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Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Pipes
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Extract

It has been said of so-called old English traditions that on closer scrutiny they usually turn out to date back no further than Queen Victoria. Mutatis mutandis, the same observation can be made about the terminology and concepts of modern Russian history. Closer inves- tigation reveals that in a surprising number of instances they are the product of political polemics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially those involving the Marxists. They are not only neologisms, as historical terms and concepts often are, but neologisms devised for specific political purposes and never subjected by historians to critical appraisal.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1964 , pp. 441 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1964

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References

1 Serge A. Zenkovsky, “The Russian Church Schism: Its Background and Repercussions,” Russian Review, XVI (Oct., 1957), 46, 47.

2 The reforms of Peter the Great increased illiteracy among the peasants, because many parochial schools were closed. There were only 4,398 students in schools in 1786, about 20,000 in 1800, and 280,000 in 1865. Serge A. Zenkovsky, “The Ideological World of the Denisov Brothers,” Harvard Slavic Studies, III (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 49.

3 Ibid., pp. 65-66.

4 (), I (1950), 247.

5 () (Moscow, 1959), p. 162.

6 B. () (Moscow, 1922), p. 53.

7 Originally, the Old Believers (as exemplified by the Fedoseevtsy) had had a rule of celibacy. The innovators had said that marriage was permissible, and in this way, Ryndziunsky says, came close to the idea of a civil marriage. He adds that the community splintered over the concept of marriage and the family.

8 Walter Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (New York, 1961), p. 133.

9 For example, in 1769 the Senate (at the instigation of the Holy Synod) decreed that discovered Dukhobors (Spiritual Christians) were to be dealt with in the following manner: the men were to be sent to military service or as serfs to distant provinces; their property (including their grain) was to be sold to the public; their sons were to be sent to garrison schools and their widows and daughters put to work in various industries. In spite of this, the number of Dukhobors grew from 232 to 40,000 in 1837 in Tambov gubernia. A. H. (), VIII (1960), 68.

10 He found that in these gubernias their numbers had been underestimated by as much as eleven times, and consequently after this point they were unofficially numbered at 10,000,000. (), No. 4, 1961, pp. 150-54.

11 The exact number of sectarians and Old Believers remains a matter for dispute. Bonch-Bruevich (II3бp. con., I, 175n.) reported in 1924 that it seemed likely that there were 7,000,000 sectarians of all persuasions and 20,000,000 Old Believers of all persuasions and remarked that “in the literature” the figure was set at 25,000,000 Old Believers and 10,000,000 sectarians. M. I. Kalinin, speaking in the early twenties, repeated the figure of 10,000,000 sectarians—a considerable minority for a state then vitally concerned with the fate of minority peoples. Western scholars such as Curtiss and Kolarz, while admitting that the official 1897 census figure of 1.8 per cent of the population is too low, discount the larger figures as exaggeration. We may note that this discount on the Western side has seriously warped the picture of religious and social trends in postrevolutionary Russia —at least as much as the corresponding Soviet bias has.

12 (), I, 174.

13 () (4th ed.; Moscow, 1946), VII, 410.

14 (), I, 382-84. He described these and other instances of sectarian help in () (Moscow, 1924), pp. 22-40. Such acknowledgments do not seem to have been rare in the early twenties, but by the late twenties writers were denying that the sectarians had ever helped the Bolsheviks with a heat far surpassing the bounds of a mere polemic. For example, the Tolstoyan I. Tregubov (in (), Dec. 6, 1925, p. 2)— referring to an earlier article in (), Jan. 24, 1924—claimed that when the Bolsheviks had not been able to print () because of the Provisional Government's interference, they had taken () to the publishing house Slova Istiny, run by Baptists. Tregubov's opponent's most coherent argument was that not all the workers had been sectarians—and besides, they had overcharged. See () (Moscow, 1928).

15 In () (Moscow, 1957), pp. 12-35.

16 (), I, 247.

17 The policy was turned over by Gorky's wife as trustee to Lenin and his associates. According to Leonard Schapiro (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union [London, 1960], p. 88), the entire official budget of the Central Committee for this 1906-7 period was only 20,000 rubles more.

18 Lenin told the 8th Congress of the RKP (b) on March 18, 1919: “ … our revolution, until the organization of committees of the poor, i.e., until summer and even autumn of 1918 was to a significant degree a bourgeois revolution.” An editorial footnote to the stenographic report of the Congress explains that kombedy were confirmed by decree of June 11, 1918, but in fact they arose somewhat earlier locally. They collected and distributed grain and tools, provided cadres for the army, and laid the groundwork for collective forms of agriculture. VIII () 1919 (Moscow, 1933), pp. 23, 478. That the kombedy, at least in the beginning, were not the docile creation of the Bolsheviks is illustrated by the fact that in Nizhegorod gubernia, the peasants declared in November, 1918, that they wanted the laws of God taught in the schools, and the kombedy (illegally) allocated funds for this purpose, (), III (1956), 134.

