Submission to the “Will” of the Commune in Tsarist Russia
The typical Russian peasant in the imperial period was not only under the thumb of the gentry landlord and the family patriarch (“bol’shak”), but was also beholden to a collective of fellow peasants known as the commune (“obshchina” or, more commonly among the peasants, “mir”), the administrative actions of which were usually carried out by an all-male village assembly (“sel’skii skhod”). The commune played a very important role in the emotional life of the peasant. It was also an important political and economic structure, of course, but here I am concerned with how the peasant felt about the commune. It is possible to address this psychological issue without getting entangled in complex economic questions, and in particular without pretending to settle the hotly disputed issues of just how ancient or how genuinely Russian the peasant commune was.44
The commune seems to have gained even more control over the lives of individual peasants after the emancipation of 1861 than it held previously. The emancipated peasant in most cases still was not able to own arable land, but depended on the commune to parcel it out periodically. The commune did not assign land, moreover, to the peasant as an individual, but to the extended peasant household on the basis of the number of “tiagla” per household. A “tiaglo” was usually a married couple between the ages of eighteen and sixty (sometimes land was assigned instead on the basis of the number of adult males per household, or the number of mouths to be fed). This economic disregard for the individual peasant could not but have psychological consequences.
Although the peasant worked the land, it was not in most cases his or hers to sell or to pass on to offspring. There was no truly private property, other than the hut and the immediately surrounding farmstead land and buildings, and, for women, the dowry. The typical peasant was at best a temporary landholder, not a landowner. In addition, the post-emancipation peasant was required to work the exclusively collective portions of the commune’s land, that is, the arable land from which funds were earned to pay assistance to landless widows, herders, teachers, doctors, etc., as well as to pay for road, bridge, and church repair.
The commune did have its advantages. The members, for example, might collectively come to the aid of a family in distress (e.g., rebuilding a hut destroyed by fire, helping a family stricken by disease, etc.; this practice was called “pomoch’”).45 Successful agricultural innovation initiated by one member might end up benefiting all members (if the majority went along with the innovation). The peasant commune also offered the psychological advantage of comfortable group identity and solidarity (this solidarity was maintained even by members who left the commune for varying periods of time in order to earn money elsewhere: “zemliaki,” individuals from the same village—literally from the same “zemlia” or “land”—tended to live together in the working-class neighborhoods of large cities). Another psychological advantage to the individual member of the peasant collective was an option in some contexts to shift blame or responsibility for morally questionable actions on to the collective (see below, 237).
The commune retained enormous power over its members in exchange for the advantages it offered, however. Some, indeed, have argued that the commune enslaved the individual peasant to a greater extent than did the serf-owning landlord.46 Certainly the typical peasant felt a much greater sense of devotion to the commune than to the landowner. Here we may cite a typical response by a serf when asked by a provincial governor whether he would obey his master: “As the mir goes, so will I.” After twenty-five blows with a birch switch, the serf still gave the same response.47
The commune’s power was manifested in a wide variety of spheres. With good reason Leroy-Beaulieu speaks of “communal despotism.”48 The commune determined land allotments for each household. It determined how much each household was to pay in taxes (there was much grumbling by individuals who had to pay higher taxes when other individuals in the household slacked off, e.g., out of drunkenness).49 It determined which young males would be recruited into the military. In many cases the commune could prevent an individual from setting up a separate household. By various means it could pressure individuals to participate in a “pomoch’.”50 It could force an individual member to participate in a new agricultural project, such as draining a swamp, or it could prevent an individual member from introducing an agricultural innovation.51 It could arrange for the public shaming or other disciplining of any member who stepped out of line. It dictated whether an individual peasant could receive the passport needed to reside elsewhere than on the commune (the internal passport requirement later became a fact of Soviet life as well). The commune could even interfere in family matters. For example, the powerful head (“bol’shak”) of a multiple family household could be deposed by the commune if he did not see to it that his household fulfilled its communal obligations (e.g., if he became a drunkard and squandered patrimonial property).52
The ability of the traditional peasant collective to formally shame a member is striking evidence of the collective’s power over the individual. Among the numerous examples adduced by Christine Worobec is the following:
In 1887, in the hamlet of Iazykova in Petrov district, Saratov province, the gates to two homes in which marriageable girls lived had been tarred [signifying premarital sexual activity on the part of the girls]. The girls’ parents informed the village assembly that they suspected three village girls with whom their daughters had quarreled over suitors. Since the quarrel was common knowledge in the community, the assembly held the parents of the accused party responsible for their daughters’ actions and ordered them to treat the assembly members to fifteen rubles’ worth of vodka. Moreover, each of the guilty girls was shamed publicly by having a tarred piece of string tied round her neck. A crowd then led them to the tarred gates and forced the girls to kiss them. Such public humiliation weakened the offenders’ chances for making ideal marriage matches.53
Two layers of collective coercion of the individual are evident in this charivari. First, the collective took it upon itself to regulate women’s sexuality. It is clear that a woman’s sexual behavior was not her own business. She and her entire family might be humiliated in the eyes of the larger collective by a premarital sexual adventure (while the man and his family were not, although there were cases where the collective forced a man to marry a woman he had impregnated). Second, the collective could punish those who falsely accused a woman of not conforming to the collective’s demands on her sexuality. In effect, it could humiliate attempted humiliators, and thereby adversely affect their future lives in the collective. Apparently it was quite rare for the individual to resist or openly repudiate humiliation being meted out by the collective.
Charivaris were apparently most frequently directed against suspected petty thieves. Very often the victim was forced to treat those assembled to vodka or wine, which was supposed to effect a kind of reconciliation with the collective. In cases of more serious crimes, such as horse thievery, the suspected criminal might be tortured and beaten to death by a mob. Individuals accused of witchcraft or sorcery might also be murdered by a communal mob.54
Numerous proverbs attest to the psychological power which the traditional peasant collective wielded over the individual, or more accurately, to the power the individual felt the collective wielded. In effect, these proverbs express smirenie, an acceptance that one must submit, however reluctantly, to an omnipotent collective: