💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › freedom-press-london-the-russian-peasantry.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:23:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Russian Peasantry Author: Freedom Press, Anonymous Date: September, 1888 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 2, No. 24, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3121, retrieved on May 1, 2020. Notes: Freedom Press, London
Since the publication of this book* Englishmen have for the first time
the opportunity of learning the life and ideas, the sufferings and
wrongs of the people of Russia. The voiceless, unknown masses of
cultivators of the soil, 83 percent of the whole population, have
hitherto been vaguely pictured in English minds as a herd of coarse and
brutalized semi-barbarians. In Stepniak's book they start into vivid
reality as a nation of lovable and social human beings. Nay more, they
appear before us as men whose social and personal development is in some
directions wider than our own, men who bear a message of enlargement to
the Teutons and Kelts of Western Europe.
In his previous works Stepniak has shown the English public how the
Russian government persecutes and crushes out every attempt among the
educated classes to gain freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom
of action, how it is the ruthless foe of all enlightenment, all reform,
how this vast stronghold of darkness and tyranny is a threat and a
danger to liberty and progress all over the world. We owe it to him more
than to any one other writer that all this is ingrained in the practical
beliefs of the English people, so that "Russian Nihilist" is an
equivalent for hero and saint among our workmen, and the dullest speaker
at a meeting can evoke a murmur of applause by an allusion to the
executioners of the late Alexander as easily as by a reference to Land
Nationalization. We Anarchists owe our Democratic Russian comrade a debt
for the contempt he has poured on government.
But until Stepniak gave to the world his personal experience of his
peasant countrymen and the fruits of his long and studious research into
the conditions of then life, most Englishmen were ignorant of the motive
force which has inspired the ardent faith and daring deeds of Russian
revolutionists. They seemed to have devoted themselves for n principle,
for an ideal freedom, for the deliverance of a comparatively small
educated class. We had heard of their love for the People, but the
description of that enthusiasm left us unmoved save by admiration for
the men and women who entertained it.
Now we understand the enthusiasm itself. Stepniak has taught us to love
the Russian People, and to shrink with indignant horror from the
sacrifice of this mass of human beings to the selfish greed for wealth
and power of the privileged class of rulers and officials. With an
artist's skill he has painted for us the rugged life of the peasant, as
beneath the heavy hand of imperial despotism, he is driven from the
oppressive degradation of serfdom to the heartless demoralization of
wage slavery. A life rough, bare, simple, uncultured as that of an
English thrall of the Middle Ages. A life of strenuous unbroken toil and
continual hardship, surpassing in its exertion and its poverty that of
the most luckless proletarian of modern times. And yet a life grand with
patient endurance and deep seated self-respect, dignified by willing,
self-directed industry, and the love of work for work's sake. A life
enlarged by public cares and public responsibilities and socialized by
common possessions and common interests.
For four centuries the Russian peasant was a serf. To-day he is often
compelled to be a wage-slave. Yet, in a sense, he is in a position of
far greater independence and dignity than the most fortunate English
workman. He still lives in the traditions of a free past where public
affairs were the direct personal affairs of all and were settled by the
unanimous consent of all concerned. He has his equal voice with his
fellows in the village mir which manages all local business. He is still
partially his own master, his own employer. He is in personal possession
of the means of production. For the majority (73 percent) of peasants
still live under the ancient communal land system, and as members of a
visage community are joint owners of the land they till. Thus it comes
about that they retain so much of a free man's self respect, his intense
interest in his labor, his love for the soil.
