clubs and libraries, local government and political parties, were all moving closer to the peasantry. The growth of rural schooling, in particular, was giving rise to a new generation of 'conscious' peasant men and women — young and literate, thrifty and sober, self-improving and individualistic — who sought to overturn the old village world.
We can see it first in the fragmentation of the patriarchal household during the later nineteenth century. There was a sharp rise in the rate of household partitions following the Emancipation. Between 1861 and 1884 the annual rate of partitions rose from 82,000 to 140,000 households. Over 40 per cent of all peasant households were divided in these years. As a result, the average household size in central Russia declined from 9.5 members to 6.8. The peasants were moving from the traditional extended family to the modern nuclear one. Such partitions made little economic sense — the newly partitioned households, like the ones from which they had split, were left with much less livestock, tools and labour than before — and this was a cause of considerable anxiety to the tsarist government, which for moral and social reasons as much as for economic ones saw the peasantry's livelihood as dependent upon the survival of the patriarchal family. But it was the individualistic aspirations of the younger peasants that maintained the pressure for these partitions, in spite of their economic costs. Peasant sons and their young wives, fed up with the tyranny of the household elder, were breaking away to set up their own farms rather than wait until his death (when they themselves might be forty or fifty) to take his place at the household head. Their new farms might be small and weak but at least they were working for themselves. 'In the small family', explained one young peasant in the 1880s, 'everyone works for himself, everyone earns for himself; but if the family is large, then he doesn't end up with anything for himself.' The rate of partitioning was directly related to the involvement of the peasantry in off-farm employment as labourers. Once the younger peasants were earning wages there was a marked increase in disputes between them and
their household elders over money and property. Peasant sons would refuse to send their wages home, or would set up their own farm rather than share their earnings in the household fund. They made the distinction between their own private earnings off the farm and the family's common property from its collective labour on it.10 It was a sign of their own growing sense of individual worth: 'I earn money therefore I am.'
The growing literacy of the younger peasants was another source of their aspiring individualism. Literacy in Russia rose from 21 per cent of the Empire's population in 1897 to 40 per cent on the eve of the First World War. The highest rural rates were among young men in those regions closest to the cities. Nine out of ten peasant recruits into the imperial army from the two provinces of Petersburg and Moscow were considered literate by 1904. These peasant youths were the main beneficiaries of the boom in rural schooling during the last decades of the old regime. The number of primary schools quadrupled (from 25,000 to 100,000) between 1878 and 1911; and well over half the peasant children of school age (eight to eleven) were enrolled in primary schools by the latter date.11
The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history — the English, the French and the Russian — all took place in societies where the rate of literacy was approaching 50 per cent. The local activists of the Russian Revolution were drawn mainly from this newly literate generation. Ironically, in its belated efforts to educate the common people, the tsarist regime was helping to dig its own grave.
Literacy has a profound effect on the peasant mind and community. It promotes abstract thought and enables the peasant to master new skills and technologies, which in turn help him to accept the concept of progress that fuels change in the modern world. It also weakens the village's patriarchal order by breaking down the barriers between it and the outside world, and by shifting power within the village to those with access to the written word. The young and literate peasant was much better equipped than his father to deal with the new agricultural technologies of the late nineteenth century; with the accounting methods of the money system; with written contracts, land deeds and loan agreements; and with the whole new world of administration — from the simple recording of clock-time and dates, to the reading of official documents and the formulation of village resolutions and petitions to the higher authorities — into which they entered after 1861. The status of the young and literate peasant rose as the market and bureaucracy filtered down to the village level and the peasant community relied more upon leaders with the skills which this new society demanded.
The written word divided the village into two generational groups. The older and illiterate generation feared and mistrusted too much education ('You
can't eat books') and tried to limit its corrosive effects on the traditional culture of the village. They were worried by the urban-individualistic ways — the fashions and haircuts, the growing disrespect for peasant elders, and the dangerous political ideas — which the young picked up from their reading. As an inspector of church schools — who was clearly sympathetic to these concerns — wrote in I9II:
The only thing observed [as a result of schooling] is a heightened interest in tasteless and useless dandyism. In many areas, the normal peasant dress is being replaced by urban styles, which cut deeply into the peasants' skimpy budget, hindering major improvements to other, far more important sides of peasant life . .. Family ties, the very foundation of the well-being of state and society, have been deeply shaken. Complaints about insubordination to parents and elders are ubiquitous. Young men and adolescents often verbally abuse their elders and even beat them; they file complaints in the courts and remove from the home whatever [possessions] they can. It seems that parents have lost all authority over their children.12
On the other hand, the younger peasants — and with the explosion of the rural population they were fast becoming the majority (65 per cent of the rural population was aged under thirty by I897)u — placed education at the top of their list of priorities. It was the key to their social betterment. This cultural divide was to be a major feature of the peasant revolution. One part of it was progressive and reforming: it sought to bring the village closer to the influences of the modern urban world. But another part of the peasant revolution was restorationist: it tried to defend the traditional village against these very influences. We shall see how these two conflicting forces affected the life of a single village when we turn to the story of Sergei Semenov and the revolution in Andreevskoe.
Nevertheless, despite these modernizing forces, the basic structure of peasant politics remained essentially patriarchal. Indeed the upholders of the patriarchal order had a whole range of social controls with which to stem the tide of modernity. In every aspect of the peasants' lives, from their material culture to their legal customs, there was a relentless conformity. The peasants all wore the same basic clothes. Even their hairstyles were the same — the men with their hair parted down the middle and cut underneath a bowl, the women's hair plaited, until they were married, and then covered with a scarf. The peasants in the traditional village were not supposed to assert their individual identity, as the people of the city did, by a particular fashion of dress. They had very little sense of privacy. All household members ate their meals from a common pot and slept together in one room. Lack of private spaces, not to speak of
fertility rites, dictated that the sexual act was kept at least partly in the public domain. It was still a common practice in some parts of Russia for a peasant bride to be deflowered before the whole village; and if the groom proved impotent, his place could be taken by an older man, or by the finger of the matchmaker. Modesty had very little place in the peasant world. Toilets were in the open air. Peasant women were constantly baring their breasts, either to inspect and fondle them or to nurse their babies, while peasant men were quite unselfconscious about playing with their genitals. Urban doctors were shocked by the peasant customs of spitting into a persons eye to get rid of sties, of feeding children mouth to mouth, and of calming baby boys by sucking on their
penis.14
The huts of the peasants, both in their external aspect and in their internal layout and furnishings, conformed to the same rigid pattern that governed the rest of their lives. Throughout Russia, in fact, there were only three basic
