A people's tragedy

fn5 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.

fn6 The one major exception was the peasant wife’s dowry and other personal effects (e.g. clothing and domestic utensils), which were regarded as her private property and could be passed on to her daughter.

fn7 Whereas the partitioning of household property was entirely controlled by local customary law, Stolypin’s new laws of inheritance came under the Civil Code. Cases concerning peasant inheritance of land were thus heard in the civil (i.e. non-peasant) courts — the first major instance of the peasantry being integrated into the national legal system.

fn8 For example, under customary law a peasant found guilty of tilling another man’s land was always compensated for his labour, though the bulk of the harvest went to the land’s rightful holder. The peasants, in the words of one observer, ‘looked on the right to own the product of one’s own labour on the land with an almost religious respect’ and by custom this had to be balanced against the formal right of land tenure (Efimenko, Issledovaniia, 2, 143).

fn9 This was partly the reason why peasants had so few scruples about perjuring themselves in court and, indeed, why they tended to sympathize with convicted criminals. It was common for peasants to give away food to gangs of prisoners as they passed through the villages on their way to Siberia.

fn10 This was connected with the religious belief of the peasants that to be poor was to be virtuous.

fn11 So, for example, a study in Tula province found that 62 per cent of the peasant households with four or more horses had partitioned their property between 1899 and 1911, compared with only 23 per cent of those with one horse (Shanin, Awkward Class, 83). Statisticians such as A. V. Chayanov believed that the life-cycle of the peasant household largely explained economic inequalities within the village. The newly partitioned household, consisting of a married couple and one or two children, tended to have only a small plot of land and very little livestock. But as the children grew up and began to contribute as workers to the family economy, the household was able to accumulate more land and livestock, until it partitioned itself. Chayanov argued that the statistical surveys used by the Marxists to show the economic differentiation of the peasantry were in fact no more than ‘snapshots’ of the peasant households at different stages of this life-cycle.

fn12 According to a survey of 1881, over 90 per cent of the workforce in textiles and 71 per cent of all industrial workers returned to their villages during the summer. The proportion declined towards the turn of the century as the urban workforce became more settled. Factories adapted to the situation by stopping work during the agricultural season, or by moving to the countryside. The government encouraged the latter, fearing the build-up of an urban working class. Only 40 per cent of the Empire’s industrial workers lived in the cities at the turn of the century.

fn13 The percentage of foreign shareholding in joint-stock companies rose from 25 per cent in 1890 to about 40 per cent on the eve of the First World War.

fn14 Here lay the roots of that peculiar Russian concept of kul’turnost’, the state of having good manners, rather than being well educated, as in the Western concept of the term ‘cultured’, from which it is derived. This etymological twist could only have happened in a country like Russia, which was struggling to rid itself of its peasant past and attain the external trappings, if not the deeper moral sensibilities, of Western civilization.

Chapter 4

fn1 Chernyshevsky’s novel was published while he was still in the Peter and Paul Fortress — only to be subsequently banned!

fn2 Lydia Dan’s father had a nice way of poking fun at these selfconscious radicals. Boys, he said, did not cut their hair on the grounds that they did not have time; but women cut their hair short also to save time. Women went to university on the grounds that this was a mark of progress; but men dropped out of the education system on the grounds that this was also progressive.

fn3 These peasant nannies and domestic servants would not even be called by their proper names but by a pet name such as Masha or Vanka. They were thus denied the most basic recognition of a personality.