CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE DATE DUE SE4*-* ^UMSj'S: B- ~ AA^fiiiMi B^^M^Mfik - ^^ " FPg" - ^sc;> - - SE.*!^ig^ , - ^ f CAVLOND PniNTEO IN U.S.A. K 3 1924 067 344 964 M ^ Cornell University ^^ 7 Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924067344964 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. VOL. I. THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY Vm S. 1\\ . *;-eaters, and usurers of all sorts would never have been able to lay hold of and re-enslave the recently enfranchised agrarian population with- out the aid of the tax-gatherer and his satellities. What is it that constrains the peasants to sell in September corn which they know they will be in desperate need of a few months later on } The imperious necessity of paying their taxes. THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 91 The ideal of each peasant's household is to eat the bread from their own fields, providing for the taxes by outdoor work or by some home industry. But few are able to realize their ideal. The vast majority, as I have already shown, sell a consider- able proportion of their harvest in September, only to buy it back in the winter or the spring, always losing heavily thereby, because corn is cheap in September and from thirty to fifty per cent, dearer in the winter and spring. Never- theless they commit each year this economical absurdity, which they thoroughly understand. They risk hunger, knowing well how hard it is to make money in winter. They are aware that in such cases they will have no other resource than to "give themselves in bondage" to some koulak, or landlord, and fully comprehend how disastrous such a step will be. But a peasant always counts on his luck. He thinks he can scrape up a little money and thus escape usurers altogether. And even when compelled to appeal to their ruinous assistance, the peasant lulls his fears to rest with the hope that some pitying fate will at the last moment befriend him. In any case, times moves slowly, and ruin is as yet far off. 92 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. From the taxes there is no escape, and the reckoning day comes quickly. The administra- tion is very exacting as to arrears, for punctuality in collecting taxes constitutes the tax-gatherer's best claim for promotion and the approval of his superiors. No excuse is admitted. Even in times of famine payment of arrears is enforced by the stanovois and ispravniks. When there is neither corn nor cattle to seize in insolvent villages the police sell houses and storehouses, ploughs and harrows, by auction. But such drastic measures as these can be resorted to but once in each village ; the dis- possessed peasants are turned into beggars, and can thenceforth pay nothing more. Adminis- trators who are wise prefer other means, which, while of considerable efficacy, have no disastrous economical consequences, and may, therefore, be repeated every year and to any extent. This is flogging. Insolvent peasants are flogged in a body, in crowds and alone. To show how exten- sively this forcible administrative method is used in modern Russia, 1 may mention that during the winter of 1885-6, a tax-inspector of Novgorod province reported that in one district alone 1,500 peasants were condemned to be flogged for non- THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 93 payment of taxes. Of these, 550 had then been flogged. The remainder were awaiting their turn, and the charitable inspector interceded with the Ministry to procure them a respite. It is, indeed, open to doubt whether even on the old slave-owners' estates there was ever so extensive an application of the rod as there now is in modern Russia, twenty-five years after the Emancipation. It will thus be seen that that old ingredient in Russian life, the rod, still plays a very important part in the lives of the peasants. It is at the bottom of the whole system of spoliation, for the tax-collector's rod and nothing else is driving the peasantry under the wheels of the despoiler's machine, which has for its working or peripheral tools the koulaks, mir-eaters, and usurious land- lords. In the foregoing pages I have described the central or directing organs of the same machine, with its complicated economical network of banks, railways, paper money, and the rest. I have shown, as the reader may remember, that the mainspring of this colossal mechanism, and the final instrument in the abstraction of corn from the mouths of its producers, is the paper 94 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. money issued by the Government. Put in febrile motion by the banks, and concentrated in the hands of the corn merchants, this money over- flows the country in September, and sweeps away with irresistible power the peasants' provision of food. Thus both keys to the machine are held by the Government. In both cases its action is subservient to that of the capitalists, but in both it works in their favour, giving them the necessary power over the objects, or, let us say, the victims of their manipulations — ^the peasants. While lending to the capitalists and the higher-class koulaks millions of paper money with one hand, the Government with the other hand flogs the peasants into submission to the rural agents and representatives of these capitalists — the koulaks, mir-eaters, and usurers of every description. The terrible machine must and will do its work. With the impoverishment of the masses, the drastic measures for extorting taxes will rather become intensified than subside. Having to sustain itself more or less on a level with its powerful Western neighbours, the Empire can neither diminish its expenditure nor arrest the continual increment of the public debt. On the THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 95 Other hand, the more the koulaks and w/r- eaters succeed in their work of devastation the richer they become, and the more are they able to extend their operations. They never have any difficulty in finding investments for their capital in the villages ; they have no need to seek candidates for loans. On the contrary, each winter as the taxes fall due, all these village usurers are besieged with suppliants who, implor- ing their help, submit to every humiliation which a self-satisfied and brutal upstart can inflict, if haply they may obtain from him a loan at cent, per cent. There is no chance of the havoc being arrested. Even at the present day one-third of our formerly independent peasants are reduced to the state of homeless, down-trodden beggarly batraks, and in thirteen provinces the population is literally being starved out at the rate of seven- teen per thousand a year. If no change is brought about, we may affirm that in another fifteen years the rate of this descensus Averni will be doubled. But, the reader may well ask, is there no remedy for these heart-sickening horrors ? For unless the Opposition can bring forth some 96 THE RUSSIAN PEASAXTRY. practical and acceptable proposals of reform, some scheme for ameliorating the deep-rooted evils here described, their exposition, though it may deepen the shadows and intensify the sorrows of this vale of tears, can serve no useful purpose. The question, therefore, is whether any of the parties forming the Opposition have brought forward some acceptable plan capable of im- mediate application for the solution of Russian agrarian — which is equal to saying social- difficulties. Yes, there is such a solution — a solution which has been pointed out not by one, but by every section of the Opposition, by all the thinking men of the country who have studied the ques- tion, and, what is more important still, one which is supported unanimously, the koulaks alone dis- senting, and which enjoys the good wishes of the whole of our agrarian class. Moreover, the peasants' natural good sense has suggested the very same solution of the problem to which men of science have been led by their studies. The peasants must have the land. From sham owners they must be transformed into real proprietors, able to live by their land, pay their taxes, and put something aside for the unforeseen THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 97 casualties of agrarian life, and for the gradual improvement of the cultivation of the land according to the best methods of science and the teachings of Western experience. Is Russia sufficiently rich in land to afford the material possibility for such a reform ? The question hardly needs answering. Less than one- third (twenty-seven per cent.) of the land capable of cultivation is held by the peasantry ; the remaining two-thirds lie as dead capital in the hands of the government or are wasted by the landlords, who either do not cultivate it at all or convert it into an instrument of most reckless extortion. The kabala or " bondage " culture we have just described is the only one which exists or can exist on an extensive scale on the landlords' estates in the Russia of to-day. Now though this may be profitable to private individuals, it is absolutely ruinous to the community at large. It destroys a hundred times more wealth on the side of the peasants than it creates on that of the landlords. Neither are our landlords prospering, as I have shown by statistics in an earlier work (" Russian Storm Cloud," p. 57). If transferred to the peasants, this land, or even only a considerable part of it, would more than 7 98 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. suffice to set them on a firm footing at once, without requiring either any particular outlay or any additional technical knowledge. Every average peasant family can, provided it preserve its implements of labour in good repair and the normal number of cattle, cultivate unaided fifty-four acres of land, and can earn its own living and pay its taxes with ease. The prevailing " three fields " system of culture is undoubtedly the clum- siest of its kind ; under it only two-thirds of the arable land are utilised at a time, the remaining third being kept fallow in order to restore its fertility. The average return yielded by crops over the whole of Russia is moreover only 2*9 to one grain sown (excluding the seed). This is almost the minimum, below which regular agricul- ture would hardly be possible. But the "three fields" system of rotation is the cheapest form of cultivation, requiring a viinimnm outlay in imple- ments and the smallest quantity of manure ; and in the fertile regions of black soil no manure at all. It is the only system possible at the outset. But our agriculture admits of an almost unlimited im- provement. Were the Russian {European) fields cultivated as are those of Great Britain, says E. Reilus, Rtissia would prodjice, instead of six hun- THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 99 ■dred and fifty million hectolitres of corn annually, about five milliards, which would be s^tfiicient to feed a poptdation of five htmdred million souls. {" Geographic Unlverselle,'' vol. v., p. 859.) Add to this the fact that an enormous residue of land is laying in store for future generations. In European Russia the cultivated land is but twenty-one per cent, of the whole area, while it is sixty-one per cent, in Great Britain and eighty- three per cent, in France. The wealth of Russia in land is enormous, and amply sufficient to transform it from a country of beggars into a land of plenty. The poverty of its husbandmen, compelled to sit on their " cat's plot," whilst enormous tracts of land lie waste around them, is a monstrous crime against nature as well as against humanity. A simple reorganization of our absurd agrarian system will put an end to this, and enable the peasants to start on the work of economical progress and emulation. The urgency of this reform, the impossibility of going on without it, and the universal desire for it, are guarantees that, were Russia free to assert her will and manage her own affairs, it would speedily be realized. But it is evident that only a free Russia can and will undertake so radical a THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. reform. The decrepit autocracy has neither the moral strength to risk it nor the material means necessary for its accomplishment. All the Govern- ment has done by way of satisfying the despairing cry for more land and of silencing the clamour made about it by the democratic part of the press, was the foundation, in May 1882, of the so-called " peasants' land bank," for facilitating the acquisition by peasants of saleable land. The means placed at the disposal of this bank were, however, so small (only five million roubles a year, while the Government pays to the railway share- holders alone an annual tribute of forty-six millions) that the bank is unable to supply even the yearly increase of population with land ; and its statutory arrangements are such that it can advance money only to those who already possess something — the koulaks and groups of well-to-do peasants, and not the destitute — thus increasing the segregation and concentration af land into a few hands instead of distributing it more widely. Nothing better, indeed, could be expected from our Government. But let us suppose, for argument's sake, the Autocrat of Russia, head of the privileged of every class — let us suppose him transformed into a Czar- THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. lot Democrat such as some foolish narodniks have imagined. I affirm that the most radical agrarian reform initiated by him without the abolition of the present political organization would be quite inadequate to permanently improve the condition of our peasantry. The mischief already wrought by the present system is too deeply seated to be remedied by mere grants of land. Many of the peasants, no fewer than twenty millions, are unable to cultivate the little land they already possess for lack of cattle and implements — that is, in two words — industrial capital. After the grant of new land they can neither start afresh nor rise to material ease without enjoying for a certain time the benefit of cheap credit. Without this aid they would have to apply once more to the koulaks, who would demand their two hundred and three hundred per cent., and thus repeat the same process of enslavement and spoliation, only on a larger scale than before. The reliance placed by our peasants on their collective strength, educated as they are in the traditions of their mir, — together with the re- markable honesty, fairness, and sense of duty displayed by these mirs in their dealings when I02 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. they are really independent — greatly facilitate such operations as those in question. The union of the peasants of one village offers a far greater security than any individual landlord can give, always provided, of course, that the mir has real and full control over its affairs. A mir is, moreover, a natural and permanent assurance company for all its members in case of unforeseen misfortune, acting thus as preserver of the other- wise unstable economical equilibrium. Under the present rdgime the mir plays this part only in exceptional cases, where the commune is not totally destitute. It is generally composed of a mass of beggars, who cannot afford the assistance they would otherwise give, and of a few koulaks and Mz'r-eaters, who sell their help at the price I have named. Still less can the modern bureaucratic mir be trusted with any money, be the amount great or small. The modern mir is completely subject to the local police and the administration, which allow it the free exercise of its powers of self-govern- ment only when there is no inducement for officials to interfere. Whenever any profit is to be made the stanovoi and ispravniks are always at hand, using every means in their power, from threats THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 103 and ear-boxing to flogging, to enforce their will. The abuse of authority on the part of inferior police agents and administrators, and their cruel treatment of the helpless peasantry, form one of the most sickening and bloody chapters in the annals of Russian autocracy. The common and unfailing expedient used by these officers for getting their fingers into the pie is to get one of their minions nominated to the post of "head-man" {volost) and manager of the communal finances, — of some koulak or »«z>-eater — who will repay their support by giving them a share in the booty. The embezzlement of peasants' money by ad- ministrators of this stamp goes on as impudently here as in the Czar's Government generally. It is certainly practised on a more extensive scale in these cases than in the higher walks of political life, which are necessarily under better control. The illiterate peasants are quite defence- less, and should some educated man try to inter- fere on their behalf he is sure to get into serious trouble, for sympathy with the peasants is always considered in high circles as identical with sub- versive ideas. Robbery goes on unchecked, hardly concealed by even the forms of decency. 