Aspectos éticos

254 NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES

across the wide canal on which the fertility of the region depended, the jumbled mass of Uzbek dwellings, built of rammed earth, confronted the large, luxuorious villas and gardens composing the residential quarter of the Russian functionaries. Russian penetration in the protectorates was of the same character: New Bokhara, for example, founded in 1888 near the old city, had acquired by 1914 a mainly Russian population of about ten thousand postal and railway officials, bank employees and skilled manual workers, a social microcosm representing the farthest advance of Slav civilization in the south-east.

Russian colonization had previously been slight and sketchy on the southern Ukrainian steppes and in the Volga territories and Siberia; but the gaps were now being filled in, and the Slavs were firmly established in every part of the state where conditions were at all practicable. Land hitherto unused was cleared by the incoming Russian peasants, and the numerically weak non-Russian communities, undermined by infiltration, found themselves being either pushed back into smaller areas or diluted by successive waves of invaders. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Tatars, the Chuvashes, the Mordvinians on the Volga, the Mariis, the Udmurts on the Kama and the Bashkirs of the Ural region had become mere islets in a sea of Slavs, whose outermost waves in Siberia had reached, but not submerged, certain scattered tribes protected by distance, nature and their own insignificance: the Tunguz on the Yenisei, the Yakutsk on the Lena, the Buriat-Mongols round Lake Baikal and the Chuckshis on the Anadyr were unable, despite their tiny numbers, to preserve their cultural identity on the fringe of the imported Russian way of life.

It was in European Russia that peasant settlement was carried out most intensively, as can be seen from statistics compiled by the Soviet historian Yatsunsky. Whole regions were brought under cultivation. In the Ekaterinoslav, Kherson and Tauris provinces, the area cultivated increased from 4,855,620 acres in 1796 to 15,627,000 in 1860, 22,733,700 in 1881, and 30,915,357 in 1921. In the Don basin the figures for 1860, 1881 and 1912 respectively were 3,528,665, 10,358,658 and 18,302,096 acres. The rise was even steeper in the provinces of Samara, Orenburg, Ufa and Astrakhan: 2,928,000, 4,164,000, 18,861,000, 22,892,000. Though less spectacular than this victorious advance of the Russian peasant into new agricultural areas, the increase of cultivation in the 'black earth' country was a further pointer to the strength and persistence of demographic pressure.

The fecundity of the Russian people, necessitating the occupation of the most fertile and accessible areas in this vast expanse of Euro-Asiatic terri-tories, caused the Slav element to predominate even in places where there was a relatively high concentration of Finno-Turkish inhabitants. The Russian state which this process produced was one in which the various non-Slav groups, though preserving their individuality, were now merely the majority or a significant minority in territories which had once been their own but in which they could not longer pretend to any degree of real independence. A map of the ethnographical composition of imperial

RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS ₂₅₅

Russia in 1914 is like a partial forecast of the solution adopted by the Soviet government to the problem of these subordinate nationalities.

The Cossack Hosts

There had been a continual flow, as the centuries wore on, of colonists, run-away serfs and outlaws into the country on Muscovy's southern border, where Slav territory abutted on that of the Turkic peoples af the steppes; a frontier zone known as the 'wild field' (dikoye polie) over which no govern-met had been able to establish control for any length of time. The new-comers formed armed bands which, as they became more organized, developed into the 'Cossack Hosts'. In the thirteenth century the term 'cossack' seems to have been applied to the Polovtsian mercenaries em-ployed as frontier guards by the Genoese trading cities of the Crimea; it reappears in the fifteenth with wider, vaguer meaning which includes not only the Turkic mercenaries whom the Russian princes used as a buffer against raids by the peoples of the steppe, but also that floating population of the frontier zone which must originally have been of mixed Turkic and Slavic composition but was soon Russianized by the arrival of runaway peasants, to whom these disputed areas held the promise of freedom and a new start in life.

