A people's tragedy

True, rural life was not all dark. Under the NEP some of the trappings of the modern world began to trickle down to the villages. Electric power came. Even Andreevskoe had its first electric cables in 1927, thus finally realizing Semenov’s dream. Lenin had extolled the new technology as a panacea for Russia’s backwardness. ‘Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,’ his famous slogan went. He seemed to equate it with magical powers, once even prophesying that the light bulb — or the ‘little Ilich lamps’, as they became known — would replace the icon in the peasants’ huts. In Soviet propaganda the light bulb became a symbol for the torch of enlightenment: light was a metaphor for everything good, just as darkness was for poverty and evil. Photographs showed the peasants marvelling in almost religious wonderment at the new electric spheres of light. As Lenin saw it, a national grid would integrate the remote village world into the modern culture of the cities. Backward peasant Russia would be led out of darkness by the light of industry, and would come to enjoy a bright new future of rapid economic progress, mass education and liberation from the drudgery of manual labour. Much of this was fantasy: centuries of backwardness could not be overcome by a simple switch. Lenin, for so long the critic of utopianism, had at last succumbed, as H. G. Wells put it, to this ‘utopia of the electricians’ and, in contravention of all Marxist doctrine, had placed his faith in technology to overcome Russia’s deep-rooted social problems.23

There were other signs of rural civilization in the 1920s. Hospitals, theatres, cinemas and libraries began to appear in the countryside. The period of the NEP witnessed a whole range of agronomic improvements which amounted to nothing less than an agricultural revolution. The narrow and intermingled arable strips that had made communal farming so inefficient were rearranged or broadened on nearly a hundred million hectares of allotment land. Multi-field crop rotations such as those of Western Europe were introduced on nearly one-fifth of all communal land. Chemical fertilizers, graded seed and advanced tools were used by the peasants in growing numbers. Dairy farming was modernized; and many peasants turned to market crops, such as vegetables, flax and sugar beet, which before the revolution had been grown exclusively by the commercial farms of the gentry. Semenov, who in his own times had pioneered such reforms, would have been no less pleased by the rural co-operatives — both for commodity exchange with the towns and for credit to purchase tools and livestock — which grew impressively in the 1920s. By 1927, 50 per cent of all peasant households belonged to an agricultural co-operative. As a result of these improvements, there was a steady rise in productivity. The 1913 levels of agricultural production were regained by 1926, and surpassed in the next two years. The harvest yields of the mid-1920s were 17 per cent higher than those of the 1900s, the so-called ‘golden age’ of Russian agriculture.24

There were also real gains in literacy, resuming the trend of the 1900s, as more village schools were built in the 1920s. By 1926, 51 per cent of the Soviet population was considered literate (compared with 43 per cent in 1917, and 35 per cent in 1907). The biggest gains were among village youth: peasant sons in their early twenties were more than twice as likely to be literate than their fathers’ generation; while young peasant women of the same age were five times more likely to be literate than their mothers’. This growing generation gap was both demographic and cultural. By 1926, more than half the rural population was under the age of twenty, and over two-thirds under thirty. These were by and large the literate peasants. Many of them were acquainted with the world outside the village through their service in the army. They challenged the authority of their peasant elders, rarely went to church and displayed a strong individualist striving reflected in a sharp increase of household partitioning during the 1920s, as these sons broke away from their fathers and set up nuclear households of their own. Peasant sons were also increasingly ousting their fathers as the head of the household and gaining a greater say in the running of the farm.25 The Russian village was much less split between rich and poor, as the Bolsheviks had mistakenly believed, than it was divided between fathers and sons.