Perpetually Communist Russia?
vj...@panix.com
was Karamzin & Khomyakov's contemporary.
Atkinson, EndRuLandCommune Stanford 1983
p6 early Slavic assembly known as the veche.. democratic gatherings of the
populace, decisions were adopted by the unanimous agreement of the assembled
community. When disussions failed to produce the obligatory unanimity, the
recalcitrants settled issues by force: in the famous Novgorod veche, for
example, opposing mobs battled on the bridge over the Volkhov, attempting to
topple each other into the river. The same notion of forced unanimity as a
guarantor of ultimate peace prevailed in the small world of the modern
commune, where decisions reached by the collective were not only demonstrably
enforceable, but morallybinding on the individual. As the proverb put it,
"What the commune orders, God ordains." Modern investigators of the
redistributive commune believe that its development can be traced from the
late fifteenth or sixteenth century.. In the peasant view, it has been said,
cultivated land belonged to those whose energy had created it from wilderness
p7 In the course of time communes assumed the right to distribute vacant
and escheated land, and they began to play a stronger role in the land
affairs of the peasantry. This development paralleled the government's
gradual assertion of a proprietary sovereignty over all land, for the poperty
rights of individual households were subsumed under those of the commune just
as the rights of more powerful landholders were superseded by those of the
state. In the middle of the sixteenth century, administrative reforms enacted
by Ivan IV offered communes broad powers of self-rule under the zemisto
system, an optional arrangement giving pasants the right to elect local
officials, who were then responsible to the state for maintaining public
order and collecting taxes. The responsibilites were to prove more durable
than the rights.. landlords tried to bind peasants to their properties by
debt contracts. Many peasants lost their freedom in this fashion. In e
troubled later yearsof the sixteenth century, many peasantsfled the harsh
conditions of life in the central regions to try their luck on the open
steppes and on the frontiers. Desertion of the land threatened not only the
class available for state service, but the state itself. In order to secure a
stable work force and to assure tax revenues, the state began to introduce
regulations that deprived peasants of geographical mobility by requiring them
to maintain permanent residence on the estate or property where the cadastral
registers had recordedtheir names. By the mddle of the seventeenth century
enserfment was fully established. The failure of the tentative
mid-sixtenth-century attempt to create a stronger popular bas under the
autocracy through administrative reform meant the loss of peasant freedoms
but did not lead to the disappearance of the commune
p8 it was convenient to tax a community of serfs or state peasants as a
whole, and to make the commune collectively responsible for paying the total
amount due.. new attack on the budgetary problem, in 1722 Peter introduced a
direct tax on individual "souls" - nonnoble, tax-paying males
p9 Once the tax was fixed and equal for all individual households,
however, the commune could no longer adjust the tax load in proportion to
lanfholdings, but had to adjust landholdings in proportion to the
tax. Instead of being considered simply a basis for assessmant, land began to
be considered a means enabling peasants to pay taxes, just as it was a means
enabling estate holders to provide the military or administrative service
they were obliged to render in place of taxes.. At the same time, estate
owners began to base their demands for labor and dues on the size of the
workforce in a serf household. As a result, in the eighteenth century the
tiaglo was gradually transformed into a unit of labor entitled to (or obliged
to accept) a given amount of land and accountable for specific obligations
p10 To the extent that redistibution improved the ability of he poorer
households to meet their obligations, it heightened the utility of the
commune to all landlords.. Following the Pugachev rebellion, a major peasant
uprising in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, administrative
officials under Catherine II introduced land redistribution in communes in
the north, hoping both to increase tax receipts and to promote rural
tranquility.. Alhtough there were differences in the size of holdings within
the commune, land redistribution sharply limited the range of social
differentiation among the peasants by repeatedly impoving the position of the
bottom stratum at the expence of the top. Therefore, even though it did not
raise from an "egalitarian spirit," over the course of time the practice
fostered the development of a social concept of egalitarianism
p20 On the Western[ist] side, nineteenth-century historians of the "state
school" (notable B N Chicherin, S M Solov'ev, and K D Kavelin) argued that
the modern commune had been created by the state as a "fiscal-administrative
device" by a series of measures traceable perhaps tot he late fifteenth or
sixteenth century. The modern commune took definitive shape only in the
eighteenth century, in their view, and had little relation to ancient Russian
communes, in which the distinctive practice of land redistribution was
unknown. The Slavophiles (for example K S Aksakov, A S Khomiakov, and I D
Beliaev), on the other hand, insisted that the contemporary commune was
directly descended from ancient
p21 proto-socialists Aleksandr Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky were
writing in praise of the commune. Herzen's articles, smuggled in from abroad,
