The Russian Peasant Sphinx

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"OH thou great All-Russian Sphinx, it is not easy to be thy Oedipus." Thus Ivan Turgeniev apostrophized the Russian peasant. And a sphinx the peasant has been, even since the educated classes of the Russian cities began to take an interest in his welfare. The Slavophiles of the last century saw in the peasant, with his strong village community organization, the mir, and his supposed loyalty to the Tsar and the Orthodox Church, the Russian primitive Christian. The romantic revolutionaries of two generations ago, and the Social Revolutionists who took over many of their ideas, hailed the peasant as the natural communist, who only needed to be freed from the oppression of Tsar and landlord to set an example to the whole world in spontaneous coöperative farming. The Bolsheviks regarded the peasant as a small producer who must be conciliated during the period of active revolution but who ultimately must somehow be fitted into a Marxian collectivist order of things.

Fifteen years of war, revolution, civil war and post-revolutionary reconstruction have demolished some mistaken conceptions about the peasant and revealed him more as a normal human being than as a mysterious idol in a sheepskin coat. The idea of the peasant as a faithful son of "Holy Russia," imbued with heartfelt devotion to Tsar and Church, has been smashed beyond any conceivable reconstruction. Also exploded is the fallacy that the peasants are naturally inclined to communism. They were thorough-going revolutionaries so long as it was a question of sacking the large estates and dividing up the land among themselves. Once this process was completed they became, for the most part, zealous upholders of the rights of individualist private property: and after a decade of mingled economic pressure and economic persuasion by the Soviet authorities, barely two percent of the peasants have been induced to try their fortunes in collective farms...