"We are yours but the land is ours," said the peasants to their lords
when serfdom was established, and they retain this conception of their
relation to the land down to the present time. "Russian peasants,"
writes Stepniak, "hold that land, being an article of universal need,
made by nobody, ought not to become property in the usual sense of the
word. It naturally belongs to, or, more exactly, it should remain in the
undisturbed possession of those by whom for the time being it is
cultivated." In 1863, when the Emancipation Act was passed, the peasants
believed that the land stolen from them by the nobles, would be
restored,
Needless to say that the Russian government had no such idea. The
masters were allowed to remain in legal possession of the greater part
of their estates. Small slices, saddled with a heavy redemption tax,
were doled out to the village communes, and the peasants have been
engaged from that day to this in a desperate struggle to make both ends
meet. A losing fight, in which village after village has fallen into the
hands of usurers and been compelled to lease out its common lands to
capitalists and work on its own soil as the wage-slaves of the new
masters. Under the old lords, the serfs were at least allowed enough
land to feed and clothe themselves; the "free" peasantry are being
slowly starved to death. The exactions of the tax-gatherer force them to
sell or mortgage their tools, their crops, their cattle, until many a
communal land-owner and member of the visage council is driven to wander
through the country in winter with a sack on his shoulders asking from
peasants only less destitute than himself "morsels" wherewith to feed
his children.
Each village is collectively responsible for its impossibly heavy
redemption fees, and where these are not forthcoming, the government
officials apply a process graphically described as "the flogging out of
arrears," until the necessary sum is exacted, and frequently the
peasants are left without even seed for their spring sowing, obliged to
pledge their next summer labor in advance to some large proprietor, or
village usurer, that they may obtain wherewithal to subsist through the
winter.
Under the patronage and protection of government (in Russia as elsewhere
the agent of the exploiting classes) economic individualism is running
the old Socialism hard. Bank credit and the manipulation of the paper
currency put a tremendous power into the hands of speculators wherewith
to take advantage of the needs of the village cultivators and obtain
their corn and cattle at almost nominal prices when they are hard
pressed by the tax-gatherer and local usurer. And this happens every
year, for the peasants pay 83 percent of the imperial taxes and the
burden on their land is often considerably above the value of its yearly
produce. In Kazan the taxes amount to 300 percent. To pay these
monstrous taxes, for which they are held collectively responsible, the
village commune is forced in bad years to borrow from some kulak (local
usurer). Stepniak gives a telling example of this ruinous mode of
proceeding.
"In the Novousen district the peasants of the village of Spendorf, being
in great distress during the winter of 1880 borrowed from a clergyman
named K., £700, undertaking to pay him in eight months £1,050 (50
percent) on condition that in case of default they should give Mr. K.
pending repayment, 3,500 dessiatines of their arable land at an annual
rent of ten kopecks per dessiatine. As the peasants were unable to
fulfill their engagement, Mr. K. received the 3,500 dessiatines for 350
rubles and forthwith relet the land to the peasants themselves at the
normal rent, which in this province is about 10s. per dessiatine. Thus
he obtained £1,715 on a capital of £700, or interest at the rate of
about 250 percent a year" !
Individual peasants serape through their difficulties by giving
themselves into kabbalah (bondage) i.e., pledging their summer labor at
starvation rates to some large proprietor or capitalist, sometimes for
years in advance. Almost all work, during the winter, for hours as long
as those of the victim of the London sweater, at some petty trade, mat
making for instance or (but these are a small minority. Less than half a
million) enter factories for part of the year. The usual length of the
working day, according to the latest report, is 12 hours in Russian
factories, but in some of them men and women are forced to labor 20
hours out of the 24.
No wonder that under such conditions as these a class of profit and
interest mongering usurers and capitalists and a class of landless
proletarians is glowing up in Russia. No wonder that the death rate in
Central Russia reached in 1882 sixty-two per thousand per annum, the
birth rate being only forty-five. No wonder that we hear continually of
peasant outbreaks and "Jewish outrages," which are frequently desperate
revolts against the tyranny of village usurers, or a refusal to pay
impossible taxes. No wonder that the government punishes with the
cruelty of guilty terror all who attempt to draw public attention to
these wrongs and miseries. No wonder that the revolutionary party are
animated by a fierce and implacable hatred of the system which is
ruining the mass of the Russian people in body and mind.
We propose next month to give our readers some few of Stepniak's graphic
details of the social life and religious ideas of the Russian peasants.
religion' By Stepniak. Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.