It is important to note that the peasant did not perceive his fusion with the commune as a violation of his individual rights, that he did not feel enslaved by the commune. Because the feeling of “I” was only inadequately developed, the individual peasant voluntarily sought to immerse himself in the “we” of the commune. The most striking example of this was the fact that decisions in the assembly were ordinarily expected to be unanimous, and if that unanimity was wanting, the commune made long, stubborn efforts to achieve it through compromise and suasion. Although the fusion of the individual peasant with the commune could have meant the forcible subordination of the minority to the majority, this was rarely the case… and the peasants regarded involuntary subordination as both extraordinary and undesirable. The relationship between peasant and commune may be called organic, voluntary conformism. This conformism was political, intellectual, moral, and social, and it made for standardization of the peasants’ needs and interests.62
The conformism was also psychological, of course, as Mironov’s own metaphors indicate: the peasant’s “I” achieved “fusion” with the communal “we”—“more often unconsciously than consciously,” as Mironov says. Parts of Mironov’s article actually read like a psychoanalytic study of large group processes (cf. psychoanalyst Geoffrey Gorer’s discussion of the “feeling of being merged into a larger group” which occurs in members of both tsarist and post-tsarist collectives,63 or Margaret Mead’s assertion that the mir stressed “merging of the individual in the group”).64 But Mironov does not specify (1) who the “we” might be a personification of in early ontogeny, and (2) he does not explicitly grant that the individual’s attitude to the group was masochistic. The masochism is implicit, however, in Mironov’s formulation (just as it was implicit in Slavophile writings about the commune over a century earlier): the individual commune member did not feel enslaved, there was not a forcible subordination of the individual—ergo the subordination was voluntary, was welcomed, even if “unconsciously” so. The subordination was thus masochistic by definition.
It was Petr Arkad’evich Stolypin (1863–1911), Russia’s premier and interior minister under the last tsar, who initiated a series of agrarian reforms aimed at improving productivity and eliminating the peasant’s slavish dependance on the commune. Stolypin and his fellow reformers made it possible for the peasant actually to own land privately. Their proposals were attractive enough to induce many peasants to overcome not only the fear of losing the security of the commune,65 but related masochistic attitudes toward the commune as well. However, although almost two-thirds of peasant households obtained title to land by the end of the period 1906—17,66 the reform did not stick. After the events of 1917 massive re-communalization took place. As Michael Confino and others have pointed out, 95 percent of peasant land in Russia during the 1920s was held on communal tenure.67 After forced collectivization of agriculture occurred under Stalin in the early 1930s, private ownership of course remained totally out of the question. Not until the late 1980s and early 1990s were there any signs that individuals might get out from under the thumb of statewide collective control of arable land.
In the meantime, however, psychological attitudes toward the land had not changed. In December of 1990, when the Russian Parliament was taking steps for the privatization of farmland, President Boris Yeltsin made the following remarks to foreign correspondents: “You would never understand the spirit of Russians who never have become accustomed to the terminology and even more to the practice of selling and buying land—the motherland, as we call it.” Yeltsin added: “As some legislators used to say, ‘One can not sell his or her mother.’” “It is a psychological issue,” declared the Russian leader.68 The traditional idea of the Russian “land” as mother was thus alive and well late in the twentieth century. “You pick up the soil and it’s like holding your mother’s hand,” said a collective farm worker to a reporter in 1988.69 This is an extremely common sentiment in the Russian countryside.
To understand just how restrictive the Russian Parliament was on “selling the mother,” one need only consider some of the details of its legislation: an individual who obtained land from the government was required to keep it for a minimum of ten years, and then could sell it only back to the government—not to other individuals in Russia, and not to foreigners. Such limitations on access to the agricultural “mother” would certainly be unacceptable to farmers in the West.
State ownership of land in the Soviet period fostered the same psychology as did communal ownership in previous times, that is, a masochistic attitude toward collective authority.70 Only private ownership, free of collective control and individual submissiveness, profoundly motivates farmers to produce. True, self-interest can result in abuses too (e.g., the owner’s greed can be harmful to hired hands). But self-interest is generally better than self-harm, even for the larger collective. For example, on the eve of the First World War, as a result of the Stolypin reforms, Russia became the world’s second-largest exporter of grain.71 The small private plots that were permitted during the Soviet period made a disproportionately large contribution to overall Soviet agricultural productivity by comparison with collectivized agriculture.72
The idea that Stolypin’s agricultural reforms countered a previously masochistic (not merely repressive) arrangement between the peasant and the commune is not entirely new. There is a very interesting passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 which demonstrates an awareness of the psychological essence of agrarian reform in Russia. Solzhenitsyn begins by succinctly characterizing Stolypin’s project:
Stolypin’s idea was one of shining simplicity—yet too complicated to be grasped or accepted. The repartitional commune reduced the fertility of the land, took from nature what it did not return, and denied the peasant both freedom and prosperity. The peasant’s allotment must become his permanent property.
Solzhenitsyn then pauses to consider the psychological consequences of this momentous change, wondering whether the proposed reforms might deprive the peasant of a traditional outlet for moral masochism. Solzhenitsyn does not express himself in psychoanalytic terms, of course. But his neo-Slavophilic terminology clearly refers to what psychoanalysts mean by moral masochism:
Perhaps, though, in this self-denial, this harmonization of the will of the individual with that of the commune[v etom umeren’i, soglasii svoei voli s mirskoi], this mutual aid and curbing of wild willfulness, there lay something more valuable than harvests and material well-being? Perhaps the people could look forward to something better than the development of private property? Perhaps the commune was not just a system of paternalistic constraints, cramping the freedom of the individual, perhaps it reflected the people’s philosophy of life, its faith? Perhaps there was a paradox here which went beyond the commune, indeed beyond Russia itself: freedom of action and prosperity are necessary if man is to stand up to his full height on this earth, but spiritual greatness dwells in eternal subordination, in awareness of oneself as an insignificant particle[no v izvechnoi sviazannosti, v soznanii sebia lish’ krokhoi obshchego blaga vitaet dukhovnaia vysota].