A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

f Whereas the partitioning of household property was entirely controlled by local customary law, Stolypin's new laws of inheritance came under the Civil Code. Cases concerning peasant inheritance of land were thus heard in the civil (i.e. non-peasant) courts — the first major instance of the peasantry being integrated into the national legal system.

labour principle, the second major peasant legal concept. Membership of the household was defined by active participation in the life of the farm (or, as the peasants put it, 'eating from the common pot') rather than by blood or kinship ties. An outsider adopted by the family who lived and worked on the farm was usually viewed as a full member of the household with equal rights to those of the blood relatives, whereas a son of the family who left the village to earn his living elsewhere eventually ceased to be seen as a household member. This same attachment of rights to labour could be seen on the land as well.* The peasants believed in a sacred link between land and labour. The land belonged to no one but God, and could not be bought or sold. But every family had the right to support itself from the land on the basis of its own labour, and the commune was there to ensure its equal distribution between them.²² On this basis — that the land should be in the hands of those who tilled it — the squires did not hold their land rightfully and the hungry peasants were justified in their struggle to take it from them. A constant battle was fought between the written law of the state, framed to defend the property rights of the landowners, and the customary law of the peasants, used by them to defend their own transgressions of those property rights. Under customary law, for example, no one thought it wrong when a peasant stole wood from the landlord's forest, since the landlord had more wood than he could personally use and, as the proverb said, 'God grew the forest for everyone.' The state categorized as 'crimes' a whole range of activities which peasant custom did not: poaching and grazing livestock on the squire's land; gathering mushrooms and berries from his forest; picking fruit from his orchards; fishing in his ponds, and so on. Customary law was a tool which the peasants used to subvert a legal order that in their view maintained the unjust domination of the landowners and the biggest landowner of all: the state.f It is no coincidence that the revolutionary land legislation of 1917—18 based itself on the labour principles found in customary law.

The subjective approach to the law — judging the merits of a case according to the social and economic position of the parties concerned — was the third specific aspect of the peasantry's legal thinking which had an affinity with the revolution. It was echoed in the Bolshevik concept of 'revolutionary justice', the guiding principle of the People's Courts of 1917—18, according to

* For example, under customary law a peasant found guilty of tilling another man's land was always compensated for his labour, though the bulk of the harvest went to the land's rightful holder. The peasants, in the words of one observer, 'looked on the right to own the product of one's own labour on the land with an almost religious respect' and by custom this had to be balanced against the formal right of land tenure (Efimenko, Isshdovaniia, 2, 143).

t This was partly the reason why peasants had so few scruples about perjuring themselves in court and, indeed, why they tended to sympathize with convicted criminals. It was common for peasants to give away food to gangs of prisoners as they passed through the villages on their way to Siberia.

which a man's social class was taken as the decisive factor in determining his guilt or innocence. The peasants considered stealing from a rich man, especially by the poor, a much less serious offence than stealing from a man who could barely feed himself and his family.* In the peasants' view it was even justified, as we have seen, to kill someone guilty of a serious offence against the community. And to murder a stranger from outside the village was clearly not as bad as killing a fellow villager. Similarly, whereas deceiving a neighbour was seen by the peasants as obviously immoral, cheating on a landlord or a government official was not subject to any moral censure; such 'cunning' was just one of the many everyday forms of passive resistance used by peasants to subvert an unjust established order.²³ Within the context of peasant society this subjective approach was not without its own logic, since the peasants viewed justice in terms of its direct practical effects on their own communities rather than in general or abstract terms. But it could often result in the sort of muddled thinking that made people call the peasants 'dark'. In The Criminal for example, Chekhov tells the true story of a peasant who was brought to court for stealing a bolt from the railway tracks to use as a weight on his fishing tackle. He fails to understand his guilt and in trying to justify himself repeatedly talks of 'we' (the peasants of his village): 'Bah! Look how many years we have been removing bolts, and God preserve us, and here you are talking about a crash, people killed. We do not remove all of them — we always leave some. We do not act without thinking. We do understand.'

Here, in this moral subjectivity, was the root of the peasant's instinctive anarchism. He lived outside the realm of the states 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

* This was connected with the religious belief of the peasants that to be poor was to be virtuous.

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