The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984

Robert Ernest Frederick Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138417175
• eBook ISBN: 9781135781491
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1977, The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984 is a significant contribution to history.

The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia

PART 1

THE APPEARANCE

Chapter 1

(In which the well-disposed reader becomes acquainted with the triumph of socialism and Alexei Kremnev, the hero of our story.)

It was long past midnight when the owner of labour book No.37413, once, in the bourgeois world, called Alexei Vasil'evich Kremnev, left the stuffy, grossly overcrowded great auditorium of the Polytechnical Museum.

The misty haze of an autumn night blanketed the sleeping streets. The infrequent electric lights seemed lost in the far distance of intersecting alleyways. A wind stirred the yellowed leaves on the trees of the boulevard and in the gloom the walls of Kitaigorod loomed fabulously large and white.

Kremnev turned into Nicholas Street. In the misty haze it seemed to have taken on its former features. Wrapping himself up fruitlessly in his raincoat against the penetrating damp of the night, Kremnev looked nostalgically at the church of St. Vladimir and St. Panteleimon's chapel. He recalled how, when he was a first-year law student many years ago, with a faltering heart he bought Flerovskii's ABC of the Social Sciences ² just here, on the right, from Nikolaev, the second-hand bookseller; how, three years later, he started his icon collection by finding a Novgorod Saviour at Elisei Silin's; and those many and long hours when, with the proselyte's burning eyes, he burrowed through the treasures of the manuscript and book stacks of Shibanov's secondhand shop, where now you could make out, under the dull light of a street lamp, the brief inscription ‘Glavbum’.³

Banishing these guilty recollections, Alexei turned towards the Iberian Gate, went past the first House of the Soviets and plunged into the darkness of Moscow alleyways.

Words, phrases, and fragments of phrases just heard at the meeting in the Polytechnical Museum flashed morbidly through his mind:

‘By destroying the family hearth we are dealing the final blow to the bourgeois system!’

‘Our decree forbidding taking meals at home eliminates from our lives the joyful poison of the bourgeois family and firmly establishes the socialist principle for ever’.

The cosiness of family life leads to possessiveness; the petty proprietor's joys conceal the seeds of capitalism’.

His tired head ached and was now, as usual, reasoning, but without conscious thought, and registering without drawing conclusions; and his legs mechanically moved towards the half-destroyed family hearth fated in a week's time to be destroyed completely in accordance with the decree of 27 October 1921, which had just been published and elucidated.

Chapter 2

(Telling of the influence of Herzen on the inflamed imagination of a Soviet official.)

Alexei buttered a large piece of bread, a blessed gift from the god-protected Sukharevka, poured himself a glass of boiling coffee and sat down in his working chair.⁴

The town could be seen through the panes of the large window; below, in the misty nocturnal haze, rows of street lamps stretched out in milky patches of light. Here and there, the dark bulks of houses, windows still alight, glowed a dull yellow.

‘So, it's done.’ Alexei thought, peering into the Moscow night. ‘Old Morris, kind Thomas, Bellamy, Blatchford and you other good, dear Utopians.⁵ Your solitary dreams are now common beliefs, your greatest. audacities have become an official programme and an everyday commonplace! In the fourth year of the revolution, socialism can consider it holds undivided sway over the globe. Are you satisfied, Utopian pioneers?’

And Kremnev looked at the portrait of Fourier hanging above one of his bookcases.

But for himself, old socialist, important Soviet worker in charge of a section of the World Economic Council that he was, there was something not altogether right about this realisation; there was a confused nostalgia for the past; some cobweb of bourgeois psychology still clouded his socialist consciousness.

He strolled up and down the carpet of his study, his glance sliding over the covers of the books; he suddenly noticed a row of small volumes on a half-forgotten shelf. The names of Chernyshevskii, Herzen and Plekhanov on the leather spines of the solid bindings caught his eye. Smiling a smile of childhood recognition, he took down Pavlenkov's edition of Herzen.