reached the topmost levels of the government. Raising the spectre of renewes
Pugachevshchina, a vast peasant uprising, he effectively exploited
upper-class fears that social unrest might follow the disappearance of the
commune. Chernyshevsky, the remarkable journalist who was soon to become the
social conscience of radial youth, agreed on the desirability of retaining
the commune. Formulating the problem in Hegelian terms, he suggested that
under favorable conditions Russia might pass via the contemporary commune
from lower foms of communal landholding to the highest socialist form,
skipping the "negation" of private poperty. Such arguments in support of the
commune brought the nascent revolutionary undergorund into uneasy alignment
with the tradition-oriented Salvophiles
p22 The debate on the commune set a precedent by involving historiographic
questions in the determination of policy on social reform. Yet the ultimate
determinants of emancipation policy on the commune were undoubtedly the
practical implications of its abolition. Long reliance on the commune in
matters of local jurisdiction and tax collection left the state with
inadequate administrative machinery to replace it.. Both conservatives and
radicals supported the commune, and even most of its liberal opponents were
in favor of retaining it temporarily. No surprisingly, then, the emancipation
statute of February 19, 1861, preserved the commune
p24 At any rate, the Statute of february 19, 1861, made no
provision for the conversion of private property into communal
property, only for the reverse. Although the legislation did not
disturb the predominant redisributional tenure, most members of the
commission acknowledged th adverse consequences of communal land
redistribution, noting that it led to excessive frgmentation of
holdings and stifled incentive to make improvements on the land. The
commission discussed the merits of prohibiting or restricting land
redistribution, but finally agreed that the numerous exceptions
required would clutter the legislation wit excessive detail. Instead,
it decided merely to discourage redistributions by requiring that each
be approved by a large majority of the householders within a commune
p26 Besides retaining the commune, the emancipation legislation
stated that the peasant - rather, the peasant household - was not
merely granted a share of communal lands but was obliged to accept
them, along with a corresponding tax burden and mutual responsibility
for the taxes of the entire commune. A peasant who wanted to leave,
even temporarily, for outside work was dependent on the commune for a
passport. On the other hand, a peasant in arrears in his payments
could be sent out to work by the commune. Despite emancipation, then,
there were still serious constraints on the geographical mobility of
the peasantry
p28 "the Emancipation waslargely responsible for the social and
economic crisis that resulted in the Russian Revolution"
Zenkovsky. Stolypin 1986 ISBN 0-440670-25-9
pp12-3 By the measures contained in the law of November 9. 1906,
Stolypin obtained passage of a law about land tenure through the
legislative institutions. The Land Tenure Commission was entrusted
witht he following tasks: 1. securing land for peasantry as
inalienable property; 2. consolidation of assigned land into single
plots; 3. creation of farmsteads (that is, special properties); and,
4. developing alternatives to strip farming, and assigning land as
property of individual peasants. Striving toward creation of a private
peasant economy, Stolypin directed the attention of the Land Tenure
Commission toward the necessity for encouraging, in every possible
way, the creation of farmsteads as well as separation from
communes. An individual member of the commune would, upon leaving it,
receive that land alloted to him by local tradition, retaining his
proportionate share in the pastures, forests, and other conveniences
of the commune. The Land Tenure Commission was composed of the
Marshals of the Nobility, chairmen of district land boards, individual
representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture, members of the
district courts, local agricultural leaders, three elected
representatives from the peasants, and representatives of the communes
where the work was being carried out. In the course of seven years it
apportioned a total area of some 12 million desiatines to nearly 1.2
million households.. The speaker for the Agrarian Committee, Octobrist
S I Shidlovskii, pointed out that the new agrarian law represented a
return to the true liberal path of reform of Alexander II, the path
from which authority had departed in the time of reaction
---
Soil & Soul Hellberg-Hirn Ashgate 1998 ISBN 1-85521-871-2
p113-4 From the Muscovite to the Imperial period, Russian society grew
increasingly patriarchal and rigidly hierarchical, yet among the peasantry
pagan matrilocal beliefs persisted.. cult of Mokosh continued among Russian
women right up to the present century, resisting the imprecations of the
Christian missionaries who thundered against women who sacrificed to
Mokosh.. tsaritsa of all creation
p126 adherents of the female myth of Russian nationhood persist in seeing
the essence of Russia in submissive and suffering passivity, as if she were
an eternal baba always 'awaiting her bridegroom', a hero who will redeem and
deliver her, be it the Varangian Prince, the Byzantine priest, Western
Enightenment, German socialism or the European market
p128 "Appealing to Russia, Soloviev said: Which kind of East do you wish
to be: The East of Xerxes or of Christ"
p200 widely travelled aristocrat and a champion of Westernization,
Karamzin was deeply shocked by the French Revolution.. autocracy as the only
power to ensure the evolutionary development.. for Karamzin, the difference
