The feud between them had begun with a skeleton. Maliutin’s daughter, Vera, had given birth to a baby out of wedlock. Out of shame she murdered it and buried its body in the woods. Somehow the authorities found out and the police arrived in the village to investigate. Maliutin managed to buy them off, and the matter was quietly dropped. But for a long time he accused Semenov of having informed the authorities. With his supporters he began a campaign of intimidation to drive Semenov out of the village. They burned down his barn, killed his livestock, took away his tools and accused him of sorcery. The local church added its voice to this charge. Semenov was an atheist. He refused to receive priests in his house, and on Sundays and other holidays was the only peasant to be seen working in the fields. But even worse, he was also a follower of Tolstoy, who had been excommunicated. In 1902 Semenov was finally convicted of sorcery in the ecclesiastical courts and imprisoned for six months.26
On his release, he returned to his village, this time to join the peasant revolutionary struggle. He was among that remarkable group of local peasants, agronomists and teachers, who established the reading clubs, the co-operatives and the peasant unions in Volokolamsk district, culminating in the Markovo Republic of 1905–6 (see here). This gave Maliutin a second chance to strike a blow at his rival, and he now informed the police that the village contained a dangerous revolutionary. Semenov was arrested in July 1906, along with the peasant leaders of Markovo, and imprisoned for two months in Moscow before being sent into exile abroad. With Tolstoy’s financial help, Semenov spent the next eighteen months touring the countryside of England and France. Seeing the farming methods practised in the West merely strengthened his conviction of the need for a complete overhaul of the communal system in Russia. It burdened the Russian peasants with an inefficient system of land use and stifled their initiative as individual farmers. Under the communal system, the peasants held their land in dozens of narrow arable strips scattered across the village domain. Semenov’s own 10 desyatiny (27 acres) consisted of over 50 different strips in a dozen different locations. The strips were far too narrow — some of them no more than three feet wide — for modern ploughs and harrows; and far too much time was wasted in moving from one to another. The periodic redistribution of the strips left little incentive to improve the soil, since any benefits from this might be lost in the subsequent reallocation of the strips. There was little prospect of introducing advanced crop-rotations because in the open-field system everyone was obliged to follow the same pattern of cultivation so as to allow the cattle to graze on the stubble simultaneously, and, if only by force of numbers, inertia set in. ‘It was my dream’, Semenov wrote, ‘to set up an enclosed farm of my own with a seven-field rotation and no more narrow strips.’27
Having left the village as a revolutionary, he was now returning to it as a pioneer of the government’s own policies. His dream had also become that of Stolypin: the dismantling of the commune. But unlike Semenov, who saw this only in agronomic terms, Stolypin also linked it to the creation of a new class of peasant landowners, who, by owning property and growing more wealthy, would learn to respect the rights of the squires and give up their revolutionary aspirations. ‘The government’, Stolypin told the Duma in 1908, ‘has placed its wager, not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdy and the strong.’28 Entrepreneurial peasants like Semenov were now encouraged to break away from the commune and set up their own private enclosed farms. By a Law of 9 November 1906 they were given the right to convert their communal strips of land into private property on fully enclosed farms outside the village (khutora) or consolidated holdings within it (otruba). The whole village could make this transformation by a vote of two-thirds majority of the household heads. Further legislation followed to speed up the process of land reorganization and to help the separators purchase additional land from the gentry and the state with low-interest credit from the Peasant Land Bank. There was little doubt of the high priority the government gave to this project. This was the first time it had ever really tried to effect a major change in the everyday life of the peasants and the more intelligent ministers and officials knew that, unless a dramatic improvement was made, it was also likely to be the last. Conscious of its historic powerlessness in the countryside, the government pulled out all the bureaucratic stops to facilitate the enclosure process. Four different ministries, hundreds of provincial and district land commissions and thousands of surveyors, agronomists, statisticians and engineers were employed in its administration. The land captains and the other local officials were bombarded with directives from the centre urging them to encourage the separators, and tens of millions of roubles were earmarked to help them. It was as if the regime realized that its own political survival had come to depend on this ‘wager on the strong’.
Stolypin could not have wished for a better pioneer than Sergei Semenov. He embodied the spirit of peasant self-improvement and enterprise upon which Stolypin’s reforms relied. Like Stolypin, he took a dim view of his neighbours’ ways — their disrespect for property, their fear of books and science, their constant drinking and their fighting — which he blamed on the ‘serf-like habits of the commune and the Maliutins of this world’.29
To the Maliutins of Andreevskoe, who saw no need to change the old communal ways, Semenov was nothing but a troublemaker. They continued to denounce him as an ‘arteist’ (atheist) and a ‘lootinary’ (revolutionary) because he attacked the Church and the Tsar. They tried to block him from attending the village assembly on the grounds that his old and alcoholic father, whom Semenov continued to support, was still legally the household head. Maliutin argued that to invest time and money in reforms would be a waste. ‘Our grandfathers did it this way — and so shall we.’