Despite the rural origins and outlook of the majority of industrial workers, the government eyed them with suspicion, fearing that their concentration and proximity to cities made them susceptible to corrupting influences. And, indeed, there was cause for concern. In the early 1900s, industrial workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow were 80 to 90 percent literate, which made them an inviting target for the propaganda and agitation of radicals, to which the rural population was quite immune.
The most difficult aspect of rural Russia to understand is peasant mentality, a subject on which the scholarly literature is quite unhelpful. There exist many works on the economic conditions of the pre-revolutionary peasantry, on its folklore and customs, but virtually no scholarly studies that explain what the muzhik believed and how he reasoned.30 It is as if Russian intellectuals regarded the peasant mind as an immature specimen of the progressive mind (their own) and hence undeserving of serious attention. To understand the peasant mentality, one must have recourse to other than scholarly sources, mainly belles lettres.31 These can be supplemented with information gathered by students of peasant customary law, which provides an oblique insight into the peasant mind as revealed by the way he coped with problems of daily life, especially property disputes.32 Familiarity with this material leaves little doubt that the culture of the Russian peasant, as that of the peasantry of other countries, was not a lower, less developed stage of civilization but a civilization in its own right.
As has been pointed out, the world of the Russian peasant was largely self-contained and self-sufficient. It is no accident that in the Russian language the same word—mir—is used for the peasant commune, the world, and peace. The peasant’s experiences and concerns did not extend beyond his own and neighboring villages. A sociological inquiry into peasant attitudes carried out in the 1920s indicated that even after a decade of war, civil war, and revolution which had dragged the Russian peasantry into the vortex of national and international affairs, the muzhik had no interest in anything outside the confines of his canton. He was willing to let the world go its own way as long as it left him alone.33 Pre-revolutionary literary sources similarly stress the absence among the peasantry of a sense of belonging to the state or nation. They depict it as insulated from influences external to the village and lacking in awareness of national identity. Tolstoy emphatically denied the peasant a sense of patriotism:
I have never heard any expression of patriotic sentiments from the people, but I have, on the contrary, frequently heard the most serious and respectable men from among the masses giving utterance to the most absolute indifference or even contempt for all kinds of manifestations of patriotism.34
The truth of this observation was demonstrated during World War I, when the Russian peasant soldier, even while performing courageously under difficult conditions (shortages of weapons and ammunition), did not understand why he was fighting since the enemy did not threaten his home province. He fought from the habit of obeying: “They order, we go.”35 Inevitably, once the voice of authority grew faint, he stopped obeying and deserted. Equal to the Western soldier in physical courage, he lacked the latter’s sense of citizenship, of belonging to a wider community. General Denikin, who observed this behavior at close quarters, blamed it on the total absence of nationalist indoctrination in the armed forces.36 But it is questionable whether indoctrination by itself would have made much difference. Judging by Western experience, to bring the peasant out of his isolation it was necessary to develop institutions capable of involving him in the country’s political, economic, and cultural life: in other words, making him a citizen.
The majority of French and German citizens in the early 1900s were also either peasants or urban dwellers a mere generation or two removed from the peasantry. Until quite recent times the Western European peasant had not been culturally superior to the Russian muzhik. Speaking of nineteenth-century France, Eugen Weber draws a picture familiar to the student of Russia: large parts of the country populated by “savages” living in hovels, isolated from the rest of the nation, brutalized and xenophobic.* The situation was not much better in other rural areas of Western Europe. If by 1900 the European peasant had become something different, the reason is that in the course of the nineteenth century institutions had been created that pulled him out of rural isolation.
Using Norway as a model, several such institutions can be identified: the church, the school, the political party, the market, and the manor.† To these we must add private property, which Western scholars take so much for granted that they ignore its immense socializing role. All were weakly developed in late Imperial Russia.
Observers of pre-revolutionary Russia concur that the Orthodox Church, represented in the village by the priest (pop), exerted little cultural influence on the parishioners. The priest’s primary function was ritualistic-magic, and his main duty to ensure the flock’s safe passage into the next world. A. S. Ermolov, in discussing with Nicholas II the revolutionary unrest, disabused him of the notion that the government could rely on the priests to keep the villages in line: “the clergy in Russia has no influence on the population.”37 The cultural role of the Church in the rural districts was confined to elementary schooling, which taught children to read and write, with bits of religious didacticism thrown in. Higher values—theology, ethics, philosophy—were the preserve of the monastic or “black” clergy, which alone had access to Church careers but was not directly involved in parish life. Because, unlike his Western counterpart, the village priest received little if any financial support from the Church and had no hope of making a career in the clerical hierarchy—this was reserved for unmarried, monastic priests—the vocation did not attract the best elements. The peasant is said to have treated priests “not as guides and advisers, but as a class of tradesmen, who have wholesale and retail dealings in sacraments.”38
Before 1917, Russia had no system of compulsory education, even on the elementary level, such as France had introduced in 1833 and most of Western Europe adopted by the 1870s. The need for such a system was often discussed in government circles but it was never realized, partly for lack of money, partly from fear of the influence that secular teachers, mostly intellectuals with left-of-center political ideas, would have on peasant youths. (Conservatives complained that schools taught disrespect for parents and old people and made pupils dream of “far-off rivers flowing with milk and honey.”)39 In 1901, Russia had 84,544 elementary schools with an enrollment of 4.5 million pupils, the administration of which was divided between the Ministry of Education (47.5 percent) and the Holy Synod (42.5 percent). In terms of pupils enrolled, the ministry enjoyed a clear advantage (63 percent and 35.1 percent).40 This was hardly adequate for a country with 23 million children of school age (seven to fourteen years). Literacy, promoted by the zemstva and volunteer organizations, did make rapid progress, especially among males, largely because recruits with a certificate attesting to the completion of primary school served shorter terms of military service (four years instead of six): in 1913, nearly 68 percent of the recruits were said to be literate, but it is doubtful whether many of them could do more than sign their name. Approximately only one in five of these recruits had a school certificate qualifying him for shorter service.41 Neither the schools nor the private associations dedicated to the spread of literacy inculcated national values, because in the eyes of the government, nationalism, a doctrine that considers the “nation” or “people” to be the ultimate sovereign, was a threat to autocracy.42