between samoderzhaviie (autocracy) and samovlastiie (tyranny) - whether
practiced by the ruler, by th eoligarchy, or by the people - was a crucial
one [compare Edmund Burke].. Pushkin proclaimed, however, that Karamzin in
his Istoriia simply and elegantly proves the necessity of tyranny and the
pleasures of the whip, prelesti knuta.. contemporary poet Viazemskii, who
wrote: "Karamzin saved RUssia from oblivion and proved that we have a
fatherland, as many of us learned in 1812"
p201 elite were sadly lacking in factual knowledge of their country and
people.. December 1825 (sometimes called the first Russian revolution), when
hopes of liberal reform and a constitutional monarchy were crushed.. elite
now wstranged from the state, found a sense of personal closeness to, even
worship of, the people
p204 "unkown in the West, that of sobornost or 'conciliarism'
(Khomiakov). This was a form of true fellowship, a 'free unity' of believers
that precluded both self-willed individualism and its restaint by coercion"
[cit Walicki 1979:95-96].. 'ancient Russian freedom' had nothing in common
with 'republican liberty'.. Konstantin Aksakov. Republican libery, he argued,
was political freedom, which presupposed the people's active participation in
political affairs; ancient Russian freedom, on the other hand, meant
freedom_from_politics [how Platonic and unAristotellian!] - the right to live
according to unwritten laws of faith and tradition, and the right to full
self-realization in a moral sphere on which the state would not impinge. The
people could be sure of complete freedom to live and think as they pleased,
while the monarch had complete freedom of action in the political
sphere. This relationship depended entirely on moral convictions rather than
on legal.. Aksakov wanted every individual to submit totally to his mir
p205 Schelling and Herder.. Chaadaev in _Apology, and you will see that
each important fact in Russian history is a fact that was forced on
us.. affinities between Germany and Russia: both faced the need to modernize
at a time when capitalism was already growing in other European countries and
had begun to reveal its negative features, which gave them a broader
perspective and made it easier to "idealize the patriarchal traditions and
archaic social structures that in their countries had shown an obstinate
vitality" [107] The Slavophiles, longing to unite Russia's soil and soul,
discovered Russianness first and foremost in the Orthodox [98]
p227 In the 1830s the Russian Idea was reanimated by the Slavophiles, and
later, after RUssia's defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56, further developed
by Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Danilevskii. While Soloviev insisted on the
universal character of the Russian cultural mission, Danilevskii argued in
Rossiia i Evropa (1869) thatthe Russiancultural heritage was unique and
self-contained. Following the Slavophiles, Danilevskii believed in the
promise of the Russian peasant commune.. [Dostoevsky:] "But a Russian is not
only a European, he is also an Asiatic. Moreover: our hopes may belogn more
to Asia than to Europe"
Russia & Soul Pesmen Cornell 2000 ISBN 0-8014-3739-3
p97 Spiraling complaining about how much food there used to be and what
kinds, but we're not starving yet.. darkness of Russia's past, the
shamefulness of her present, the absence of her future, how Jews were
responsible for the Revolution..how everything will continue to decline until
the red star is removed form the Kremlin "and until Lenin is buried, because
he is roaming the country".. rumor that Saddam Hussein (who "has gone totally
insane") is Stalin's lost grandson
p283 Berdiaev rhapsodizes about how "The West is conciseness; everything
favors the development of civilization...[but] Russian soul... corresponds to
the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of Russian land." "For this
reason," he continues, "Russian people have found difficulty in achieving
Rancour-laFerriere Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and Cult
of Suffering ISBN 0-8147-7458-x NYU 1995 darancour...@ucdavis.edu
russian.ucdavis.edu/drl
p25 self-immolation practiced by some Old Believers eventually
became an emblem of Russia's dark side. Mussogorsky's great opera
Khovanshchina, for example, is based on events surrounding the Old
Believer schism, and ends with amass suicide by fare. Avvakum's
autobiography exerted an enormous influence of the RUssian radical
intelligensia
p124 Sadistic attitudes toward the fool are very common in
Russia. In general, it is assumed that a fool is someone who is beaten
ofen, or who ought to be beaten or otherwise abused
p215 The commune seems to have gained even more ocntrol over the
lives of individual peasants after the emancipation of 1861 than it
held previously. The emancipated peasant in most cases still was not
able to own arable land, but depended on the commune to parcel it out
periodically. The commune did not assign land, moreover, to the
peasant as an individual, but to the extended peasant household on the
basis of the number of "tiagla" per household. A "tiaglo" was usually
a mrried couple between the ages of eighteen and sixty (sometimes land
was assigned instead on the basis of the number of adult males per
household, or the number of mouths to be fed)
p223 In the meantime, however, psychological attitudes toward the
land have not changed. In December of 1990, when the RUssian
Parliament was taking steps for the privatization of farmland,
President Boris Yeltsin made the following remarks to foreign
correspondents: "You would never understand the spirit of Russians who
never have become accustomed to the terminology and even more t the
practice of selling and buying land - the motherland, as we call it."