104 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. It not infrequently happens that the money paid for taxes is embezzled, the peasant in this case being compelled to pay a second time. The sums sent by the zemstvos for the relief of the hungry are embezzled ; the funds advanced for the purchase of seed corn are seized ; the very corn which is stored in communal granaries as a provision for times of scarcity is stolen. Each year brings heaps of such cases to light. All that can be plundered is plundered. On what ground, then, can we hope that " cheap credit " institutions would escape ? We know by experience how these so-called •' peasants' loans and savings banks " are managed, which for a time were the hobby of the zemstvos and of the liberal officials. They received a consider- able-development, their capital amounting in 1883 to thirteen million roubles— on paper, at least. To show what these banks were I need only quote from the Novoe Vremya, the organ of the high- class koulaks, which admitted that "in an enormous majority of instances the banks benefited the bulk of the peasants nothing what- ever, having become instruments of usury in the hands of rural kotdaks and swindlers." The managers, communal clerks, koulaks, parish THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 105 beadles, and other rural notabilities "borrowed money from the banks to re-lend at usurious interest to needy peasants." (No. 2532.) Several revisions, undertaken on some occasions by the Governors-General in entire provinces, as for instance in those of the eight districts of Tchernigoff Province and the whole Penza province {1882), have shown that the money was principally " bor- rowed " by a few persons when the banks first started, some ten or twelve years ago, and has not yet been refunded. To use plain English, it was simply stolen. For formality's sake, a new book was bought every January, and the old debtors' names re-entered from year to year, as if the amounts standing to their debit had been only just advanced. Exactly the same trick was used by Rykoff, YoukhanzefT, and other high-class robbers who stole millions, a fact which only goes to prove yet once again that les beaux esprits se rencontrent . Enough of this. From these cursory remarks the reader can well realize that the second of the great measures indispensable for extricating the peasants from the grasp of usury — cheap credit — would be a rather risky proceeding under the present political rdgiine. io6 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. The third indispensable requirement for ren- dering the acquisition, by the people, of the material means of work, of any avail is the spread of both elementary and professional education among the rural classes. A large and wide diffusion of knowledge among them would in- crease tenfold the productiveness of labour, and open out an unlimited field for further progress in its social and economical life. But here, once more, we stumble against the autocracy, which cannot tolerate the idea of an educated peasantry, and which does not recoil from the most bare- faced obstructions and shameful subterfuges for hindering the diffusion of primary education, impeding the foundation of new schools, and blocking the wheels of the old ones. To conclude. There is a means for extricating our people from the deadlock to which Russia has been brought ; but it implies as a conditio sine qua, non the abolition of the bureaucratic despotism and the transformation of the autocratic Empire into a free constitutional State of the European type. Of all the series of measures which only in their totalit)^ would suffice to reduce to order the present economical, social, and political chaos, not one can be adopted by the existing regime. THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 107 Each implies or necessitates the breaking up of the present system. And every step that makes for the redemption of the masses involves danger to the supremacy of the Czar and his satellites. Our Government, caring above all things for its own interests and privileges, and putting all else in the background, acts according to the dictates of the grossest selfishness. It did not object to reforms in favour of the peasants so long as the reforms could be effected at the expense of the serf-owning nobility. This was very wise and perspicacious, and for a time won the Emperor Alexander II. great popularity, even among extreme Radicals and Socialists. But from the moment when this was found insufficient, and a demand was made for the cessation of absolute power, the Government made up its mind and took the opposite course. The whole home policy of the two last reigns since the Emancipation, is nothing but a constant fostering of the interests of the privileged classes at the expense of the masses. Hundreds of millions — milliards — of money exacted from the peasants are spent in "supporting the nobility" or the "landlords," or in subsidizing great manufac- turers. For the sake of augmenting the profits THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. of the favoured trades, prohibitive tariffs are levied, wars of conquest are undertaken, and conquered provinces cut off by cordons of custom- houses of the interior. And when, in 1871, the more enlightened and liberal part of the privileged classes — the zemstvos of all the thirty-four provinces where the zemstvos existed — unani- mously condemned the injustice of the present fiscal system and petitioned for the introduction of a progressive income-tax, equitable for all, the Czar Alexander II. pronounced the measure to be too democratic and subversive — too likely to injure and alienate the koulaks, the usurers, the sharpers and the swindlers of every sort. In its selfish fear autocracy appeals to the worst instincts and the basest elements of human nature, for selfish- ness and greed is its best support. Connivance is secured by dividing the booty, and attempts to improve the condition of the masses are regarded as acts of overt sedition. They are opposed by the combined forces of the censorship of the Press and the police. The people's friends are not even allowed to denounce the horrors which are passing under their eyes. The democratic monthlies, such as the Annales, the Slovo, and the Dielo, are suppressed under THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 109 the pretext that they are organs of " revolution " — a nonsensical accusation against periodicals that had been published for fifteen or eighteen years in the Czar's capital. Their real offence was that they made the investigation of the condition of our peasantry the chief object of their efforts, and continually held the light of truth and science over this abyss of popular suffering. Whenever some fact or some rumour brings the agrarian question forcibly before the public, the press invariably receives secret orders, like those of June 12th, 1881, and June 26th, 1882, forbidding, " in order not to excite public opinion," the publication of anything referring to the sen- sational affair of Count Bobrinsky and Prince Scherbatoff, showing such an amount of cruelty, cheating, and malversation on the part of these gentlemen towards the peasantry as to be ex- ceptional and revolting even for Russia. Or the orders are more sweeping, as on March 17th, 1882: — "It is absolutely forbidden to publish anything referring to the rumours going on among peasants as to the redistribution of land, as well as articles alleging the necessity or the justice of making any alteration in the agrarian condition of the peasants." Or on September THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. i8th, 1885: — "Forbidding absolutely the com- memoration in any form of the coming (February 19th, 1886) twenty-fifth anniversary of the eman- cipation of the peasants," lest some allusion to their present evil plight might perchance escape the speakers. This is our position. It is not the Imperial Government that materially or purposely ruins the peasants, which is equivalent to saying the nation ; but the Government, out of regard for its mere selfish interests, purposely and deli- berately supports and assists those who are ruining it, whilst, for the same reason, suppressing every influence and force likely to produce a dif- ferent result. The Government of the two Alex- anders is, therefore, fully and entirely responsible for the present sufferings of the Russian masses. This is the chief, the most terrible and over- whelming count in the indictment against our Government. Great are the wrongs, bitter the abuses and sufferings inflicted by this despotism on the whole of educated Rusia— arbitrary arrests, detentions, exiles without any trial whatever, the trampling down of all sacred human rights, suppression of freedom of speech and of the press, violation of THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. in the hearth and prevention of the right to work, whereby the lives of thousands of intelligent, well-intentioned, and innocent men and women are either wasted or made miserable. But what are their sufferings compared with those of the dumb millions of our peasantry ? What an ocean of sorrow, tears, despair, and degradation is re- flected in these dry figures, which prove that households have by hundreds of thousands been forced to sell by auction all their poor posses- sions ; that millions of peasants who were at one time independent have been turned into datraks, driven from their homes, have had their families destroyed, their children sold into bondage, and their daughters given to prostitution ; and untold numbers of full-grown, nay even gray-haired, respectable labourers, have been shamefully flogged to extort taxes. Then think on these frightful figures of mortality — sixty-two a year per thousand in thirteen provinces. This means nothing less than half a million a year virtually dying of hunger, starved to death in a twelve- month, with the probability that before long the proportion will be doubled. Verily, it is here, and not so much in the cruelties inflicted on political offenders, that we THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. must look for the cause of the fierce, implacable hatred of the revolutionists against their Govern- ment. Herein lies the peremptory cause, the perma- nent stimulant and the highest justification of the Russian revolution and of Russian conspiracies. Life is not worth living when your eyes con- stantly behold such miseries as these inflicted on a people whom you love. It would be a shame to bear the name of a Russian had these unutterable sufferings of the masses called forth no respon- sive and boundless devotion to the people's cause ; a devotion which glows in the hearts of all those thousands of Russia's sons and daughters who risk life, freedom, domestic happiness, all which is most dear to our common nature, in the effort to free their country from a Government which is the mainspring of all these woes. But, we are sometimes told, the Nihilists have no right to set themselves up as champions of the peasants against the autocracy, for the rural masses are loyal and devoted to the Czar. If to label aspirations which, in their very essence, are hostile to the Czardom with the name of the Czar can in truth be called loyalty, why then a vast majority of our peasants are most THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. 113 assuredly very loyal indeed. In this case, how- ever, it is strange that the Imperial Government and the Czar himself place so little trust in this loyalty as to tremble at the thought of putting it to the test. The prospect of perpetual Nihilist attempts, which make the present life of the Gatschina prisoner a burden and the future a terror, seem to the Government preferable to the chances of a popular vote. For have not the Nihilists repeatedly declared that they would desist from hostilities towards their paternal government from the first moment that it obtained the sanction of the freely expressed voice of the people .'' The fact is that the peasants are as dissatisfied with the working of the present institutions as the Nihilists themselves— certainly more dissatisfied than are the educated and privileged classes as a whole. And the reader will certainly admit that for this discontent they have ample cause. The only difference between the middle-class opposition and the peasantry is, that the peasantry think the autocracy has no share whatever in bringing on them the calamities from which they suffer, and that the Czar is as much dissatisfied as the peasants themselves with the present order of 8 114 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. things, which they attribute to the wickedness and cunning of the " nobihty." It is doubtful whether the peasants will stick for ever, or for long, to this nonsensical idea. But I frankly confess that, even as matters now stand, I take a totally different view as to this would-be sanction. I think that if there be anything which deprives our Government of all claim to respect ; if there be anything which can lower it in the eyes of mankind, and which will remain as a stain on its escutcheon for evermore, it is just the foul perfidy involved in the abuse of this touching, child-like confidence reposed in it by the simple-hearted millions of our Russian peasantry. THE MOUJIKS AND THE RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY. CHAPTER I. When, about a score of years before the Emanci- pation, the Russian democrats for the first time came into close contact with the peasants, with the view of becoming better acquainted with their down-trodden brothers, they were amazed at their discoveries. The moujiks proved to be an entirely different race from what pitying people amongst their " elder brothers " expected them to be. Far from being degraded and briltalised by slavery, the peasants, united in their semi-patri- archal, semi-republican village communes, ex- hibited a great share of self-respect, and even capacity to stand boldly by their rights, where the whole of the commune was concerned. Diffident in their dealings with strangers, they showed a remarkable truthfulness and frankness in their dealings among themselves, and a sense of duty and loyalty and unselfish devotion to their little communes, which contrasted strikingly ii8 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. with the shameful corruption and depravity of the official classes. They had not the slightest notion of the pro- gress made by the sciences, and believed that the earth rested on three whales, swimming on the Ocean ; but in their traditional morality they sometimes showed such deep humanity and wisdom as to strike their educated observers with wonder and admiration. These pioneer democrats, men of great talent and enormous erudition, such as Yakushkin, Dal, and Kireevsky, in propagating among the bulk of the reading public the results of their long years of study, laid the base of that democratic feeling which has never since died out in Russia. From that time forth the momentous rush of the educated people "amongst the peasants," and the study of the various sides of peasant life, has been constantly on the increase. No country possesses such a literature on the subject as Russia ; but the tone of the writers of these latter times — men of the same stamp as Yakushkin and Kireevsky — is no longer that of unmixed admiration. Whether you embark on the sea of statistical and ethnographical lore collected for posterity by the untiring zeal 'of the THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 119 late Orloff and his followers, or whether you are lost in admiration of the artistic sketches of peasant life drawn by Uspensky, or whether you are perusing the works of no less trustworthy though less gifted essayists of the same school, such as Zlatovratsky and Zassodimsky, you will invariably be brought to recognise a great breaking up of the traditional groundwork of the social and moral life of our peasantry. Something harsh, cruel, cynically egotistical, is worming itself into the hearts of the Russian agricultural population, where formerly all was simplicity, peace, and goodwill unto men. Thus the grey-bearded grandfathers are not alone in modern Russia in lamenting the good old times. Some of our young and popular writers are, strangely enough, striking the same wailing chords. It is evident that in the terrible straits through which our people are passing, not only their material condition but their very souls have suffered grave injuries. Yet it is not all lamentation about the past in the tidings which reach us from our villages. The good produced by the progress of culture is, in spite of its drawbacks, according to our modest opinion, full compensation for the impairing THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. of the almost unconscious virtues of the old patriarchal period. Freed from the yoke of serfdom, and put before the tribunals on an equal tooting with other citizens, their former