World's Energy

Johnson's Russia List Arthur E. Adams Professor of History Emeritus, Ohio State University In our country, wherever serious interest exists in Russia there is perplexed dismay at the apparent passivity of the Russian people. I am constantly asked, "Why are they so submissive and long-suffering? Why dona't they organize themselves, stand up and fight to win the rights every citizen should enjoy? Addressing these questions by means of a brief historical survey suggests three political, economic, social, and cultural forces that shaped Russiaa's people and that continue to influence their behavior. If Russians appear to be supine, long-suffering, and even hopeless, there are reasons for this. However, to make this statement is not to agree that the popular view is correct. Far-reaching and violent changes are presently underway, but the processes are complex and complicated, concealed by the public mediaa's concentration upon international relations and the flaws of Russiaa's leaders. Why are the Russians that way? At least in part because they lived for several hundred years as slaves. Russian slavery was called serfdom, a term only distantly related to the kind of feudal serfdom that developed in the West. In Russia, the prince or tsar granted land and male "souls" with their families to his servitors. The landowner became the owner of the land and the people who lived on it, enjoying the right to buy and sell his "souls" and to discipline and punish them, including the use of the knout and banishment to Siberia if they complained at the treatment they received. For his gift the tsar required the provision of military service, collection of taxes, road-building, and in the eighteenth century, work in new industries. The landowner decided who should marry whom, who should be sold, and whose sons should serve for life in the army. The serf with his family was usually granted the use of a small plot of land he could cultivate when he wasna't required for work on the ownera's fields. In the larger settlements and villages of the landowner the peasants governed their internal affairs organized as communes to which all male souls belonged. Essentially, the commune functioned as a self-governing organization that served as administrator and executor for the landowner, making crucial decisions about internal affairs by means of authoritarian-democratic procedures. The commune periodically reallocated the allotments of land assigned each serf, decided who would serve in the army, and how much labor or money should be given by each household to pay various charges levied by the landowner. It also exercised the right to punish its members. Serfdom expanded rapidly during the eighteenth century. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, needing money and services for wars and reforms, gave hundreds of thousands of serfs to their favorites. And those serfs, bought and sold and given away like cattle, fought the wars, tilled the fields, manned the new factories, and somehow eked out their living from the tiny parcels granted for their use. During the nineteenth century, as was true in the United States during the decades prior to our civil war, the injustice of slavery became a subject of constant and growing debate among the governing classes. Political and moral condemnation of the system grew among the upper classes and even among the rulers, resembling the kinds of passions displayed in the United States between abolitionist and slave-owner states. Ultimately, these concerns culminated in Tsar Alexander IIa's "Proclamation of the Emancipation of the Serfs" in February 1861--a noble and courageous effort that unfortunately left the serfs almost as badly off as before. They were declared free to marry as they chose, to acquire property, engage in trade, and even to bring action into the courts. However, the land continued to be the property of the landowner. The "freed" peasants could buy the small plot of land they had previously occupied, but they were saddled with redemption payments owed the landowners under conditions that invariably gave the landowners the upper hand in settlement negotiations. In effect, this arrangement pinned millions of peasants to the land, obligating them to pay for it. Redemption payments were to be completed within 49 years, and because the conditions of payment proved so difficult the redemption system was abolished in 1905. The communal system also continued to rule local affairs until 1904, although Michael Florinsky noted that "the deadening hand of communal organization in some manifestations lasted until 1917." In short, the freeing of the serfs was botched and incomplete. It left millions of serfs pinned to the land as before and bearing the painful obligation of working off their new-found debts by laboring in the land-ownersa' fields or finding some other means of payment. It is useful to compare the numbers of black slaves freed in the United States and those "freed" by the Emancipation Proclamation in Russia. Census figures in the United States recorded a total population of 31,183,744 in 1860, of which 3,950,528 were slaves. Our Emancipation Proclamation freed roughly four million black slaves, or 12.7% of our total