Maliutin’s arguments had much to recommend them to the peasantry, who were by their nature wary of reform. There were profound cultural reasons for the peasants to oppose the breakup of the commune, which had been the focus of their lives for centuries. The basic worry was that giving some peasants the right to own part of the communal land, or to hold it privately in perpetuity, would deprive others of their rights of access to this land as their basic means of livelihood. This fear was strongest amongst the junior members of the family, especially the women, for once a household consolidated its land as private property, family ownership ceased to function and the land became the legal property of the household elder. He could bequeath it to one or more of his sons, or sell it altogether, thus depriving the other household members of their inheritance. ‘The peasants’, declared one official, ‘are very hostile to the Law of 9 November,’ because ‘they fear that the peasant elders will sell up the land and their children will become paupers. They say no one should sell land — let them trade what they like but not land.’30 Many peasants were afraid that allowing the communal land to become private property would enable the richest members to buy it all up. There was also a widespread fear that the government surveyors, who had been instructed to encourage the process of enclosure, would reward the separators with more than their fair share of the best land.
And indeed the peasants had real cause to wonder just how the old patchwork of strips, which were often intermingled within the commune, could be disentangled at all. On what terms was a good bit of land in one place to be exchanged for a poor one in another? How were they to divide the meadows, the woods and the rivers, which had always been held in common? And if the new enclosed farms were to build their own roads, wouldn’t these cut across existing boundaries and private rights of way? The peasants were attached to their land in a very particular sense. Most of them had farmed the same strips for many years, knew their peculiar traits and would not easily be parted from them. No one had ever taught them how to calculate the area of a piece of land by multiplying its width by its length, so they had no reliable means of satisfying themselves that two equal plots were in fact the same size. Their fields were divided ‘by eye’ or by pacing out the width of the strips and making rough adjustments where their length or the quality of their soil was uneven. They had no doubt that this primitive method, used by their grandfathers, was a good deal more accurate than the complex scientific methods of the government’s land surveyors, with their suits, their rulers and their tripods. For one thing, the surveyors could not take into account the detailed variations in the quality of each strip, as the peasants themselves did in endless debates during the land division. Nor could they take into account the various social factors that inevitably influenced the peasants’ allocation of the strips: for giving the best land to the most powerful families had become an important means of preserving traditional peasant hierarchies. It was the biggest farmers, with the most to lose from the breakup of the commune, who usually led the campaign against land reform. And it was not hard for them to stir up a general fear of reform among the peasants, for the existing dispensation had become a part of their everyday life, their family histories and the social structure of the village.31
All these factors played their part in Semenov’s struggle to separate from the commune. To begin with he and his supporters, who were mostly the younger and more literate peasants, tried to persuade the rest of the village to consolidate all their land together, or at least to carry out a communal redivision of the land to reduce the number of narrow strips. But Maliutin and his supporters raised all sorts of objections, and the rest of the peasants were either too fearful of them, or else too fearful of change, to give Semenov and his supporters the two-thirds majority they required to enforce a general consolidation. So Semenov’s group now began to campaign for the right to consolidate their own allotments as otruba. But again they encountered hostile opposition from Maliutin and the other elders. The village broke down into two warring minority camps — one trying to break away from the commune and the other trying to stop them — whilst the majority of the peasants did not know what to think but tried, like sheep, to stay with the largest group. To frighten Semenov, the elders barred his children from the village school and deprived him of access to the communal pastures and woods. Maliutin’s followers beat up his wife, killed his livestock and burned the houses of his supporters. They even threatened to kill the land surveyors when they came to the village; and for eighteen months no surveyor dared reappear.
Such intimidation was by no means unusual (in many villages troops had to be brought in and martial law imposed to end the violence). It was certainly effective in putting off many potential peasant pioneers. Of the six million individual applications for land consolidation received before 1915, over one-third were subsequently withdrawn by the applicants themselves, largely because of pressure from their neighbours. Of those that were completed (about one million individual consolidations in all), two-thirds had to be forced through by the authorities against the opposition of the commune.32 And yet, as Semenov was to learn, even with the state on their side, it would need considerable determination by the separators to see the thing through to the end.
Bureaucratically, the fate of Stolypin’s reforms was in the hands of the local land captains. They were charged with explaining to the peasants the advantages of the new mode of farming and with approving their petitions to the land commission, the Peasant Land Bank, and other sources of financial support. Semenov’s land captain, Makarov, was a liberal and educated noble driven to this relatively humble office by bankruptcy and a tragic love affair. Like the provincial governor, he was quite sympathetic to the enclosure movement. This was unusual. The majority of their colleagues in the provincial bureaucracy were opponents of reform. They saw the enclosures as part of a general campaign by Stolypin to undermine the gentry’s domination of the countryside, and tried to block their implementation through inaction and delay. The need to involve the land captain turned out in itself to be a major deterrent to potential separators. For in many areas the captain had played the key role in putting down the agrarian disorders of 1905–7 and peasant mistrust of the captain, as of all government officials, still ran very deep.33
But there was still not much that even Makarov could or would do to help Semenov. The Marshal of the Nobility and the other land captains in Volokolamsk were strongly opposed to the reforms, and Makarov was not prepared to step out of line for fear of losing his job. Nor was he brave enough to use his coercive powers and force through Semenov’s rights in the face of hostile opposition from his fellow villagers. Indeed he never once came to the village for fear of his life. All this played into the hands of Semenov’s opponents, who now stepped up their resistance. Led by Maliutin, they bombarded the local authorities with petty complaints against Semenov. These complaints were cleverly planned to give the authorities an excuse for endless bureaucratic delays over the land reform. They denounced Semenov to the district police for defiling a portrait of the Tsar, so that a detailed investigation had to be carried out before Semenov was deemed worthy enough to own a private plot. They took the question of whether Semenov or his father was to have rights at the village assembly to the volost court, and, when it failed to reach a decision, they took it to the district courts. All of this took up nearly two years. Maliutin also dragged him through the courts with a bogus claim to his allotment land, so that while the case was sub judice he would be unable to enclose his strips since he had no clear legal right to them.