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The Soviet Experiment
Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States
✯
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
University of Michigan
SE C ON D E DI T ION
New York Oxford

OX F OR D U N I V E R SI T Y P R E S S
2011
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s
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Copyright © 2011, 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
ISBN: 978-0-19-534055-6
Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
For My Father,
Gourgen “George” Suny
(1910–1995),
who started me up the road that led to this book
and My Mother,
Arax Kesdekian Suny,
born the very month of the Russian Revolution, still and always with us
This page intentionally left blank
C ON T E N T S
illustrations xi
preface xiii
acknowledgments xiv
introduction: Utopia and Its Discontents xvi
part i CRISIS AND REVOLUTION 1
1 The Imperial Legacy 3

Land and People 3
Autocracy, Nobility, Reforms, and Reaction 14
The Coming of Capitalism 21
The Russian Intelligentsia 23
Marx, Lenin, and the Case of Russia 25
Empire and Nation in Tsarist Russia 29
The Final Crisis of Tsarism 32
The Tsar’s Last War 38
Suggestions for Further Reading 45
2 The Double Revolution 47

The February Revolution and the End of Romanov Rule 47
Overlapping Revolutions, Dual Power 51
The Revolution Deepens 56
On the Road to October 61
The October Insurrection 63
3 Socialism and Civil War 68

On the Road from Democracy to Dictatorship 68
v
vi C ON T E N T S
After October 69
Socialism: What’s in a Name? 72
Building State Capitalism 74
Founding the New State: War, Peace, and Terror 76
Intervention and the Civil War in the South 84
Civil War in Siberia and the Volga 87
Russia on Its Own 90
Waiting for the International Revolution 94
Where Have All the Workers Gone? 96
The Peasant Revolution 101
Why the Bolsheviks Won the Civil War 107
4 Nationalism and Revolution 110

South Caucasia 111
Ukrainians and Belorussians 117
Poland and the Russo-Polish War 119
The Baltic Peoples 121
The Finns 125
The Jews 126
Islam and the Peoples of the East 129
Nationalist and Class Struggles 134
part ii RETREAT AND REBUILDING 137
5 The Evolution of the Dictatorship 139

Five Easy Steps 139
One-Party Government 139
The Weakening of the Soviets 140
The Party-State 143
Opposition within the Party 146
Resistance, Rebellion, and Mutiny 151
A Retreat to State Capitalism 153
6 Socialism in One Country 157

The Nationality Question 157
The General Secretary 162
Lenin’s Mantle 164
Early Crises of the NEP Economy 166
Socialism in One Country 168
The Final Crisis of NEP 174
Contents vii
Retreat and Retrenchment 176

The Soviet Union Isolated 179
Continuing Revolution in Asia 181
The War Scare of 1927 183
Stalin and the Comintern 183
Balance and Power 184
Stalin’s Path to Power 185
7 NEP Society 188

Cultures and Classes 188
Workers under State Capitalism 190
Peasant Russia 194
The Nepmen 199
The Red Army 200
The New Soviet Man and Woman 201
Religious Wars 206
Building Legitimate Authority 208
8 Culture Wars 213

Intelligentsia and Revolution 213
Fellow-Travelers and Proletarian Writers 217
Film and Popular Culture 222
Soviet School Days 224
Cultural Revolution 226
part iii STALINISM 233
9 The Stalin Revolution 235

Revolution from Above 235
War on the Peasants and the Final Opposition 236
Collectivization and Dekulakization 239
Famine in Ukraine 245
The Countryside after the Storm 247
10 Stalin’s Industrial Revolution 252

Industrialization Stalin-Style 252
Class War on the Specialists 254
Extension and Centralization 256
Stalin’s Working Class 259
viii C ON T E N T S
The New Class of Bosses 265

The Second Five-Year Plan and Stakhanovism 266
Making the Socialist City 268
11 Building Stalinism 273

Politics and the Party 274
Retreat 278
The Great Purges 282
12 Culture and Society in the Socialist

Motherland 291
Socialist Realism 291
Going to the Movies with Stalin 296
Disciplining the Intelligentsia 298
Women and the Family 300
Mind, Body, and Soul 303
Indestructible Union 307
13 Collective Security and the Coming

of World War II 316
The Fascist Menace 316
The Popular Front and Collective Security 320
Communism versus Fascism 323
War in Europe 328
14 The Great Fatherland War 336

Invasion 336
From Blitzkrieg to War of Attrition 341
The Supreme Commander and the Road to Stalingrad 350
War and Diplomacy at Home and Abroad 352
Endgame 356
15 The Big Chill: The Cold War Begins 363

Historians Look at the Cold War 364
Diplomacy and the War Effort 365
Yalta and Its Aftermath 369
Atomic Diplomacy 371
A New World Order 372
The Left in Europe 374
Contents ix
The Soviets in Eastern Europe 375

Perceptions and Misperceptions 377
The Division of Europe 379
Poland 381
Czechoslovakia 382
Yugoslavia 383
The Finnish Exception 384
The German Question 385
16 Late Stalinism at Home and Abroad 389

From Under the Rubble 389
Reconstructing Hearts and Minds 395
Stalinizing Eastern Europe 402
Cold War and Hot War 403
High Politics in the Kremlin Court 407
part iv REFORM AND STAGNATION 411
17 From Autocracy to Oligarchy:

Khrushchev and the Politics of Reform 413
The Several Deaths of Stalin 413
The Man 419
The Soviets Enter the Nuclear Age 421
Peaceful Coexistence and Its Setbacks 423
Khrushchev in Crisis 425
The Thaw and Destalinization 429
Farm, Factory, and School 433
The Arms Race 436
Rift with China 436
Crises in the West 438
Kennedy and Khrushchev 440
Khrushchev’s Gamble: The Cuban Missile Crisis 441
The Fall of Khrushchev 443
18 The Paradoxes of Brezhnev’s Long Reign 447

The Leadership 447
Meeting the American Challenge: Vietnam 449
The Defeat of Reforms 451
Crushing the Prague Spring 453
Public Opinion and Dissent 455
x C ON T E N T S
Agriculture 460
Brezhnev Ascendant 462
Social Changes in the Era of Stagnation 463
Détente and the Arms Race 470
Two Crises: Afghanistan and Poland 473
part v REFORM AND REVOLUTION 477
19 Reform and the Road to Revolution 479

The Brief Reign of Iurii Andropov 479
The Briefer Reign of Konstantin Chernenko 480
The Road to Radical Reform 481
Glasnost and the Erosion of Authority 484
The New Thinking and the End of the Cold War 487
Politics in a New Idiom 489
The Awakening of Nations 491
From Reform to Revolution 495
The Unraveling of the Empire at Home 499
Surrendering Stalin’s Empire 500
Power to the People 502
The Final Crisis 505
Coup and Collapse 509
20 The Second Russian Republic

and the Near Abroad 515
The Shock of Therapy 518
Constitutional Crisis 522
Russia, the Near Abroad, and Beyond 525
The War in Chechnya 529
Treading Water 531
The Decline and Abdication 535
Reviving Russia 539
The World Outside 542
chronology 549
index 563
I L LU ST R AT ION S
Figure 1.1 Volga peasants, 1905. 15

Figure 1.2 Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna leaving
the Winter Palace during the 300th anniversary of the Romanov
Dynasty, 1913. 38
Figure 1.3 The Russian empire, 1914. 39
Figure 2.1 Smolny Institute, the site of the Bolshevik headquarters, in
October 1917. 55
Figure 2.2 July Days protesters fired on by soldiers in Petrograd, 1917. 57
Figure 3.1 European Russia during the civil war, 1918–21. 88
Figure 3.2 Commissar of War Lev Trotsky during the Russian civil war. 90
Figure 3.3 A women’s revolutionary detachment in front of the Winter Palace
during the Russian civil war, 1918. 97
Figure 3.4 Vladimir Lenin at the celebration of the second anniversary of
the October Revolution, Red Square, 1919. 98
Figure 4.1 Kyrgyz Red Army cavalrymen bringing Soviet power to
Central Asia. 130
Figure 4.2 A classroom of Uzbek women, 1921. 133
Figure 5.1 Joseph Stalin, Aleksei Rykov, Grigory Zinovyev,
and Nikolai Bukharin, 1924. 145
Figure 6.1 Sales Crisis, 1922, and Scissors crisis, 1923. 168
Figure 6.2 Capital stock and investment output in the 1920s. 170
Figure 6.3 “Long Live the Third Communist International,” poster. 180
Figures 7.1 Peasant polarization or cyclical mobility? Absolute polarization
and 7.2 model and cyclical mobility model. 197
Figure 7.3 Removing the bells from the Cathedral of Christ Our Savior, 1930. 207
Figure 8.1 Death of the Commissar, painting by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. 218
Figure 8.2 Vladimir Tatlin’s monument to the Third International. 222
Figure 9.1 Running tractors on the new collective farms, early 1930s. 241
Figure 9.2 “Expel the Kulaks from the Kolkhoz,” poster. 244
Figure 9.3 Building the Ferghana Canal in Uzbekistan, 1939. 248
Figure 10.1 Alexei Stakhanov operating a jackhammer in a
Soviet coal mine, 1935. 258
Figure 10.2 Moscow metro workers ride as passengers on its first train, 1935. 267
xi
xii I L LU ST R AT ION S
Figure 10.3 Sergo Orjonikidze, member of the Politburo, visits

the first underground construction site of the Moscow metro. 270
Figure 11.1 “Religion is poison. Safeguard the children,” poster. 276
Figure 12.1 Yuri Annenkov’s 1921 portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 301
Figure 13.1 Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, 1935. 322
Figure 13.2 “Tractor in the field, so that there can be tanks in battle!”
poster, 1942. 331
Figure 14.1 Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II. 339
Figure 14.2 A German officer deals with five partisans in Moldavia, 1941. 342
Figure 14.3 Destruction by German artillery during the blockade
of Leningrad, 1942. 344
Figure 14.4 “Grief (The dead won’t let us forget).” Soviet survivors search for
their war dead, January 1942. 348
Figure 14.5 Victorious Soviet soldier raises the flag over the Reichstag. 358
Figure 15.1 The USSR and Europe at the end of World War II. 366
Figure 15.2 Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta, February 1945. 369
Figure 16.1 Beria, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Suslov carrying
Stalin’s coffin, March 1953. 409
Figure 17.1 Khrushchev speaks before farmers in Kazakhstan. 419
Figure 18.1 A Georgian family having a picnic, 1985. 468
Figure 18.2 Castro speaking on Red Square; Khrushchev and Brezhnev
look on, 1963. 472
Figure 19.1 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, after signing a nuclear
forces reduction agreement, August 1987. 487
Figure 19.2 Yeltsin defending the White House during the 1991 Coup. 509
Figure 20.1 Russian White House burning, October 1993. 524
Figure 20.2 Russia and the newly independent states, 1997. 526
Figure 20.3 Democracy Russian-style. Yeltsin does the frug. 535
Figure 20.4 Russian President Vladimir Putin visiting the Republic of Tuva. 538
Figure 20.5 News conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and
Barack Obama, April 2009. 547
P R E FAC E
I n the decade that has passed since the first edition of this work appeared, the
states of the former Soviet Union have undergone dramatic changes—some
would say, reversals. The initial transitions appeared to be moving in a democratic
direction. Fifteen new states replaced the USSR, and hopes were high that the rad-
ical reforms that had brought down “state socialism” would move consistently
toward more open, pluralistic societies. While the move to capitalist market econ-
omies became the general tendency in most of the former Soviet states, liberal,
consolidated democracy eluded most of them. This new edition attempts to under-
stand the historical roots that both made reform possible but frustrated the
anticipated democratic transformation.
Changes to the Second Edition

Besides a new concluding section of the book, this second edition has made other
significant changes—the author hopes, improvements—to the earlier edition. The
first chapter, on imperial Russia, has been expanded, thanks to the work of histo-
rians of prerevolutionary Russia. As in the first edition, even more in the second,
social and political history has been enriched by looking at the multiethnic history
of the tsarist and Soviet empires. Throughout the book, new material has been
added to illustrate general trends, social processes, and cultural achievements. The
chapters on the history after the death of Stalin in 1953 have benefitted enormously
from the new scholarship that has emerged in the last decade, and the growing
interest and willingness of historians and anthropologists to tread where only
intrepid political scientists and sociologists had ventured before has given us a
much richer picture of what life and politics in the Soviet Union was like in its final
decades. The first edition had already benefitted from the “archival revolution” that
had permitted Western and post-Soviet scholars to delve into new sources and
illuminate the darker pages of Soviet history. This second edition has reaped even
greater riches from the scholarly work that has emerged from the continued
adventure of exploring the archives.
xiii
AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S
T his history of the USSR, its origins, evolutions, and collapse, is the product of
more than forty years of teaching, reading, and writing on the subject. An
enormous debt is owed to my own teachers but an even greater one to colleagues
and students who have continued to contribute to my understanding. I especially
want to thank Shawn Borelli-Mear, Wayne Dowler, David Kerans, Valerie Kivelson,
Daniel Orlovsky, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Peter Martinson, Thomas Noonan, Amir
Weiner, and Steven Zipperstein for reading parts or the whole of earlier drafts;
James Reische and Susan Monahan for their diligence, care, and intelligence in
compiling the index; my editors James Miller, Brian Wheel, and Charles Cavaliere
for numerous suggestions on how to improve the manuscript; and especially
Nancy Lane, who first conceived of the project, convinced me to undertake it, and
kept me at it through moments of discouragement.
Though some historians are mentioned in the text, many more would have
had footnotes to their work in a conventional scholarly work. I have made an effort
to list all those who have contributed to this history in the sections on suggested
readings. While the second edition of The Soviet Experiment is primarily the
product of one historian’s reflections and analyses of the work of a whole profes-
sion, it is also the beneficiary of the students at the University of Michigan and the
University of Chicago who listened to lectures, read chapters, and argued with that
historian about how that history might be understood. This seems the appropriate
place and time to express my gratitude for what they have taught me.
I am grateful to the reviewers for the Second Edition—Eliza Ablovatski
(Kenyon College); Michael C. Hickey (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania);
and Elaine MacKinnon (University of West Georgia), as well as several anony-
mous reviewers. Special thanks go to Tom Hooker, my research assistant, who
helped in myriad ways in preparing this text for publication. Finally, as always, I
must mention with unlimited gratitude the patience and tolerance of my wife,
Armena Marderosian, and my daughters, Sevan and Anoush Suni. We all live with
the loss of the time taken from our lives together to tell this story.
xiv
Acknowledgments xv
Two technical points are in order. First, the calendar used in Russia was twelve
days behind the Western calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days in
the twentieth. I have used the Russian dating up to the Soviet adoption of the
Western calendar in February 1918 and indicated where necessary whether the
Russian “old style” (o.s.) dating is used or the Western “new style” (n.s.). Second,
the spelling of Russian names and terms follows the Library of Congress usage
with a few modifications for clarity, e.g., no marks for soft or hard signs. Names
familiar to Western readers are given in the generally accepted form. The word
soviet refers to the council of deputies, as in Petrograd soviet; when capitalized,
Soviet refers to the state or government (e.g., the Soviet Union, or Soviet people).
INTRODUCTION
✯
Utopia and Its Discontents
T rying to understand Russia or the Soviet Union has preoccupied serious

Western observers at least since the fifteenth century, probably much earlier.
A society closed to easy penetration and comprehension, Russia has fascinated
many precisely because it is so difficult to know. Winston Churchill spoke of Russia
as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Journalists and political lead-
ers, Kremlin watchers and scholars have written so many contradictory things
about the USSR that they confirm what the American humorist Will Rogers said:
“Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it’s true.”
The last years of the twentieth century seemed to be the right moment to tell
the story of the Soviet Union as a whole. When I began the first edition of this
work, that turbulent tale now had a beginning, a middle, and an end. So traumatic
and painful had been that century’s transformations of Russia and the Soviet
republics, so controversial their motivations and effects, and so filled with political
passion were the observers and participants that no single historian’s view could
be convincing to all. The Soviet Union was gone, but its effects remained.
Understanding that experience, giving it meaning and making judgments about it,
will continue for a long time to engage present and future generations of social
scientists and students. This book is an attempt to deal fairly and dispassionately
with a complex history that has divided friend from foe, East from West, Left from
Right—not with the vain hope of reconciling irreconcilable differences, but with
the expectation that an analytic and interpretative narrative will add to our under-
standing. This latest edition has expanded the chapters on the prerevolutionary
period, added new material throughout the text, and brought the story up to the
present.
In overall design this history of the Soviet Union is conceived as the story of
three revolutions, each identified with a single individual: the revolution of 1917,
in which Vladimir Lenin played a key role and that founded the Soviet political
order; Joseph Stalin’s revolution of the 1930s, which forged the statist economic
system that the West would call “totalitarian” and the Soviet leaders would identify
xvi
Int ro duc t ion xvii
as “socialism”; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s revolution (1985–91), which tried to dis-

