From the experience of discussions about the life of peasants in Tsarist Russia, I know that to prove their difficult lot, they often recall, in particular, 12 letters from the village of Alexander Nikolaevich Engelgardt (Engelgardt A.N. From the village: 12 letters 1872-1887. M., 1999 - see on the Internet, for example)
Let us not forget, however, that these letters are from the 1870s and 80s - and the situation of the peasants from the end of the 19th century until 1917 was rapidly improving. We should also not forget that A.N. Engelhardt was close to the populists (and, in fact, was exiled to his village Batishchevo in 1870 in connection with student unrest, organized, by the way, by the main demon of the populists - S. Nechaev, the prototype of Peter Verkhovensky in "The Possessed" by Dostoevsky It is clear that Engelhardt, when he dwelled on the life of the peasants, wrote primarily about the troubles of the Russian village of those times.
Moreover, from a historical point of view, the works of Russian writers and classics of Russian literature cannot be said to reflect the fullness of the life of peasants. Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Korolenko - they wrote exactly about what their souls ached about, about the troubles of the people, even if these troubles concerned only the poorest, the most humiliated, the most insulted. How many of these poor people were there? 10-15%? Hardly more than 20%. Of course, this is a lot – and Russia at that time (and still is) grateful to everyone who wrote about it – but if we are studying history, then let’s study the situation of all layers of the peasantry, and not just the poor.
Returning to N. Engelhardt's letters, I note that, in my experience of discussions with opponents, they usually quote these letters very selectively. For example, a common quote:
<<В нашей губернии, и в урожайные годы, у редкого крестьянина хватает своего хлеба до нови; почти каждому приходится прикупать хлеб, а кому купить не на что, те посылают детей, стариков, старух в «кусочки» побираться по миру. В нынешнем же году у нас полнейший неурожай на все... Плохо, - так плохо, что хуже быть не может. … Крестьяне далеко до зимнего Николы приели хлеб и начали покупать; первый куль хлеба крестьянину я продал в октябре, а мужик, ведь известно, покупает хлеб только тогда, когда замесили последний пуд домашней муки. В конце декабря ежедневно пар до тридцати проходило побирающихся кусочками: идут и едут, дети, бабы, старики, даже здоровые ребята и молодухи>>.
It's a difficult picture. But I don’t remember that any of the opponents quoted the following paragraph of this letter from Engelhardt:
<<«Побирающийся кусочками» и «нищий» - это два совершенно разных типа просящих милостыню. Нищий - это специалист; просить милостыню - это его ремесло. Нищий, большею частью калека, больной, неспособный к работе человек, немощный старик, дурачок. .... Нищий - божий человек. Нищий по мужикам редко ходит: он трется больше около купцов и господ, ходит по городам, большим селам, ярмаркам. .…
The one who is begging in pieces has a yard, a farm, horses, cows, sheep, his woman has clothes - he just doesn’t have bread at the moment; when next year he has bread, not only will he not go begging, but he will serve the pieces himself, and even now, if, having survived with the help of the collected pieces, he finds a job, earns money and buys bread, then he will serve the pieces himself . A peasant has a yard for three souls, three horses, two cows, seven sheep, two pigs, chickens, etc. His wife has a supply of her own canvases in her chest, his daughter-in-law has outfits, she has her own money, his son has a new sheepskin coat. ...>>
Three horses, two cows, seven sheep, two pigs, etc. - yes, this is a “middle peasant” (or even a “fist”) by the standards of the 1930s... And he takes pieces because he does not want to sell anything from his own good, and knows that this year (for his family, or a village, or a province with a bad harvest) they will help him, and next year, for someone with a bad harvest, he will help others. This is a common principle of peasant mutual assistance for the Russian village. By the way, in a fundamental scientific study, Dr. M.M. Gromyko’s “The World of the Russian Village” (we will talk about this book later) devotes an entire chapter to peasant mutual aid.
And, ending this long digression about the book by A.N. Engelhardt, of course, the entire educated society of Russia at that time was grateful to him (and, of course, rightly grateful) for these letters (and for his activities in the post-reform Russian village). I will also note that these letters of his were published in Otechestvennye zapiski and Vestnik Evropy of that time - without any censored cuttings.
Well, everything is learned by comparison. Can you imagine any truth-seeker or writer publishing his letters from the village in the 1930s in Soviet newspapers and magazines, where he would describe what was happening there? In general, during Stalin’s time, can you imagine? Perhaps in a personal letter to Stalin himself, risking his freedom (and even his life), Sholokhov, for example, dared to write about this. He should try to publish this!
***
THE LIFE OF PEASANTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE REIGN OF NICHOLAS II
Let us return to the situation of the peasants at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas II, at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century.
Next, I present, based on the research materials of the famous emigrant historian Sergei Germanovich Pushkarev (1888-1984), “Russia in the 19th century (1801 – 1914).” See http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/History/pushk/08.php
By the end of the 19th century, out of 380 million acres of land in the European part of Russia, only 15% belonged to nobles, and in Siberia and the Far East there were no noble landholdings at all. Moreover, with the predominance of small peasant land ownership in Russia, there were much fewer small-land holdings (less than 5 acres per yard) than in other countries - less than a quarter. Thus, in France, farms of less than 5 hectares (that’s 4.55 acres) accounted for about 71% of all farms, in Germany - 76%, in Belgium - 90%. - Average size of land holdings of French peasant farms at the end of the 19th century. was 3-4 times less than the Russians. The main peasant problem in Russia until about 1907 was technical backwardness, low productivity of peasant farming, and communal land ownership.
However, already from the second half of the 19th century, the community was not a hindrance for the enterprising peasant. He could rely on her and take her into account in some ways, but he could also act quite independently. Expressive evidence of the opportunities for entrepreneurial initiative is the huge role of the so-called trading peasants in the country's economy even under serfdom, as well as the origin of merchants and entrepreneurs from peasants as a mass phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century.
In general, the peasant land community, with its egalitarian tendencies and the power of the “peace” over individual members, was extremely “lucky” (in quotes) in Russia; she was supported, defended and protected by everyone - from the Slavophiles and Chernyshevsky to Pobedonostsev and Alexander the Third. Sergei Witte writes about this in his “Memoirs”:
“The defenders of the community were well-meaning, respectable “ragpickers,” admirers of old forms because they were old; police shepherds, because they considered it more convenient to deal with herds than with individual units; destroyers who support everything that is easy to shake, and finally theorists who saw in the community the practical application of the last word of economic doctrine - the theory of socialism.”
Let me also remind you that peasant communities in Russia hundreds of years earlier were planted from above (by the authorities, for fiscal purposes - collecting taxes), and were not at all the result of a voluntary association of peasants or the “collectivist character of the Russian people,” as former and current “soilists” claim " and "statists". In fact, in his deepest natural essence, Russian people were and are a great individualist, as well as a contemplator and inventor. This is both good and bad, but it is true.
Another problem at the beginning of the 20th century was that all the “advanced” (precisely in quotes) parties (RSDLP, then the Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, and then even the Cadets) offered and promised the peasants to give them the master’s land - but if the peasants had any idea about agrarian statistics and would have known that the division of the “master’s” lands could increase their land use by only 15-20 percent, they, of course, would not have strived for it, but would have taken up the possible improvement of their own economy and the improvement of the farming system (under the old “three regiments” a third of the land was constantly unused).
The previously mentioned famous historian S. Pushkarev wrote about this problem in his book “Russia in the 19th century (1801 – 1914)”. He wrote further:
<<Но они (крестьяне) возлагали на предстоящую «прирезку» совершенно фантастические надежды, а все «передовые» (в кавычках) политические партии поддерживали эту иллюзию - поддерживали именно потому, что отъем господских земель требовал революции, а кропотливая работа по улучшению урожайности и технической оснащенности (в частности, через развитие на селе кооперации) этого не требовала. Этот прямо обманный, аморальный подход к крестьянскому вопросу составлял суть крестьянской политики всех левых, революционных партий, а затем и кадетов">>.
But the fundamental morality of the country was maintained primarily by the peasantry. Along with hard work, honor and dignity were her core. And so, this foundation began to be corroded by the rust of the crafty and deceptive propaganda of the left parties of the then Russia. Of course, here we could talk in more detail about the fact that by the beginning of the reign of Nicholas II, the triad “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” was not a slogan, but the actual core of peasant Russia, but we will limit ourselves to what has been said above.
"POOR PEOPLE", "MIDDLE PEOPLE", "FIST"?
What was the stratification of peasant farms at the beginning of the 20th century? Lenin, in one of his first works, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” (1899), based on an analysis of zemstvo statistics for the European part of Russia (for arable provinces, with a grain bias), provides the following data:
Horseless farms: 27.3%
With 1st horse: 28.6%
With 2 horses: 22.1%
With 3 or more horses: 22%
(V.I. Lenin, PSS, vol. 3 http://vilenin.eu/t03/a023)
True, in these data Lenin did not include statistics on the rich Don region, and made a reservation that in dairy farms it would be necessary to take into account not the number of horses, but the number of cows. At the end of the 19th century, the areas in which the predominant importance was not grain products, but livestock products (dairy farming) included the rich Baltic and western provinces, as well as the wealthy northern and industrial ones, and only parts of some central provinces (Ryazan, Oryol, Tula, Nizhny Novgorod). Lenin in his work (in Chapter V "The Decomposition of the Peasantry in Dairy Farming Regions") gave statistics only for some of these latter, relatively poor provinces. According to his data, about 20% of peasant farms in these non-chernozem provinces did not have a single cow on their farm, about 60% of farms had 1-2 cows, and about 20% had 3 or more cows.
In general, on average, according to V. Lenin, there were 6.7 heads of livestock per peasant household in central Russia (in terms of cattle).
Does all this mean that 20-27% of peasant families in the European part of Russia had neither a horse nor a cow? Apparently, this is not at all the case: rather, 20-27% of farms in grain counties did not have a horse, but kept cows, and approximately 20% of farms in dairy counties did not have cows, but had a horse.