The Cossacks of necessity built up their communities on military lines;

and though their living came mainly from agriculture they also went in for a mixture of alternate trade and pillage. Tactically, they commanded the caravan routes which, partly overland and partly by river, somewhat pre-cariously connected the Black Sea and the central Russian principalities, across the Tatar-dominated steppes between; they sold their co-operation to the highest bidder, but from the fourteenth century onwards they were gradually drawn into the Russian orbit by community of religion, self-interest, and the pressure increasingly applied by the Muscovite rulers.

The Don Cossacks rapidly became a defensive barrier against the Tatars, and received Russian support in return. The territory of the Ukrainian Cossacks was divided by the frontier between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, a fact to which they owed an independence of long duration., The southernmost part of that territory, in the bend of the Don, was the home of the curious Zaporozhe Cossack community, a kind of military republic which played a very active role in the conflicts between Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Impatient of outside control, but gradually converted to the Russian cause by its successive leaders, this community did not finally disappear until the reign of Catherine n: it was crushed and dispersed in 1775, by which time the Russians had installed themselves permanently on the Black Sea coast under the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1764) and the intensive colonization of the southern steppes was turning the warlike organization of the Cossacks into a useless anachronism. Similar reasons led during the eighteenth century to the ex-tinction of the other Cossack communities in the Ukraine, which was joined to the Russian state under Alexis Mikhailovitch.

256

The Zaporozhe Sietch has nevertheless survived in traditional memory as the perfect example of a Cossack society, and has been the chief source of the Cossack myth: a conception partly legendary and partly real, in which the Cossacks are pictured as living in a free democratic community, show-ing superlative courage as defenders of Orthodoxy against the Crescent, and staunchly championing the Russian people against the nomads of the steppe.

In reality, however, the Zaporozhe Sietch followed the same path of development as the other Cossack societies, whose structure was demo-cratic in appearance only; their military hierarchy masked acute in-equalities of personal wealth. Decisions were reached in open discussion, everyone had his say, but the liberty and equality fostered by this oral, public procedure were unreal. And anti-Turkish feeling, strengthened by constant guerrilla warfare and by strict adherence to Orthodoxy - which, in the seventeenth century, was to make the Cossacks into pillars of the 'Old Believers' heresy - did not preclude accommodations and even temporary alliances with the Ottoman Empire.

Some branches of the Cossacks lived on until the Revolution of 1917.

They took service under the state and, as the Russian Empire developed, constituted the forward elements of expansion to the south and east and guarded the Caucasian and Asian frontiers. The Cossacks of the Ukraine and the Don provided the detachments which the Stroganovs sent east-wards from the Ural and which, under Ermak, conquered western Siberia. Russian power was extended to the Pacific shore by Cossacks.

Dezhnev, the discoverer of the Behring Straits, was a Cossack.

The Russian government, strengthening its grip from the seventeenth century onwards in the lands along its southern borders, across the Don, in the valleys of the Kuban, the Terek and the Yaik, transformed these unruly mercenaries into faithful soldiers of the tsar. On the pattern of the existing communities (which were refashioned, amalgamated, or transferred from, their old areas), it created new ones along the Asian frontier by a combined process, which went on until the end of the nineteenth century, of import-ing real Cossacks and 'cossackizimport-ing' the local peasantry. In 1914 there were eleven Cossack voiskos (armies, divided into stanitsas): those of the Don, the Kuban, the Terek, the Ural, Siberia, Astrakhan, Orenburg, Transbaikalia, Semiretchensk, the Amur and the Usuri, in addition to three city-based Cossack regiments.

Although in the late eighteenth century the Cossacks were still taking part in the great agrarian revolts which rocked the imperial throne and inflamed vast areas of southern Russia - and a highly important part at that, since they provided the unorganized peasants with such leaders as Bolotnikov, Stenka Razin, Bulavin and Pugachev - they subsequently aligned themselves completely with the country's political structure and became the foremost defenders of the existing order. As the most reliable troops the army possessed, they became shock-troops and took part in the most important battles; but these proud horsemen in their black sheepskin

RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS ₂₅₇

caps (papakha) were feared as well as admired by the civilian population on account of their absolute fidelity to the tsar in times of unrest, when they drove back the crowds of peasants or workers with their nagaikas.