mantle the Stalinist legacy and ended by undermining the Leninist heritage as
well. Two major periods of reform separated these revolutionary episodes: the
New Economic Policy (1921–28), with its confusion about the transition from
capitalism to socialism and the power struggle among the leading Communists
for leadership, and the post-Stalin years divided between Nikita Khrushchev’s
erratic and incomplete reforms and the nearly two decades of Leonid Brezhnev’s
conservative retrenchment.
The Soviet Union, its leaders, and its mission to build socialism have often
been characterized as utopian. The word utopia means “no place,” something that
exists, not in the real world, but, like Thomas More’s peaceful and harmonious
island society, only in the imagination. The word stirs up notions of perfection and
perfectibility, of a possible resolution of the mundane problems of human exis-
tence, but it also brings to mind an impossible ideal, a lack of realism, or an
impractical scheme for social improvement. In the present “post-utopian” world,
utopia is most often associated with senseless dreams that can lead to social disas-
ter, and much futuristic fiction, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World, warns readers away from zealous tampering with the delicate
mechanisms and achieved compromises of the societies in which they live.
But utopia can also be understood to be an ideal, a goal toward which people
aspire. In this sense of utopia are contained the political hopes and ends for which
people are prepared to work, die, even kill. In a sense, every political movement
seeking change contains within it a utopia, a place where, if all were possible,
people would like to end up. The early Soviet leaders traced their political heritage
back to the revolutionary Left that emerged in the French Revolution. Its goals
were admittedly utopian in the sense that they sought to change and reconstruct
society in line with their ideals of equality, social justice, and popular participation
in the political world. From the early nineteenth century, socialism, in its variety
of specific meanings, has referred to the principal set of ideas and the principal
social movement opposed to capitalism, the form of human organization that
arose to become the dominant system of production throughout the world. From
its origins, socialism had the goal of broadening the power of ordinary people, that
is, of extending as far as possible the limits of democracy, not only in the realm of
politics (which was the goal of democratic radicals and leftist liberals) but in the
economy as well. Indeed, socialists were always convinced that the ideal of liberal
democrats of a representative political order coexisting with the private ownership
of the means of production and the potential accumulation of enormous wealth
was fundamentally contradictory. The power implicit in property and wealth, they
believed, would inevitably distort and corrupt the democratic political sphere.
Therefore, socialists searched for mechanisms of social control or social ownership
of the means of production.
Devoted to Karl Marx’s vision of socialism, in which the working class would
control the machines, factories, and other sources of wealth production, the
Communists led by Lenin believed that the future social order would be based on
xviii INTRODUCTION
the abolition of unearned social privilege, the end of racism and colonial oppres-
sion, the secularization of society, and the empowerment of working people. Yet
within a generation Stalin and his closest comrades had created one of the most
vicious and oppressive states in modern history. Soviet-style “state socialism”
ended up as a perverse imitation of authentic social ownership, in which a ruling
elite of party chieftains and bureaucratic managers ran the country in the name
of—and ostensibly in the interests of—the mass of the people. Unless one believes
that any attempt at social engineering or revolutionary transformation, any tam-
pering with the delicate mechanisms of existing societies, must inevitably end up
in authoritarianism, historians must attempt to explain the rapid fall from democ-
racy and egalitarianism into the terror and totalitarianism of Stalinism.
Soviet history has been used to tell many stories. Its sympathizers have lauded
its virtues as evidence of what a socialist system can achieve, from high levels of
industrial growth to championship Olympic teams; its opponents have depicted its
history as the proof of the evils (indeed, the impossibility) of a nonmarket road to
modernity. Gorbachev’s efforts to create a more democratic evolution of the
system, to restrain the power of the Communist party, to awaken public opinion
and political participation through glasnost, and to allow greater freedom to the
non-Russian peoples of the Soviet borderlands seemed to confirm the optimism of
those who believed in the democratic potential of Soviet socialism. But the col-
lapse of communism in 1989–91 dragged down with it not only the hard-line
Communists but also more democratic socialists who had banked on gradual
reform toward social democracy or some moderate form of market economy. In
its wake came the widely touted belief that Gorbachev’s failure had finally proven
the infeasibility of a socialist state and the exclusive possibility of a rapid move
toward capitalism. Many liberal and conservative analysts believe that freedom,
democracy, and the market are inextricably tied together; property rights and per-
sonal rights are not only not in opposition but necessary for one another. And the
bankruptcy of Soviet-style socialism, the exposure of the vastness of Stalin’s crimes,
the rapid conversion of many former Communists, like Boris Yeltsin, to the ideas
of market economics—all came together in a powerful perception that the Soviet
experiment had been doomed from the beginning and that there is no real alterna-
tive to capitalism, which remains, as it has always been, the one great economic
system that best fits human nature. We have reached, proclaimed the writer Francis
Fukuyama, the end of history, and the West has won!
This book is an attempt to recover the complexities and contradictions of the
seventy years of Soviet power, its real achievements as well as its grotesque failings.
Rather than see all of Soviet history as moving toward a preordained end, made
inexorable because of the impossibility of realizing the original utopian vision, this
history of the Soviet Union seeks to show the false starts and unintended results of
the Soviet experience as well as the ways in which human will and effort were able
to transform society. If there is an overall thesis, it is that Soviet achievements
produced the factors that eventually led to its decline and collapse. One of the
recurrent ironies of the twentieth century was that Marxist governments came to
Introduction xix
power, not where they were supposed to in theory, in the highest developed capi-
talisms, but in backward, semicolonial states. And their greatest achievements
have been to reproduce in many ways the great transformation that the Western
middle classes accomplished in their capitalist industrializations. That is, the actual
project of Leninist states has been to modernize, but under noncapitalist condi-
tions. And in crude terms they were extraordinarily successful, transforming
agrarian societies into urban, industrial ones in far shorter time than in most
Western countries. But even as they did so these actually existing socialisms aban-
doned much of the original socialist utopia.
Social revolution is always a compromise between what historical material is
available and the visions of the revolutionaries. Russia was one of the most inhos-
pitable places on the globe for social experimentation either socialist or capitalist.
A country 85 percent peasant, the least likely candidate in Europe to create a soci-
ety modeled on Marx’s ideas of proletarian democracy, Russia suffered years of
war, revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and famine before the Communists
were securely in power. Even Lenin argued, until his death, that socialism could
not be built in one country, certainly not in Russia, without an international pro-
letarian revolution to come to the aid of more backward nations. But that revolution
never came, and the Soviet Union was left isolated and backward at the edge of
Europe. If the country was to become modern, it would have to do it on its own.
Marxism’s intellectual roots ran deep in the industrial revolution, and, along
with its aspirations to end exploitation and fully realize human potential, it also
shared certain logics with capitalism and the whole Western project to achieve a
particular kind of industrial modernization. The Communist Party committed
itself to the enormous task of transforming the people from peasants to workers
and the country from basically agrarian to industrial. But as it used the instru-
ments of its power to force change on a reluctant people, the party moved rapidly
away from any conceivably democratic concept of popular participation. In many
ways, the story of the twentieth century can be told as the erosion of the emancipa-
tory, moral, humanistic side of Marxism, indeed socialism in general, and the
elevation of the economistic, productivist, statist elements—to the point that its
utopia became, in the USSR, the dystopia of Stalinism or, in the West, the compro-
mise with capitalism embodied in Western Social Democracy.
Though what the Communists eventually created was a distorted version of
what the early revolutionaries had intended, their efforts had profound and lasting
effects. A self-perpetuating class of Communist bosses ran a colossal state-driven,
nonmarket economy and a gargantuan state apparatus that crushed any opposi-
tion to its rule, stifled free expression outside its own strict limits, and constantly
forced the population to display its loyalty to the system. Arbitrariness and per-
sonal power overruled the rule of law. In the economy command and obedience
replaced enterprise, innovation, and initiative. When the gears of the Soviet system
began to grind more slowly in the 1980s, Gorbachev tried first lubrication and
then major repairs, but the machine fell apart. In the ruined landscape left by the
Soviets, new leaders attempted another great experiment, this time embracing
xx INTRODUCTION
capitalism and democracy. Tearing down much of the Soviet edifice, the marketers
and self-proclaimed “democrats” oversaw a decade of economic dislocation and
political confusion, a severely weakened state, and a disheartened population
before a handpicked president and unexpected wealth from oil turned Russia
toward prosperity, greater confidence, and a renewed authoritarianism. Most
former Soviet republics, with the notable exception of the Baltic states, also drifted
off the democratic road by the new century. Whatever its ultimate outcome, the
shape of the post-Soviet world will be indelibly marked by the Soviet experience
that preceded it. This book is about that experience.
PART I
✯
Crisis and Revolution
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C HA P T E R 1
✯
The Imperial Legacy
LAND AND PEOPLE

The first impression of a traveler moving across Russia at the turn of the twentieth
century was the vast size of the country. Stretching nine thousand miles from
Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean, Russia was the largest country in the world.
Finland and most of Poland, with its historic capital, Warsaw, were within its bor-
ders, as were the ancient Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia and the
Muslim emirates of Bukhara and Khiva. Traveling from west to east, one moved
across an enormous plain without any significant natural barriers. Even the Ural
Mountains, which mapmakers established as the border between Europe and Asia,
were no obstacle to nomads or invaders. Only in the south were there major moun-
tain chains, like the Caucasus in European Russia and the Pamir, Tien Shan, and
Altai at the edge of Central Asia and China. A lesser range, the Carpathians,
marked the border between Ukraine and the countries of Central Europe. Moving
from north to south was as easy as moving from east to west, facilitated by the
great river systems of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Ob, Enisei, and Lena.
Russia began as a landlocked cluster of small states that grew first to the north
and west and later to the east and south, until it bordered on the Baltic Sea and the
Arctic Ocean, the Black and Caspian Seas, and, by the seventeenth century,
the Pacific Ocean. Russia lay to the north of most of the other major powers in the
world. Two-thirds of the empire was above the 50th parallel. One of its southern-
most towns, Erevan, later to be the capital of Armenia, was on a parallel with
Philadelphia. The harsh continental climate of Russia proper was alleviated only in
the empire’s peripheries—on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts, in South Caucasia,
Central Asia, and the Far Eastern maritime regions. Much of northern Russia and
Siberia is permanently frozen tundra, a wasteland of scrubby vegetation. To its
south are the massive coniferous forests of the taiga, followed by the mixed-forest
zone and the great plains, or steppe. Still farther south, especially in Central Asia,
are the arid deserts that make up another 20 percent of the country’s territory.
Russia’s unfortunate position on the earth’s surface determined both the limits
of development and the burdens that ordinary Russians bore as their rulers
3
4 PA RT I • C R I SI S A N D R EVOLU T ION
attempted to compete with more industrialized and technologically more sophis-

ticated countries to the west. Despite its abundant mineral resources, often
forbiddingly difficult to recover, Russia was a relatively backward, underdeveloped
country as it entered the twentieth century. In the words of one economist, pre-
revolutionary Russia was “the poorest of the civilized nations.” It was the great
power least transformed by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. In
1913 Great Britain was almost five times richer per capita than Russia; the United
States was more than eight times richer. Indeed, Russia was poorer per capita than
Italy and Spain. And the gap between Russia and the richer nations of Europe
widened between 1861 and 1931. Both tsarist and Soviet elites were motivated by
the drive to overcome their inferior position and rival the greatest powers on the
globe. A sense of backwardness and the need to catch up stimulated, inspired, and
sometimes brought Russian leaders to despair.
Just over 43 percent of the people of the Russian Empire in 1900 were ethnic
Russians, sometimes called Great Russians, speakers of a Slavic language, usually
members of the Orthodox Church, and primarily peasant farmers. They were
closely related linguistically, socially, and religiously to the two other major Eastern
Slavic groups, the Ukrainians and Belorussians. These three peoples, along with
the Poles, made up the Slavic core of the empire, about 72 percent of the popula-
tion. But since the conquest of the Tatar Khanate of Kazan on the Volga in 1552,
Russia had been a multinational empire, and in the early twentieth century it ruled
over millions of Jews (4 percent of the population), Kazaks (3 percent), Finns
(2 percent), Tatars, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Muslims of the Volga region,
Caucasia, and Central Asia, and the so-called small peoples of the north. The
dominant language, used by officials and in higher education, was Russian, but
over a hundred other languages, from the Turkic tongues of the Central Asian
nomads to the Baltic languages of the Latvians and Lithuanians, coexisted uneasily
with Slavic. The empire proclaimed itself religiously Orthodox, the heir to the
heritage of Byzantium, but many of its subjects followed other Christian churches,
like that of the Armenians, as well as Islam, Judaism, Shamanism, and Buddhism.
Russia was a great state, a multinational empire, but not a single nation with a
single culture and sense of collective identity.
The first Russian state was founded on the Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine,
in the late ninth century (traditional date, 882). The princes of Kievan Rus adopted
Christianity as their official religion around 988, establishing a relationship with
the Byzantine Empire and what became Orthodoxy, which had enormous influ-
ence on the future ideology of tsarism. The imperial two-headed eagle, symbolizing
the close relationship of state and church, with the latter headed by the tsar, the
separation from the Catholic West and its Renaissance, and a sense of religious
mission—all came from Byzantium and influenced the shape of the Russian world.
With the decline and fall of Kiev in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, the Russian
lands were fractured into smaller, competing principalities which were subjugated
by the Mongols in 1237–40. For nearly two hundred years Russia and much of
Eurasia were ruled by a great empire with its center far to the east in the steppes
CHAPTER 1 • The Imperial Legacy 5
of Mongolia. Paying tribute to the Great Khans like the other Russian states, one of
the least prominent of the principalities, Moscow, emerged eventually as the center
of resistance to the Mongols and effectively “gathered the Russian lands” into a
single state. In the reign of Ivan III, “the Great” (1462–1505), Moscow conquered
Novgorod and Tver, and its particular system of absolutist rule replaced the more
oligarchic forms in other states. Muscovite Russia was autocratic, with absolute
power in the hands of the grand duke (later the tsar), highly centralized (eventu-
ally bureaucratic), and militaristic, with its warrior nobles having little independent
authority and serving at the pleasure of the prince.
Muscovy expanded steadily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in
the reign of Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (1533–84), it moved beyond the Volga and
south to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Ivan IV was the first Russian ruler to call
himself “tsar,” the Russian word for emperor borrowed from the Latin caesar. After
his death, the empire suffered a “Time of Troubles,” civil strife and foreign inva-
sions by the Poles. But with the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, greater
stability led to renewed growth, first to the west, with the incorporation of Ukraine
(the union of Pereiaslavl, 1654), and then to the east, with the steady migration
into Siberia. Russians crossed the Bering Strait and the Pacific and briefly estab-
lished colonies in California. In the eighteenth century dynamic emperors pushed
Russia’s frontiers to the Baltic and Black Seas, bringing Latvians, Lithuanians,
Estonians, Baltic Germans, and Tatars into the empire. In the first half of the
nineteenth century Russians crossed the Caucasus and annexed the lands of
Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis, after which they had to fight for decades
to “pacify” the peoples of the mountainous North Caucasus. The final phases of
Russia’s expansion came in the second half of the century with the drive
into Central Asia and the ultimately futile effort to extend Russian power in the
Far East. Russia reached its greatest size in the decades before the revolution of
1917. Though Soviet influence and power would at times reach far beyond
the borders of the Soviet state, the trend in the twentieth century was no longer
expansion of the empire’s borders but “downsizing” of the Russian realm, until by
the last decade of the century Russia had shrunk back to the contours of Muscovy
and Siberia.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeen centuries the Muscovite state steadily
limited the movement of Russian peasants, who had enjoyed relative freedom to
pursue their own economic lives, gradually turning them into serfs of the land-
holding nobles. A vast gulf developed between the top and bottom of society.
Peasants lived as a separate class, isolated from the larger towns in village com-
munes, holding on to their traditions, superstitions, and religion. The tsars and
nobles adopted the ways of the West, particularly after the reign of Peter I, “the
Great” (1682–1725), who forced the elites of Russia to study Europe in order to
better serve the imperial state. Peter built up his army, levied new taxes, increased
service obligations on the nobles, gave greater emphasis to European education,
and introduced new industries and technologies borrowed from the West.
Peter began a pattern of economic and political reform from above, in response to
foreign challenge and domestic pretensions to greatness, that would be repeated

