A People's Tragedy (75 page)

'provisional'. They presented the government as only the temporary guardian of the state until the election of the Constituent Assembly, and always stressed that their legislation was ultimately dependent on the legal sanction of the Assembly. And yet for this reason people questioned why they should obey the government: the word 'provisional' did not command respect.

With hindsight it is difficult not to blame the leaders of the Provisional Government for failing to act more quickly to convene the Constituent Assembly, which alone could have given them the democratic mandate they required. Everyone acknowledged the urgency of its convocation. But the liberal leaders allowed their common sense to become clouded by their high ideals. They were overawed by the solemn importance of their task — to construct a national parliament expressing the 'will of the people' — and insisted on the most detailed legal preparations to ensure the fairest possible franchise.

A council of representatives from various political groups was summoned at the end of March. It took two months to agree on the composition of a second Special Council of over sixty members to draft the electoral law and this, in turn, got bogged down in lengthy deliberations on the various options of proportional representation, the fairest possible methods of redrawing the electoral boundaries, and the best ways of organizing elections in the army and the ethnic borderlands.

By the early summer, as chaos spread through the country and the urgent need for a stronger legal authority became clear, there was growing public concern about the slow progress of the Special Council. Some people argued that it would have been quicker to appoint a smaller commission to draft the

electoral law. But F. F. Kokoshkin, a Kadet lawyer and the Chairman of the Special Council, defended its careful approach on the grounds that the new electoral law had to live up to the 'wishes and interests of all the population'. There were certainly practical problems that made hasty elections inadvisable: millions of people were on the move and it was not clear how their votes were to be counted. But to a certain extent these reservations had become a pretext for delay. The Kadets, in particular, favoured the postponement of the elections, no doubt because they knew they would lose them.

Prince Lvov supported Kokoshkin's procrastination. He, above all, was sold on the ideal of a perfect parliament. 'The Constituent Assembly', Lvov told the Special Council,

'must crown the great Russian revolution. It must lay all the vital foundations for the future order of the free democratic state. It will bear the responsibility for the entire future of Russia. It must be the essence of all the spiritual and mental forces of the people."9

This was surely placing unrealistic expectations on what, in the context, should have aimed to be no more than a makeshift parliament of national salvation. However imperfect, to begin with, such an assembly might have been, it would at least have established a focus, and a base of legitimacy, for Russia's fragile new democracy. There are very few examples in history of a long-lasting revolutionary parliament, and, steeped as they were in the history of Europe, the leaders of the Provisional Government should have been well enough aware of this to keep their expectations in realistic bounds. But they allowed their high ideals to cloud their common sense. Perhaps it was a case of too many lawyers and not enough statesmen. The failure of the government to hold the elections enabled the Bolsheviks to sow serious doubts in the people's minds about its intentions to hold them at all; and this lent weight to their propaganda claims, which were used to justify their own seizure of power, that the government had fallen into the hands of the 'counter-revolution. Under growing public pressure, the leaders of the Provisional Government announced in mid-June that the elections would finally be held on 17 September. But everyone knew that at the rate things were going this was out of the question, for the register of electors had not been drawn up and the local government organs, which were supposed to do this, had still not been established. By August little progress had been made and the date of the elections was once again postponed until 12 November. But by this time the Bolsheviks had come to power.

ii Expectations

'We are living through wild times', Sergei Semenov wrote to an old friend in the spring of 1917. It is hard for the people of our generation to adapt to the new situation. But through this revolution our lives will be purified and things will get better for the young.'10 The peasant reformer pinned all his hopes on the civilizing mission of the revolution. At last, so he thought, the time had come for the backward Russian village to receive the benefits of the modern world. He welcomed the fall of the old regime in a spirit of optimistic expectation and reconciliation with his mistrustful peasant neighbours in the village commune of Andreevskoe. It was now a full six years since he had ended his long and bitter struggle to separate from them and set up his own private enclosed farm on the outskirts of the village.

During that first hopeful spring Semenov picked up once again from the reforms he had started during 1905. He expanded his work in the agricultural co-operatives; revived the local Peasant Union; opened a 'people's club' in the local market town of Bukholovo; and organized lectures for the peasants on a whole range of progressive subjects, from republican philosophies to the advanced methods of overwintering cows. He even drew up a blueprint for the electrification of the whole of the Volokolamsk district which he presented to the Moscow city duma. Semenov's daughter, Tatiana, recalls her fathers renewed hopes and energies during the spring of 1917:

We were amazed by our father's strength — it had literally doubled overnight — and he now looked forward to the future with high expectations. He not only worked in the fields but he also travelled around the villages, looking into every aspect of peasant affairs. He read on everything, and constantly wrote. Sometimes, when we were all asleep, he would still be working in his room. The next morning he was the first up.11

The revolution raised Semenov's standing among the villagers of Andreevskoe. It also reduced the power of Grigorii Maliutin, the patriarchal elder of the village commune and arch-enemy of Semenov's reforms. The old power structure upon which Maliutin had depended — the volost elder, the local police and the gentry land captain — was dismantled almost overnight. Within the village the voice of the younger and more progressive farmers was also becoming more dominant, while that of the older peasants, like Maliutin, who saw nothing good in the revolution, was increasingly ignored. The social changes of the past few years lay at the root of this democratization of the village commune. More and more households were being headed by the younger peasants, as a result of household partitions. During the war years, in the absence of their menfolk, many peasant households were headed by women: in many regions up to one-third, and in Andreevskoe itself over a quarter. These younger peasants looked towards Semenov as a champion of reform. He always spoke out at the village assembly against the Church and the patriarchal order. As the

most literate peasant in the village, he was also called upon to write its resolutions when the village scribe, a lackey of Maliutin's, refused to 'work for the revolution'. But what really raised Semenov's standing was the success of his long campaign to get six of the poorest villagers released from the army because there was no one else to feed their families. During the autumn of 1916 he had been sentenced to six weeks in jail after Maliutin had denounced him to the authorities for 'encouraging desertion'. But the villagers had refused to let him go and had held him in Andreevskoe, a hostage and hero of the peasant revolution, until the downfall of the old regime. Two weeks later the six peasants all returned home. Maliutin was discredited, and Semenov emerged as the leader of the village.12

During that spring Semenov broke up his private enclosed farm and returned to the peasant land commune. Most of Stolypin's peasant pioneers chose to do likewise in 1917. If up to one-third of the peasant households in Russia farmed private holdings on the eve of the revolution, then four years later less than 2 per cent continued to do so.

