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p “Plough, sow, look after your farm, do what the authorities tell you, and don’t bother your head about things, whatever happens!" says the reliable, thrifty peasant. The sphere in which the peasant’s thought can safely move is restricted to the peasant’s farming. By engaging in farming the peasant is placed in certain relations with the land, manure, implements of labour and draught animals. We assume that these relations are extremely varied and extremely instructive. But they have nothing in common with the mutual relations of people in society, and it is the latter that cultivate the citizen’s thinking and it is on them that the greater or lesser breadth of his views, concepts of justice, and social interests depend. As long as a man’s thinking does not extend beyond the limits of his farm, his mind will sleep the sleep of the dead, and if it awakes under the influence of some exceptional circumstances, it awakes only to hallucinations. A natural 142 economy is most unfavourable for the development of keen social thought and broad social interests. Since any given economic unit is satisfied by its own produce, its relations with the rest of the world are extremely uncomplicated, and it is totally indifferent to the fate of the latter. We are accustomed here to extol a sense of solidarity as being characteristic to a high degree of commune peasants. But this custom is quite unfounded. In fact commune peasants are just as individualist as peasant proprietors. "Fictitiously united in the commune by collective responsibility in the performance of numerous social obligations, the greater part of which, moreover, are imposed from without,” Gl. I. Uspensky rightly says, "they are left to themselves, not as commune members and state workers, but simply as people, each one has to answer for himself, each one suffers for himself, struggles through, if he can, and if he can’t, goes under" (From a Village Diary}. True this remark of Gl. I. Uspensky’s refers to the peasants of Novgorod Gubernia who have long since been living in the conditions of a very developed commodity economy. But from Naumov’s writings it is clear that there is little solidarity between the Siberian peasants too and that the poor man meets with little sympathy from his fellow villagers there too. The peasant Yashnik with whom we are already acquainted had only one horse, Peganka, that was worn out by constant work and lack of fodder. Peganka would often stop in the road, totally exhausted, and no amount of urging or blows could get it to move from the spot. All that Yashnik could do was to harness himself to the cart, to the great amusement of the whole village.

_p “’There’s a fine pair of trotters for you, lads, just take a look. Tee, hee, hee! Looks as if they’ll smash the cart to pieces, eh?’

p “’A pair like that would cost about a hundred rubles, friends, eh?’

p “’You couldn’t get them even for that! Just look, they’re both going at a trot now, see how their colouring matches.... As if they came from the same mare.’

p “’But if you take the difference between them, lads, which is the best-looking, the central one or the outrunner, eh?’

p “’The central one, of course, because at least its coat is all in one piece, though it’s moulting, but there’s so many patches on the outrunner it makes your eyes sore!’ hooted the village wits, referring to the large number of motley patches that adorned Yashnik’s one and only sheepskin coat which never left his shoulders either in winter or in summer" (Vol. I, p. 212).

p Such callous mocking of the poor is possible only where the harsh law of "each man for himself, and God for all" reigns supreme and where a man who is not able to combat want unaided arouses nothing but contempt in those around him. Naumov gives a good portrayal of the peasants’ indifference to another man’s 143 grief in The Village Auction also. One of the villagers is having his property sold by auction. From the open windows of his house comes a muffled sobbing. He himself is sitting on the porch, his head bowed in misery, while a dense crowd of peasants who have driven to the auction from the neighbouring villages presses round him, examining the objects prepared for auctioning and not paying the slightest attention to his genuine grief. A young fellow has bought his mare at an advantageous price and an old man has been “swindled” buying two harnesses. The latter is whining to the assessor, asking him to knock something off the excessively high price of the harnesses: "please, your honour, I’m a poor man”. But the very same "poor man" has just been intending to benefit at the expense of his fellow villager who has been ruined by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. He shouts: "A curse on them, all these okshuns".... But the only reason why he shouts this is because his calculations have not worked out, not because the “okshun” has ruined another peasant like him.

_p It could be said, of course, that in such cases the lack of solidarity between the peasants is the result of the new, emergent commodity economy, and not of the old, natural one. But this would be wrong. The commodity economy does not create the divergency of interests between the peasants; it merely aggravates it, using it as a foundation tor its own development. We have already seen how revolting the forms of exploitation are that arise in the process of the transition of a natural economy into a commodity one: the usurer enslaves the producers completely. But what creates this terrible, overwhelming power of usurer’s capital? The relations which it finds, on its emergence, between producers who have been brought up in the conditions of a natural economy. Isolated from one another and totally incapable of toiling together for the common good as soon as this toil extends beyond the limits of their age-old routine, the producers are the usurer’s natural prey and he deals with them as easily as a kite with chickens. And they themselves are aware not only of their economic impotence in relation to the usurer, but also of his intellectual superiority to them.

