The household chief, the landlord, Tsar, and God were all addressed with ty and the quasi-kinship term, batjushka (“little father”). Thus a striking feature of authority in Russia as against the West was that vy generally did symbolize greater power, but that when the greatness passed a certain point the speaker switched back to what might be called the ty of total subordination or of an intimacy that could not be jeopardized. From another point of view, ty to God, Tsar, and squire emphasized the fatherly aspect of their jural authority.12
In the Soviet period childish familiarity with authority figures decreased, of course. But the paternal metaphor continued to reign. A Soviet woman physician and hospital section head writing a letter to sociologist Larisa Kuznetsova, describes a confrontation she had with another physician who was supposed to be working under her: “Once I permitted myself to make a joke: ‘Which of us in this section is the Mama—me or you?’ Pedantically he raised his index finger and replied harshly: ‘Remember that I am everywhere the Papa.’”13 Eventually this woman quit her job as section head and went back to being an ordinary physician. As another Moscow woman said: “Inequities don’t always give rise to anger. Sometimes they make you subservient.”14
Patriarchy Conceals Matrifocality
Despite the overt patriarchal orientation of adult Russian culture, the child’s early viewpoint should not be neglected. Small children are preoccupied with their mothers, not their fathers. They cannot eat, drink, clothe themselves, clean themselves, or move about without the mother’s assistance and/or permission. The “barin” may not allow you to leave the borders of his estate, and the paternalistic Russian bureaucrat may not permit you to leave the borders of the Soviet Union, but your mother did not even let you out of her arms, or the swaddling bands, or the cradle, or the hut.
To a traditional Russian child the world must seem very “matriarchal” (and even more so if the father is absent or indifferent). Patriarchs do not mother. They can take neither credit for caring for the infant nor blame for subjugating it. Indeed, mothers in all cultures are in charge of their children until they are weaned.15
Actually, a much better term than “matriarchal” here would be matrifocal, meaning that the emphasis in Russia is on the mother-child relationship at the expense of the father-child or father-mother relationships.16 There is in fact no such thing as a “matriarchal” society anywhere on our planet, and there probably never has been one.17 But it is possible for a society, such as Russia, to be intensely matrifocal while at the same time being patriarchal to varying degrees at various time periods.
Even after the Russian child has grown up, the mother remains extremely important. Ivan Petrovich Sakharov, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, quotes a long peasant incantation designed to neutralize the effects of a mother’s anger against her grown-up son.18 Referring to interviews with Soviet Russian soldiers, Henry Dicks says: “On the whole the impression was gained that a Russian man’s mother remained his most important love-object even though he was married.”19
In Russia, according to philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, “the fundamental category is motherhood.”20 This statement is not just about individual Russians and their mothers. The matrifocality of the Russian family has spilled out into the culture as a whole. Maternal imagery permeates all levels of Russian society and culture. To the Westerner, there seems to be an excess of signification about mothers in Russia, and this excess indicates that the average Russian needs to continue dealing, even in adulthood, with the experience of having been mothered.
For example, mother earth is the place where, in the native lore, all crops grow (“mat’ zemlia-kormilitsa”) and all Russians are eventually buried (“mat’ syra zemlia”). Russians speak of the “bosom of the earth” (“lono zemli”). More than one Dostoevsky character has been known to flop down upon the earth, kiss it as if it were a person, and moisten it with tears of joy or grief. On various ceremonial occasions among the peasantry the earth was kissed. Russian peasants sometimes swore oaths by swallowing a handful of earth. Land disputes were decided by peasants who paced boundaries with a clump of earth on their head. In the absence of a priest, peasants would sometimes confess their sins to mother earth.
The Volga, the Oka, and various other Russian rivers, Moscow and some other cities, plants such as rye (“rozh’”)—all have “mother” or the pleonastic “natal mother” (“mat’ rodnaia”) as their epithet. “Mother Russia” (“matushka Rus’,” “Rossiia mat’”) is a very normal way for the Russian to personify his or her country, while “Fatherland,” that is, “otechestvo” is less common and less significant (except in contexts of extreme nationalism or war). Some lines from Nikolai Nekrasov provide a famous example:
“Motherland” (“Rodina,” literally “Birthland”) is another widespread designation, as in the famous recruitment poster from World War II, “The Motherland Mother Calls” (“Rodina mat’ zovet”); this term can also refer to the village or general locale one was born in.
The “Mother of God” (“Bogoroditsa” or “Bogomater’,” unlike the “Blessed Virgin Mary” of Western Christianity) is quite as important as the male divinities in Russian Orthodoxy and popular Russian Christianity. She pities those who suffer and who sin, she is a protector, she works miracles, she aids women in labor, churches are consecrated in her name, she was the guarantor of military pacts, her icon was worshipped by soldiers before battle, and so on. Mary is not only Christ’s mother, she is the metaphorical mother of all religious Russians, even of all humankind. Historically, she seems to have inherited some features of the old Slavic fertility goddess Makosh’, the “mother of the harvest.”
In the religious lore, there are repeated allusions to the “three mothers” in every person’s life: the Mother of God, Mother Moist Earth, and the natal mother. It is as if one mother were not enough, or not adequate enough. Mother cults, both Christian and pagan, can be traced back to earliest Russia. A central figure of Russian folktales is the maternal hag Baba Yaga, who threatens to eat little children.