A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Romas accepted defeat philosophically, putting it down to the ignorance of the villagers. He refused to give up his belief in the peasants' socialist potential and when, fifteen years later, Gorky met him again, he had already served another ten-year sentence of exile in Siberia for his involvement in the Populist movement. But for Gorky the experience was a bitter disillusionment. It led him to the conclusion that, however good they may be on their own, the peasants left all that was fine behind them when they 'gathered in one grey mass':

Some dog-like desire to please the strong ones in the village took possession of them, and then it disgusted me to look at them. They would howl wildly at each other, ready for a fight — and they would fight, over any trifle. At these moments they were terrifying and they seemed capable of destroying the very church where only the previous evening they had gathered humbly and submissively, like sheep in a fold.³

The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he

experienced the everyday life of the peasants, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric*

Such misunderstandings were a constant theme in the history of relations between educated and peasant Russia — the 'Two Russias', as Herzen once called them. The Populists, though perhaps the most conspicuous, were not the only people to impose their own ideals on the peasants. Virtually every trend of Russian social thought fell into the same trap. As Dostoevsky wrote:

We, the lovers of 'the people', regard them as part of a theory, and it seems that none us really likes them as they actually are but only as each of us has imagined them. Moreover, should the Russian people, at some future time, turn out to be not what we imagined, then we, despite our love of them, would immediately renounce them without regret.⁴

Long before the Populists came on to the scene, Slavophile writers had argued for the moral superiority of the 'ancient' peasant commune over modern Western values. A commune', wrote Konstantin Aksakov, 'is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act.' Similar virtues were attributed to the peasants by the great romantic writers of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky, for example, claimed that the simple Russian peasant — the 'kitchen muzhik' as he once called him in a famous dispute — lived on a higher moral plane than the more sophisticated citizens of Western Europe. The peasants, he had written in his Diary of a Writer, were truly Christian and long-suffering. It was they who would 'show us a new road, a new way out of all our apparently insoluble difficulties. For it will not be St Petersburg that finally settles the Russian destiny . . . Light and salvation will come from below.' Tolstoy also saw the simple peasant as a natural sage. Thus it is from the peasants that Prince Levin learns how to live in Anna Karenina; just as in War and Peace it is from Karataev, a humble Russian peasant, that Pierre Bezukhov comes to understand the spiritual meaning of life. Karataev's character — spontaneous, direct and unselfconscious — was a projection of Tolstoy's own moral philosophy. He lived in harmony with the world and humanity.⁵

These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The Populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception

* At the age of twenty-three Gorky was beaten unconscious by a group of peasants when he tried to intervene on behalf of a peasant woman, who had been stripped naked and horsewhipped by her husband and a howling mob after being found guilty of adultery.