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then the ties binding the inhabitants of a village and socializing them were intensely personal. The outside world was perceived through very clouded glasses as something distant, alien and largely irrelevant. It consisted of two parts: one, the vast, holy community of the Orthodox, and the other, the realm of foreigners, who were divided into Orientals (Busurmane) and Occidentals (Nemtsy). If foreign residents can be trusted many Russian peasants as recently as the nineteenth century did not know and would not believe that there were in the world other nations and other monarchs than their own.
The peasant was very conscious of the difference between equals and superiors. Everyone not in authority, he addressed as brat (brother); those in authority he called otets (father) or, more familiarly, batiushka. His manner toward equals was surprisingly ceremonious. Travellers to Russia were struck by the elaborate manner in which peasants greeted one another, bowing politely and tipping their hats. One of them says that in politesse they yielded nothing to Parisians promenading on the Boulevard des Italiens. To superiors, they either kowtowed (a habit acquired under the Mongols) or made a deep bow. Foreigners also commented on the peasant's gay disposition, readiness to mimic or break into song and his peaceful disposition: even drunk he rarely came to blows.
But when one turns from these descriptions to peasant proverbs one is shocked to find neither wisdom nor charity. They reveal crude cynicism and complete absence of social sense. The ethic of these proverbs is brutally simple: look out for yourself and don't bother about the others: 'Another's tears are water.' The socialists-revolutionaries who in the 1870s 'went to the people' to awaken in them a sense of indignation at injustice learned to their dismay that the peasant saw nothing wrong with exploitation as such; he merely wanted to be the exploiter instead of the object of exploitation. A leading agricultural expert, who had spent many years working among peasants, sadly concluded that at heart the Russian peasant was a kulak, that is, a rural speculator and usurer:
The ideals of the kulak reign among the peasantry; every peasant is proud to be the pike who gobbles up the carp. Every peasant, if circumstances permit, will, in the most exemplary fashion, exploit every other. Whether his object is a peasant or a noble, he will squeeze the blood out of him to exploit his need.18 And this is what Maxim Gorky had to say on the subject:
In my youth [during the 1880S-90S], I eagerly looked in the villages of Russia for [the good-natured, thoughtful Russian peasant, the tireless seeker after truth and justice which Russian literature of the nineteenth century had so convincingly and beautifully described to the world]. I looked for him and
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failed to find him. I found in the villages a stern realist and a man of cunning who - when it suits him - knows very well how to appear a simpleton... He knows that the 'peasant is no fool, but the world is dumb', and that 'the world is strong like water, and stupid like a pig.' He says 'Fear not devils, fear people', 'Beat your own people and others will fear you.' He holds a rather low opinion of truth: 'Truth won't feed you', 'What matter if it's a lie as long as you've got enough to eat', 'An honest man, like a fool, is also harmful'.1* Allowing for the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century, when Gorky was on his quest, the peasant was demoralized by economic difficulties, the fact remains that even before Emancipation had compounded his problems he displayed many of the characteristics with which Gorky credits him. Grigorovich's novels of peasant life brought out in the 1840s and Dai's collection of peasant proverbs, published in 1862, present an unattractive picture by any standard.
One possible resolution of the contradiction between these two images is to assume that the peasant had a very different attitude towards those with whom he had personal dealings and those with whom his relations were, so to say, 'functional'. The 'others' whose tears did not matter, who were stupid, who could be lied to and beaten, were outside his family, village or personal contact. But since they were precisely those who made up 'society' and 'state', the breach of the walls isolating the small peasant mir from the large mir - the world - an event which occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, left the peasant utterly bewildered and at a loss what to do. He was ill-prepared to enter into decent impersonal relations, and, when compelled to do so, revealed promptly his worst, most rapacious characteristics.
In his religious life, the peasant displayed a great deal of external devotion. He crossed himself continually, attended regularly the long church services, observed the fasts. He did all this from a conviction that scrupulous observance of church rituals - fasts, sacraments, and the constant making of the cross - would save his soul. But he seems to have had very little if any understanding of the spiritual meaning of religion or of religion as a way of life. He did not know the Bible or even the Lord's Prayer. He had nothing but contempt for the village priest or pop. His attachment to Christianity was on the whole superficial, resting primarily on the need for formulas and rituals with which to gain access to the nether world. It is difficult to quarrel with Belinskii's judgement as made in his famous Open Letter to Gogoclass="underline"
According to you the Russian people is the most religious in the world. That is a lie! The basis of religiousness is pietism, reverence, fear of God, whereas the Russian man utters the name of the Lord while scratching himself somewhere. He says of the icon: If it isn't good for praying it's good for covering the pots.
THE PEASANTRY
Take a closer look and you will see that it is by nature a profoundly atheistic people. It still retains a good deal of superstition, but not a trace of religiousness. Superstition passes with the advances of civilisation, but religiousness often keeps company with them too; we have a living example of this in France, where even today there are many sincere Catholics among enlightened and educated men, and where many people who have rejected Christianity still cling stubbornly to some sort of god. The Russian people is different; mystic exaltation is not in its nature; it has too much common sense, a too lucid and positive mind, and therein, perhaps, lies the vastness of its historic destinies in the future. Religiousness has not even taken root among the clergy in it, since a few isolated and exceptional personalities distinguished for such cold ascetic contemplation prove nothing. But the majority of our clergy has always been distinguished for their fat bellies, scholastic pedantry, and savage ignorance. It is a shame to accuse it of religious intolerance and fanaticism; instead it could be praised for exemplary indifference in matters of faith. Religiosity among us appeared only in the schismatic sects who formed such a contrast in spirit to the mass of the people and who were numerically so insignificant in comparison with it.20 How superficial a hold Orthodoxy exercised over the masses is evidenced by the relative ease with which the communist regime succeeded in uprooting Christianity in the heartland of Russia and replacing it with an ersatz cult of its own. The job proved much more difficult to accomplish among Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Dissenters.