_p “He’s a bright one, he is!" says Naumov’s coachman about the kulak Kuzma Terentich.

p “Clever, is he?

p “Bucketfuls of brains, he’s got. Just take a look at him yourself and see what he’s like, this Kuzma Terentich...”, etc. (Vol. I, p. 56, The Web).

p This admiration of the ordinary peasant for the brains of the kulak has always struck the best researchers into Russian popular life. It would in itself be sufficient proof of the fact that the kulaks are produced not by the external, but by the internal conditions of peasant life. External conditions would be powerless if the 144 internal conditions precluded the emergence from the peasant mir of people bearing the expressive name of eaters of the mir.

p Powerless before the kulak as a result of their isolation, the producers of the period of economic development in question are also totally powerless in relation to the centre which is in charge of the general affairs of any given territory. The larger this territory, the more powerless individuals and whole communes are in relation to it. The proud independence of the savage gives way to the pathetic submissiveness of the enslaved barbarian. The total insignificance of each of these barbarians in relation to the centre assumes an extremely unattractive external, so to say, ceremonial expression. In his relations with the centre the barbarian producer acts not as a human being, but merely as a pathetic semblance of a human being. He calls himself not by his full name, but by a degrading nickname, extending his disparagement to everything that has the slightest relationship to him: he adds the derogatory suffix -ka when speaking of his wife, his children and his cattle. Finally, he has ceased to belong to himself, becoming the property of the state. His slavery, his attachment to the land is, in the afore-mentioned conditions, essential for the satisfaction of the economic needs of the state. If he were not attached to the land, he would never cease to "roam around" depriving the state of all possibility of a stable existence. The state gives him land as long as this is the only way of maintaining his "paying power”. Once having grown attached to the land, he becomes one with it, like a snail with its shell, like a plant with the soil that nourishes it. As long as such a person is in a state of mental equilibrium, i.e., to put it more simply, in his right mind, it never occurs to him to ask himself questions that are not directly related to the production process which absorbs all his spiritual and physical strength. He ploughs, sows, looks after his farm, does what the authorities tell him, and never "bothers his head about things". That is not his job. It is the job of the people who live in the centre, and it is his duty to provide them with the economic possibility of bothering their heads about things, i.e., to plough, sow, look after his farm, etc. Only producers who for some reason or other are mentally unbalanced can permit themselves the luxury of “thinking”. At the stage of economic development which we are discussing now the absence of division of labour in the production process inevitably leads to social division of labour in which “thinking” becomes a quite superfluous and even harmful activity for producers.

p Kindly do not point to people like Bychkov as evidence that people of sound mind could "bother their heads about things" under the economic order in question. The Bychkovs do not in fact "bother their heads" about the social relations around them, but struggle against a few individual abuses. The questions that 145 occur to people such as Zamora would in most cases seem senseless even to the Bychkovs. The Bychkovs do not aim at leading their fellows forward, they only try to alleviate their stationary existence. The Bychkovs are honest conservatives; and these conservatives also come to a bad end, as we have seen, and also have to flee to other “okrugs”.  The Bychkovs have settled all our eastern borderlands. These borderlands have frequently “revolted” but they have never introduced anything new into our popular life for the simple and understandable reason that they themselves have not managed to reach a higher level of economic development.

p Oppressed on all sides by harsh and merciless reality, the barbarian farmer himself becomes harsh and merciless. He knows no pity where he has to struggle for his wretched existence. We know how peasants deal with horse-thieves. Naumov describes how some Siberian drivers dealt with three thieves who made their living by stealing tea: "They caught them, see, and dragged them into the forest, about a verst from the road. Then they stripped them bare, lit three fires, and tied them to trees by their hands and feet so that their backs were hanging over the fires, then started to warm their backs.... So much, folk say, that they prayed to be put to death. After that, a long time after, they were found hanging from the trees, and the roasted flesh had dropped off their bones...” (Sketches Without Shadows, Vol. II, p. 338).

p Naumov goes on to argue in detail that the peasant drivers incur great losses because of the thieves. No one will dispute this. But barbaric cruelty is barbaric cruelty, and there is always a great deal of it among “patriarchal” farming peoples. Take the refined cruelty of the Chinese, for example.

_p The absence of division of labour among producers in no way precludes the division of labour between man and woman. The man produces and the woman adapts his produce for consumption. Thus the woman becomes materially dependent on the man, and in the stage of economic development in question material dependence quickly leads to slavery. And women are indeed becoming men’s slaves, their things, their property. The husband can not only “teach” his wife "a lesson"’, but is often compelled to do so by the influence of public opinion. When he is “teaching” her, no one considers that they have the right to interfere and stay his heavy hand, and neighbours frequently watch with philosophical calm as a husband beats his wife almost to death. In Naumov’s Sketches Without Shadows we find a story about a working man who lets another man have his wife. "There was this soldier who lived at the gold mine ... a lecherous bastard, who boasted of nothing but his St. George’s cross. But his wife was a good, hardworking woman__ Then she got mixed up with another fellow

