How did you live before the revolution? Russian peasantry in ethnographic notes

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ethnographic notes about the life of the Russian peasantry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries show the existence of some white blacks in the country. People defecate in their huts right on the straw on the floor, they wash the dishes once or twice a year, and everything around in the house is teeming with bugs and cockroaches. The life of Russian peasants is very similar to the situation of blacks in southern Africa.

Apologists for tsarism are very fond of citing the achievements of the upper classes of Russia as an example: theaters, literature, universities, inter-European cultural exchange and social events. That's all right. But the upper and educated classes of the Russian Empire included at most 4-5 million people. Another 7-8 million are various kinds of commoners and urban workers (the latter by the time of the 1917 revolution there were 2.5 million people). The rest of the mass - and this is about 80% of the population of Russia - was the peasantry, in fact, the indigenous mass deprived of rights, oppressed by the colonialists - representatives of European culture. Those. de facto and de jure, Russia consisted of two peoples.

Exactly the same thing happened, for example, in South Africa. On the one hand, 10% of a well-educated and civilized minority of white Europeans, about the same number of their close servants from Indians and mulattoes, and below - 80% of natives, many of whom even lived in the Stone Age. However, the modern blacks in South Africa, who threw off the power of the "terrible oppressors" in 1994, still does not think that they are involved in the success of the white minority in building "small Europe". On the contrary, blacks in South Africa are now trying in every possible way to get rid of the "legacy" of the colonialists - they destroy their material civilization (houses, water pipes, agricultural estates), introduce their own dialects instead of the Afrikaans language, replace Christianity with shamanism, and also kill and rape members of the white minority.

In the USSR, the same thing happened: the civilization of the white world was deliberately destroyed, its representatives were killed or expelled from the country, in the ecstasy of revenge, the previously oppressed majority of the natives still cannot stop.

It seems strange to the Interpreter's blog that some of the educated people in Russia began to divide the country's population into "Russians" and "Soviet". It would be more correct to call the first "Europeans" and the second "Russians" (especially since the nationality was not indicated in the passports of the Russian Empire, but only religion was affixed; that is, there was no concept of "nationality" in the country). Well, or as a last resort, tolerantly "Russians-1" and "Russians-2".

It is interesting that blacks in the United States found a lot in common with Russian peasants, who were also actually slaves:

“In the last decade, more and more researchers' attention has been attracted by elements of the similarity between the worldview of blacks on the American continent and the psychology of the Russian peasantry after liberation. Parallels are found between the ideas of the Slavophiles about the preservation of the national spirit and the search for self-identification by the Negro intelligentsia. Lectures are given at universities on the importance of the Russian and Soviet cultural context in understanding the quest for African American writers. An important place in the program of such courses is occupied by the reports and memoirs of those who went to the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the stories of those who returned “home to Harlem”. Cover of D. E. Peterson's book “Out of the shackles. Literature about the Russian and African American Soul ", which interprets from the standpoint of postcolonial literary theory the representation in Russian and African American literature of the duality of human consciousness, is decorated with a reproduction of Repin's" Barge Haulers on the Volga ".

The parallels (as well as the differences) between Russian serfdom and American slavery were noted in the black press of the United States as early as the 1820s, and later repeated many times. "This system was called serfdom, but it was the worst kind of slavery," Rogers wrote. Two descriptions of the life of Pushkin, by the same author (published in 1929 and 1947), are written in a language understandable to the inhabitants of the American South: “Pushkin learned Russian from his nanny, the white" Mammie "[black woman nurse] and slaves who worked on his father's plantation ". “Thirty million of his Russian brethren, the whites, were held in cruel slavery,” and, knowing about their plight, Pushkin sympathized with the rebels, “dedicated to overthrowing the autocracy and freeing slaves.”

According to African-American authors, the poet's special connection with Arina Rodionovna is made possible precisely because of the black color of his skin. The nanny and the child are united by a sense of isolation. Other black authors also write that it was the (Negro) race of Pushkin who made him the spokesman for the soul of his (Russian) people. So, Pushkin becomes the embodiment of the Russian spirit, not despite the fact that he was a Negro, but thanks to this circumstance. Thomas Oxley argues that it was precisely “racial traits” that allowed Pushkin to become “the first writer to express the soul of the [Russian] people. He felt the beating of his heart."

That is, in the views of the US blacks, the Negro Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin began the formation of the Russian nation among the slaves of the European colonialists.

In this light, by the way, the 1917 Revolution looks no longer so much a socialist movement as a national liberation movement of the Russians, against the colonial administration of Europeans and their "mulatto" servants (intelligentsia and part of the commoners).

But this is all a mental description of the Russian oppressed people. And how did these slaves of the white masters physically live?

The study of Vladimir Bezgin, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of the Tambov State Technical University, describes the sanitary and hygienic conditions of peasant life in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. (Published in the collection The Russian peasant in the years of wars and years of peace (XVIII - XX centuries. Collection of works. Participant of the scientific conference. (Tambov, June 10, 2010)) Tambov: Publishing house of GOU VPO TSTU. 2010. 23 - 31. This study was prepared with the financial support of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Short-term Grant 2009).