It was two o'clock. The clock struck with a long-drawn hiss and was silent once more.

Good, noble, childishly naïve words revealed themselves to Kremnev's eyes. He was engrossed and troubled by what he read as one is troubled by recollections of one's first youthful love, one's first youthful vow.

His mind seemed freed from the hypnosis of Soviet daily life; new, unhackneyed, thoughts stirred in his mind; he found it possible to think in new ways.

Excitedly, Kremnev read a prophetic page he had long forgotten:

‘Weak, puny, stupid generations/Herzen wrote, ‘will somehow last until the eruption, until a flood of lava smothers them under a stony pall and confines them to the oblivion of history. And then? Then spring will come, young life will burgeon on their gravestones; the barbarism of infancy, full of unmatured but healthy strength, will replace the barbarism of senility, a wild, new power will burst forth in the youthful breast of the young nations; it will be the start of a new cycle of events and of the third volume of universal history.

Its basic tenor can be grasped now. It will be an era of social ideas. Socialism in all its aspects will grow to the utmost limits, to absurdity. Then again, a cry of refusal will break from the titanic breast of the revolutionary minority, and there will be once more a mortal struggle in which socialism, in the position of today's conservatism, will be defeated by another, unknown revolution still to come’.⁶

‘A new rising. But where is it? And in the name of what ideals?’ he wondered. ‘Alas, it has always been the weakness of liberal doctrine that it was incapable of creating ideologies and had no Utopias’.

He smiled regretfully. ‘O, you Milyukovs and Novgorodtsevs, Kuskovs and Makarovs, what Utopia will you paint on your banners?⁷ What, save the obscurantism of capitalist reaction, have you to offer in place of socialism? I agree… ours is by no means a socialist paradise…But what will you give in its stead?’

The Herzen volume suddenly snapped itself shut with a crack; a bundle of loose octavo and folio sheets fell off a shelf.

Kremnev shuddered.

A suffocating odour of sulphur filled the room. The hands of the large wall clock spun faster and faster until they disappeared in a whirl. The pages of the tear-off calendar began to detach themselves noisily and spiralled upwards, filling the room with paper vortices. The walls became oddly distorted and trembled.

Kremnev's head swam and there was a cold sweat on his brow. He shuddered and in a panic of terror dashed for the dining-room door. It banged shut behind him with the crackle of breaking wood. He vainly felt for the electric light switch; it was not in its old place. Groping about in the darkness, he repeatedly struck unfamiliar objects. He felt dizzy and befuddled, as if he were sea-sick.

Exhausted by his efforts, Alexei lowered himself onto a sofa which had not been there before, and lost consciousness.

Chapter 3

(Depicting Kremnev's appearance in the land of Utopia and his pleasant conversation with a Utopian Moscow girl on the history of twentieth century painting.)

Kremnev was woken by a silvery bell.

‘Hello, yes, it's me’, a woman's voice was saying, ‘Yes, he's arrived…. evidently last night…still sleeping…He was very tired, fell asleep without undressing…Very well. I'll call you.’

The voice ceased and the rustling of skirts indicated that its owner had left the room.

Kremnev propped himself up on the sofa and rubbed his eyes in amazement.

He was in a large yellow room flooded by the morning sun. Its appointments were of a strange, unfamiliar style: furniture made of red wood with greenish-yellow upholstery, yellow curtains, half drawn over the windows, and a table with wonderful metal fittings. Light female steps were heard in the neighbouring room. A door creaked and there was silence once again.

Trying to understand his position, Kremnev leapt up and quickly walked up to the window.

Thick autumn clouds were sailing across the blue sky. A little below them, just above the earth, some small and large airplanes of bizarre design darted about, the revolving metal parts gleaming in the sun.

The town lay spread out below…undoubtedly, this was Moscow.

