SEVEN
Is the Slave Soul of Russia a Gendered Object?
I am a slave.
The “slave soul of Russia” is a metaphorical characterization of a mentality that pervades Russia on all cultural levels. But in the depths of the individual Russian psyche, this “slave soul” is a specific, personified, and gendered entity: it is a woman, most commonly the first and foremost woman in every Russian’s life, namely, the mother. At the national level, as we saw earlier, the “great [female] slave” (Grossman) is “Mother Russia” herself.
Any responsible mother is in some sense enslaved by her children, especially by very small children who require constant attention. Vasilii Rozanov characterized a mother as a slave (“sluzhit rabyneiu”) in a touching vignette about a sick child and its attentive mother.2 But there is nothing particularly Russian about sacrificing oneself to the needs and whims of what Freud liked to call sa majesté l’enfant.
In Russia, however, there has always been a gross inequality of the sexes which served to intensify a woman’s enslavement. A traditional Russian woman was, in effect, the slave of her man. Among the peasantry, for example, a daughter was expected to be obedient to her father until he married her off, whereupon she was required to submit to the will of her husband. The husband became her “father” within the patriarchal peasant culture, as in the proverb “A husband is the wife’s father, a wife is the husband’s crowning glory” (“Muzh zhene otets, zhena muzhu venets”).3 Among the gentry the situation was not very different, as can be seen from Professor Stites’s discussion of “the subservience of married women to their husbands in nineteenth-century Russia.” Stites goes so far as to make an analogy with the institution of serfdom: “In many ways, the wife-daughter’s status under the husband-father was analogous to that of the landlord’s serf.”4
Among the peasantry the husband himself was likely to be a slave (literally until 1861, metaphorically both before and after). There is a famous passage about the complexities of the serf wife’s enslavement in Nikolai Nekrasov’s folkloristic poem Red-Nose Frost:
Here Nekrasov sympathizes with the downtrodden Russian woman, and understandably so. But the picture was really more complicated. The inequality of the sexes was affected in important ways by the fact that both spouse abuse and child abuse were common in the peasant family.
When a peasant wife did not submit to the will of her husband, that is, did not behave in accordance with the ethical principle of smirenie, she could expect to be beaten by him. When her children did not submit to his will, they too could be beaten by him. They could also be beaten by their mother, although mothers tended to beat their children for different reasons than fathers did.5 Nevertheless, both parents were abusive. The abuse was accomplished in a variety of ways: the child was whipped with a rope, hit with a fist, a stick, or a nettle switch, dragged by the ear or the hair, or kicked.6
Although from a small child’s viewpoint the mother is a dominating, enslaving figure in any culture (above, 96), as the Russian child grows it becomes increasingly clear that the father is the family slave driver. Among the Russian peasantry the father’s abuse of the mother would often take place right in front of the children. For example, ethnographer Ol’ga Semenova-Tian-Shanskaia reports on one muzhik who, when drunk, used to threaten his wife with an axe, or beat her on the head with a threshing-flail as the children cried and screamed nearby.7
It must be quite an epiphany for the growing Russian child to discover that its master has a master (especially if this occurs in the context of the primal scene—see below). The original enslaver is, after all, a slave. Any hostile wishes that the child may have had against the mother—and even children who have not been swaddled Russian-style have hated their mothers at one point or another—must be reactivated by a male adult who himself lords it over the child’s mother. At the same time, having been lorded over in the past, the child must also be able to identify with a mother who now appears to be a victim. In other words, the child must be torn. At some moment in development the child has the affective makings of both master and slave, both sadist and masochist.
Within the traditional peasant family the father was a harsh disciplinarian who had a right to beat his children, to decide who they married, to determine where they would live, etc. Christine Worobec provides a very typical example in her excellent recent book on post-emancipation peasants:
On 12 September 1871, in Ivanovo canton, Shuia district, Vladimir province, a father charged his son with leaving home and not being respectful of parental authority. When the son defended his action by accusing his father of severely beating him, the father replied that it was a parent’s right to punish a disobedient son. The father reasoned that such beatings were merely instructive; they could not lead to maiming. The cantonal court sided with the father, sentenced the son to twenty lashes, and ordered that he return to his parents’ home.8
Such familial authority has always had its political analogue in Russia. Political authoritarianism is expressed with specifically paternal metaphors. The Russian tsars, for example, had since the seventeenth century been affectionately referred to by the naively monarchistic peasantry as “little father” (“Batiushka”). Peter the Great was “Father of the Fatherland” (“Otets Otechestva”).9 Iosif Stalin, who far outstripped the tsars in the degree to which he enslaved Russia (and the rest of the Soviet Union), was called “Father,” “Father of the Peoples,” “Wise Father,” “Beloved Father,” and so forth.10
In the religious realm, as in the political, the paternal metaphor reigned, and continues to reign. For example, a nineteenth-century Russian monk writes: “We must not try to find out why this happened in this way, and not in that, but with childlike obedience we must surrender ourselves to the holy will of our heavenly Father and say from the depth of our souclass="underline" ‘Our Father, Thy will be done.’”11 The Russian Orthodox “God” is most definitely a father, not a mother.
The childlike quality of Russian obedience is manifested in the very pronouns Russians used in addressing the authorities. Russian has two second person pronouns, the familiar ty and the polite vy (cf. French tu and vous, German Du and Sie). Initially the Russian child uses only ty, whether the interaction is with adults or with peers. The familiar pronoun is the pronoun of childhood. Among peasants this pronoun remained predominant in adulthood as well, however. Vy was used on certain formal occasions (e.g., matchmaking), or in situations where deliberate distance was desired, or in addressing some members of the gentry (e.g., the landlord’s wife). But ty was used toward those in authority, as Paul Friedrich has pointed out: