Man during the Middle Ages was much closer to nature than we are now. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the relationship between man and nature was harmonious. Nature often forced man to feel his weakness. The supplies in the barn of a peasant or feudal lord, on which their life depended, were actually determined by the will of nature. Rain and hail, droughts or floods, hurricanes or frosts were harbingers of illness, suffering, and death. Therefore, the dependence of medieval man on natural and climatic conditions was extremely great.
In the Middle Ages, the climate in Europe was unstable: sometimes it got colder, sometimes it got warmer. It is believed that in the 11th century. The climate of the continent resembled the modern one. True, sometimes the temperature rose even higher. In the XIII-XIV centuries. there was a sharp cold snap. Therefore, crop failures often occurred in northern Europe. Observing sudden changes in climate, medieval chroniclers constantly expressed fears about the coming of the end of the world.
In the early Middle Ages, human well-being was largely determined by the ability to use forest resources. As the French historian M. Blok said, the forest accompanied the peasant “from the cradle to the grave.” Forest was the main building material, providing light and heat; tools, crafts and household items were made from wood. However, the forest and everything in it belonged to the lord. The peasants could only collect brushwood, as well as fruits and berries. In addition, hermit monks settled in the forest to be tempted and fight temptations. Forests were places of adventure for knights-errant. Sometimes robbers hid in the forests, attacking travelers and robbing them. Consequently, for some the forest was a refuge, but for others there lay mortal danger.
Turn of the VIII-IX centuries. From Charlemagne's Capitulary on Estates Material from the site
So that our forests and reserved bowls are well guarded; and if there was a convenient place for clearing, they would clear it and not allow the fields to be overgrown with forest; and where there should be forests, they should not be allowed to be cut down or destroyed; closely guard the animals in our reserved thickets; also take care of falcons and hawks for our cause; but the taxes due for this must be collected diligently. The stewards, as well as the elders and their people, if they drive pigs to pasture in our forest, let them themselves be the first to pay the proper tithe, setting a good example for us, so that later other people will pay their tithe in full.
In the Middle Ages, human influence on nature was spontaneous, but its consequences were significant and unpredictable.
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In the Middle Ages villages were concentrated around the castles of feudal lords, and the peasants were entirely dependent on these lords. This happened because at the dawn of the formation of feudalism, kings gave away lands to their vassals along with the people living on them. In addition, internal and external wars, in which medieval society was constantly in a state, ruined the peasants. It often happened that the peasants themselves asked the feudal lords for help when they could not independently protect themselves from the raids and robberies of their neighbors or strangers.
The number of peasants and their role in society.
Peasants made up about 90% of the total population of medieval Europe. On the one hand, this is the lower, third estate. The knights despised the peasants and laughed at the ignorant men. But, on the other hand, peasants are a necessary part of society. According to medieval sages, the peasants feed everyone else, and this is their great merit to the entire society. Church writers even argued that Peasants have the best chance of going to heaven: after all, fulfilling God’s commandments, they earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow.
Life of peasants.
The peasant was interested only in the events taking place in his native village, and even in two or three neighboring villages.
Housing.
Over much of Europe, peasant the house was built of wood, but in the south, where this material was in short supply, it was more often made of stone. Wooden houses were covered with straw, which was suitable for feeding livestock in hungry winters. Open hearth slowly gave way to the oven. Small windows were closed with wooden shutters and covered with bubble wrap or leather. Glass was used only in churches, among lords and the city's rich.
Nutrition.
Crop failures and famine were constant companions of the Middle Ages. Therefore, the diet of a medieval peasant never wasn't plentiful. The usual was two meals a day - morning and evening. The daily food of the majority of the population was bread, cereals, boiled vegetables, grain and vegetable stews, seasoned with herbs, with onions and garlic.
Norms and values.
The life of a peasant was almost independent of the events that took place in big world" , - crusades, changes of rulers on the throne, disputes among learned theologians. It was much more influenced by the annual changes that took place in nature - change of seasons, rains and frosts, deaths and offspring of livestock. The peasant’s circle of human contacts was small and limited to a dozen or two familiar faces, but constant communication with nature gave the villager a rich experience of emotional experiences and relationships with the world. Many of the peasants subtly felt the charm of the Christian faith and tensely pondered the relationship between man and God.
Ticket.
Urban culture in traditional society.
In the X-XI centuries. In Western Europe, old cities begin to grow and new ones emerge. A new way of life, a new vision of the world, a new type of people was emerging in the cities. Based on the emergence of the city, new social strata of medieval society were formed - townspeople, guild artisans and merchants. They unite in guilds and workshops protecting the interests of their members. With the emergence of cities the craft itself becomes more complicated, it requires special training. Cities are forming new social relations - the artisan is personally free, protected from arbitrariness by the workshop. Gradually, large cities, as a rule, managed to overthrow the power of the lord, and in such cities arose city government. Cities were centers of trade, including foreign trade, which contributed to greater awareness among citizens and expansion of their horizons. The city dweller, independent of any authority other than the magistrate, saw the world differently from the peasant. Striving for success, he became a new type of personality.
Appearance
Cities in medieval Europe were small. In the average city of Western Europe in the times described, no more than 5-7 thousand people lived. A city with a population of 15-20 thousand was already considered large, and a population of 40-50 thousand was only in the capitals of large states, such as London or Paris. A very small town could have only 2-3 thousand inhabitants.
Cities built along river banks, along major highways or around castles. If a city was located on a road, then a section of this road within the city turned into the main city street. Almost any city surrounded by walls. Moreover, the larger and richer the city, the more powerful and high the walls enclose it.
Many cities had approximately the same type of radial layout. Main square in the center, on which the most important buildings were located: central cathedral, town hall or meeting hall, house (or castle) of the ruler. From the square, streets spread out in radii. They were not straight, they looped, intersected, forming small squares; they were connected by alleys and passages. All this formed a real labyrinth in which it is not difficult for a visitor to get lost.
Population
The main population is artisans. They became peasants who fled from their masters or went to the cities on the condition of paying quitrent to the master. Becoming townspeople, they gradually freed themselves from personal dependence on the feudal lord. Although the bulk of the townspeople were engaged in crafts and trade, many city residents had their own fields, pastures and vegetable gardens outside the city walls, and partly within the city limits. Small livestock (goats, sheep and pigs) often grazed right in the city.
Craftsmen of a certain profession united within each city into special unions - guilds. In most cities, belonging to a guild was a prerequisite for practicing a craft. The workshop strictly regulated production, and through specially elected officials ensured that each master - a member of the workshop - produced products of a certain quality. Guild regulations strictly limited the number of journeymen and apprentices that one master could have, prohibited work at night and on holidays, limited the number of machines per artisan, and regulated stocks of raw materials. In addition, the workshop was also an organization of mutual assistance for artisans, which provided assistance to its needy members and their families in the event of illness or death of a member of the workshop through the entrance fee to the workshop, fines and other payments. The workshop also acted as a separate combat unit of the city militia in case of war.
Old log house covered with shingles Mazanka, outskirts
The way of life of the peasants also changed very slowly. The working day still began early: in the summer at sunrise, and in the winter long before dawn. The basis of rural life was the peasant household, which consisted (with a few exceptions) of a large family, where parents lived under the same roof with married and unmarried sons and unmarried daughters.
