Such attitudes provide the background to the peasant’s political philosophy, which, for all its apparent contradictions, had a certain logic. To the peasant, government was a power that compelled obedience: its main attribute was the ability to coerce people to do things which, left to themselves, they would never do, such as pay taxes, serve in the army, and respect private property in land. By this definition, a weak government was no government. The epithet Groznyi applied to the mentally unbalanced and sadistic Ivan IV, usually rendered in English as “Terrible,” actually meant “Awesome” and carried no pejorative meaning. Persons who possessed vlasf (authority) and did not exercise it in an “awe-inspiring” manner could be ignored. Observance of laws for the peasant invariably represented submission to a force majeure, to the will of someone stronger, not the recognition of some commonly shared principle or interest. “Today, as in the days of serfdom,” wrote the Slavophile Iurii Samarin, “the peasant knows no other sure pledge of the genuineness of imperial commands than the display of armed force: a round of musketry still is to him the only authentic confirmation of the imperial commands.”64 In this conception, moral judgment of governments or their actions was as irrelevant as approval or condemnation of the vagaries of nature. There were no “good” or “bad” governments: there were only strong and weak ones, and strong ones were always preferable to weak ones. (Similarly, serfs used to prefer cruel but efficient masters to kindly but ineffective ones.65) Weak rulers made it possible to return to primitive freedom or volia, understood as license to do whatever one wanted, unrestrained by man-made law. Russian governments took account of these attitudes and went to great lengths to impress on the country the image of boundless power. Experienced bureaucrats opposed freedom of the press and parliamentary government in good part because they feared that the existence of an overt, legitimized opposition would be interpreted by the peasantry as a sign of weakness and a signal to rebel.
The overall effect of these peasant attitudes was very deleterious for Russia’s political evolution. They encouraged the conservative proclivities of the monarchy, inhibiting the democratization which the country’s economic and cultural development demanded. At the same time, they made it possible for demagogues to play on the peasantry’s resentments and unrealistic expectations to incite a rural revolution.
At the turn of the century, observers noted subtle changes in the attitudes of the peasantry, particularly the younger generation. They were religiously less observant, less respectful of tradition and authority, restless, and somehow disaffected not only over land but over life in general.
The authorities were especially perturbed by the behavior of those who moved into the cities and industrial centers. Such peasants were no longer intimidated by uniformed representatives of authority and were said to act “insolently.” When they returned to the village, permanently or to help out with the field work, they spread the virus of discontent. The Ministry of the Interior, observing this development, objected, on security grounds, to further industrialization and excessive rural mobility, but, for reasons previously stated, it had little success.
One of the causes of changes in the mood of the peasantry seems to have been the spread of literacy, actively promoted by the authorities. The 1897 census revealed a very low level of literacy for the Russian Empire as a whole: only one in five (21 percent) of the inhabitants could read and write. But disaggregated the statistics looked considerably better. As a result of the combined efforts of rural schools and private associations, literacy showed a dramatic spurt among the young, especially males: in 1897, 45 percent of the Empire’s male inhabitants aged ten to twenty-nine were recorded as literate.* At this rate, the population of the Empire could have been expected to attain universal literacy by 1925.
Literate peasants and workers read most of all religious books (the gospels and lives of saints), followed by cheap escapist literature, the Russian equivalent of “penny dreadfuls”66—a situation not unlike that observed in England half a century earlier. Yellow journalism emerged to meet the demand for the printed word. Access to publications, however, did not bring the mass reader into closer contact with the urban culture: “the vast majority of the lower-class readers in the countryside and in the cities … remained estranged, in their cultural sensibilities and in their daily lives, from the milieu of the intelligentsia and the intellectual world of modernist creativity.”67
Growing literacy, unaccompanied by proportionately expanding opportunities to apply the knowledge acquired from reading, probably contributed to the restlessness of the lower classes. It has been noted in other regions of the world that schooling and the spread of literacy often produce unsettling effects. African natives educated in missionary schools, as compared with untutored ones, have been observed to develop a different mentality, expressed in an unwillingness to perform monotonous work and in lower levels of honesty and truthfulness.68 Similar trends were noted among young Russian peasants exposed to urban culture, who also seemed less ready to acquiesce to the routine of rural work and lived in a state of powerful, if unfocused expectations aroused by reading about unfamiliar worlds.69
All of which gave more thoughtful Russians cause for anxiety. Sergei Witte, having familiarized himself with rural conditions as chairman of a special commission to study peasant needs, felt deeply apprehensive about the future. Russia, he wrote in 1905,
in one respect represents an exception to all the countries in the world.… The exception consists in this, that the people have been systematically, over two generations, brought up without a sense of property and legality.… What historical consequences will result from this, I hesitate now to say, but I feel they will be very serious.… Scholarship says that communal land belongs to the village commune, as a juridical person, but in the eyes of the peasants … it belongs to the state which gives it to them for temporary use.… [Legal relations among the peasants] are regulated not by precise, written laws, but by custom, which often “no one knows.” … Under these conditions, I see one gigantic question mark: what is an empire with one hundred million peasants who have been educated neither in the concept of landed property nor that of the firmness of law in general?70
*Jack Goody in Jack Goody et al, eds., Family and Inheritance (Cambridge, 1976), 117. Another factor affecting inheritance practices is the proximity of cities: Wilhelm Abel, Agrarpolitik, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1958), 154.
*Aversion to dissent seems to be universal among peasants: Robert Redfield notes that “villages do not like factions” (Little Community, Uppsala-Stockholm, 1955, 44).
†Calculated on the basis of figures in Ezhegodnik Rossii, 1910 g. (St. Petersburg, 1911), 258–63. Most of that private land was owned by associations and villages rather than by individual households.
*A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 2nd. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1914), 23. As early as the 1880s, Leroy-Beaulieu says that he met with universal disenchantment with the commune: Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, II (New York-London, 1898), 45–46.