Yeltsin added: "As some legislators used to say, 'One can not sell his
or her mother," "It is a psychological issue," declared the RUssian
leader. THe traditional idea of teh Russian "land" as mother was thus
alive and well late in the twentieth century. "You pick up the soil
and it's like holding your mother's hand," said a collective farm
worker to a reporter in 1988. THis is an extremely common sentiment in
the Russian countryside
p247 In his book on Dostoevsky Berdiaev says: "There is a hunger
for self-destruction in the Russian soul, there is a danger of
intoxication with ruin"
Obolensky [Oxford], ByzCommonwealth, svots.edu 1982 orig
Weidenfield 1971 ISBN 0-913836-98-2
p106 Byzantine writers considered that the defeat of the Slavs at Patras
marked the end of the Slav occupation of the Peloponnese. This was an
over-optimistic view, for the Peloponnesian Slavs revolted again several
times; and on the slopes of Mount Taygetus Slav tribes retained until the
Turkish conquest of the fifteenth century their language, their ethnic
identity, and a tradition of insubordination to the imperial government
p327 By the second half of the eleventh century, in place of the free
peasant-soldier commune [puhlease, what next, a Khazar kibutz?], two
types of land holding had become prevalent in the Byzantine Empire: on
the one hand the large hereditary estate of the civil or military
magnate and, on the other, crown property handed out to eminent
Byzantines or foreigners to administer, usually in return for military
service, free of state taxation. The latter system was called pronoia
(literally, "care").. differed from a land grant of the first type in
that it was held for a limited time, usually until the recipient's death, and
was, until the second half of the thirteenth century, inalienable. From the
time of Michael VII, however, pronoiarioi were allowed to bequeath
John Meyendorf, Byzantium & Rise of Russia, Cambridge, 1980 repr
SVOTS.edu 1989 ISBN 0-88141-079-9 LC89-28011
p21 Ethnic Greeks, living in Russia, were not particularly popular
with the local population. The Chronicles frequently accuse them of
being deceitful [cit 1164 of bp Anthony of Chernigov 'In himself he
held deceit, because Greek by birth'], but generally recognize their
'wisdom' (mudrost) and refinement (khitrost), the signs of a
culturally superior civilization
p97-9 direct ('mystical') knowledge of God and the primacy of
incarnational, eschatological and sacramental values over secular
concerns. This provoked a polarization - not new in Byzantine society
- between a monastic-dominated Church and the 'humanists' who promoted
the study of Greek antiquity and who were becoming increasingly
attracted by the opportunities in the West, particularly in Italy,
with the beginning of the Renaissance. The victory of the Hesychasts
encouraged trans-national contacts between monastic communities..