The larger the yard, the easier it was for him to cope in the short four to six month period allotted by the nature of the middle zone for field work. Such a yard contained more livestock and could cultivate more land. The cohesion of the economy was based on joint labor under the leadership of the head of the family.
Peasant buildings consisted of a small and low-height wooden hut (commonly called “huts”), a barn, a cattle barn, a cellar, a threshing floor and a bathhouse. Not everyone had the latter. Bathhouses were often heated in turns with neighbors.
The huts were made from logs; in forest areas the roofs were covered with shingles, and in the rest, more often with straw, which was the cause of frequent fires. In these places they were devastating due to the fact that the peasants did not have gardens or trees around their houses, as in the southern regions of the Chernigov province. Therefore, the fire spread quickly from building to building.
In the districts of the Bryansk region, which then belonged to the Chernigov province, one could find mud huts - a type of house characteristic of Little Russia. They had a pipe, but no floors. The walls of such a house consisted of a wooden frame (thin branches) or mud brick and were coated with clay both from the outside and from the outside. inside and then covered with lime.
In the majority peasant dwellings throughout the 19th century, stoves with chimneys continued to be absent. It was not only, and not even so much, the complexity of their manufacture.
S. Vinogradov. In the hut.
A.G. Venetsianov. Barn floor
Many peasants were convinced that a “black” or chicken hut (without a chimney) was drier than a white one (with a chimney). In the “black” hut, a window was cut at the top to allow smoke to escape. Additionally, when the stove was lit, a door or window was opened. The influx of fresh air cleared the atmosphere of the cramped dwelling, which contained not only a large peasant family, but also often a calf or lambs, which had to be kept warm for some time after birth. However, the walls of such huts and people’s clothes were constantly covered with soot.
The interior decoration of the hut was not very diverse. Opposite the door, in one corner there was a stove, in the other there was a chest or box, above which there were shelves with dishes. The stove was rarely made of brick because of its high cost. More often it was made from clay, making a vault on wooden hoops, which were then burned after drying. Several dozen baked bricks were used only on the surface of the roof to lay out the pipe.
In the eastern corner opposite from the stove there are images and a table. A platform was made along the wall from the stove, which served instead of a bed, and benches were located along the remaining walls. The floor was rarely plank, but more often earthen. The stove, with or without a chimney, was made in such a way that there was always a warm place on which several people could fit. This was necessary to dry clothes and warm people who were forced to spend the whole day in the cold and slush.
However, all family members gathered in the hut only in the coldest winter time. In the summer, the men spent the night in the field with horses, in the fall, until severe cold, while threshing continued, on the threshing floor, under the barn.
In addition to the hut, the peasant yard had unheated cages or barns. Fabrics, clothes, wool were stored here; self-spinning wheels, as well as food supplies and bread. Before the onset of winter cold, married family members or unmarried daughters lived here. The number of cages depended on wealth and the presence of young families. Many peasants stored dry grain and potatoes in special earthen pits.
Sheds or sheds for livestock were most often built without high costs of materials: from thin logs and even in the form of a fence with a large number of holes. Livestock feed was placed along the wall and served as bedding at the same time. Pigs were rarely housed in separate rooms and simply wandered around the yard; chickens were kept in the hallway, attics and huts. Waterfowl ducks and geese were more often bred in those villages and villages that stood near lakes and rivers.
In terms of food, the peasants were content with what was produced on their own farm. On weekdays, food was seasoned with lard or milk, and on holidays ham or sausage, chicken, pig or lamb were stored. Chaff was added to flour to make bread. In the spring, many peasants ate sorrel and other greens, boiling them in beet brine or seasoning them with kvass. A soup called “kulesh” was prepared from flour. At that time, only wealthy peasants baked bread.
According to the description left, peasant clothes were also still made at home. For men, the main part of it is a zipun (kaftan) made of homemade cloth up to the knees, a shirt made of homemade canvas, felt skullcaps on the head, and in winter, lambskin hats with ears and a cloth top.
Women's clothing was made from the same material, but differed in a special cut. When going outside, they put on a wide cloth jacket (scroll), under which a fur coat was worn in winter. white. Women also wore poneva, that is, a piece of colored woolen fabric with a canvas apron. Long fur coats were rare. On ordinary days, the head was tied with a canvas scarf, on holidays - with a colored one.
The specific features of the mentality of the peasantry are associated with the material existence of this social stratum and, above all, with the nature of its production activity, with managing the land in close and direct communication with nature. But not the economic activities themselves or the surrounding nature, but those that grew on their basis social structures and relationships determined the mentality of the peasantry. The main social unit where the peasant’s worldview was formed, his ideas about the world around him - nature and society, about his destiny, what he should and what is, and social justice - was the community.
The mentality of the peasantry is a communal mentality formed within a closed local community, in a rural neighborhood organization. Of course, macro-society also influenced the mentality of the peasantry, but its importance in this regard is incomparable with the comprehensive influence of the community. In the pre-industrial stages, it was the communal mentality of the peasantry that determined the mentality of the social whole.
The community acted as a social institution that regulated the internal life of the peasant community and its connections with the outside world, the custodian and transmitter of production and social experience, the entire value system of the peasantry. The main manifestations of the peasant’s life activity were confined to the community and his consciousness, naturally, could not be other than group, communal. The worldview of a peasant is the worldview of a member of a small community, whose entire life from birth to death passes within a closed world. This nature of the peasant mentality is ultimately determined by the nature of the peasant economy and all the essential aspects of peasant life, the contacts of peasant communities with macro-society, and their social status. Engagement in agriculture and livestock husbandry, i.e., those areas that are directly tied to the natural basis and subject to the action of socio-natural laws, the family nature of peasant production, the inevitability of cooperation of individual families - this is the basis on which the peasant mentality was formed: perception of the world, morality, aesthetics , social psychology, behavioral stereotypes.
Specific forms of peasant mentality vary in time and space depending on the totality of historical and environmental conditions. However, in one form or another, the collectivist communal principle is present in all peasant communities. The most pronounced forms of communal consciousness among the peasantry occur at the stage of dominance of the traditional agrarian economy. But the communal principle is retained for a long time in the peasant mentality even with the advent of agricultural innovations with the beginning of society’s ascent to the industrial stage of development. While significant masses of the peasantry remain in the population, it influences the mentality of the entire society and its cultural and historical appearance.
In the post-primitive pre-industrial stages, the rural community is the basic structure for the emergence of all other social structures and institutions. The community archetype with its inherent forms of consciousness lies at the deep basis of the entire social organism. Civilization at these stages of social development is agrarian-traditional in nature. Its foundations are laid by the dominance of the agrarian economy and communal existence. And even in societies that have reached a high level of industrial development and have outlived the community as a structural element, the communal principle - albeit in a “removed” form - is present in social relations. It makes itself felt vividly in mass consciousness, in the extrapolation of the features of community consciousness to society as a whole (to national self-awareness, the perception of statehood as a connection between individual microworlds, etc.). The explanation for this should be sought in the fact that, despite its limitations and isolation, the institution of community and group communal consciousness in the most direct form encoded the main essence of sociality: the involvement of the individual in the affairs and interests of the collective, solidarity, cooperation, mutual assistance. The community was a specific form of social community from which all other forms of social community known in human history were born.