Only the small minority of fully enclosed
khutora
had to be brought back by force. The semi-enclosed
otruba
tended to be much weaker economically and, like Semenov's, generally smaller than the neighbouring communal allotments. The prospect of sharing in the spoils of the commune's 'war on the manors', which started again during the spring, was enough to encourage most of them to return voluntarily.13

This return of the separators reflected a general peasant striving for solidarity within the village commune. 'Today, in free Russia, everyone should be equal and united,' declared the peasants of Dubovo-Pobedimov in Bugul'ma. 'The members of the communes should accept all the separators into their family on an equal basis and should cease all oppressive measures against them, since these only play into the hands of the enemies of the people.' The village commune was greatly strengthened as a result of the revolution. It revived from its pre-revolutionary state of torpor and decay to become the main organizing force of the peasant revolution on the land. All the main political organs of the revolution in the countryside — the village committees, the peasant unions and the Soviets — were really no more than the peasant commune in a more revolutionary form. The village commune stood for the ideals of land and freedom which had always inspired the peasants to revolt. It defined a circle of 'insiders' and defended their interests against 'outsiders' — landowners, townsmen, merchants, state officials, even peasants from the neighbouring communes — at a time of great insecurity.

Since the days of serfdom, the land commune had served as a link between its peasant household members (usually within a single village) and a particular landlord's estate. In 1917 it thus provided these villagers with a historical and a moral right to that estate on the often-stated peasant principle: 'Ours was the lord, ours is the land.' During the seizure of the gentry's estates

the members of the commune displayed a remarkable degree of solidarity and organization. It was common for the village assembly to pass a resolution compelling all the members of the commune to take part in the march on the manor, or in other forms of peasant resistance, such as rent strikes and boycotts, on the threat of expulsion from the commune. It was a matter of safety in numbers. Contrary to the old Soviet myth, there were very few conflicts within the village between the richer and poorer peasants. But there were a great many conflicts between neighbouring communes, sometimes ending in little village wars, over the control of the estates.14

This is how the revolution on the land took place. At a pre-selected time the church bells rang and the peasants assembled with their carts in the middle of the village. Then they moved off towards the manor, like a peasant army, armed with guns, pitchforks, axes, scythes and spades. The squire and his stewards, if they had not already fled, were arrested or at least forced to sign a resolution conceding all the peasant demands.

During the spring these were usually quite moderate: a lowering of land rents; the redistribution of prisoner-of-war labour; or the compulsory sale of grain, tools and livestock to the commune at prices deemed 'fair' by the peasants. The mass confiscation of the gentry's land did not occur until the summer. Most of the peasants were still prepared to wait for the Provisional Government to pass a new land law transferring the estates to them, just as they had once waited for the Tsar to pass a 'Golden Manifesto'.

They were afraid to attack the estates before it was clear that the old regime would not be restored, as it had been in 1906—7, with the mass executions of the peasants which had followed. It was really only at the start of May, with the appointment of the SR

Chernov as Minister for Agriculture, that the peasants had such a guarantee; and it was from this time that the outright confiscation of the gentry's estates became a nationwide phenomenon. Early May was also the start of the summer agricultural season. If the peasants were to harvest the squire's fields in the autumn, they would need to plough and sow them now.* So there was an obvious motive for the peasants to seize the land from about this time. The nuns of the Panovka Convent in Serdobsk were some of the more unusual victims of this increasing peasant aggression: A resolution of the Davydovka volost executive committee on 10 April ordered our convent to rent to the peasants 15
desyatiny
of our spring fields. On 19 May we received a communication from the same committee that, for our own needs, we may keep 15

desyatiny
of fallow land, but that a further 30
desyatiny
of land must be given to the peasants of Pleshcheevka

* Not surprisingly, many of the squires had left their fields unsown.

village. Now [in mid-June] the peasants are requisitioning grain from our convent: 600

pud
has been taken for the local villagers at I rouble 52 kopecks, but grain from the peasants is requisitioned at 2 roubles 50 kopecks.15

The return of soldiers on Easter leave, and indeed of deserters from the army, also had a lot to do with this increased peasant militancy. The peasant soldiers often took the lead in the march on the manors. Sometimes they encouraged the peasantry to indulge in wanton acts of vandalism. They burned the manor houses to drive the squires out; smashed the agricultural machinery (which in recent years had removed much of the need for hired peasant labour); carried away the contents of the barns on their carts; and destroyed or vandalized anything, like paintings, books or sculptures, that smacked of excessive wealth. It was also not uncommon for these soldiers to incite the peasants to attack the squires. In the village of Bor-Polianshchina, in Saratov province, for example, a band of peasants, led by some soldiers, forced their way into the manor house of Prince V V Saburov, and hacked him to death with axes and knives. It was a bloody retribution for the role his son had played as the local land captain in 1906, when twelve peasant rebels had been hanged in the village before their screaming wives and children.