If your horse dies, you might as well die. . . .
There is no place to earn an extra copeck as in the old days, no more landlords and no more lumbermen. . . “And now if you are sick, you can buy no sugar and no white bread and no ginger snaps and you die like a horse. . . . I recalled some of the poignant expressions I had heard at a memorable mass-meeting in my own village on the first Sunday I was there. He could afford no boots, no herring, often he had to do without iron, without nails. They talked to callers with a frankness, a warmth, a friendliness, that should have stirred trust, affection, respect and instead there was this flaming bitterness!Īnd then i thought of the peasant’s tempestuous complaints as i had heard them in his home, in the field, at roadways, mass-meetings and I had to confess that there was grim substance in his words. They were insistent on the observance of the new laws of the land, but they always offered lengthy explanations for this insistence. There was nothing haughty in their demeanor. But these youths were themselves peasants from villages in the district. True, they were the government of the district, and government has always meant something spiteful and dastardly to the muzhik-judges, police, prosecutors, tax-collectors-people who continually pestered you with edicts, repressions, fines, jail sentences. The violent denunciations that I had heard in my own and in neighboring villages were hurled mainly against them. Yet oddly enough there was scarcely a peasant with whom I talked but regarded this desperately earnest chairman and his desperately zealous associates as the enfants terribles of the district, of all Russia. Did a peasant steal apples from a neighbor? Did a man beat his wife? Was a son neglectful of his father or mother? Did a boy wrong a girl? Was there a dispute between two neighbors over road rights, water rights, pasture rights? Did a girl object to marrying the man her father chose for her as a husband? Did someone discover a neighbor’s pig or cow in his field or garden? Was a peasant too poor to pay his tax or to buy wood? Was he without a cow or without a horse, without a plow, without a wagon? Did a fire destroy his home or his barn? They all came to him for counsel, for help, for restitution, aye, even for vengeance and they demanded satisfaction, heatedly-even rudely. What a stupendous burden he had to shoulder! Was there a problem in the whole range of peasant experience that he was not pressed to face? Peasants came to him from far and near with their worries and perplexities, seeking aid, guidance, succor. He was short, stocky, with shaven head and flashing blue eyes. I was especially impressed with the chairman of the Soviet, the oldest of its six members and the most active. But then, who wouldn’t lose his temper with muzhiks so self-assertive now, so demanding, that they often yelled defiance of unfavorable rulings and sought with all manner of tricks and subterfuges to annul or evade them? At times they were impatient and spoke bluntly, dep-recatingly. There was scarcely a suggestion of the official in their behavior, scarcely a note of the bureaucratic callousness that I had observed in so many Soviets in the Russian cities. That was evident enough from the manner in which they received callers and listened to their complaints. One shave a week is the prevailing custom in Russia. They were dressed like the folk whom they served, save that none of them wore lapti (bark-sandals), and they were all clean-shaven at the beginning of the week. Unlike officials in the old days, these youths wore no uniforms. They were trained for their work in the Red Army and in the schools that devote themselves to preparing administrators for the thousands and thousands of villages scattered over the vast territories of the Soviet Republics. They were all peasants from the villages in the district one, the secretary, from my own old village. I say men but in reality they were only youths, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-five. Six men comprised the personnel of this Soviet. For several days I had been watching the streams of humanity passing in and out of the district Soviet in the part of Russia where I was born.
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