throughout the next three hundred years. In the eighteenth century the educated
elite of Russia took on the manners, and even the French language, of the European
nobility, and in the reign of Catherine II, “the Great” (1762–96), the empress and
her courtiers saw themselves as participants in the cultural and literary
Enlightenment. While the upper layers of Russian society were marked by the
more secular and cosmopolitan culture of the West, the great mass of the Russian
people remained imbedded in the traditional religious culture that was wary of,
even hostile to, foreign influences.
The vastness of the Russian Empire was a mixed blessing for its people. The
very size of the country meant that the distances to market were extremely great.
The riches that lay under the ground and might have contributed to industrializa-
tion were far from centers of population. Roads, railroads, and transportation
networks in general were poorly developed, though they slowly improved in the
century before the revolution. Yet in earlier centuries the frontier was a place to
which peasant serfs might flee; later, Siberia attracted migrants from European
Russia. Open lands, often quite rich, as in the southeast of central Russia, sup-
ported the peasants of the peripheries, though they were faced by unreliable
precipitation and fewer sources of water. For the native peoples of the south, the
mountains of Caucasia and the great deserts of Central Asia were refuges where
the arm of the state could only weakly reach.
The Russian social historian Boris N. Mironov argues convincingly that colo-
nization was what made Russia a great state but that there were also negative
effects. Conquering other peoples made the Great Russians a minority in their
own empire. A sense of Russian nationhood never fully developed, except argu-
ably among the intellectual and political elite. Russians migrated for much of their
history into unpopulated border regions and did not settle in great numbers where
other peoples—like the Finns, Poles, or Caucasians—lived in denser settled com-
munities. Russians moved to relatively unpopulated Siberia, the southern steppe,
or what later became Ukraine. They did not exterminate native peoples but either
integrated them into their ethnicity or left them to their own traditional ways.
Migration and colonization created habits and attitudes in favor of developing the
economy extensively, that is by cultivating new lands and exploiting the abundant
natural resources, rather than intensively increasing the productivity of already
cultivated lands or husbanding resources at hand. Waste and squandering went
along with expansion. There was little incentive to use intensive methods, since
there was no shortage of land or labor and no abundance of surplus capital to
invest. Only in the last half-century of tsarism, when the fund of unclaimed land
grew ever smaller and more distant and population continued to grow, did some
peasants and landlords turn to more intensive production. But it was difficult to
eradicate traditional ideas that “For every soul God will provide” or “For every
starving person a piece of bread will be found.”
Life for most subjects of the tsar was as harsh as the climate. Life expectancy
for the tsar’s subjects in 1897 was on average only thirty-two years, slightly higher
for women, slightly lower for men. But ethnic Russians lived less long than other
peoples of the empire: on average only twenty-eight years. Latvians lived longest
(forty-five years), with Estonians and Lithuanians just behind them, while
Ukrainians and Jews managed to make it into their late thirties. Russia’s infant
mortality rates were the highest in Europe. On the eve of World War I, 245 infants
per 1,000 died before completing their first year of life, compared to 76 per 1,000
in Sweden. It was estimated that almost half of all peasant children (43 percent)
did not live until their fifth birthday. As Mironov puts it: “Children were born in
order to die. The more children were born, the more died; the more children died,
the more were born.” Russian Orthodox women took a fatalistic attitude toward
childhood mortality: “If the child is born to live, it will live; if to die, it will die.”
Because of various cultural practices, such as techniques of suckling babies, mor-
tality rates among children were much lower among non-Russians—lowest among
Estonians but also lower among Jews, Ukrainians, Tatars, Bashkirs, and others.
Still, Russia’s birthrate, one of the highest in Europe, more than made up for high
mortality. The population grew rapidly, even after birthrates began to fall just
before 1900. Despite the worsening of nutrition and standards of living for most of
the population, death rates also began to decline as medical services, sanitation,
and literacy improved.
Russia was a society divided into legally constituted social categories called
“estates” (sosloviia). Unlike classes, which are usually defined by income, occupa-
tion, or, by Marxists, as “the relationship to the means of production,” estates are
fixed, hereditary stations in life defined in law to have specific rights, privileges,
and obligations. Classes were related to the economy, and one could move more
easily from one to another, while estates were legally defined social statuses into
which one was usually born and from which it was more difficult to rise or fall. In
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian law tended to distin-
guish between four principal estates: the nobility (dvorianstvo), the urban residents
(divided into various categories: pochetnye grazhdane, meshchanstvo, kupechestvo,
etc.), the clergy (dukhovenstvo), and the peasantry (krestianstvo). At the very time
when Russia was consolidating the estate system, much of Western Europe and the
newly formed United States of America were eliminating such hereditary catego-
ries and opening their societies to greater social mobility between classes. In the
Russian Empire there was no principle of the tsar’s subjects being equal before the
law; they, in fact, were by law unequal! Because not everyone fit neatly into these
social categories, a residual category of “people of various ranks” (raznochintsy)
had to be recognized for those, like artists, teachers, clerks, or petty traders, who
fell between noble and peasant. Birth and wealth were key to social status in tsarist
Russia, but talent and ability also would be recognized. Because nobility required
service to the state until the late eighteenth century, it remained the case that
people who served the empire well were often rewarded, first, with personal nobil-
ity, and, later, with hereditary nobility that they passed on to their heirs. A curious
example of such advancement was Ilia Ulianov, an educational administrator in
the Volga town of Simbirsk, who through his diligence and dedication eventually
rose to the rank of hereditary noble, which then passed to his son, Vladimir, who
would be known to the world as Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
In 1897, the year of the first all-Russian census, the empire’s population num-
bered 124,649,000. Of these only 18,436,000 people lived in towns and cities,
making up less than 14 percent of the population. They included artisans, indus-
trial workers, clergy, nobles, bureaucrats, merchants, and a variety of other
townspeople. The most powerful and influential people in the empire, the heredi-
tary and personal nobility, numbered less than 1.5 percent of the population. Over
three-quarters of the empire’s population (84 percent) were peasants, of whom
90 percent tilled the fields and lived in villages. The Russian word for village—
mir—also meant “world” and “peace” and was the place where most peasants spent
their whole lives. Generalizing about the more than 100 million people living in
rural areas scattered across Eurasia and divided into dozens of different nationalities
is impossible. Enormous differences divided nomads and seminomads in Central
Asia from fur trappers and hunters of northeastern Siberia or the farmers of
southern Ukraine. Rather than attempt here to characterize the variety of ways of
life and mentalities of villagers throughout the country, we can make a few points
about the peasants of European Russia.
Throughout Russia’s history, the peasants paid for the rest of society, for the
state, for industry, for the civilization of the towns and cities, which they despised
and admired simultaneously. Particularly in the last half-century of tsarist rule the
government forced the peasants to “underconsume,” as it has been euphemistically
put, in order to tax their output and export grain abroad so that purchases and
payments on the foreign loans that financed Russia’s industrialization could be
made. Living at the bottom of the social ladder, peasants were considered socially
inferior to the rest of society and had little effect on the state’s actions. Rather, they
were acted upon by the state in the guise of its agents—the tax collector, the police
officer, and the military recruiter. To the villagers, the government was foreign and
far away and appeared only as an intruder.
Yet this mass of people by its very size and importance in the economy of
Russia was quite powerful, if in no other way because of what it could prevent
from happening. During the imperial period the government and intellectuals
at times saw the peasantry as the major obstacle to progress and development,
at other times as the principal dike against the threat of revolution. Indeed,
what the peasantry did or did not do would determine whether Russia would
grow economically, stagnate, or even slide backward. The general poverty of
the peasants limited the growth of markets—they had little money to buy very
much—and restricted the formation of capital with which to industrialize
the country. Many intellectuals saw the peasantry as the major obstacle to eco-
nomic and social development. Some argued that the poverty of the peasants
prevented the rise of a consumer market and that their lack of skills retarded
the formation of an industrial working class. Others saw a transformed, socialist
peasantry as the best hope for Russia to avoid the devastations of early capitalist
industrialization.
Peasants were basically grain producers. On the eve of World War I over
90 percent of the sown land area was in grain. Not only were wheat and rye what
the peasants ate and sold, but grain was the major export of the Russian Empire.
The central economic struggle was over how much grain the peasants could keep
or control and how much landlords and the state could take from them through
rents, collection of debts, and taxation. Most peasants had very little disposable
grain. Poverty, disease, death, and ignorance were their constant companions.
They were poor in livestock and draft animals, and a cruel image from peasant life
was that of a peasant pulling his own plow. The number of horses, cattle, and pigs
per capita fell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rapid
growth of the population in the second half of the nineteenth century (25 million
more peasants) meant less land for individual peasant families, higher prices for
land, and migration either to Siberia or into cities.
Just after the Emancipation of the peasant serfs in 1861, slightly more than a
quarter of Russia’s peasants were unable to support themselves through agricul-
ture alone. By 1900 just over half of the peasants could no longer make a living
without outside earnings. For generations peasants lived on the edge of starvation,
threatened by unpredictable natural forces. A drought or an epidemic could pro-
duce widespread famine, as in 1891. Outside the villages wolves roamed, killing
upward of a million head of livestock a year. Movement from the village was dif-
ficult, even after Emancipation, for laws and economic ties bound people to the
peasant commune. Peasant males might leave the village if drafted into the army
or sent into Siberian exile or for seasonal work on other farms or in factories.
Many peasants were so desperate for improvement in their material conditions
that in the last twenty years of the empire 4.5 million Russians migrated to western
Siberia and Central Asia.
Nevertheless, peasants managed to cope with the shortage of land and the
backwardness of their technology. For all the uncertainty and brutality of peasant
life, their conditions may have improved somewhat in the decades before
World War I. Overall per-capita grain production actually increased between
Emancipation and World War I. In many regions peasant income grew, especially
after 1900, and peasants were able to keep more grain in their villages for their own
consumption. After the peasant revolts of 1905–7, the government canceled many
peasant debts (the payments to redeem the land given peasants after the
Emancipation), and their incomes rose even more because of higher prices for
grain. Peasant farmers may have felt poor and exploited, overtaxed and abused by
the noble landlords in their midst, but in fact they produced on their own fields
86 percent of the total cereal output of the empire and 75 percent of the grain that
reached market.
In the ethnically Russian center of the empire, peasant life and work were
organized by a unique institution, the commune (in Russian, obshchina). The com-
mune’s boundaries were those of the village, and it was at one and the same time
the local administration, police, and enforcer of custom and tradition. A typical
agricultural commune was made up of anywhere from four to eighty peasant
households, with a mean in the late nineteenth century of roughly fifty-four house-
holds and 290 people. But in those provinces where water sources were more
sparse, toward the south and east of European Russia, villages often included up to
one thousand families. The commune ran the lives of the peasants and stood
between them and the state. It collected taxes for the government, recruited young
men for military service, and kept order in the village. While urban and upper-
class Russians lived under written laws, tempered by the will of the autocrat, the
peasants lived largely under the customary laws of their region. As a peasant saying
declared, “God is invisible and the tsar is far away.” But the state, represented by the
police or local officials, like the justice of the peace, could make itself felt when it
needed to. After 1889 a new official, the land captain, appointed from the local
nobility, enjoyed broad administrative and judicial powers over peasants.
Whereas state law was based on individual responsibility, peasant law recog-
nized the collective responsibility of the village commune. The village as a whole
was responsible for all taxes and obligations assessed on the villagers. Whereas
private property was the norm in towns and cities, family-held or communal forms
of property were dominant in the villages. Townspeople might accumulate wealth
and rise far above their neighbors socially, but village folk remained generally
equal in material terms to one another, and the commune periodically redistrib-
uted the village lands to keep households relatively equal. Peasant society was
egalitarian and collective, in distinction to the world of the middle and upper
classes, which was more individualistic and hierarchical. Instead of individual
autonomy being highly praised, conformity to the ways of the village was enforced
by the favorable or unfavorable opinion of others. Peasants were hard on those
who deviated from social norms. Besides ridiculing them or gossiping about them,
peasants controlled their fellow villagers more harshly by beating them, expelling
them from the commune, turning them over to the military recruiter, or even, in
the case of thieves or arsonists, killing them.
Peasants largely ran their own local affairs through a village assembly and
their elected leaders, the elder and the tax collector. While the state tried to impose
its authority through these officials, in practice they governed with the consent of
the village assembly. The assembly had the greater authority among the peasants,
who would obey government directives only after they had been adopted by the
assembly. Male heads of household participated and voted in the assembly, which
was dominated by older and better-off peasants and excluded women, youths, and
men who did not have their own independent household.
Everything in peasant life was geared to the survival of the household and its
meager economy. Marriage, for example, was based not so much on fulfilling emo-
tional needs as on maintaining the supply of labor for the fields. Marrying for love
alone was considered shameful. Parents arranged marriages and tried to have their
children marry young, no later than their early twenties, in order to guarantee that
there would be grandchildren and that the family would survive. A boy was not
considered a man (muzhik) until he married and brought his wife into the house-
hold of his parents, where she then fell under the authority of his mother
and father. Girls had little choice but to marry. As peasant proverbs expressed it,
“Without a husband, a woman is an orphan.” “Life without a husband is a cess-
pool.” “Wings make the bird strong, a husband makes the wife beautiful.” Marriage
was seen as natural, required, and divinely sanctioned. Its value and meaning came
from giving birth to children, particularly sons, and man and wife laboring
together.
The family usually worked together and produced for themselves. Little was
left over for the market or the tax collector. In this way, peasants may be said to
differ from those we usually understand as farmers, those who produce surpluses
for the market and are, therefore, intimately involved in the capitalist system.
Russian peasant society was far from what Marxists call “bourgeois” society, in
which social improvement and position based on accumulated wealth, profit, and
saving is both a goal and an incentive to work more than one needs to satisfy basic
needs. Traditional in their work habits and ambitions, peasants were not guided by
ideas of profit, maximizing their wealth, or efficiency, as capitalist farmers might
be. Peasants suspected those with wealth and believed that it was accumulated at
someone else’s expense. They valued a rough equality, and anyone better off than
another was expected to help the less fortunate, at least ideally. Peasants bought
and sold in the markets when they could, but in times of great need they could
withdraw, lower the amounts that they ate and used, tighten their belts, and wait
for better times.
Their ideas of time were also different from those of people in modern indus-
trial societies. Rather than being “spent” or “wasted” as in capitalist economies or
regulated by clocks as in the modern world, peasant time responded to the natural
rhythms of the sun and the seasons. Peasants might work from dawn till dark or for
just a few hours, depending on what tasks or needs faced the family. When sowing
or harvesting had to be done, peasants worked long, hard hours, but in winter they
might spend most of the day asleep on the stove. Peasants worked as long as they
had to to finish a job, not as long as a boss or a time clock told them to work. In this
way, peasant work was task-oriented, not time-oriented. In addition, the work year
was punctuated by religious holidays and feast days, which when added to Sundays
made up over one hundred free days a year. The feasts were marked by huge con-
sumption of food and alcohol, toasts, singing, and mass fistfights between villages
that helped alleviate the petty hostilities and tensions of country life.
Though the Russian villagers lived in a world apart from that of the urban
classes, many peasants moved back and forth to towns to find work. The circum-
scribed cultural horizons of most peasants were broadened by such movements, as
well as by schooling, which peasants sought as a means to improving their lives. In
1900 almost three-quarters of them were illiterate. More men than women could
read, many of them learning their letters while serving in the army. The rate of
literacy rose dramatically in the last decades of the tsarist empire, from 21 percent
of the population in 1897 to about 40 percent on the eve of World War I. Though
it is difficult to generalize about the mentality and beliefs of millions of peasants,
historians have argued that they basically accepted the legitimacy of the existing
social and political order. The “Little Father Tsar” was a revered and holy figure
who, it was thought, cared for his children, the peasants, and would redress their
grievances if only nobles and bureaucratic officials did not prevent their cries from
reaching his ears. Loyal primarily to family and village, and perhaps their region,
tsar, and the Church, peasants did not have a very clear notion of allegiance to a
broader Russian nation.
The existing order was sanctioned by God, and peasants were wary of change.
They resisted innovation with the declaration that “our fathers and grandfathers
didn’t do that and they lived better than we do.” They opposed experiments with
new tools and were suspicious of the agronomists who tried to teach them new
techniques. One provincial administrator in Tambov went so far as to claim that
“fear of ridicule is deeply entrenched among the people. They fear evil much less
than being laughed at.” The world was highly unpredictable and full of dangers.
Nature was populated by spirits and demons, water nymphs and devils who might
be cruel or kind. Popular religion included belief in sorcerers and witches, spells
and curses, the evil eye, and the power of magic. Natural signs were used to tell the
peasants when to sow—“when the trees get dressed,” for example, or when a cer-
tain bird would arrive in the village.
Before the abolition of serfdom in 1861, most peasants lived in large extended
families, with several generations under the same roof. Family size shrank some-
what in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the household, like
the commune, remained patriarchal in structure, with ultimate authority in the
hands of the oldest male (bol’shak), who was at one and the same time father or
grandfather, judge and mediator of disputes, family accountant and supervisor of
chores and farm labor. Women were subordinated to him and other men. As a
peasant saying proclaimed, “A crab is not a fish, a woman is not a person.” Often
the victims of beatings or the violent justice of the village, peasant women were
forced to accept male dominance. “The more you beat the old woman,” another
proverb stated, “the tastier the soup will be.” Children were beaten regularly as
well, and one who escaped the village to become a famous actor remembered that
for his father “loving and fearing your parents was the same thing.” Over time,
particularly after Emancipation, family relations became less brutal, and women’s
complete subordination to the will of men was somewhat relieved. The institution
of justice of the peace, the spread of liberal ideas, and the migration of both men
and women from the villages to towns and factories introduced new ideas and
norms that undermined the unquestioned rule of tradition and older men.
Though they were in most things dependent on men and far less socially
mobile, peasant women were allowed to retain their dowries and their earnings
from certain kinds of work, such as selling eggs or feathers. Women maintained
the home and the children, reproducing the relations of power in the household
and the commune. They socialized the children and taught them the values of the
village world. The children grew up nurtured by mother’s love (“There is no other
friend like your mother,” a proverb proclaimed) and disciplined by the blows of an
authoritarian father (“Parental blows give health,” claimed another).
Peasants lived in simple, small cottages that outsiders experienced as dark,

dank, smelly, and smoky. A frequent visitor to Russian villages, the journalist
Maurice Hindus, put together a vivid composite picture of what it was like enter-
ing a peasant house:
There is no door from the street. To enter it you must go into the courtyard, which
is always thickly strewn with rags, egg-shells, bones, garbage, and all manner of
filth, for the peasant housewife dumps her refuse into the yard. In spring and fall
and at other times after a heavy rain, the yard, especially if it is on low ground,
turns into a puddle of slush. . . . The first room you enter is the seny—a sort of
vestibule with no windows and no light, excepting what dribbles in through the
crannies in the walls or the thatch overhead. In this room certain agricultural and
house implements are kept and provisions are stored. It is always cold and damp,
and smells of rotting wood and musty bread. . . . In front of the seny are the living
quarters, usually only one room, fair-sized, dark, damp, fetid, smoky, with bare
walls, a floor of earth or rough boards—always, excepting at Easter or Christmas,
in sad need of scrubbing. In the place of honor in the corner, directly beneath
the ikons, stands a big bare polished table; near or around it, crude backless
benches, often also a few chairs, and heavy planks around the walls. Then there
is the polati, a wide spacious platform, resting against the back wall, which serves
as a sleeping place. There is no mattress on it, no pillow, no sheets, no blankets,
no semblance of bedding, excepting loose straw or sacks stuffed with straw and
covered with a home-woven hemp cloth. When bedtime comes, the peasant
pulls off his boots, if he has any on, and drops on the polati, usually in his
clothes. . . . If the family happens to be very large every available inch of space on
the polati is occupied.
No glass on the windows, the wind and rain were kept out by stuffing rags or hay
into the openings. What warmth there was came from the large brick oven, where
cooking and laundry were done, where peasants bathed, and on top of which in
cold weather older folks or visitors slept. Under the stove lived the hens. The whole
hut was filled with dense smoke. “Whenever it comes to a choice between smoke
and warmth on the one hand and cold on the other,” writes Hindus, “the mouzhik
[peasant] always prefers the first.”
Travelers to the villages and self-styled ethnographers as well as novelists and
artists tried to fathom the mysteries and varieties of Russia’s peasants, but much of
their interior life must remain elusive. Among the most prevalent values and
beliefs of the villagers was the notion that everyone was obliged to work. “If you
want to eat bread,” the saying went, “then do not just sit on the oven.” The land
belonged to God and those who worked it. Peasants did not believe in private
property in land or in the “bourgeois” idea that land could be accumulated in one’s
own hands and make one rich. The land was to provide for all. Labor conveyed the
right to participate in the produce of the land, to be respected by one’s neighbors,
and to share in the occasional repartition of the communal lands. Peasants held
tenaciously to an ideal of equality: “All for one and one for all”; “Don’t run ahead
and leave your own behind.” Getting rich was a kind of vanity, but there was no
particular virtue in being very poor. “God smiles upon him who is satisfied
with little.” “Wealth is a sin before God, but poverty is a sin before other people.”
Outsiders who saw peasants sleeping on the ovens or taking time off on the many
religious holidays thought of the country folk as lazy, when in fact they responded
to the seasonal need to work and the need to rest. “The taxes are paid,” they said,
“we have bread, now it is time to lie down in a warm place.” “There are plenty of
God’s days ahead of us—we will work enough!” Sundays and holidays were sacred:
“He who plows on Sunday will be looking for his mare on Monday.” And alcohol
was the necessary lubricant of leisure. “On a holiday, even the sparrows have beer.”
Or vodka!
Tradition, following the old ways, was a guide to life: “Like fathers and grand-
fathers, so should we be,” the saying went. “Our fathers and grandfathers may not
have known everything, but they were not any worse off.” Life, nature, social rela-
tions—all were ordered and overseen by God: “What the mir ordains is what God
has decreed.” “You can do whatever you like, except climb to the moon.” Order,
stability, custom, and knowing what to expect were important to peasants, for life,
the weather, sickness, and death were unpredictable, and changes could shatter the
delicate balance of village life. “Much that is new, little that is good; where there is
novelty, there is crookedness.”
Peasants lived in close proximity to one another, unlike American farmers.
The gaze of the other villagers determined what behavior was proper and accept-
able. They addressed each other with the familiar pronoun, ty (thou), rather than
the formal vy (you), which was used for one’s social superiors, the landlord or the
occasional visitors from the city. Relations with others were based on emotional or
kinship attachments, on respect or disdain, sympathy or enmity, rather than on
strictly rational or instrumental using of another person. Being alone was unfor-
tunate. “A person who is alone will drown in his own kasha (porridge).” “Live for
people, and they will live for you.” As the nineteenth century progressed and peas-
ants after Emancipation were freer to affect their own lives, some peasants struck
out on their own and adopted more individualistic values. Certain traditions were
questioned; the power of the elders was challenged more often; women worked to
improve their status. Village life was never as static as some outsiders imagined.
Changes were taking place, though fundamental values of egalitarianism among
households, besides gender and age hierarchies, remained strong.
AUTOCRACY, NOBILITY, REFORMS, AND REACTION

In 1900 the head of the Russian state was Nicholas II (1894–1917). Though himself
a weak and indecisive man, he sat atop an unwieldy, overly bureaucratic political
structure that endowed him with enormous power. The Russian political system
was an autocracy, that is, a system in which the emperor’s (tsar’s) will was unlim-
ited. In Muscovite times, the whole of Russia was conceived of as the tsar’s own
patrimony, though from at least the sixteenth century a distinction was made
between the tsar’s person and the state. From the time of Peter the Great, the law
declared that the monarch was “not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in
Figure 1.1 Volga peasants, 1905 (RIA Novosti).
the world.” The emperor or empress was both legislator and executive, final judge
and arbiter of the fate of millions of his or her subjects.
Autocracy was the opposite of constitutionalism or limited government.
Unlike in Western monarchies, where the powers of rulers were constrained by
parliaments or noble councils, through charters or feudal rights invested in landed
elites, in Russia the nobility was not entitled to implement its interests or its will
through state institutions. Nobles had no independent claims to authority in the
state but were seen as the chosen servants of the tsar. Their land had originally
been granted to them by the grand dukes of Moscow and later the tsars and
in earlier centuries could have been taken from them at the will of the sovereign.
The Russian aristocracy made few attempts to limit the tsar’s power, and none
were successful. The bulk of the nobility preferred continuance of the autocracy,
rather than any aristocratic oligarchy or European representational institution,
at least until the early twentieth century. Tsar and noble supported each other,
maintaining a stable political regime that could defend the realm against foreign
threats, keep the various nobles from fighting each other, collect taxes and keep
order over the immense spread of the Russian lands, and preserve the nobles’ hold
over their peasant serfs.
While not a ruling class, the landed nobility was in actuality the dominant
class in Russian society and remained so until the revolution swept them into
oblivion. Their very way of life—their wealth, style, behavior, and distance from
ordinary people, all of which stemmed from their birth—gave them a sense of
their own right to rule and to be obeyed. The tsar and his state were the ultimate
guarantor and protector of the nobility and the landlord’s relationship to the peas-
antry. It was the tsarist government that enserfed the Russian peasantry in the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the state that crushed peasant rebellions, and
the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II (1855–81), who handsomely rewarded the landed
gentry when he freed the serfs from bondage. On the other hand, landed nobles
thought of themselves as the proper governing class of the empire, particularly in
the provinces, even though those nobles who stayed in the countryside lost much
of their influence to the highest hereditary nobles nearer to court and to a less
prestigious personal nobility within the civil bureaucracy and the military.
Russia often turned to reform of its governmental structure or social institu-
tions after defeats in war. Peter the Great looked to the West for models of governance
after Swedes and Turks humiliated Russia on the battlefield. Military needs led to
fiscal reforms that carried over into other spheres of life. Alexander II came to the
throne in the midst of the devastating losses in the Crimean War, when Russia faced
a number of European powers and the Ottoman Empire, and he soon empowered
his more liberal advisors to begin a vast program of emancipating the enserfed
peasantry, modernizing the army, and creating a new system of justice. The emper-
or’s concern was to stimulate economic development of the country and ensure
social stability and political order. Against the will of most of the landholding
nobles, Alexander granted personal freedom to the serfs and gave them land to
farm. Though the state paid the nobles up front, the peasants were obligated to pay
back the state’s loans and were thus condemned to immobility and indebtedness for
decades to come. Neither nobles nor peasants were satisfied. The former landlords
had neither the skills nor the capital to become efficient producers for the market,
while the peasants felt that the emancipation law had been “written for the masters,
not for us.” Peasants remained dependent on nobles, who controlled much of the
land, but as time passed, more and more nobles had to sell their land and many of
the buyers were peasants. The amount of land held by the nobility steadily dropped
after 1861, and land held by peasants increased until by 1905 peasants owned about
two-thirds of the arable land. The eventual effect of the Emancipation was a
landowning class of peasants that aspired to full, unencumbered possession of the
land, but ultimately that would come only with the revolution of 1917.
With the reduction of noble control over the countryside, the tsar set up insti-
tutions of local government, the zemstva, which were to run schools, provide for
welfare, and carry out local administration. To compensate for their losses in the
Emancipation, the nobles were given the dominant position in the zemstva. But
there was an inherent contradiction between an autocratic state, which in theory
placed unlimited power in the sovereign, and these somewhat-autonomous local
bodies running the districts and provinces. Later emperors and conservative
bureaucrats worked to restrict the powers of the zemstva, but new professionals—
referred to as the “third element”—found a home in the local institutions and
tried in small ways to improve life in the provinces. The state pulled in one
direction, toward central control and discouraging local initiative, while society
pulled in another, carving out a space for independent activity fostering social
improvement.
One of the most important innovations of the Age of the Great Reforms
was the juridical reform of 1864. Earlier, courts were meant to protect and defend
the state rather than the rights of the people. As in many countries, wealth, social
position, and whom one knew, along with well-placed bribes, determined how
well one would do in court. “Justice is strong,” the proverb claimed, “money is
stronger.” “Do not fight with a strong man, do not go to court against a rich man.”
“Where there is a court,” a most cynical saying went, “there is injustice.” Law
was made by the state, not by courts, but “God is high, and the tsar is far away.”
There seemed to be a contradiction between unlimited autocracy and the possibil-
ity of a judiciary free from the pressure and interference of government officials.
Yet Alexander II was determined to create a justice system independent of the
government’s will with judges and juries that would determine the verdicts. This
system was designed for the middle and upper classes, since peasants had their
own courts that ran according to the customary law of the region. The tsar set up
justices of the peace, who also would judge peasants and others in petty cases.
A hierarchy of courts was created for more important criminal and civil cases,
with judges appointed by the Ministry of Justice. By law these courts were to oper-
ate with complete freedom, free speech in the proceedings (if nowhere else in
Russia), and independent juries. Yet from the beginning the tsar could overturn a
verdict or keep a case out of court. When Alexander removed a judge and was told
that judges were irremovable, he simply said, “But not for me!” Autocracy trumped
procedure and the rule of law. When in the 1870s juries acquitted revolutionaries
whom the government wanted convicted, the police arrested them anyway.
“For the Russian autocracy to accept an independent judiciary,” writes historian
Richard Wortman, “required that it betray its essence and cease to be the Russian
autocracy.”
The monarchy made a strong effort to improve the position of the nobility
during the reign of Alexander III (1881–94), often viewed as a period of reaction-
ary policies and social repression. The emperor himself was an avowed anti-Semite,
who once said, “In the depth of my soul I am happy when the Jews are beaten up.”
His policies increased the influence and power of the landed nobility, among the
most conservative groups in the empire, and tied the peasants even more securely
to the village communes. He rejected the suggestion that courts and other state
institutions be open equally to all his subjects regardless of estate. Prepared to
quash any resistance or opposition to the smooth functioning of his state,
he sought to surround himself with “true Russians” as advisors. His ministers
initiated severe censorship of the press and in universities and carried out dis-
criminatory policies toward non-Russians. By the turn of the century the nobles’
economic and political decline was reversed, largely because of global economic
trends. Like the peasants, those nobles who held onto their land benefited from the
rise of cereal prices after 1900 and enjoyed a period of considerable prosperity on
the eve of World War I.
Noble attitudes on the autocracy varied from the reverent to the rebellious.
The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the uncle of Nicholas II, asked Sergei Witte,
a key advisor to the tsar, whether he thought the emperor was “merely a human
being or is he more?” Witte answered, “Well, the Emperor is my master and I am
his faithful servant, but though he is an autocratic ruler, given to us by God and
Nature, he is nevertheless a human being with all the peculiarities of one.” The
grand duke disagreed. “To my mind,” he said, “the Emperor is not a mere human
being, but rather a being intermediate between man and God.” A conservative
newspaper editor was more cynical when he confided to his diary in February
1900:
Autocracy is far superior to parliamentarism because under parliamentarism
people rule, while under autocracy—God rules. . . . The Sovereign listens only to
God, and only from God does he take advice, and because God is invisible, he
takes advice from everyone he meets: from his wife, from his mother, from his
stomach . . . and he accepts all this as an order from God.
One of Alexander III’s ministers, fearful of Western-style innovations that would