masters included, the peasants, too, are beginning to feel themselves to be citizens. A new generation, which has not known slavery, has had time to grow up. Their aspiration after independence has not as yet directed itself against political despotism, save in isolated cases ; but in the meantime it has almost triumphed in the struggle against the more intimate and trying domestic despotism of the bolshak, the head of the household. A very important and thoroughgoing change has taken place in the family relations of the great Russian rural population. The children, as soon as they are grown up and have married, will no longer submit to the bolskak's whimsical rule. They rebel, and if imposed upon, separate and found new households, where they become masters of their own actions. These separations have grown so frequent that the number of independent house- holds in the period from 1858 1 88 1 increased iVom thirty-two per cent, to seventy-one per cent, of the whole provincial population. THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. It is worthy of remark that the rebellion among the educated classes also first began in the circle of domestic life, before stepping into the larger arena of political action. Elementary education, however hampered and obstructed by the Government, is spreading among the rural classes. In 1868, of a hundred recruits of peasant origin there were only eight who could read and write. In 1882 the propor- tion of literate people among the same number was twenty. This is little compared with what might have been done, but it is a great success if we remember the hindrances the peasant has had to overcome. Reading, which a score of years ago was con- fined exclusively to the upper classes, is now spreading among the moujiks. Popular literature of all kinds has received an unprecedented development in the last ten or fifteen years. Popular books run through dozens of editions, and are selling by scores of thousands of copies. Religion is the language in which the human spirit lisps its first conceptions of right and gives vent to its first aspirations. The awakening of the popular intelligence and moral consciousness has found its expression in dozens of new religi- THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. ous sects, a remarkable and suggestive phenome- non of modern popular life in Russia. Differing entirely from the old ritualistic sectarianism, which was more of a rebellion against ecclesiastical arrangements than against orthodoxy, these new sects of rationalistic and Protestant type have acquired in about ten or twelve years hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of proselytes. This movement of thought, both by its exalt- ation and the general tendency of its doctrines, can be compared with the great Protestant movement of the sixteenth century. The only difference consists in its being confined in Russia exclusively to the rural and working classes, with- out being in the least shared by the educated people. The sources of religious enthusiasm are dried up, we think for ever, in the Russian in- tellectual classes, their enthusiasm and exaltation having found quite another vent. For nobody can seriously consider the few drawing-room attempts to found some new creed, of which we have now and then heard of late. But it is beyond doubt that the genuine and earnest deve- lopment of religious thoughts and feelings, which we are witnessing among our masses, will play an important part in our people's near future, THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 123 In whatever direction we look, everything proves that under the apparent calm there is a great movement in the minds of our rural popula- tion. The great social and political crisis, through which Russia is passing, is not confined to the upper classes alone. The process of demolition, slower but vaster, is going on among the masses too. There all is tottering to its fall — orthodoxy, custom, traditional forms of life. The European public only takes notice of the upper stratum of the crisis, of that which is going on among the educated, because of its dramatic manifestations ; but the crisis among our agricultural classes, wrought by the combined efforts of civilisation on the one hand and of economical ruin on the other, is no less real, and certainly no less interesting and worthy of study than the former. In what does this crisis consist ? How far and in what direction have the changes in the social and ethical ideals, the traditional morality and the character of the mouj'ik, the tiller and guardian of our native land, gone ? It would seem presump- tion to answer, or even to attempt to answer, in the space of a few pages such questions in refer- ence to an enormous rural population like the Russian. I hasten, therefore, to mention one 124 THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. thing which renders such an attempt— partial at least — justifiable. A Russian moujik presents of course as many varieties as there are tribes and regions in the vast empire. There is a wide difference between the peculiarly sociable, open-hearted Great Russian peasant, brisk in mind and speech, quick to love and quick to forget, and the dreamy and reserved Ruthenian ; or between the practical, extremely versatile and independent Siberian, who never knew slavery, and the timid Beloruss (White Russian), who has borne three yokes. But through all the varieties of types, tribes, and past history, the millions of our rural population present a remarkable uniformity in those higher general, ethical, and social concep- tions which the educated draw from divers social and political sciences, and the uneducated from their traditions, which are the depositories of the collective wisdom of past generations. This seemingly strange uniformity in our peasants' moral physiognomy is to be accounted for by two causes : the perfect identity of our people's daily occupation, which is almost exclusively pure husbandry, and the great simili- tude of those peculiar self-governing associations, THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. laj village communes, in which the whole of our rural population, without distinction of tribe or place, have lived from time immemorial. No occupation is fitter to develop a morally as well as physically healthy race than husbandry. We mean genuine husbandry, where the tiller of the soil is at the same time its owner. We need not dwell on the proofs. Poets, historians, and philosophers alike have done their best to bring home to us, corrupted children of the towns, the charms of the simple virtues which hold sway amidst the populations of staunch ploughmen. In Russia, until the " economic progress " of the last twenty-five years turned twenty millions of our peasants into landless proletarians, they were all landowners. Even the scourge of serf- dom could not depose them from that dignity. The serfs, who gratuitously tilled the manorial land, had each of them pieces of freehold land which they cultivated on their own account. Nominally it was the property of the landlords. But so strong was tradition and custom that the landlords themselves had almost forgotten that they had a right to it. So much was this the case that Professor Engelhardt (" Letters from a Village"), tells us that many of the former 126 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. seigneurs only learned from the Act of Emancipa- tion of 1 86 1 that the land on which the peasants dwelt also belonged to them. Gleb Uspensky, in discussing the causes of the wonderful preservation of the purity of the moral character of the Russian people through such a terrible ordeal as three centuries of slavery, which passed over without ingrafting into it any of the vice of slavery, can find no other explanation than this : the peasant was never separated from the ploughshare, from the all-absorbing cares and the poetry of agricultural work. Our peasants could, however, do something more than preserve their individuality. They could give a more lasting proof and testimony as to their collective dispositions and aspirations. A Russian village has never been a mere aggrega- tion of individuals, but a very intimate association, having much work and life in common. These associations are called mirs among the Great and White Russians, hromadas among the Ruthenians. Up to the present time the law has allowed them a considerable amount of self-government, They are free to manage all their economical con- THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 127 cerns in common : the land, if they hold it as common property — which is the case everywhere save in the Ruthenian provinces — the forests, the fisheries, the renting of public-houses standing on their territory, etc. They distribute among them- selves as they choose, the taxes falling to the share of the commune according to the Govern- ment schedules. They elect the rural executive administration — Statost and Starshinas — who are (nominally at least) under their permanent control. Another very important privilege which they possess is that they, the village communes com- posing the Volost, in general meeting assembled, elect the ten judges of the Volost. All these must be peasants, members of some village commune. The jurisdiction of the peasants' tri- bunal is very extensive ; all the civil, and a good many criminal offences (save the capital ones), in which one of the parties, at least, is a peasant of the district, are amenable to it. The peasants sitting as judges are not bound to abide in their verdicts by the official code of law. They administer justice according to the customary laws and traditions of the local peasantry. The records of these tribunals, published by an official commission, at once afford us an insight 128 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTKy. into the peasants' original notions as to juridical questions. We pass over the verdicts illustrating the popular idea as to land tenure, which has been expounded above. We will rather try to elicit tht other side of the question : the peasants' views on movable property, the right of bequest, of in- heritance, and their civil code in general, which presents some curious and unexpected peculiarities. The fact which strikes us most in it is, that among the peasants where the patriarchal principle is as yet so strong and the ties of blood are held so sacred, kinship gives no right to property. * The only rightful claim to it is given by work. Whenever the two interests clash, it is to the right of labour that the popular conscience gives the preference. The father cannot disinherit one son or diminish his share for the benefit of his favourite. Notwithstanding the religious respect in which the last will of a dying man is held, both the 7nir and the tribunal will annul it at the complaint of the wronged man, if the latter is known to be a good and diligent worker. The fathers themselves know this well. Whenever they attempt to prejudice one of their children in their wills they always adduce as motive that he has been a sluggard or a spendthrift and has THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 129 already dissipated his share. The favourite, on the other hand, is mentioned as " having worked hard for the family." Kinship has no influence whatever in the distribution and proportioning of shares at any division of property. It is determined by the quantity of work each has given to the family. The brother who has lived and worked with the family for the longer time will receive most, no matter whether he be the elder or the younger. He will be excluded from the inheritance alto- gether if he has been living somewhere else and has not contributed in some way to the common expenses. The same principle is observed in settling the differences between the other grades of kinsfolk. The cases of sons in-law, step-sons, and adopted children are very characteristic. If they have remained a sufficient time — ten or more years — with the family, they receive, though strangers, all the rights of legitimate children, whilst the legitimate son is excluded if he have not taken part in the common work. This is in flagrant contradiction to the civil code of Russia, as well as of other European countries. The same contradiction is observable in the question of women's rights. The Russian 9 I30 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. law entitles women — legitimate wives and daugh- ters — to one-fourteenth only of the family inherit- ance. The peasants' customary law requires no such limitation. The women are in all respects dealt with on an equal footing with the men. They share in the property in proportion to their share in the work. Sisters, as a rule, do not inherit from brothers, because in marrying they go to another family, and take with them as dowry the reward of their domestic work. But a spinster sister, or a widow who returns to live with her brothers, will always receive or obtain from the tribunal her share. The right to inheritance being founded on work alone, no distinction is made by the peasants' customary law between legitimate wives and concubines. It is interesting to note that the husband, too, inherits the wife's property (if she has brought him any) only when they have lived together sufficiently long — above ten years ; otherwise the deceased wife's property is returned to her parents. The principle ruling the order of inheritance is evidently the basis for the verdicts in all sorts of litigation. Labour is always recognized as giving an indefeasible right to property. Accord- THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 131 ing to common jurisprudence, if one man has sown a field belonging to another — especially if he has done it knowingly — the court of justice will unhesitatingly deny the offender any right to the eventual product. Our peasants are as strict in their observance of boundaries, when once traced, as are any other agricultural folk. But labour has its imprescriptible rights. The customary law prescribes a remuneration for the work executed in both of the above mentioned cases — in the case of unintentional as well as in the case of premeditated violation of property. Only, in the first instance, the offender, who retains all the product, is simply compelled to pay to the owner the rent of the piece of land he has sown, according to current prices, with some trifling additional present ; whilst in the case of violation knowingly done, the product is left to the owner of the land, who is bound, nevertheless, to return to the offender the seed, and to pay him a labourer's wages for the work he has done. If a peasant has cut wood in a forest belonging to another peasant, the tribunal settles the matter in a similar way. In all these cases the commbn law would have been wholly against the offender, the abstract right of property reigning supreme. 