“The Russian peasants were very unassuming in household use. An outsider, first of all, was struck by the asceticism of the interior decoration. The peasant hut of the late 19th century was not much different from the rural dwelling of the previous century. Most of the room was occupied by a stove, which served both for heating and for cooking. Most of the peasant huts were drowned "in a black way". In 1892, in the village of Kobelke, Epiphany Volost, Tambov Province, out of 533 households, 442 were heated "in black" and 91 "in white". According to the doctor of medicine V. I. Nikolsky, who examined the medical and sanitary condition of the residents of the Tambov district, for each member of a family of seven people had 21.4 arshins of air, which was not enough. In winter, the air in the huts is filled with miasma and is extremely hot.

The sanitary condition of the peasant dwelling depended, first of all, on the nature of the floor covering. If the floor had a wooden covering, then it was much cleaner in the hut. In houses with earthen floors, they were covered with straw. Straw served as a universal floor covering in a peasant hut. Children and sick family members sent their natural needs to it, and it was periodically changed as it became dirty. The Russian peasants had a vague idea of the sanitary requirements.

The floors, mostly earthen, served as a source of dirt, dust and moisture. In winter, young animals were kept in the huts - calves and lambs, therefore, there was no question of any neatness.

The cleanliness of the beds in rural huts can only be said relatively. Often the bed was a "straw man", that is. a bag full of rye or spring straw. This straw did not change sometimes for a whole year, a lot of dust and dirt accumulated in it, bugs were started. There was almost no bed linen, only pillows sometimes wore pillowcases, but there were not always pillows. The sheet was replaced by a row, homespun bedding, and the blanket did not know any duvet covers.

There was no proper food hygiene in rural life. Food in peasant families, as a rule, was consumed from common utensils, they practically did not know cutlery, they drank from mugs in turn. The peasants did not wash the dishes after eating, but only rinsed them in cold water and put them back. In this way, the dishes were washed no more than once or twice a year.

… And in a number of villages and latrines were not. So in the Voronezh villages they did not arrange latrines, and "human excrement was scattered across the fields, in yards, backyards and was devoured by pigs, dogs, chickens."

Ethnographic sources of the late 20th century contain information about the presence of harmful insects in peasant huts: cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas. It can be concluded that they were invariable companions of rural life. The head louse is a common companion of the entire population; especially there are a lot of them on children. Women in their free time "are looking for each other in the head." A mother, caressing her child, will certainly, although slightly, look for parasites in his hair. In the travel notes of A. N. Minha, we find the following observation of the author about the favorite pastime of peasant women in one of the villages: "Baba rummages in the head of another with a wooden comb used for combing flax, and the frequent clicking proves the abundance of insects in the hair of our Russian women."

In the summertime, the peasants were overwhelmed by fleas, even the peasants' post was called a flea post by the peasants. During this period, in the Vologda villages, one could observe the following picture: "In the hut sat a man and a woman, completely naked, and were engaged in catching fleas, not in the least embarrassed - it is customary and there is nothing reprehensible here."

The traditional means of maintaining the purity of the body in the Russian countryside was a bath. But there were too few baths in the Russian village. According to A. I. Shingareva, at the beginning of the twentieth century baths in the village. Mokhovatka had only 2 out of 36 families, and in the neighboring Novo-Zhivotinnoye - one in 10 families. Most of the Voronezh peasants, according to the author's calculations, washed themselves once or twice a month in a hut in trays or simply on straw.

Lack of personal hygiene was the reason for the spread of most infectious diseases in the Russian countryside. The researcher of the pre-revolutionary period N. Brzheskiy, based on the study of the life of the peasants of the chernozem provinces, came to the conclusion that "the poor quality of water and decisive indifference to keeping oneself clean becomes the cause of the spread of infectious diseases." And how could it be otherwise, when they ate from the same bowl, drank from the same mug, wiped themselves with one towel, used someone else's linen. Explaining the reason for the widespread prevalence of syphilis in the village, doctor G. Hertsenstein pointed out that “the disease does not spread sexually, but is transmitted during everyday life-long relationships between healthy and sick family members, neighbors and people who are walking around. A common bowl, a spoon, an innocent kiss of a child spread the infection further and further … ". Most researchers, both past and present, agree that the main form of infection and spread of syphilis in Russian villages was household, due to non-observance of elementary hygiene rules by the population.

The food for infants consisted of milk from a horn, with a gutta-percha pacifier, a frequent cow tit, and a chewing gum, all of which was contained in extreme impurity. In a difficult time, with a dirty, stinking horn, the child was left for the whole day under the supervision of young nannies. In the appeal of Dr. V. P. Nikitenko, "On the fight against infant mortality in Russia," indicated the main cause of death of infants, both in Central Russia and in Siberia: “Neither Jewish nor Tatar women replace their own milk with a pacifier, this is an exclusively Russian custom and one of the most disastrous. There is general evidence that refusal to breastfeed babies is the main reason for their extinction.” The lack of breast milk in the diet of infants made them vulnerable to intestinal infections, especially common in the summer. The majority of children under one year of age died in a Russian village due to diarrhea."

The great writer Maxim Gorky in his letter "On the Russian peasantry" described their thoughts in relation to the city, that is, European civilization: we ourselves made a revolution - long ago it would have been quiet on earth and order would have been … Sometimes the attitude towards the townspeople is expressed in such a simple but radical form: - you have covered us! " “Now we can say with confidence that, at the cost of the death of the intelligentsia and the working class, the Russian peasantry has revived,” concludes Gorky.

Surely, with the further development of Russian, democratic nationalism, the theme of the liberation movement of the peasants, its autochthonous origin against European colonialism will receive further development.