tamper with the divinely sanctioned autocratic system, warned:
Every attempt to introduce West European parliamentary forms of government
into Russia is doomed to failure. If the tsarist regime is overthrown, its place will
be taken by pure undisguised communism, the communism of Mr. Karl Marx,
who has just died in London and whose theories I have studied with attention
and interest.
The constitution granted by the last tsar, Nicholas II, in 1905 helped to revive
noble power by giving them influence in the upper house of parliament, the State
Council, and in the lower house, the Duma, thanks to property qualifications for
enfranchisement, and within high state institutions. The semiconstitutional, semi-
autocratic regime created after 1905 gave unexpected clout to a small number of
landed nobles, who in the last decades of the tsarist regime were able to make
political and land reform difficult, if not impossible. Their recalcitrance and short-
sightedness contributed directly to the final crisis of the imperial state. So closely
tied to the tsarist regime was the nobility that its demise quickly followed the fall
of tsarism.
In stark contrast to the fate of the nobility, another institution of the tsarist
period, the bureaucracy, not only survived the revolution but after some major
surgery transformed itself into the central nervous system of the new Soviet
system. From its modest origins in the Muscovite state the Russian state bureau-
cracy grew steadily as an instrument of westernization, expanding from about
15,000 to 16,000 officials in the late eighteenth century to more than 74,000 by the
mid-nineteenth century and on to about 385,000 in the early twentieth. During
the nineteenth century the number of officials rose seven times as rapidly as did
Russia’s population. Even so, in Russia there were fewer bureaucrats per person
than in any other European country. Though the very highest officials and officers
were often men of great property and wealth, family ties became far less important
for a state or military career as time went on. Increasingly nonnoble in origin, the
bureaucrats were people whose status depended less on birth and more on educa-
tion and achievement.
As some members of the bureaucracy became more professional in their out-
look and work habits, particularly in the nineteenth century, they attempted to
promote regular procedures and an adherence to law in order to combat the corrup-
tion and disarray within the ministries and the influence of court favorites. They
were ultimately thwarted by the autocratic nature of the tsarist system, which allowed
the tsar to act in arbitrary and contradictory ways, making a decree on a Tuesday and
changing his mind on a Thursday. The autocrat’s ability to act on whim precluded the
establishment of a general rule of law in Russia. The country was a land of regula-
tions and personal favoritism rather than a land of impersonal rules, predictable
laws, and rational bureaucracy. Russian officials were often petty men of little talent
who did not have clearly defined functions and procedures within the bureaucracy.
Moreover, there were no effective channels of communication through which influ-
ential people in society could express their interests to the bureaucratic state.
Closely allied to the state was the Russian Orthodox church. The tsar was head
of both church and state, and from the time of Peter the Great, the Holy Synod, a
state institution, replaced the Muscovite patriarchs as the highest authority within
the church. Steadily from the early eighteenth century, the church lost influence
and power within the ruling groups, even as it retained the loyalty of the vast peas-
ant population. Catherine the Great secularized the church’s enormous land
holdings and deprived it of its serfs and much of its revenues. The church became
dependent on state subsidies, while ordinary parish clergy grew ever poorer, living
off contributions from their parishioners. As Russian elite culture became more
Western and secular, the role of religion in life diminished, and much of the intel-
ligentsia saw the church as a reactionary ideological pillar of the autocracy. The
church retained control over marriage and divorce, however, and much of educa-
tion was in its hands. At times conservative tsars, like Nicholas I (1825–55) and
Alexander III, turned to the church to reinstate old Russian values and religion in
the minds of the young. On occasion missionaries attempted to convert pagans
and Muslims among the non-Russian population to Orthodoxy but with limited
success.
The Orthodox clergy was divided between the “black clergy,” celibate monks
who could rise to the top of the Church’s hierarchy, and the “white clergy,” the
lowly parish priests who could marry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
local parish priests were elected by their parishioners and then confirmed by the
bishops. But over time villagers tended to choose children of their priests to
become priests, and eventually the priesthood became hereditary in clerical fami-
lies. The clergy received certain privileges. Like nobles, they were freed from direct
taxation and exempted from corporal punishment and military service. By the
early nineteenth century the status of clergy was equal to that of personal nobles
(for example, they had the right to ride in carriages). But in the eyes of most nobles
they remained social inferiors. Despised for their loose morals by peasants as
well, dissipate priests dragged down the prestige of the Church. The higher author-
ities worked to reform the Church, abolish the hereditary status of the parish
priests, improve their education, and turn what had become a social estate into
a free profession.
Russia’s Orthodox church was highly traditional and seldom innovative theo-
logically and never experienced anything like the Reformation. Indeed, its greatest
challenge came from an antireformationist movement, known as Old Belief, that
beginning in the seventeenth century resisted any changes in liturgy or ritual.
Ironically, the ultratraditionalist schismatics, particularly those who chose to live
without priests of any kind, brought a spiritual vigor and even radicalism to their
religious practices. They resisted the church hierarchy’s injunction to cross oneself
with three fingers rather than the traditional two, and thousands of schismatics
burned themselves to death rather than succumb to alien authority. For millions of
Russians religion was deeply felt, though very often its most passionate practice,
whether among sectarians or peasants who mixed Orthodoxy with superstition
and remnants of paganism, occurred outside the church.
The ponderous bulk of the tsarist state weighed heavily on the Russian land-
scape, crushing the weak institutions of civil society that budded outside of the
state. The tsar and his ministers remained suspicious of all autonomous organiza-
tions and activities of his subjects that in any way might compromise their absolute
power. Censors and the police patrolled the society, restricting intellectuals to pri-
vate discussions, preventing workers from forming unions (up to 1906), and
restraining efforts by professionals and even nobles to form organizations to
express their own views and interests. What did develop was a public sphere of
educated people who were able in a limited way to express their ideas, largely
through literature and art, but the regime stifled a broad civil society of autono-
mous organizations and interest groups. Only in the last decade of the regime,
after the constitutional reforms of 1905, was the realm of rights briefly and hesi-
tantly extended to the population. Between society and the state emerged the
alienated intelligentsia of liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries, which became a
rival society with oppositional ideologies that seriously threatened the defenders
of tsarism. In Russia, as the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci put it, “the
state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”
THE COMING OF CAPITALISM

Historians of capitalism have emphasized the importance of towns in the early
Middle Ages as the original site where long-distance trade created the conditions
for the emergence of a market economy, the increased use of money and credit,
and a division of labor between agricultural production and manufacture. In his
influential writings Karl Marx argued that as a system of production capitalism
was indebted to early modern England, the enclosure of peasant lands by the pow-
erful that drove villagers into poverty, the towns, and waged labor. In Russia the
centuries of serfdom, with peasants tied to land and landlords, unable to move
freely and forced to produce for their masters, inhibited the development of both
market relations and urban settlements. In the deep past towns in Russia were first
and foremost fortresses, walled settlements often centered around an inner fort,
the kremlin, with tradesmen and craftsmen settled around them. They were few
and far between. Even on the eve of World War I, Russian towns officially num-
bered only 729. The average distance between them was 55 miles in European
Russia, closer in Poland and the Baltic region, but 307 miles in Siberia. In Western
Europe the corresponding distances between towns averaged from just under 5
miles to just over 9 miles. Saint Petersburg, the capital and the empire’s largest city,
had 1,265,000 inhabitants in 1897; Moscow followed with 1,039,000. The next
eight largest cities—Warsaw, Odessa, Łódź, Riga, Kiev, Kharkov, Tiflis, and Vilna—
were all in non-Russian ethnic borderlands. Until quite late Russian towns were in
large part agrarian, with more than half the population engaged in agriculture, and
only in the second half of the nineteenth century did those towns turn into trad-
ing, manufacturing, and industrial centers. Still, Russia remained an overwhelmingly
rural country. On the eve of the revolution of 1917, only 17 percent of the popula-
tion lived in towns and cities.
As Russia entered the last quarter of the nineteenth century, its economy was
still dominated by peasant agricultural production, much of which never reached
the market. Trade and commerce were poorly developed, and for nearly a century
influential Russian economists had been advocating that the country follow
Western Europe and America in the direction of market capitalism. The European
and American economies were based on private ownership of enterprises, hired
rather than compulsory labor, and production of goods for sale on the market.
Moreover, England, the first capitalist economy, had led the world into industrial-
ization and mass production. Though in many ways the 1880s and early 1890s
were the height of tsarist patriarchy or patrimonialism, those decades were also
the moment of the first great takeoff of Russian industrialization and began a rad-
ical transformation of the economy. As his minister of finance Sergei Witte wrote
in his memoirs, “Alexander III recognized that Russia could be made great only
when it ceased being an exclusively agricultural country. A country without
strongly developed industry could not be great.”
Serfdom had inhibited the formation of an industrial workforce by keeping
peasants tied to the land, and the great power of the landed nobility, the estate
most opposed to capitalist development, inhibited the shift to a market economy.

Once the serfs were freed, however, and noble power suffered a decline, the road
to capitalism was somewhat smoother. By requiring redemption payments for
their land from the peasants, nobles contributed to the circulation of money. Those
nobles able to adjust to the new economic environment consolidated considerable
estates and successfully engaged in commercial agriculture. The increased flow of
grain to market and the greater (though still restricted) mobility of peasants aided
the growth of cities and the emergence of a working class.
Russia was capital-poor and had only a small entrepreneurial class of
industrialists and merchants. The least “bourgeois” of any major European state,
Russia had few traditions that encouraged enterprise. Almost all social groups
were suspicious of middle-class virtues, such as thrift, delayed gratification, and
investment for the future, and considered the accumulation of wealth obscene.
Intellectuals, from the conservative novelist Feodor Dostoevsky to the Marxists,
shared with nobles and peasants a contempt for the “bourgeoisie,” the propertied
middle class of the West. Standards of honesty were low; arbitrariness, cheating,
bribery, and the currying of favor with officials marked economic and social inter-
changes. In a society where obedience to law was not internalized but required a
firm authority to enforce it, personal relationships often took precedence over
legal norms.
Yet a small group of entrepreneurs, some of them former serfs, many mem-
bers of dissident religious sects like the Old Believers, emerged in the nineteenth
century to plant the seeds of a market economy. Over time the merchants devel-
oped respect for hard work, thrift, temperance, and modest living. Russian business
operators tended to be patriotic and devoted to autocracy, probably because they
were dependent on the state for support. They did not develop oppositional ide-
ologies, like liberalism, as was common in Western Europe, but were instead
nationalistic, anti-Western, and supportive of Russian imperialism in Central Asia
and Eastern Europe. Merchants were hostile to nobles, whom they considered lazy
and undeservedly privileged, and nobles reciprocated by looking upon business-
people as “dirty-faced” and “fat-bellied.”
The weakness of the Russian middle class meant that other sources of capital
formation had to be found. Some economic growth resulted from private indus-
tries, such as cotton textiles and sugar refining, that found domestic markets. But
the weakness of the internal market and the lack of purchasing power among the
peasants constricted rapid development. Beginning in the 1880s the tsarist state
became a major initiator of industrial development. Taxing the peasants, export-
ing grain abroad, and borrowing from foreign investors, the government established
a program of public works, such as the building of the Trans-Siberian railroad, that
stimulated other enterprises, among them the iron and steel industry. In 1891 the
Mendeleev Tariff, favored by the merchants, placed high duties on imported
European goods that created a protected area in which native industry could
develop and contributed to the state’s revenues. The government acted in the role
of the largely absent Russian bourgeoisie through a system of state capitalism,
which was an early version of deficit financing. In a capital-poor country the

government stepped in, borrowed money, and founded new industries that then
stimulated a cycle of economic growth. Long before Communists took power,
Russia had the largest state-financed industrial sector of any major power.
The results were spectacular. Gross factory output increased more than 5 per-
cent per year from 1883 to 1913, sustaining an annual rate of overall industrial
growth of 8 percent per year in the 1890s. The labor force grew about 3 percent per
year, and labor productivity in industry increased 1.8 percent annually. The older
industrial regions of Russia, like the Urals, were soon eclipsed by the newly indus-
trialized Ukraine. Coal from the Donets region provided fuel for locomotives as
well as coke for the iron and steel works that made rails for the new railroads. Iron
ore from Krivoi Rog created a new industrial landscape around Kharkov and
Ekaterinoslav. At the same time, Moscow and Vladimir took the lead in textile
production away from Saint Petersburg, which remained, however, both a textile
and a metallurgical center. Industrial production in Russian Poland increased ten
times between 1870 and 1890, doubling between 1887 and 1893.
THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA

Education in tsarist Russia was a privilege reserved for the few. From the early
nineteenth century those distinguished from the rest of society by education and
their reformist attitudes were known collectively as the intelligentsia. As a social
group, the intelligentsia was marked by its sense of being apart from the people
around it and its distance from the tsarist state. One of its earliest representatives,
Aleksandr Herzen, defined his fellow Moscow intellectuals as possessed of “a
strong feeling of alienation from official Russia and from their surroundings.” The
historian Marc Raeff saw as “the characteristic trait of the intelligentsia” its con-
ception of “its role as one of service to the people.” Less generously, Dostoevsky
criticized the intelligentsia for being “historically alienated from the soil” and for
“raising itself above the people.” While liberals in Russian society saw the intelli-
gentsia as social reformers engaged in enlightened activity, conservatives thought
of it as pathological and ultimately harmful.
The intelligentsia was not a social class, that is, a group of people of similar
social position or engaged in related work; rather it was a group of men and women
of different social origins united by vague feelings of alienation from society and
dedicated to changing Russian society and politics. At first most intellectuals were
nobles, but increasingly a number of people from no definite social estate, the so-
called raznochintsy, joined their ranks. Idealist in both the philosophical and
political sense, the early intellectuals gathered in discussion circles where they
debated questions of art and philosophy. After the December 1825 conspiracy by
Western-oriented nobles to overthrow the autocrat was crushed, the new emperor,
Nicholas I, became deeply suspicious of intellectuals and reformers. As police sur-
veillance increased, real politics became too dangerous, and discussions about the
perfectibility of human beings and society became a kind of surrogate.
The first generation were liberals either enamored of the West (the
Westernizers) or who looked backwards to an idealized collectivist Russia (the
Slavophiles). Herzen and his friend Nikolai Ogarev became interested in the fledg-
ling socialist movements in France, but their innocent search for political
alternatives ended with their arrest in 1834. In the next decade a few intellectuals
became more radical, more critical of religion, and more directly involved in poli-
tics. Slavophiles and Westernizers no longer frequented each other’s circles, and
among Westernizers socialists broke with the more moderate liberals. The
Slavophiles celebrated the imagined harmony and collectivity of the peasant com-
mune and feared that western capitalism combined with Russian bureaucratic
absolutism would eventually destroy the unique values of traditional Russian life.
The liberal Westernizers believed that Russia had to abandon its backward ways
and become more like Europe—industrial, urban, and constitutional. Reform had
to come from above, from the state, and be gradual and moderate. The socialists
combined elements from both Slavophilism and Westernism. They called for a
leap beyond capitalism into a social order based on the peasant commune. For
men like Herzen socialism meant a fusion of what they took to be democratic and
egalitarian elements of the commune with the guarantees of individual dignity and
rights found in the most advanced Western states. But they fervently wanted to
avoid the West’s capitalism, private property, a proletariat, and an urban industrial
system as Russia moved along its own unique road into the future. If reform did
not work, they were prepared to advocate revolutionary change.
With the outbreak of revolutions in western Europe in 1848, the tsar cracked
down hard on dissident politics within his empire. The liberal writer Ivan Turgenev
was sent into exile for writing a laudatory obituary for his fellow writer Nikolai
Gogol. Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to death for belonging to a socialist
circle. At the last moment, with the novelist standing before a mock firing squad,
the sentence was changed to exile in Siberia. This dark period culminated in
Russia’s hapless drift into war over Crimea (1853–56) and its defeat at the hands of
the European powers. With the ascension of Alexander II, a new era of somewhat-
freer expression and reform began. New journals and newspapers, discussion
circles, and underground political movements blossomed. Poetry, short stories,
and novels, which had appeared for the first time in Russia in significant quantity
and quality only in the first decades of the century, now became a major medium
through which powerful thoughts about society, personality, and morality were
expressed. Even when hobbled by the censors, Russia’s writers, from Pushkin
and Mikhail Lermontov to Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and on to
Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, managed to produce a literature that in its
profound explorations of human existence exposed the pettiness and brutality
of Russian life.
The 1860s was an age of radical, even revolutionary, politics, but the young
radicals denigrated the elitism of Russia’s westernized culture. They considered
literature and art to be products of upper-class sensibilities, and thus cut off from
the great majority of the people. Rather than poetry and romantic intuition, the
radicals called for a commitment to science, reason, and useful art. The acknowl-
edged leader of the “men of the sixties” was Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828–89), a
philosopher and the editor of a leading intellectual journal, who boldly identified
beauty with the morally and socially desirable. Art was to show life as it is and
ought to be. Turgenev called Chernyshevskii a “literary Robespierre,” and in his
famous short novel Fathers and Sons he drew a sharp portrait of the rival political
generations. From his jail cell Chernyshevskii answered with his own novel, What
Is to Be Done?, in which he portrayed a model revolutionary that inspired many
young men and women to turn to revolutionary activity.
Alexander II’s early reign was also a time in which non-Russian peoples of the
empire enjoyed relatively benign treatment by the tsarist government. Some ethnic
leaders, as well as tsarist officials, advocated assimilation into the dominant Russian
culture. Urban Armenians russified the endings of their names, and influential
Jewish intellectuals pushed for secular reform of their community. At the same
time poets and patriotic writers in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Caucasus elabo-
rated ideas of national culture and history that laid the foundation for future claims
to nationhood. But when Poles rebelled against the empire in 1863, Alexander
brutally suppressed the movement and moved away from his earlier reformist
efforts. The government was particularly determined to deny separate nationality
to the Slavic peoples of the empire. Petr Valuev, Alexander II’s minister of the inte-
rior, declared that “a special Little Russian language [Ukrainian] has not existed,
does not exist, and cannot exist.” Later, just as Ukrainian writers were developing
their own literary language, the state forbade all printing and performances in
Ukrainian.
In 1866 an attempt was made on the life of the tsar, and the era of tolerance
came to an abrupt end. Liberals bided their time, hoping that the emperor would
renew his program of reform. Radicals went underground, and in the 1870s sev-
eral thousand dedicated young people organized a movement “to the people,” to
try both to teach the peasants as well as to learn from them. These propeasant
activists made up the political movement known as populism, which sought to
create a Russian socialist society based on the peasant commune. When their
efforts at propaganda met little positive response from the peasants, one wing of
the populist movement turned to terrorism to weaken the government and inspire
peasant rebellion.
MARX, LENIN, AND THE CASE OF RUSSIA

