To an extent inconceivable either in the West or in countries untouched by Westernization, Russia’s rural population was a world unto itself. Its relationship to the officialdom and the educated class was in all respects but the racial like that of the natives of Africa or Asia to their colonial rulers. The peasantry was hardly affected by the Westernization which had transformed Russia’s elite into Europeans, and in its culture remained loyal to Muscovite Russia. Russian peasants spoke their own dialect, followed their own logic, pursued their own interests, and viewed their betters as aliens to whom they had to pay taxes and deliver recruits but with whom they had nothing in common. The Russian peasant of 1900 owed loyalty only to his village and canton; at most he was conscious of some vague allegiance to his province. His sense of national identity was confined to respect for the Tsar and suspicion of foreigners.
Under assault from the Westernized intelligentsia, the monarchy came to regard the peasant as the bearer of “true” Russianness and it went to great lengths to protect him from the corrupting influence of the city. It institutionalized the cultural isolation of the peasantry by tying it to the village commune and subjecting it to special laws and taxes. It offered peasants few educational opportunities, and such little schooling as it provided it preferred to entrust to the clergy. It placed obstacles to the entry of outsiders into villages and forbade Jews to settle in them. At the turn of the century, the conservative establishment saw in the alliance of the Crown and the village the cornerstone of the country’s stability. As events were to show, this was a profound misconception. As conservative as the muzhik indeed was, his world outlook, his values, and his interests made him exceedingly volatile. Unlikely to initiate a revolution, he was certain to respond to urban disorders with a revolution of his own.
The life of the Russian peasantry revolved around three institutions: the household (dvor), the village (derevnia or selo), and the commune (mir or obshchina). All three were distinguished by a low degree of continuity, structural fluidity, poorly developed hierarchies, and the prevalence of personal rather than functional relations. In these respects, Russian rural conditions differed sharply from those found in Western societies and certain Oriental ones (notably Japan’s), a fact which was to have profound consequences for Russia’s political development.
The peasant household was the basic unit of rural Russia. In 1900, the Empire had 22 million such households, 12 million in European Russia. The typical Great Russian dvor was a joint family, with the parents living under the same roof with their sons, married and unmarried, and their respective families, as well as unmarried daughters. This kind of family structure was encouraged by Russia’s climatic conditions, under which the brevity of the agricultural season (four to six months) called for coordinated seasonal work by many hands in brief bursts of intense effort. Statistical evidence indicates that the larger the household, the more efficiently it functioned and the richer it was likely to be: a large dvor cultivated more land, owned more livestock, and earned more money per head. Small households, with one or two adults, either merged with others or died.1 At the turn of the century, the largest number of Russian rural households (40.2 percent) had between six and ten members.2 Despite their proven economic advantages, the proportion of large households kept on declining: to escape quarrels common in joint families, many peasant couples preferred to leave and set up their own households. The disintegration of large joint family households would accelerate in the twentieth century for economic reasons which will be described in due course.
Although the typical household was based on kinship relations and its members were most commonly connected by blood or marriage, the determining criterion was economic—namely, work. The dvor owed its cohesion to the fact that it engaged in disciplined field work under the direction of a headman. A son who left the village to make his living elsewhere ceased to be a member of the household and forfeited his claim to its property. Conversely, strangers (e.g., sons-in-law, stepsons, and adopted children) admitted into the household as regular workers acquired the rights of family members.3 Occasionally, households were formed entirely on such a voluntary basis by peasants who were not related either by blood or marriage.
15. Russian peasants: late nineteenth century.