To understand the fate of Russia in the past and present, study the manifestations of the communal principle in the mentality of the people - and in in this case we can talk not only about the peasantry, but about the entire people - a task of paramount importance. In the recent past, by historical standards, Russia was a peasant country. The mentality of the Russian peasantry, while having common features with the peasantry of other countries and regions, had specificity determined by the peculiarities of historical development, starting from the early Middle Ages and ending with the disappearance of the class of small landowners leading small-scale family farming.
The existence of the peasantry in Russia (including the stage of its formation and de-peasantization) goes back at least a thousand years. By the beginning of the 20th century, when the industrial system was already dominant in economically developed centers, Russia became a country where the peasantry constituted the undivided dominant mass of the population, and small-peasant production was the most widespread economic structure. The reasons for the retention of modern and modern times in Russia on such a huge scale by the small-peasant way of life and its preservation of traditional features lie in the relatively late (compared to other regions of Europe) agricultural development of the East European Plain, in the geopolitical situation of the existence of the Russian state, as well as in the peculiarities of environmental conditions, to a large extent influenced the nature and pace of development of peasant production (and, consequently, the country’s economy as a whole), in the specifics of the Russian social system. The overwhelming majority of the Russian peasantry was organized into communities, the viability and strength of which was clearly revealed by the failure of the Stolypin reform and the revival after the 1917 revolution of community organizations, their appearance where they had disappeared at one time or had previously not existed at all (as, for example, in newly developed areas). In such conditions, the communal principle in the mentality of the peasantry and the whole society was extremely strong.
The industrialization and modernization of the country, carried out at an accelerated pace in an incredibly short time frame, took place in the conditions of the persistence of huge layers of pre-capitalist relations in the social system, from the economy to the spiritual sphere. Naturally, the spirit of community was the aura in which the mentality of the entire society was formed. Its bearer was not only everyone rural population, but also the working class of post-reform Russia, which had just (mostly in the first or second generation) broken away from the peasantry, and the intelligentsia, in the person of its advanced representatives, acutely felt and experienced the people’s troubles, and even part of the bourgeoisie (especially those who came from the Old Believer environment ).
At the stage of the pre-industrial agrarian economy - and it is precisely at this stage that the existence of the traditional peasantry occurs - farming on the land and the entire existence of the peasant is inextricably linked with the local community - the rural neighboring community. Family cooperation, with the greatest isolation and independence, could not do without outside help. Given the technology that existed at the pre-industrial stage of social development and the direct dependence of production on weather conditions (with their periodic fluctuations), this was required even on the peasant’s own farm. The creation of infrastructure, the economic use of rural land, and even more so the development of new territories were only within the power of the team. An individual family found itself defenseless in socially. Only together, united families could defend their interests and resist the onslaught of the state, large landowners and other powerful people. A peasant family - even if it was an undivided large family - simply could not survive alone. The community acted as a guarantor of the normal functioning and reproduction of the peasant family, an institution that ensured its physical survival in extreme conditions. (A. Ya. Efimenko, A. A. Kaufman, I. V. Chernyshev, K. R. Kacharovsky, N. P. Oganovsky, R. Redfield, J. Scott, etc.).
Joint performance of work that is beyond the strength of one family, cooperation, mutual assistance, a certain degree of equalization in providing all families with land and other objective economic conditions, the presence of an insurance fund - these characteristic features of the peasant community and, as a consequence, communal consciousness can be traced to the very end of the existence of the neighboring community . In Russia, even in post-reform times, with a clear understanding by the peasants that the community with its redistributions, interstriping, three-field with forced crop rotation, the supreme disposal of all lands in the world, mutual responsibility, the absorption of the individual into the community stood in the way of agrotechnical and social progress, the village held on to this medieval Institute as an anchor of salvation. In conditions of acute land shortage and poverty, mutual responsibility, multi-striped and striped, forced crop rotation, missing the most profitable time for raising crops (due to the use of the field allocated for it as a temporary pasture) and other seemingly completely irrational customs in the post-reform community, sharply negatively assessed in Soviet (and sometimes in pre-revolutionary) domestic literature, they served as a means of basic survival for the peasantry.
Group communal consciousness (to a large extent it was mythological) permeated all spheres of life of the peasant community. It was the consciousness of a collective of people connected with each other not only by business relations, but also emotionally, a consciousness oriented towards ancient traditions and ideals. For a peasant, his community is the whole world. It is not for nothing that Russian peasants called the community the world or society. The communal peasant divided people into “us” and “strangers.” Moreover, the category of “outsiders” included not only city dwellers, feudal lords and representatives of other classes in general, but members of other rural communities. (Unity with them occurred only during mass peasant movements). “We” and “they” - this vision of the world around us was the product of communal localism and isolation;
The rural community was the institution where the socialization of its members took place. The peasant confronted the outside world and was included in an integral social organism (macrosociety) not as a separate individual, but through a community organization. From an early age, he perceived the orders, customs and traditions of his community as immutable laws of nature.
The dominance of communal consciousness is directly revealed in land relations - this most important sphere of peasant life. The traditional farmer is emotionally connected to the land. He and the earth are one. For the peasant, labor on the land is the main content of his life. The weak separation of social and natural principles at the stage of dominance of the agrarian economy implied the sacralization of the land. The right of every member of the rural community to work on the land is sacred. This is essentially the right to life. It is given from birth, predetermined by the fact that a person belongs to a specific community and is secured by traditional community institutions, primarily the supremacy of collective communal property over family-individual property.
Property is a historical category. In traditional peasant communities there is no property in modern understanding. The rights of disposal, possession and use are merged here and in this unity, depending on specific environmental and historical conditions, are divided in a certain form and extent between the peasant family and the community. An even more significant feature of traditional land tenure was its connection with the labor principle. Peasant landownership rights (to the extent that it was allowed by the community, and in the case of a seigneurial regime, also by the owner) extended only to cultivated land. Private ownership of uncultivated land is a later phenomenon, associated with a fairly high level of commodity-money relations and social development in general. In the facts of alienation of plots of land (sometimes even entire plots) by communal peasants recorded by Russian medieval sources, we are talking about transactions not for land as a natural factor, a certain territory, but for the labor invested in its cultivation.
This side of the legal thinking of the traditional peasantry is perfectly reflected in the now textbook formula that limits the right of ownership to the boundaries of economic activity (cutting, plowing, haymaking, establishing fishing and hunting equipment, etc.). The relationship between the right to land as an objective condition of labor and the principles of labor law was thoroughly analyzed in pre-revolutionary domestic science (A. Ya. Efimenko, V. V., K. Kocharovsky, A. A. Kaufman, I. V. Chernyshev, P. A. Sokolovsky and others). For the Russian peasant, land is a natural (God’s) gift. She belongs to everyone. And everyone has the right to work on it. The right to work on the land, the appropriation of land for the implementation of this right in the eyes of the peasant is the highest truth and justice. The disposal of land plots can only be associated with the labor invested. This practice was guarded by common law and the entire system of relations in the community. The collectivism inherent in the community, the mediation of the appropriation of land by the peasant through secular organization, found expression in group consciousness.
The predominance of the general over the family-individual, private in the sphere of land relations in the peasant worlds of Russia was largely facilitated by the economic conditions and the specifics of the social system, in particular the particularly active role of the political superstructure, the formation in the 17th century. systems of state feudalism, the transformation of land occupied by tax communities free from private dependence into state property over time.