To the left, the bulk of the Kremlin towers reared up, on the right, the Sukharevka shone red, and, far off, Kadashi rose proudly against the sky.

A view he had known for many, many years.

Yet how much it had all changed! The piles of stone which had once crowded the horizon were gone; whole architectural complexes had disappeared; Nirenzei's house was no longer in its place…Instead, there were gardens everywhere…Sprawling clumps of trees enveloped the whole space almost up to the Kremlin itself, dotted with solitary islands of architectural complexes. Boulevards intersected the sea of greenery, now turning to yellow. Streams of pedestrians, motor cars and carriages poured along them in a living river. Everything breathed a certain distinctive freshness, a cheerful confidence.

Undoubtedly this was Moscow, but a new, transformed and brighter one.

‘Have I really become the hero of a Utopian novel?’ Kremnev exclaimed.

‘A pretty stupid situation, I must say!’

He began to look around him to get his bearings, hoping to find some reference point that would enable him to identify the new world around him.

‘What is waiting for me beyond these walls? The blessed kingdom of socialism, now consolidated and enlightened? The marvellous anarchy of Prince Kropotkin? Capitalism restored? Or perhaps some new, hitherto unknown social system?’

On the evidence of the view from the window, one thing was clear; people enjoyed quite a high standard of living and culture and lived in common. But this was not enough to understand the nature of his surroundings.

Alexei eagerly began to examine the objects around him, but they told him very little.

For the most part, they were articles of everyday life, notable only for the careful finish, a certain emphatic precision and luxury of execution and the peculiar style of their forms, reminiscent both of Russian antiquity and of the ornaments of Nineveh. A strongly russified Babylonian style, in a word.

Kremnev's attention was drawn to a large picture hanging over the heavily upholstered sofa on which he had woken up.

At first glance it might be confidently identified as a typical work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The same composition with its high horizon, the same bright jewel tints, the same foreshortened figures, but…the canvas represented people in coloured frock-coats, ladies with umbrellas and motor-cars, and the subject was undoubtedly something like the take-off of aeroplanes. Several reproductions lying on a neighbouring table were in similar style.

Kremnev went up to a large desk made from something like dense cork and hopefully began to look over the books that lay scattered there. These were the fifth volume of The Practice of Socialism by V.Sher, The Renaissance of the Crinoline, a study of contemporary fashion, two volumes of Ryazanov's From Communism to Idealism, the 38th edition of E.Kuskova's memoirs, a magnificent edition of the Bronze Horseman, a pamphlet The Transformation of V-energy, ⁸ … Finally, his hand trembling with excitement, he picked up a recent newspaper.

Impatiently, Kremnev spread out the small sheet. It was dated, 23.00 hours, 5 September 1984. He had leapt forward sixty years.

There was now no doubt that Kremnev had woken up in a land of the future; he plunged into reading the news-sheet.

‘Peasantry’, ‘The past era of urban culture’, ‘State collectivism of sad memory’…‘This was in capitalist times, i.e. almost in pre-history…’, ‘The Anglo-French isolated system’—all these phrases and dozens of others penetrated Kremnev's brain, filling his mind with astonishment and a great desire to know.

The telephone interrupted his thoughts; steps were heard in the neighbouring room. The door opened and a young girl entered, together with a flood of sunlight.

‘Ah, you are up…’ she said gaily. ‘I slept through your arrival yesterday.’

The telephone rang again.

‘Excuse me, this should be my brother worrying about you…hello…yes, he is up now…...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction
• Note on the sources of George Orwell’s 1984
• Maxim Gorky, On the Russian Peasantry
• Extracts from A.M.Bol’shakov, The Soviet Countyside 1917–1924
• Contents
• Ivan Kremnev (pseudonym of A.V.Chayanov), The Journey of my brother Alexei to the land of Peasant Utopia
• Contents
• The Sign of the Zodiac, Second Evening Edition, Moscow, Friday 5th September 1984
• Note on Russian Terms
• Bibliography