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

threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity. The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, drove himself insane after years of trying to reconcile his romantic view of the peasants with the ugly reality of human relations which he was forced to observe in the countryside. Many of the 'realist' writers of the 1860s, who described the darker side of the countryside, ended up as alcoholics. There was a general sense of Angst amongst the liberal educated classes whenever the hard facts of peasant life disturbed their idealized images of it. Witness the storm of debate caused by the unflattering portrait of village life in Chekhov's Peasants (1897), the short story of a sick Moscow waiter who returns with his wife to his native village, only to find that his poverty-stricken family resents him for bringing another set of mouths to feed. Or the even greater public outrage at the publication of Bunin's novella The Village (1910), which spared nothing in its dark portrayal of peasant poverty and cruelty. 'What stunned the Russian reader in this book', a contemporary critic remarked, 'was not the depiction of the [peasants'] material, cultural and legal poverty .. . but the realization that there was no escape from it. . . The most that the Russian peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving . . . was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed.'⁶

Gorky wrote about The Village that it had forced society to think 'seriously not just about the peasant but about the grave question of whether Russia was to be or not to be?'⁷ The enigma of the peasant stood at the heart of the problem of Russia's national self-identity. The 'Peasant Question' was the starting point of all those interminable debates (they fill the largely unread pages of nineteenth-century Russian novels) about the future of Russia itself.

Russia was still a peasant country at the turn of the twentieth century: 80 per cent of the population was classified as belonging to the peasantry; and most of the rest traced their roots back to it. Scratch a Russian townsman and one found a peasant. Most of the workers in the cities' factories and workshops, laundries and kitchens, bath-houses and shops, were either immigrants from the countryside or the children of such immigrants, who still returned to their farms for harvest and sent money back to their villages. Restaurants employed vast armies of peasant waiters, while the houses of the wealthy relied on peasant domestics in numbers that made European visitors gasp. The vendors on the city streets were mostly peasants by origin, as were the cabmen, doormen, hauliers, builders, gardeners, dustmen, draymen, hawkers, beggars, thieves and prostitutes. Russia's towns and cities all remained essentially 'peasant' in their social composition and character. Only a few miles from any city centre one would find oneself already in the backwoods, where there were bandits living in the forests, where roads turned into muddy bogs in spring, and where the external signs of life in the remote hamlets had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. Yet, despite living so close to the peasants,

the educated classes of the cities knew next to nothing about their world. It was as exotic and alien to them as the natives of Africa were to their distant colonial rulers. And in this mutual incomprehension, in the cultural gulf between the 'Two Russias', lay the roots of the social revolution and its tragic destiny.