One way or another, but, with appropriate adjustments, it can be assumed that no more (or rather much less) 20% of peasant families could be classified as “poor”, at least 50% as “middle peasants”, and wealthy peasants (with 3 or more horses and/or cows) - at least 22%. There was no concept of “kulak” (or “middle peasant”) in the village at that time; in fact, the peasants themselves divided themselves simply into hard workers and idlers.
However, was the stratification between these groups so great in terms of living standards and food consumption (nutrition)?
Yes, in most poor (horseless) peasant families, someone (the head of the family, or one of the eldest sons) worked as a laborer on wealthy farms. But the farm laborer ate from the same pot in a prosperous household with members of the “kulak” family, and during censuses he was often recorded by the owner as a family member (see article by S. Kara-Murza “Lenin’s Fruitful Mistakes”, http://www.hrono.ru/ statii/2001/lenin_kara.html).
This is what S. Kara-Murza writes in this article:
<<Ленин придает очень большое значение имущественному расслоению крестьянства как показателю его разделения на пролетариат и буржуазию. Данные, которыми он пользуется (бюджеты дворов по губерниям), большого расслоения не показывают. "Буржуазия" - это крестьяне, которые ведут большое хозяйство и имеют большие дворы (в среднем 16 душ, из них 3,2 работника). Если же разделить имущество на душу, разрыв не так велик - даже в числе лошадей. У однолошадных - 0,2 лошади на члена семьи, у самых богатых - 0,3. В личном потреблении разрыв еще меньше. Посудите сами: у беднейших крестьян (безлошадных) расходы на личное потребление (без пищи) составляли 4,3 рубля в год на душу; у самых богатых (пять лошадей и больше) - 5,2 рубля. Разрыв заметен, но так ли уж он велик? Думаю, данные Ленина занижают разрыв, но будем уж исходить из тех данных, на которых он основывает свой вывод.
Lenin attaches particular importance to nutrition as an indicator of living standards; here is “the sharpest difference between the budgets of the owner and the worker.” Indeed, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat differ as classes not only in their property relations, but also in their culture - their way of life. And here the type of nutrition is one of the main signs. Was this difference among the peasantry such that it was necessary to italicize the words “master” and “worker” to indicate a class difference? Horseless people spend 15 rubles [per year] on food. per family member, for five-horse horses - 28 rubles.
The gap seems to be large, but further data explains the gap. Almost all horseless families, according to Lenin, allocate on average 1 farm laborer (either a husband, a wife, or children). A villager, even becoming a farm laborer, at that time did not cease to be a full-fledged peasant - and was considered such both in his family and in the family of the peasant employer.
The farmhand eats from the owner. According to data for the Oryol province, the cost of food for a farm laborer costs the owner an average of 40.5 rubles. per year (detailed diet is provided). This money must be added to the budget of a horseless family. If so, it turns out that the “proletarian” spends 25.4 rubles on food per family member, and the “bourgeoisie” spends 28 rubles. (per year) The expenses for a farm laborer should be deducted from the owner’s budget, if he recorded the farm laborer as a member of his family during the census, then the gap would decrease even more - but we will not do this, there is no accurate data. But the main thing, I repeat, is the type of food, not the size of the bowl. Yes, the rich peasant ate more lard than the poor man, and there was more meat in the common bowl on his table. But he ate lard, not oysters, drank moonshine, not champagne.
From the data given by Lenin (if we take not “yard”, but per capita expenses), there is no stratification of peasants into classes on this basis. Yes, and Tolstoy noted: “In that yard in which they first showed me bread with quinoa, in the backyard they were threshing their own thresher on four horses... and the whole family of 12 souls ate bread with quinoa... “Dear flour, They're going to shoot you, are you ready? People eat with quinoa, what kind of gentlemen are we!”
Those whom Lenin called the “bourgeoisie” (5 horses per yard) were in fact a working peasant family: on average, such a family had 3.2 of its own workers - and hired 1.2 farm laborers.>>
The peasants themselves divided themselves into “conscious” - hard-working, non-drinking, active - and idlers (“hooligans”).
MASS FAMINE OF 1891-1892
Let us first recall that until the 19th century, mass famine in lean years was common in all European countries. Back in 1772 in Saxony, 150 thousand people died from lack of bread. Also in 1817 and 1847. famine raged in many parts of Germany. Mass famine in Europe became a thing of the past from the middle of the 19th century, with the final abolition of serfdom (in most countries of Central and Western Europe - at the end of the 18th century, in Germany - from the middle of the 19th century), as well as thanks to the development of communications, which made it possible to quickly ensure food supplies to lean regions. A global food market has emerged. Bread prices ceased to directly depend on the harvest in the country: abundant local harvests almost did not lower them, and poor harvests did not increase them. The incomes of the population of Europe increased and peasants, in the event of a crop failure, began to be able to purchase the missing food on the market.
In Tsarist Russia, the last mass famine was in 1891-1892.
The dry autumn of 1891 delayed planting in the fields. The winter turned out to be snowless and frosty (the temperature in winter reached -31 degrees Celsius), which led to the death of the seeds. The spring turned out to be very windy - the wind carried away the seeds along with the top layer of soil. Summer began early, already in April, and was characterized by long, dry weather. In the Orenburg region, for example, there was no rain for more than 100 days. The forests were struck by drought; livestock deaths began. As a result of the drought-induced famine, about half a million people died by the end of 1892, mostly from cholera epidemics caused by the famine.
Russian railways could not cope with transporting the required volumes of grain to the affected areas. The main blame was placed by public opinion on the government of Alexander III, which was largely discredited by the famine. It refused even to use the word famine, replacing it with crop failure, and forbade newspapers to write about it. The government was criticized for only banning grain exports in mid-August, and traders were given a month's notice of the decision, allowing them to export all their grain stocks. Minister of Finance Vyshnegradsky, despite the famine, was against the ban on grain exports. Public opinion considered him the main culprit of the famine, since it was his policy of increasing indirect taxes that forced peasants to sell grain. The minister resigned in 1892.
On November 17, 1891, the government called on citizens to create voluntary organizations to combat hunger. The heir to the throne, Nikolai Alexandrovich, headed the Relief Committee, and the royal family donated a total of 17 million rubles (a huge amount for private donations at that time). Zemstvos received 150 million rubles from the government for the purchase of food.
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF VICTIMS IN THE MASS FAMINE OF 1891\93
On the Internet you can find a variety of estimates of the victims of the mass famine of 1891/93 (from 350 thousand to 2.5 million), but without links to sources. I quote data from well-known sources:
1. In the work of 1923, academician-demographer S.A. Novoselsky (S.A. Novoselsky. The influence of war on the natural movement of the population. Proceedings of the Commission for the Study of the Sanitary Consequences of the War, 1914-1920. M., 1923, p. 117) already Soviet times, when Tsarist Russia was certainly not favored, data is provided on the victims of the 1892 famine - 350 thousand people.
2. Statistics data located on the website of Indiana University (http://www.iupui.edu/~histwhs/h699....manitChrono.htm) - 500,000 die-(Americans helped the hungry in 1891-1892)
3. In the famous book of the American historian Robert Robbins in 1975 (Robbins, R. G. 1975. Famine in Russia. 1891-1892. New York; London: Columbia University Press.) - from 350 thousand to 600-700 thousand.
4. Dutch historian Ellman Michael, professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands - in comparison with the famine of 1947, also provides data based on the work of Novoseltsev - “Excess mortality in 1892 was about 400 thousand.”
M. Ellman Famine of 1947 in the USSR // Economic history. Review / Ed. L.I. Borodkina. Vol. 10. M., 2005
5. V.V. Kondrashin in the book “Famine of 1932\33” estimates the victims of the famine of 1891\92 at 400-600 thousand with references to: Anfimov A.M. "The economic situation and class struggle of the peasants of European Russia. 1891-1904" (1984) and the dissertation "The History of the Famine of 1891\92 in Russia" (1997).
http://www.otkpblto.ru/index.php?showtopic=12705
So, according to known sources, the number of victims of the mass famine of 1891-1893 is estimated at 350-700 thousand people, including those who died from various diseases.
The famine of 1891/92 was the last mass famine in Tsarist Russia. Of course, there were droughts and lean (hunger) years after 1891, but later the rapid development of railways and the development of agriculture allowed the government to quickly transfer grain reserves from prosperous regions to areas of drought and crop failure. The next mass famine was already in the Soviet Deputies (“Sovdepiya” is Lenin’s expression), in the early 1920s, then in the early 1930s and then in 1947, and each time the number of victims was much (many times!) greater than the number of victims the last mass famine in Tsarist Russia...
FALSE MYTHS ABOUT THE MASS FAMINE OF 1901, 1911 AND OTHER YEARS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE.
You can often find statements like:
<<В двадцатом же веке особенно выделялись массовым голодом 1901, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1911 и 1913 годы, когда от голода и сопутствующих голоду болезней погибли миллионы жителей. По данным доклада царю за 1892 год: “Только от недорода потери составили до двух миллионов православных душ”. По данным доклада за 1901 год: “В зиму 1900-1901 гг. голодало 42 миллиона человек, умерло же их них 2 миллиона 813 тыс. православных душ. Из доклада уже Столыпина в 1911 году: "Голодало 32 миллиона, потери 1 млн. 613 тыс. человек">>.
I quote further from the forum
http://www.otkpblto.ru/index.php?showtopic=12705:
<<Но вот ссылок на источники в подобных публикациях нет. Откуда вообще взялись такие цифры, и откуда вообще взялись эти "всеподданейшие доклады", тем более, с такой точной статистикой(до тысячи жертв)? ... 2 милллиона 813 тысяч, 1 млн. 613 тысяч? Ни слова о таких количественных потерях нет ни в одной монографии, которую на эту тему мне пришлось в годы обучения на истфаке читать. В тоже время отечественная блогосфера буквально пестрит этой статистикой. … Я решил своими силами попытаться верифицировать эти данные.