19 VIII CБeзб..., pp. 506-7.

20 Ibid., pp. 339-53. Compare this with A. I. Rykov's statement: ”… I said that I would consider it a great achievement from the point of view of socialism if there appeared in the village one tractor, instead of a collective organization of peasants with a wooden plow.’ () (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), p. 25.

21 VIII CБeзб. … . pp. 395, 417-20.

22 J. S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950 (Boston, 1953), pp. 159-63.

23 See Bonch-Bruevich () on the Moscow Trezvinniki.

24 See Klibanov's (op. cit.) analysis for Tambov oblast, which, granted, is not very far from the center; this fact alone illustrates the grounds for common cause between the Soviet state and the Orthodox Church.

25 We acknowledge here our debt to Robert G. Wesson's The Soviet Communes (New Brunswick, 1963) while insisting that what he and others regard as a secondary phenomenon— the existence of state-sponsored sectarian communes—is the linchpin in a discussion of culture change in the Soviet Union as a whole and among the Great Russians in particular. As Wesson points out, the communes naturally took root in the countryside, because on the land it is possible to be, more than self-supporting, self-contained. The capacity of the communes to consume their produce almost literally signed their deathwarrant. (() [Moscow, 1960] I, 498; II, 313-14). In the period of collectivization, we may note in passing, the ability of the kolkhoznik to exist largely on the produce of his private plot has kept the peasant far more passive politically than he might otherwise be.

28 (), pp. 41-78, 105-6.

27 Ibid., pp. 140-44. One of Bonch-Bruevich's arguments for the acceptance of this commune as genuine was that the sectarians were little understood, by either the intelligentsia or the masses, partly because of their communistic outlook. He adds that sectarians in the south of Russia were especially receptive to social propaganda. “Their surprisingly strong unified organization gave our propagandists and agitators, once in this organization, the opportunity to awaken sympathy, to distribute oral and written propaganda widely among like-thinking people of this sect, and through them to act upon the surrounding uncultured, unenlightened, often completely undeveloped peasant mass. In the sectarian literature, we often encountered quotes from our illegal works of that time, almost unknown to the intelligentsia, and little studied to this time” (pp. 142-43).

28 (), Dec. 6, 1925, p. 2; Dec. 13, 1925, p. 3. He claims that Lenin allowed these exemptions by decrees on Jan. 1, 1919, and Feb. 14, 1920.

29 (), Feb. 13, 1925

30 (), II, 309.

31 Ibid., p. 352.

32 () CCCP, No. 2, 1961, p . 234.

33 See, for example, K. Petrus, () (New York, 1953), and Kolarz (op. tit.), both of whom ignore the most interesting aspect of the drive to make militarists out of sectarians. The merger of Evangelical-Christians with Baptists and a sprinkling of Pentecostal communities cannot be considered a comfortable one from the point of view of the groups involved, since the Baptists always agreed to military service and the Evangelical-Christians did not, while the Pentecostals are an extremist group to say the least. If, as Kolarz claims, dissenting Evangelical-Christians were deported when the merged group came out in favor of military service, this is an excellent example of Communist tactics: set the larger and/or stronger group against the smaller and/or weaker one, and give official sanction to the more manageable one. The Soviet indifference to doctrinal differences among the sects has had the interesting, and to the Soviet authorities totally unexpected, result of erasing the boundaries between religious groups without destroying them.

34 () (Moscow, 1926).

35 (), I, 511.

36 A reading of such pamphlets as () (Moscow, 1930), indicates, however, that although the communes were the smaller, less stable units, this was not always either inevitable or invariable. Membership in communes increased despite a turnover which approached or reached 100 per cent. The familial aspect of the communes rather than their small size was the basis of the decision to abandon them.

37 () (Moscow, 1958), p. 468. Sectarian communes were destroyed not only by deporting those who protested but by mixing in large numbers of Orthodox and Communists.

38 (), II, 436.

39 The agitation against the kolkhozy on the grounds that everything—including women —would be collectivized, which the Soviets blame on the kulaks, is interesting if we remember that the Orthodox, even in the Soviet period, always believed that the sectarian communes were hotbeds of immorality.

