The mood of rebellion soon spread to the countryside. Seeing the government’s weakness, the peasants took their chance and organized rent strikes to force the landowners to increase their wages as labourers. They trespassed on the gentry’s land, felled their trees and cut their hay. By the early summer, when it became clear that the harvest had failed once again, they began to launch full-scale attacks on their estates, seizing property and setting fire to the manors, forcing the landowners to flee. Witnesses spoke of the night sky lit up by the blaze of burning manors and of lines of horse-drawn carts moving along the roads, loaded with plundered property. There was a good deal of vandalism — ‘culture smashing’ — as the peasants set out to destroy anything that smacked of superfluous wealth. They burned libraries, destroyed antiques and left shit on the Oriental carpets. Some villagers even took the paintings and statues, the Bohemian crystal and the English porcelain, the satin dresses and powdered wigs, which they then divided among themselves, along with the livestock, the grain and the tools. In one village the peasants broke up a grand piano, which they had hauled away from the manor, and shared out the ivory keys. Nearly 3,000 manors were destroyed (15 per cent of the total) during the Jacquerie of 1905–6. Most of the violence was concentrated in the central agricultural zone, where peasant poverty was most acute and the largest estates were located. Once the local squires had been ‘smoked out’, the peasants retreated into their own communal world. Local officials were replaced by the peasants, conservative priests driven out, and government laws and tax demands ignored.41
The struggle for the land was not the only form of peasant revolution in 1905–6, although because of the gentry’s fears it was the main concern of official records (and has thus since dominated the historiography). Alongside the violence on the land there grew up a whole range of peasant unions, agricultural societies and co-operatives. They were generally more moderate and sophisticated in their aims and methods than the majority of traditional village communes, and they tended to attract the sort of young and ‘conscious’ peasants who had emerged with the spread of rural schools. Many of the peasant unions, in particular, had close connections with the local teachers and the rural intelligentsia. For these reasons, they tended to develop in the largest villages, where there were more cultural institutions, such as schools and reading-rooms, and where the peasantry was most exposed to the influence of the outside world (e.g. in the form of markets and railways, state officials and police). Some of these organizations became famous throughout Russia for establishing what were in effect independent peasant republics (for example, the Sumy Republic in Kharkov province). They espoused the ideals of political reform, of a constitution and a parliament, and of better education for the peasants, in addition to land reform. Their aim was to end the ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ ways of the villages, to bring them the benefits of the modern world, and to end their isolation by integrating them into national politics.42