132 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. In the vast practice of the many thousands of peasants' tribunals, there are certainly instances of verdicts being given on other principles than these, or contrary to any principle whatever. Remembering the very numerous influences to which a modern village is subjected in these critical times, it would have been surprising were it otherwise. Moreover, the peasants' tribunal has by its side the pissar, the communal clerk, a stranger to the village and its customs. This important person is the champion and propagator of official views and of the official code. His in- fluence on the decisions of the peasants' courts is considerable, as is well known. The rarity of the ex- ceptions, however, makes the rule the more salient. The peasants have applied their collective intelligence not to material questions alone, nor within the domain apportioned to them by law, The niir recognises no restraint on its autonomy. In the opinion of the peasants themselves, the mir s authority embraces, indeed, all domains and branches of peasant life. Unless the police and the local officers are at hand to prevent what is considered an abuse of power, the peasants' mir is always likely to exceed its authority. THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 133 Here is a curious illustration. In the autumn of 1884, according to the Russian Courier of the 1 2th November, 1884, a peasants' mir in the district of Radomysl had to pronounce upon the following delicate petition : One of their fellow- villagers, Theodor P., whose wife had run away from him several years before, and who was living as housemaid in some private house, wanted to marry another woman from a neigh- bouring village. He accordingly asked the mir to accept his bride as a female member of their commune. Having heard and discussed this original demand, the mir unanimously passed the following resolution : " Taking into consider- ation that the peasant Theodor P., living for several years without his legitimate wife by the fault of the latter, is now in great need of a woman (!), his marriage with the former wife is dissolved. In accordance with which, after being thrice questioned by the elder (mayor) of our village as to whether we will permit Theodor P. to receive into his house as wife the peasant woman N , we give our full consent thereto. And if, moreover, Theodor P. shall have children by his second wife, we will recognise them as legitimate and as heirs to their father's 134 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. property, the freehold and the communal land included." This resolution, duly put on paper and signed by all the householders and by the elder of the village, was delivered as certificate of marriage to the happy couple, no one sus- pecting that the mir had overstepped its power. In the olden times, as late as the sixteenth century, it was the mir who elected the parson (as the dissenting villages are doing nowadays), the bishops only imposing hands on the mirs nominees. The orthodox peasants have quite forgotten this historical right of theirs ; but the natural right of the mir allows it to deal even with subjects referring to religion. The conversion to dissenting creeds of whole villages in a lump, is of very common occurrence in the history of modern sects. A dissenting preacher comes to a village and makes a few converts. For a time they zealously preach their doctrines to their fellow-villagers. Then, when they consider the harvest ripe, they bring the matter before the mir, and often that assembly, after discussing the question, passes a resolution in favour of the acceptance of the THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 135 new creed. The whole village turns "shaloput" or "evangelical," changing creeds as small states did in the times of the Reformation. To a Russian peasant it seems the most natural thing in the world that the mir should do this whenever it chooses. In my wanderings among the peasants, I remember having met near Riazan with a peasant who amused me much by telling how they succeeded in putting a check on the cupidity and extortion of the pop of their village. "When we could no longer bear it we assembled and said to him, ' Take care, batka (father) ; if you won't be reasonable, we, all the mir, will give up orthodoxy altogether, and will elect a pop from among ourselves.' " And the pop then became " tender as silk," for he knew his flock would not hesitate to put their threat into effect. The mir forms indeed a microcosm, a small world of its own. The people living in it have to exercise their judgment on everything, on the moral side of man's life as on the material, shaping it so as to afford to their small com- munities as much peace and happiness as is possible under their very arduous circumstances. 136 2HE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Have these uneducated people been able to achieve anything in the high domain of public morality ? Yes, they have, though what they have done cannot be registered in volumes like the verdicts of their tribunals. They have maintained througn centuries, and improved, the old Russian principle of governing without oppression. To settle all public questions by unanimous vote, never by mere majority, is a wise rule, for a body of people living on such close terms. This system, however, could only be rendered practicable, amongst people of all sorts of tempers and diverse moral qualities, by a high development of the sentiments of justice, equanimity, and concili- ation. Our peasants lay no claim to being a race of Arcadian pastors. Their present and their past alike has been and still is too hard to make it possible for them ever to forget that charity begins at home. In the bitter struggle for a bare existence which they have had to sustain, each has had to consider his own skin first. In their every day life and intercourse they are as egotistical as any other set of people, each man trying to make the best of his opportunities. THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 137 " Each for himself," say they — " but God and the mir for all." The mir is no egotist ; it pities everybody alike, and should it have to settle any difference it does not look to the numerical strength or respective influence of the contending parties, but to the absolute justice of the cause. But is not the mir composed of the selfsame individuals who outside of its charmed circle are pursuing each his personal ends and interests .-' If they are able to forget themselves when at the mir, and can elevate their minds and hearts to the exercise of perfect justice and impartiality, they must also be equal to doing the same out- side of the mir, in those solemn moments when daily cares and anxieties are cast on one side and their higher nature has free play. The mir s morality gives its tone to, and shapes according to its image, the morality of the individual too. Hence that wide tolerance which characterises our peasants ; that somev/hat gregarious benevo- lence embracing all men, almost to the prejudice of intensity of personal attachment, but which excludes nobody from its pale. The Russian moujik is proverbially benevolent towards strangers 138 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. of his own race. He is accustomed to feel something Hke family attachment to most, or to very many, of the members of his mir. It is. easy for him to admit a new member into so large a family. When difference of religion and of language do not allow of the full benefit of adoption — he will still recognise in the stranger a man like himself. There is no people on the face of the earth who treat aliens so kindly as do the Russian moujiks. They live peacefully side by side with hundreds of tribes, differing in race and religion — Tartars, Circassians, Bouriats, and German colonists. (The outburst against the Jews sprang from economical causes, and not from racial antipathy.) During the last Turkish war, whilst the burghers and the shop-boys of the towns were casting stones and mud at the poor Turkish prisoners of war, as they passed along the streets, until the police had to intervene, the moujiks offered them bread and coppers, and in some cases even took them home to their villages as paid labourers. They were greatly perplexed, it is true, as to whether they could invite them to share their meals, being " infidels," but they generally ended by conquering their prejudices ; THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 139 and they, the representatives of two belligerent nations, might be seen amicably eating at the same table (Zlatovratsey). The mir in the management of its affairs recog- nises no permanent laws restricting or guiding its decisions. It is the personification of the living law, speaking through the collective voice of the commune. Every case brought before the mir is judged on its own merits, according to the endless variety of its peculiar circumstances. In foreign lands, too, the laws tacitly acknowledge the necessity for making a considerable allowance for the voice of pure conscience in the more delicate questions of society — as to the culpability or innocence of its members. But by the side of the jury sits the judge, the representative of the written law, one of whose duties it is to control and keep them within their strictly defined limits — i.e„ to the mere verdict as to the facts of the case. With a Russian mir the law is nowhere, ^ the " conscience " everywhere. Not merely the fact of the criminal offence, but every disputed point is settled according to the individual justice of the case, no regard being paid to the category of crime to which it may chance to belong. HO THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. These villagers have to deal with living men whom they know and love, and it is deeply repugnant to them to overshoot the mark by so much as a hair's breadth for the sake of a dead abstraction — the law. This bent of mind is not confined to the peasantry, — it is national. I have frequently observed, and I believe that all who have given any attention to the subject will agree with me, that the abstract idea of " law," as a something which is to be obeyed to the letter under all circumstances, even when the peculiar circumstances of a case make it unjust, is grasped with the greatest difficulty, even by the most cultured Russians. There are few among our countrymen who will not give the preference to the dictates of con- science tempered by a fair and impartial mind. They are in this respect a perfect contrast to the people of English origin. In otir great poet Pushkin this feeling was so strong as to make him an upholder of the principle of absolute monarchy. "Why," he said, "is it necessary that one of us should be put above all the rest, and even above the laws ? Because the law is a wooden thing. In the law the man feels something hard. THE MOUIIKS AT HOME. unbrotherly. With a literal application of the law you cannot do much. But at the same time nobody may take upon himself to transgress or disregard the law. Hence it is necessary that there should be a supreme clemency to temper the laws, and this can only be embodied in the autocratic monarch." Out of respect to the memory of our great national teacher of art, I will not here discuss the antiquated conception of a monarch as a dispenser of justice, and not as an administrator, bound to know all, to see all, to understand all, under penalty of being befooled and made a tool of at every turn. I simply mention it as a good illus- tration of the peculiar bent of the Russian mind. Much of this is to be ascribed to the lack of political education, and to the feeble development of the proud and powerful sense of individuality which is the one quality we most envy our Western neighbours. To a truly independent man even a hard law, because abstract and dis- passionate, and known to him beforehand, is a better thing than the most benignant despotism. That which is the most abhorrent to him is the sense that he is dependent on the good pleasure cf another — be it the benevolent despotism of 142 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. one master or even the still more benevolent despotism of a friendly crowd. Nevertheless we must not forget that on the other hand we have been spared the habit of not looking or caring to look beyond the mere legal aspect and established rule as to human conduct. In constantly striving after individual justice, both in practice, as with the peasants, and in theory, as with the educated classes, our people have not been able to rest satisfied with mere appearances, nor to consider the question solved as soon as they discovered under which section of the criminal or any other code the trespass fell. They have had to look into the very innermost recesses of the human heart, to discover all its hidden promptings, and to subject them to an impartial, dispassionate examination, all which must needs have educated our people in a spirit of the highest tolerance. " To understand every- thing is to forgive everything," is the deepest of human sayings. Hence that "pity for all" which extends, not merely to the weak, but to the fallen, to the de- graded, to the outcast. Just observe how our moujiks behave towards criminals. All, without distinction, are designated under the generic terra IHE MOUJIKS AT HOME. i43 oi "unhappy," and are treated as such. No contempt, no harshness can be detected in the demeanour of the crowd of peasants, who meet (bearing alms in their hands) a body of convicts being escorted to Siberia. They know that many •of them must be innocent of any real offence. But there is something deeper than this in their humanity. Gogol, who excelled all other writers in the insight he possessed as to the workings of the Russian mind, observes that " of all nations the Russian alone is convinced that there exists no man who is absolutely guilty, as there exists no man who is absolutely innocent." Is it not this same idea which permeates Dostoievsky's masterpiece, " Buried Alive" ? Is not this "pity for all " apparent throughout the works of all our great masters, from Gogol to Gonciaroff and Ostrovsky ? Herein lies yet one more proof that in the moral qualities of the two extreme sections of the Russian nation — the peasantry, who are at the bottom of the social scale, and the educated, who are at the top — there are some striking resemblances which cannot be purely accidental. Many foreign writers have been struck by the peculiar ardour which animates the Russians of ail classes in their devotion to their country. THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Well, I do not know whether this is due fy the emotional character of our people, or whether it is merely a reflection of what is intensely de- veloped under another name within our masses. Among the peasantry, in whose eyes their mir is their country, the devotion of each individual to the mir has been made the keynote of social morality. They have learned to exercise self- restraint in petty everyday concessions and services to the mir, and have risen to the sub- limity of heroism in their acts of self-sacrifice for its good. Examples of this are frequent. To "suffer for the mir;" to be put in chains and to be thrown into prison as the mirs khodok or messenger, — " sent to the Czar " with the mirs grievances ; to be beaten, exiled to Siberia or to the mines, for having stood up boldly for the rights of the mir against some powerful oppressor, — such are the forms of heroism to which an enthusiastic peasant aspires, and which the people extol. The orthodox Church has no hold over the souls of the masses. The pop or priest is but an official of the bureaucracy and depredator of the commune. But we hardly need to say that the high ethics of Christianity, the appeal to brotherly THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. i45 love, to forgiveness, to self-sacrifice for the good of others, yet have always found an echo in the responsive chords of our people's hearts. " The type of a saint, as conceived by our peasants," says Uspensky, " is not that of an anchorite, timidly secluded from the world, lest some part of the treasure he is accumulating in heaven might get damaged. Our popular saint is a man of the mir, a man of practical piety, a teacher and benefactor of the people." In AthanasiefFs col- lection of popular legends we find an illustration of this idea. Two saints — St. Cassian and St. Nicolas — have come before the face of the Lord, •'What hast thou seen on the earth } " asks the Lord of St. Cassian, who first approached. " I h^ve seen a moujik foundering with his car in a marsh by the wayside." " Why hast thou not helped him ? " " Because I was coming into Thy presence, and was afraid of spoiling my bright clothes." The turn of St. Nicolas comes, who approaches with his dress all besmeared. " Why comest thou so dirty into my presence ? ' asks the Lord. " Because I was following St. Cassian, and, seeing the moujik of whom he just spoke, I have helped him out of the marsh." TO 146 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. "Well," said the Lord, "because thou, Cassian, hast cared so much about thy dress and so litde about thy brother, 1 will give thee thy saint's day only once in four years. And to thee, Nicolas, for having acted as thou didst, I will give four saint's days each year." That is why St. Cassian's Day falls on the 29th of February, in leap year, and St. Nicolas has a saint's day each quarter. Such is the peasant's interpretation of Christian morality. And is it not suggestive that the greatest novelist of our time, and a man of such vast intelligence as Count Leo Tolstoi, in making his attempt to found a purely ethical religion, formulates his views by referring the educated classes to the gospel as it is understood by the moujik ? Since I do not in the least presume to sketch anything like a full picture of our people's moral physiognomy, I shall stop here. My sole object has been to show that our peasantry, on the whole, as it has entered into political life and freedom after centuries of internal growth, presents a race with highly developed social instincts and many elements promising further progress ; and that the feelings of deep respect, sometimes of enthusiastic THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. I47 admiration, which the Russian democrats feel for the peasantry, are not devoid of foundation. These feelings may often have been exag- gerated, especially of old, when the two classes for the first time came into close contact. But excess of idealisation and sentimentality have become matters of history. They were destroyed by the rough touch of reality ; and the mighty figure of the hero of the plough has lost nothing by being stripped of tinsel. Hewn in unpolished stone, he looks better than when robed in marble. The charm of his strength, dauntless courage, and his moral character is strengthened by the thrilling voice of pity for the overwhelming, the indescribable sufferings of this childlike giant. A passion for Equality and Fraternity is and will ever be the strongest, we may say the only strong social feeling in Russia. It is by no means the privilege of " Nihilists," or advanced parties of any kind ; it is shared by the enormous majority of our educated classes, Man is a sociable being. He yearns to attach himself to something vaster than a family, having a longer existence than his immediate sur- roundings. The feeling in which this yearning finds its commonest and easiest expression is 148 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. patriotism, embracing the whole of the nation, the State and the people being blended into one. For us Russians, no such blending is possible. The crimes, the cruelties, equalled only by the folly, of those who are representing Russia as a State, stand there to prevent it. No, no true Russian can ever wish Godspeed to the Government of his country. And yet we Russians are most ardent patriots. We have no attachment to our birthplace or any particular locality. But we love our people, our race, as intensely and organically as the Jews. And we are almost as incapable of getting thoroughly acclimatised in any other nation. In describing Russia's real and not fictitious glories, in speak- ing when in an expansive mood about his country's probable future and the service she is likely to render to mankind, a Russian can startle a Chauviniste of the grande nation. Yes, we are certainly patriotic. Only our patriotism runs entirely towards the realisation of the democratic ideal. The idea of country is em- bodied for us not in our State but in our people, in the moujiks and in those various elements which make the moujiks cause our own. Our hopes, our devotion, our love, and that irresistible THE MOUJIKS AT HOME. 149 idealism which stimulates to great labour, all that constitutes the essence of patriotism, with us is democratic. In the following chapters I will relate how our popular notions of morality and justice bore the test of adversity ; what was the form assumed in villages by the corrosive elements, and how the people defended their traditional ideals of life. We will begin by briefly sketching the ten- dencies of the purely political elements newly introduced into Russian village life, as they are more circumscribed in their action and far less widespread than the economical. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. CHAPTER I. As soon as the government had earnestly set its mind on the emancipation of the serfs, the all- important questions had to be faced, as to how all these millions of newly-made citizens should be managed and kept in order ; and how they should be made to pay the price of their re- demption to the lords of the manors, and the taxes to the State ? The bureaucratic commission appointed for the settlement of this great problem of the Emancipation, with usual bureaucratic fore- sight and profundity, at first proposed that to the former seigneurs should be entrusted the admini- stration, the justice, and the police of the rural districts. This would have been neither more nor less than a re-instatement, only in another form, of serfdom — a joke made all the more dangerous in that there was but too much reason to anticipate bitter disappointments on the part of the people on many other points connected with their libera- 154 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. tion. Fortunately for itself, the Government listened to wiser counsel, offered by local commit- tees, and the press, which pointed to the village communes as to natural and long-established insti- tutions standing ready to their hand and existing throughout the country. The village commune was preserved. The open-air meetings of all the peasants, the mir, were acknowledged as the chief authority both in the village commune and in the rural volost or district, an administrative unit embracing a few village communes. But here most puzzling questions of detail presented themselves to the minds of the St. Petersburg legislators. Notwithstanding the benevolent regard for the peasants which pre- vailed at this epoch in the highest governmental circles, our lawgivers could not admit that the mir might be left just as they found it. It was more than the most refined bureaucratic mind could digest — the mir and the tchin ! It was as though two cultures, two different worlds, we may almost say two different types of human nature, as strongly individualized as they were antipathetic, had suddenly been brought face to face. What is a tchmovnik ? 1 1 is a man convinced that were it not for his "prescriptions," "instruc- PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 155 tions," and " enjoinments " the world would go all askew, and the people would suddenly begin to drink ink instead of water, to put their breeches on their heads instead of on their legs, and to commit all sorts of other incongruities. As all his life is passed from his most tender youth upward in offices, amidst heaps of scribbled papers, in complete isolation from any touch with real life, the tchinovnik understands nothing, has faith in nothing but these papers. He is as desperately sceptical as regards human nature as a monk, and does not trust one atom to men's virtue, honesty, or truthfulness. There is nothing in the world which can be relied upon but scribbled papers, and he is their votary. Such an institution as the mir — a self-governing body with no trace of hierarchy or distinction of ranks, wielding an authority so extensive that in its own sphere of action it might be called un- limited, and at the same time wishing for no record of its proceedings, confiding in people's good faith and the infallible guidance of such a thing as collective conscience and wisdom — such an institution as the mir, to the mind of a tchinovmk, must have appeared incoherent, in- comprehensible, almost contrary to the laws of 156 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. nature. It was his most sacred duty to bring order into this chaos. Every Russian village commune elects its elder or mayor, who is by virtue of his office its spokesman and delegate before the authorities. In the village itself the elder is neither the chief nor even the primus inter pares, but simply the trusted servant and executor of the orders of the 7mr. The Tnir discusses and regulates every- thing that falls within its narrow and simple sphere of action, leaving hardly anything to the discrimination and judgment of its agent. So simple and subordinate are the elder's duties, that any peasant, provided he be neither a drunkard nor a thief, is eligible for the post. In many villages, in order to avoid discussion, the office of elder Is filled in turn by all the members of the mir. As the eldership brings the peasant Into frequent, almost daily, contact with the adminis- tration, which involves him in endless trouble and annoyance, peasants show very little ambition to fill rhe office. Much persuasion, sometimes remonstrance and abuse, are necessary before an honest peasant, who has not the feathering of his nest in view at the expense of the commune, can be induced to accept this post of honour. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 157 Some writers — Mr. Mackenzie Wallace among them — in describing Russian village life, wonder at this strange lack of political ambition. I think it only too natural : our moujiks have not studied the history of Rome, Athens, and other republics, nor do they so much as suspect the existence of great municipalities such as London, Paris, or New York. No obsequious imagination suggests to them flattering analogies, and they cannot see that the proffered dignity is anything but a double servitude — to the mir on the one hand and to the administration on the other with no room whatever for the proud self-assertion which gives the charm of office to the gifted ; a burden and a public work, differing from those of mending the roads, digging wells, or transporting Government freights only in so far that it is more trying and more troublesome. Now, in modifying the system of rural self- government the St. Petersburg tchinovniks were inspired to transform this very modest and humble village elder into a diminutive tchinovnik, created in their own image and likeness. The task was not without its difficulties. The elder was as a rule deficient in the most essential qualification for his profession — he could not 158 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. write ! It was therefore necessary that he should be provided with a secretary, who could inscribe the paper to which he should affix his seal or his cross. This important person, the clerk, was generally a perfect stranger to the village, a man picked up from the streets. As the law must needs give him extensive powers, it was all the more desirable that he should be easily controlled. Our legislators proved equal to their task ; for they blessed our villagers with a system of law- court proceedings which would do honour to much bigger places. To give some idea of their method, suffice it to say that the clerk of the > volost is bound to supply his office with no less than sixty-five different registers, wherein to keep a record of the sixty-five various papers he has to issue daily, monthly, or quarterly. This was pushing their solicitude for the welfare of the countrymen rather too far, and taxing the clerk's powers rather too highly. In some of the larger volosts one man does not suffice for the task, and the peasants are compelled to maintain two, nay, even three clerks. It is needless to add that such a complication of legal business can in no way keep an adroit clerk in check nor prevent the abuse of his power. The opposite is rather the PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. mg case. The figure cut by the pissar or clerk in the annals of our new rural local government is a most unseemly one indeed. In its earlier period it was decidedly its blackest point. The Government has undoubtedly had a hand in making the pissar such a disreputable character, by expressly prohibiting the engagement for this office of men of good education, — for fear of a revolution. All who have completed their studies at a gymnasium (college), much more those who have attended a high school, are precluded from filling this post. Only the more ignorant, those who have been expelled from college or who have never passed farther than through a primary school, have been trusted to approach the pea- santry at such close quarters. Being generally self-seekers, and not particularly high-minded, they easily turned the peculiar position in which they were placed to their own advantage. The pissar, the interpreter of the law, and, more often than not, the only literate man in the district, could practically do whatever he chose. The elder, his nominal chief, in whom the word law inspired the same panic that it did in the breast of every other peasant, and who was quite bewildered by the bureaucratic complication of his i6o ThE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. new administrative duties, was absolutely helpless in \ki^ pissar' s hands. The elders could, however, find ample com- pensation for this kind of involuntary dependence, in the consciousness of the power they wielded over the rest of the villagers. At the present day they are really chiefs and masters. To the elders of both grades was granted the right of imposing fines, to the extent of one rouble at a time ; also the right to imprison or to impose compulsory labour, for a period not exceeding two days, on any member of their respective communes or volost. This " at their own discretion and without appeal," for any word, or act, or slight which they might consider derogatory to their dignity, such as omission to take off a hat before them, etc., of which there have been instances in recent times. Neither with regard to the mir as a whole, may the elder's rights be lightly trifled with. In them is vested the exclusive right of convening meetings of the commune or the volost. A meeting assembled without their authorization is declared illegal, its resolutions void, and its con- veners liable to severe penalties. By withdrawing from a meeting the elder can break it up when- PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. i6r ever he considers that the debate is taking an unlawful turn. Thus the elder, though elected by- popular vote, when once confirmed in his office becomes, for all practical purposes, the master of the body which elected him. A strange sort of local government certainly, though by no means an exceptional one under an autocracy. The local governments granted to our provinces in 1864, and to our towns in 1871, are modelled on exactly the same pattern. In both the chair- man has more power than the body he presides over ; an arrangement which has, as is well known, deprived both the provincial and the municipal governments of all vitality. It is interesting to observe that in the villages the same trick did not produce this same effect. There the legislation met with an ancient custom of collective communal life and local government which no ukaz could uproot. True that in the last twenty years great corruption had crept in, even in the case of village government. But this was due to the internal economical decomposition of the village commune, which divided the inhabi- tants into two camps, the one composed of a knot of rich people, and the other of a mass of proletarians and beggars. The law then became II i62 THE RUSSIAN. PEASANTRY. a ready-made channel for the manifestations of the new anti-social elements, but not its direct cause. So long as the process of the economical dis- integration of the peasantry remains in an inci- pient state, as also in the thousands of communes which have until the present time preserved their original economical character, the bureaucratic prescriptions of the law remain a dead letter. The mir keeps to the traditional forms of local government. The elders, too, imbued with these traditions just as much as are their fellow-peasants, never think of making use of the strange powers reposed in them by the State. They remain in the subordinate and modest position formerly assigned to them — the " mirs men," to use our people's own expression. It fared far worse with the other series of manipulations introduced into rural government, and which formed the natural supplement to those just dealt with. Local village government had as yet to be linked in hierarchical order with the whole of the administrative machine of the State. After having created, in the midst of the once demo- cratic villages, a sort of tchin, it was necessary to PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 163 discover another tchin to which to subject the newly-founded one. The government, in the honeymoon of its liberalism, acted with sense and discretion in entrusting this function to the mediators, officers nominated conjointly by the ministry and by the election of the citizens. These mediators, elected from among the liberal and really well-intentioned part of the nobility, exercised their authority with moderation and wisdom, not so much as regarded subjection to the control of the mir, which was perfecriy equal to its task, but to protect it from the abuses and malversations of the local police and \\s,pissars. Since 1863, the year of the Polish Insurrection, which marks the point at which our Government adopted a policy of reaction, the state of things has changed considerably. The Government then threw all the weight of its authority into the scale with the party of the " planters," as the obdurate advocates of serfdom were, in 1861, christened. The whole administration changed sides, and Russia has since seen m-ediators who have used their powers in order to compel the peasants to gratuitously do all sorts of work on their estates ; who have publicly flogged the elders — mocking i64 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. at the law, which exempted them from corporal punishment, by first degrading them from their office, and then restoring to them the attributes of their dignity after they have been flogged. The regular bondage of the mir began, how- ever, a few years later. From 1868 down to 1874, when the office of the mediators was entirely suppressed, the mir gradually passed under the supreme command of the ispraviiik, i.e., the superintendents of the local police. The peasants' bitterest enemy could not have made a worse choice. A police officer — we are speaking now of the common police, charged with the general mainten- ance of order and the putting down of common offenders — is a tchin in the administrative hierarchy like all the others. But between him and a paper-scribbling tchin of the innumerable Government offices, there is as wide a difference as between a decent, peaceful Chinese, votary of his ten thousand commandments, and a brutal and fierce Mogul of Jenghiz— though both have beardless faces and oblique eyes. A police tchin is our man of action. With him the instrument of command is not the pen, but the fist, the rod, and the stick. He breaks more teeth and flays. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT, 165 more backs than he issues papers. As regards other people's property, tchins of all denomina- tions hold the same somewhat strange views. But whilst the scribbling tchin cheat and swindle, the police tchin ransack and extort like Oriental pachas. In the villages, amongst the moujiks, who will suffer to the uttermost before "going to law,'' the police can afford to go to any extreme short of open homicide and arson. The function of tax collector alone, which, after the Emancipation, was entrusted to the police, offered a vast field for interference, abuse, and oppression, and of these the early zemstvos often complain. When the ispravniks were charged with the chief control of the rural administration, and could at their pleasure, and by way of disciplinary punishment, indict, fine, and imprison both the district and commual elders, self-government by the peasants, as such, was practially abolished. It could exist only as far and in so much as the police chose to tolerate it. " The ispravniks, thanks to the powers they have received, have transformed the elected officers of the rural government, the elders, into their submissive servants, who are more dependent on them than are even the l66 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. soldiers of the police-stations," — that is the state- ment made by the most competent authorities on the subject, the members of the zemstvos. {Russian Courier, Nov. 8th, 1884.) The village communes have become for the country police a permanent source of income,^ often levied in a way which reminds one forcibly of the good old days of serfdom. Thus, in the circular issued by the Minister of the Interior on March 29th, 1880, we find the significant confession that, "according to the reports accumulated in the offices of the ministry," the country police officers, profiting by their right to have one orderly to run their errands, were in the habit of taking from forty to fifty such orderlies from the communes under their command, whom ihey used as their house and field labourers. In some cases the communes, instead of this tribute of gratuitous labour, paid a regular tribute of money (called obror by former serfs), amounting in some provinces, according to the same authority, to from forty thousand to sixty thousand roubles a year per province. CHAPTER II. The stanovois and ispravniks are the menials of the provincial administration. Set over them are the Governors of the Provinces, with the Governors-General of regions containing several Provinces, both surrounded by a swarm of tchinovniks, attached to their persons, or grouped on "boards," "chambers," or "courts of justice " of various denominations. They do not come into direct contact with the moujiks, unless in exceptional cases, and by means of a few special officers. In these higher grades of the administration, the chief means possessed by the servants of the public for enriching themselves at the expense of the peasantry assume a more refined form than that of petty bribery, and are at the same time far more profitable. They are the embezzlement of land. I will pass over all the common everyday malversations of which the peasants are victims. i68 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Those I will take as a matter of course ; but I will devote a few pages to describing this peculiar mode of plunder because it is practised on the largest scale by the whole of the Russian official world, from petty clerks up to the Governors, Governors-General, Ministers, and courtiers, both male and female. The Provinces of those vast oriental regions bordered by the steppes of Central Asia have grown particularly famous of late, by reason of the extensive and bare-faced embezzlement of the land. The land there is plentiful ; the bulk of the population consists of alien tribes, who know next to nothing of Russian law or even of the Russian tongue, Russian being nevertheless the language in which all official documents are drawn up. The tchinovniks are all-powerful here, and practically beyond control, so enormous are the distances from the Central Government. They can and they do profit by these opportunities, and permanently improve their private fortunes by robbing the people of the land, their sole valuable possession. For the edification of those who indulge in singing paeans to Russia's mission of civilization to the barbaric tribes of Asia, it must be observed PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 169 that these services are not without their draw- backs. The Russian advance in these regions presents two markedly different stages. The first, which follows immediately upon the conquest or the peaceful annexation, shows the Russian rule in a most favourable light. Order is established, slavery and brigandage disappear, as do also the distinctions of race ; laws are made equal for all, and respect to them enforced with severity tempered by justice. The best men of the Empire, such as Count Perovsky, Mouravieff of the Amour, Tcherniaeff, Kaufmann, in all of whom ambition is stronger than cupidity, are sent to administer the newly-annexed territories. They generally defend the natives as far as they ■can even against Russian officials, and the hosts of adventurers and swindlers who follow in the rear of a conquering army. During this period the Russian settlers are almost exclusively peasants, who are invited and encouraged to migrate into the newly-acquired ■country, in order to give Russia a stronger footing there. The Russian moujiks never fail to answer to such an appeal. The word " free land " produces a magic effect on them, and they constantly stream in all directions where such I70 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. treasure is to be found. Thousands of Russian villages have quite recently been founded on the Amour, on the enormous plains of Southern Siberia, among the Bashkirs, Khirghis, and Kalmuks of the Uffa, Orenburgh, and Samara Provinces, of which we shall shortly have to speak. Often the colonists precede the con- querors, penetrating into neighbouring countries, scores of years before the armies. The annexa- tion merely increases this movement. But in these parts land is plentiful— nobody suffers from the intrusion. The peasants take only so much land as they can till with their own hands, never appropriating one acre more. Furthermore, they rarely decline to enter into a friendly compromise with the natives. Whilst the government of Siberia had to resort to the most drastic measures, such as the knout and hard labour, to prevent the nobility and rich merchants from converting the natives into slaves, the peasants of the Provinces of Astrakhan or Samara or Orenburg often paid a yearly tribute in money or in goods to the nomads whose lands they had appropriated. The rent in these districts is, however, so low, and the chances of receiving it so small, that neither the tchinovnik nor the PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 171 capitalists feel tempted to acquire estates. The husbandmen of both nationalities have thus plenty of land for tillage. The position changes when the increase of population has considerably raised the value of land and diminished the amount to be disposed of. By this time the province has become solidly incorporated with the rest of the Empire, re- quiring neither particular ability nor care in its administration. The men of talent, ambition, and energy are attracted to other fields. Their posts are filled by commonplace tchinovniks, who start a new mode of "Russifying" and "benefiting" the country — by taking the land from both the natives and their own countrymen, the Russian colonists, with perfect impartiality. This spoliation of land is going on everywhere, even in Siberia. For this we have the testimony of Yadrinzeff, who is our best authority on Siberian matters ; though in this enormous desert, covered with ice and marshes and impenetrable brush-wood, the plunder is of necessity confined to those few districts more thickly populated than the rest. On the Siberian main, with its one inhabitant to every three square kilometers — two square miles (English) — the land is as yet free. 172 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. The peasantry know of neither rent nor communal property : each husbandman takes as much land as he can find and can cultivate. But in other colonies and regions more favoured by nature the robbery of land is perpetrated on a very large, sometimes gigantic scale, and is the chief specula- tion of the tchinovniks, their relatives, and their hangers-on, as well as of their St. Petersburg protectors. Thus in the vast provinces of Uffa and Oren- burg, which together cover an area equal to that of the United Kingdom — the officials with their numerous retinue have, in the period between 1873 to 1879, by force and fraud embezzled no less than five million acres of the best arable land and timber wood of those districts. The whole operation was carried out with all the appearance of legality, and was screened behind the plausible pretext of the " Russifica- tion " of the Provinces and " the improvement of their industries." With this object in view the officials asked and obtained permission to sell the land " unoccupied by peasants of any race," "on easy terms," to officials "who have merited such favour by their faithful services to the State." PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 173 As a matter of fact, only one item of that fable was true : the terms were the easiest imaginable, as excellent arable land, besides timber wood, which in these parts costs from fifty to one hundred roubles (a rouble is worth about two shillings) a dessiatine, were sold to the officials for merely nominal prices, varying from eight shillings down to tenpence a dessiatine, payable over long periods, varying from ten up to thirty- seven years. All the rest of the tale was an impudent falsehood and farce. The land officially designated as free for occupation had generally been owned for gene- rations, either by native Bashkir villagers or by Russians who had migrated years ago from the interior Provinces. It was precisely this fact which made these estates particularly attractive to the officials, as it enabled them to turn an honest penny. A certain Yusefovitch bought an estate of 1,017 dessiatines (a dessiatine is equal to 27 acres) for 4,804 roubles, and resold it to the peasants for 25,000 roubles. Another estate, for which 506 roubles were paid to the crown, was resold a few days later to the resident peasants for 15,000 roubles. A third Govern- ment official bought an estate for two roubles per 174 l^i^ RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. dessiatine, and immediately let it to its occupants, at a rental of twelve roubles a year per dessiatine! Of course but few of the peasants were able to pay such a heavy ransom for their own land. And for those who could not pay there was the sole alternative : either to be evicted or to accept a sort of serfdom, i.e., to work gratuitously on the estates of their new landlords as remuneration for that small portion of land which he vouchsafed to leave in their hands. Thus was the bulk of the rural population of these Provinces almost totally ruined, reduced to beggary and indigence, and decimated by hunger. In distributing these iniquitous gifts, the administration in most cases could not even put forward any services rendered to the State (i.e., useless scribbling for regularly paid salaries) as a pretext. A private person, a teacher, who was not so much as a member of the civil service, paid nine hundred roubles for an estate which he immediately resold for 15,000. Two gymnasts bought each an estate of 1,000 dessiatines for 2,000 roubles, to be paid over thirty-seven years, whilst both relet their land at once for 900 roubles per year. There was no limit to the favouritism shown PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 175 by the uncontrollable administration. A father received an estate of 6,000 dessiatines ; whilst to his daughters 1,000 each were allotted, and to his sons 2,000 each. The son married ; his wife's relatives were endowed with an estate. The next to marry was a daughter — her husband received an estate, and his family another. The contagion of this land hunger spread far beyond the sphere of Uffa and Orenburg ■officialdom. Scores of tchinovniks flocked from St. Petersburg and other quarters, probably armed with good introductions, and, after having " served " in the Provinces two or three years received their rewards in the form of splendid estates of from two to three thousand dessiatines and upwards, in the most fertile parts of the country, on the shores of big, navigable rivers. The Ministry of the Interior, then presided over by Count Valueff, at last grew jealous of the privileges enjoyed by the Governor-General who had such an Eldorado to dispose of, and ended by distributing estates on its own account to its own favourites. When the senatorial revision of 1879, called forth by all these scandalous corrup- tions, began its investigations, several of the highest officers of the imperial court and Govern- 1/6 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. ment hastened to voluntarily resign their ill-gotten riches in order to avoid judicial proceedings. It was rumoured that even the Minister of the Interior, Valueff, had had a finger in the pie. The reporters of German and English newspapers communicated news to that effect abroad, and the minister was indeed dismissed shortly after. The Russian press, however, in spite of this, received the following significant secret order, dated 4th October, 1881 : — "In some foreign periodicals it has been stated that Count P. A. Valueff has been implicated in the prosecutions now proceeding for misappropriation of land in the Orenburg region. The head board of management of the press depart- ment requests that the papers will not circulate, nor so much as mention these reports." Thus were these rumours suppressed without being so much as denied. A no less conspicuous part in the wholesale peculation of land in the Uffa and Orenburg Pro- vinces was played by the forcible or fraudulent "purchase" of land from the natives by the officials themselves, or with their active conni- vance. To show to what an impudent extent this legalized robbery was pushed one illustration will suffice. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. lyr In 1873 four local capitalists joined in purchas- ing from the Bashkir peasants 30,000 dessiatines of land, lying on the shores of the Uffa river, for the sum of 21,000 roubles, on condition that if it were afterwards found that there was more land in the estate than was specified in the agreement, they, the buyers, should have no further sum to pay. (Such strange clauses as this are to be found in most agreements of this description, because the Bashkirs are easily cheated in the measurement of land.) This agreement was, as usual, guaranteed by an enormous fine of 150,000 roubles. It was presented, as prescribed by law, for examination bo the mediator, the immediate chief and pro- tector of the peasants of his district, who approved of it and handed it on to head quarters, the Civil Board of Uffa, for registration. It was duly registered, and the four sharks formally invested with the right of ownership. But at this point the Bashkirs "rebelled," and refused to fulfil their part of the engagement, and sent their men to lodge complaints in various quarters. After a "long series of charges," the Govern or- General resolved to send a special Inspector to the spot to enquire into the case. 12 178 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. This Inspector chanced to be an honest man, who investigated the matter fairly, and reported : first, that the estate purchased comprised full 70,000 dessiatines ; and secondly that it included splendid timber wood, which in these parts was worth no less than one hundred roubles a dessia- tine. He discovered, moreover, as was natural, that the Bashkirs were quite unwilling to part with their property on such terms, and that the agreement to sell it had been extorted from them by threats, and under compulsion. The mediator, their immediate superior, and the magistrate of the district, had ordered them to sign it, and had also arrested and removed from the village, "for disobedience and calumny against men in office," the twenty-four householders who had protested and absolutely declined to put their hands to the agreement. In conclusion, the Inspector reported that in acknowledgment of their services both the mediator and the magis- trate had received small estates from their grateful clients. The mediators and the magistrates were not the only officials who lent themselves to these disgraceful practices. Persons who held higher berths in the provincial government did the same. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 179 Members of the Governor-General's Privy Coun- cil, who enjoyed the full confidence of the chief of the department, and through him held command over the police, " persuaded " the Bashkirs to sell their land to various persons on terms similar to those quoted above, and acquired on their own account about 30,000 dessiatines of land, mostly rich in timber wood. A certain Shott, father-in-law of Cholodkovsky, chief of the Civil Service Department, acquired by similar " purchases " 50,000 dessiatines of land. Threats, extortions, imprisonment, and open violence were resorted to for crushing obstinate resistance. The officers most directly responsible for the protection of the peasantry from malversation and injustice, the mediators and the members of the Peasants' Court of Justice, had the largest share in this wholesale plunder. A special commissioner, a General and chamber- lain to the Emperor, Burnasheff, was sent from St. Petersburg in 1874 for the purpose of revising the Uffa Civil Board. He reported that everything was as it should be there. But it was afterwards discovered that he had himself "purchased" an estate of 20,000 dessiatines for 40,000 roubles in the Belebeef district, with the i8o THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. usual prescription of 80,000 roubles in case of the non-fulfilment of the agreement. This trans- action was, however, annulled by the Senate in 1878. The total number of agreements of this com- plexion registered by the Uffa Civil Board up to the time of the arrival of the Senatorial Inquiry Commission was one hundred and twelve ; and the area of land covered by them was nothing less than one million dessiatines, or 2,700,000 acres. The Senatorial Inquiry Commission sent into these Provinces by special order of the Emperor annulled some of the most scandalous of these legalized robberies, whilst some of the highest officials returned to the crown the estates they had received, declaring their ignorance of the injustice done to the peasantry who had pre- viously held it. But the enormous majority of these land-robbers were not so sensitive about their reputations, and contrived to keep their booty. This has been revealed by the agrarian disturbances which occurred in these Provinces some three years later, in 1882, and which ex- tended over four districts. The Bashkirs of the Province of Uffa have been despoiled of their land definitely and irre- PA TERNAL GOVERNMENT. trievably. The Governor-General, Kryshanovsky, who had headed the band of robbers, was dis- missed; other officials got off with a "reprimand;" no one was indicted before a regular tribunal. Even this rebuke, however mild, was caused by the absolute want of discretion and moderation shown on the part of the robbers themselves, who in the fever of greed forgot all moderation and caution ; and made the Uffa malversations a byword to the whole Russian Press. In the neighbouring province of Samara, which lies on the left shore of the Middle Volga, and covers an area three times as large as Switzerland, the Administration has done exactly the same thing, without incurring any annoyance. The ethnographical and economical conditions of these two contiguous regions are pretty much the same, the northern part of the Samara plain, the Bagulminsk district, being chiefly populated by Bashkirs, the southern by Russian colonists, with a sprinkling of native Mordvas and Kalmuks, the latter mostly keeping to a nomadic state. Twenty years ago the land was so plentiful in these parts that the peasants could rent from the crown or from the native nomads as much as they chose for from ten to fifteen kopecks a i82 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. dessiatine. During the last twenty to twenty-five years things have gradually changed. The land was despoiled by officials and the private indivi- duals whom they favoured. Up to 1881 the total amount of land thus abstracted from the Russian settlers amounted to about 700,000 dessiatines, or 1,890,000 acres. Enormous tracts of land were taken from the Kalmuks by means of sham purchases, more vile even than those practised upon the agricultural Bashkirs. The spoliation was effected gradually and cautiously, but the final result was the same. The Samara peasantry, prosperous in bygone days, is now one of the most wretched and hunger-stricken. Famine is of constant recurrence in this Pro- vince, the most terrible being those of 1878 and 1 88 1, M^hen, in some villages, one- fourth of the whole population died from starvation. In the same years millions of puds of corn were ex- ported from the Province by the landlords, who battened on the land which had been robbed from the people. If we skip the Province of Astrakhan, composed mostly of saline sands, where nothing can be got to grow and which are not worth robbing, we shall find ourselves in the Caucasus — the gem PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 183 of nature, the country which disputes with the valley of the Euphrates the glory of having been the place chosen for the earthly Paradise of tradition. Our great poets and novelists, Pushkin, Lermontoff, Tolstoi, owe many of their best inspirations to the snowclad Caucasus, and they have all contributed to render familiar and dear to the Russians its sumptuous, grand, and grim character, as well as its noble, simple, and chivalrous inhabitants. Nowadays, though as poetical as ever, the Caucasus has ceased to be the country of romance. Its warlike mountaineers are subdued; the country is peaceful ; the Hadji Abrecks, the Kazbitchs, the Ismail Beys, the Abrecks, the terror of the valleys, are no longer to be met with there in living flesh and blood. These heroes of the poniard and scimitar have disappeared under forty years of uncontested Russian rule, and in the natural course of things have been supplanted by robbers, who may very possibly be as mischievous as they, but who certainly have nothing of romance or poetry left about them. The plunder of the State and of the people as regards their landed wealth (we will confine ourselves to this question here), by the Caucasian Administration and its proteges, 1 84 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. combines the characteristics of both the Uffa and the Samara robberies. It is as extensive and bare-faced as in the first- named Province, and as safe as in the last. The Caucasus is administered, not by a simple Governor-General but by a grandee of a much higher grade, a lieutenant who is, with rare ex- ceptions, a Grand Duke, brother or uncle of the Czar. Nothing need be feared behind such a screen. Moreover, the dangers and difficulties of the conquest of the Caucasus, though they ceased to exist some thirty-eight years ago, still furnish a good pretext for the distribution of sinecures. In this fabulously rich country the Government owns vast tracts of land, forests, mines of priceless value, and mineral springs classed under four hundred and eleven "heads" in the official list, which, however, bring to the exchequer next to nothing — at the outside an average of seventy- three roubles per estate. The reason for this is very simple : the greatest number, two hundred and fifty-five out of four hundred and eleven, are given to tchinovniks almost free of charge. In the Province of Kutais an estate comprising 2,000 dessiatines of arable land was let to a tchinovnik for PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 185 4! ten roubles or, ^'i, a year. In the Viliet district of the same Province, 1,000 dessiatines of arable land were let to another man at a rental of twenty-five roubles per annum ; and so on. (Slovo 1880, VII.) During the same period, from 1866 to 1875, '^he administration disposed of about 100,000 dessia- tines of land, from which its former inhabitants, the Circassians, had been expelled with fire and sword. Of this, 23,000 dessiatines were distributed amongst the military, and 26,000 amongst mem- bers of the Civil Service, whilst 50,000 were sold at merely nominal prices to a lot of speculators who obtained the protection of the administration. In the vicinity of Baku lies the land containing the petroleum springs, which is valued at from 25,000 to 60,000 roubles a dessiatine. After the abolition of the power of sale by auction of some of the State revenue, this land was declared inalienable. Yet General Staroselsky, Prince Withenstein, and Prince Amilakhvary were each presented with ten dessiatines of this most valua- ble land. The Princess of Gagarine, wife of the Governor of the Province of Kutais, received five dessiatines of petroleum land, which she exchanged for 7,000 dessiatines of ordinary arable land in the i86 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Province ot Stavropol. Other five dessiatines of this same land were granted to the Princess Orbeliany. Full forty-five dessiatines were pre- sented to the members of the Caucasian Civil Service for their relief fund. At the time to which all these statements refer, the short liberal respite of 1881, when the press was permitted to allude to such subjects, it was proposed to dis- tribute the greater part of the forest covering the shores of the Black Sea in Abkhasia amongst the members of the Civil Service. Our story will never draw to a close if we attempt to mention all that came to light in this question of land-robbery in the border provinces alone. And how about the central provinces ? Are the peasants dwelling there guaranteed at least against this form of oppression ? Not quite, — though of course nothing like the wholesale theft going on in the border lands is possible here. In the interior, land is taken by instalments, a bit here and a bit there. The chief means employed to this end are legal chicanerv and litigations, in which all the advantages are on the side of the great people, especially if they are members of the local administration. Since the Emanci- PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 187 pation, hundreds of thousands of dessiatines have been filched from the peasantry by means of thousands of these lawsuits, which differ from open robbery only in name. The highest dignitary of the empire and the noble aristocrats themselves have not recoiled before such methods of enrichment. Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the minister, has despoiled the peasants on his Riazan possessions of their land ; Count Sheremeteff is doing the same thing with the forty-two villages of the Gorbatov district, the inhabitants of which, to the number of 8,000 souls, were formerly his serfs. The Tartars of the Crimea are still struggling for their strip of land with Count Mordvinoff. It is no uncommon thing for the despotic powers of the administration to be called upon to facilitate the success of these lawsuits. Thus, for instance, in No. 163 of the Russian Courier for 1 88 1 we read that a peasant named Mikhailoff of Novosilka, a village in the Birutch district. Province Voroneje, was exiled by order of the administration to the province of Archangel. The offence alleged against him was that he mcited his fellow-villagers not to pay their taxes. But the real facts of the case were as follows • THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. — the peasants of the villages of Novosilka, Podleska, and several others, had a lawsuit about some land with the neighbouring landlords, Sheglov, Sinelnikoff, and others. The peasant Mikhailoff was chosen by the joint village mirs as their delegate. He commenced operations with great activity, and discovered documents proving the injustice of the landlords' claims. They thought it advisable to have him removed. Cases of downright robbery are not wanting either. The method generally adopted is, to forge resolutions of the mir. ordering that the coveted piece of land shall be yielded up. In No. 142 of the Russkia Vedomosty for 1881 the follow- ing curious incident is recorded. In the Fatej district of the Province of Kursk a certain lady, Nikitina, sold to various persons eighty-three dessiatines of land, which she of course stated to be her own, for two hundred and fifteen roubles a dessiatine. But when the new owners came to take possession of their property, they found it was occupied by the peasants of the village, Archangelskoie, who on hearing the claims of the new comers expressed the greatest surprise, and, flatly refusing to yield the land, drove away the intruders. At this IVIadame Nikitina applied PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 189. to the ispravnik, who sent the stanovoi to the spot. This gentleman arrived at Archangelskoie, and having convened the peasants' mir began to admonish them not to offer rebeUious resistance. The peasants answered unanimously that they had no desire to rebel against anybody, but that they would not give up the land, because it was their own, and they had never sold it to Nikitina, nor to anybody else, and knew nothing about the matter. An agreement to that purport existed, how- ever, dated 13th September, 1878, and was witnessed by a member of the Peasants' Court, who gave testimony to the effect that he had read this agreement before the mir, and was told that everything was correct, after which the deed was approved by the Peasants' Court, on 30th January, 1881, though it bore on the face of it the evidence of being a forgery. It did not bear the seal of the Archangelskoie mir, and it was signed by a total stranger to the village — the coachman of the member in question — and was witnessed as genuine by .three servants of Madame Nikitina. The Golos for the same year reported several similar cases as having occurred in the igo THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. district of Balta, Province of Podolsk. Here the very men in office actually appropriated a good deal of peasants' land, by means of forged agree- ments, which the communal clerks drew up in the name of the mir by order of the mediators. One of the mediators, in virtue of such an agreement, received from the peasants as a 'bresent three hundred dessiatines of land, which constituted the only means of subsistence for a whole village. " It is easy to imagine," adds the correspondent, " the despair of the peasants when they were told that they had ' presented ' the mediator with the only piece of arable land which they possessed." Instances of such shameless abuses as these are, according to the Golos, numerous in the Province of Podolsk. In other places, according to Novoe Vremya, the communal clerks drew up fraudulent agree- ments of this nature for their own benefit. In the Starobelsk district, in 1881, the Novoaidarsk Commune brought an action against their elder, Russenoff, for appropriating 1,000 dessiatines of communal land by means of a forged agreement {Golos, 1 881). These are a few specimens selected from among a heap of facts which the temporary relaxation PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 191 of the censorship of the press has enabled the Russian newspapers to publish. Since 1882 we have heard no more of them, this class of publications being prohibited as inflammatory, and calculated to "disturb the public mind." They are considered seditious, and would involve severe punishment by the censorship. With regard to the misappropriation of land, this is certainly not likely to diminish by the withdrawal df even this slight check. The peasants are pretty nearly defenceless against the coalition of robbers. The official control is little more than a mere fiction. The central government depends necessarily on the in- formation it receives from the tchinovniks, i.e., the very accomplices or perpetrators of the robberies. And when some tchinovnik of good position, head of some board or governor of some province, is not actively compromised by the misdeeds of his subordinates, he screens them and conceals their actions none the less when once committed, because he is personally responsible to his superiors for all which happens within his juris- diction. The all-directing, all-controlling Auto- cracy is a myth. The real Autocracy has long been broken up into a series of petty despotisms 192 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. — a sort of feudalism, which reproduces in modern Russia the same phenomenon discovered by the historical school of economists as existing in Western Europe in the middle ages, — the con- version of political power into economical pre- dominance, of which the robbery of the land from the people is the most striking feature. At the base of these operations, wherever committed, lies brute force. The Russian tchinovniks have at their disposal the military forces of the State, which they are free to use themselves, or to lend to any private person when needed, to put down any resistance which the peasants may offer to the appropriation of their land by any one of the methods described above. Rebellions of the peasantry, followed by " mili- tary executions," having their origin in the embezzlement of land, can be counted by the score, though these events are rarely honoured with more