After a more thorough search, I found the original source - a certain I. Kozlenko, Kirov, newspaper “BOLSHEVIST Pravda” http://marxdisk.narod.ru/blagos.htm)
Neither here nor there the authors bothered to provide any links to studies or archives. Of course, journalism, and from fairly biased sites. But the problem is that many people operate with this data in all seriousness >>.
I also tried many times to find the sources of this “data” about the millions of victims of the mass famines of 1901, 1911 - and also in the end, through search engines, I came across the same source - this very article by a certain I. Kozlenko (Kirov) " Blessed Russia”? (truth of figures and slander of fiction) (From the newspaper "Bolshevik Truth"): http://marxdisk.narod.ru/blagos.htm
Thus, all these figures from the “most loyal reports” are taken from one odious source - from this article by a certain Kozlenko, from the Bolshevik lies...
The myths that the tsarist government at the beginning of the twentieth century (and until 1917) exported grain even in lean years from lean provinces are also false. In fact, the export of grain in lean years was limited, and in 1906 a special law was passed obliging the free distribution of flour in lean provinces, at the rate of 1 pood (16.4 kg) per adult and half a pood per child per month - moreover, if this norm cannot be fulfilled by the province, and grain exports are completely stopped. As a result, grain exporters, interested in stable trade relations with their foreign partners, were now the first to come to the aid of the peasants of the provinces affected by crop failure. [History of Russia, twentieth century, 1894-1939\ ed. A.B. Zubkova, M., ed. Astrel-AST, 2010 (p.223)]
***
To compare the mass famine of 1891\93 and the famines in the USSR, I will provide here documented data:
--- Mass famine 1921-1922 (devastation after the Civil War) - traditional estimate of 4 to 5 million deaths. According to modern estimates, at least 26.5 million people were starving. Similar figures (27-28 million people) were given in a report at the IX All-Russian Congress of Soviets by M.I. Kalinin.
--- Holodomor in 1933-1933. General estimates of the number of victims of the 1932-1933 famine made by various authors vary significantly, although the prevailing estimate is 2-4 million: Lorimer, 1946 - 4.8 million, B. Urlanis, 1974 - 2.7 million, S. Wheatcroft, 1981, - 3-4 million, B. Anderson and B. Silver, 1985, - 2-3 million, S. Maksudov, 2007, - 2-2.5 million, V. Tsaplin, 1989, - 3.8 million, E. Andreev et al., 1993, - 7.3 million, N. Ivnitsky, 1995, - 5 million, State Duma of the Russian Federation, 2008, - 7 million (Statement of the State Duma of the Russian Federation "In memory of the victims of famine 30s on the territory of the USSR")
--- Famine in 1946-1947- According to M. Ellman, only from famine in 1946-47. In the USSR, between 1 and 1.5 million people died. Some researchers consider these figures to be overestimated. Child mortality was especially high, at the beginning of 1947 amounting to 20% of the total number of deaths. Cases of cannibalism have been reported in a number of regions of Ukraine and the Black Earth Region.
An acute food shortage, which, however, did not lead to mass famine, existed in the USSR until the end of the 1940s.
Conclusion: the most terrible famine in Tsarist Russia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while certainly a monstrous tragedy, was still many times (!) lower in terms of the number of human victims than any of the three famines of the Soviet period.
These facts, of course, do not justify the mistakes of the tsarist government in the mass famine of 1891/92, but still, when comparing the scale and consequences of the famine years, one should also take into account the breakthrough in science and medicine that occurred in the world from 1892-1893. to 1931\32
And if the famine of 1921-1922. and 1946-1947 can be explained by the terrible devastation after the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars, respectively, without even analyzing “political” factors, such exorbitant mortality figures in 1932-1933. explaining from the standpoint of “and we inherited this from the damned backward tsarist Russia, people there died in the millions every year” or “we have such a climate in Russia, and hunger is typical for it” does not work. The fact remains that tsarist Russia is already in At the end of the 19th century, I did not know such huge human losses from crop failures as the people in the USSR suffered in the early 1920s, 1930s and 1946\47 (http://www.otkpblto.ru/index.php?showtopic=12705 )
***
ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND PEASANTS: BENEFITS, ALLOWANCES, PEASANT BANK
Let's go back to the end of the 19th century. Already at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas II, the government more than once provided peasants with various benefits (in 1894, 1896, 1899), which consisted of full or partial forgiveness of arrears on government payments. Next, I again quote data from S. Pushkarev’s book “History of Russia in the 19th Century”:
In 1895, a new charter of the Peasant Bank was issued, which allowed the bank to acquire land in its own name (for sale to peasants in the future); in 1898, annual growth was reduced to 4%. - After the reform of 1895, the Bank’s activities began to expand rapidly. In total, from the opening of the Bank in 1882 to January 1, 1907 (even before Stolypin’s reforms), through the Bank, more than 15% of the owner’s (lord’s) land, worth up to 675 million rubles, passed into peasant hands, of which the loan was 516 million issued rubles
Since 1893, when active construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began, the government began to patronize resettlement, seeking, first of all, to populate the area adjacent to the railway. In 1896, a special “resettlement department” was established within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1896, 1899 and 1904, regulations were issued on benefits and allowances for immigrants; for travel expenses they were supposed to receive a loan in the amount of 30-50 rubles, and for economic organization and seeding of fields - 100-150 rubles.
During the decade from 1893 to 1903, the government allocated up to 30 million for resettlement. rub. and by the end of the century this matter had developed quite widely (although the full development of the resettlement movement dates back to the Stolypin era). From 1885 to 1895, the total number of migrants beyond the Urals amounted to 162 thousand; for the 5-year period from 1896 to 1900 - 932 thousand. A significant part of the settlers, attracted by rumors about the land riches of Siberia, hurried to move there “by gravity”, without asking for permission from the government or “passage certificates”. The return movement of settlers ranged from 10 to 25%. More prudent peasants first sent “walkers” to Siberia for reconnaissance, and only then, upon their return, liquidated their affairs in their homeland and moved on a long journey - “towards the sun”...
The government was also aware of the need to organize small loans in the countryside and tried to promote the creation of this organization. In 1895, the “Regulations on Small Credit Institutions” were published.
***
Cooperation also developed in Russia at the end of the 19th century. The emergence of the first cooperative organizations in Russia dates back to the 60s of the 19th century, that is, to the same time when they began to spread in the advanced countries of Europe. Moreover, Russia was even ahead of many of them in this regard. Zemstvos, seeing the unconditional usefulness of cooperative associations for peasants, became the initiators of their creation. In addition, they allocated considerable funds to support cooperatives. However, cooperation gained real strength and spread in Russia under Stolypin, when the peasants themselves understood its advantages. We'll talk more about this later.
***
At the beginning of the article is a color photograph of S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky (early 20th century)
Every person should be interested in the past of his people. Without knowing history, we will never be able to build a good future. So let's talk about how the ancient peasants lived.
Housing
The villages in which they lived reached approximately 15 households. It was very rare to find a settlement with 30–50 peasant households. Each cozy family yard contained not only a dwelling, but also a barn, barn, poultry house and various outbuildings for the household. Many residents also boasted vegetable gardens, vineyards and orchards. Where the peasants lived can be understood from the remaining villages, where courtyards and signs of the life of the inhabitants have been preserved. Most often, the house was built of wood, stone, covered with reeds or hay. They slept and ate in one cozy room. In the house there was a wooden table, several benches, and a chest for storing clothes. They slept on wide beds, on which lay a mattress with straw or hay.
Food
The peasants' diet included porridge from various grain crops, vegetables, cheese products and fish. During the Middle Ages, baked bread was not made because it was very difficult to grind grain into flour. Meat dishes were typical only for the festive table. Instead of sugar, peasants used honey from wild bees. For a long time, peasants hunted, but then fishing took its place. Therefore, fish was much more common on the tables of peasants than meat, which the feudal lords pampered themselves with.
Cloth
The clothing worn by peasants in the Middle Ages was very different from that of the ancient centuries. The usual clothing of peasants was a linen shirt and knee-length or ankle-length pants. Over the shirt they put on another one, with longer sleeves, called blio. For outerwear, a raincoat with a fastener at shoulder level was used. The shoes were very soft, made of leather, and there were no hard soles at all. But the peasants themselves often walked barefoot or in uncomfortable shoes with wooden soles.
Legal life of peasants
Peasants living in communities were in different ways dependent on the feudal system. They had several legal categories with which they were endowed:
- The bulk of the peasants lived according to the rules of “Wallachian” law, which took as its basis the life of the villagers when they lived in a rural free community. Ownership of land was common on a single right.
- The remaining mass of peasants were subject to serfdom, which was thought out by the feudal lords.
If we talk about the Wallachian community, then there were all the features of serfdom in Moldova. Each community member had the right to work on the land only a few days a year. When the feudal lords took possession of the serfs, they introduced such a load on the days of work that it was realistic to complete it only over a long period of time. Of course, the peasants had to fulfill duties that went towards the prosperity of the church and the state itself. The serf peasants who lived in the 14th – 15th centuries split into groups:
- State peasants who depended on the ruler;
- Privately owned peasants who depended on a specific feudal lord.
The first group of peasants had much more rights. The second group was considered free, with their personal right to move to another feudal lord, but such peasants paid tithes, served corvée and were sued by the feudal lord. This situation was close to the complete enslavement of all peasants.
In the following centuries, various groups of peasants appeared who were dependent on the feudal order and its cruelty. The way the serfs lived was simply horrifying, because they had no rights or freedoms.
Enslavement of the peasants
During the period of 1766, Gregory Guike issued a law on the complete enslavement of all peasants. No one had the right to pass from the boyars to others; the fugitives were quickly returned to their places by the police. All serfdom was reinforced by taxes and duties. Taxes were imposed on any activity of peasants.