The traditional right of the peasant to work on the land and the fruits of his labor, clearly reflected in medieval sources, will pass through the centuries. Moreover, when at the end of the Middle Ages and in modern times, due to demographic growth and the appearance of the first signs of land oppression in the center of Russia, with the growth of large feudal land ownership, the restructuring of management in estates and estates, the increase in private rent, land redistributions spread, this is a communal legal consciousness will become noticeably stronger. In conditions of scarce land and heavier taxes, equal redistribution meant the real implementation of the right of every peasant family to work and, consequently, to physical existence.
And in post-reform times, the strength of the community institution, the effectiveness of community collectivism and consciousness were based on the traditional system of interrelation and interaction between the community and the peasant household as a family-labor association. The community continued to act as a direct continuation and guarantor of the family economy, which was directly reflected in property relations. Unfortunately, the property of the peasant household in the post-reform period was not subjected to special analysis from this angle. Meanwhile, the property of the peasant household in the community and outside the community was not yet complete private property - that private property that was both a condition and a factor of capitalist development. Russian post-reform law distinguished four types of peasant property: public (more precisely, communal), common, family and personal, which alone was fully private property. This latter one had difficulty making its way into the village. It is no coincidence that the emphasis on replacing the property of the courtyard as a family-labor association with the property of the individual householder was the starting point in the Stolypin agrarian reform. According to the law of June 14, 1910 on leaving the community (Articles 9, 47, 48), all land plots that were or had ever previously passed into household ownership were declared from that moment the personal property of the householder. Only plots of land that were in the undivided possession of the mother and children or persons who were not related to each other were recognized as common property. Family-labor property was supposed to disappear along with the community. The failure of the attempt to replace the property of the family-labor collective with the property of the householder in the land legal relations of the peasantry was one of the main reasons for the failure of Stolypin’s attack on the community. All known definitions indicate that at this point the peasantry offered the most widespread and decisive resistance.
Private ownership of land by a householder in the eyes of the peasants meant either a rapid fragmentation of land plots, since with the liquidation of the community the possibility of compensating growing families at the expense of smaller ones disappeared, or the introduction of single inheritance, which would lead to a violation of the equality of family members, dividing them into haves and have-nots from birth. Single inheritance in its social results would represent a kind of “fencing” within the peasant household and, naturally, would encounter resistance from broad sections of the village.
In relation to the Soviet period - and this is shown in the literature - the consistent implementation of the principle of household ownership and the denial of the personal private property of the householder was one of the main ideas of the revolutionary legal consciousness of the peasant masses, which found expression in all the basic land laws of the Soviet government, starting with the Decree on Land. This was one of the most important factors in the revival of the community during and after the revolutions of 1917.
It must be emphasized that the belief in the superiority of the property of the courtyard as a family-labor association over the property of the individuals included in it, including the householder, is not unique to the Russian peasantry. It is known, for example, that the same legal consciousness was inherent in the Moselle peasantry in Germany in the 40s of the last century, and there it manifested itself, in particular, in resistance to the unified inheritance imposed from above on the principle of primogeniture.
The economy (and ethics!) of survival creates its own system of social relations, including property relations, the specifics of which are of fundamental importance for understanding the peasantry as a social phenomenon, for understanding the peasant perception of life. Here the most important properties of the peasant mentality are manifested, incorporating the life experience of previous generations.
Revolution of 1917 left an outstanding document that reflected with utmost force the very core of the peasant mentality in Russia. It's about on the Model Order, drawn up on the basis of 242 rural and volost orders to the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies in May 1917. The main place in the Order was occupied by pressing social issues, primarily the question of land, around which the agrarian history of Russia has unfolded since the reforms of 1861 d. In the light of the peasant mentality, “the most fair solution to the land issue looked like this: “The right of private ownership of land is abolished forever... All land... is alienated free of charge, turned into the national property and transferred to the use of all workers on it... The right to use land is granted to all citizens (without distinction of gender) of the Russian state who wish to cultivate it with their own labor, with the help of their family or in partnership, and only as long as they are able to cultivate it. Land use must be equal, i.e., land is distributed among workers... according to labor or consumption standards...”
The peasant ideal is “free labor on free land.” He assumed the possibility of implementing it by everyone who was willing and able to cultivate the land with their labor.
During the revolution, the community revived and strengthened again, absorbing the bulk of agricultural land (over 9/10). This circumstance is put forward as the basis for the conclusion about the archaization of the socio-economic structure of the post-revolutionary village.
A solution to the contradiction between traditional communal orders and the demands of agriculture began to be sought even before the revolution along the paths of a progressive community.” In the 1920s, work to “improve the community” was carried out quite widely, but they did not receive adequate support from the state. The attention of the new government was entirely directed towards a collectivist future, opposed to the old community with its worldly self-government.
The group consciousness of communal peasants was ideologically consolidated by a series of rites, customs, traditions and rituals. An important role in this was played by the joint holding of everyday and religious holidays, feasts, for which the entire village, village or close relatives gathered.
Poverty, lack of land, class humiliation, hardships associated with redemption payments firmly tied the bulk of the peasantry to the community, but in its depths a still narrow layer of farmers was born, who were constrained by the communal order. The active activity and energy of this layer required the free manifestation of personality in all respects. Over time, in the rural community, a confrontation between two types of community members became more and more clearly established - the traditional peasant, committed to the customs of his fathers and grandfathers, the community with its collectivism and social security, and the new peasant, who wanted to live and farm at his own risk. Their coexistence was so characteristic that it was reflected in fiction. Very expressively two opposite types, one of which was the bearer of a communal principle, and the other individualistic, are presented, for example, in the story of A. I. Ertel “From the Same Root” (1883).
The weakening of the traditional foundations of the community as a result of the socio-economic stratification of the village in post-reform times is beyond doubt. At the same time, the formation of a new type of personality was observed among the peasants, striving to free themselves from the power of the community, as a result of which the relationship between the individual and the world often acquired a conflicting nature.
The powerful upsurge of the peasant movement, which served as the basis for the entire Russian revolution, was ultimately the manifestation and triumph of the communal-egalitarian mentality. The egalitarianism of a rural community is not the equality of modern civil society, but egalitarianism in the distribution of objective conditions of economic management and existence. The principle of equalization, conveyed by the Russian peasantry until the 20th century, slowed down the commodity-capitalist transformation of the village, but mitigated the terrible poverty of the village, ensured the physical survival of the village, and in this sense had advantages over the formal legal equality of bourgeois society. This principle played a huge role in the revolutionary movement of the peasantry, its struggle for land, the abolition of class humiliation.
The egalitarian communist tendencies of the communal peasantry left a strong mark on the revolutionary liberation movement in Russia. They became the basis for the theoretical views and practice of the Narodniks and even influenced the Social Democrats, who in theory did not accept the Narodnik idea of utopian socialism, but in fact contributed to its approval.
Due to the direct attachment of the traditional agrarian economy to the natural basis, its immersion in nature, as discussed above, powerful layers of primary (pre-class, pre-state) sociality were preserved in the peasant community: the principles of collectivism, democracy, and social justice. But the hierarchy and authoritarianism of the community also go back to the stage of primary sociality, stemming from the subordination of man to natural forces, represented in the form of gods and demons, omnipotent spirits of primitive religions.
It goes without saying that the opposition between localism and statehood, pre-state and state consciousness was not clear-cut during the historical process. In the mentality of the peasant worlds, as they were drawn into broad social connections (with the city, church, large landownership, etc.), the importance of the state principle increased.
