The revolution tipped the scales in Semenov’s favour. The old power structure upon which Maliutin had depended, of the volost elder, the local police and the gentry land captain, was dismantled overnight. Within the village the voice of the younger and more progressive farmers was also becoming more dominant, while that of the old patriarchal leaders like Maliutin, who saw nothing good in the revolution, was increasingly ignored. As a champion of reform, Semenov became a dominant figure at the village assembly. He always spoke out against the old patriarchal order and the influence of the Church. In 1917 he helped to organize the land redivision in Andreevskoe, cutting down Maliutin’s farm to half its size. He was active in both the district Soviet land department and the local co-operatives; established associations for the purchase of advanced tools, market gardening, improved dairy farming and flax cultivation; wrote pamphlets and gave lectures on agronomy; campaigned against alcoholism; set up a school and a library in the village; and even wrote plays for the ‘people’s theatre’ which he had established with his schoolteacher friend in the nearby township of Bukholovo. He even drew up plans on how to cover the villages of Volokolamsk with electric and telephone cables which he sent to the Moscow Soviet. Although Semenov’s Tolstoyan beliefs prevented him from taking up office in the village or the volost Soviet, there was no doubt, as one local put it, ‘that the peasants, not just of Andreevskoe, but of the whole region as well, saw him as their leader and champion’.
Meanwhile, Maliutin and his fellow elders continued to oppose his every move. They claimed that he was a Communist — and that his reforms in the village had merely brought upon it all the evils of the new regime. The local priest accused him of sorcery, and warned that his ‘atheism’ would lead to the devil. Archdeacon Tsvetkov of Volokolamsk joined in the denunciations, claiming that Semenov was the Antichrist. The new village school, organized by Semenov in 1919, enraged them especially, since it was built from timber taken from the woods that had belonged to Maliutin and the Church before they had been nationalized. Moreover, the school had no religious instruction. In place of the cross on the classroom wall there was the obligatory portrait of Lenin. One night Semenov’s barn was burnt; on another his farm tools were taken and sunk in the lake. Anonymous denunciations were sent to the local Cheka claiming that Semenov was a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a ‘German spy’: on more than one occasion Semenov was hauled in by the Cheka to answer for his actions, although a brief call to Kamenev, the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, whom Semenov vaguely knew, was always enough to release him. During 1921, when Russia was hit by various cattle epidemics, Maliutin and his allies blamed the death of the livestock in the village on Semenov’s ‘evil reforms’. It was even claimed that he had ‘made the cattle ill by sorcery’. Some of the peasants now became confused. Although they knew that throughout Russia cattle were dying from similar diseases, they wanted explanations for their own losses, and some now became suspicious of Semenov.
In the end, Maliutin organized his old rival’s murder. On the night of 15 December 1922, as he was walking to Bukholovo, Semenov was ambushed by several men, including two of Maliutin’s sons, who suddenly appeared from their sister Vera’s house on the edge of the village. One of them shot Semenov in the back. As he turned to face his attackers they fired several more shots, and then, as he lay dead on the ground, blew off his face. They cut the blood-red sign of a cross into his chest.
It had been a cowardly murder. Semenov had always faced his rivals openly and had been fair to their points of view; yet they maligned him and shot him in the back. Later, when the murderers were arrested, they claimed that Semenov had been ‘working for the devil’ and that he had conjured up the cattle plague. They also confessed that Grigorii Maliutin and the Archdeacon Tsvetkov had ordered them to kill Semenov — ‘in the name of God’, as the latter had told them. They were all convicted of conspiring to murder and sentenced to ten years of hard labour each in the Arctic north.
Semenov was buried on his own beloved plot of land in Andreevskoe: he became a part of the soil for which he had lived and struggled all these years. Thousands of people from the surrounding villages attended the funeral, including hundreds of schoolchildren whom Semenov had personally taught. ‘It is tragic to lose such a life’, his friend Belousov said in his address, ‘just at the moment when his work and teachings have become so badly needed by the people.’ To commemorate Semenov’s achievements, the village school was named after him, while his farm was preserved by the state, and run by his son until 1929, as a model farm to show the peasants the benefits of the latest agricultural innovations. Semenov would have been deeply touched: it was something he had dreamed of all his life.21
Never known to miss an opportunity for party propaganda, Pravda focused on this small provincial tale. It portrayed Maliutin as the evil ‘kulak’ and Semenov as the poor but politically conscious peasant. All of which was of course nonsense — Semenov was no more poor than Maliutin was a ‘kulak’, and in any case it was not class that had divided them. What the murder really showed was that less than a hundred miles from Moscow there were villages, such as Andreevskoe, which modern civilization had not yet reached — a world apart where the people still believed in witchcraft and lived as if they were trapped in the Middle Ages. The Bolsheviks had yet to conquer this unknown country. They looked at it with misapprehension, like an army in a foreign land. Early Soviet ethnographers, who set out for the countryside around Moscow like explorers for the Amazon forests, found that many of their fellow Russians still believed the earth was flat, that angels lived in clouds, and that the sun went around the earth. They discovered a strange village culture steeped in archaic and patriarchal ways, a world where time was still measured by the seasons and religious holidays as opposed to months, a world full of pagan rituals and superstitions, of wife-beating, mob law, fist fights and bouts of drinking that went on for days.
The Bolsheviks were unable to understand this world — Marx had said nothing about sorcery — let alone to govern it. Their state infrastructure had only got as far as the volost townships. Most of the villages were still governed by their own commune, whose smallholding ‘peasant’ nature had been greatly strengthened by the revolution and the civil war. Indeed, Russia as a whole had become much more ‘peasant’ in the previous few years. The great urban populations had largely disintegrated, industry had been virtually destroyed and the thin veneer of provincial civilization had been swept away by the revolution. The smallholding peasants were all that was left. No wonder so many Bolsheviks felt threatened by the peasant mass. Gorky, who was just as hostile to the ‘barbaric peasants’, expressed their fears. ‘The immense peasant tide will end by engulfing everything,’ he told a foreign visitor shortly before his departure for Berlin. ‘The peasant will become the master of Russia by sheer force of numbers. And it will be a disaster for our future.’22 This fear of the peasant was the great unresolved tension of the 1920s — one that led inexorably towards the tragedy of collectivization.
True, rural life was not all dark. Under the NEP some of the trappings of the modern world began to trickle down to the villages. Electric power came. Even Andreevskoe had its first electric cables in 1927, thus finally realizing Semenov’s dream. Lenin had extolled the new technology as a panacea for Russia’s backwardness. ‘Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,’ his famous slogan went. He seemed to equate it with magical powers, once even prophesying that the light bulb — or the ‘little Ilich lamps’, as they became known — would replace the icon in the peasants’ huts. In Soviet propaganda the light bulb became a symbol for the torch of enlightenment: light was a metaphor for everything good, just as darkness was for poverty and evil. Photographs showed the peasants marvelling in almost religious wonderment at the new electric spheres of light. As Lenin saw it, a national grid would integrate the remote village world into the modern culture of the cities. Backward peasant Russia would be led out of darkness by the light of industry, and would come to enjoy a bright new future of rapid economic progress, mass education and liberation from the drudgery of manual labour. Much of this was fantasy: centuries of backwardness could not be overcome by a simple switch. Lenin, for so long the critic of utopianism, had at last succumbed, as H. G. Wells put it, to this ‘utopia of the electricians’ and, in contravention of all Marxist doctrine, had placed his faith in technology to overcome Russia’s deep-rooted social problems.23