But even all this oppression and fear did not suppress the spirit of freedom in the peasants who rebelled against their slavery. After all, it’s hard to call serfdom anything else. The way peasants lived during the feudal era was not immediately forgotten. Unbridled feudal oppression remained in the memory and did not allow the peasants to restore their rights for a long time. The struggle for the right to free life was long. The struggle of the strong spirit of the peasants has been immortalized in history, and is still striking in its facts.
Right. During the period of its formation (XI-XV centuries), the dependence of the peasants on the landowners was expressed in the payment of tribute, performing work at the request of the landowner, but left enough opportunities for a completely acceptable life for his family. Starting from the 16th century, the situation of serfs became increasingly difficult.
By the 18th century, they were no longer much different from slaves. Working for the landowner took six days a week; only at night and on the one remaining day could he cultivate his plot of land, which was how he fed his family. Therefore, the serfs expected a very meager set of products, and there were times of famine.
On major holidays, festivities were held. The entertainment and recreation of the serfs was limited to this. In most cases, the children of peasants could not receive an education, and in the future the fate of their parents awaited them. Gifted children were taken to study, they later became serfs, became musicians, artists, but the attitude towards serfs was the same, no matter what work they did for the owner. They were obliged to fulfill any request of the owner. Their property, and even their children, were at the complete disposal of the landowners.
All the freedoms that at first remained with the serfs were lost. Moreover, the initiative to abolish them came from the state. At the end of the 16th century, serfs were deprived of the opportunity to move to, which was provided once a year on St. George’s Day. In the 18th century, landowners were allowed to exile peasants to hard labor without trial for misdeeds, and they established a ban on peasants filing complaints against their master.
From this time on, the position of serfs approached that of cattle. They were punished for any offense. The landowner could sell, separate from his family, beat, and even kill his serf. In some of the manor's estates, things were happening that are difficult for modern man to comprehend. So, in the estate of Daria Saltykova, the mistress tortured and killed hundreds of serfs in the most sophisticated ways. This was one of the few cases when, under the threat of an uprising, the authorities were forced to bring the landowner to justice. But such show trials did not change the general course of the situation. The life of a serf peasant remained a powerless existence, filled with exhausting labor and constant fear for his life and the life of his family.
The very name “peasant” is closely related to religion; it comes from “Christian” - a believer. People in villages have always lived according to special traditions, observing religious and moral norms. Life and the peculiarities of the everyday way of life were created over hundreds of years and passed on from parents to children.
Instructions
Most peasants in Rus' lived in half-dugouts or log huts. It was a small room where the whole family lived, where livestock were sheltered in winter. There were only 2-3 windows in the house, and those were small to retain heat. The main thing in the house was the “corner” where the iconostasis was located. The goddess could consist of one or more; there was also a lamp with oil and sacred scriptures with prayers nearby. In the opposite corner there was a stove. It was a source of heat and a place where food was prepared. They heated it black, all the smoke remained in the room, but it was warm.
It was not customary to divide the house into rooms; everyone was housed in one room. Families were often large, with many children sleeping on the floor. There was always a large table in the house for the whole family, where everyone in the household gathered to eat.
The peasants spent most of their time at work. In the summer, they planted vegetables, fruits, and grains and took care of them so that there would be a large harvest. They also raised livestock, and almost every family had chickens. In winter, animals were allowed into the house during severe frosts to save their lives. In cold weather, men repaired items
Moreover, this is all constant, “background” hunger, all sorts of tsar-famines, pestilences, shortages - this is additional.
Due to extremely backward agricultural technologies, population growth “ate up” the growth of labor productivity in agriculture, the country confidently fell into the loop of a “black dead end”, from which it could not get out under the exhausted system of public administration of the “Romanov tsarism” type.
Minimum physiological minimum for feeding Russia: no less than 19.2 pounds per capita (15.3 pounds for people, 3.9 pounds is the minimum feed for livestock and poultry). The same number was the standard for calculations by the USSR State Planning Committee in the early 1920s. That is, under the Soviet Government it was planned that the average peasant should have remained at least this amount of bread. The tsarist authorities were little concerned about such issues.
Despite the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century average consumption in the Russian Empire finally amounted to a critical 19.2 pounds per person, but at the same time, in a number of regions, an increase in grain consumption occurred against the backdrop of a fall in the consumption of other products.
Even this achievement (a minimum of physical survival) was ambiguous - according to estimates, from 1888 to 1913, the average per capita consumption in the country decreased by at least 200 kcal.
This negative dynamic is confirmed by the observations of not just “disinterested researchers” - ardent supporters of tsarism.
So one of the initiators of the creation of the monarchical organization “All-Russian National Union” Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov wrote in 1909:
“Every year the Russian army becomes more and more sick and physically incapable... Of three guys it is difficult to choose one who is quite fit for service... Poor food in the village, a wandering life to earn money, early marriages that require intense labor at almost adolescence , - these are the reasons for physical exhaustion... It’s scary to say what hardships a recruit sometimes endures before serving. About 40 percent recruits ate meat almost for the first time upon entering military service. In service, a soldier eats, in addition to good bread, excellent meat soup and porridge, i.e. something that many people in the village no longer have a clue about...". Exactly the same data was given by the Commander-in-Chief General V. Gurko - on conscription from 1871 to 1901, saying that 40% of peasant boys try meat in the army for the first time in their lives.
That is, even ardent, fanatical supporters of the tsarist regime admit that the nutrition of the average peasant was very poor, which led to mass illness and exhaustion.
“The Western agricultural population mainly consumed high-calorie animal products; the Russian peasant satisfied his food needs with lower-calorie bread and potatoes. Meat consumption is unusually low. In addition to the low energy value of such nutrition... consumption of a large mass of plant food, compensating for the lack of animal food, entails severe gastric diseases.”
Hunger led to severe mass diseases and severe epidemics. Even according to the pre-revolutionary studies of the official body (a department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire), the situation looks simply terrifying and shameful. The study shows the mortality rate per 100 thousand people. for such diseases: in European countries and individual self-governing territories (for example, Hungary) within countries.
Mortality rates for all six major infectious diseases (smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus) are firmly ahead, with a colossal margin factor of Russia was in the lead.
1. Russia – 527.7 people.
2. Hungary – 200.6 people.
3. Austria – 152.4 people.
The lowest total mortality rate for major diseases is Norway – 50.6 people. More than 10 times less than in Russia!
Mortality by disease.
Scarlet fever: 1st place – Russia – 134.8 people, 2nd place – Hungary – 52.4 people
3rd place – Romania – 52.3 people.
Even in Romania and disadvantaged Hungary, the mortality rate is more than two times less than in Russia. For comparison, the lowest mortality rate from scarlet fever was in Ireland - 2.8 people.
Measles: 1. Russia – 106.2 people. 2nd Spain – 45 people. 3rd Hungary – 43.5 people.
The lowest mortality rate from measles is Norway - 6 people, in impoverished Romania - 13 people. Again the gap with the nearest neighbor on the list is more than double.
Typhus: 1. Russia – 91.0 people. 2. Italy – 28.4 people. 3. Hungary – 28.0 people. The smallest in Europe is Norway – 4 people. Typhus, by the way, in Russia-which-we-lost was attributed to losses from hunger. This is what doctors were recommended to do - to write off starvation typhus (intestinal damage due to fasting and related diseases) as infectious. This was written quite openly in the newspapers. In general, the gap with the closest neighbor in misfortune is almost 4 times. Someone, it seems, said that the Bolsheviks falsified statistics? Oh well. But here, either fake it or not, it’s the level of a poor African country.
Smallpox: 1. Russia – 50.8 people. 2. Spain – 17.4 people. 3. Italy – 1.4 people. The difference with the very poor and backward agrarian Spain is almost 3 times. It’s even better not to remember the leaders in eliminating this disease. Poor Ireland, oppressed by the British, from where thousands of people fled overseas - 0.03 people. About Sweden it’s even indecent to say 0.01 people per 100 thousand, that is, one out of 10 million. The difference is more than 5000 times.
The only thing where the gap is not so terrible is just a little more than one and a half times - diphtheria: 1. Russia - 64.0 people. 2. Hungary – 39.8 people. 3rd place in mortality – Austria – 31.4 people. The world leader in wealth and industrialization, only recently freed from the Turkish yoke, Romania - 5.8 people.
“Children eat worse than calves from an owner who has good livestock. The mortality rate of children is much greater than the mortality rate of calves, and if an owner with good cattle had a calf mortality rate as high as a peasant’s child mortality rate, then it would be impossible to manage... If mothers ate better, if our the wheat that the German eats remained at home, then the children would grow up better and there would not be such mortality, all this typhus, scarlet fever, and diphtheria would not be rampant. By selling our wheat to the Germans, we are selling our blood, that is, peasant children.”.
It is easy to calculate that in the Russian Empire, only because of increased morbidity from hunger, disgusting medicine and hygiene, just like that, by the way, about a quarter of a million people died every year for a sniff of tobacco. This is the result of the incompetent and irresponsible government administration of Russia. And this is only if it were possible to improve the situation to the level of the most disadvantaged country in “classical” Europe in this regard - Hungary. Reducing the gap to the level of an average European country would save approximately half a million lives a year. Over the entire 33 years of Stalin’s reign in the USSR, torn apart by the consequences of the Civil, brutal class struggle in society, several wars and their consequences, a maximum of 800 thousand people were sentenced to death (significantly fewer were executed, but so be it). So this number is easily covered by only 3-4 years of increased mortality in “Russia-which-we-lost.”
Even the most ardent supporters of the monarchy did not speak, they simply shouted about the degeneration of the Russian people.
“A population living from hand to mouth, and often simply starving, cannot produce strong children, especially if we add to this the unfavorable conditions in which, in addition to lack of nutrition, a woman finds herself during pregnancy and after it.”.
