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

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as quickly as possible,' he later wrote, 'to free myself from my father's despotism and tutelage, to begin to live a self-reliant and independent life.'³⁸ It was not long before poverty forced his father to give in to his requests. At the age of sixteen Kanatchikov finally left for Moscow, where his father had arranged for him to work as an apprentice in the Gustav List metal factory. There, like thousands of other peasant immigrants, he would begin to redefine himself both as a worker and as a 'comrade' in the revolutionary movement.

Kanatchikov's motives for wanting to leave the village were typical of his generation. The dull routines of peasant life and the isolation of the village were a heavy burden for young men like him. It became even more difficult once they had learned to read, for the stories of city life in newspapers and pamphlets could only strengthen their awareness of these restrictions. Virtually any employment in the city seemed exciting and desirable compared with the hardships of peasant life. All the healthy and able young men ran away from our village to Moscow and took whatever jobs they could find,' recalled Semenov. 'We eagerly awaited the time when we would be old enough to find something in Moscow and could leave our native village.' Andreevskoe, Semenov's village, was, like Gusevo, close to Moscow, and the city was a magnet for the young peasants. 'The proximity of our village to Moscow', Semenov wrote to a friend in 1888, 'has made our peasants sick of the land. The desire for a social life, for fashionable dress, for drinking, for the pursuit of an easier life — all this weighs very heavily on them. They do not care any longer for farming. Everyone is trying as hard as he can to liberate himself from it and find an easier means of existence.'³⁹

The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. For young peasant women, in particular, who found themselves at the bottom of the patriarchal pile, working as a domestic servant in the city (which is what most of them did) offered them a better and more independent life. Many social commentators noted such aspirations. A study of rural schoolchildren in the 1900s, for example, found that nearly half of them wanted to pursue an 'educated profession' in the city, whereas less than 2 per cent wanted to follow in the footsteps of their peasant parents. 'I want to be a shop assistant', remarked one village schoolboy, 'because I do not like to walk in the mud. I want to be like those people who are cleanly dressed and work as shop assistants.'⁴⁰ Parents and educators became alarmed that many peasant boys, in particular, once they learned how to read and write, refused to do agricultural work and tried to distinguish themselves from the rest of the village by swaggering around in raffish city clothes.

If social ambition was often the primary motive of those peasants who

went to the towns, more commonly, as in Kanatchikov s case, it was an unexpected consequence of a move enforced by poverty. But either way the experience of the city transformed the way most peasants thought — of the world, of themselves, and of the village life they had left behind. On the whole, it had the effect of making them think in secular, more rational and more humanistic terms, which brought them closer to the socialist intelligentsia, and to reject and even despise village culture, with its superstitions and its dark and backward ways. That was the Russia of 'icons and cockroaches', to cite Trotsky's phrase, whereas the city, and (for many of them) the urban culture of the revolutionary movement, stood for progress, enlightenment and human liberation. The rank and file of the Bolshevik Party were recruited from peasants, like Kanatchikov. The mistrust and indeed contempt which they were to show for the peasantry, once in power, can be explained by this social fact. For they associated the dismal peasant world with their own unhappy past, and it was a vital impulse of their own emerging personal and class identity, as well as of their commitment to the revolution, that this world should be abolished.

Kanatchikov's father had arranged an apprenticeship for him at the Gustav List factory through a neighbour from Gusevo who had gone to work there several years before. Most immigrants relied on such contacts to get themselves settled in the city. The peasants of one village or region would form an association (either an artel' or a zemliachestvo) to secure factory jobs and living quarters for their countrymen. Whole factories and areas of the city were 'colonized' by the peasants of one locality or another, especially if they all shared some valuable regional craft, and it was not unusual for employers to use such organizations to recruit workers. The industrial suburb of Sormovo near Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, where one of the country's largest engineering works was located, recruited all its workers from a handful of surrounding villages, where metal-working was an established handicraft. Through such associations the peasant immigrants were able to maintain ties with their native villages. Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. The factories suffered much disruption at harvest time.* Other peasants regularly sent home money to their families. In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in

* According to a survey of 1881, over 90 per cent of the workforce in textiles and 71 per cent of all industrial workers returned to their villages during the summer. The proportion declined towards the turn of the century as the urban workforce became more settled. Factories adapted to the situation by stopping work during the agricultural season, or by moving to the countryside. The government encouraged the latter, fearing the build-up of an urban working class. Only 40 per cent of the Empire's industrial workers lived in the cities at the turn of the century.

the city was still insecure. Indeed in some industrial regions, such as the Urals and the mining areas of the south, it was common for the workers to live in their villages, where their families kept a vegetable plot, and commute to the factories and mines.

Many of these immigrants continued to see themselves as essentially peasants, and looked on industrial work as a means of 'raiding' the cash economy to support their family farms. They maintained their peasant appearance — wearing their traditional home-made cotton-print blouses rather than manufactured ones, having their hair cut 'under a bowl' rather than in the new urban styles, and refusing to shave off their beards. 'They lived in crowded, dirty conditions and behaved stingily, denying themselves everything in order to accumulate more money for the village,' Kanatchikov recalled. 'On holidays they attended mass and visited their countrymen, and their conversations were mostly about grain, land, the harvest and livestock.' When they had saved up enough money they would go back to their village and buy up a small piece of land. Others, however, like Kanatchikov, preferred to see their future as urban workers. They regarded their land in the village as a temporary fall-back whilst they set themselves up in the city.⁴¹

It was through an artel' of fifteen immigrant workers that Kanatchikov found a 'corner' of a room in a 'large, smelly house inhabited by all kinds of poor folk'. The fifteen men who shared the room bought food and paid for a cook collectively. Every day at noon they hurried home from the factory to eat cabbage soup — just as the peasants did, 'from a common bowl with wooden spoons'. Kanatchikov slept in a small cot with another apprentice. His windowless 'corner' was dirty and full of 'bed bugs and fleas and the stench of 'humanity' '. But in fact he was lucky to be in a private room at all. Many workers had to make do with a narrow plank-bed in the factory barracks, where hundreds of men, women and children slept together in rows, with nothing but their own dirty clothes for bedding. In these barracks, which Gorky compared with the 'dwellings of a prehistoric people', there were neither washing nor cooking facilities, so the workers had to visit the bath-house and eat in canteens. There were whole families living in such conditions. They tried as best they could to get a little privacy by hanging a curtain around their plank-beds. Others, even less fortunate, were forced to live in the flophouse or eat and sleep by the sides of their machines. Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent. Landlords divided rooms, hallways, cellars and kitchens to maximize their profits. Speculative developers rushed to build high tenements, which in turn were quickly sub-divided. Sixteen people lived in the average apartment in St Petersburg, six in every room, according to a survey of 1904. In the workers' districts the figures were higher. The city council could have relieved the housing crisis by building suburbs and

developing cheap transportation, but pressure from the landlords in the centre blocked all such plans.⁴²

Like most of Russia's industrial cities, St Petersburg had developed without any proper planning. Factories had