go,
there’s all kinds,
and they’re
thick as nettles:
kulaks,
red tapists,
and,
down the row,
drunkards,
sectarians,
lickspittles.
They strut around
proudly
as peacocks,
badges and fountain pens
studding their chests.
We’ll lick the lot of ’em ’
but
to lick ’em
is no easy job
at the very best.
On snow-covered lands
and on stubbly fields,
in smoky plants
and on factory sites,
with you in our hearts,
Comrade Lenin,
we build,
we think,
we breathe,
we live,
and we fight!’
Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin –
a photograph
on the whiteness of wall.12
The land of the knout and the pogrom. Tsarist Russia – patriarchal, sumptuous, barbaric – buttressed ideologically by the Orthodox Church (with its genetic anti-Semitism) and its own self-belief, defended militarily by stiff-necked braggadocio and geometric garrison towns, dominated economically by huge estates and a nobility dependent on the goodwill of a savagely oppressed peasantry, had long avoided both the revolutionary upheavals that had transformed England, Holland and France as well as the radical structural reforms from above that later united Germany. Because of this, Russia was rarely free from a dissent that sometimes emerged in the highest places. And the lowest. Russian absolutism created its opposites.
Later, over the course of the long nineteenth century, an oppositional intelligentsia (the word itself of Russian origin) emerged and continuously provided the country with liberal, Populist, anarcho-terrorist, pacifist, nationalist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who became a vital force in the history of Europe. It was a century that had given birth in Western Europe, Japan and North America to an accelerated industrial capitalism and its offshoot, imperialism. In normal conditions, there would be a reconciliation with the rising bourgeoisie whereby the latter would help to individualise the intelligentsia and in return would be provided with the bare necessities of civilised discourse. In Russia, however, the process was explosively uneven.
The outcome for the tsarist empire was dramatic: three revolutions – January 1905, February 1917 and October 1917 – within the first two decades of the twentieth century. Just as defeat in the Crimean War had pushed the tsar towards reforms, so the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 helped pave the way for what Lenin described as the dress rehearsal of 1905. The ‘Great’ War of 1914–18 made February 1917 inevitable. Lenin ensured the success of October.
An idealized depiction of serfs after the
Emancipation. In fact conditions remained grim.
The apex of the system was the court. The tsar, whether in Moscow or St Petersburg, exercised control of virtually every aspect of life. He was assisted by a despised bureaucracy, membership in which often altered class locations by opening the gates to the lowest levels of the nobility. This upward mobility, designed to ensure stability, occasionally had the opposite effect. Everything was relative. The peasants and, later, the intelligentsia wondered whether the next ruler would be a good or a bad tsar.
In 1796, understandably panicked by the tumbrils in Paris, Catherine’s grandson and tsarevitch Grand Duke Alexander confessed to his French tutor ‘that he hated despotism everywhere … that he loved liberty … that he had taken the greatest interest in the French revolution; that while condemning its terrible mistakes, he hoped the Republic would succeed and would be glad if it did.’ The French Revolution was never too far from the thoughts of rulers and ruled in Russia.
A few years later Alexander conspired in a palace coup that did away with his father Paul I and dismantled some of the more odious structures of his reign. Alexander ordered the removal of gallows from public squares, authorised the import of foreign books and ended the state monopoly on the establishment of printing presses. He lived to regret the latter. Nothing fundamental changed. Despotism was inbred. The autocracy needed it to survive. For a while, however, Alexander was the best example of the ‘good tsar’ as far as many of his subjects were concerned.
Ever since the legal code of 1649 – a time when England was already engulfed in a bourgeois revolution – forbade peasants from leaving the land without authorisation, serfdom had gradually become entrenched in the absolutist system. Overnight, millions of people became tied to the land. This Russian form of servitude adversely affected the country on many levels, cutting it off from developments in Western Europe and delaying capitalism and modernisation till the twentieth century. When an 1861 imperial proclamation ended legal bondage, it was almost time to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.
Unlike the African slaves in North and South America or the West Indies, the Russian serfs lived in their own villages and were responsible for reproduction and the sharing of communal lands. In many other ways, however, their suffering was not dissimilar to that of slaves elsewhere. Contemporary historians argue that the serfs, unlike slaves, had 153 holidays a year, but leaving aside Easter, Christmas and numerous saint days, this probably had much more to do with the inclement Russian winters than a more benign dispensation on the part of their landlords. In 1800, for instance, the price of a serf fluctuated depending on the market and natural calamities but never rose higher than that of a pedigree dog, especially one imported from France or Germany. Young women were sold in the marketplace alongside horses, cows and used carriages. Advertisements such as the following in Moscow were common elsewhere in the country: ‘For sale at Pantaleimon’s, opposite the meat market: a girl of thirty and a young horse.’ Liveried serfs worked in the households of rich families in huge numbers: the Sheremetievs had 300 house-serfs; the Stroganoffs, 600; the Razumovskys, 900. A similar pattern was repeated on different scales throughout the country. While some of the domestic serfs (the ‘house niggers’, in Malcolm X’s memorable description of their Afro-American counterparts) shared the prejudices of their masters, many others imbibed a deep sense of bitterness and hatred. Serf memoirs published in the literary press after the abolition of legal bondage contain numerous details concerning the treatments to which they were regularly subjected. Sexual oppression against women and children was common. When the time came to rebel, serfs’ congealed anger did not remain hidden. Class fought against class. And the serfs’ numbers were huge. The 1825 census revealed that out of a total population of 49 million, a large majority –