The traditional image of the Cossack has inspired both novelists (such as Gogol, with his legendary Taras Bulba, 1837) and painters (Repin, The Zaporozhe Cossacks' Letter to the Sultan, 1891, inspired by a forged document of the eighteenth century and referring to the Turco-Polish war

•1677-8).

The Cossack societies were an exceptional, privileged element in the Russian social scene, and their influence was large in relation to their lumbers. The largest voisko, however, that the Don, with a territory of some 23,200 square miles, which included the Donets region as well as the middle and lower Don, comprised 1,750,000 people in all - approximately 43 per cent of the total population of the area. Capable of providing 200,000 men for military service, it had been given the freehold of 7,413,000 acres of farming land, owned enormous herds of horses and cattle and locks of sheep, held exclusive fishing rights on the Don and in the bight of the Sea of Azov, and was exempted from taxes on its wine trade and tolls on the transit of other goods.

In such circumstances, this 'Cossack' population was concerned only to a light extent with military activities. With its fertility, its mineral wealth (the Donets coalfield) and its outlets on the Sea of Azov, the region took part in the country's general economic development; it had technical in-stitutes as well as numerous schools, and produced engineers, doctors, rchitects, teachers and scholars. Even so, the past was remembered and raditions were preserved; there was a consciousness of privilege, a peculiar pchology which made this a special society with a powerful common 3ond of feeling, though the social structure was identical with that of the

ussian people everywhere.

The other Cossack voiskos were less imposing in size, but, like the Don, anstituted a distinctive, unusual element in the peasant population of the ontier areas. Ethnically speaking, moreover, they were a transitional lement, since both in the northern Caucasus and in Siberia the Cossacks acquired an admixture of non-Russian blood, Tatar, Chechen and iuriat. Their clothes were modified by native tradition; even their lan-lage, in some cases, was contaminated by the local dialects. Some sack units consisted wholly of non-Russians; the voisko of the Terek Deluded several contingents whose standards displayed the Crescent. Ser-ice life and conditions, and obedience to the tsar, ensured unity. All the sack armies were given plenty of land to use and move about in, and sessed considerable privileges.

The Cossack stock-breeders of the Kuban, the largest group after the MI Cossacks, concluded profitable leases with oil companies and also had

•It-marshes to exploit. The Ural Cossacks had a monopoly of sturgeon-shing in the Ural River and its tributaries. The Cossacks of Transbaikalia a monopoly of the sale of timber to the Siberian goldmines. They were

258 NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS ₂₅₉ a wealthy peasantry and supported the existing order; in 1917 they sided •

with the counter-revolutionaries in the civil war.

II THE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT REFORMS Peasant Emancipation: Dependence in a New Form

The Slav colonial drive within the boundaries of the Russian empire was bound up with the new conditions of peasant life in the second half of the nineteenth century. The population was rising rapidly, by about a million a year: the total, which according to the census of 1897 was 127,000,000, had reached 175,000,000 by 1914. There was too little land under culti-vation to induce the peasant to stay where he was, and in order to try his luck outside his village he had no need to emigrate to a foreign country; he took a job in one of the new factories or went to till virgin soil in Siberia.

The abolition of serfdom had not really made the peasants any better off.

The Emancipation Act (the 'Statute for peasants liberated from serfdom') affected an enormous number of people - over 20,000,000, which was half the total number of peasants. Both psychologically and legally, these had undergone a sudden change of status; their rights as citizens were recog-nized; they had become equal with the state peasants and recovered their human dignity, though memories of serfdom continued to overshadow their attitude to life for many years (plate 21).