And yet, it was in the sphere of state-institutional ideas that the peasant mentality underwent the most radical changes at the beginning of the 20th century. Already during the first Russian revolution, the peasantry rose to the level of political demands (the presence in the Duma of factions representing the interests of the peasants, direct speeches in the Duma by the peasants themselves, peasant orders, etc.) and the creation of their own political organization - the Union of the Working Peasantry, which could potentially outgrow V political party. The reprisal against the people's revolution and Stolypin's agrarian reform dealt the first blows to naive monarchism among the peasantry. It was finally eradicated by the horrors of the First World War, the mediocrity and selfishness of the ruling classes. The peasant mentality becomes republican with a decisive denial of any possibility of autocracy, at least in the form of the presidency.
Let us refer to such an outstanding document of 1917 as the “Exemplary Mandate”: “The supreme power in the Russian state from now on and forever belongs to the free people themselves... The form of government in the Russian state should be a democratic republic... The republic should be without a president ... Broad self-government on a democratic basis in all sectors of public and state life...” The order also contained direct anti-monarchical provisions, up to the requirement of “confiscation of the capital of the Romanov dynasty located abroad.” Subsequent events of the revolution and civil war did not change the anti-tsarist, and in particular anti-Romanov, sentiments among the peasant masses. The Antonovites, who launched a peasant uprising against the Bolshevik Soviets in 1920, demanded the creation of a democratic state that would ensure “the political equality of all citizens, without dividing them into classes, with the exception of the House of Romanov.” However, before the convening of the Constituent Assembly, the Antonovites also excluded communists from political life.
The democratic demands of the mandate are permeated with the idea of direct and immediate participation of the people in the management of state and local affairs, which corresponded to the spirit of the communal mentality of the peasantry. This is also the reason for the peasantry accepting the power of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies as a unified system of state and local government.
The localism of the peasant worlds, which persisted in post-reform Russia, in the conditions of military devastation and increasing pressure from the state, came to life as a natural and adequate defensive reaction. An indicator of this is the emergence of peasant republics, especially in 1918, when the peasantry, with the help of localism, defended their vital interests and saved themselves from plunder by the state. The history of Russia has known two ways for the state to fight communal localism and overcome “self-will” in the behavior of the peasantry:
1) before the revolution, the integration of community self-government into the system of state local government, which facilitated the subjugation and suppression of the peasantry until community self-government suddenly turned out to be an organization of revolutionary actions of the peasants, albeit on a local scale;
2) in Soviet era the limitation of community self-government to purely intra-farm affairs, mainly land affairs, and its direct subordination to government bodies - village and volost councils, associated with a radical change in the peasant mentality and requiring significant effort and time.
Of course, the communal heritage in the peasant mentality of modern Russia is not limited to the usual value of direct self-government of the village; it consists, first of all, in the absolute priority of labor use of the land - equal rights to the land of all who cultivate it with their labor, for labor on the land is the basis of human life. In this regard, it is necessary to emphasize that forcing economic and political reforms without taking into account the mentality of society that has come from the historical past can have catastrophic consequences. And this mentality largely inherited the features of the peasant communal mentality with its principles of direct democracy, social justice, and collectivity.
The communal principle in the mentality of peasants is not, of course, a specifically Russian phenomenon. This generic sign peasant mentality and in one expression or another it is characteristic of the peasantry in general. However, in Russia it has acquired a particularly stable and pronounced character. Due to the largely unfavorable geopolitical, social, and environmental conditions of Russia, the task of survival for peasants remained the main one even in the 20th century. It will have to be resolved in the coming 21st century.
Traditional communal mentality belongs to past stages of social development. Now its historical limitations are obvious. But it is no less obvious that it contains enduring values that characterize the essential nature of sociality: collectivism, democracy, mutual assistance, social justice, equality. These high moral principles, developed by communal microworlds, must be transferred to macro-society and humanity as a whole and preserved by modern civilization.
Natural factors and processes, included with the help of technical means in the composition of the productive forces, had a significant impact on material production, and through it on socio-economic and political relations, the spiritual life of society and ethnic traditions.
The peculiarities of the geographical environment are associated, for example, with the spatial and temporal spread of forms of feudal exploitation. Thus, the corvee-serf system dominated mainly in the temperate climate zone, in the presence of good or average soil quality. Under these conditions, landowners could successfully run their farms, exploiting the peasants, who were mainly engaged in agriculture. In areas with a harsh climate, infertile soil, and low population density, landowner estates were rare: under these conditions it was much more difficult to exploit the peasants. If in the old, long-populated southern and central regions in the middle of the 19th century. the number of landowner peasants exceeded or was approximately equal to the number of state peasants, then in the Southern Urals it was only 31% of state peasants, in the Northern Urals - about 15%, in the European North - 24%, in Siberia there were only 3 thousand, i.e. that is, a little more than 0.1% of state peasants. The landowners themselves perfectly understood all the benefits that the favorable natural conditions of the southern regions of the country gave to serfdom. Back in the second half of the 16th century. The “displacement” of nobles south of the Oka became intense 2. True, at that time it was caused mainly by military considerations. Ho at the end of the 17th and especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Landowner development of the southern regions was carried out for economic reasons. Many landowners sold their lands in the Black Earth Center or Ukraine, transferring their serfs to them. By the time of the peasant re
These southern territories were thoroughly developed by landowners.
The influence of the natural-geographical environment on the form and magnitude of peasant duties was manifested, for example, in the territorial distribution of corvee and quitrents in Russia in the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. Although the distribution of these duties was influenced primarily by social factors, geographical conditions also played a role. Thus, in the provinces of the Non-Black Earth Center, the percentage of peasants who performed mainly corvee work was in the 60s of the 18th century. 40.8%, and in 1858 - only 32.5%, and in the fertile provinces of the Black Earth Center and the Middle Volga it amounted to 66.2-75% and 72.7-77.2%, respectively 3t In non-Black Earth regions, higher costs labor per unit of agricultural production forced landowners to prefer a quit-rent form of exploitation, especially since in this area there were many opportunities for peasants to leave to earn money. A kind of “instruction” on this matter is the statement of one of the landowners of the black earth provinces in the middle of the 19th century: “When destining an estate for rent or corvee, one must first carefully consider the quality and quantity of the land.
As a result of this consideration, poor soil and lack of land form a quitrent estate, for the peasants, not relying on the fertility of the land, turn to other means for their subsistence and payment of the next quitrent from them... An estate intended for corvée is subject to completely different conditions. It should be endowed not only with fertile soil, but also with a sufficient amount of land...”
The degree of soil fertility in conditions of increasing marketability of agriculture was also taken into account by landowners when deciding on the size of corvee plowing. L.V. Milov, analyzing statistical and economic materials on the Moscow province of the 60-70s of the 18th century, believes that due to the increased demand for bread, landowners who had more fertile lands were much more active in dispossessing peasants than those who had land were not fertile. He notes that “in conditions of severe land shortage, but with comparative fertility and favorable sales, the landowners launched an attack on peasant lands. Moreover, this process is elusive if you pay attention to only one side of the matter - the overall size of the landowner's arable land."