“Let’s stop, gentlemen, deceiving ourselves and playing tricks with reality! Do such purely zoological circumstances as lack of food, clothing, fuel and basic culture mean nothing to the Russian common people? But they are reflected extremely clearly in the deterioration of the human type in Great Russia, Belarus and Little Russia. It is precisely the zoological unit - the Russian man - that in many places is engulfed in fragmentation and degeneration, which has forced, in our memory, to lower the standard twice when accepting recruits for service. A little over a hundred years ago, the tallest army in Europe (Suvorov’s “miracle heroes”) - the current Russian army is already the shortest, and a terrifying percentage of recruits have to be rejected for service. Does this “zoological” fact mean nothing? Doesn’t our shameful infant mortality rate, unheard of anywhere in the world, mean anything, in which the vast majority of the living masses do not live to reach a third of the human age?”
Even if we question the results of these calculations, it is obvious that the dynamics of changes in nutrition and labor productivity in the agriculture of tsarist Russia (and this made up the vast majority of the country’s population) were completely insufficient for the rapid development of the country and the implementation of modern industrialization - with the massive departure of workers to factories There would have been nothing to feed them under the conditions of Tsarist Russia.
Maybe this was the general picture for that time and it was like that everywhere? What was the food situation like among the geopolitical opponents of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century? Something like this, data from Nefedov:
The French, for example, consumed 1.6 times more grain than Russian peasants. And this is in a climate where grapes and palm trees grow. If in numerical terms the Frenchman ate 33.6 pounds of grain per year, producing 30.4 pounds and importing another 3.2 pounds per person. The German consumed 27.8 pounds, producing 24.2, only in the dysfunctional Austria-Hungary, which was living out its last years, grain consumption was 23.8 pounds per capita.
The Russian peasant consumed 2 times less meat than in Denmark and 7-8 times less than in France. Russian peasants drank 2.5 times less milk than Danes and 1.3 times less than Frenchmen.
A Russian peasant ate as much as 2.7 (!) g of eggs per day, while a Danish peasant ate 30 g, and a French peasant 70.2 g per day.
By the way, dozens of chickens appeared among Russian peasants only after the October Revolution and Collectivization. Before this, feeding chickens with grain that your children do not have enough was too extravagant. Therefore, all researchers and contemporaries say the same thing - Russian peasants were forced to fill their bellies with all sorts of rubbish - bran, quinoa, acorns, bark, even sawdust, so that the pangs of hunger would not be so painful. In essence, it was not an agricultural society, but a farming and gathering society. Much like in the less developed societies of the Bronze Age. The difference with developed European countries was simply devastating.
“We send wheat, good clean rye abroad, to the Germans, who will not eat any rubbish. We burn the best, clean rye for wine, but the worst rye, with fluff, fire, calico and all sorts of waste obtained from cleaning rye for distilleries - this is what a man eats. But not only does the man eat the worst bread, he is also malnourished. ...from bad food, people lose weight, get sick, the guys grow tighter, just like what happens with poorly kept cattle...”
What does this academic dry expression mean in reality: “ the consumption of half the population is below average and below the norm" And " half the population lived in conditions of constant malnutrition", here it is: Hunger. Dystrophy. Every fourth child did not even live to see one year old. Children fading before our eyes.
It was especially difficult for children. In case of famine, the most rational thing for the population is to leave the necessary food for workers, reducing it for dependents, which obviously includes children who are unable to work.
As the researchers frankly write: “Children of all ages who are in a systematic caloric deficit under all conditions.”
"At the endXIXcentury in Russia, only 550 out of 1000 children born lived to be 5 years old, while in most Western European countries - more than 700. Before the Revolution, the situation improved somewhat - “only” 400 children out of 1000 died.”
With an average birth rate of 7.3 children per woman (family), there was almost no family in which several children did not die. Which could not but be reflected in the national psychology.
Constant hunger had a very strong impact on the social psychology of the peasantry. Including the real attitude towards children. L.N. During the famine of 1912 in the Volga region, Liperovsky was involved in organizing food and medical assistance to the population, testifies: “ In the village of Ivanovka there is one very nice, large and friendly peasant family; all the children of this family are extremely beautiful; One day I went into their mud hut; a child was screaming in the cradle and the mother was rocking the cradle with such force that it was thrown up to the ceiling; I told the mother how such rocking could be harmful to the child. “May the Lord take at least one... And yet this is one of the good and kind women in the village» .
"C 5 to 10 years, the Russian mortality rate is approximately 2 times higher than the European one, and up to 5 years – higher by an order of magnitude...The mortality rate of children over one year of age is also several times higher than in Europe”.
Caption under the photo: Aksyutka, to satisfy her hunger, chews white fireproof clay, which has a sweetish taste. (Patrovka village, Buzuluk district)
For 1880-1916. Excess child mortality compared to was more than a million children per year. That is, from 1890 to 1914, only because of incompetent public administration in Russia, approximately 25 million children died for just a pinch of tobacco. This is the population of Poland in those years if it had died out completely. If you add to this the adult population who did not live up to the average level, the overall numbers are simply terrifying.
This is the result of tsarism's control of the "Russia-that-we-lost."
By the end of 1913, the main indicators of social well-being, quality of nutrition and medicine - life expectancy and infant mortality in Russia were at African levels. Average life expectancy in 1913 - 32.9 years Melyantsev V.A. East and West in the second millennium: economics , history and modernity. - M., 1996. While in England - 52 years, France - 50 years, Germany - 49 years, Central European - 49 years.
According to this most important indicator of the quality of life in the state, Russia was at the level of Western countries somewhere in the early to mid-18th century, lagging behind them by about two centuries.
Even the rapid economic growth between 1880 and 1913 has not reduced this gap. Progress in increasing life expectancy was very slow - in Russia in 1883 - 27.5 years, in 1900 - 30 years. This shows the effectiveness of the social system as a whole - agriculture, economics, medicine, culture, science, political structure. But this slow growth, associated with an increase in population literacy and the spread of basic sanitary knowledge, led to population growth and, as a consequence, a decrease in land plots and an increase in the number of “mouths.” An extremely dangerous unstable situation arose from which there was no way out without a radical restructuring of social relations.
However, even such a short life expectancy applies only to the best years; during the years of mass epidemics and famines, life expectancy was even shorter in 1906, 1909-1911, as even biased researchers say, life expectancy “for women it did not fall below 30, and for men it did not fall below 28 years.” What can I say, what a reason for pride - the average life expectancy was 29 years in 1909-1911.
Only the Soviet Government radically improved the situation. So just 5 years after the Civil War, the average life expectancy in the RSFSR was 44 years. . While during the 1917 war it was 32 years, and during the Civil War it was approximately 20 years.
Soviet Power, even without taking into account the Civil War, made progress compared to the best year of Tsarist Russia, adding more than 11 years of life per person in 5 years, while Tsarist Russia during the same time during the years of greatest progress - only 2.5 years in 13 years. By the most unfair calculation.
It is interesting to see how Russia, while starving itself, “fed all of Europe,” as some peculiar citizens are trying to convince us. The picture of “feeding Europe” looks like this:
With an exceptional combination of weather conditions and the highest harvest for Tsarist Russia in 1913, the Russian Empire exported 530 million poods of all grain, which amounted to 6.3% of the consumption of European countries (8.34 billion poods). That is There can be no question that Russia fed not just Europe, but even half of Europe.
Importing grain in general is very typical for developed industrial European countries - they have been doing this since the end of the 19th century and are not at all embarrassed. But for some reason there is no talk about the inefficiency of agriculture in the West. Why is this happening? It’s very simple - the added value of industrial products is significantly higher than the added value of agricultural products. With a monopoly on any industrial product, the position of the manufacturer becomes generally exclusive - if someone needs, for example, machine guns, boats, airplanes or a telegraph, and no one has them except you - then you can simply increase the insane rate of profit , because if anyone doesn’t have such things that are extremely necessary in the modern world, then they don’t exist, there’s no question of doing it quickly yourself. But wheat can be produced even in England, even in China, even in Egypt, and its nutritional properties will not change much. If Western capital doesn't buy wheat in Egypt, no problem - it will buy it in Argentina.
Therefore, when choosing what is more profitable to produce and export - modern industrial products or grain, it is much more profitable to produce and export industrial products, if, of course, you know how to produce them. If you don’t know how and need foreign currency, then all that remains is to export grain and raw materials. This is what Tsarist Russia did and what post-Soviet ErEf is doing, having destroyed its modern industry. Quite simply, skilled labor gives a much higher rate of profit in modern industry. And if you need grain to feed poultry or livestock, you can buy it in addition, taking out, for example, expensive cars. Many people know how to produce grain, but not all of them can produce modern technology, and the competition is incomparably less.
Therefore, Russia was forced to export grain to the industrial West in order to receive foreign currency. However, over time, Russia clearly lost its position as a grain exporter.
Since the early 90s of the 19th century, the United States of America, rapidly developing and using new agricultural technologies, has confidently displaced Russia as the main exporter of wheat in the world. Very quickly the gap became such that Russia, in principle, could not make up for what it had lost - the Americans firmly held 41.5% of the market, Russia’s share dropped to 30.5%.
All this despite the fact that the US population in those years was less than 60% of the Russian population - 99 versus 171 million in Russia (excluding Finland).
Even the total population of the USA, Canada and Argentina was only 114 million - 2/3 of the population of the Russian Empire. Contrary to the recent widespread misconception, in 1913 Russia did not surpass these three countries in total in wheat production (which would not be surprising, having one and a half times the population employed mainly in agriculture), but was inferior to them, and in total harvest cereals were inferior even to the United States. And this despite the fact that while almost 80% of the country’s population was employed in the agricultural production of the Russian Empire, of which at least 60-70 million people were employed in productive labor, and in the USA - only about 9 million. The USA and Canada were at the head of the scientific and technological revolution in agriculture, widely using chemical fertilizers, modern machines and new, competent crop rotation and highly productive varieties of grain and confidently squeezed Russia out of the market.
