Back in 1922, Maxim Gorky in Berlin published the article “On the Russian Peasant”, excerpts from which were translated into Ukrainian and published the following year by “LNV”, edited by Dmytro Dontsov. Unfortunately, to this day, this instructive article remains little known and even more unfortunately, it is relevant. We offer it for your attention.
Ed.
I experienced and saw many atrocities. I could never find a justification for their existence. My whole life tormented me: Where does this human cruelty come from?
I once happened to read a book with the fatal title: “Progress, development of cruelty.” The author tries to prove, with the help of very carefully compared and explained examples, that the progress of humanity leads to the discovery of a mysterious, characteristic human pleasure: to torture one’s neighbour, his body and soul. I read the book with disgust, it did not convince me in the slightest, and its paradoxes soon disappeared from my memory.
But now, after the terrible madness of the European war, after the bloody orgy of the revolution, I am again beginning to wonder about those paradoxes. At the same time, it should be noted: that concerning Russian brutality, absolutely no progress can be seen in it, its forms have remained unchanged.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the following tortures were used: the victim’s mouth was filled with gunpowder, which was then lit. Women’s breasts were drilled and a rope was pulled through their mouths, by which the victims were then hanged.
In 1918 and 1919, the same was done on the Don; in the Urals, the Reds and Whites tortured their victims for so long, until they died.
It seems to me that the most striking feature of the Moscow national character is actual cruelty, just like English humour. This is a special cruelty, and at the same time a cold-bloodedly invented measure of the degree of endurance and resistance in patience that man can attain; a kind of test of her vitality.
The most interesting feature of Moscow brutality is its devilish finesse, its, I would say, aesthetic refinement. I do not think that these features can be explained by such words as “psychosis”, “sadism” or similar. Because in essence, they do not explain anything. A consequence of alcoholism? – But I do not think that the people of Moscow were more poisoned by alcohol than other European nations. However, it must be admitted that the influence of alcohol on the psyche of a Muscovite is particularly fatal because our nation is worse off than others.
I am not talking here about cruelty, which appears sporadically, like an explosion of a sick or perverted soul. These are exceptions that will chill a psychiatrist: here I am talking about mass psychology, about the nation’s soul, about collective cruelty.
In one Siberian village, the peasants came up with the following idea: they dug several pits, put the heads of captured Red Army soldiers in them, and then filled these pits up to half so that only the legs of those buried from the knee protruded from the ground. Then they watched with interest the leg cramps.
In the Tambov region, captured communists were nailed to trees. But the nails were driven only into the left arm and leg, and they had fun watching how these half-crucified men, in deadly convulsions, moved their unnailed arms and legs.
Other prisoners were subjected to such torture: their stomachs were ripped open, the end of the intestine was pulled out and they were nailed to a tree or a telegraph pole. Then they chased the unfortunate around the tree, watching how the intestine developed.
Here is the department of captured senior officers completely without clothes. Bits of skin, the size of a shoulder blade, were cut from their shoulders, and nails were driven into the place of the stars. Then leather belts in the shape of red Cossack stripes were put on their legs. This operation slowly entered into general life and was called “uniform absorption”. It certainly required a lot of time and precision. Similar and even worse crimes have become more and more frequent in Russia in recent years.
Which of them is the most cruel: white or red? In reality, both are equal in that respect, because both are Muscovites. When there is disagreement about the degree of cruelty, it can be said with certainty that those who have the most energy and power in their hands are the most cruel. I don’t know if there is a place on earth where women would be treated so cruelly and mercilessly as in a Moscow village. It is already quite certain that nowhere, as in Russia, is there such a mass of disgusting stories: “A woman is loved twice: when she enters the house engaged and how she is carried to the cemetery”, “There is no court for women and beasts”, “Do you want your food to taste good, beat the woman about a little.” In Moscow villages, there are hundreds of similar tales that express the wisdom accumulated over centuries, children hear them every day and youth grow up with them.
Children in the village are also mocked. When I recently became interested in the statistics of crimes in the Moscow province and reviewed the acts of punitive massacres for the years 1901-1910, I was frightened by the huge number of atrocities committed against children and crimes committed against young people. In Russia, in general, everyone almost enjoys beating someone. “People’s wisdom” sees in punishment on the body something necessary and useful for a person. The expression of this is the proverb “Two are given for a battered man.”
I often asked the participants in the civil war if they were not disgusted with killing each other. The answer was always the same: “There is nothing disgusting in that. They have weapons, and so do we, and we and they are in the same position. Who does it hurt that we kill each other? Many of our brothers still remain in the world.”
I once asked a soldier who participated in the World War, and later was a high-ranking sergeant in the Red Army the same question. He gave me a strange answer: “What is this, an internal war? A war with foreigners is something else entirely, it touches the soul. I will tell you quite frankly, comrade, what does it matter to kill a Muscovite? There are so many of them that it is not even noticed when some are missing. Look at these villages, for example, they can disappear from the face of the earth whenever they want, what did they give up on?