In some cases, a relationship was observed between the biological productivity of the soil and the degree of exploitation of peasants. I. D. Kovalchenko, using mathematical research methods, came to the conclusion that in the middle of the 19th century. “...both in the black earth and in the non-chernozem zone between the height of the grain yield on the plowing of the landowner peasants and the size of their duties (i.e., the ratio of landowner and peasant crops in the black earth and the amount of quitrent in the non-chernozem zone)
there was a direct relationship... that is, the highest duties corresponded to the highest yields" *. Landowners took into account the natural productivity of the land and tried to use it in such a way as to obtain maximum income.
And until the 19th century. individual species duties varied depending on specific natural conditions. Thus, according to the legal codes of 1497 and 1550, when peasants “exited” they paid “elderly” (payment for using the dvop) depending on the nature of the area in which the peasant lived. If he lived in a steppe area, he paid a ruble; if he lived in a forest area, he paid only half a ruble. Apparently, the higher cost of the timber that the landowner gave to the peasant to build a hut in the steppe zone compared to the forest was taken into account. Dimensions of the plow land taxation unit from the middle of the 16th century. were also set taking into account soil quality. Lands were divided into three categories: “good”, “average” and “poor”, and the area of a unit of taxation with “poor” soil was 1.3-1.5 times larger than a plow with “good” soil. In this way, lands of different quality and bringing different income to the owner were taxed depending on their economic value. In addition, in accordance with the characteristics of the natural resources of a given area, the feudal lords established the specific content of the quitrent - whether to pay it in sables, squirrels, beavers, fish, honey, meat, flour, etc. This was of great importance until the last quarter of the 18th century. when quitrent in kind reigned.
Forms and methods of exploitation were associated with changing natural cycles and stages of the economic year. Thus, work in the corvée was usually distributed unevenly: most corvée days were appointed by landowners in the warm season. But here, too, the days the peasants worked for themselves and for the landowner were rarely distributed evenly: “... many landowners provided the peasants with their days only after the master’s urgent work was completed; This was especially often practiced during the summer harvest during mowing and harvesting. At the same time, usually all the bucket days were spent under corvée, while on rainy days the peasants were allowed to work in their fields. This system was disastrous for peasant farms, because they often had to either harvest the grain when it fell off, and mow the grass when it had time to dry out, or work at night and on holidays.”7 This kind of “taking into account” by the landowners of natural conditions essentially represented an increase in the rate of exploitation beyond the formally accepted number of corvee days on a given estate.
The time of the transition of peasants from one owner to another, sanctioned by the feudal authorities, coincided with the end of the agricultural year: in the Pskov land the transition was possible during the week before and the week after the Filippov conspiracy (November 14), and later the Code of Law of 1497 established for the whole
Russian land for a two-week period, the middle of which was St. George’s Day (November 28).
The influence of natural conditions is also noticeable in a number of specific features popular movements. It makes sense to talk about seasonal changes in the peasant movement, which depended on the annual economic cycle. Table 10 reveals the pattern of manifestations of the peasant movement by month and season of the year. Table 10 was compiled for a period for which there are widespread reliable sources. The material for this table was the appendices (“Chronicle of the Peasant Movement”) available in each collection of documents on the peasant movement8. These appendices give dating and brief description all cases of the peasant movement known to the compilers. Since the number of manifestations of the peasant movement, the beginning of which dates back to a month or season of the year, is significant (about 3 thousand), the general patterns should be observed quite clearly and, according to the law of large numbers, the distorting influence of accidents should not be strong.
The table of the peasant movement by month gives quite interesting picture. The overall result for 65 years indicates noticeable fluctuations in the activity of the peasant movement, the range of which from the most “passive” month, February, to the most “active”, July, increases exactly 2 times. It is characteristic that only one month (March) is close to the average number (250 cases, or 8.3%), while the rest are no less than I% above or below this level, which indicates significant differentiation. During the year, the curve of the peasant movement smoothly and gradually (with the exception of the first two months) increases and, reaching its peak in July, also smoothly goes down. The months of greatest activity (May, June, July), giving an average of 10.8% of all manifestations of movement per month, follow each other; In the same close group are the months that provide the period of lowest activity - on average 6.3% of the total - November, December, January and February. Thus, the difference in the activity of the peasant movement during these periods was 1.7 times. These two periods are separated by months in which traffic activity fluctuated around average numbers,
The differentiation of the peasant movement is also characteristic of the seasons of the year. In this case, two “active” seasons, summer and spring, gave the number of performances 1.5 times more than two “passive” seasons, winter and autumn. The most “active” season, summer, gave 1.7 times more manifestations of movements than the most “passive” season, winter. To find out whether the above patterns are observed based on the results of smaller periods, calculations were also made for three periods of the peasant movement (1796-1825, 1826-1849 and 1850-1860). Calculations by season show that the share of each of them changed quite noticeably. The strong deviation is especially noticeable
| Month | 1796- | -1825 i | 1826- | -1849 | 1850- | -I860 | 17S6- | ¦I860 |
| abs. | % | abs. | % | abs. | % | abs. | % | |
| January | 66 | 9,3 | 65 | 6,2 | 74 | 5,8 | 205 | 6,9 |
| February | 46 | 6,7 | 57 | 5,4 | 74 | 5,8 | 177 | 5,9 |
| March | 48 | 7,0 | 91 | 8,7 | 99 | 7,9 | 238 | 7,9 |
| April | 65 | 9,2 | 121 | 11,5 | 95 | 7,7 | 281 | 9,4 |
| May | 65 | 9,2 | 125 | 11,9 | 133 | 10,5 | 321 | 10,7 |
| June | 69 | 10.0 | 108 | 10,3 | 144 | 11,4 | 321 | 10,7 |
| July | 61 | 8,4 | 129 | 12,3 | 164 | 13.0 | 354 | 11,8 |
| August | 71 | 10,4 | 88 | 8,4 | 133 | 10,5 | 292 | 9,7 |
| September | 54 | 7,9 | 58 | 5,5 | 105 | 8,2 | 219 | 7,3 |
| October | 43 | 6,3 | 66 | 6,3 | 107 | 8,4 | 216 | 7,2 |
| November | 46 | 6,7 | 71 | 6,8 | 69 | 5,5 | 186 | 6,2 |
| December j | 53 | 7,8 | 66 | 6,3 | 66 | 5,2 | 185 | 6,2 |
| Total | 687 | 100,0 | 1047 | 100,0 | 1263 | 100,0 | 2995 | 100,0 |
Table 10
the number of performances during the winter of 1796-1825 was 5.1% higher than for the period as a whole. But even this period confirms the general pattern: spring and summer give more performances than the other two seasons.
By month, in certain periods, there were, of course, more deviations from the average figures for the entire period. Here you can see that the three most “active” months (May, June, July) do not always occupy the first three places; in turn, some of the four "passive" months sometimes go far from their average. This is especially noticeable again in 1796-1825, when January gained a higher percentage than July. Information on the number of performances by month for each year indicates stronger anomalies, which, however, is quite natural. But even there, stronger activity of the peasantry is noticeable in the summer and spring months.
How can one explain such manifestations of the seasonality of the peasant movement? Apparently, the main reason is the coincidence of the time of increased activity of the peasantry with the period of field work. In the months and weeks when the fate of both the peasant and landowner harvest was being decided, when the landowners demanded more days of corvée than in colder time years, class contradictions inevitably had to become especially acute. It was also of considerable importance that it was in the spring and summer (until July inclusive) that peasant food supplies dried up, and it was at this time (spring) that peasants and their livestock most often eked out a half-starved existence. In the fall, after the new harvest, the peasant usually had food and money and his living conditions.
could not be considered satisfactory or even good. Probably, it was also influenced by the fact that in the fall and winter the peasants were left without such an active and relatively broad-minded layer as the otkhodniks, who often led the peasants’ protests.
