Until 1905, Russia had no legal political institutions outside the bureaucratic chain of command. Political parties were forbidden. Peasants could vote in elections to zemstva, but even in this case their choice was narrowly circumscribed by bureaucrats and government-appointed officials. In any event, these organs of self-government dealt with local, not national issues. Peasants could not even aspire to a career in the Imperial civil service, since its ranks were for all practical purposes closed to them. In other words, peasants, even more than the members of the other non-noble estates, were excluded from the country’s political life.
Peasants in Russia were not entirely insulated from the commercial marketplace, but the latter played a marginal role in their lives. For one, they did not care to eat food that they did not grow themselves.43 They bought little, mainly household and farm implements, much of it from other peasants. Nor did they have much to selclass="underline" most of the grain that reached the market came from landlord estates or large properties owned by merchants. The ups and downs of the national and international commodity markets, which directly affected the well-being of American, Argentinian, or English farmers, had little bearing on the condition of the muzhik.
The manor was viewed by conservative Russians as the outpost of culture in the countryside, and some well-meaning agrarian specialists opposed the expropriation of landlord properties for distribution among peasants from fear of the cultural consequences. This fear may have been justified in the economic sense of the word “culture,” in that landlord estates were indeed operated more efficiently and yielded consistently better crops: according to official statistics 12–18 percent more, but in fact possibly as much as 50 percent.* The cultural influence of the manor on the countryside in the spiritual and intellectual sense of the word, however, was insignificant. For one, there were not enough gentry in the countryside: as we have noted, seven out of ten dvoriane resided in the cities. Second, an unbridgeable psychological gulf separated the two classes: the peasant insisted on treating the landlord as an interloper and felt he had nothing to learn from him. Tolstoy’s “A Landlord’s Morning” (“Utro pomeshchika”) and Chekhov’s village tales show the manor and the hut talking at cross-purposes, without a common language of communication: and where such a language was absent, there could be no transmission of ideas or values. A Frenchman who visited Russia in the 1880s saw the Russian landlord “isolated in the midst of his quondam serfs, outside of the commune, outside even of the volost’ in which he usually resides: the chain of serfdom broken, nothing else binds him to his former subjects.”44
Private property is arguably the single most important institution of social and political integration. Ownership of property creates a commitment to the political and legal order since the latter guarantees property rights: it makes the citizen into a co-sovereign, as it were. As such, property is the principal vehicle for inculcating in the mass of the population respect for law and an interest in the preservation of the status quo. Historical evidence indicates that societies with a wide distribution of property, notably in land and residential housing, are more conservative and stabler, and for that reason more resilient to upheavals of all sorts. Thus the French peasant, who in the eighteenth century was a source of instability, became in the nineteenth, as a result of the gains of the French Revolution, a pillar of conservatism.
From this point of view, Russia’s experience left a great deal to be desired. Under serfdom, the peasant had, legally speaking, no property rights: the land was the landlord’s, and even his movable belongings, although safeguarded by custom, enjoyed no legal protection. The Emancipation Act entrusted his allotment to the commune. And although after 1861 the peasant avidly accumulated real estate, he failed clearly to distinguish it from his communal allotment, which he held only in temporary possession. In his mind, ownership of land, the principal form of wealth, was indissolubly bound up with personal cultivation and he had no respect for the property rights of non-peasants merely because they held a piece of paper granting them title. In contrast to the peasantry of Western Europe, the muzhik lacked a developed sense of property and law, which made him poor material for citizenship.
Thus, there were few bridges connecting the Russian village with the outside world. The officials, the gentry, the middle classes, the intelligentsia lived their lives and the peasants theirs: physical proximity did not make for the flow of ideas. The appearance (in 1910) of Ivan Bunin’s novel The Village, with its devastating picture of the peasantry, struck the reading public as something from the darkest ages. The book, writes a contemporary critic, “had a shattering effect”:
Russian literature knows many unvarnished depictions of the Russian village, but the Russian reading public had never before confronted such a vast canvas, which with such pitiless truth revealed the very innards of peasant and peasantlike existence in all its spiritual ugliness and impotence. What stunned the Russian reader in this book was not the depiction of the material, cultural, legal poverty—to this he had been accustomed from the writings of talented Russian Populists—but the awareness of precisely the spiritual impoverishment of Russian peasant reality; and, more than that, the awareness that there was no escape from it. Instead of the image of the almost saintly peasant from which one should learn life’s wisdom, on the pages of Bunin’s Village the reader confronted a pitiful and savage creature, incapable of overcoming its savagery through either material prosperity … or education.… The maximum that the Russian peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving, even in the person of those who rose above the “normal” level of peasant savagery, was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed …45
The peasant, who knew how to survive under the most trying circumstances in his native countryside, was utterly disoriented when separated from it. The instant he left the village, his mir or world, ruled by custom and dominated by nature, for the city, run by men and their seemingly arbitrary laws, he was lost. The Populist writer Gleb Uspenskii, who rather idealized rural Russia, thus described the effects of the uprooting on the muzhik:
the vast majority of the Russian people is patient and majestic in bearing misfortunes, youthful in spirit, manly in strength, and childishly simple … as long as it is subjected to the power of the earth, as long as at the root of its existence lies the impossibility of flaunting its commands, as long as these commands dominate its mind [and] conscience and fill its being … Our people will remain what it is for as long … as it is permeated with and illuminated … by the warmth and glow of the mother raw earth … Remove the peasant from the land, from the anxieties it brings him, the interests with which it agitates him, make him forget his “peasantness”—and you no longer have the same people, the same ethos, the same warmth which emanates from it. There remains nothing but the vacuous apparatus of the vacuous human organism. The result is a spiritual void—“unrestrained freedom,” that is, boundless, empty distance, boundless, empty breadth, the dreadful sense of “go wherever your legs will carry” …46