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

* * * Semen Kanatchikov (1879—1940) was just one of the millions of peasants to make this transition from the village to the city during the industrial boom of the 1890s. Many years later, as a minor grandee in the Bolshevik government, he recalled the experience in his memoirs. He was born to a poor peasant family in the village of Gusevo in the Volokolamsk district of Moscow province. His father had been born a serf and, although he had tried to improve his lot by renting land, dabbling in trade and teaching himself to read, he had lived on the margins of poverty like most of the peasants in his district. Every winter he left the village to work as a labourer in the city, leaving his sick and feeble wife, who had lost all but four of her eighteen children, to run the farm on her own. Years of disappointment had turned him into a heavy drinker, and when he was drunk he would beat his wife and children. And yet, like many Russians, he mixed heavy drinking with a deep fear of God; and wanted nothing more than for his son to become a 'good peasant'. The young Kanatchikov found life unbearable. After his mother's premature death, for which he blamed his father, he resolved to run away. 'I wanted to rid myself of the monotony of village life


as quickly as possible,' he later wrote, 'to free myself from my father's despotism and tutelage, to begin to live a self-reliant and independent life.'38 It was not long before poverty forced his father to give in to his requests. At the age of sixteen Kanatchikov finally left for Moscow, where his father had arranged for him to work as an apprentice in the Gustav List metal factory. There, like thousands of other peasant immigrants, he would begin to redefine himself both as a worker and as a 'comrade' in the revolutionary movement.

Kanatchikov's motives for wanting to leave the village were typical of his generation. The dull routines of peasant life and the isolation of the village were a heavy burden for young men like him. It became even more difficult once they had learned to read, for the stories of city life in newspapers and pamphlets could only strengthen their awareness of these restrictions. Virtually any employment in the city seemed exciting and desirable compared with the hardships of peasant life. All the healthy and able young men ran away from our village to Moscow and took whatever jobs they could find,' recalled Semenov. 'We eagerly awaited the time when we would be old enough to find something in Moscow and could leave our native village.' Andreevskoe, Semenov's village, was, like Gusevo, close to Moscow, and the city was a magnet for the young peasants. 'The proximity of our village to Moscow', Semenov wrote to a friend in 1888, 'has made our peasants sick of the land. The desire for a social life, for fashionable dress, for drinking, for the pursuit of an easier life — all this weighs very heavily on them. They do not care any longer for farming. Everyone is trying as hard as he can to liberate himself from it and find an easier means of existence.'39

The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. For young peasant women, in particular, who found themselves at the bottom of the patriarchal pile, working as a domestic servant in the city (which is what most of them did) offered them a better and more independent life. Many social commentators noted such aspirations. A study of rural schoolchildren in the 1900s, for example, found that nearly half of them wanted to pursue an 'educated profession' in the city, whereas less than 2 per cent wanted to follow in the footsteps of their peasant parents. 'I want to be a shop assistant', remarked one village schoolboy, 'because I do not like to walk in the mud. I want to be like those people who are cleanly dressed and work as shop assistants.'40 Parents and educators became alarmed that many peasant boys, in particular, once they learned how to read and write, refused to do agricultural work and tried to distinguish themselves from the rest of the village by swaggering around in raffish city clothes.

If social ambition was often the primary motive of those peasants who


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