Of course, the very causes of the peasant movement, as well as any manifestation of the class struggle, were in no way connected with the geographical environment. The change of seasons did not entail the fatal inevitability of an increase or decrease in the activity of the peasant masses. But nevertheless, the change of seasons indirectly, through the economy, created a peculiar seasonality of the peasant movement.
It is characteristic that individual forms of the peasant movement gave even more vivid manifestations of seasonality than the entire movement as a whole (see Table 11, compiled from the same materials as Table 10). The total figures here are relatively small, so we have to allow for a greater probability of possible random deviations in the results than in the table. 10. Nevertheless, it seems that these data can be used, since each case noted in the “Chronicle” represents not an individual, but a collective action. It is quite natural that attempts to seize landowners' agricultural property should have been carried out mainly during the period of field work. Indeed, the five months from April to August accounted for almost three-quarters (74%) of all such cases. In winter, which is typical for logging work on peasant farms, felling of the landowner's forest was carried out mainly. For four months (December - timber on the peasant farm was carried out in the main - noble forest.
In both cases, we should talk about the indirect influence of the geographical environment. But we also have a rare case of the direct influence of natural conditions on the distribution of peasant shoots by month. During the six warm months of the year, April - September, four-fifths (79.7%) of all mass escapes occurred. Indeed, escaping, in which one usually has to leave one’s household and hide from the persecution of the landowner, is especially difficult and dangerous in the cold season.
Seasonal changes are also noticeable in the labor movement of this time. This is explained by the fact that a significant part of those who worked at Russian enterprises in the first half of the 19th century V. was still closely connected with agriculture and had to work on her own plot of land. According to the Chronicle of the Labor Movement, the number of workers' protests by month for 1800-1860 is revealed. (see table 12),
Seasonality is quite clearly reflected here too. The three months with the largest numbers (April, May, June) again follow one another and give an average of 11.7% of the annual amount; five
Tao faces 11
Changes in the activity of individual forms of the peasant movement by month
(1796-1860)
| month | Seizure of landowners' lands (unrave them, harvest, mow meadows; | Maccor felling of the landowner's forest | Mass escapes |
|||
| a^s. | % | abs. | % | abs. | % |
|
| January | I | 0 | 6 | 19,4 | 3 | 3,8 |
| February | 2 | 7,4 | 4 | 12,9 | 2 | 2,5 |
| March | I | 3,7 | 4 | 12,9 | I | 1,3 |
| April | 4 | 14,8 | 2 | 6,5 | 5 | 6,3 |
| May | 4 | 14,8 | 2 | 6,5 | 9 | 11,4 |
| June | 2 | 7,4 | ¦-¦ | 0 | 19 | 24,1 |
| July | 10 | 37 | 2 | 6,5 | 13 | 16,5 |
| August | 2 | 7,4 | I | 3,2 | 7 | 8,9 |
| September | I | 3,7 | 2 | 6,5 | 10 | 12,5 |
| October | 0 | 2 | 6,5 | 4 | 5,1 |
|
| November | I | 3,7 | 2 | 6,5 | 4 | 5,1 |
| December | ¦g | 0 | 4 | 12,9 | 2 | 2,5 |
| Total | 27 | 100 | 31 | 100 | 79 | 100,0 |
Table 12
Changes in the activity of the labor movement by month (1800-1860)*
| Month | January | February | March | April | "8 th | n | l With: I S | August | September | October | November | December | Total |
| abs. | 18 | 25 | 24 | 30 | 39 | 33 | 25 | 25 | 17 | 14 | 17 | 23 | 290 |
| % | 6,2 | 8,6 | 8,3 | 10,3 | 13,4 | 11,4 | 8,6 | 8,6 | 5,9 | 4,9 | 5,9 | 7,9 | 100 |
| * Labor movement | in Russia in the 19th century. S * | !-e yzd | M., 1955. t* | I, 1800 | -I860. | Part I, 2. |
|||||||
months, September - January, also follow one after another,” but on average they provide only 6.1% of the total annual amount, i.e., traffic activity drops by 1.9 times. These periods of high and low activity are separated by periods of medium activity, each lasting two months. Compared to the ‘peasant movement’, the active period is shifted exactly by a month, and its peak falls not in July, but in May. This may be due to the fact that the sharpest conflicts between workers and entrepreneurs arose during the sowing period, and in other months workers were less distracted from enterprises for agricultural work. The activity of workers in the month with the most unrest increased compared to the most “passive” month (October) by 2.5 times, that is, the gap was even higher than the difference in the months of the peasant movement that were opposite in activity.
Although for the period before the 19th century. We do not have such massive materials as on the peasant movement of the pre-reform period; we can assume that the seasonality of the peasant movement was also characteristic of an earlier time in Russia.
The popular movement could also be influenced by natural disasters. They sharply worsened the situation of the masses, which often led to an increase in the political activity of the people.
Let us consider the most important turbulent events in the life of the peasantry and urban poor associated with natural disasters. Natural disasters had some role in the uprising of 1484-1486. in Pskov. L.V. Cherepnin believes that “one of the prerequisites for the long-term unrest of the Pskov smerds in these years was the poor harvest of these years”9_tc.
Outbreaks of class struggle associated with natural disasters were also observed during the period of a centralized state. There were a number of such outbreaks in 1547-1550. The June fire of 1547 destroyed a significant part of Moscow. On June 25, a few days after the fire, the largest uprising in the city began. in Russia, which the government was able to cope with only by using not only force, but also deception. In March 1550, following a fire in Pskov, unrest occurred among the Pskov residents. The almost universal shortage of crops that struck the country in 1548-1550. and especially strong in the northern districts, contributed to the aggravation of the class struggle in them. During these years, cases of murder of the founders of monasteries and feeding staff became more frequent, and an uprising took place in 1549 in Ustyug the Great.
At the beginning of the 17th century. Almost the entire country was gripped by a severe famine in 1601-1603, which made life extremely difficult for the masses. In September 1603, a major Khlopko uprising began, and then the first peasant war in Russia of 1606-1607. Of course, all these events were the result of a long-term social and political crisis, the roots of which must be sought in Russian reality in the last third of the 16th century, but the famine aggravated class contradictions to the limit and accelerated the outbreak of the civil war in Russia* In creating the situation that preceded the uprising of 1662. in Moscow and 1650 in Pskov, low harvests played some role, which, however, would not have led to unrest if the policy of the feudal government had not neglected the misfortunes of the peasants. A lot of peasant unrest occurred during the lean years of 1704-1706, when “there was a great famine in the villages.” New series crop failures that followed two decades later in 1722-1724 served as a reason for massive peasant unrest.
In 1771, the essentially anti-people actions of the Moscow administration during an epidemic caused a “plague riot” in Moscow. Several “cholera riots” occurred in 1830-1831, when a cholera epidemic was observed in the southern and western provinces. Suffering from the disease, the oppression caused by medical measures to combat the epidemic, many times caused explosions
popular indignation towards the nobility and all those in government service, including even doctors. The largest of these riots broke out in Sevastopol and Tambov (1830), Staraya Pyce and Sennaya Square in St. Petersburg (1831).