population. In Russiaa's case out of a population of 60,000,000, 49,486,065 were peasants. In other words, the Russian emancipation "freed" 82% of the population. (1) We know well the cultural, economic, and psychological traumas our nation endured during the process of emancipation, and we are very much aware that slavery laid a blight on the lives of American black people some of which continues right into this century. Although racial prejudice played, and still plays, a unique role in the American experience, this comparison brings home the fact that 82% of the Russian population suffered from a form of slavery right into the twentieth century. Serfdom contributed to the character of Russiaa's masses, accustoming them to accept living and working conditions they could not escape, teaching them to bow to the cruel and capricious willfulness of their masters. The lessons learned from the mistreatment of centuries have not been easily erased. The Russian Orthodox Church and the faith it embodied also bear great responsibility for the passivity and submissiveness of the Russian people. It was unlike the Roman Catholic Church with its moral principles, its learned priests and borrowings from the Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Judeo-Christian legacy, and its amazing ability to adapt and adjust to conditions in the secular world. Also, the Russian Church was unlike the protestant denominations of the West where reason, morality, and good works were made keys to salvation. These influences have never been present in the Russian faith. Priests did not preach; monks did not write learned tomes for the enlightenment of the flock. Beginning in the sixteenth century the state made itself the ruler of the church. Ivan the Terrible made it clear that State and Church were one, claiming divine authority for himself. In the early years of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great went even further, by making church administration a state responsibility and establishing an ecclesiastical committee, the Synod. Thereafter the chief administrators of the church were appointed by the tsar and carried out his commands. Little protest was expressed among religious officials and the laity about the secularization of the Church. However, here and there, over the years one or another protestant group raised its head, but its leaders and followers were quickly isolated or exiled. The Russian faith consists almost wholly of belief in the magic effect of ritual. Through all of Russiaa's history, the faithful have attended services without preaching, without moral guidance, or rules of belief and behavior to be followed. In the beautiful Russian churches the mass is performed, the congregation participates in the proceedings without understanding their significance. The ritual is the magic. One performs it, or watches the priest,s performance, and feels peace or satisfaction when the ceremony is complete. During week-days the priests performed other sacred rituals--marriage, birth, death--and received payment for each duty performed. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men and women of the upper classes gazed out at the land, pondering the life of the people. They were awed by those millions of serfs who displayed such endurance and courage, who worked all their lives, accepting cruel punishment as their due and displaying contentment with the mystery of the mass. And because the faith of the serfs seemed to be so profound, the more learned men and women developed theories that the serfsa' faith was the source of Russiaa's unique character. Writers and publicists discovered in the masses a spiritual virtue of unity in the faith and the peasant commune. Some defined the "special" character as a quality of mystic-religious oneness that rose from the innate strength and goodness of the Russian soul. In time they concluded that this special goodness was destined someday to penetrate the sinful West and bring love and peace to the world. This belief joined with national pride, creating theories that the nation embodied the special goodness of the people, and that this special virtue was destined to save mankind. Feodar Dostoevsky dramatically expressed this conviction when he prophesied that someday Russia would "show a way out of the sorrows of Europe in our Russian soul, universally human and all-uniting; to find a place in it, with brotherly love, for all our brothers, and finally perhaps to speak the final word of the great harmony of all, of the brotherly unison of all nations according to the law of the gospel of Christ." Within the Church and among Russiaa's publicists, this special quality of unity was more imaginatively termed sobornost, a Russian word that stems from church and gives the idea of unity an overtone of holiness. These ideas were vigorously propagated by talented writers and thinkers in the latter years of the nineteenth century, and while to westerners the ideas may appear absurd, they are surely no more absurd than the British belief that civilizing the natives was the white mana's burden, or the idea popular once (and perhaps even now) that the United States has a manifest destiny to do good works in the world. The mystic-religious-nationalist concept of sobornost satisfied the needs of people who loved their country and their faith and needed to assure themselves that Russia stood for something vastly superior to the materialistic West. In fact, however, the Church failed to establish demanding principles of morality, good works, and the values of learning and law. This was a catastrophe for Russia with consequences so far-reaching that it helped to create generations of followers who were unable to compete in the world. This conclusion is not meant to be a condemnation of the Russian Church. Russia endured many catastrophes that could not have been avoided, and the Church suffered from them. For example, the Tatar occupation from the thirteenth century through almost the whole of the fifteenth century cut Russia off from the explosive developments of the western renaissance. Also, the crucial need of the first emperors to expand their land and fight off those who attacked them, compelled them to create an autocracy that submitted all elements of society to the need for money, laborers and troops. The Church was a victim of such events. It continued to teach little but respect for mystic rituals, and this left the Russian people without the intellectual weapons and institutions that might have helped them change Russiaa's history. A third major factor in the history that shaped the rural masses of Russia was the seventy-odd years reign of the Communists. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 freed the peasants momentarily to seize the land they had so long coveted. For a few months, while the chaos of continuing war, allied invasion, and the merciless destruction of the former ruling classes kept the Bolsheviks busy, peasants ran wild, killing or driving landowners away, breaking up large holdings. A severe drop in agricultural production and a breakdown of procurement facilities for moving produce to the cities compelled Lenin to acknowledge that his theory of proletarian revolution suited the proletariat of the cities but not the land-starved, "petty-bourgeois" peasants. Determined efforts were made to establish Bolshevik dominance in the countryside during several years of civil war that left the party dictator of the nation but still struggling to restrain the peasants. For the peasants there was ultimately a gloomy realization that the new rulers were far more ruthless than the ones they had lost. They accepted the fact, but grimly continued the struggle to control the land in their own interests. Stalin soon realized that new and effective systems of controlling the agricultural production and procurement problems had to be created if the imperative to industrialize the nation was to be fulfilled. To meet these and other needs it was decided to collectivize agriculture in early 1930. Collectivization was not a system designed to improve the lives of peasants or the productivity of their work. It was essentially a means of consolidating thousands of private farms and placing them under communist control in fewer, manageable units. It was also designed to make procurement of agricultural produce for the cities more effective and to satisfy the need for agricultural products that could be exported to pay for machines needed from abroad to advance industrialization. Finally, it served as a welfare system for the hordes of rural people forced into the collective farms. The peasants fought the new system bitterly during Stalina's campaign to drive them into huge farms. Branding those who opposed the collectivization as Kulaks (petty capitalists) and enemies of the people, Stalin literally went to war against his own people. Peasants driven from their homes died from the fighting, from famine (five million in the Ukraine alone), or were exiled to Siberia during the early thirties. When this struggle was over, the peasants were packed into collective and state farms. Once again they were pinned to the land, with limited opportunities to escape, subordinated to their communist masters, seething with resentment, but cowed into acceptance and silence. The people of the cities were subjected to similar pressures throughout the communist regime. Stalina's policies and those of his successors consisted of unceasing efforts to drive Russiaa's industrialization forward in all haste. Threat of attack from Germany, and the war itself, intensified this effort, and at least for Stalin it justified the all-out effort to continue to whip the whole population into constant and heroic effort. Later, when the war was over, the devastation wreaked by the fighting was so terrible that there could be no rest before beginning the task of reconstruction. The communistsa' decades-long effort to transform the population into what was called "The New Soviet Man" was one of the most brutal and concentrated efforts to make over a whole population seen in the twentieth century. Stalin and his successors wanted Russiaa's people to become loyal, hard-working, dedicated, moral, and spiritually bound to the precepts of communism. To accomplish this transformation they employed an incessant barrage of propaganda designed to instill the masses with a godless religion that idealized productive labor, unquestioning