Tolstoy & the Russian Peasantry.

 

Leo Tolstoy

In 1910, around 80% of Russia's population were peasants. In 1900 the Russian population was said to be around 132.9 million people. There were around 200 different nationalities in the Russian empire and Russian society, was still largely feudalistic.

Russian serfdom was abolished by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. As the land was owned privately, the Russian peasant had to 'redeem' their land allotments from the landlords using government loans. They then had to make "redemption payments" to the government for 49 years until they were terminated by the government in 1905. Though some well-to-do peasants did emerge, most Russian peasants remained poor, land hungry and crushed by huge redemption payments. Most of the land was held communally by the village and the peasant remained tied to the village.

The life of a Russian peasant wasn't that great under the old Russian Tsarist regime, but it became far worse under Bolshevism. Not all Russian landowners were like Count Lev Tolstoy who tried to educate the peasant children on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana.  He fathered a child with a peasant woman from the estate and by the 1860s, he often worked in the fields with his peasants and dressed as a peasant.

I am currently reading the diaries of countess Sophia Tolstaya. His wife Sophia, resented her husband's love of the common people and thought it beneath a Russian aristocrat to associate with the peasantry. She also disliked the disciples of Tolstoy who she thought were riff-raff. They often turned up at the house and estate to meet with Tolstoy and expected free food and accommodation. Tolstoy dreamt of social equality while enjoying the privileges of a Russian aristocratic landowner. He wrote that "Serfdom is an evil, but a very pleasant one."

They say that in later life Tolstoy was always courteous to the peasants and enjoyed their company and that he never lost his temper with the servants. The peasants, in turn, seemed to have respected him. In his novel War and Peace, Pierre meets the Russian peasant Platon Karataev, in a prison-of-war camp. For Tolstoy, Platon Karataev idealised the archetypal good Russian peasant.