*Under a last-minute provision inserted into the Emancipation Edict, a peasant who did not want to pay could take a fraction of the allotment due to him free of charge. Such allotments were called otrezki.
*Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, II (Stuttgart, 1891), 257–65. If one recalculates Ratzel’s figures, given in leagues, a country with Russia’s climate should support 23 inhabitants per square kilometer.
†Recent researches indicate that the population growth in pre-revolutionary Russia may have been even higher than believed at the time. The current estimate places the excess of births over deaths in 1900 at 16.5 per 1,000 and rising. In European Russia it is estimated to have been 18.4 (1897–1916) and in the Lower Volga region was high as 20: S. I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan in ISSSR, No. 3 (1980), 81. H. J. Habakkuk believes that partible (or “equal division”) inheritance promotes population growth in that it encourages marriage: Journal of Economic History, XV (1955), 5–6.
‡The government estimated that between 1861 and 1901 the rural population in the Empire grew from 52 to 86.6 million and that the annual accretion of rural inhabitants in the closing years of the nineteenth century came to 1.5 million: Alexander Kornilov in Josef Melnik, Russen über Russland (Frankfurt, 1906), 404. This was the figure used by Stolypin in 1907: see below, Chapter 5. The margin of error in all Russian statistics, however, is wide and these figures do not make allowance either for non-rural inhabitants or for infant mortality.
*There were also 7 to 8 million persons occupied in household industries (kustarnaia promyshlennost’), which operated largely to supply the peasants with consumer durables: P. A. Khromov, Ekonomika Rossii perioda promyshlennogo kapitalizma (Moscow, 1963), 105. The majority of the persons who worked in these industries did so at times free from field work and they continued to rely primarily on agricultural income.
†The reliability of these figures has been questioned, however, on the grounds that they make no allowance for peasants who had left the land for the cities and industrial centers although nominally still counted as members of the commune: A. S. Ermolov, Nash zemel’nyi vopros (St. Petersburg, 1906), 62.
*Ivan Oserow (Ozerov) in Melnik, Russen, 211–12. From the statistics provided by A. S. Nifontov (Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroipolovine XIX veka, Moscow, 1974, 310), it transpires that even after rising grain exports are taken into account, the amount of grain domestically available per capita in the 1890s was larger than it had been twenty years earlier; in other words, food production outpaced population growth. Cf. James Y. Simms, Jr., in SR, XXXVI, No. 3 (1977), 310.
*A. S. Ermolov, Nash zemel’nyi vopros (St. Petersburg, 1906), 2, 5. Russia, in fact, lagged far behind all European countries in agricultural yields. “Intensive” agriculture also meant adoption of technical crops, for instance, hemp and flax, which brought in more income.
*Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif., 1982), 3, 5, 48, 155–56. “La patrie,” the author quotes a French priest, “a fine word … that thrills everyone except the peasant”: Ibid., 100. On this subject, see further Theodore Zeldin, France: 1848–1945 (Oxford, 1977), II, 3.
†Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago-London, 1956), 42–64. In his study of the acculturation of the French peasantry, Weber lists as “agencies of change” roads, participation in the political process (“politization”), migration, military service, schools, and the church.
*Ermolov, Zemel’nyi vopros, 25. The discrepancy is due to the fact that official statistics counted as landlords’ property the land which they leased to peasants.
*Pervaia Vseobshchaia Perepis’ Naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g., Obshchii Svod, I (St. Petersburg, 1905), 56. Among females in the same age group, the proportion of literates was not quite 21 percent.
4
The Intelligentsia
Nothing presents less of an obstacle than the perfecting of the imaginary.
—Hippolyte Taine
Whether the conflicts and resentments that exist in every society are peacefully resolved or explode in revolution is largely determined by two factors: the existence of democratic institutions able to redress grievances through legislation and the ability of intellectuals to fan the flames of social discontent for the purpose of gaining power. For it is intellectuals who transmute specific, and therefore remediable, grievances into a wholesale rejection of the status quo. Rebellions happen; revolutions are made:
Initially, a rebellion is without thought: it is visceral, immediate. A revolution implies a doctrine, a project, a program.… A revolution under one aspect or another has intellectual lines of force which rebellions lack. Moreover, a revolution seeks to institutionalize itself.… That which characterizes the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution is the effort to initiate a new organization (in the absence of society!) and this … implies the existence … of “managers” of the revolution.1
In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, social discontent is not enough to produce a revolution:
Neither the opportunity to attack nor real or fancied grievances are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the emergence of active hostility against a social order. For such an atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.2
These groups, these “managers,” are the intelligentsia, who may be defined as intellectuals craving for political power.
Nothing in early-twentieth-century Russia inexorably pushed the country toward revolution, except the presence of an unusually large and fanatical body of professional revolutionaries. It is they who with their well-organized agitational campaigns in 1917 transformed a local fire, the mutiny of Petrograd’s military garrison, into a nationwide conflagration. A class in permanent opposition, hostile to all reforms and compromises, convinced that for anything to change everything had to change, it was the catalytic agent that precipitated the Russian Revolution.
For an intelligentsia to emerge two conditions are required:
1. An ideology based on the conviction that man is not a unique creature endowed with an immortal soul, but a material compound shaped entirely by his environment: from which premise it follows that by reordering man’s social, economic, and political environment in accord with “rational” precepts, it is possible to turn out a new race of perfectly rational human beings. This belief elevates intellectuals, as bearers of rationality, to the status of social engineers and justifies their ambition to displace the ruling elite.
2. Opportunities for intellectuals to gain social and occupational status to advance their group interests—that is, the dissolution of estates and castes and the emergence of free professions which make them independent of the Establishment: law, journalism, secular institutions of higher learning, an industrial economy in need of experts, an educated reading public. These opportunities, accompanied by freedom of speech and of association, make it possible for intellectuals to secure a hold on public opinion.