Russian village

“ Is this, then, the land in which civilization has made her abode, and whose wonderful advance in the path of wisdom is to form an era in the records of the human race? Surely those who are under this delusion can have but very little idea how small an amount of civilization exists beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, or they must have been too ready to believe the boastings of the Russians and the flourishing accounts of superficial travellers.
A Russian village is generally composed of a long row of wooden houses on each side of the post-road, with usually a line of birch-trees in front. ”

“ Practically, a small Russian village consists of one street, since those peasants who live on the occasional parallel or side lanes are "no account folks," and not in fashion. It seemed inconsistent that ranks and degrees should exist in peasant villages; but human nature is much the same in the country as in capitals, even in the village of the man who advocates absolute equality of poverty, and despite the views of my merry izvostchik Alexei. ”

“ For example, just outside of Tzarskoe Selo, on the Petersburg highway, lies a Russian village called Kuzmino, whose inhabitants are as genuine, unmodified peasants as if they lived a hundred miles from any provincial town. Here in the north, where timber is plentiful, cottages are raised from the ground by a half-story, without windows, which serves as a storeroom for carts, sledges, and farming implements. The entrance is through a door beside the large courtyard gate, which rears its heavy frame on the street line, adjoining the house, in Russian fashion. ”

“ Each village is a shady shelter, alive with the running water of the irrigation canals, wherein are trailing families of ducks. There are long lines of splendid poplar trees, solid houses, schools, shops, a church, post office, municipal buildings, and so on. A notice-board tells the number of souls and the date of the foundation of the village.
When the long caravans of new colonists came to a settlement they tied their horses and oxen to trees, repaired to inns, sought out people who had come from their part of Russia, and made merry with them. ”

“ On the banks of older channels the villages are thick; slight groups of sheds and churches, with a cloister here and there, and a scatter of windmills whirling against the sky; each village and mill in its appointed place, without the freak and medley of original thought. Here nothing is done by individual force; a pope, an elder, an imperial officer, must have his say in every case; and not a mouse can stir in a Russian town, except by leave of some article in a printed code. ”

“ The land of a Russian village belongs to the people as a whole, not to individuals. It is divided up among them for tillage, but no man can [Pg 43] claim the fields he tills as his own, and for thousands of years what is known as communism has prevailed on Russian soil. ”

“ From these brief remarks it will be readily apparent that a Russian village is quite a different thing from a provincial town or village in America. While it is true in a sense that in our villages the citizens are bound together in certain interests of the community, yet each family, outside of a few individual friends, is more or less isolated from the rest of the community—each family having little to interest it in the affairs of the other. In a Russian village, however, such a state of indifference and isolation is quite impossible. ”

“ A village is a republic, governed by a law, a custom, and a ruler of its own.
In Western Europe and the United States a hamlet is no more than a little town in which certain gentlefolk, farmers, {209} tradesmen, and their dependents dwell; people who are as free to go away as they were free to come. A Russian village is not a small town, with this mixture of ranks, but a collection of cabins, tenanted by men of one class and one calling; men who have no power to quit the fields they sow; who have to stand and fall by each other; who hold their lands under a common bond ”

“ But there is much that is instructive in all ranks of life to be gathered from a prolonged sojourn in this "Imperial Village," where world-famed palaces have their echoes aroused at seven in the morning by a gentle shepherd like the shepherd of the remotest provincial hamlets, a strapping peasant in a scarlet cotton blouse and blue homespun linen trousers tucked into tall wrinkled boots, and armed with a fish-horn, which he toots at the intersection of the macadamized streets to assemble the village cattle ”

“ A share does not mean simply a plot or parcel of land; on the contrary, it always contains at least four, and may contain a large number of distinct plots. We have here a new point of difference between the Russian village and the villages of Western Europe.
Communal land in Russia is of three kinds: the land on which the village is built, the arable land, and the meadow or hay-field, if the village is fortunate enough to possess one. ”

“ It is quite a summer resort town, has a number of well constructed brick buildings, half a dozen or more schools, a seminary, monastery, saw mill, and in many others respects is far above the average Russian village. ”

“ To understand the radical differences of the conditions of life in Britain and in Russia, compare a British village with a Russian village. The British village appears to us as a highly differentiated political organism with its hierarchy of classes, its division of social labour: at the summit a small aristocratic community of landed proprietors presided over by the lord of the manor or the local magnate; an intermediate middle class of farmers and trades-people led by the clergyman and the schoolmaster ”

“ Imagine the village we had reached—all overblown with snow; the inevitable village idiot, Serozha, walking almost naked in the snow; the priest, who won’t play cards the day before a festival but writes denunciations to the village starosta instead—a stupid, artful man, and an adept at getting alms, speaking an atrocious Petersburg Russian. If you have grasped what society was like in the village you know to what point of boredom and stupefaction we attained. ”

“ There is nothing of the merely sentimental in this feeling that their government is, and ought to be, paternal in its character. Every Russian peasant drinks it in from the first, for he gets his training in the Mir of his native village. It is there he learns what family and social rule really mean, and they are identical. His home is ruled by his father, the village by the elder; and everything is as constitutional and as democratic as it can be, or is anywhere else in the world. The children have their rights, but look up to and obey their father. ”

“ The fact is, that just as we have in Gógol’s tales quite a world opening before us—a Little Russian village, or provincial life—so also here we see, as the very title of the novel suggests, the whole life of a large estate at the times of serfdom, with its mass of retainers, followers and foes, all grouped round the horse-breeding establishment which makes the fame of the estate and the pride of all connected with it. ”

