The Rudnevs, a medium-sized landowning family in Simbirsk province, were a typical example. They had decided to stay on their family estate because, as Semen Rudnev put it, they thought that ‘the disturbances of the revolution would be less harsh in the countryside than in the towns [and because] the economic conditions of the village, with its almost natural economy, would also be better’. The turmoil of 1917 largely passed their village by. The Rudnevs spent the summer and autumn in the leisurely manner to which they were accustomed: ‘The men went drinking and hunting, guests from Simbirsk came to stay, and we went off to Nazhim and the milk-farm for picnics and mushroom picking.’ During the following winter they agreed to the demand of the neighbouring village commune to turn their land and property over to the peasants. They kept a small farm of 20 desyatiny (54 acres) near the manor house, where they continued to live. The livestock and tools were auctioned off at bargain prices, though most of the peasants could not afford to feed their new pedigree horses, which kept running back to their former owners for hay. The peasants came to work in the Rudnevs’ fields during the spring and were paid in vodka and fruit liqueurs. The harvest was bigger than the peasants’ and so the commune ordered the Rudnevs to sell their surplus grain at fixed prices to the village poor. But well before the harvest could be gathered the manor house was ransacked, and the Rudnevs forced to flee, by a local detachment of the Red Guards.75
This was a common pattern. Though peasant acts of violence, pillage and arson were not uncommon, it was usually the young demobilized soldiers who took the lead in instigating them. The slogan ‘Loot the Looters!’ was brought home to the villages by those who returned from the Front and the garrisons, where they had developed a strong sense of militant brotherhood and where they had been exposed to the propaganda of the Bolsheviks. They often formed a paramilitary faction inside the village, not unlike the fascisti in rural Italy at this time. They had their own regional organizations, such as the Union of Front-Line Soldiers, or the Union of Wounded Veterans, as well as their own Red Guard detachments, attached to the local Soviet, which could exert a powerful influence on the village and steer it towards more violent forms of action against the gentry. In one particular village of the Kerensky district in Penza province, for example, peasant attacks on the local squires suddenly increased: it was connected to the return of several soldiers, who were then elected to the head of the village Soviet. The war had obviously had a brutalizing effect upon them, for they soon became notorious for their heavy bouts of drinking and sadistic violence. One poor noble widow, who had hitherto lived quite peacefully with the peasants, having already given to them most of her land and livestock, was driven to suicide when the drunken bullies shot her last horse and cow and left her pet dog dead on her doorstep: it had been an act of pure spite.76
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The Russians, it might seem, were particularly prone to such cruel and savage acts of revenge. ‘I am’, wrote Gorky, ‘especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour’s master.’77 Mob trials and lynchings were the most common expression of this popular vengeance, both in the countryside and in the towns. They had taken off as a mass phenomenon in response to the catastrophic rise in crime and the breakdown of law and order during 1917 (when Gorky claimed to have counted over 10,000 cases of mob justice). Since the police and the old criminal courts had virtually disappeared, there was a common feeling that the only way to deal with the problem of crime was by mob trials in the street. Some poor thief would be seized by the crowd, given summary justice and executed on the spot. Gorky witnessed one such instance in the centre of Petrograd, in which even children had taken part in the brutal execution of a thief (see here). As the socio-economic crisis deepened, and the popular belief developed that the burzhoois were responsible for it, so these mob trials began to assume an overtly class nature. They became a weapon in the war against privilege, focusing less on petty thieves from the urban poor and much more on merchants and shopkeepers, factory owners and employers, army officers, former tsarist officials and other figures of superordinate authority.