In terms of grain harvest per capita, the United States was two times ahead of Tsarist Russia, Argentina - three times, Canada - four times. In reality, the situation was very sad and Russia’s position was getting worse – it was falling further and further behind the world level.
By the way, the United States also began to reduce grain exports, but for a different reason - before the First World War, they were rapidly developing more profitable industrial production and with a small population (less than 100 million), workers began to move into industry.
Argentina also began to actively develop modern agricultural technologies, quickly squeezing Russia out of the grain market. Russia, “which fed all of Europe,” exported grain and bread in general almost as much as Argentina, although the population of Argentina was 21.4 times less than the population of the Russian Empire!
The USA exported large quantities of high-quality wheat flour, and Russia, as usual, exported grain. Alas, the situation was the same as with the export of raw materials.
Soon Germany ousted Russia from the seemingly unshakable first place as an exporter of Russia's traditionally main grain crop - rye. But in general, in terms of the total amount of exported “classic five grains,” Russia continued to hold first place in the world (22.1%). Although there was no longer talk of any unconditional dominance and it was clear that Russia’s years as the world’s largest grain exporter were already numbered and would soon be gone forever. So Argentina's market share was already 21.3%.
Tsarist Russia fell further and further behind its competitors in agriculture.
And now about how Russia fought for its market share. High quality grain? Reliability and stability of supplies? Not at all - at a very low price.
The emigrant agricultural economist P. I. Lyashchenko wrote in 1927 in his work devoted to grain exports in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: “The best and most expensive buyers did not take Russian bread. To the American pure and high-grade grain of uniformly high standards, the American strict organization of trade, consistency in supply and prices, Russian exporters contrasted grain that is contaminated (often with direct abuse), mismatched, does not correspond to trade standards, thrown onto the foreign market without any system and restraint at the least moments. favorable conditions, often in the form of goods unsold and only on the way looking for a buyer.”
Therefore, Russian merchants had to play on the proximity of the market, price differences, etc. In Germany, for example, Russian grain was sold cheaper than world prices: wheat by 7-8 kopecks, rye by 6-7 kopecks, oats by 3-4 kopecks. per pood. - right there
This is what they are, “wonderful Russian merchants” - “wonderful entrepreneurs”, there is nothing to say. It turns out that they were unable to organize grain cleaning, stability of supplies, and could not determine market conditions. But in the sense of squeezing grain from peasant children, they were experts.
And where, I wonder, did the income from the sale of Russian bread go?
For a typical year 1907, income from the sale of bread abroad amounted to 431 million rubles. Of this, 180 million was spent on luxury goods for the aristocracy and landowners. Russian nobles left another 140 million, crunching on French rolls, abroad - they spent it at the resorts of Baden-Baden, went on a spree in France, lost in casinos, and bought real estate in “civilized Europe.” To modernize Russia, efficient owners spent as much as one-sixth of the income (58 million rubles) from the sale of grain extorted from starving peasants.
Translated into Russian, this means that “effective managers” took the grain from the starving peasant, took it abroad, and drank the gold rubles received for human lives in Parisian taverns and squandered it in casinos. It was to ensure the profits of such bloodsuckers that Russian children died of hunger.
The question of whether the tsarist regime could carry out the rapid industrialization necessary for Russia with such a management system does not even make sense to raise here - there can be no question of this. This is, in fact, a verdict on the entire socio-economic policy of tsarism, and not just the agricultural one.
How was it possible to pump out food from a malnourished country? The main suppliers of marketable grain were large landowner and kulak farms, supported by the cheap hired labor of land-poor peasants who were forced to hire out as workers for a pittance.
Exports led to the displacement of traditional Russian grain crops by crops that were in demand abroad. This is a classic sign of a third world country. In the same way, in all the “banana republics” all the best lands are divided between Western corporations and local comprador latifundists, who produce cheap bananas and other tropical products for next to nothing through the cruel exploitation of the poor population, which are then exported to the West. And local residents simply do not have enough good land for production.
The desperate situation with famine in the Russian Empire was quite obvious. These are the peculiar gentlemen now, explaining to everyone how good it was to live in Tsarist Russia.
Ivan Solonevich, an ardent monarchist and anti-Soviet, described the situation in the Russian Empire before the Revolution as follows:
“The fact of Russia’s extreme economic backwardness in comparison with the rest of the cultural world is beyond any doubt. According to the figures of 1912, the national income per capita was: in the USA (USA - P.K.) 720 rubles (in pre-war gold terms), in England - 500, in Germany - 300, in Italy - 230 and in Russia - 110. So, the average Russian, even before World War I, was almost seven times poorer than the average American and more than twice poorer than the average Italian. Even bread is our main wealth - was meager. If England consumed 24 pounds per capita, Germany - 27 pounds, and the USA - as much as 62 pounds, then Russian consumption of bread was only 21.6 pounds, including all this for livestock feed.( Solonevich uses somewhat inflated data - P.K. ) It is necessary to take into account that bread occupied a place in the Russian diet that it did not occupy anywhere else in other countries. In rich countries of the world, such as the USA, England, Germany and France, bread was replaced by meat and dairy products and fish - fresh and canned..."
S. Yu. Witte emphasized at a ministerial meeting in 1899: “ If we compare consumption in our country and in Europe, then its average per capita in Russia will be a fourth or fifth of what in other countries is considered necessary for normal existence»
These are the words of not just anyone, the Minister of Agriculture 1915–1916. A. N. Naumov, a very reactionary monarchist, and not at all a Bolshevik and revolutionary: “ Russia actually does not get out of the state of famine in one province or another, both before the war and during the war" And then he says: “Speculation in grain, predation, and bribery are flourishing; commission agents supplying grain make a fortune without leaving the phone. And against the background of complete poverty of some - the insane luxury of others. Two steps away from the convulsions of starvation - an orgy of satiety. Villages around the estates of those in power are dying out. Meanwhile, they are busy building new villas and palaces.»
In addition to the “hungry” comprador exports, there were two more serious reasons for the constant hunger in the Russian Empire - one of the lowest yields in the world for most crops, caused by the specific climate, extremely backward agricultural technologies, leading to the fact that, despite a formally large area of land, land, The Russian sowing season available for processing with antediluvian technologies in a very short period of time was extremely insufficient and the situation only worsened with population growth. As a result, the widespread problem in the Russian Empire was land shortage - the very small size of the peasant plot.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the situation in the villages of the Russian Empire began to become critical.
So, just for example, in the Tver lips. 58% of peasants had an allotment, as bourgeois economists elegantly call it, “below the subsistence level.” Do supporters of Russia-that-we-lost understand what this really means?
« Look into any village, what kind of hungry and cold poverty reigns there. The peasants live almost together with their livestock, in the same living space. What are their allotments? They live on 1 dessiatine, 1/2 dessiatine, 1/3 dessiatine, and from such a small plot they have to raise 5, 6 and even 7 family souls...» Duma meeting 1906 Volyn peasant - Danilyuk
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the social situation in rural areas changed dramatically. If before this, even during the severe famine of 1891-92, there was practically no protest - dark, downtrodden, massively illiterate, duped by churchmen, peasants obediently chose their scrip and accepted death by starvation, and the number of peasant protests was simply insignificant - 57 individual protests in the 90s. e years of the 19th century, then by 1902 mass peasant uprisings began. Their characteristic feature was that as soon as the peasants of one village protested, several nearby villages immediately burst into flames. This shows a very high level of social tension in the Russian village.
The situation continued to deteriorate, the agrarian population grew, and the brutal Stolypin reforms led to the ruin of a large mass of peasants who had nothing to lose, complete hopelessness and hopelessness of their existence, not least of all this was due to the gradual spread of literacy and the activities of revolutionary educators, as well as a noticeable weakening of the influence of churchmen in connection with the gradual development of enlightenment.
The peasants desperately tried to reach out to the government, trying to talk about their cruel and hopeless lives. Peasants, they were no longer speechless victims. Mass protests began, seizures of landowners' lands and equipment, etc. Moreover, the landowners were not touched; as a rule, they did not enter their houses.
Court materials, peasant orders and appeals show the extreme degree of despair of the people in “God-saved Russia.” From materials from one of the first ships:
“...When the victim Fesenko turned to the crowd who had come to rob him, asking why they wanted to ruin him, the accused Zaitsev said, “You alone have 100 tithes, and we have 1 tithe* per family. You should try to live on one tithe of land..."
accused... Kiyan: “Let me tell you about our peasant, unhappy life. I have a father and 6 young (without mother) children and I have to live with an estate of 3/4 dessiatines and 1/4 dessiatines of field land. For grazing cows we we pay... 12 rubles, and for a tithe of bread we have to work 3 tithes for harvesting. It’s impossible for us to live like this,” Kiyan continued. “We are in a loop. What should we do? We, men, have applied everywhere... we are nowhere to be found.” they accept, there is no help for us anywhere";
The situation began to develop progressively, and by 1905 mass protests had already captured half of the country’s provinces. In total, 3,228 peasant uprisings were registered in 1905. The country openly talked about a peasant war against the landowners.
“In a number of places in the fall of 1905, the peasant community appropriated all power to itself and even declared complete disobedience to the state. The most striking example is the Markov Republic in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow province, which existed from October 31, 1905 to July 16, 1906.”
For the tsarist government, all this turned out to be a big surprise - the peasants endured it, obediently starving for decades, and they endured it here on you. It is worth emphasizing that the peasants’ protests were overwhelmingly peaceful; in principle, they did not kill or injure anyone. At most, they could beat the clerks and the landowner. But after massive punitive operations, the estates began to be burned, but still they tried with all their might not to commit murder. The frightened and embittered tsarist government began brutal punitive operations against its people.