The writings of the German philospher and historian Karl Marx (1818–83) were
known to a small segment of the Russian reading public from about 1848, when
the government censor permitted translations to enter Russia. The state’s guardian
of proper information was convinced that Marx’s work in no way threatened the
regime but, rather, was “an abstract speculation” with no relevance to Russia.
In 1872 the first volume of Marx’s major economic treatise, Capital, was translated
into Russian, and Marx himself was surprised by its reception. “By some irony of
fate,” he wrote, “it is just the Russians whom for twenty years I have incessantly
attacked [who] have always been my well-wishers.”
Marxism was first taken up in Russia by the young populist revolutionaries,
who, impressed by his analysis of capitalism and appalled by the rise of “bourgeois
society” in the West, resolved to prevent such a social evolution in Russia. Both Marx
and his closest associate, Friedrich Engels, admired the revolutionary zeal of the
populists and argued that Russia would be an exception to the general European
development of capitalism. If it acted soon enough, Russia would be able to avoid
capitalism and build its socialism on the commune, but only “if the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other.” But Marx’s most fervent followers came, not from the rad-
ical, but from the moderate wing of populism. Led by Georgii Plekhanov (1856–1918),
a number of young socialists gradually lost faith in the commune, which they saw as
already infected by the polarizing effects of the market economy, and declared them-
selves “Marxists.” Rather than concede that Russia might build a peasant-based
socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia could not avoid a bourgeois-capitalist
stage. A “bourgeois revolution,” like that in North America in 1776 or France in
1789, was inevitable in Russia and was necessary to create the conditions for the full
development of capitalism and democracy. The task of socialists and workers, wrote
Plekhanov, was to aid the Russian bourgeoisie to make its revolution and, once that
revolution was victorious, to demand the political rights necessary for the working
class to create the conditions for the next, the socialist, revolution.
With Plekhanov, Russian Marxism began its own drift away from the complex
and often contradictory writings of Marx himself into a more deterministic, rigid,
and dogmatic philosophy. For Plekhanov economic forces were decisive in deter-
mining social structures and ideological superstructures, that is ideas, laws, and
culture. Changes in the material basis of society provided the initial impetus for
institutional and ideological change. The coming of capitalism to Russia meant
that the peasant commune was a relic of history and should not be preserved.
Objective economic trends and experience in the factories would create a proletar-
ian-socialist consciousness among workers. “Let our intellectuals go to the
workers,” wrote Plekhanov. “Life itself will make them revolutionaries.”
Plekhanov and his comrades formed the first Russian Marxist organization,
the Liberation of Labor Group, in Geneva in 1883. At first only a few isolated intel-
lectuals and workers read their pamphlets, but by the mid-1890s Marxist ideas
became increasingly popular among students, the broader intelligentsia, and the
new working class. The extraordinary reception for a body of ideas that to many
seemed inappropriate for a largely peasant, primarily agricultural country with an
insignificantly small proletariat was the result of the conjuncture of several devel-
opments. First, history seemed to be on the side of the Marxists. The Russian
industrialization, producing in its wake a class of factory workers and a new urban
environment, conformed to the predictions of the Marxists that the future lay with
industry and capitalism rather than with the peasant commune. Second, the
famine of 1891 demonstrated the helplessness and passivity of many peasants and
turned many young intellectuals toward the workers as an alternative revolution-

ary force. Third, Marxism itself had a number of internal appeals. It was both a
sociological tool of analysis of the present and a philosophy of history that antici-
pated a classless society at the end of a long struggle. Marxism contained both an
appreciation of the power of industrial capitalism to create the modern world and
a powerful critique of the new economic order that promised transcendence into
a more just, egalitarian, and harmonious realm. And finally, Marxism was a doc-
trine from the West identified with the most progressive social movements of the
age, the Social Democratic parties of Germany, Austria, and other European coun-
tries. Rather than isolating Russia and making its development peculiar, Marxism
linked Russia’s future to that of the rest of the continent.
One of the precocious young Marxists of the 1890s was a brilliant and self-
assured law student from the Volga city of Simbirsk, Vladimir Ulianov (1870–1924),
soon to be known by his revolutionary nom de guerre, Lenin. Born April 10 (22
n.s.), 1870, the son of a dedicated civil servant who was an inspector of schools and
a mother who raised five children, Vladimir Ulianov had a happy childhood and
excelled at school. His older brother, Aleksandr, joined a revolutionary conspiracy
and was executed when Vladimir was seventeen—an event that had a profound
effect on the younger boy. Vladimir Ulianov entered Kazan University but was
expelled within a few months for participation in a student protest. He completed
his law degree as a correspondence student, but by the early 1890s he was already
studying Marxism. After moving to St. Petersburg in 1893, he met his future wife
and party comrade, Nadezhda Krupskaia. From his earliest days in the Marxist
movement, Lenin was respected for his militancy and leadership qualities. For
these reasons as well as his premature baldness, his fellow Marxists nicknamed
him “Old Man.”
Lenin was by nature and training an intellectual, a scholar of politics whose
published works would fill fifty-five volumes. He was a rationalist who proposed
the application of reason and science to political and social problems, which he
believed could be solved through the institution of socialism. As a scientist of
insurrection, he worked hard to discipline his emotions, overcome his irritations,
and direct all his knowledge and energies to the revolution. Gorky remembered
Lenin’s musings as they listened to Beethoven’s “Apassionata” Sonata in the writer’s
home on Capri sometime before the revolution:
I know nothing greater than the “Apassionata.” . . . I always think with pride: what
marvellous things human beings can do! But I can’t listen to music too often. It
affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the
heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And
you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have
to hit them over the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use
force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard.
Supremely self-confident, often aggressive, even ruthless, in his polemics with

opponents and comrades, Lenin could be personally charming, had a good sense
of humor, and was modest and unassuming. A man without personal pretensions
and ascetic in his personal life, Lenin was coldly practical about the struggle for
the international revolution. Power was the means of achieving socialism, and
nothing, in his view, could be allowed to stand in the way of its victory. “The sci-
entific concept of a dictatorship,” he wrote, “signifies nothing other than a power
which, unrestricted by any laws, uninhibited by any absolute rules, resorts freely to
the use of violence.” While his ultimate vision was to create a society in which the
simplest people would rule themselves, he argued that dictatorship and violence,
civil war and repression of the enemy, were the only practical means to that end.
Like many of the younger recruits to the Social Democratic movement in the
1890s, Lenin shifted his attention from the economic struggle, agitating for
improved wages and working conditions for workers, to a more political strategy
aimed at overthrowing the autocracy. After the first attempt to unite Russian
Marxists in a Russian Social Democratic Labor Party failed in 1898, Lenin and his
associates began publishing a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), around which politi-
cally minded revolutionaries could coalesce. The number of small circles of
workers and socialist intellectuals loosely affiliated with social democracy mush-
roomed in the next few years.
In the spring of 1902 Lenin published What Is to Be Done? a comprehensive
statement of his thoughts on the role of a revolutionary Social Democratic party.
Here he called for a “party of the new type,” a centralized, disciplined army of
Social Democratic professionals, rather than a broad-based party of simple adher-
ents. Lenin broke with those Marxists who believed that class consciousness
generated by actually living and working under capitalism was sufficient for work-
ers. “The history of all countries shows,” he wrote in one of his most revealing
phrases, “that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop
only trade-union consciousness.” Raising workers’ wages and shortening hours
was not enough for Lenin. Workers must become aware of the need for the politi-
cal overthrow of autocracy. That awareness could be acquired by workers only
from outside the economic struggle, from the Social Democratic intelligentsia.
The party of revolutionary Social Democrats was to act as the tribune of the whole
people, expounding the need for democracy, and not as a “trade union secretary”
advocating the immediate material interests of workers alone. Under Russian con-
ditions the party was to be made up “first and foremost of people who make
revolutionary activity their profession. . . . All distinctions between workers and
intellectuals. . .must be effaced.” Such an organization was to be small, as secret as
possible, and willing to push the workers beyond their immediate desires.
The issues laid out in What Is to Be Done? had been widely discussed in Social
Democratic circles, but they had never before been exposed so starkly. Lenin’s per-
sonal political style, which was to have a decisive influence on the Bolshevik wing
of Russian social democracy, was expressively demonstrated in this book. Here he
promoted sharp ideological distinctions, principled divisions, and purity of posi-
tion and threw aside accommodation, compromise, and moderation in favor
of an impatient commitment to action. For a militant revolutionary like Lenin
conciliation was a negative quality. Discipline, sobriety, toughness, and subordina-

tion to the dictates of the party leaders became the new virtues.
Though Leninism was not yet a fully formed political tendency, Lenin’s lan-
guage and proposed practice had an immediate appeal for certain Social
Democratic activists. In the summer of 1903, Lenin’s plans for a “party of a new
type” seemed about to bear fruit, as Social Democrats from all over Russia made
their way to Brussels for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party (RSDLP). But on the crucial question of who should be allowed to join
the party, the delegates split into rival factions. Lenin wanted only people who
actively participated in one of the party organizations to be members. On this
issue he lost to his friend Iulii Martov, who favored including anyone who ren-
dered regular personal assistance to the party under the guidance of one of its
organizations. Though to many outsiders the matter of defining membership
seemed trivial, in fact two different visions of the political party—one an army of
professional revolutionaries, the other a mass party of supporters—divided the
Russian Social Democrats irrevocably. After other divisive debates and walkouts
by dissidents, Lenin soon gained a majority in the congress, and his faction came
to be known as Bolsheviks (the majority) and those who followed Martov and
others were labeled Mensheviks (the minority). The split between those Marxists
who emphasized leadership and direction over the workers’ movement (the
Bolsheviks) and those who promoted more democratic participation of the rank
and file in the movement (the Mensheviks) would eventually divide the political
Left throughout the world. After World War I, those who preferred Lenin’s van-
guardist model would be known as Communists and those who favored a more
moderate, democratic approach would be known as Social Democrats.
EMPIRE AND NATION IN TSARIST RUSSIA