than a short and dry notice in the newspaper chronicles of the day. Exceeding few- are allowed to be thoroughly investigated and discussed. When some particularly gross abuse committed against the peasants forces itself upon the public notice and that of the higher ministerial circles, it is the deliberate policy of the govern- PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 193 ment, ministers and Czar included, to hush the matter up as much and for as long as possible, because, taking the Russian reading and thinking public as it now is, nothing stirs it half so deeply as do affairs of this nature. Among dozens of scandalous trials for briber)'-, embezzlement of the public funds, plunder in the Ordnance Department, etc., which the Govern- ment allowed to be heard in public, we remember only one important case — that of the Governor of the Province of Minsk, General Tokareff, and the man associated with him, in which the prosecution, followed by a public trial, was due to the initiative of the Government. Other famous " peasant cases," such as Count Bobrinsky's, Prince Sherbatoff's, etc., only came to light owing to some outrages committed by the peasants, who appeared as the prosecuted party, the Govern- ment exercising to the full its power over the press to prevent these affairs from being well thrashed out. The Tokareff affair is a very instructive one, and is well worth studying for more reasons than one. It was tried before the fifth department of the Senate in November 1881, though the offence was committed in 1874. It took seven years 13 194 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. to make its circuitous way to the court, and it was by a mere accident that it was not altogether swamped on the way. The trial only began in 1878, four years after the commission of the crime. The chief offender, General Tokareff, had by that time been promoted from the governorship of the Province of Minsk to the post of Special Commissioner of the Red Cross in Bulgaria, and was, together with his accomplice General Loshkareff, a member of the Ministerial Council. The third hero in the Loghishino affair, Colonel Kapger, had been created Knight of the Order of Vladimir, and he too was pursuing his noble career elsewhere. The trio would probably have been left un- molested to the present day had not two hostile parties at the court of St. Petersburg broken out into open strife. The Trepoff-Shouvaloff-Potapoff Coalition, all- powerful at the court before 1877, received a severe blow by the Zassoulitch trial, which revealed Trepoffs infamous brutalities. His numerous opponents thought the moment most opportune for entirely crushing the coalition by a new blow and resolved to disinter the Loghishino affair, which would compromise several of the gang PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 195 Four years previously Potapoff, then Governor- "General of the Lithuanian Provinces, had allowed his follower and subordinate Tokareff, then Gov- ernor of the Province of Minsk, to take several thousand dessiatines of land from the peasants of Loghishino. The act was committed under pecu- liarly aggravating circumstances, as the peasants struggled hard for their property. They " re- belled " several times, and were put down by a liberal allowance of flogging, but did not give up the fight. They lodged their complaint with the Senate, and after two years of litigation succeeded in 1876 in gaining their suit. The Loghishino peasants, in so far as they re- ■covered their property, were much more fortunate than most of their fellow-victims. They never thought, however, of taking further action against their former Governor for his past offences. But •on this occasion PotapofTs adversaries, then in the majority in the ministry, became unusually alive to the people's wrongs. They brought the matter before the first department of the Senate. They fared badly in this, their first attack. The Senate, where Potapoff's party was probably well represented, opined that the affair ought to be ■concluded by a " reprimand " to Tokareff and 196 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. his accomplices. Then the ministers discussed the matter at a cabinet council, and resolved to^ report the affair to the Emperor. The document wound up with the following remarkably bold and novel truth : " We consider it to be the duty of the Government to take severe and impartial legal action in cases such as this, of misde- meanour on the part of men in office." The Emperor's hand traced the word "certainly" opposite this sentence. Nevertheless the Potapoff party for three years succeeded in preventing the fulfilment of the Emperor's resolution. The affair was not adjudicated until 1881. It was not in vain that the two hostile parties contended so bitterly — the one to bring it before the public, the other to hush it up. The details of the affair were sufficiently revolting to make it an ideal battering-ram. The Province of Minsk, of which Tokareff was Governor, forms a part of the vast region to which converged the greed of the Russian icktnovniks, until they discovered still richer prey in the enormous eastern outskirts of the empire. After the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863-64, the Government confis- cated a total area of 60,914 dessiatines of land belonging to such landlords as had been implicated PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 197 in patriotic conspiracies. These spoils of the vanquished the Government threw as prey to its •officials, and especially to the bloodhounds who had helped to quench the insurrection, — as the hunter throws the remains of the skinned beast to his dogs. This rich booty did not suffice to satisfy the appetites of the crew When the best of the landed property had been appropriated amongst them, the tchinovniks began to plunder the peasants, according to the common methods as practised elsewhere. One of these tchinovniks was the Governor of the Province of Minsk himself. General Tokareff, who obtained from the Gover- nor-General of the region, Potapoff, an estate of 3,000 dessiatines, yielding an income of about 9,000 roubles a year, for the sum of 14,000 roubles, payable over twenty years. Tokareff's vassal, Sevastianoff, chairman of the Local Board of Minsk, ■carved out this estate for him from the land which belonged by right to the peasants of Loghishino. It is evident that both Sevastianoff and Tokareff committed this act of flagrant robbery in full cognizance of the fact, though they denied it before the tribunal. The Loghishino peasants had been in possession of the land claimed by Tokareff from time immemorial, and had never igS THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. paid an iota of rent to the Local Board. This could hardly be ignored by the Chairman of the Local Board, more especially as Loghishino- is only twenty-five miles distant from Minsk. In addition to this, the peasants could show ample documental evidence in support of their rights, the best proof of which is the eventual- success of their suit before the Senate in 1876: a charter from the King of Poland, and an ^lkaz confirming their rights from the Russian Senate. On being apprised of the impending transfer of their land to their Governor, they sent their deputies to the latter to explain to him how the matter stood, and at the same time forwarded the senatorial ukaz to Sevastianoff. The Governor, however, refused to listen to any- thing. As to the ukaz sent to Sevastianoff, it mysteriously " disappeared " at the office, and could never be recovered : in other words, it was stolen either by Sevastianoff on behalf of the Governor, or by his direction. When the Ministry to which the Loghishino peasants appealed, upon the failure of their applications at Minsk, applied for information at Minsk upon the subject, to the Minsk Local Government Board, Sevastianoff replied that the peasants' claims were void of any PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 199 foundation, and that the land was unquestionably State property, and that therefore there could be no legal obstacle to its transfer. The Governor-General himself did not lie idle. On learning that five peasants had been deputed to St. Petersburg to push forward the Loghishino suit, Tokareff reported to the ministry that these deputies were revolutionary agitators. They were accordingly at once locked up, and without further trial exiled to the northern Littoral, as is the custom in such cases with our Administration. Having thus removed all obstacles, Tokareff was in 1874 formally invested with the rights of ownership over the Loghishino estate. But when he sent his agents to collect the rents the peasants refused to pay, and drove away the police. Twenty-six peasants were arrested and thrown into the Minsk prison. Tokareff's next move was to send small detachments of troops against the village to compel obedience and levy the money. The peasants, however, persisted in their refusal. When the troops were drawn up before them, they tried to force the line, but were driven back at the butt-end of the musket. The soldiers then fired a volley with blank cartridges, and withdrew without resorting to more THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. drastic measures, the officer in command not being anxious probably to obtain a cross or promotion for the putting down of " civil enemies." On the first news of the failure of the ex- pedition — -four days before the official report reached him — Tokareff hastened to telegraph to St. Petersburg that the Loghishino peasants had broken out into open rebellion and had repulsed the troops. Such a grave emergency requiring strong and prompt measures, the ministry sent a special commissioner from St. Petersburg, General Loshkareff, with most extensive powers. On October 25th, 1874, the General arrived at Minsk, received from Tokareff one battalion of soldiers, with 250 Cossacks, and marched against the " rebels." In the subsequent, most revolting, part of the proceedings, the leading actor is Colonel Kapger, the ispravnik of Minsk, whom Tokareff attached to the expedition quite unlawfully. The duty of assisting the military in compelling obedience from the peasantry belonged of right to the ispravnik of Pinsk, Zolotnizky, because the Loghishino commune was in his district. Tokareff did not want to trust an affair of such personal interest to himself to the local police. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. Kapger was under the circumstances a much fitter person, and was therefore attached to the expedition "as an experienced and capable poHce officer, to try and persuade the peasants to submit to the law," as the mealy-mouthed Governor explained in his own justification. Kapger did not disappoint the expectations of his chief His first precaution was to stow away in the Loghishino police-station {siajt) several cart- loads of birch rods. When this order had been executed, he arrived on the 31st October at about mid-day at the village, and appeared before the peasants in the public square escorted by two policemen. He then began to abuse and vilify the villagers for their ill-behaviour, and announced that " an army was advancing on them, with a General who was authorized to bury them alive, to flog them to death, to shoot them, to do with them as he would with rebels, — anything he chose, if they would not at once submit." The frightened people said they would submit, and hastened to send three deputies forward to meet and propitiate the terrible General. They met him at a few miles' distance from the village, and said that they submitted and would pay rent to General Tokareff This did not, however, stay THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. the advance of Loshkareff, who entered Loghi- shino at the head of his troops at night time, and immediately ordered the Cossacks to invest the village from all parts, " lest anyone might escape." A second deputation then came before him, bring- ing the traditional "bread and salt," in token of welcome and obedience. But the General said he would not accept these offerings from " rebels," until they had repented and fulfilled the claims of their landlord, who demanded about 500 roubles as a part of the rent for 1874, and 5,000 for the arrears owing to him for 1873. This claim was a most impudent extortion. Tokareff had only been invested with the right of ownership in 1874. Any claim on the rent for the previous year was therefore absolutely illegal. On being questioned on this point by the tribunal, Tokareff explained that though he was formally invested with the right of ownership in 1874, still it had been reported to the chairman of the Local Board (his friend and accomplice Sevas- tianoff) that the Loghishino peasants were in- formed a year before by a tchinovnik of the Minsk courts of justice (who had neither juridical nor even administrative powers over them) that they must hand over one third of the harvest to PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 205 Tokareff. Then Stanovoi Trikovsky made a valuation, unassisted even by the local surveyor, and most generously adjudicated full 12,000 roubles to his chief, who reduced the sum to 5,500 roubles. Thus were the Loghishino peasants not merely robbed of their land, but had to present Tokareff with the capital which he had to disburse in the transaction ! The poor people could not, however, afford to ponder on the injustice of their case in the face of this array of bayonets and Cossacks. They sub- mitted, pleading only for a short respite in which to sell some of their goods in order to make up the required sum. No respite was granted them. The General told them in firm but moderate lan- guage, as became so high an official, that they must collect and deposit in his hands the sum of 5,500 roubles within forty-eight hours, otherwise he would compel them to pay the whole sum of 12,000 roubles. On this he retired, and shut himself up in the house assigned to him, leaving the command to the ispravnik Kapger. This officer went at once to the root of the matter, and showed to the full extent how " experienced " and " capable" he was in fulfilling the mission assigned to him by the 204 '^'HE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Governor. He refused to wait for the money even until the next morning. He rushed upon the peasants as one possessed, abusing them, caUing them names, stamping his foot, boxing them on the ears, and shouting, " The rods, bring the rods ! I will flog you to death ! I will flay you alive ! " He did not want the peasants to distribute the contribution demanded, according to their means. He made short work of all these forma- lities by assigning twenty-five roubles as the amount to be paid by each of the 233 households. Those who said they had not the money and could not pay at once were sent to the police station, and there flogged until they promised to find the money, selling their goods to the Jews of the village for a song, or borrowing from them the money at an interest of from one and a half to three per cent, a week. As the Loghishino peasants were poor people, according to the statements of the policemen themselves, many suffered very severely. One of the witnesses, the deputy Korolevitch, testified that the peasant Malokhovsky was beaten so savagely that he had never since fully recovered. He was a non- commissioned officer, and had only just returned from his regiment. He had had no time to get PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. 205 settled in his home, and was very poor. When summoned before Kapger, who was sitting at the police-station, he gave him full particulars as to why he was unable to pay the twenty-five roubles. He was conducted to the execution-chamber, and there flogged by two policemen under the personal superintendence of Kapger. After some time Kapger stopped the flogging, and asked whether he would bring the money or not. On receiving the same answer as before, he ordered the men to flog him once more. When he was again released, he said to Kapger that " whilst in the Czar's service he had never undergone the shame of corporal punishment." For this " imper- tinence" Kapger ordered him to be flogged for the third time. But even after that Malokhovsky brought no money, which was paid for him by the niir. Lukashevitch, an old man of sixty-nine years, begged the ispravnik to give him a short respite, but the latter struck him in the face twice so violently that he could not keep his feet. Then he ordered him to the flogging-room, where he was flogged three times, Kapger telling his men to strike more heavily, and asking the victim •whether he would bring the money now .-* 2o6 THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY. Many fainted under the ordeal. Kapger him- self superintended the execution of the sentences, giving his men instructions as to how to use the rods so as to cause the victims to suffer more acutely. None vv'ere spared. The deputy Korolevitch testified to the fact that Kapger