A people's tragedy

The mir could engender strong feelings of communal solidarity among the peasants, bound as they were by their common ties to the village and to the land. This was reflected in many peasant sayings: ‘What one man can’t bear, the mir can’; ‘No one is greater than the mir’; and so on.8 The existence of such ties can be found in peasant communities throughout the world. They bear witness not so much to the ‘natural collectivism’ of the Russian people, so beloved by the Slavophiles and the Populists, as to the functional logic of peasant self-organization in the struggle for survival against the harsh realities of nature and powerful external enemies, such as the landlords and the state. Indeed, beneath the cloak of communal solidarity observed by outsiders, fellow villagers continued to struggle between themselves for individual advantage. The village was a hotbed of intrigue, vendettas, greed, dishonesty, meanness, and sometimes gruesome acts of violence by one peasant neighbour against another; it was not the haven of communal harmony that intellectuals from the city imagined it to be. It was simply that the individual interests of the peasants were often best served by collective activity. The brevity of the agricultural season in Russia, from the thaw and the start of the spring ploughing in April to the first snows in early November, made some form of labour co-operation essential so that the major tasks of the agricultural cycle could be completed in brief bursts of intense activity. That is why the traditional peasant household tended to be much larger than its European counterpart, often containing more than a dozen members with the wives and families of two or three brothers living under the same roof as their parents. Statistical studies consistently highlighted the economic advantages of the bigger households (a higher proportion of adult male labourers, more land and livestock per head and so on) and these had much to do with the benefits of labour co-operation. The difficulties of small-scale peasant farming, which in the vast majority of households was carried out with only one horse and a tiny store of seed and tools, also made simple forms of neighbourly co-operation, such as borrowing and lending, advantageous to all parties. Finally, there were many worthwhile projects that could only be done by the village as a whole, such as clearing woods and swamp-lands, constructing barns, building roads and bridges, and organizing irrigation schemes.

The village assembly, or skhod, where these decisions were taken, was attended by the peasant household elders and usually held on a public holiday in the street or in a meadow, since few villages had a big enough building to accommodate the whole meeting. There was no formal procedure as such. The peasants stood around in loose groups, drinking, smoking and debating different subjects of local interest, until the village elder, having mingled in the crowd and ascertained the feelings of the dominant peasants, called for the meeting to vote on a series of resolutions. Voting was done by shouting, or by standing in groups, and all the resolutions were passed unanimously, for when opinion was divided the minority always submitted to the majority, or, as the peasants put it, to the ‘will of the mir’. Romantic observers took this self-imposed conformity as a sign of social harmony. In Aksakov’s words, the commune expressed its will as one, like a ‘moral choir’. But in fact the decision-making was usually dominated by a small clique of the oldest household heads, who were often also the most successful farmers, and the rest of the villagers tended to follow their lead. The unanimity of the mir was not the reflection of some natural peasant harmony, but an imposed conformity set from above by the patriarchal elders of the village.

Some observers of peasant life (and this was to include the Bolsheviks) described these dominant patriarchs as ‘commune-eaters’ (miroyedy) or ‘kulaks’.fn3 These were the so-called ‘rich’ and ‘cunning’ peasants, ‘petty-capitalist entrepreneurs’, ‘usurers’, ‘parasites’ and ‘strongmen’, whom the rest of the villagers feared and whose greed and individualism would eventually lead to the commune’s destruction. ‘At the village assemblies’, wrote one jurist in the early 1900s, ‘the only people to participate are the loud-mouths and the lackeys of the rich. The honest working peasants do not attend, realising that their presence is useless.’9