In the end, may the devil take our whole agriculture and all our affairs. But in Prussia, everything was different there. When we stepped there, I was so sorry. What kind of villages, what kind of cities, what kind of organization! We destroyed it all. Why and what for? It could drive you crazy. I felt almost happy when I was wounded and could no longer participate in this madness… Later I was under Yudenich in the Caucasus. There we saw Turks and other devils, all needy people but we felt sorry for them too…” This person was very humane in his own way; behaved well with his soldiers, who loved and respected him and loved his military craft.
When talking about Moscow’s brutality, one cannot ignore the Jewish pogroms. The fact that these pogroms were organized in agreement with stupid representatives of the authorities does not justify anything or anyone. These fools and scoundrels who allowed Jews to be killed and robbed did not order to torture them, rape women, kill children, drive nails into people’s heads. All these bloody horrors came from the instinct of the masses themselves.
However, one can finally ask, where is this Moscow peasant, intelligent, kind, restless seeker of truth and justice, whom our literature of the 19th century portrayed so beautifully and convincingly?
In my youth, I looked for this man with enthusiasm all over Moscow, but I did not find him. Everywhere I found only a crude realist, a cunning peasant who pretends to be a fool when it seems useful to him. By nature, he is far from stupid, this peasant, and he knows it very well. He created many sad songs, and many harsh, wild and bloody legends and invented thousands of fairy tales in which he expressed his solid life experience. He knows that “man himself is not a fool”, only “the world is like sheep”, and that “the world is as strong as a stream but as stupid as a hornless beast”. He says: “Don’t be afraid of the devil, but be afraid of the man” and “Fight your own, be afraid of others.” He has no respect for the truth: “You cannot be fed the truth,” he says. He has many such proverbs and uses them at every opportunity. He hears them from an early age, and from an early age, he feels all their harsh truth, bitter sadness and hatred for the people who live by them. Some, especially the townsfolk, obstruct the peaceful course of his life and he considers them unnecessary on earth, on that earth which he loves with mystical love and in which he believes with mystical faith. This land, to which he is attached with his life, body and soul, which is his “natural property”, this land was stolen from him by robbers. Long before Byron, a Moscow peasant already knew that “the sweat of a peasant is worth more than God’s soil.”
The populist direction of our literature, with its idealized peasant, strives for a certain political goal. But already, for example, at the end of the XIX century, there was a turning point in this literature, which dealt with the village and the peasant: it became less merciful and more sincere. Antin Chekhov in his “Men” gave us a new image of the people. In the first half of the XX century. “Village” by Ivan Bunin, a master of the Moscow style, appears. In his stories, especially in “Night Conversation”, a new point of view of ” man” can be seen; almost critically, the truth is shown here without any embellishments. Bunin was accused of being an aristocrat because he treated the peasants with indifference, and even with hostility. It is not true. Bunin is foremost only an artist.
In more recent modern literature, we find even scarier examples of the spiritual darkness in which the Moscow village is drowning. I would especially pay attention to the stories of the peasant Ivan Volny in “Youth”, to the Muscovite Semen Podyachev and the Siberian Vsevolod Ivanov. With certainty, none of these writers can be accused of some kind of aristocratic hostility towards the peasant: they themselves are peasants and are connected to the village in body and soul. Better than anyone else, they understand and know the life of ordinary people, the misfortunes and simple joys of the village, the spiritual blindness of the peasant and the cruelty of his psyche.
I will end with this little story that I heard from a member of an academic expedition in 1921 in the Urals. One man from the village where the mission was delayed asked my informant: “You are academics, so explain such an event to me. Last week, a Bashkir killed my cow. Of course, I killed a Bashkir and then stole his cow. So tell me – can I be punished for that cow?” – When he was asked if he was not afraid that he would soon be punished for killing a Bashkir, the man, with complete peace of mind, answered: “And nowadays people are worth nothing.” The word “understood” is worth noting. Crime becomes frequent and habitual.
Here is another example of the same order, which shows how the rural consciousness is adjusted according to new ideas. One folk teacher, a peasant’s son, writes to me: “The famous scientist Darwin proved through science the finality of the merciless struggle for existence. Because he does not protest against shortening the lives of weak and useless people, because even in ancient times old people were left to die of hunger in their caves, or hung from high trees – then I would like to propose exterminating, in some humane way, those who that have become unnecessary for life, because I am against all cruelty. I suggest poisoning them with some delicious poison. This method will settle the struggle for existence… It must be applied against the weak-minded, idiots, against all those ill-equipped by nature: the crippled, the blind, and also against the terminally ill. Such a law, of course, will not please our intellectual youth, but the time has come when we should not pay attention to these “ideal” reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Maintenance of waste costs the people dearly, it is necessary to reduce these expenses to zero.”
Many similar letters are received in present-day Russia, with similar questions and proposals. The impression is painful, but, commemorating their savagery, they give the impression that “thought” in the Moscow village has already been awakened and, although still young and crude, is already making attempts to go in a direction completely foreign to it: the village is beginning to think about the state and its tasks.
A Literary and Academic Bulletin, 1923, p. 167-177, volume LXXIX