Of the various kinds of states that have existed historically, nation-states and
democracies are among the most recent, and empires and monarchies have been
among the most ubiquitous and long-lasting. Empires are a particular form of
political domination. Almost without exception created through conquest and
justified initially by the rule that might makes right, empires, like dynastic monar-
chies, ultimately drew their legitimacy from God. Some people in an empire had
the right to rule over other people in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship.
Empires were characterized by inequality and distinction between the rulers, who
were deemed to be superior, and their subjects, who were said to be inferior. In
empires the right to rule comes from above, not from below from the people as in
nation-states and democracies.
A nation-state, the most widespread political form of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, is fundamentally different from the ideal type of empire.
While empire is inequitable rule over something different, the citizens of a nation-
state are equal to one another under the law. A nation-state, at least in theory if not
always in practice, represents the people conceived as a “nation.” A nation is a
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hynsders derfoar en al gaueftich seach se Wolmoet hjar kopke neist
Lysbeth hjarres en âlde Wobbe foaryn. De sidene linten fen syn
broek waeiden yn ’e moarnskoelte, de sulveren knopen fen syn
baeitsje glimden der oer en hy siet derfoar as in âld soldaet, dy-t in
keningsdochter rydt.
En de middeis stie de wei swart. Foaroan yn ’e bûrren by de
tonne, it brânpunt, de bern mei de noas der op, bang en nijsgjirrich
fen beiden. Yn hiele kloften kaem it folk delsetten op de
Wedzebûrren ta en den einliks de pret sels, de kat yn ’e tonne. Der
hokke alles gear, hwet durf hie, om in gleone kat, dy-t út in tonne
fleach, dy-t stikken kneppele wie, to fangen. En dy moed liichde der
net om.
For in dûbbelstûr sloech min de tonne en by tiden klapten se er op
oan trije kanten. Einliks en to ’n lêsten kaem ien fen Beine Harms
jonges, sa ’n greaten, loaijen slinger en dy diich me der in houw, det
de boom fleach út de tonne en ’e kat oer ’e wei en stoude razen de
Wedze-kant út, alle folk der maltjirgjend efteroan. Hwa ’t him nou
fong, det wie de man. Dy lei de dei gjin wynaeijen.
Ald Janom kaem der stadich oantraepjen, in nuzje foeken oer ’t
skouder, hwette toside op ’e wei. Roan der simtiden gjin bigangel yn
’e midden? hy moete se ljeaver net, hwent den moast ’r de lêste
folgje en sjen, hwer se hinne gyngen.... hy wie berne mei in helm.
Ald Janom skerpe nou syn harsens op, myn goede guant! hwet
gyng ’t der oan wei! Patriotten en prinsljue slaende deilis? Goed
patriot as ’r wie—droech ’r net altyd reade streekhoazzen en dronk ’r
net altyd út in blau reauke?—winske ’r op ’t selde stuit alle prinsljue
troch ’t hinnipen finster[3] sjen to litten, mar dochs waerden syn
eagen roun fen skrik, do-t ’r foar him op ’e wei de razene kat
oankommen seach, lyk op him yn en der al it baltende, laeitsjende
en skreauwende folk efter oan yn in wolken fen stof.
[3] De galge.
Hy pielde ek mei bijkjen, wie dos net sa gau forfeard for in prip ef
in klau en koart biredt, smiet ’r de kat it hiele bosk foeken foar de
foetten. Dy rekke ’r yn fortiisd en siet.... Hânsum in âld bûsdoek om
de rjuchterhân, de kat by ’t nekfel, âld Janom wie fiif trije-gounen
riker en trêdde stadich nei de karmasters ta, ek gjin stap hirder, al
ho-t de kat ek moardte en oangyng.
It folk hantsjeklapte om ’t hirdst, mar do-t der ien bigoan to
roppen fen Patriot! patriot! wie ynienen de kaert forjown. Knyften
kamen út ’e ské en de jassen út en yn in omsjoch stiene der twa
partijen tsjin inoar oer, it grou sa op inoar, det hja koene der bêst ta
komme en stekke inoar dea. De frouljue stouden fen ruten, de
lietsjesjongers waerden stil, de kat socht in hinnekommen yn in hege
beam en siet der to blazen en to fûl-sjen.
En do sloegen se der yn, om mâllens. Ald Janom hie al gau sa ’n
trewinkel, det dy joech him skytskoarjend ôf en Harm Beins joegen
se in sneed oer ’t ear, it hinge der suver by. Japik snider en Klaes
Stok tokerfden se suver de hiele kop, it bloed sipele hjar by
strieltsjes yn ’e hals út, mar twa fûle mirden wierne ’t, hja joegen
gjin krimp en skreauwden mar fen „Oranje boven”.
Der riisde great en strang eksteur mei syn assistinten út it skaed
fen ’e wei en do wie ’t fen naei-út. Hja fleagen oer ’e hage en troch
de sleatten, ien wie yn in omsjoch by Nanne Binderts boppe op ’t
hea en eksteur, âld, krebintich man, gnúvde al wakker om him
hinne, mar markbite al ringen, hy kaem in tel mennich to let. It
saekje wie krekt biredt, de baeifangers útpykt. Hy seach de stirt fen
in lang kammisoal noch krekt skeanoer de lânnen wippen, like det
Wibe Lubberts net? dy Oranje smycht? en de hokken hjouwer foar
him út forweegden sims al sa onnatuerlik. Mar syn wiif wie de marke
op en hy hie in pear fles wyn yn in bultsje kaf, det gûd koe hjoed
mei de waermte ek wol net ris better wirde....
En eksteur sette de hoarnen brul hwet leger en skreau op in
hikkestirt in „rapport” en de assistinten teikenen graech for in fijfje
alles, hwet eksteur dy deis sjoen miende to hawwen.
De dei wie sa moai en de sinne sa hjit, scoe min net miene kinne,
noch yn midsimmer to wêzen? Nou kaem de joun, fol tear ljocht en
lei in ljochte, goudene skimer oer ’e hege popelbeam by de sleat....
de drokke lûden fen ’e dei joegen hjar njonkenlytsen nei gefluster en
stiltme. De dauwe bigoan stadich út ’e sleatten to tinen en ’e
beamspintsjes waerden warber en hingen to weven twisken de fine
bledtsjes fen ’e palmbeamkes yn ’t naentsjetún. Oan ’e
kumbeammen glimke hjir en der in readwangkje apel, de hege
ligusterhage wie fol fen fûgelgetsjotter en sa út en troch kreauwden
se yn inoar om as in kloftke útlittene bern by Geale skoenmakkers
foardoar.
In hiele kloft moai opdiene frouljue stie by Eadske ’s by ’t bjinstap
to praten. Ho scoe ’t tojoune komme? tape de hospes wol nei de
reboelje fen tomiddei? Hy hie al sei, hy scoe twa Westereintsjers
hiere en dy-t him to ûnderstean doarste en jowe ek mar lûd, dy
smieten se fjouwerkant ta de doarren út en fenwegen de minne
tiden en de noed om ’t gûd, det joun stikken reitsje koe, gyng ’r
hinne en sette it mingelen brandewyn en ’t healfearntsje in
dûbbelstûr en in stoater heger en spikere planken foar de finsters.
Wie ’t nin griis! in frjemd ynkomling moast suver miene, it wie hjir in
moardhoale, sei Eadske en tocht om Anders. Dy woe de wrâld sims
yn, om nijs to bilibjen, nou hjir bilibben se ek wol hwet nijs en net
folle moaijs en ’t âld minske tochte om ’e trije Frânsken, dy-t hja
jisterjoun ynkertierd krige hie en dy-t nou de bûrren ynstitsen wierne
to pleats-bisjen.
Wolmoet en Eadske Pytsje sieten togearre op ’e koelbak en
mûskoppen, det it hwet diich. Lit fjuchtsje, hwet woe, hja krigen de
wyldsten wol njúd en elts foar oar formakke him yn tinsen al mei de
wille fen joun. Hja ontroanen inoar net folle, Eadske Pytsje wie
allinne hwet omtleiner, hwet foarser, Wolmoet de lytste kant neist,
wie fynbonkeriger en fleisiger, mear nei Wytse Jans folk útskaeid.
Mar allebeide hiene se as greatste toai hjar jeugd. Dy joech hjar
eagen de lokjende skittering en hjar wangkjes it fynste blijread, sa ’s
hja it fynder noait earne op mjillet en kleure mei poarperen gloede
de bocht fen ’e frisse mûltsjes en mei tearblau de ierkes oan ’e
sliepen, heal biditsen fen ’e fine kantylje goudene earizerknoppen.
Pytsje wie wakker op ’e tekst fen hjar Ljouwter reis, lêsten
Saterdei’s. Hwet wie ’t in ein to gean! en hja hiene pleistere yn
Hirdegeryp, der hie Wibe Lubberts in nift ta sines to wenjen, dy wie
der trouwd oan ’e skoallemaster en hounegiseler Jan fen Tijum. Mar
do dy âld prikkewei troch de Tyttsjerkster poellen! hja hie der noch
blierren fen ûnder ’e foetten.
By minhear Falentijn ’s hiene se iten, jonge petrizen en stoofde
parren en tusearten en brette hansfotsjes en Bet hie mei hjar it
bolwirk om west en de Nijestêd op, der wierne trije winkels, dy hiene
in glêzene útstalkast, der lei yn to bisjen, hwet se to keap hiene. En
de middeis wierne se útforsocht by minheare Ripperda en der
krigene se brieven mei for Bindert Japiks, master Marten Joukes en
Foppe-om en hiele greaten for ’t bûtelân, dy stoppe se twisken it
foer fen hjar rokken yn, der hie nimmen der erch yn, hwent Wibe
Lubberts sels koene se al as in Oranjeman, hy doarst gjin skrifturen
mear oerbringe. En nou wierne se al yn ’t Bouwekleaster en Driesum
ef reisgen al mei Ulrich, de jeneveroaljekoop nei ’t poepelân en der
krige de jonge minhear Ripperda se, dy focht tsjin de Frânsken, hie
mefrou Ripperda sei.
En om ienen hinne, gyngen se nei ’t fearskip ta, det lei oan ’t
Súdfliet en der foeren se mei nei hûs, de man in dûbbeltsje en den
hiene se de kofje ta. Mem hie in bêste triûwetsiis bisoargje litten en
in mingelen skiepmôlke en in pear woarsten, it waerde in hiel feest,
dy weromreis en op Birgumerdaem moeten se in aerdige feint, dy
hie sei, hy gyng joun ek marke op en woe mei hjar.
En Eadske Pytsje hie forlangst, al wist se it sels noch net. Wolmoet
harke swijchsum, mei de hânnen yn ’e skirte en ’e greate, moaije
blauwe eagen yn stille mimer. Hja wist net, ho-t it wie hjoed, en
bikende ’t hjar sels mei fammige skrutenens, hja scoe ek wol wolle
en sjogge tojoune immen, dy-t mei hjar gean scoe de stille Hamster
wei lâns nei hûs ta. En wer foartgean.... faken komme en foartgean,
faken.... en den ienkear, ienkear komme en foargoed to hjarres
bliûwe as hjar man.
En ynienen tocht se om jonker Ripperda.... en ho-t it do to hjarres
west hie dy dei ef hwet. It wie itselde âld hûs noch en itselde hôf, de
loft, de sinne! alles noch krektlyk as altyd en dochs.... hja seach it
mei oare eagen nou, dy-t de moaijens fen in heldere ljocht-moanne-
joun bigriepen en de keinens fen in útkame blom.... Der slûpte mei
him hwet frjemds yn ’e hûs, hwet nijs, hwet hearliks en hja wist, hja
hie nóch stilder west, noch skrutener as ornaris. En as se den jouns
om ’e hird hinne sieten, der al in lyts hjerstfjurke barnde ta eare fen
’e hege gast, en hja somwilen s kant útseagen, bigoan se der ek for
’t earst yn hjar libben weet fen to krijen, hokker sterke fielings ien
loaits to wekker roppe kin. En sedich hie se de eagen foardel slein....
En de joune foardet ’r reisgje scoe, o ho wist se it noch! hiene se
in amerij togearre west yn ’t binhûs. Syn ranseltsje lei tichtstrûpt, de
pistollen blonken op ’e klaptafel, in greate ikene stôk lei der by. Ho
griisde it hjar allegear oan! Hjar herte waerde sa weak fen meilijen,
det de triennen kamen hjar yn ’e eagen. Hy hie it grif sjoen, hwent
hy kaem stadich op hjar ta en krige hjar beide hânnen beet.
Do moast hja wol nei him opsjen en hwa koe ’t helpe, de triennen,
dy domme triennen, wierne hjar oer de wangen rôlle.
„Is det om my?” hie ’r hiel sêft sei.... „Der is Ien, dy-t my dit
swiere paed maklik meitsje kin, Wolmoet. Dy scil my net forlitte. En
myn earm, lyts lân yn noed likemin. Tinkst ris om my?” en do hiene
syn lippen efkes hjar foarholle roerd, krekt as woe ’r der de
frjeonskip mei bisegelje.
O! en dit forgeat se noait wer! It wie de earste feint, dy-t hjar
oanroerde, it wie in pea fen wijinge, nou-t se it jongfammelibben
yngyng mei al syn fleur en tier. Hy frege neat werom.... stadich liet ’r
hjar hânnen los.... do gyng ’r by hjar wei, stil troch ’t foarhús en
bûtedoar. Hja hearde him by de hússide lâns hinne en wer kuierjen.
Gefaer wie der net, de joun wie tsjuster en winich.
Yn it boek fen hjar ljeafste oantinkings biskreau Ryklef Ripperda sa
it earste bled.—
It wie suver noch waerm op ’e joun. In bolle, sêfte wyn waeide en
oan ’e lofteinder kroesden hwet wite, tinne wolkjes. De sinne sakke
ljocht en klear en ’e lytse rútsjes fen ’e Op-Twizeler huzen laken blier
yn ’t jounljocht. In tropke protters kwéle hjerstich yn ’e platsnoeide
linebeam foar Sije Jans syn weardshûs, mar do-t de fioele bigoan to
jeuzeljen en ’e fluite en de triängel der middenmank, joegen se hjar
fen ruten. Sa roerich koene hja de stille bûrren net.
De âldere minsken kamen bûtedoar en hokken by inoar op in
stoepbanke to praten oer ’e nijtsjes fen ’e dei en it jongfolk stapte
hjar kwierich en alhiel út ’e leage wosken, foarby to feestfieren. De
tiiden wierne oars fierst to min, miende âlde Ant, ’t wie better, hja
bisparren in dûbbelstûr for ’e kwea dei. Mar in âld bysfeint giisgobbe
en dy sei, it heuchde him noch, ho-t Ant yn ’t bûnt sits ek wol ris
keamer op west hie en ienkear selst de soal fen hjar skoech
tróchdânse hie. En Ant seach spûnsk en hjitte it him ligen en hiel
slim ek. En sa siet det der op inoar om to hottefyljen en yn ’t hier to
hingjen, krekt sa lang, do kipe âlde Sjoerd om ’e hoeke en brocht
hjar in stove en in kruk. Hwent âlde Ant dânse nou al sont lange
jierren net mear.
Nou is der libben en biweging op alle Twizeler paden. De
boeresoannen nimme frij en it folk hat healjoun. De fammen yn ’e
stisel, risselje as popelbledden en rinne bliid en fluch de lytse
krinkelpaedtsjes lâns troch de keale boulânnen, de feinten komme
hwette stadiger op ’t doel ôf, de sidene petten skean op en de piipen
gleon oan al kostet de toeback ek in skandaligen twa goune it poun.
Hja binne allegear sa jong! en it libben! o it is ommers neat oars as
ien great feest!
En Foppe-om komt ek noch del op ’e âld skimmelmerje mei ien
each en neist him rydt, hiel koel en heech, hast foarnaem yn syn
donkere klaeijing en it smelle, bleke antlit efkes biskade fen in great
hoed, ien fen syn jonge frjeonen, Roanes Gearts, de
skûtmakkerssoan fen Eastemar. ’t Is krekt, as hâldt ’r it hynsder net
iens, sa licht en wis rydt ’r. Ho doar ’r, tinkt Foppe-om en sjocht
tomûk ris nei syn sydkammeraet op it swarte hynsder mei it bûnte
oranjestek. Ho moai kleuret it! Der is neat gjin prael en pronk oan
dizze ruter, mar dochs seit syn hâlding, syn klaeijing, it sjen fen syn
eagen, by him thuses is ’t gjin smeldoek, der snijt min goede
broggen.
En in lytse blide skalk laket yn âld Foppe-om syn goedlike blauwe
eagen.... Mar hy praet hiel earnstich oer deistige saken en hat it oer
syn bijkjen en fortelt, hy hat hjoed in bêste koer útslachte en scil ek
mei in trompkefol hunnich nei ’t Bouwekleaster ta. Der wennet syn
nifte Wolmoet.... en jongefammen binn’ swietbekjes.
Der foroaret neat yn it koele antlit neist him.... de earnstige mûle
bliûwt ticht en hy sjocht rjucht foar him út, al kurende wei. Hwer
tinkt hy om?
Hja draeije det op nei Wibe Lubberts, der scill’ de hynsders yn ’t
lân, en stiene efkes by Wobbe to praten, dy-t al wer ynslacht.
Lysbeth en hy moatt’ ommers melkjoun thús wêze! en Wolmoet,
nou, dy tinkt der net om, om nei hûs ta to gean, dy scil joun mei
Eadske Pytsje en alle oare jongefammen foar de fioele, marke hâlde!
„As ’r mar feinten genôch binne!” knypeaget Wobbe heal
pleagjend tsjin Wibe Lubberts. Mar dy bliûwt earnstich en sjocht
stoef. Feinten genôch, planteit. Binn’ der earjisterjoune gjin tweintich
Frânsken oankaem, dy-t hjir ynkertierd binne en nou yn gloednije
uniformen, lange sabels op ’e side, yn ’t folk omstappe en de
jongefammen frijpostich ûnder de kypsen oploere, det se fen
biskamsumens de holle omdraeije en yn ’e oarre-wei sjogge. En min
seit: der komme noch mear, folle mear....
Twongen scill’ se wirde, dy hirdhollige Friezen, dy Oranjekraeijers,
dy-t it mei Bibel en Kening hâlde. In kening by de graesje Gods....
den spotgnyskje de Frânsken, it folk is de god, dy-t hja oanbidde.
Wibe Lubberts fielt it nou yn syn eigen hert.... o ho wier is ’t, det
twang de heit is fen forset! en wrokjende wei tinkt ’r om wûndere
dingen.
Hy hat noch gjin ynketiering.... de ryksten komme it earst oan bar
sa ’s Eelke Harms en Driûwers Piters, Sjoerd Rinzes en soksoartigen
mear, by him soppet it net sa rûm, seis lytse bern en den sa ’n djûr
steed yn hier[4], mar hjoed ef moarn scil de biisjager ek wol ta
hjarres komme mei it hate pompier en oplêze, hwa ’t by hjar op lêst
fen ’e Staet útfenhûzje scille en ’t brea út ’e mûle ite.
[4] Historysk. Wibe Lubberts kofte letter de Tsjerkepleats to
Twizel it hûs mei ien stikje lân for toalvehûndert goune. It oare
lân rekke as losse stikken foart oan mear as ien egener.
It wie net genôch, hûndert millioen goune as oarlochsskatting
opbringe to moatten op oarder fen det smoarge Haegse fordrach fen
de 26ste April 1795, né, hja moasten ek noch 25.000 Frânsken
ûnderhalde en in goed lean jaen boppedien. Hwer scoe ’t allegear
wei komme? En den yn ’e bûrren feestfiere, det it hwet diich, de
jongerein wie net wizer, mar de trouden, waerden hjar de earen net
goedernôch bikôge? Stie der gjin bankrot to wachtsjen, as ’t regear
sá foartfarde?—
In hiele rigel fammen swaeide de reed op, lûd gekjeijende en
laeitsjende, allinne Wolmoet roan der stil by, it kopke hiel greatsk op
it slanke halske, de eagen fol dreamerich forlangst nei de
heimsinnige earste markejoun. Hja gyngen by de hússide lâns....
Foppe-om seach se tomûk efternei troch ’t skûrrefinster en do loaitse
’r nei Roanes. Dy syn antlit stie effen en earnstich as altyd en
dochs.... en dochs....
De faeitonne mei de beide jonge brunen, boldere wer oer de
efterhússtriette, de tsjellen sakken wei yn ’t moudige sân fen de
hearrewei, min seach noch in skimer fen Lysbeth hjar waeijende
bûnte kypslinten, do wie de joun wer stil. Foppe-om en syn jonge
maet bleauwne noch efkes by Wibe Lubberts stean to praten en do
gyngen se nei Eadske’s om in jounbrogge en om ris to sjen, ho-t it
der foarstie. ’t Sloof siet mei trije Frânsken opskeept en hie Anders
jister al ier en betiid nei Foppe-om tastjûrd, hy moast komme. It
barnde op ’e neil.
En nou kaem Foppe-om. ’t Wie folle slimmer, as ’r him foarsteld
hie. Eadske huze yn ’t keammerke, de greate foarkeamer hiene de
Frânsken opfoardere en ’e goezzeplûmmene bêdden en nou sliepten
se sels mar op striesekken en Anders yn ’t hea. En Pytsje útfenhûze
by Jan Hindriks oer ’e wei. ’t Wie better, hie Jan biisjager sei, hwent
de Frânsken hâlden fen grappen. Hja hie him bigrepen —. sei se mei
in sucht.
Foppe-om nikte. It wie nou stil yn ’e foarkeamer, hja sieten yn it
weardshús to kaertspyljen. Strak ansens kamen se thús, den easken
se fen alles en Eadske wie sa goed net as hja moast hjar mar
hânsum alles efternei drage. Hwent de bern.... dy kamen se net
byneist. Dy wierne sa bang det fen ’e greate sabels en ’e pistollen en
’e hege berefellene mûtsen en ’e gleone swarte eagen. Dy fleagen
efter skeanoer nei skoalle ta en toarken de hiele dei bûtedoar om ef
boarten by Wibe Lubberts yn ’t skieppehok.
„En joun”, sei Eadske fjirders mei hjar sêft seurderich lûd, „den
scoe de bûter jild jilde. Hja rôpen mar neat oars as: dânsje! dânsje!
en stiene mei hjar trijen tsjin ’t bedsket oan en bûgden foar in âld
stoel, „madame”, prevelen se den. Krekt as wie ’t hjar yn ’e holle
slein. En jenever hiene se fen Klaes stoker helle, in krûk fol.”
En do bigoan ’t sloof to gûlen. Det grypte Foppe-om yn ’t moed.
„Kom, kom; ho nou? Sa ’n krankyl wyfke. Moast dû de holle hingje
litte?” sei ’r. „It wetter komt noait heger as oan ’e lippen ta, den is de
help der ek. Der is in Weitsjer for de widdou en it weeske, Eadske,
hwer earne se ek binne yn ’e wrâld. Det wist dû ek wol, net?”
„O ja,” andere se sêft, mar mei in glans yn hjar eagen, dy telde
Foppe-om, hjir hie hy de rjuchte snaer fen treastinge roerd.
Roanes Gearts siet der stil by.... hy bigoan der nou einliks ek hwet
bisef fen to krijen, ho slim de tiiden wol net wierne. It leed kaem
tichterby, min fielde syn binearjend skaed.
Foppe-om ljurke oan ’e piip en sei in setsje ek neat, hielendal yn ’e
prakkesaesje wei. „Wist, hwetst dochst, Eads?” sei ’r op ’t lêst. „Stjûr
my dy bizen mar ris yn nije wike op in dei mei Anders to fiskjen op ’e
mar. Licht bifalt it hjar derre en as se it sels forsykje, den kinne se
wol hwet by my bliûwe en scil ’t regear det net wegerje. Ier ef let
krij ’k se dochs en dû bist for in setsje wer holpen.”
„O ast koe!” hope se mei in griselke moed.
„Wy moatte mar ris sjen”, en Foppe-om iet mei like folle smaek as
oars syn jounbrogge. In soune mage jowt soune tinsen en soune
tinsen jamk soune dieden en al ho gebeten ’r ek wie op ’e Frânsken,
hy wist wol, mei in leppel fol sjerp komt min fierder as mei in flesfol
jittik.
Nou leit de sinne leech tsjin ’e groun en yn ’e beamkrunen wirdt it
swartich en jounich. Hjir en der flikkert al in inkele stjer.... it lûkt
koel, de spinrêchstriedden op ’e hage wirde stiif en feal en de
hjerstblommen gien’ stadichwei ticht.... Mar hjar geur.... dy hinget
noch yn ’e stille loft, der gjin wynsigentsje mear warber is. De reek
stiet steil boppe de skoarstiens, de lytse wite skieppewolkjes krekt
oer ’e bûrsterhuzen roere hjar hast net fen ’t steed, driûwe loai nei ’t
Easten ta, hwer de moanne great en roun út ’e dauwe weisilen komt
as in dreame-skip oer ’e Ald-Dyk. In reiddomp klaget yn ’e mieden....
boem.... boe..m, fierôf andert in oaren. It heart efkes onhúslik,
wintereftich, binaud.... Den is alles wer stil en moai....
Yn dy moaije joun giet Wolmoet mei hjar maten nei it feest. Is ’t
net in prinseske, tinkt Foppe-om en sjocht hjar efternei. Hokker ’t
joun ris wirde scil, hokker feint scil yn ’e ginst falle fen syn lytse
keningin? ’t Moat nou ek ris wêze, hja is al yn ’t njuggentsjinde jier,
mar altyd sa.... sa.... koel. Ho hat se Kinge fen Lieûwe-om hawn! dy-
t op in Sneintomiddei ris hwet frijpostich waerde yn ’t kuijerjen troch
’t hôf! Kinge hat der net in foet wer binnedoar set.
De hospes stiet krekt op in lange ljerre en stekt de kjersen op yn
’e lantearnen oan ’e balken fen ’e trochreed. Der hingje in pear
pompierslingers oan en ta eare fen ’e frânske gasten in great
pompier en der mei gleone read farwe letters op: Vive la Françe!
Hwent Wiggele Wyldhier is in goed patriot, hy draecht as Janom ek
altyd reade hoazzen en drinkt út in blau reauke en rint[5] gesworen
mei in greate kleurde cocarde op ’e âld pet. En dy-t om syn spreuk
der net yn wol, dy bliûwt der mar út.
[5] Historysk.
Hy hat syn wird gestand dien en ek in pear Westereinders

opstreweard, om de ljue der út to keiljen, dy-t altomets net om lyk
wolle. ’t Binn’ reuzen, mar optheden njúd en stil mei de mage fol
pankoeken en glei spek en nou drok dwaende, om skammels en
banken oan to dragen.
Yn ’e hoeke op in âld moalkiste sit de spylman, ek al drok yn ’e
skrip om ’e fioele to stimmen en de snaren mei hars to bistriken. En
de hospes komt en jowt him de houten nap, dy-t ’r fielende wei
oankriget, hwent Beinte spylman is blyn.
Hy heart it folk kommen, de jachtweide en de trochreed folrinnen,
’t gerissel fen ’e greinene skoarten en ’t gebos fen ’e swiersoale
skoen, do bigoan ’r to spyljen en mei syn krêkerich âld-mannelûd to
sjongen:
Ik ben ’r al verre naar ’t Oosten gegaen,

Daer sag ik myn allerliefst frysterke staen,
Ik sei ’r: hoe duur is een kus fen dijn mond?
Ik kuste so geren myn herte gesond!
O ruiterke stout, hebstû kuskes so geern?

