of land he held as Bobrov the gentleman did for his. No wonder then if, like most peasants, Timofei often muttered: ‘One day we’ll kick those nobles out and get the rest of the land for ourselves.’
He did not hate the landowner – not personally. Hadn’t he and Misha Bobrov played together when they were children? But he knew that the nobleman was a parasite. ‘They say the Tsars gave the Bobrovs their land,’ he had explained to his children, ‘in return for their services. But the Tsar doesn’t need them any more. So he’ll take their land away soon, and give it to us.’ It was a simple belief which was shared by peasants all over Russia: ‘Be patient. The Tsar will give.’ And so he had waited for better times.
Young Boris Romanov was a pleasant-looking boy – square and stocky like his father, but with hair that was lighter brown and already rather thin at the front. His blue eyes, though defiant, were gentle.
He did not want to hurt his family; but in the last few months since his marriage, life had become impossible. The arrival of his wife – a lively, golden-haired young girl – in the household had produced a new pecking order. While Arina and Varya had previously expected obedience from his sister Natalia, they rather ignored her now and concentrated their attention on Boris’s wife. ‘They think they own me,’ she would furiously complain.
But it was his mother’s unexpected pregnancy which really brought about the crisis. ‘We shall be starting a family also,’ the girl protested to Boris. ‘And where will that leave us, when it’s her new child who’ll be the important one?’ His father Timofei, too, always moody and feeling the strain of the new situation, had taken to shouting at him on the slightest pretext. ‘Call that a way to stack wood, you Mordvinian?’ he would bellow; and to Boris’s wife he had promised: ‘I may have failed with my son, but I’ll thrash some sense into my grandchild when you give me one – you can be sure of that!’ By the time the spring thaw came, Boris had decided it could go on no longer.
And this was why, that very morning, he had made the fateful announcement that he was moving out.
He had several friends who had done the same thing in recent years. ‘It’s hard when you start with your own izba,’ they had warned him. ‘But then it gets easier. And it’s better really once you’ve done it, because you don’t quarrel with your family so much.’ He was sure it was a good idea.
Indeed, he would have made the break sooner but for one consideration: his sister Natalia. For what would become of her? What would the family do to the fifteen-year-old girl with the pouting mouth and the air of secret defiance? ‘They’ll break her,’ he told his wife ruefully. ‘They’ll work her into the ground to make up for us.’ He had suggested taking Natalia into their house, but his wife had refused. Natalia, too, had been adamant. ‘Go, Boris,’ she told him. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ And when he asked her how she would manage: ‘I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ She grinned: ‘I have a plan.’ He wondered what it was.
It was an hour later that Timofei Romanov, rather pale, stood staring across an open field. Beside him was the man who would now decide his fate.
The village elder was a small, grey-bearded peasant with a loud voice and a decisive manner, whom Timofei respectfully addressed in the old-fashioned way, by his patronymic only, as ‘Ilych’.
Nervously Timofei explained the situation, scarcely daring to look at the elder; but when he had done, unable to bear the suspense, he turned to him abruptly and asked: ‘Well, Ilych, am I ruined?’ Whatever the other said, he knew it would be final; and there would be nothing in the world he could do about it.
Timofei Romanov was free: and yet he was not. In this he resembled most of the former serfs in Russia. For when the Tsar’s advisers had given the serfs their land, they had encountered one other, most difficult problem: what if these peasants, no longer owned by their masters, started wandering about doing what they liked? ‘How will we control them? How can we ensure that the land is tilled and taxes collected?’ Freedom was all very well, but one couldn’t have chaos. And so, in their wisdom, the authorities had devised a simple solution. The peasant, though legally free, would still be tied to his place. The land taken from the landlord was not given to the peasant individually, but to the village commune, which was made responsible for taxes and everything else. If, for instance, Timofei wanted to travel to Moscow, he would have to apply to the village elder for a passport, just as he had formerly applied to Bobrov. Even minor matters of justice rested with the commune. And above all, it was the village elder who periodically redistributed the scattered strips of land – so many good, medium and poor for each family. In short Timofei Romanov was now, in effect, a member of a medieval village without a feudal lord, or, to use a modern term, a compulsory peasant cooperative. The terms do not matter for, in reality, they are one and the same.
And this was the problem: if Boris left home and set up on his own, the land would be repartitioned. Timofei’s share would probably be reduced. The land he had now was not enough to support the family and its obligations. How would he manage?