« Blood was shed then exclusively on one side - the blood of peasants was shed during punitive actions by the police and troops, during the execution of death sentences to the “ringleaders” of the protests...A merciless crackdown on peasant “arbitrariness” became the first and main principle of state policy in the revolutionary countryside. Here is a typical order from the Minister of Internal Affairs P. Durny to the Kyiv Governor-General. “...immediately exterminate the rebels by force of arms, and in case of resistance, burn their homes... Arrests now do not achieve their goal: it is impossible to judge hundreds and thousands of people.” These instructions were fully consistent with the order of the Tambov vice-governor to the police command: “arrest less, shoot more...” The governors-general in the Ekaterinoslav and Kursk provinces acted even more decisively, resorting to artillery shelling of the rebellious population. The first of them sent a warning to the volosts: “Those villages and hamlets whose residents allow themselves to commit any violence against private economies and lands will be shelled by artillery fire, which will cause destruction of houses and fires.” A warning was also sent to the Kursk province that in such cases “all the dwellings of such a society and all its property will ... be destroyed.”
A certain order of implementing violence from above while suppressing violence from below has developed. In the Tambov province, for example, upon arrival in the village, punitive forces gathered the adult male population for a gathering and offered to hand over the instigators, leaders and participants in the riots, and return the property of the landowners. Failure to comply with these demands often resulted in a volley being fired into the crowd. The dead and wounded served as proof of the seriousness of the demands put forward. After this, depending on the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the requirements, the yards (residential and outbuildings) of the extradited “culprits”, or the village as a whole, were burned. However, Tambov landowners were not satisfied with the improvised reprisal against the rebels and demanded the introduction of martial law throughout the province and the use of military courts.
The widespread use of corporal punishment by the population of the rebellious villages and hamlets noted in August 1904 was noted everywhere. In the actions of the punishers, the morals and norms of serfdom were revived.
Sometimes they say: look how little the tsarist counter-revolution killed in 1905 - 1907. and how much - the revolution after 1917. However, the blood shed by the state machine of violence in 1905-1907. must be compared, first of all, with the bloodlessness of the peasant uprisings of that time. Absolute condemnation of the executions then carried out on peasants, which was voiced with such force in L. Tolstoy’s article.”
This is how one of the most qualified specialists in the history of the Russian peasantry, V.P., describes the situation in those years. Danilov, he was an honest scientist, personally hostile to the Bolsheviks, a radical anti-Stalinist.
The new Minister of Internal Affairs in the Goremykin government, and subsequently the Pre-Council (Head of the Government) - liberal Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin thus explained the position of the tsarist government: “The government, for the purpose of self-defense, has the right to “suspend all norms of law.” When a “state of necessary defense” sets in, any means are justified, even the subordination of the state to “one will, the arbitrariness of one person.”
The tsarist government, without any hesitation, “suspended all norms of law.” Based on the verdicts of military courts alone, 1,102 rebels were hanged from August 1906 to April 1907. Extrajudicial killings were a widespread practice - peasants were shot without even finding out who he was, and, at best, were buried with the inscription “familyless.” It was in those years that the Russian proverb “they will kill you and will not ask for your name” appeared. Nobody knows how many such unfortunates died.
The protests were suppressed, but only for a while. The brutal suppression of the revolution of 1905-1907 led to the desacralization and delegitimization of power. The long-term consequences of this were the ease with which both revolutions of 1917 occurred.
The failed revolution of 1905-1907 did not solve Russia's land or food problems. The brutal suppression of a desperate people drove the situation deeper. But the tsarist government was unable and unwilling to take advantage of the resulting respite, and the situation was such that emergency measures were required. Which, in the end, had to be carried out by the Bolshevik government.
An indisputable conclusion follows from the analysis: the fact of major food problems, constant malnutrition of the majority of peasants and frequent regular famines in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. no doubt. The systematic malnutrition of most of the peasantry and frequent outbreaks of famine were widely discussed in the journalism of those years, with most authors emphasizing the systemic nature of the food problem in the Russian Empire. This ultimately led to three revolutions within 12 years.
There was not a sufficient amount of developed land in circulation at that time to provide for all the peasants of the Russian Empire, and only the mechanization of agriculture and the use of modern agricultural technologies could provide it. All together, this constituted a single interconnected set of problems, where one problem was insoluble without the other.
The peasants understood very well the hard way that land shortage was such, and the “question of land” was the key one; without it, conversations about all sorts of agricultural technologies lost their meaning:
“It is impossible to keep silent about the fact,” he said, “that a lot of accusations were made here by some speakers against the peasant /79/ population, as if these people were incapable of anything, good for nothing and not suitable for anything at all, that the planting of culture among them - the work also seems unnecessary, etc. But, gentlemen, think; Why should the peasants use the crop if they have 1 - 2 dessiatines. There will never be any culture." Deputy, peasant Gerasimenko (Volyn province), Duma meeting 1906
By the way, the reaction of the tsarist government to the “wrong” Duma was simple - it was dispersed, but this did not increase the land for the peasants and the situation in the country remained, in fact, critical.
This was commonplace, ordinary publications of those years:
7. New encyclopedic dictionary / Under the general. ed. acad. K.K. Arsenyev. T.14. St. Petersburg: F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron, 1913. Stb.41.
8. Nefedov “Demographic-structural analysis of the socio-economic history of Russia. End of the 15th – beginning of the 20th century"
9. O. O. Gruzenberg. Yesterday. Memories. Paris, 1938, p. 27
10. Nikita Mendkovich. PEOPLE'S NUTRITION AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE RUSSIAN MONARCHY IN 1917 http://actualhistory.ru/golod_i_revoluciy
11. Vishnevsky A.G. Sickle and ruble. Conservative modernization in the USSR. 1998 p.13
12. S.A. Nefedov. "On the causes of the Russian Revolution." Collection "Problems of Mathematical History", URSS, 2009.
13. Menshikov M.O. Youth and the army. October 13, 1909 // Menshikov M.O. From letters to neighbors. M., 1991. P. 109, 110.
14. B. P. Urlanis Population growth in Europe (Calculation experience). B.m.: OGIZ-Gospolitizdat, 1941. P. 341.
15. Novoselsky “Mortality and life expectancy in Russia.” PETROGRAD Printing house of the Ministry of Internal Affairs 1916 http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/novoselskij/novoselskij ...
16. Engelhardt A.N. From the village. 12 letters. 1872–1887. St. Petersburg, 1999. pp. 351–352, 353, 355.
17. Sokolov D.A., Grebenshchikov V.I. Mortality in Russia and the fight against it. St. Petersburg, 1901. P.30.
18. Menshikov M.O. National Congress. January 23, 1914 // Menshikov M.O. From letters to neighbors. M., 1991. P.158.
19. Prokhorov B.B. Health of Russians over 100 years // Man. 2002. No. 2. P.57.
20. L. N. Liperovsky. A trip to hunger. Notes of a member of the famine relief detachment of the Volga region (1912) http://www.miloserdie.ru/index.php?ss=2&s=12&id=502
21. Rosset E. Duration of human life. M. 1981
22. Adamets S. Mortality crises in the first half of the twentieth century in Russia and Ukraine.
23. Urlanis B.U. Fertility and life expectancy in the USSR. M., 1963. With. 103-104
24. Collection of statistical and economic information on agriculture in Russia and foreign countries. Year ten. Petrograd, 1917. P.114–116. 352–354, 400–463.
26. In the 19th century, Russia had a chance to become the world's largest grain exporter http://www.zol.ru/review/show.php?data=1082&time=1255146 ...
27. I.L. Solonevich People's Monarchy M.: ed. "Phoenix", 1991. P.68
28. Minutes of the speeches of the Minister of Finance S. Yu. Witte and the Minister of Foreign Affairs M. N. Muravyov at a meeting of ministers chaired by Nicholas II on the basis of the current trade and industrial policy in Russia. a... And by the way, the current country of “abandoned fields” has nothing to do with the Bolsheviks. In the USSR there were actually no such fields. 4 July 16, at 06:25 “Backward” Tsarist Russia did not sell a single liter of crude oil abroad. But only in finished processed form. Only the Bolsheviks who came to power began to pump it raw. In general, looking for anything built and still working a hundred years ago is quite an amazing experience. Yes, the road from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, built under the Tsar, is still functioning even a hundred years later. But BAM, which only recently had been rebuilt by the entire country for several decades in a row, has already collapsed. That's quality. And abandoned fields are an indicator of the Bolsheviks’ need for the Russian village. Yes, to the Bolsheviks: Yeltsin and Gorbachev were communists who ruined the country. Text hidden
Reactions to a comment
Text hidden
Reactions to a comment
Reading such “horrors” of peasant life before the revolution, many can say that this is Bolshevik agitation.
In order to confirm or refute such statements, it is necessary to present evidence from contemporaries.
A witness to the life of pre-revolutionary peasants is, for example, Count L.N. Tolstoy (quotes from the Complete Works in 90 volumes, academic anniversary edition, volume 29):
“In the first village I arrived in, Malaya Gubarevka, there were 4 cows and 2 horses for 10 households; two families were begging, and the poverty of all the inhabitants was terrible.
The position of the villages is almost the same, although somewhat better: Bolshaya Gubarevka, Matsneva, Protasov, Chapkin, Kukuevka, Gushchin, Khmelinok, Shelomov, Lopashina, Sidorov, Mikhailov Brod, Bobrik, two Kamenki.
In all these villages, although there is no mixture of bread, as was the case in 1891, they do not provide enough bread, even if it is clean. Cooking - millet, cabbage, potatoes, even the majority, do not have any. The food consists of herbal cabbage soup, whitened if there is a cow, and unbleached if there is none, and only bread. In all these villages, the majority have sold and pawned everything that can be sold and pawned.
From Gushchino I went to the village of Gnevyshevo, from which two days ago peasants came asking for help. This village, like Gubarevka, consists of 10 courtyards. There are four horses and four cows for ten households; there are almost no sheep; all the houses are so old and bad that they are barely standing. Everyone is poor and everyone is begging for help. “If only the guys could get some rest,” the women say. “Otherwise they ask for folders (bread), but there is nothing to give, and they will fall asleep without having dinner.”
