NATASHA

they investigate Russian mythology, wedding, and funeral rites; they grieve for the people; go to the people; are filled with high hopes; fall into despair; they even give up their lives, face execution or starve to death for the people's cause.¹⁷

The intelligentsia was defined by its mission of service to the people, just as the noble class was defined by its service to the state; and the intelligentsia lived by the view, which many of its members came to regret, that 'the good of the people' was the highest interest, to which all other principles, such as law or Christian precepts, were subordinate. Such attitudes were so endemic that they were even shared by members of the court, the state administration and the aristocracy. The liberal spirit of reform which had brought about the emancipation continued to inform the government's approach towards the peasantry in the 1 860s and 1870s. With the peasant's liberation from the gentry's jurisdiction there was a recognition that he had become the state's responsibility: he had become a citizen.

After 1861 the government set up a whole range of institutions to improve the welfare of its peasant citizens and integrate them into national life. Most of these initiatives were carried out by the new assemblies of local government, the zemstvos, established at the district and provincial level in 1864. The zemstvos were run by paternal squires of the sort who fill the pages of Tolstoy and Chekhov -liberal, well-meaning men who dreamed of bringing civilization to the backward countryside. With limited resources, they founded schools and hospitals; provided veterinary and agronomic services for the peasantry; built new roads and bridges; invested in local trades and industries; financed insurance schemes and rural credit; and carried out ambitious statistical surveys to prepare for more reforms at a future date.* The optimistic expectations of the zemstvo liberals were widely shared by the upper classes of society. There was a general attitude of paternal populism - a sympathy for the people and their cause which induced the high-born from all walks of life to support the students radicals.

The Minister of Justice, in a report to the Tsar, listed a whole catalogue of foolish acts in the 'mad summer' of 1874: the wife of a colonel in the Gendarmes had passed on secret information to her son; a rich landowner and magistrate had hidden one of the leading revolutionaries; a professor had introduced a propagandist to his students; and the families of several state councillors had given warm approval to their children's revolutionary activities.¹⁸ Even Turgenev, who saw the solution to the peasant problem in liberal reform, could not help admiring (and perhaps envying) the idealistic passion of these revolutionaries.¹⁹ He mixed in their circles in France and Switzerland, and he even gave some money to the Populist theorist Pyotr Lavrov

* The hopes of the zemstvo liberals were never realized. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the powers of the zemstvos were severely curtailed by the government of the new Tsar, Alexander III, who looked upon the zemstvos as dangerous breeding grounds for radicals. Many of the students who had taken part in the 'going to the people' ended up as zemstvo employees - teachers, doctors, statisticians and agronomists whose democratic politics attracted the police. Police raids were carried out on zemstvo offices - including even hospitals and lunatic asylums - in the search for such 'revolutionaries'. They even arrested noblewomen for teaching peasant children how to read. (A. Tyrkogo-Williams, To, chego bol'she ne budet (Paris, n.d.), p. 153).

(whose writings had inspired the student radicals) so that he could publish his journal Forwards! in Europe.²⁰ In his novel Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev gave a portrait of the types who answered Lavrov's call. Though he saw through the illusions of the Populists, he managed to convey his admiration, too. These 'young people are mostly good and honest', he wrote to a friend on finishing the novel in 1876, 'but their course is so false and impractical that it cannot fail to lead them to complete fiasco'.²¹

Which is just how it turned out. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who listened humbly to their revolutionary sermons without really understanding anything they said. The peasants were wary of the students' learning and their urban ways, and in many places they reported them to the authorities. Ekaterina Breshkovskaya, later one of Russia's leading socialists, found herself in jail after the peasant woman with whom she was staying in the Kiev region 'took fright at the sight of all my books and denounced me to the constable'.²² The socialist ideas of the Populists were strange and foreign to the peasantry, or at least they could not understand them in the terms in which they were explained to them. One propagandist gave the peasants a beautiful account of the future socialist society in which all the land would belong to the toilers and nobody would exploit anybody else. Suddenly a peasant triumphantly exclaimed: 'Won't it be just lovely when we divide up the land? I'll hire two labourers and what a life I'll have!'²³ As for the idea of turning out the Tsar, this met with complete incomprehension and even angry cries from the villagers, who looked upon the Tsar as a human god. 'How can we live without a Tsar?' they said.²⁴

Rounded up by the police, forced into exile or underground, the Populists returned from their defeat in deep despair. They had invested so much of their own personalities in their idealized conception of the peasantry, they had hung so much of their personal salvation on the 'people's cause', that to see them both collapse was a catastrophic blow to their identity. The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, eventually became insane after many years of trying to reconcile himself to the stark reality of peasant life; and many of the Populists were driven to the bottle by this rude awakening. It was suddenly made clear that the idea of the peasantry they had in

their minds did not in fact exist - it was no more than a theory and a myth - and that they were cut off from the actual peasants by a cultural, social and intellectual abyss that they could not hope to bridge. Like an unsolved riddle, the peasant remained unknown and perhaps unknowable.

2

In the summer of 1870 Ilia Repin left St Petersburg for 'an undiscovered land'.²⁵ Together with his brother and a fellow student painter called Fedor Vasilev, he travelled by steamer down the Volga river as far as the town of Stavropol, about 700 kilometres east of Moscow. The young artist's aim was to make a study of the peasants for a painting he had planned of the Volga barge haulers. The idea of the picture had first come to him in the summer of 1868, when he had observed a team of haulers trudging wearily along a river bank near St Petersburg. Repin had originally thought to contrast these sad figures with a well-groomed group of happy picnickers. It would have been a typical example of the sort of expository genre painting favoured by most Russian realists at the time. But he was dissuaded from this propagandist picture by his friend Vasilev, a gifted landscape painter from the Wanderers' school, who persuaded him to depict the haulers on their own.

It took two years to obtain the finance and the permits for their trip - the Tsarist authorities being naturally suspicious of the art students and fearing that they might have revolutionary aims. For three months Repin lived among the former serfs of Shiriayevo, a village overlooking the Volga near Samara. He filled his sketchbooks with ethnographic details of their fishing boats and nets, their household utensils and rag-made shoes and clothes. The villagers did not want to be drawn. They believed that the Devil stole a person's soul when his image was depicted on the page. One day they discovered Repin trying to persuade a group of village girls to pose for him. They accused the painter of the Devil's work and demanded his 'passport', threatening to hand him over to the local constable. The only document which Repin had on him was a letter from the Academy of Arts. The impressive Imperial

insignia on the letterhead was enough to restore calm. 'See,' said the village scribe who scrutinized the 'passport', 'he comes to us from the Tsar.'²⁶

Eventually the painter found a team of haulers who, for a fee, allowed him to sketch them. For several weeks he lived with these human beasts of burden. As he got to know them, he came to see their individual personalities. One had been an icon painter; another a soldier; and a third, named Kanin, was formerly a priest. Repin was struck by the sheer waste of talent in their bestial servitude. Strapped into their riggings, their noble faces weathered, the haulers were for him 'like Greek philosophers, sold as slaves to the barbarians'.²⁷ Their bondage was a symbol of the Russian people's oppressed creativity. Kanin, Repin thought, had 'the character of Russia on his face':

There was something eastern and ancient about it… the face of a Scyth… And what eyes! What depth of