Ho kanstû jonk frysterke ’s herte bigeern!
Dat ligt er so diep in een kamerke fijn,
Dat kan nimmer noait voor een ruiterke sijn....
Ik ben ’r al verre naar ’t Oosten gegaen,

Geen scoonere liefste en sag ik noait staen,
Kom rozemond, laet dij nu kussen terstond,
Ik dek dij met kussen dijn soetrooden mond.
Sij kusten tesamen in somernoenschijn,

Het ruiterke forsch en ’t frysterke fijn,
En do’r de mane in den avondschijn glom,
Do wendde de ruiter sijn peerdeken om.
Het frysterke schreide heur oogekens rood,

Om ’t ruiterke forsch.... om ’t ruiterke snood;
Maer diep ligt noch ’t herte in ’t kamerke fijn,
Dat sal voor de liefste, geen ruiter noait sijn!
It lûd wie net moai mear, forsliten fen ’t sjongen fen tûzen lieten
op wit hofolle marken en jounpretten en doch.... Wolmoet, jong
bern, fielde ’r hwet yn, det eat wekker makke, djip yn hjar hertke ek,
like goed as yn ’t frysterke hjarres yn ’t sangkje.... Kom rozemond,
laat dij nu kussen terstond.... It waerme bloed gyng hjar mei
gjalpkes nei de holle, hja moete de loaitsen fen ien fen ’e frânske
soldaten yn ’e hoeke. Stiif, aloanwei seach ’r nei hjar. Heal biteutere,
heal nijsgjirrich seach se einliks ien tel ek nei him. Leart ynienen op
dit stuit, ho-t in manljueseach lokje kin. Wirdt ta de hals út read en
draeit hjar gysten om nei hjar spylfammen, krekt as wol se der
biskerming sykje tsjin dy skroeijende loaits, hwer hjar herte fen
skrillet yn syn djipste skûlhernen.
De spylman set wer yn, in roundte. Alles, hwet jonge foetten hat,
siket inoar en wylt de âlderen fen ruten spylje nei de tapkeamer ta
ef op de banken ûnder d’âld linebeam, draeit de fleur fen Optwizel
for ’t earst yn ’e roundte. Anders is op Wolmoet takaem, pakt hjar
sûnder in bult fiven en seizen om ’e kliene mil en hja dânsje, det it
klapt. It is in gewanten baes, in feardich jongkearel mei syn moai
bosk krol hier en syn bliere eagen, it pearet net sa min, tinkt Foppe-
om, dy-t om ’t hoekje sjocht. Wolmoet fielt syn hân om ’e mil,
himsels tige tichte by en tafallich sjocht se him yn ’e eagen. Hja
skrilt.
„Lit my los”, seit se mei in lyts lûd.
Mar Anders klammert hjar fêster tsjin him oan en draecht se hast.
„Bistû bang?” pleaget ’r. „’t Scil wol wenne. Siz ris, ik kom yntkoart in
nacht by dy to meiden hear!” Syn laitsjende eagen sjogge nou hiel
djip yn hjarres.
Wolmoet hjar moaije blauwe eagen wirde great fen binaudens. Dy
healwize Anders! It lipke stiet prúl.
Foartdaedlik lit Anders hjar los. „’t Wie mar in grapke, fanke”, seit
’r. „Sippe femylje, bist ommers wol wizer. Mar in moai fanke yn ’e
earms, is as in tsjilkfol hjitte wyn oan ’e lippen, ju.”
Wolmoet laket wer en efkes letter sitte se smûk yn in herntsje to
drinken, swiete bramboaze brandewyn en ite der Dimterkoeke en
Dokkumer fluitsjes by. Wolmoet hjar eagen skitterje. Hja geniet for ’t
earst de triomf fen hjar moaijens en bigrypt wûndre skoan, hwerom
de feinten nou sa hastich op hjar takomme en de spylfammen hjar
spyt hast net mear forkropje kinne.
Der ynienen sjocht se de frjemde feint wer stean, dy-t se
fenmiddei ek al seach by Wibe Lubberts en grif kinde hat oan Foppe-
om. Bleek en slank stiet ’r der yn syn donker habyt, praet mei in
pear ljue, drinkt den stadich wei syn bier út. Der is hwet sûnders oan
him, hja wit net hwet. Eat rêstichs, eat, det de oaren hjir net
hawwe. Tomûk sjocht hja noch ris nei him. Hy dânset net, nou ’t der
wer in roundte spile wirdt, krekt as is ’r to greatsk om in faem to
freegjen. En Wolmoet winsket ynienen, det ’r hjar frege, hjar allinne.
Hja scoe mei him wolle, ek wol faker as ienkear.
Mar hy draeide him om en waerde wei yn ’t gewoel. De joun gyng
syn gong.... it spyljen hâldde efkes op, de spylman bigoan bylâns to
rinnen mei syn nap en de duiten en ’e fijfjes rôllen eryn. It waerde in
fette joun, it jongfolk goederjowsk. Ho scoene se ’t ek net op ’t
ienichste Twizeler feest?
Der ynienen, dreame hja? Foppe-om stie foar hjar en neist him dy
frjemde feint. In bliid skokje trille hjar troch ’t hert.
„Dizze feint wol ek ris mei dy dânsje, Wolmoet”, sei ’r. „Nou
Roanes, gien dyn gong. ’k Scil ris sjen, ast se wol fen ’e flier krije
kinst. ’t Is in stymsken ien”, pleage ’r en joech him glimkjend ôf.
Einliks dochs.... hy hie oars al tocht, it waerde neat.
Nou wie ’t den sa fier. Wolmoet lei hjar hantsje yn Roanes sines,
hiel lichjes lei ’r syn earm om hjar hinne en der draeiden se yn ’t
roun, stadich earst, al hirder en hirder en op ’t lêst roerden hjar
foetten hast nin groun mear, hja sweefde deroer, ienwillich mei hjar
sterke hâlder en neat oars mear fielende as de sêfte twang fen dy
skuttende, draechjende en troaikjende earms.
Hja waerde waerm en ynein, mar sei it net. Al scoe se ’r nou by
delfalle, hja dânse troch. Nou gyng ’t stadiger, al mar stadiger. Hy
seach hjar hjitte wangkjes en de switdripkes op ’t blanke foarholtsje.
„Kom”, sei ’r sêft en hja gyng mei, it hantsje noch yn sines, det ’r
bifrijde mei lytse forljeafde knypkes. Nei in hoekje stevenen se ta,
hwer it net yn ’e sigen siet en skimerich wie en stil en der liet ’r in
flesse wyn komme en soeskreakels en der smûzden se do togearre
fen, krekt sa as nys ansens mei Anders, mar nou dochs oars o! hiel
oars! ’t Wie hjar frjemd tomoete.... hy hie neat fen it optwingerige
fen ’e oaren en doch.... hja foege hjar jern nei syn wil en fielde hjar
thús en feillich by him as in skutte tsjin ’t woelige folk, det noch mar
net bikaem like to wêzen fen ’e reboelje fen ’e middeis. Hjir en der
mûskoppe in kloftsje yn in herntsje, guont er fen de holle en ’e
hânnen yn wynsels biswaggele, der waerde ek al ris in fûst skodde
tsjin de Frânsken, dy-t op ’t eareplak ticht by de spylman sieten en
mar fen alles op ’e skammeltafel opdisse lieten, hwet mar lekker wie.
De patriotten en hjar oanhang krûpen der ticht omhinne, eksteur
mei syn assistinten, de biisjager en in stik ef hwet nearingdwaenden,
wylt de prinsljue, al de geseten boeren en oare eigenerfden by inoar
hokken op ’e oare ein. Skaet as bokken en skiep, seagen se inoar
oan mei ûlseagen.
Roanes seach de binaudens yn hjar ljeave eagen en gau biredt
krige ’r syn glês op en brocht it hjar yetteris ta mei in bizich glimke
en hja helle it loddereindoazke út ’e bûs. „Ek ris rûke?” sei se in
bytke pleagjend. Do seach ’r hjar for ’t earst oan, lang, o sa lang.....
Hjar hertke trille. Hja sloech de eagen foardel en waerde oer en oer
read.
„Wolmoet!” sei ’r sêft, mar mei neidruk. Do moast hja de eagen
wol opslaen en sjogge him oan. Alles sonk yn in dize wei.... krekt as
wierne hja der beide optheden mar allinne oerbleauwn fen al det
folk en waerde se hoeden yn in nije wrâld fol heimsinnige moaijens
laet.
„Sá is it goed”, sei ’r wer earnstich-wei. „Dû moast net bang wêze,
ik mien ’t dy goed.... tige.... goed”, en de ljeave earnstige loaits fen
syn donkerblauwe eagen telde it hjar noch folle better as alle
wirden, ja hy miende it hjar goed.
„Bistû nou utrêst? Den scille wy yetteris skotse”, en hy smiet twa
skellings yn ’e spylman syn nap en rôp: „In skotse, Beinte-baes!” En
Beinte-baes stimde de fioele opnij en de fluiten kamen der by en ’e
triangel. Wolmoet hjar jong hertke tilde op fen wille. En einliks liet ’r
se los en wie dit moaijs foarby en siet se wer by de spylfammen en
dânse wer gewoan. Dit allinne hie oars west.
„Nou, nou, dû dochst it mar”, pleage Anders en kaem hjar al wer
op ’e side. „Wol sa op ’t snjit mei hjar Eastermarder, hwette? Meijst
wol oer boatsje farren, fanke?”
Wolmoet pluze hwet mei de kanten fen ’e skelk om.... hja wie
noch to jong, to nofteren om in gekjeijerich wirdtsje werom to finen.
In bult jongfolk kaem net yn ’t Bouwekleaster, Anders en Wynsen
wierne al wakker de ienichsten en langlêsten.... Ripperda. Mar dy
stie sá fier boppe hjar, dy hearde net ta hjar wrâld sa to sizzen. En
Anders wie hielendal los fen ’t ket joun, diich sa ’n steil wird, det de
fammen gûlden hast fen ’t laitsjen en woene der wol om fjuchtsje,
hwa ’t mei him dânsje scoe. Mar Wolmoet koe dy eare neat skille.
Hja miste hwet, sont se Roanes foartgean sjoen hie mei Foppe-om
en oare prinsljue nei de gelachkeamer ta. It feest wie syn gloarje
kwyt.
Bûtedoar barnden se nou tartonnen en smieten mei swervels.
Opslûpen jonges sprongen der omhinne as tsjammen. By en
hwennear de lôge der goed útsloech, seach min de bûrsterhuzen, de
mounle en ien amerij in âld bijestal en der siet in pearke smûk to
frijen, sa ’n twiskenbeurtsje. ’t Folk roan allegear bûtedoar, de
jachtweide en ’e trochreed rekkene leech.
Ek de nij-ynkommelingen, de Frânsken, de forspuiden, settene der
op ta en stiene, hwette appart, der nei to sjen, de lytste foaren-oan.
Hja kipten hjar hielendal út ’e Twizelers mei hjar fynbisniene antlitten
en donker útsjoch, mar de lytste noch wol it measte. Hy like ek wol
de heechste yn rang to wêzen, grif de brigadier, hwent syn streken
op de mouwe wierne breder en fen klearebare goud, syn plûm op ’e
mûts greater en syn hiele hâlding dy fen in man fen oerwicht en
gesach.
Wolmoet stie net sa fier fen him ôf, kant en kein yn hjar
blaukleurich pakje, in fris roazeknopke fol geur en kleur en hy, de
frouljueskenner fen in bulte lânnen, bispeurde it wûndre skoan, dizze
hjar moaijens wie echt. Hja fielde it, der stoareage aloan immen nei
hjar en seach ynienen yn ’e fierte wer dy moaije gleone eagen, dy
snikwite tosken ûnder it swarte snoarke, krekt as laken se hjar ta.
Koart biredt draeide hja hjar om en socht om Anders. Mar ’t wie sa
gau net, as de frjemdling mirk it en fielde ’r de tobekset út. Det
joech him in prip. Dizze just, dizze ynfierene doarpsprinsesse scoe ’t
nou wirde, dit teare lytse famke fen frjemdlânsk bloed mei hjar
greate séblauwe eagen en ’e kantene fichu om ’e smelle skouderkes.
En do-t de jachtweide en ’e trochreed wer folroan en bline Beint
op syn heech sit in skots ynsette, stapte ’r permantich út it folk wei
en mei de hospes foarop as help yn need, op Wolmoet ta.
De greate goudene tressen op syn uniform skitteren, syn spoaren
rinkelen, hy naem de berefellene mûtse ôf, wist omrake goed, ho-t
syn fyn bisnien donker antlit den op ’t alderfordéligst útkaem ûnder
’t roetswarte, gledkiemde hier. ’t Gemien gyng oan kant.... de
spylman hâldde op. Dizze eare wie great.... der moast stiltme by
wêze.
„De heecheale boarger, monsieur Dompierre wol mei jou dânsje.
Kom mar ris harren”, en Wiggele Wyldhier, goe patriot oan ’e lytste
tean ta, kromp yn inoar as ien boskje onderdanigheit foar de hege
hear.
Wolmoet bitocht hjar efkes. „En ik wol net,” sei se do.
Monsieur Dompierre bigriep der neat fen. Dit wie him noch noait
oerkaem, net yn Parys, noch yn Amsterdam, hwer se om him hinne
flodderen as de finken om ’e floiter en nou hjir.... hwet wie det....
Wegere se syn ginsten?.... Koe ’r net mei gewelt nimme, hwet him
net goederjowske graech jown waerd’? Koe ’r se net nei Ljouwert
slepe litte twisken tritich ruters yn en oerdrage oan guont, tûzenkear
slimmer maten as hysels, dy-t de heechste priis as losjild fregen fen
in moai faem....? En monsieur Dompierre syn tsjokke ier op ’e
foarholle sette út. Det foarsei net folle goeds.
Stilwei kamen syn soldaten om him hinne. Der wie gefaer, hja
fielden it, mar wisten einliks net, hwer it om gyng yn dit forflokte lân
fen sompen en gatten. Fen ’e oare kant bigoanen de ljue ek op to
kringen.... Foppe-om en Roanes stiene der middenmank. Hja
bistoaren ’t hast fen skrik. Hwet bidiich Wolmoet der yn ’t
foarmidden twisken de soldaten? Hja bigoan to praten. Foppe-om
pakte Roanes syn hân, knypte him hast stikken fen deabinaudens.
„Stiltme!” raesde der ien.
Do hearden se yn dy stiltme hjar helder lûd. „Ik dânsje net mei in
patriot. Woll’ jy him det bitsjutte?” Hja sei ’t bidaerd, mar hjar lûd
trille en hjar eagen stiene fol triennen.
Ien amerij bleau ’t noch stil, do wie ’t ljeave libben geande.
Dompierre scoe hjar fen ’e bank ôflûke nei him ta, mar as jonge
lieuwen fleagen de Twizeler feinten him oan. Hy skûrde de sabel út
’e ské en syn maten diene fen ’t selde, do pakten de oaren de
skammels en de banken en sloegen der as mâllen op los.
Wolmoet en hjar kammeraetskes spilen fen ruten, mar by de doar,
der wie de greatste reboelje. Do scoene se ta de syddoar út, der
kaem Foppe-om mei in hiele oanhang oansetten. Der wie gjin
untwyk mear, gjin kant út. Dompierre, razen fen sneuens oer syn
tobekset, socht hjar oeral, om se dea to stekken, raesde ’r breinroer.
Hja hearde syn frjemdlânsk lûd boppe alles út.
O hie se dochs mar ien roundte mei him dien! Mar ien! Né, sei hjar
greatsk Oranjehert, scilst sloaije? gjin fijan de frjeonehân, noait en
to nimmer net en hja mikere alle kanten út, hwer mar in mûzegatsje
to finen wêze scoe.
„Hjir! Gau!” hearde se ynienen hwa sizzen. In donkere omslagdoek
waerde om hjar hinne slein, o sa heech, oer ’e holle, oer ’e eagen,
twa, trije né wol fjouwer pakten hjar beet en gauwer as se ea tinke
koe, waerde se trochjown fen d’iene nei d’oare en stroffele einliks
oan ’e hân fen ’e lêste in smel gongkje lâns, troch in skûrke, in
efterdoar út, op ’e wei en do oer ’e wei efter de huzen, sa hird as
hjar lytse foetsjes hjar mar drage koene.
„’t Giet der om, fanke”, flustere der immen deun neist hjar, „dit ’s
libben ef dea joun, lytse dappere Prinsman”, en in greate, waerme
hân joech hjar in hiel lyts triûwke. Hwerom hie se iderkear al de
wissichheit hawn, det it krekt dizze hân wêze scoe, dy-t hjar laette?
O it herte fielt sa fyn.... foartdaedlik hie se ’t al formoede.... nou wist
se it. En al scoe ’t nou de nacht sa troch gean, de tsjustere lije
neisimmernacht, hja wie net bang mei dy allinne. Hja sei neat, roan
op in drafke neist him.
„Sjesa”, bigoan ’r einliks, „it gefaer is foarby. Gien hjir de reed
efkes op, hwette yn ’t tsjuster fen ’e beammen en de doek hielendal
om dy hinne en wachtsje. Ik moat Foppe-om tynge bringe....”
Nou fleach hjar dochs de binaudens oan. Hja abbeleare tsjin.
„Kinst net bliûwe?” smeke se. „Kinst net?”
„Ik moat mei dyn omke prate en ’t oare Oranjefolk. Sjen, det wy ’t
sa bikûpje kinne, detstû bûte skot komst en oars.... Dû bist
optheden yn libbensgefaer. Slimmer ast sels wol tinkst. En op alle
Oranjeklanten wirdt dyn dwaen wreekt. Op dysels as se kinne it
measte. Mar wy binne yn Gods hân, fanke. Hy kin selst it tsjoede ek
wer keare litte ta goed. En as wy Oranje tsjinje, den tsjinje wy yn
Oranje Him.... Ien amerijke en ik bin wer by dy....”
Hja seach him gean, yn ’t tsjuster in breed tsjuster skaed.... en
hâldde him net. Hja makke hjar lyts efter de wringe, de swarte doek
oer ’e wite flodder en ’t ljochte feestkleed, hjoed sa mei freugde
oanlitsen. Ho ’n dei, ho raer syn ein! Hjar earste feest en licht.... hjar
lêste....?!
Hwer wie Foppe-om, hwer Anders? O licht wol dea! formoarde!
Hja raesden der noch wakker om yn ’e fierte, mar ho-t it der krekt
foar stie, koe se der net út wys wirde, derfoar wie ’t to fier ôf.
Hja wist net mear, ho lang as se der nou al allinne siet. Hja skrilde
fen elts wyntwirke, fen ’t fallen fen in toar bled en ’t risseljen fen
hjar eigen skoart. Hjar hert sloech as in wyld efter ’t siden spinserke,
de syken gyngen hjar red, mar net allinne fen ’t hird rinnen fen nys
ansens.
Yn in húske oer ’e wei bigoanen se mei in tútlampke yn in greate
keamer om to skermesearjen, grif setten se de bêdsdoarren op. ’t
Joech hjar de treastlikens fen ’e biwenne wrâld en minsken tichteby.
’t Wie ek noch net sa let, om tsjienen hinne, einliks noch net ienris
nacht. Mar is in neisimmernacht mei syn loft fol fonkeljende stjerren
wol ea tsjuster?
Sûnder, det hja him oankommen heard hie, stie Roanes wer foar
hjar. „Ho wie ’t? o.... ho wie ’t?” kaem der hoartsjend út by hjar.
„’t Giet mâl,” andere hy mei in djippe sucht. „Hja slagge yn inoar
om as wylden. Wibe Lubberts ha se healdea slein, omt ’r „Vive la
France” forskûrd hat en Dompierre hat in sneed oer ’e hân en hofolle
as ’r mei in bloeddrige kop omrinne, det stekt net nau. ’t Is in griis.
Foppe-om bliûwt to nacht by Eadske-en-dy-s, hwent dy scil de
neipret wol krije mei dy dronken divels.”
„En.... ik,” sei se hiel sêft, deun neist him op it smelle sânpaedtsje
fen ’e hearewei.
„Dû giest mei my, okke”, flustere ’r hiel tear en fielde foarsichtich,
hwer hjar kopke wêze koe ûnder ’e greate, bifeiligjende omslagdoek.
Dy skouwde ’r hwet tobek en naem do it triljende mûlke syn
allerearste patsje ôf.
Kom rozemond.... laat dij nu kussen terstond.

