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

obtain.* Even a peasant wanting to leave the village for a few weeks on migrant labour could not do so without first obtaining an internal passport from the commune's elders (who were usually opposed to such migration on the grounds that it weakened the patriarchal household and increased the tax burden on the rest of the village). Statistics show that the issuing of passports was heavily restricted, despite the demands of industrialization and commercial agriculture for such migrant labour.¹⁹ The peasants remained tied to the land and, although serfdom had been abolished, it enjoyed a vigorous afterlife in the regulation of the peasant. Deprived of the consciousness and the legal rights of citizenship, it is hardly surprising that the peasants respected neither the state's law nor its authority when its coercive power over them was removed in 1905 and again in 1917.

* * * It is mistaken to suppose, as so many historians do, that the Russian peasantry had no moral order or ideology at all to substitute for the tsarist state. Richard Pipes, for example, in his recent history of the revolution, portrays the peasants as primitive and ignorant people who could only play a destructive role in the revolution and who were therefore ripe for manipulation by the Bolsheviks. Yet, as we shall see, during 1917—18 the peasants proved themselves quite capable of restructuring the whole of rural society, from the system of land relations and local trade to education and justice, and in so doing they often revealed a remarkable political sophistication, which did not well up from a moral vacuum. The ideals of the peasant revolution had their roots in a long tradition of peasant dreaming and Utopian philosophy. Through peasant proverbs, myths, tales, songs and customary law, a distinctive ideology emerges which expressed itself in the peasants' actions throughout the revolutionary years from 1902 to 1921. That ideology had been shaped by centuries of opposition to the tsarist state. As Herzen put it, for hundreds of years the peasant's 'whole life has been one long, dumb, passive opposition to the existing order of things: he has endured oppression, he has groaned under it; but he has never accepted anything that goes on outside the life of the commune'.²⁰ It was in this cultural confrontation, in the way that the peasant looked at the world outside his village, that the revolution had its roots.

Let us look more closely at this peasant world-view as expressed in customary law. Contrary to the view of some historians, peasant customary law

* Even in communes with hereditary tenure (mainly in the north-west and the Ukraine) it was hardly easier. There the household wishing to separate had either to pay off its share of the communal tax debt in full (a near-impossible task for the vast majority of the peasants) or find another household willing to take over the tax burden in return for its land allotment. Since the taxes usually exceeded the cost of rented land outside the commune, it was difficult to find a household willing to do this.

IMAGES OF AUTOCRACY

1 St Petersburg illuminated for the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. This electric display of state power was the biggest light show in tsarist history.

2 The imperial family rides from the Winter Palace to the Kazan Cathedral for the opening ceremony of the tercentenary.

3 Nicholas II rides in public view for the first time since the 1905 Revolution.

4 The famous Yeliseev store on Nevsky Prospekt is decorated for the tercentenary.

5 Guards officers greeting the imperial family at the Kazan Cathedral. Note the icons, the religious banners, and the crosses of the onlookers.

6 Townspeople and peasants come to see the Tsar in Kostroma during the tercentenary provincial tour.

7 The court ball of 1903 was a landmark in the cult of ancient Muscovy. Each guest dressed in the seventeenth-century costume of his twentieth-century rank. The Tsar and Tsarina are standing in the centre of the front row.

8 The Temple of Christ's Resurrection on the Catherine Canal - a hideous example of the last tsars' efforts to 'Muscovitize' St Petersburg.

9 Trubetskoi's bronze statue of Alexander III on Znamenskaia Square in St Petersburg. The workers called it 'the hippopotamus'.

10 The Moscow statue of Alexander III - with its back to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour - at its opening ceremony in 1913.

11 The imperial family (right to left): Olga, Tatyana, Nicholas, Alexandra, Maria, Alexis and Anastasia.

12 Rasputin with his admirers. Anna Vyrubova, the closest friend of both Rasputin and the Empress, is standing fifth from left.

13 The Tsarevich Alexis with his playmate and protector, the sailor Derevenko. After the February Revolution Derevenko joined the Bolsheviks.