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

As a young girl in the 1900s the writer Nina Berberova used to observe the peasants as they came to consult her grandfather in his study on the family estate near Tver. 'They were of two kinds,' she recalled, 'and it seemed to me that they were two completely different breeds':

Some muzhiks [peasants] were demure, well bred, important-looking, with greasy hair, fat paunches, and shiny faces. They were dressed in embroidered shirts and caftans of fine cloth. These were the ones who were later called kulaks. They . . . felled trees for new homes in the thick woods that only recently had been Grandfather's. They walked in the church with collection trays and placed candles before the Saint-Mary-Appease-My-Grief icon. But what kind of grief could they have? The Peasants' Credit Bank gave them credit. In their houses, which I sometimes visited, there were

geraniums on the window sills and the smell of rich buns from the ovens. Their sons grew into energetic and ambitious men, began new lives for themselves, and created a new class in embryo for Russia.

The other muzhiks wore bast sandals, dressed in rags, bowed fawningly, never went further than the doors, and had faces that had lost all human expression . .. They were undersized, and often lay in ditches near the state-owned wine shop. Their children did not grow because they were underfed. Their consumptive wives seemed always to be in the final month of pregnancy, the infants were covered with weeping eczema, and in their homes, which I also visited, broken windows were stopped up with rags, and calves and hens were kept in the corners. There was a sour stench.²⁷

The differences between rich and poor peasants had been widely debated since the 1870s, when the whole issue of rural poverty and its causes had first come to the shocked attention of the Russian public. To Marxists and many liberals it was axiomatic that the peasantry should be divided into two separate classes — the one of entrepreneurial farmers, the other of landless labourers — as capitalism took root in the Russian countryside. But the Populists, who dreamt of a united peasantry leading Russia directly towards socialism, denied this process was taking place at all. Each side produced a library of statistics to prove or disprove that capitalism was leading to the disintegration of the peasantry, and historians today still dispute their significance.

There were, it is true, growing inequalities between the richest and the poorest sections of the peasantry. At one extreme there was a small but growing class of wealthy peasant entrepreneurs; at the other an impoverished peasantry increasingly forced to abandon its farms and join the army of migrant wage-labourers in agriculture, mining, transport and industry. The young Lenin set out to prove in the 1890s that these two extremes were the result of capitalist development. But this is not necessarily true.

The major differences in the living standards of the peasantry were in fact geographic. Commercial farming had taken root in a circular band of regions around the periphery of the old Muscovite centre of Russia during the nineteenth century. In parts of the Baltic the Emancipation of the serfs in 1817 had enabled the local landowners, with access to the Western grain markets, to turn their estates into capitalist farms worked by wage-labourers. In the western Ukraine, too, the nobles had established huge sugar-beet farms. Meanwhile, in the fertile regions of south Russia, the Kuban and the northern Caucasus a wealthy stratum of mixed farmers had emerged from the peasants and the Cossacks. The same was true in western Siberia, where the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway had made it possible for the smallholders to grow rich producing cereals and dairy products for the market. These regions accounted for the national rise in

peasant living standards — reflected in their increased spending-power — which recent historians have detected and used to refute the old historical orthodoxy that the peasants were becoming increasingly impoverished before 1917.²⁸ What was emerging, in fact, was a growing divergence in the economic position of the peasantry between the new and relatively affluent areas of commercial farming in the west, the south and the east, on the one hand, and, on the other, the old and increasingly overpopulated central agricultural zone, where the majority of the gentry's estates were located, and where backward farming methods were unable to maintain all of the peasants on the land. It is no coincidence that after 1917 the richer agricultural regions became strongholds of counter-revolution, whereas the impoverished central zone remained loyal to the revolution.