In 1839, drought caused crop shortages and massive summer fires. That year, as stated in the “Moral and Political Report” of the III Department for 1839, “... in the middle of Russia, 12 provinces were subjected to an extraordinary disaster - fires and popular unrest... Rumors spread that arson was carried out by landowners to ruin their peasants who were designated to be free... finally believed that the government was setting fires to resettle estates according to a new plan.” As a result, the peasants “... rushed at the first one who raised doubts, beat and arrested village clerks, clerks, bailiffs, and landowners”11. In 1847, a fairly strong movement of peasants in the Vitebsk province was noted, the emergence of which was facilitated by three crop failures in a row1Z.
From this brief overview The following conclusions can be drawn. The mere presence of a natural or environmental disaster did not in any way guarantee or create a fatal need for an intensification of the class struggle. There are many known cases where droughts, epidemics, and fires were not accompanied by a noticeable aggravation of class contradictions. Natural disasters directly influenced only the state of the economy and the health of the population, although here too this influence was refracted by socio-political factors, those movements in which peasants in feudal times showed the highest organization and discipline (peasant wars, “temperance movement”, etc.) , as a rule, were not caused by natural disasters.
It would be interesting to check the influence of natural disasters on increasing the activity of the class struggle using statistical materials. This opportunity is given to us by the information from the “Chronicles of the Peasant Movement” in volumes for 1796---1860. and data on crop failures. On the given table. 13 years in which crop failures were most noticeable are highlighted in bold13.
To calculate the average figure for ordinary years, 22 years were taken from 1822 to 1856. Earlier years are not taken into account because their low numbers would noticeably reduce the average figure; the years immediately preceding the peasant reform are also not taken into account, since its preparation caused a sharp intensification of the peasant movement. The average number of peasant uprisings for normal years is 72. The average number of uprisings for 15 years with natural disasters is §2.6. Consequently, years of disasters bring increased activity
on average by 15%.
For the purpose of verification, similar calculations were made using another source, which indicated the average yield in European Russia for each year in sam14. With many years
Table 13
Number of peasant uprisings during natural disasters
| Decade | Last digit of the year |
|||||||||
| I | " 2 | 3 j | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | V | 9 | 0 |
|
| 1791-1800 | | | | | | 57 | 177 | 12 | 10 | 16 |
| 1801-1810 | 7 | 24 | 26 | 20 | 29 | 15 | 12 | 29 | 30 | 17 |
| 1811-1820 | 30 | 65 | 29 | 20 | 38 | 30 | 56 | 82 | 87 | 48 |
| 1821-1830 | 36 | 69 | 88 | 70 | 61 | 178 | 53 | 25 | 35 | 76 |
| 1831-1840 | 73 | 51 | 70 | 67 | 48 | 92 | 78 | 90 | 78 | 55 |
| 1841-1850 | 59 | 90 | 81 | 72 | 116 | 64 | 88 | 202 | 63 | 92 |
| 1851-1860 | 74 | 85 | 74 | 81 | 60 | 82 | 192 | 528 | 938 | 354 |
The average yield was sam-3.5 years of disasters when the yield fell below sam-3. For the same years from 1822 to 1856 there are only 9 of them (1823, 1830-1833, 1839, 1848, 1850, 1855). The average unrest figure for these years is 88, and the average unrest figure for the remaining 25 years is 75.5. Consequently* here the increase in activity during years of natural disasters is 16.6%, a value close to that obtained earlier.
Thus, in the 19th century. Natural disasters did not sharply increase the activity of the peasantry, although their influence in this regard is still noticeable. Perhaps in early periods it was more powerful.
A number of features of popular movements were associated with spatial-territorial relations. Under unique conditions, popular movements developed on the outskirts of the country and in hard-to-reach areas. Although the concept of “outskirts” is relative and changes its specific meaning depending on the development of society and changes in state borders, the inevitable difference in the position of individual regions of the country (for the feudal era it is especially significant) is always present. The very fact of the remoteness of the outskirts from the center with the highest population density, which caused additional difficulties in building roads, seriously hampered communication with the outskirts, including the delivery of troops there if necessary. The weak population of the outskirts (to some extent dependent on the vast territory of the country) also made it difficult to create a strong state coercive apparatus here.
All this contributed to the mass exodus of peasants who sought to get rid of feudal exploitation to the outskirts. During the period of Ancient Rus', peasants fled to the northern and eastern outskirts, later peasants went to the forest-steppe and steppe areas, to the Don, in the Urals. Since the 17th century the way opened to Western and then to Eastern Siberia.
On the outskirts, popular movements had more scope for their development. It is not for nothing that a movement such as schism persisted especially stubbornly on the outskirts or in hard-to-reach places.
ahs, separated from the center by forests and swamps. Cossack “republics” also existed in areas remote from the center. The Cossacks could hardly have arisen if vast, almost uninhabited territories had not been located near the southern borders of Russia. In Western European countries, small in area, it is difficult to find analogies to the Russian Cossacks. According to S. O. Schmidt, the existence of the Cossacks “... created the possibility of massive popular uprisings, unprecedented in other parts of Europe” *5.
The peculiarity of the class struggle on the outskirts lay in the fact that the feudal class here was not always able to quickly and decisively deal with the rebels. This was especially evident in the 17th century. Solovetsky uprising 1668-1676 lasted eight years, the unrest of monastic peasants in the Iset province of 1662-1666. and the revolt of 1695-1699. in Nerchinsk - four years. The government’s fear of carrying out mass repressions on the outskirts quite clearly affected the fate of participants in numerous uprisings in the 90s of the 17th century. in Eastern Siberia, participants in the 1650 uprisings in Novgorod and Pskov. In some of them, the government completely abandoned the persecution of the rebels; in other cases, the repressions were not significant.
Apparently, it was no coincidence that they began on the outskirts in the 17th century. and peasant wars. The government forces here were not strong enough to defeat the rebels. The war under the leadership of Bolotnikov began in the Putivl region, the peasant wars of 1670-1671. and 1707-1708 - on the Don, the peasant war under the leadership of Pugachev - on Yaik. As the positions of the feudal lords in the southwestern regions of the country strengthened, the area where the peasant wars began gradually shifted to the east.
The vastness of the country's territory and the presence of sparsely populated areas along its borders gave Russian peasants greater opportunities to escape from the landowners than in Western Europe. A well-known expert on the history of feudalism, B.F. Porshnev, connects the beginning of a period of peasant wars and uprisings in European countries with the end of mass desertions of peasants from the feudal lords. If leaving was difficult or prohibited, then the peasants in the fight against the feudal lords had to resort to a last resort - an uprising. Therefore, “...much earlier than on the continent of Europe, back in the 11th-12th centuries, peasant uprisings began in England and in the Scandinavian countries, where the island or peninsular position itself set natural limits to the scope of peasant migrations”16. For the continental countries of Western Europe, the era of peasant uprisings began later, from the 14th century, and for Russia “... only in the second half of the 16th century, precisely because here the opportunities for leaving were immeasurably greater and exploitation, in connection with this, increased more slowly.” 17. Probably, in this case, the features of the geographical environment in Russia "Act
Indeed, they contributed to a slower growth in the degree of exploitation and a later onset of peasant uprisings and wars than in Western Europe.
