Worobec points to the general social approval of wife beating:
Russian peasant society did not countenance a woman’s flight to her parents as a justifiable response to wife beating. In directly challenging her husband’s authority, she threatened the entire power structure of the village. The display of a man’s strength vis-à-vis his wife was important both inside and outside the household. It maintained his propriety as an upright community member and brought honor upon his household.94
Worobec cites cantonal court cases lost by women who attempted to run away from their violent husbands. Only women whose husbands were completely irresponsible about managing the household economy or paying taxes were granted any legal relief—and even then these women were expected to continue living with their dangerous husbands.
Nancy Shields Kollmann, writing of an earlier period in Russian history (fourteenth- through seventeenth-century Muscovy), observes that “women could seek defense against abusive husbands and other male kin.” However, husbands were abusive nonetheless, and wives tolerated the abuse, as we must conclude from the immediately following sentences in Kollmann’s article:
Although men were allowed to discipline their wives, Orthodox teaching urged them to inflict only just and moderate beatings. Litigants declared that excessive beating invalidated a husband’s conjugal authority over his wife.95
Here I have taken the liberty of italicizing some items in order to point up the obvious.
All scholars of peasant Russia in tsarist times agree that wife beating was common. Ol’ga Semenova-Tian-Shanskaia asks, for example, “how often” a husband would beat his wife, not whether he beat her (the answer: often if he was drunk, rarely if he was sober). Semenova-Tian-Shanskaia goes on to observe that, after taking a beating, a peasant wife was more likely to be concerned about whether the object the husband had used to beat her was broken than about the condition of her own body.96
The absence of wife beating was considered abnormal. The fact that most women remained married nonetheless (and only uncommonly sought recourse with the village assembly or cantonal court) strongly suggests that women accepted a bad situation. Some of Dahl’s proverbs bear this out:
This has nothing to do with me, whatever my husband says is correct (Moe delo—storona, a muzh moi prav).
My Ustim is bad, but it’s better being with him (Khud moi Ustim, da luchshe s nim).
With him there is sorrow, but without him it’s twice as bad (S nim gore, a bez nego vdvoe).
He (my husband) won’t beat me, but he won’t leave either (On [Muzh] bit’ ne b’et i proch’ neidet).97
The last item suggests an unclear domestic situation. A man who is not beating his wife would normally be expected to leave, for he must not love her anymore. There were some women, in other words, who felt unloved if they were not beaten. Apparently this was not just a male fantasy. Efimenko, a woman with enlightened views who had plenty of experience living with peasants, states that “Russian [peasant] women regard the blows of the husband as proof of his love.”98 This does not mean that they were enjoying the blows, but that they were semiotizing them in a certain way.
Sexologist Krafft-Ebing, citing a seventeenth-century German source, tells of a certain German visitor to Russia who took a Russian wife and settled with her there. The German noticed that his new wife was unhappy, and asked her what was wrong: “‘I want nothing,’ was the answer, ‘but what is customary in our country—the whip, the real sign of love.’ When [he] adopted the custom his wife began to love him dearly.”99
Maxime Kovalevsky, in his lectures delivered at Oxford in 1889–90, writes: “In more than one popular song the wife is represented as bitterly complaining of the indifference of a husband who never on any occasion gives her a good beating.”100 Earlier, in his 1872 book Songs of the Russian People W.R.S. Ralston translates a series of lyrics sung by a young man and a girl (or more frequently, by two girls) on the subject of “A Wife’s Love.” First one of the singers (representing the husband) declares that he is going to the bazaar to get some fine cloth for his wife. The other (representing the wife) rejects this present, however. Then the husband sings that he is going to get a golden ring, but the wife rejects this too. Finally the husband comes back from the bazaar with a “silken whip” and proceeds to deliver a blow to the wife with it. The wife’s attitude changes completely. She now looks upon her husband with affection as the chorus sings:
He has won her love by abusing her.
To repeat: Russian peasant women did not necessarily get pleasure from being mistreated. On the other hand, as was made clear at the beginning of this book, pleasure is not a necessary ingredient of masochism in the first place. I think, therefore, it is best to interpret the evidence as supporting the existence of masochism among peasant women. This is not to say that the Russian peasant woman was continually masochistic in all contexts, but that she was at least capable of on-again, off-again masochism to deal with her mate’s intensely ambivalent feelings toward her, as well as to deal with her own emotional needs.
To read beatings as a sign of love indicates a need for love. The ethnographer or anthropologist might object that Russian peasant women did not marry “for love” in the first place. Even granting that this might be true (and keeping in mind that these women often did not have much say in the matter), it has nonetheless never been demonstrated by any ethnographer that peasant women had no need for love. Certainly any chrestomathy of Russian folk songs will contain love lyrics sung by women. To assume that peasant women had no emotional needs would be condescending indeed. On the other hand, to assume that they had a need to love or to be loved (as is the case with normal women and men in the twentieth-century West) is to raise the possibility that they might have accepted abuse as a next-best substitute for the love they needed.
The idea that beating signifies love may seem strange to the Western mind, but if we consider the connections which Russian culture makes between violence and sexual intercourse (which in turn can be related to love), the idea will not seem so strange.
It was Freud’s Russian patient Sergei Pankeev, better known as the Wolf Man, who inspired the famous linkage of sex and violence now known in the psychoanalytic literature as the primal scene. By this term is meant the “scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain indications, and phantasies. It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father.”102 According to Freud, Pankeev by chance witnessed parental intercourse at the age of one and a half (or two and a half) years, and mistakenly interpreted what was going on as something terrible for his mother. Yet the mother did not react as if she were being mistreated at alclass="underline" “He assumed to begin with, he said, that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.”103 Pankeev’s mother thus seemed to be behaving masochistically—not because she was apparently enjoying sex, but because she was welcoming what appeared to the Wolf Man to be violence directed against her.