loyalty to the leaders and their ideology, and total subordination to the will of the state. Education became a system to create the new Soviet man; youth and sports organizations indoctrinated the young; farms and industries and offices and the walls of buildings became billboards lauding in red and gold the glory of work and Russia. Literature, higher education, music and science were judged by the quality of their socialist message. To achieve the loyalty and effort Stalin demanded, the secret police and hordes of zealots from a variety of organizations including the party itself were assigned the task of ferreting out the doubter, the dissenter, the person whose knowledge or bourgeois grandfather or almost any expression of dissatisfaction seemed to signify deviance from total loyalty and support. For those who were found less than loyal--and there were millions--punishment varied from harassment and loss of employment, to torture, imprisonment, execution or exile.(2) The ultimate effect was to create a culture where family members dared not express dissenting opinions to one another. A whisper, a lifted eyebrow, or something one had said to a friend years before might attract the attention of the thought police and earn a ticket to a labor camp for life. Despite such mistreatment, or perhaps because of it, millions of men and women fought and died defending the nation during World War II that cost the lives of seven million military personnel and civilians. Khrushchev and his successors, though rapidly losing momentum and faith in their doctrines, managed to prolong many aspects of Stalina's system until the arrival of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. The details of this recent period are too well known to require summary here, but the conclusion is undeniable--communisma's reign marked the third great cultural force impacting the people with demands so rigorous that, like serfdom, the only possible response for those who could not escape was acceptance, submission, and silence. What does this tracing of the Russian peoplea's history signify? That the people are now so beaten down, abused, and conditioned by their past that there is no hope for them? Such a conclusion seems quite reasonable, but many signs indicate that more hopeful conclusions may be possible. The rural population has been diminished by the growth of industries and cities. At present 87.7 percent of the labor force is urban; only 12.7 percent is rural. Most Russians now live in the cities where, although living and working conditions are difficult, there is extensive opportunity for exchanging views with associates. Local and national groups act in defense of workers. Russian organizations resembling the Westa's NGOa's work for change deemed essential, and several hundred thousand of them are now registered in the country. The computer internet is flourishing with six million users. Although the central government owns or controls the national television companies, 7,300 more or less independent television stations operate around the country along with 65 million radios.(3) Russians travel abroad. Despite Western concern about official suppression of the press, close observers are constantly surprised at the boldness of public criticism. In sum, a wide variety of economic and social processes appear to be improving the quality of everyday life. It seems possible that through the complex mess of botched reform efforts, oligarchs punished and unpunished, and several hundred other developments now taking place, there may be a glimmer of hope that the long-suffering, grimly enduring people may be changing in character. If this is true, it is wonderful news, but the promise of progress may take generations to be fulfilled. One can only hope that the people find the courage and knowledge to play forceful roles in the way their lives are to be shaped in the future. They have much to escape-the slavery of serfdom, the failure of their religion to provide them with the principles and rules needed for life in the world, and the cruel communist effort to create a great industrial nation on the backs of the new Soviet Man. One small but impressive example of change in the right direction appeared early in January of 2005, when elderly people staged a kind of sit-down strike in the cities, objecting to the governmenta's bungled effort to cut back on old folksa' and other pensionersa' benefits. This demonstration called forth an immediate and responsive effort on the part of the government to backtrack, to adjust, to explain and correct its mistakes. Does this exhibit a remarkable step forward, with Russiaa's government hastily leaping to satisfy the publica's expressed need? It closely resembles the processes of interaction we call democracy.
(1) Wallace, Sir Donald Mackienzie. RUSSIA, Praeger, 1970. P.417; United States Population 1860. http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/state.php).
(2) Conquest, Robert, THE GREAT TERROR. A REASSESSMENT. Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 484-489. He estimates twenty million dead from Stalina's terror, not including peasant losses of the early thirties.
(3) THE WORLD FACTBOOKRUSSIA, CIA. Updated through 2004. Pp.10-12.