aiming at maintaining the values and structures of the Orthodox faith
in the midst of a rapidly changing political situation in the Middle
East and Eastern Europe.. [1347 Thessaloniki Abp] Gregory Palamas on
the one hand denies that Aristotelian logic can serve as a criterion
in showing which theological arguments are truly decisive; on the
other hand, he develops at length the patristic doctrines of
'deification' (8ewsis) or communion (koivwvia), with God, which
represent, in his opinion, the only acceptable context for a Christian
epistemology.. position of Palamas was endorsed by the Council of
1341, and Barlaam left for Italy.. significant group of Byzantine
Thomists - led by the brothers Demetrios and Prochoros Kydones - also
opposed Palamism, but in the context of a deliberate trend towards a
rapprochement with Italy and the Latin West
p161-2 During the following two years, the joint policy of
Cantacuzenos and Moscow produced spectacular results. Not only was
Metropolitan Theognostos able to visit Volhynia in 1348 and assert his
jurisdiction in the area, but Symeon of Moscow - with the cooperation
of both the metropolitan and the khan - succeeded in concluding
matrimonial alliances between his own family and the courts of
Lithuania and Tver. Increasingly, the Grand-prince of Moscow acquired
the stature of leader 'of all Russia'.. Tatar policies in Russia were
based on maintaining a balance among the various princes. Similarly,
the Genoese influence in Constantinople and in Sarai, fully determined
by crude commercial interests, also tended to support division and
competition among the Rulers of Russia and, as such, contradict the
ideal of a united Orthodox Commonwealth, promoted by Cantacuzenos and
his friend Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos. The year 1349, which saw the
defeat of Cantacuzenos by the Genoese in Constantinople, witnessed the
conquest of Galicia and Volhynia by Casimir if Poland [until 1667]
p208 Loyalty to the weakening Horde was only in the interest of the
Genoese, whom Philotheos - and his friend John Cantacuzenos - had
always hated and whose control of Galata and all the Byzantine economy
was the very symbol of the Empire's humiliation
Schmemann HistRdEOrth svots.edu 1977 (1963 Holt, tr L Kesich)
p280 painlessly and without embarassment accepted the prohibition
against converting Moslems, thus rejecting the universal calling of
the Church; but they expended great effort - aided by the Moslems - in
humiliating, subjugating, and subduing their own brothers in the
faith.. patriarchs of Constantinple systematically endeavored not only
to subdue all the Slavic churches which had previously been
autocephalic; but also to make them Greek, eliminating any mention of
their Slavic past.. This canonical abuse of power was accompanied by
forced "Greciszing," particularly in Bulgaria, whereit later served as
the basis of the so-called Bulgarian question. The same sad picture
prevailed in the East as well, in the patriarchates of Jerusalem,
Antioch, and Alexandria, where orthodox Arabs became the victims of
this forced unification
p292 messianism has sometimes simply equated Orthodoxy with Russia,
oblivious to its Byzantine origins and the "sleeping East.' The late S L Frank
recently called this national self-infatuation "the chronic disease of
the Russian mind"
p300-2 Russian psychology was from the first marked by this
ritualism and by a somewat hypertrophied, narrowly liturgical piety..
Slavic paganism did not offer fanatical opposition.. lacked
organization, literature.. "soft" paganism, based on nature and
profoundly bound to natural life.. doubly foreign, being Greek and
coming from the prince as well, which meant support by the Varangian
druzhina, the ruling clique.. bookish by its very nature.. divine
service, the ritual - were easily accepted; it charmed.. feeling,
imagination, and tenderness would be proclaimed as the basic points of
distinction between Russian and Greek Christianity, the latter being
considered calculating and cold
p305 "Tatarism" - lack of principle and a repulsive combination of
prostration before the strong with oppression of everything weak -
unfortunately marked the growth of Moscow
p308 The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the
contrary, its inner judgement seat and accuser.. origins of the "Russian
soul".. tragic discord between the vision of spiritual beauty and purity
expressed in monasticism and the sence of hopeless sinfulness of life.. dualism
pp312-313 Philotheus, the teaching elder of the Lazarus Monastery
of Pskov.. letters to the Grand Princes Basil III and Ivan IV in
Moscow, the Orthodox Church, like the wife in the Apocalypse, had
first run from old to new Rome, "but found no peace there because of
the union with the Latins at the Eighth Council. THen the Church of
Constantinople fell, and the empire fled again to a third Rome, which
is in New Great Russia... All Christian empires bow down to you alone:
for two ROmes are fallen, but the third stands fast; a fourth cannot
be; your Christian kingdom shall not be given to another... YOu alone
are Emperor over all Christians under the sun"... [Fedotov, "Russia
and Freedom" in his Novyi Grad in RUssian NY 1952 p145]: Tatar element
had possesed the soul of Russia, not outwardly but from within..
spiritual Mongol conquest coincided with the political defeat..
thousands of baptized and unbaptized Tatars entered the service of the
Prince of Moscow.. infecting it with Eastern concepts.. Freedom
perished only after the liberation from the Tatars"