Here, in this moral subjectivity, was the root of the peasant’s instinctive anarchism. He lived outside the realm of the state’s laws — and that is where he chose to stay. Centuries of serfdom had bred within the peasant a profound mistrust of all authority outside his own village. What he wanted was volia, the ancient peasant concept of freedom and autonomy without restraints from the powers that be. ‘For hundreds of years’, wrote Gorky, ‘the Russian peasant has dreamt of a state with no right to influence the will of the individual and his freedom of action, a state without power over man.’ That peasant dream was kept alive by subversive tales of Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev, those peasant revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose mythical images continued as late as the 1900s to be seen by the peasants flying as ravens across the Volga announcing the advent of utopia. And there were equally fabulous tales of a ‘Kingdom of Opona’, somewhere on the edge of the flat earth, where the peasants lived happily, undisturbed by gentry or state. Groups of peasants even set out on expeditions in the far north in the hope of finding this arcadia.24
As the state attempted to extend its bureaucratic control into the countryside during the late nineteenth century, the peasants sought to defend their autonomy by developing ever more subtle forms of passive resistance to it. What they did, in effect, was to set up a dual structure of administration in the villages: a formal one, with its face to the state, which remained inactive and inefficient; and an informal one, with its face to the peasants, which was quite the opposite. The village elders and tax collectors elected to serve in the organs of state administration in the villages (obshchestva) and the volost townships (upravy) were, in the words of one frustrated official, ‘highly unreliable and unsatisfactory’, many of them having been deliberately chosen for their incompetence in order to sabotage government work. There were even cases where the peasants elected the village idiot as their elder.25 Meanwhile, the real centre of power remained in the mir, in the old village assembly dominated by the patriarchs. The power of the tsarist state never really penetrated the village, and this remained its fundamental weakness until 1917, when the power of the state was removed altogether and the village gained its volia.
The educated classes had always feared that a peasant volia would soon degenerate into anarchic licence and violent revenge against figures of authority. Belinsky wrote in 1837: ‘Our people understand freedom as volia, and volia for the people means to make mischief. The liberated Russian nation will not head for the parliament but will run for the tavern to drink liquor, smash glasses, and hang the nobility, whose only guilt is to shave their beards and wear a frock-coat instead of a peasant tunic.’26 The revolution would, in all too many ways, fulfil Belinsky’s prophecy.
ii The Quest to Banish the Past
As a young girl in the 1900s the writer Nina Berberova used to observe the peasants as they came to consult her grandfather in his study on the family estate near Tver. ‘They were of two kinds,’ she recalled, ‘and it seemed to me that they were two completely different breeds’:
Some muzhiks [peasants] were demure, well bred, important-looking, with greasy hair, fat paunches, and shiny faces. They were dressed in embroidered shirts and caftans of fine cloth. These were the ones who were later called kulaks. They … felled trees for new homes in the thick woods that only recently had been Grandfather’s. They walked in the church with collection trays and placed candles before the Saint-Mary-Appease-My-Grief icon. But what kind of grief could they have? The Peasants’ Credit Bank gave them credit. In their houses, which I sometimes visited, there were geraniums on the window sills and the smell of rich buns from the ovens. Their sons grew into energetic and ambitious men, began new lives for themselves, and created a new class in embryo for Russia.
The other muzhiks wore bast sandals, dressed in rags, bowed fawningly, never went further than the doors, and had faces that had lost all human expression … They were undersized, and often lay in ditches near the state-owned wine shop. Their children did not grow because they were underfed. Their consumptive wives seemed always to be in the final month of pregnancy, the infants were covered with weeping eczema, and in their homes, which I also visited, broken windows were stopped up with rags, and calves and hens were kept in the corners. There was a sour stench.27
