A people's tragedy

He took with him Alexei Peshkov, later to become known as the writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), who was then, at the age of twenty, already known as an ‘old man’ (Tolstoy once said of him that he seemed ‘to have been born a grown-up’). In his first eight years Gorky had experienced more human suffering than the literary Count would see in the whole of his eight decades. His grandfather’s household in Nizhnyi Novgorod where he had been brought up after the death of his father, was, as he described it in My Childhood, a microcosm of provincial Russia — a place of poverty, cruelty and cholera, where the men took to the bottle in a big way and the women found solace in God. By the age of nine, Gorky had already been put out to work, scavenging for rags, bones and nails, and occasionally thieving timber from the banks of the Volga. Then his mother had died and his grandfather had sent him out into the world to fend for himself. Like countless other abandoned orphans, Gorky had roamed around the booming industrial towns of the Volga, a shoeless street urchin dressed in rags. He had worked as a dish washer on a steamboat, as a stevedore, a watchman, a cobbler’s assistant, an apprentice draughtsman, an icon painter, and finally as a baker in Kazan, where Romas had found him and taken pity on the lad after he had tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest.

Krasnovidovo was set on a steep hill overlooking the Volga River. At the top of the hill was a church with a light-blue onion dome, and below it a row of log huts stretching down towards the river. Beyond these were the kitchen gardens, the bath-houses and the rickety animal sheds, and then the dark ploughed fields which ‘gently rolled away towards the blue ridge of the forest on the horizon’. It was a relatively wealthy village. Its proximity to Kazan had made it a centre of production for the market and its most successful farmers had come to enjoy a modicum of comfort. Their well-built huts had boarded roofs and colourful ornamentation, with animal designs on their wooden shutters and window-frames. Inside them one would find an assortment of factory-made items from Russia’s burgeoning industries: iron pots and pans, samovars, curtains, mirrors, bedsteads, kerosene lamps, accordions, and so on. Slowly but surely, like the rest of peasant Russia, Krasnovidovo was being drawn into the market economy.1

This put it in the front line of the Populists’ battle for the peasantry. Central to their philosophy was the idea that the egalitarian customs of the peasant commune could serve as a model for the socialist reorganization of society. If the village was protected against the intrusions of capitalism, Russia, they believed, could move directly towards the socialist utopia without going through the ‘bourgeois stage of development’ — with all the negative features which that entailed — as had happened in Western Europe. The ancient village commune would be preserved as the basis of Russian communism.

Responding to the calls of the Populist leaders to ‘Go to the People’, thousands of radical students, Mikhail Romas among them, poured into the countryside during the 1870s in the naive belief that they could win over the peasantry to their revolutionary cause. Finding in the world of the village a reflection of their own romantic aspirations, they convinced themselves that they would find in the ordinary peasants soul-mates and allies in their socialist struggle. Some of them tried to dress and talk like peasants, so much did they identify themselves with their ‘simple way of life’. One of them, a Jew, even converted to Orthodoxy in the belief that this would bring him closer to the ‘peasant soul’. These romantics conceived of the village as a collective and harmonious community that testified to the basic socialist instincts of the Russian people. Among the peasantry, wrote one of the Populist leaders, ‘there is more attentiveness to the worth of the individual man, less indifference to what my neighbour is like and what I appear like to my neighbour’. Such was their idealized view of the peasants that many Populists even contended that in sexual matters they were more moral and celibate than the corrupted urban population. So, for example, they believed that prostitution did not exist among the peasants (even though the majority of urban prostitutes were originally peasant women); that there was no rape or sexual assault in the village (despite the peasant custom of snokhachestvo which gave the household patriarchs a sexual claim on their daughters-in-law in the absence of their husbands); and that whereas syphilis (which was endemic throughout Russia) might have been venereal in the depraved cities, in the villages it was caused more innocently by the peasant custom of sharing wooden spoons and bowls.2