40 A. Dolotov () [Novosibirsk, 1930]) claims that the Baptists never had more than 2 per cent of their membership among workers; he gives a figure of 1.37 per cent in 1924. By contrast, Klibanov (op. cit., p. 85) says that in 1925-26 in Rasskazovskii raion, Tambov oblast, of 800 Subbotniki, 179 were workers. The Molokans of the same raion had 27 workers out of 157 members. The radical decline of Subbotniki and Molokans after that is explained by the failure to attract youth, but we can attribute this decline in part to the fact that both workers and young people had considerable opportunity for mobility through the Komsomol and the Communist Party. But in Siberia from 1921 to 1924, Baptists and Old Believers, according to Dolotov (op. cit., pp. 74, 81) mounted a cultural offensive similar in many ways to the Communist one.

41 Ibid., pp. 122-23. Kolarz notes that proselytizing among the nationalities continues. Soviet ethnographers have noted that under conditions of extreme shortage of women, a baptized native woman was preferred by the Old Believers over an Orthodox woman. By and large, however, Old Believers migrated in large family groups and were therefore able to preserve community endogamy. See, for example, () (Leningrad, 1930). At the time this community was studied, the influx of Orthodox newcomers had yet to change the complexion of the villages, although the so-called Austrian Church had begun to attract Orthodox and Old Believers alike. A news item in Hseecmtui, July 10, 1962, announcing that 94 villages with 5,000 families had been resettled owing to the completion of the Bukhtarma hydroelectric station and consequent flooding of the territory, is an indication that radical change may have at last caught up with the Bukhtarma Old Believers.

42 The revulsion which the Soviet historian A. I. Klibanov feels for this sect is interesting because it is traditional for the educated semiofficial Russian. In 1915 in Tambov oblast there were 500 Khlysty; as of 1959 there were 250 in three raions, which is remarkable because other sects in the same area have sustained proportionately far greater losses. The Khlysty refused absolutely to join the kolkhozy, and to this day remain outside them. Klibanov scorns them because although the sect has religious prohibitions against the use of both the potato and the onion, Khlysty sow potatoes for the market and earn from these sales 25,000 to 30,000 rubles annually. Klibanov cites one Khlyst who used Michurinist science on his garden and orchard, but only in order to get his crop to market earlier than anyone else. He seemed, Klibanov says, more concerned with the state of the market than with the state of his soul, but he “practiced zeal” (the obligation of every member to spread the faith) by walking and talking in the market place, using for his own purposes many items of Communist propaganda.

43 L. N. Mitrokhin, “Education and Atheism and Methodology of Studying the Survival of Religious Beliefs,” Soviet Sociology, Summer, 1962, pp. 27 and 31, n. 1.

44 MajiaxoBa, op. cit.

45 Reporting on the work of the 1960 expedition of the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, USSR, to Lipets oblast and Voronezh, Malakhova says that the Elets Baptist community has a membership of 35 per cent men and 65 per cent women; in the Dolgoruki community the ratio is 25 and 75 per cent, and in the Griazin (Yellow Sands) community it is 40 and 60 per cent. By age the communities break down as follows: in the Elets community, 7 per cent are under forty, 63 per cent are forty to sixty, and 30 per cent are older than sixty. Among the Dolgoruki, 30 per cent are forty to sixty, 20 per cent are older than sixty, and 50 per cent are twenty to forty. In the Yellow Sands community there are no youth, and almost the entire community is older than sixty. In Voronezh, 5.3 per cent are twenty to thirty; 13 per cent are thirty to forty; 15.7 per cent are forty to fifty; 25.3 per cent are fifty to sixty, and 40.7 per cent are older than sixty. More than 60 per cent of the members in the three communities are either “persons not engaged in production,” housewives, or pensioners. E. F. Muraviev and Iu. V. Dmitriev (“Concreteness in the Study and Overcoming of the Vestiges of Religion,” Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, Fall, 1962, pp. 5-6) compare two Evangelical-Christian Baptist communities, the Kremen community, Ternopol oblast, and the Belgorod community. In the first case, out of 199 members, 24 are workers, 156 are peasants, 6 have white-collar jobs, and 13 are invalids and pensioners; 135 are women, and 64 are men; 190 are between twenty-five and forty, and 19 are under twenty-five. In the Belgorod community, out of 1,989 members, 1,506 are women (739 of them housewives); 1,218 are barely literate; 892 are over sixty.

40 See Table 1 in D. B. Shimkin's “Current Characteristics and Problems of the Soviet Rural Population,” in Roy Laird, ed., Soviet Agricultural and Peasant Affairs (Lawrence, 1963).

47 () (Moscow, 1958). We have dealt with this material at some length in “The Great Russian Peasant: Culture Change or Cultural Development?” Ethnology, July, 1963, pp. 320-38.

48 “An Ethnographic Study of the Russian Collective-Farm Peasantry of Eastern Siberia in 1957-1959,” Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, Summer, 1962, pp. 19-37