I know that there is some exaggeration here, but what the man in the caftan with a torn shoulder says right there is probably not an exaggeration, but reality.
“If only I could knock two or three off the bread,” he says. “But then I brought the last scroll to the city (the fur coat has been there for a long time), brought three pounds for eight people - how long will it last! But there I don’t know, what to bring..." I asked to change three rubles for me. There wasn't even a ruble of money in the entire village.
There are statistical studies that show that Russian people are generally undernourished by 30% of what a person needs for normal nutrition; In addition, there is information that young people of the black earth strip over the last 20 years have been meeting less and less the requirements of a good build for military service; the general census showed that population growth, 20 years ago, which was the largest in the agricultural zone, was decreasing and decreasing, and has now reached zero in these provinces.”
“The poverty in this village, the state of the buildings (half the village burned down last year), the clothes of women and children and the lack of any bread, except in two households, is terrible. For the most part, they've baked their last quinoa bread and are finishing it - there's a week or so left. Here is a village in Krapivensky district. There are 57 households, of which 15 have bread and potatoes, counting on the sold oats to buy rye, enough on average until November. Many did not sow oats at all due to lack of seeds from last year. 20 yards will be enough until February. Everyone eats really bad quinoa bread. The rest will feed. All the livestock is sold and given away for free and buildings are burned for fuel; the men themselves set fire to their yards in order to receive insurance money. There have already been cases of starvation.
Here [in the village of Bogoroditsky district] the situation of those who were already poor in previous years, who did not sow oats, and whose households were abandoned, is even worse. Here they are already finishing their last meal. Now there is nothing to eat, and in one village that I inspected, half of the households rode off into the distance on horseback to beg. In the same way, the rich, who make up about 20% everywhere, have a lot of oats and other resources, but in addition, landless soldiers' children live in this village. The whole settlement of these inhabitants has no land and is always in poverty, but now, with expensive bread and meager alms, they are in terrible, terrifying poverty.
A ragged, dirty woman came out of the hut near which we stopped and walked up to a pile of something lying in the pasture and covered with a torn caftan that was torn everywhere. This is one of her 5 children. A three-year-old girl is sick in extreme heat with something like influenza. Not that there is no talk of treatment, but there is no other food except the crusts of bread that the mother brought yesterday, abandoning the children and running off with a bag to collect the money. And there is no more comfortable place for a sick woman than here on the pasture at the end of September, because in a hut with a collapsed stove there is chaos and children. This woman's husband left in the spring and did not return. This is approximately what many of these families are like. But the land-grant peasants, who belong to the category of degenerates, are no better off.
We adults, if we are not crazy, can, it would seem, understand where the people's hunger comes from.
First of all, he - and every man knows this - he
1) from the lack of land, because half of the land is owned by landowners and merchants who trade in both land and grain.
2) from factories and factories with those laws under which the capitalist is protected, but the worker is not protected.
3) from vodka, which is the main income of the state and to which the people have been accustomed for centuries.
4) from the soldiery, who select from him the best people at the best time and corrupt them.
5) from officials who oppress the people.
6) from taxes.
7) from ignorance, in which government and church schools deliberately support him.”
“Wages have been reduced to a minimum. Complete processing of the tithe, starting from the first plowing and ending with the delivery of cut and tied grain to the landowner's threshing floor, costs 4 rubles. for a tithe of 2400 sq. soot and 6 rub. for a tithe of 3200 sq. soot Daily wages from 10-15 kopecks. per day.
The further into the Bogoroditsky district and the closer to Efremovsky, the situation gets worse and worse. There is less and less bread or straw on the threshing floors, and there are more and more bad yards. On the border of Efremovsky and Bogoroditsky districts, the situation is bad, especially because despite all the same adversities as in Krapivensky and Bogoroditsky districts, with even greater sparseness of forests, no potatoes were born. On the best lands almost nothing was born, only seeds returned. Almost everyone has bread with quinoa. The quinoa here is unripe and green. That white kernel that is usually found in it is not there at all, and therefore it is not edible. You can't eat quinoa bread alone. If you eat just bread on an empty stomach, you will vomit. Kvass made with flour and quinoa makes people go crazy.
I approach the edge of the village on this side. The first hut is not a hut, but four gray stone walls, smeared with clay, covered with ceilings, on which potato tops are piled. There is no yard. This is the home of the first family. Right there, in front of this dwelling, stands a cart, without wheels, and not behind the yard, where there is usually a threshing floor, but right there in front of the hut, a cleared place, a threshing floor, where oats have just been threshed and winnowed. A long man in bast shoes with a shovel and his hands pours cleanly winnowed oats from a heap into a wicker seeder, a barefoot woman of about 50 years old, in a dirty, black shirt torn at the side, wears these seeders, pours them into a cart without wheels and counts. A disheveled girl of about seven years old, clinging to the woman, disturbing her, wearing only a shirt gray with dirt. The man is the woman's godfather, he came to help her winnow and remove the oats. The woman is a widow, her husband has died for the second year, and her son is in the soldiers at autumn training, the daughter-in-law is in the hut with her two small children: one is an infant, in her arms, the other, about two years old, is sitting on a bench.
This year's entire harvest is oats, which will all be put into a cart, about four quarters. From the rye, after the sowing, a bag of quinoa, about three pounds, remained neatly tidied up in the bunk. No millet, no buckwheat, no lentils, no potatoes were sown or planted. They baked bread with quinoa - it was so bad that it was impossible to eat, and that day the woman went to the village, about eight miles away, to beg in the morning. There is a holiday in this village, and she gained five pounds in the pieces without quinoa of the pie that she showed me. The basket contained about 4 pounds of crusts and pieces in the palm of your hand. Here are all the property and all the visible means of food.
The other hut is the same, only a little better covered and has a courtyard. The rye harvest is the same. The same bag of quinoa stands in the entryway and represents barns with supplies. No oats were sown in this yard, since there were no seeds in the spring; There are three quarters of potatoes, and there are two measures of millet. The woman baked the rye that was left over from being given out for seeds in half with quinoa and now they are finishing it. There are one and a half rugs left. The woman has four children and a husband. My husband was not at home while I was in the hut - he was building a hut, stone on clay, for a peasant neighbor across the yard.
The third hut is the same as the first, without a yard and roof, the situation is the same.
The poverty of all three families living here is as complete as in the first courtyards. Nobody has rye. Some have two pounds of wheat, some have enough potatoes for two weeks. Everyone still has bread baked with quinoa from rye, given out for seeds, but it won’t last for long.
Almost all the people are at home: some are cleaning the hut, some are shifting, some are sitting doing nothing. Everything has been threshed, the potatoes have been dug up.
This is the entire village of 30 households, with the exception of two families who are wealthy.”
At S.G. Kara-Murza’s book “Soviet Civilization” also contains evidence from contemporaries:
“The chemist and agronomist A.N. Engelhardt, who worked in the village and left a detailed fundamental study of “Letters from the Village”:
“In P.E. Pudovikov’s article “Brain surpluses and national food” in the journal “Otechestvennye zapiski” 1879, No. 10, the author, based on statistical data, argued that we do not sell bread out of excess, that we sell our daily bread abroad , necessary for our own food... Many were struck by this conclusion, many did not want to believe, they suspected the accuracy of the figures, the accuracy of the information about the harvests collected by the volost boards and zemstvo councils... To those who know the village, who know the situation and life of the peasants, he doesn’t need statistics and calculations to know that we don’t sell bread abroad out of excess... In a person from the intelligent class, such doubt is understandable, because it’s simply hard to believe how people live like this without eating. And yet this is really so. It’s not that they haven’t eaten at all, but they are malnourished, living from hand to mouth, eating all sorts of rubbish. We send wheat, good clean rye abroad, to the Germans, who will not eat any rubbish... But not only does the peasant eat the worst bread, he is also malnourished. The American sells the surplus, and we sell the necessary daily bread. The American farmer himself eats excellent wheat bread, fatty ham and lamb, drinks tea, and has a lunch of sweet apple pie or papaska with molasses. Our peasant farmer eats the worst rye bread with kosper, calico, furs, slurps empty gray cabbage soup, considers buckwheat porridge with hemp oil a luxury, has no idea about apple pies, and will even laugh that there are countries where sissies -The men eat apple pies, and they feed the farm laborers the same. Our peasant farmer doesn’t have enough wheat bread for his baby’s pacifier; the woman will chew the rye crust that she eats, put it in a rag and suck it.”
It should be noted that reliable information about the real life of peasants reached society from the military. They were the first to sound the alarm because the onset of capitalism led to a sharp deterioration in the nutrition and then the health of peasant conscripts into the army. The future commander-in-chief, General V. Gurko, cited data from 1871 to 1901 and reported that 40% of peasant boys tried meat in the army for the first time in their lives. General A.D. Nechvolodov in the famous book From Ruin to Prosperity (1906) cites data from Academician Tarkhanov’s article “National Nutrition Needs” in the Literary Medical Journal (March 1906), according to which Russian peasants on average per capita consumed food worth 20.44 rubles . per year, and English ones for 101.25 rubles.”
And here is what Alexander Aleksandrovich Blok writes in his note “Intellectuals and Revolution”:
“Why are they making holes in the ancient cathedral? - Because for a hundred years an obese priest has been here, hiccupping, taking bribes and selling vodka.
Why do they shit in the noble estates dear to the heart? - Because they raped and flogged girls there: not from that master, but from a neighbor.
Why are hundred-year-old parks being torn down? - Because for a hundred years, under their spreading linden and maple trees, the gentlemen showed their power: they poked a beggar in the nose with money, and a fool with education.
It's like that. I know what I am saying. You can't get around this with a horse. There is no way to hush this up; but everyone, however, keeps silent.”