The Russian Revolution полностью

Before 1917, Russia had no system of compulsory education, even on the elementary level, such as France had introduced in 1833 and most of Western Europe adopted by the 1870s. The need for such a system was often discussed in government circles but it was never realized, partly for lack of money, partly from fear of the influence that secular teachers, mostly intellectuals with left-of-center political ideas, would have on peasant youths. (Conservatives complained that schools taught disrespect for parents and old people and made pupils dream of “far-off rivers flowing with milk and honey.”)³⁹ In 1901, Russia had 84,544 elementary schools with an enrollment of 4.5 million pupils, the administration of which was divided between the Ministry of Education (47.5 percent) and the Holy Synod (42.5 percent). In terms of pupils enrolled, the ministry enjoyed a clear advantage (63 percent and 35.1 percent).⁴⁰ This was hardly adequate for a country with 23 million children of school age (seven to fourteen years). Literacy, promoted by the zemstva and volunteer organizations, did make rapid progress, especially among males, largely because recruits with a certificate attesting to the completion of primary school served shorter terms of military service (four years instead of six): in 1913, nearly 68 percent of the recruits were said to be literate, but it is doubtful whether many of them could do more than sign their name. Approximately only one in five of these recruits had a school certificate qualifying him for shorter service.⁴¹ Neither the schools nor the private associations dedicated to the spread of literacy inculcated national values, because in the eyes of the government, nationalism, a doctrine that considers the “nation” or “people” to be the ultimate sovereign, was a threat to autocracy.⁴²

Until 1905, Russia had no legal political institutions outside the bureaucratic chain of command. Political parties were forbidden. Peasants could vote in elections to zemstva, but even in this case their choice was narrowly circumscribed by bureaucrats and government-appointed officials. In any event, these organs of self-government dealt with local, not national issues. Peasants could not even aspire to a career in the Imperial civil service, since its ranks were for all practical purposes closed to them. In other words, peasants, even more than the members of the other non-noble estates, were excluded from the country’s political life.

Peasants in Russia were not entirely insulated from the commercial marketplace, but the latter played a marginal role in their lives. For one, they did not care to eat food that they did not grow themselves.⁴³ They bought little, mainly household and farm implements, much of it from other peasants. Nor did they have much to sell: most of the grain that reached the market came from landlord estates or large properties owned by merchants. The ups and downs of the national and international commodity markets, which directly affected the well-being of American, Argentinian, or English farmers, had little bearing on the condition of the muzhik.

The manor was viewed by conservative Russians as the outpost of culture in the countryside, and some well-meaning agrarian specialists opposed the expropriation of landlord properties for distribution among peasants from fear of the cultural consequences. This fear may have been justified in the economic sense of the word “culture,” in that landlord estates were indeed operated more efficiently and yielded consistently better crops: according to official statistics 12–18 percent more, but in fact possibly as much as 50 percent.* The cultural influence of the manor on the countryside in the spiritual and intellectual sense of the word, however, was insignificant. For one, there were not enough gentry in the countryside: as we have noted, seven out of ten dvoriane resided in the cities. Second, an unbridgeable psychological gulf separated the two classes: the peasant insisted on treating the landlord as an interloper and felt he had nothing to learn from him. Tolstoy’s “A Landlord’s Morning” (“Utro pomeshchika”) and Chekhov’s village tales show the manor and the hut talking at cross-purposes, without a common language of communication: and where such a language was absent, there could be no transmission of ideas or values. A Frenchman who visited Russia in the 1880s saw the Russian landlord “isolated in the midst of his quondam serfs, outside of the commune, outside even of the volost’ in which he usually resides: the chain of serfdom broken, nothing else binds him to his former subjects.”⁴⁴