and latched on to him. At first the other fellow had a lot of trouble

10—0766

146 with the soldier. One day the soldier went at him with a knife, but the fellow took hold of him like a pup by the scruff of his neck, see, and put him in a trough of water by the machine that washes the gold, and said: give me your wife, or I’ll decide the matter by drowning you, St. George’s cross and all.... Well, after the soldier had cooled off a bit in the icy water his spirits sank: ’Take my wife, only let me go in peace!’ he said. So the fellow got the woman, and to make it more official he and the soldier got a paper about it; in the gold-mine office they wrote out this paper, that the soldier had given his wife to the other fellow, like rented her out, for a hundred rubles down, and whatever he could manage later, and that the soldier would have nothing to do with the woman, and that if the fellow should die, the woman should be entrusted to the will of God" (Vol. II, pp. 333-34). A wife can only be rented out if she is regarded as her husband’s property. But even this formal handing over of a woman by one man to another is in fact a presage of the collapse of the old peasant life, the result of the instability which the gold mines have brought to the life of the working masses. A true peasant would never give up his wife, just as he would never sell a horse needed "by the homestead" except in extreme need: such an action would introduce too much disorder into his farm. The system which we are examining shows a remarkable vitality. Usurer’s capital robs and humiliates producers, but it does not^change the modes of production. These modes can exist for thousands of years almost without any change. Correspondingly the social relations which grow up on their basis show a remarkable inertia. The countries in which they prevail are rightly regarded as stagnating countries. Mankind has made the transition to higher stages of cultural development only in places where a favourable combination of circumstances has upset the balance of these barbaric systems, where economic progress has dispelled the century-old slumber of the barbarians. To the good fortune of all Russians without exception, Russia is not fated to sleep as soundly as the other historical Oblomovkas, such as Egypt and China. It has been saved by the influence of its Western neighbours, thanks to which it has already embarked irrevocably on the path of general European economic development. Ever since the abolition of serfdom the decline of our old economic life has proceeded very rapidly, bringing broad rays of light into the formerly dark realm. In spite of the most persistent attempts to idealise this life, all that remained to the Narodnik fiction writers was to portray both the actual process of its decline arid its social and psychological consequences. Busy with his humane preaching, Naumov barely touches upon this aspect of the matter.  [146•*  147 But it comes out very clearly in Gl. I. Uspensky, Karonin and Zlatovratsky.

By a strange irony of fate the finest Narodnik fiction writerswere to portray the triumph of the new economic order which, in their opinion, promised to bring Russia nothing but material and moral disaster. This view of the new order was bound to be reflected in their writings also. With a very few exceptions (for example, Karonin’s short novel From the Bottom Upwards), they portray only the negative aspects of the process which we are undergoing, and the positive ones are touched upon only by chance, accidentally and in passing. It must be hoped that the disappearance of Narodnik prejudices will be accompanied by the emergence in Russia of writers who are consciously striving to study and reproduce artistically the positive aspects of this process. This would be a great step forward in the development of our fiction. And in order to take such a step writers do not need to stifle within themselves the sympathy for the people which was the strongest and most appealing aspect of Narodism. Certainly not. The nature of this sympathy would be different, of course. But it would merely be stronger for the change. However much the Narodniks idealised the peasants, they nevertheless looked down upon them as good material for their charitable historical experiments. There was a strong element of haughtiness among the Narodniks. The new type of intelligentsia which has been called upon to replace the Narodniks is incapable of adopting a haughty attitude towards people who do manual labour because of its belief that these people’s historical task can only be carried out by them. It sees them not as children who have to b& educated, not as unfortunates who deserve charity, but as comrades with whom one must march side by side, sharing both joy and sorrow, defeat and victory, with whom one is to go through the great educating school of historical progress to a single common goal. And who does not know that comradely sympathy is more serious and more valuable than sympathy, or rather compassion, the pity of the benefactor for the person upon whom he is proposing to bestow charity? In this way the gulf that has long existed between thinking people and people of manual labour disappears, because the latter themselves begin to think, themselves become intellectuals, thereby putting an end to the once inevitable, but extremely unattractive monopoly 148 on intelligence. And it ends precisely because the collapse of the old “foundations” cherished by the Narodniks has dispelled the age-old slumber of our Oblomovkas. The peasant of the good old days was not supposed to "bother his head about things" for fear of going mad. The working man of our day is obliged to "bother his head" simply by virtue of his economic position, albeit only in order to fight for his existence in the struggle against unfavourable, but at the same time constantly mobile, constantly changing economic conditions; like Figaro he needs more wit than was required "to rule all the Spains”. This is a tremendous difference which radically changes the whole character of the working masses and with it all the chances of our future historical development. The Narodniks do not see and do not recognise this difference. But ... ignorantia non est argumentum.  [148•*