But the freedom conferred by the Act was only relative; it was complete only in the case of those who possessed nothing; the household serfs became proletarians in the fullest sense of the term and joined the rank and file of the agricultural labourers and industrial workers. Those who had been farming on their owners' property were now given a smallholding (nadiel) of their own, but the size of these freehold plots varied from one district to another, and was often less than the plots they had been allowed to farm before becoming their own masters. The transfer depended either on a unilateral decision by the landlord, or on an amicable arrangement be-tween him and the rural community (except in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, where landownership was vested not in the community but in the family). The second procedure was the commoner; the mir was thus the intermediary, responsible for negotiating the agreement on the peasant's behalf and seeing that it was carried out. But with the abolition of the peasant's personal dependence on the landlord the entire feudal adminis-trative structure had been abolished too; peasant self-government, effected through the mir, was the result. The village assembly (selski skhod) and its elected mayor (starosta) continued to discharge the traditional economic functions of the commune (periodical reallocation of land, management of communal property, etc.); in addition, they now transmitted government orders, assessed the individual's share of the tax payable by the commune (and collected it), exercised police powers, and, pending final transfer of freeholds from landlord to peasantry, ensured fulfilment of the landlord's

customary rights to tithes and corvee. This state of 'temporary dependence' lasted until the deeds of purchase were signed; if the landlord refused to sign, it could last indefinitely.

The purchases in question arose from the fact that land was not distri-buted free of charge (whether directly to the peasant or through the mir as agent for the transaction); and payment was waived only if the peasant was prepared to content himself with one quarter of his allocation - the 'beggar's share', as it was called. The act of purchase conferred promotion from the category of 'dependent' peasant to that of 'peasant proprietor'.

The purchase-price, advanced by the government and repayable in forty-nine annual instalments, was remitted to the original owner in the form of bills guaranteed by the state. In practice, the state advanced only four-fifths of the price in cases where no obligation to purchase had been im-posed by the owner; the remaining one fifth was a supplementary payment which the commune could discharge in goods or labour. All in all, the former serf was less than wholly free. In one form or another, substantial traces or serfdom persisted long after publication of the Act. The process of land-transfer dragged on into the 'eighties. In relation to the state the peasants even found themselves in a worse position than before, with their annual redemption-instalments to pay in addition to the usual taxes;

sometimes the burden was too much for them, and on several occasions the government was obliged to declare a permanent moratorium on arrears;

redemption was finally abolished in 1906. The rural community, which had become an organ of the state rather than the representative of the peasants' interests, resorted on occasion to all the usual legal sanctions applicable to debtors: it confined the offender to his village by refusing him a passport, withheld his wages, distrained on his furniture or even confiscated his land. The effect of the Act of 1861 was to intensify the tyranny of the mir.

The old arrangements survived in various ways. The nobles' and peasants' properties were not separate units but were intricately entangled, and in many cases the plots retained by the former landlord were simply the snippets (otrezki, division of ground) lopped off the fields which were being looked after by the peasants at the time of the new dispensation, when the boundaries of their freeholds were worked out. The peasant went on culti-vating these otrezjki and paid rent either in cash or by working on some other patch of ground owned by the landlord. Piece-meal cultivation per-petuated dependence, at the same time as it prevented agricultural progress.

But although it was essentially a conservative compromise, the Act did m the long run constitute a turning-point in the social history of Russia.

The freeing of millions of serfs made migration easier and accelerated the influx of peasants into the towns, despite the check on movement so jeal-ously maintained by the mir. The labour market was reinforced by a flood of new recruits and this was a benefit to industry. A large number of

A

260 NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS _26l peasants, moreover (perhaps as many as half a million), left their villages

by accepting the 'beggar's share' and immediately selling it. The applica-tion of the Act took place in an atmosphere of dissatisfacapplica-tion and hard bargaining which brought increased social tension and made the villagers still more foot-loose than before.

In effect, the social promotion of the peasants was little more than

In effect, the social promotion of the peasants was little more than