A people's tragedy

The experience of urbanization was an added pressure towards secularization. Young peasants who migrated to the cities left behind them the old oral culture of the village, in which the priests and peasant elders were dominant, and joined an urban culture where the written word was dominant and where the Church was forced to compete with the new socialist ideologies. One peasant who made this leap was Semen Kanatchikov during his progress through the school of industry and into the ranks of the Bolsheviks. In his memoirs he recalled how his apostasy was slowly nurtured in the 1890s when he left his native village for Moscow and went to work in a machine-building factory where socialists often agitated. To begin with, he was somewhat afraid of these ‘students’ because ‘they didn’t believe in God and might be able to shake my faith as well, which could have resulted in eternal hellish torments in the next world’. But he also admired them ‘because they were so free, so independent, so well informed about everything, and because there was nobody and nothing on earth that they feared’. As the country boy grew in confidence and sought to emulate their individualism, so he became more influenced by them. Stories of corrupt priests and ‘miracles’-cum-frauds began to shake ‘the moral foundations with which I had lived and grown up’. One young worker ‘proved’ to him that God had not created man by showing that, if one filled a box with earth and kept it warm, worms and insects would eventually appear in it. This sort of vulgarized pre-Darwinian science, which was widely found in the leftwing pamphlets of that time, had a tremendous impact on young workers like Kanatchikov. ‘Now my emancipation from my old prejudices moved forward at an accelerated tempo,’ he later wrote. ‘I stopped going to the priest for “confession”, no longer attended church, and began to eat “forbidden” food during Lenten fast days. However, for a long time to come I didn’t abandon the habit of crossing myself, especially when I returned to the village for holidays.’39

And what about the countryside itself? This was the bedrock of ‘Holy Russia’, the supposed stronghold of the Church. The religiosity of the Russian peasant has been one of the most enduring myths — along with the depth of the Russian soul — in the history of Russia. But in reality the Russian peasant had never been more than semi-detached with the Orthodox religion. Only a thin coat of Christianity had been painted over his ancient pagan folk-culture. To be sure, the Russian peasant displayed a great deal of external devotion. He crossed himself continually, pronounced the Lord’s name in every other sentence, regularly went to church, always observed the Lenten fast, never worked on religious holidays, and was even known from time to time to go on pilgrimage to holy shrines. Slavophile intellectuals, like Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, might wish to see this as a sign of the peasant’s deep attachment to the Orthodox faith. And it is certainly true that most of the peasants thought of themselves as Orthodox. If one could go into a Russian village at the turn of the century and ask its inhabitants who they were, one would probably receive the reply: ‘We are Orthodox and from here.’ But the peasants’ religion was far from the bookish Christianity of the clergy. They mixed pagan cults and superstitions, magic and sorcery, with their adherence to Orthodox beliefs. This was the peasants’ own vernacular religion shaped to fit the needs of their precarious farming lives.

Being illiterate, the average peasant knew very little of the Gospels. The Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments were unknown to him. But he did vaguely understand the concepts of heaven and hell, and no doubt hoped that his lifelong observance of the church rituals would somehow save his soul. He conceived of God as a real human being, not as an abstract spirit. Gorky described one peasant he encountered in a village near Kazan, who:

pictured God as a large, handsome old man, the kindly, clever master of the universe who could not conquer evil only because: ‘He cannot be everywhere at once, too many men have been born for that. But he will succeed, you see. But I can’t understand Christ at all! He serves no purpose as far as I’m concerned. There is God and that’s enough. But now there’s another! The son, they say. So what if he’s God’s son. God isn’t dead, not that I know of.’