“ This village of theirs looked prosperous and clean. The men, being brought more into contact with outsiders than the women, speak Russian better than the latter, and more generally. It is not exactly a case which proves woman's conservative tendencies.
On reaching the river, and finding that no steamer was likely to arrive for several hours, we put up at the cottage of a prosperous peasant, which was patronized by many of the neighboring nobles, in preference to the wretched inns of that suburb of the wharves. ”

“ We landed our first freight at Nova Mihalofski, a Russian village on the southern bank of the river. The village was small and the houses were far from palatial. The inhabitants live by agriculture in summer, sending their produce to Nicolayevsk, and by supplying horses for the postal service in winter. I observed here and at other villages an example of Russian economy. Not able to purchase whole panes of window glass the peasants use fragments of glass of any shape they can get. These are set in pieces of birch bark cut to the proper form and the edges held by wax or putty. ”

“ Persons, however, who are acquainted with the rural districts of Norway and Sweden feel quite at home in the atmosphere of the North Russian village life.
The villages are composed of the houses of the small farmers who till the surrounding land, together with church, school, store, and grain and flax barns. Except for a few new villages along the railways, all are to be found along some watercourse navigable at least for small barges. For the waterways are the first, and for a long time the only avenues of communication and trade. In the winter they make the very best roadways for sleds. ”

“ The front windows are always built facing the south. In this way, different sides of the houses face the street, and in general, too, street life does not play so important a part in a Ukrainian village as it does in Polish, White Russian or Russian villages. The Ukrainian houses are always well fenced in, altho not so strongly and so high as the Russian houses in the forest zone, or as the White Russian houses. ”

“ A great sense of initiative and personal responsibility, as well as corporate spirit at the same time, is clearly given early in life to the peasant mind in Russia, for nowhere, I fancy, in the world, except in countries where primitive ideas and [Pg 62] customs still obtain, is there the same standard of village life and self-government. There are two kinds of communities. First, there is the village community with its Assembly or Mir, under the presidency of the Staroshta, who is elected by the village. ”

“ At the next station, the staroster, on my mentioning the incident, informed me that in the village they were simply infested with runaway convicts after a convoy had passed, and that at night the barns and outhouses were always occupied; he had known as many as a dozen men sleeping in the bath-house of the station. (The baths in a Russian village are generally in wooden outbuildings.) ”

“ Amongst the families composing a Russian village, such a state of isolation is impossible. The Heads of Households must often meet together and consult in the Village Assembly, and their daily occupation must be influenced by the Communal decrees. They cannot begin to mow the hay or plough the fallow field until the Village Assembly has passed a resolution on the subject. ”

“ Whilst she lingered at Easter festivals in churches, all rich deep colour blazing softly through clouds of incense, and imagined the mighty sound of Russian singing, she was carried away to villages scattered amongst great tracts of forest, unimaginable distances of forest, the vast forests of Germany small and homely ..... each village a brilliant miniature of Russia, in every hut a holy image ”

“ It must be borne in mind, however, that the lines between the classes in the Russian village are as yet far from being as sharply drawn as in countries with developed capitalism. It would seem that laborers permanently employed outside of their farms must unquestionably be classed among the proletarians. And yet we find the majority of them maintaining the standard of farmers. [108] This is due to the existence of the compound family, the average household numbering two adult male workers, which enables one of them to carry on farming, [105] while the other is employed outside. ”

“ The movement of population away from the rural districts, which is an economic law in capitalistic countries, plays a very conspicuous part in modern Russian economy.
Colonization of the border districts and periodical migration in quest of work, are tending to absorb the natural increase of the peasant population:
There is thus but a minor fraction of the surplus population that has forever left the native village with the chance of settling somewhere else as farmers. ”

“ The individualistic French farmer must inevitably succumb in the war of competition with the large landholder, for the latter is in a position to utilize all new agricultural improvements, while the former lacks all means of combination with his neighbors. On the other hand, supposing that the time has come for the introduction of improved machinery into Russian agriculture, would it require any revolution in the social relations prevailing in the Russian village? Not in the least; the land belongs to the community, and not to the individual ”

“ In this vast area of which we are thinking there must indeed be great varieties of experience and conditions of life, and it is not contrary to what one might expect to find much nearer home, that the people of one village may be clean in their habits and those of another quite the reverse. But from all I have seen, heard, and read the Russian labouring and peasant class have a great desire to be clean. ”

“ The pasture, the forest, and the meadow were allotted to the village as a whole, not to the individual yeoman. The arable alone was apportioned to every one in separate plots. Though these plots were conferred on individuals, through inheritance, gift etc., yet this cannot be considered as a proof of private property in land. It must be borne in mind that wherever in Russia land is in abundance, its possession rests upon the title by occupancy. In Siberia such plots pass from father to son, or daughter, exactly as was the custom among the quarterly landholders some hundred years ago. ”

“ Thus the play of economic interests is dissolving the village community into, on the one hand, a landless rural proletariat, and, on the other hand, a peasant bourgeoisie, to whom the title to a large portion of communal land is destined to be transferred. ”

“ A single concrete example will clear up the matter.
“In 1881 a small community of 5 households, former serfs of Gregoroff, emigrated from the village of Bigildino, district of Dankoff. Their land, 30 dessiatines, was sold to a rich peasant in consideration of 1500 rubles. The emigrants could not make a living at home, and most of them were yearly laborers.” ”