Ik dek ’r met kussen dijn soetrooden mond—
reaunte it yn hjar. Hja stie hiel stil tsjin him oan nou, alhiel oerjown
oan syn wil fen nimmer. En wer en wer socht ’r hjar.... ho tichteby
fielde se nou syn smel, earnstich antlit, syn mûle, dy hjar mûle om
wûnderljeaflike anderten twong.
En do gyngen se togearre stil op hûs yn, de iensume sânwei lâns
fen ’e Koatsterhoek nei de Ham, sims neist inoar, sims efter inoar.
Nin minske moete hjar mear, de Koatsters wierne op bêd en do troch
de Ham en de Skalkepaden[6] oer nei ’t Bouwekleaster.
[6] It Bouwekleaster waerde yn âlde tiden ris bilegere. Ut
kriichslist namen de kriichsljue de flucht? nei de Skalkepaden. de
mûntsen mienden, hja joegen de bilegering oer en setten hjar
nei. Do kamen de fijannen fen ’e oare kant wer opsetten en
namen ’t kleaster. Sa forskalkten se hjar.
Lysbeth bistoar it hast fen skrik, sa let yn ’e nacht noch folk en

hokfoar folk! En Wolmoet sa raer optakele, in swarte doek om ’e
holle en in greate tibéjene skoudermantel oer it pakje en hwerom
wie se net by Wibe Lubberts bleauwn útfenhûs? En hja bigoan to
gûlen, goe-sloof. Mar do-t Wolmoet hjar sa jong en fris mei sa’n
lokkige glâns yn ’e eagen út de omslagdoek woelle en alles torjuchte
prate, sûnder nou just foartdaedlik de hiele wierheit to sizzen, ea, do
sakseare it wer hwet. Wobbe kaem ek noch yn ’t foarmidden.... ’t
fjûr waerd’ yetteris oanset en kofjemeald en broggen snien en do-t
dy bipluze wierne en ’t nijs forteld, seine Wobbe en Lysbeth bizich
fen nacht....
Hy siet foar ’t fjûr to smoken en hie tomûk syn eagen net fen it
lytse, ljochte figuerke ôf, suver in sintsje fen fleur en kleur yn dizze
tsjustere binnekeamer. Ho jong en linich wie se, ho fyn bisnien it
kopke, ho leeljeblank it fel! Syn brúnforbarnde greate hânnen liken ’r
suver swart by!
Einliks wie ’t in amerij sa deastil yn ’e keamer, det hy hearde it
tikjen fen ’t horloazje yn ’e fesjebûs en oars neat mear. Hy seach ris
om him hinne, in fyn glimke heldere de earnst fen syn antlit, do-t ’r
hjar der sitten seach oan ’e lânsein fen ’e tafel, sa fier fen him ôf as
’t mar koe. Hy gyng oerein en stadich nei syn oerhearrich selskip ta.
„Dyn plak is by my by ’t fjûr, tocht ik”, sei ’r en lei hiel hoeden syn
hân om hjar skouderke. In stille blide glâns kaem yn hjar eagen, do-
t hy hjar wer oanroerde, mar hja bleau sitten yn hjar hoekje by de
skerm.
„Dû moatst mar droegen wirde”, en hy tilde de stoel mei syn hiele
ljeave fracht op en sette him neist sines del.... Do lake hja mei al
hjar toskjes bleat en joech hjar willich yn ’t skûl fen syn earms, dy-t
hjar al tichter en tichter tsjin him oantreauwne, sûnder der acht op
to slaen, as de kanten doek ek knûkken krije koe ef de floddermûts
út de ploai reitsje.
Nou tochten se net mear om de rare útein fen hjar feest, nou
wierne se neat oars as twa onskildige jonge bern, dy-t inoar it earste
hillige ljeafdewitten leare....
Hy bleau net lang mear.... hy moast út namme fen Foppe-om en
Wibe Lubberts, Bindert Jacobs, Wolmoet hjar bûrman noch tynge
bringe en den ek noch nei fen Skeltinga ta op ’t slot to Stynsgea, de
beide foarmannen fen it forset tsjin de patriotten yn it hiele gea. Hy
koe se beide fen oansjen, mar der yn neare nacht mei sokke
boadskippen oankomme to moatten, der hie ’r ek al net folle smucht
op.
En wer en wer preau ’r de hunich fen syn simmerblom en koe hast
net ta skieden komme.... En dochs.... it moast einliks. Hy wist, ho
swier as de kommende dagen wêze scoene, as de kniper op ’e skine
kaem en Wolmoet opbrocht wirde koe en yn ’t rjuchthús fen
Stynsgea neitinke oer hjar sounen. Den moast ’r hânnele wirde,
sterk en strydbiredt, as dit teare skepseltsje, great fen moed him en
alle oare Oranjemannen nedich hie. Foppe-om en hy hiene net om ’e
nocht in wird-mennich mei inoar wiksele yn ’e foarnacht en
swierwichtige wirden wierne der fallen oer flucht en forskûl en oare
dingen, hwer nin Roanes Gearts ea om tocht hie, bihelle to wirden.
Sa fredich as de nacht forroan der yn ’t stille Bouwekleaster, der
yn dy smûke binnekeamer, sa wyld gyng ’t der yette oan wei yn ’e
Optwizeler bûrren. De Frânsken krigen help fen hjar maten út
Bûtenpost, mar de Optwizelers, ek net mak, sloegen der yn mei
flaljeklappen en kneppels. In great kearel kleau op in bierfet en
raesde: „Dit ’s noch ris foargoed Oranjeboven!” en smiet mei snuf. It
waerde in geprúst en gelaek en gegûl sûnder ein, de Westereindsjes
krigen der al in pear út, mar nijen, gleon om de patriotten ris in pyk
to setten, krongen ta de foardoar wer yn, sterk yn ’t bisef fen hjar
manmachtigens. Foppe-om wie der ek middenmank en al ho-t it him
ynwindich ek hage, sa Oranje fordedigje to hearren, hy eange, ho-t
de gefolgen wêze scoene. En hy riboske.
Der ynienen, nimmen wist, ho-t it kaem, stie Wibe Lubberts yn ’t
foarmidden, bleek en stil, in great bosk goudtsjeblommen foar op de
hoed.
Lang ein kearel as ’r wie, stike ’r boppe alles út en ûnder it razen
en skreauwen wei om him hinne, krige ’r de hoed ôf, swaeide ’r mei
oer it folk en rop mei syn swier lûd: „Dit is for ivich noch Oranje
boppe, mannen!” Krekt kaem eksteur der yn, wer fen in nij
wynroeske bikaem en mei him in stik ef hwet gens d’armes fen
Kollum en det wie ynienen: pak oan en bring op, ho-t it folk der ek
tsjin abbeleare en Foppe Lieûwes selst hûndert goune bea as losjild
en boarch. It gyng allegear sa gau, det do-t it folk ta himsels kaem,
wie Wibe Lubberts al lang de Wedzebûrren troch op reis nei ’t
hounegat yn ’e âlde stompe toer.
Eksteur hie ’t rapport fen ’e middeis noch ris neilêzen en wie wys
waen, min koe der licht to Ljouwert út opmeitsje, hy hie de saek
blau-blau litten en wie net goedernôch for de bilangen fen it Frânske
gesach opkaem. Nou koe hy it den ris better toane, diselde deis
noch! Stie op it dragen fen goudtsjeblommen, selst it plantsjen en
hawwen yn ’t tún net in greate straffe en dizze Wibe mei syn gebalt
fen: „For ivich noch Oranje boppe!” scoe ’r ’t ris goed yndruije litte
yn ’t blokhús. Oranje wie der foargoed ûnder, totrape, twa foet
ûnder de groun. En hy dronk him yetteris in nij roeske yn ’e
neinacht, swiet biselskippe fen monsieur Dompierre, dy-t wol in
pynstillingkje fennoaden hie.
De oare nachts waerde Wibe Lubberts twisken sa ’n tweintich
rúters yn nei Ljouwert ta brocht en flapten de Blokhúsdoaren mei in
swiere pomp efter him ticht[7]. Monsieur Dompierre oan it haed fen
syn binde hie him sels ôflevere en barde in skoan sieleranselerslean
for syn tsjinsten, sa great, det ’r in fjirtsjin dagen ûnder wetter bleau
en by tiiden en ûntiiden as in goed troubadour l’amour en les belles
bisong, ont in lege pong en in heaze kiel der einliks in stokje foar
stieken. Do waerde monsieur Dompierre wer njúd en do-t der op in
dei ek noch in bifoardering bykaem ta heger rang yn ’e greate sted
fen Utert, draefde ’r mei in bliid gemoed op syn moaije swarte merje
wer det út nei ’t Easten ta. Hy scoe dy Optwizlers wol lyts krije.
[7] Extract Sententie voor Wibe Lubberts gevangen. ’t Hof en c.
condemneert de Gevangene ter zaake, dat de Gev. op
Zondagavond 12 September 1795 ongeveer 9 uiren in de
herberge van Wiggele Jacobs te Optwijsel zijn hoed, welken hij
met geele zoogenaamde Goudtjebloemen had verciert van het
hoofd heeft genomen en gezegt, dat is oranje boven, alles
breeder ten Processe gemeld—te zitten te water en brood den tijd
van zes weeken—condemneert de Gevangen meede in de costen
van den Processe tot ’s Hof’s Tauxatie, en verklaart den klager tot
zijn verder genoomen Eisch en Conclusie niet ontvangbaar.
Acte den 7 Octobre 1795 Ter Ordtie van den Hove:
kost f 7,—
get. S. Faber.
It dûrre net sa bare lang, as it Frânske regear to Ljouwert bimoide
him dochs mei dizze saek. Koe min dy smaed op yen sitte litte?
En it folk bleau roerich. Optwizel, de Koaten, de Droege Ham,
Iestrum en Easte-Mar, it wie der sa’n rare hoeke, hja koene der
kwalik in patriot fen ’e hûd bliûwe en sadwaende makke dizze goede
saek der alhielendal gjin abbesaesje. En nou dit der noch by! Der
kamen hege hearen yn greate karossen en hynstefolk by de fleet, ta
straf krige hiele Optwizel swiere ynkertiering, sims in man ef seis yn
ien hûs. It folk forkroppe syn lilkens.... fielde optheden, hja wierne
ûnderlizzend partij. Der moaste boete bitelle wirde, net sunich en
der waerde mei flyt nei pinfiske, hokker Optwizeler jongfaem it west
hie, dy-t monsieur Dompierre sa yn ’t iepenbier misledigje doarst.
Mar nimmen koe se.... wie ’t net singulier? ’t Hie in Ljouwter west,
miende immen, guont dy-t dy deis út to plaisierriden wierne en
fensels! fensels! bigriep det fanke net, hokfoar eare sa’n hege hear
hjar net oandwaen wold hie. En monsieur Dompierre socht heech op
’t hors ef geandefoet de hiele omkrite ôf, forljeafd en lilk fen beiden
op det keine ding, hwaens moaije blauwe eagen him ljeafliker liken
as syn heitelâns loftblau yn ’t Suden fen Frankryk, mar hja wie wei
en bleau.... wei. En yn grimmitich sloech ’r op in goede joun alles
koart en klien yn ’e „Swarte Jagtwagen”.
Do pakte Wiggele Wyldhier him by de goudene kraech en saeide
him bûtedoar. Det getaep altyd for slitersjild oan dy Frânsken bigoan
him mar danich to forfélen en nou ’r sels ek al twa man ynkertierd
hie, dy-t ieten fen syn skieppetsiis en dronken fen syn jenever,
sûnder ea de pong ris los to strûpen, nou lei him „vive la France” ek
al net mear sa foarenoan op ’e tonge.
Der gyng in dei foarby en noch ien.... Wibe Lubberts kaem mar
net wer thús. Earst tocht min der net sa om, eltsenien hie syn
dagelyks wirk en de measte patty wierne de hiele dei op ’t lân to
ierdappeldollen ef al wer to ploeijen for de winterfrucht, mar do-t
Wibe Grytsje mei in bidrukt gesicht sels to ierdappeldollen gyng, de
âldste jonge mei en ’e lytse poppe yn ’e kroade, do waerden de
frouljue der hast moilik ûnder en de manljue hjar bloed hjit, al
swijden se.
Mar de oare moarne stiene der fjouwersum guont to
ierdappeldollen op hjar lân en gjin loaikerts! en de oare joune siet it
measte al yn ’e bult! gyng ’t net mei geande weinen? krekt op
itselde steed, hwer Wibe langlêsten fen praet hie, it graech ha to
wollen.
En dochs hie Grytsje hjar moed net en siet jouns yn ’e hirdsherne
to skriemen en tocht fol innigheit mei hiel hjar sêfte sterke
frouljuesljeafde om hjar man, dy-t hja wist it, noait hwet dien hie ef
dwaen kind hie, det net strookte mei syn gelove ef gewisse. En mei
de Oranje ’s wierne se troch detselde gelove forknotte, en as ’t
moast, der woene se offers for bringe, alle Friezen, dy-t noch
leauwden oan God de Heare en Syn gebod.... hjar man.... en o as ’t
moast hjasels ek....
Wylt de triennen stadich op hjar hânnen dripten wist se, hwer se
nou ek treast en stipe fine koe en hja gyng derhinne mei al hjar
herte drôfheit en bikommernisse. Hy, dy-t de widdou en de wees
noait yn hjar lijen omkomme lit, scoe hjar ek de skutte jaen, hwer se
sa ’n forlet fen hie.
Hja helle it âld psalmboekje út it kammenet en lies by it flaue
kjerskeljocht noch ris wer it jubelliet fen treast en forlossing for it
herte, det nei útkomst snokt, al fen tûzenen foar hjar ek bi-ame, as
se gyngen yn ’e skaden fen de dead ef de tsjusterste djipten fen
wrâldske ellinde peilje moasten:
„Ja, de Heer zal uitkomst geeven,

Hij, die steeds zijn gunst gebiedt,
’k Zal in dit vertrouwen leeven,
En dat melden in mijn lied,
’k Zal Zijn lof, zelfs in den nacht,
Zingen, daar ik Hem verwacht,
En mijn hart, wat mij moog’ treffen,
Tot den God mijns leevens heffen.”
Hja hearde it sykkeljen fen hjar lytse bern op bêd, hja tochte om
hjar man yn syn binypt tichthúshokje.... Mar hy litte for in goede
saek en al scoene se him ek giselje ef brânmarke, ja al binamen se
him ek it libben, syn ljeafde for Oranje scoe hy net ôfswarre. En hjar
fyn frouljuesgefoel sei ’t hjar wol, al hwet nou noch yn Ljouwert
tahâlde en ynfloed hie sa’s minhear Ripperda en de Hoppérussen en
minhear Falentijn en de Witt, scoene mei mannemacht skrippe om
him frij to keapjen ef de straf forlytse to krijen. En hja hiene noch in
bulte macht, dy hearen fen it âld regear.—
De tiid dy gyng syn gong. It waerde hjerstiger en op in moarntiid
bleau it mistich.... om middei hinne kaem de sinne der troch en
skynde op in lange spjirrebeam mei boppe yn ’e top in greate
blikkene hoed en det hiele saekje wie me der delplante mids op it
gêrsroundel fen ’e trijesprong, hwer de Wedze[8] en de hearrewei yn
inoar forrinne. Greate reade linten waeiden der by del en yn ’t wyt
klaeide fammen dânsene der omhinne, ek mar in stikmennich, hwent
dy-t hwet wierne, hâldden hjar fij.
[8] Historysk. De hjerstmis fen 1795 wie der ûnder „sêfte twang”
ek al in wapene frijcorps to Optwizel oprjuchte ûnder de
sinspreuk:
Met hart en hand voor ’t vaderland,
Staat ons gewapend corps geplant.
Fen der Kooij fen Stynsgea, boarger „representant” fen „de

Bataafsche Republiek” hie oarder jown, as der binnen fjouwer wike
gjin frijheitsbeam yn Optwizel plante waerde, den scoene se mei
dûbbelde ynkertiering straft wirde. ’t Stie him min oan, skreau ’r, det
min det oerhearrige folk dêrre net better to-plak sette. En hja
moasten soargje for mesyk en fammen yn ’t wyt en Durk stoker fen
’e Tille for jenever.
Wiggele Wyldhier wie redsum, Beint kaem mei de fioele en de
jonges mei ’t oare ark en diselde fammen, dy-t de 17e Maert der ek
to Iestrum omhinne dânse hiene, waerden nou útforsocht to
Optwizel. In inkelde Twizelder dânse nou ek al mei, hwette spitich,
omt de measte kammeraetskes absint bleauwn wierne, mar min wol
ek wol ris in forsetsje ha en minhear Braak fen Collum, hwer de
Bûtenposters sa’n moaije frijheitsbeam fen krige hiene, hielendal om
’e nocht, scoe de Twizeler fammen elkmis in moaije sidene cocarde
presint jaen, wie de hjitting. En sa kaem’t ek. De middeis, do-t it
plaisier op ’t heechst wie en ’e tamboer fen ’t Optwizeler frijcorps in
roffel sloech op ’e greate trom, stapte minhear Braak mei staesje út
’e faeiëton en op ’e fammen ta en elkmis krige in kleurich siden
roaske. En do dânsen se, minhear Braak foarop, allegear hân oan
oan, om ’e spjirrebeam hinne en ’e blikkene hoed.
Grytsje hearde se mâltiergjen en oangean. Hja skripte troch en
hjitte de bern, net op de wei om to stoatskaven. It wie nou al de
fjirde wike en yet gjin tynge fen Wibe. Foppe Lieûwes en Bindert
Japiks hiene al twa kear in reis dien nei Ljouwert en net iens
útfikelearje kind, yn hokker hoeke fen ’t spinhús hy siet. Den hie ’t
licht noch bisocht wirde kind, om ’e wacht om to keapjen en
tominsen in libbensteiken to krijen. Yn ’t kammenet hie se sa ’n
tachtich goune oersparre jild, in hiel kaptael, mar alles, alles scoe se
mei blydskip jaen wolle, as se Wibe mar wer thús krige. By dei en by
nacht pakte se der mei om, sa to sizzen wie ’t hjar gjin tel út ’e
tinsen. En it sjongen en ’t feestfieren yn ’e Wedzebûrren diich hjar
suver sear, namstomear, omt hja fielde, it wie net echt, fen der Kooij
woe ’t ommers sá, hy moast rapport opmeitsje kinne, de Optwizelers
wierne al mak, plantene al in frijheitsbeam en dânsene der omhinne,
hellen ’t frânske gesach ek al mei wille yn!
De sinne sakke stadich, de mist kleau. De bijen gounselen
hjerstich foar de bijestal om, de lêsten kamen mei dau op ’e wjukjes
thús en kroepen sleau en slûch yn ’e koer. Min hearde de kastanjes
fallen op ’t droege bjinstap, sims boarste ’r mei in knap in kastanje
iepen op it hirde hout. Skril lokken de jonge klysters op ’e
boppelânnen, ho wyld en hjerstich klonk hjar rop! en in pear
ielreagers skreauden heech yn ’e loft. It waerde al mistiger en
mistiger.... it waerde hird jounich en koel.
De bern sieten om ’e klaptafel hinne en ieten it jounmiel, bidrukt
en stil. De lytse slomme in mûzesliepke yn ’t smûke roun fen
memme earm. De bloune kroltsjes foelen him oer ’t foarholtsje, it
sêfte ljocht fen ’t tútlampke biskynde him krekt mei in tipke, it
roazereade earke en ’t sinnebrune halske. Grytsje siet sa stil det, hiel
evenredich forweegde hjar boarst op en del ûnder ’e grilbûnte doek
en fol teare ljeafde rêstten hjar eagen op it slomjende
skirtebernke....
De iene nei d’ oare gyngen de bern der stil út.... hoazfoetling troch
’t foarhûs yn ’e keamer op bêd. Hja wisten net ho-t se mem wol net
bystean scoene.... selst Lubbert, oars sa ’n houtsje, sa ’n greate
oppeteur, liet him nou om ’e finger wine en skripte en klauwde for
mem hwet ’r mar koe.
It popke op hjar skirte slomme noch. Hja forheuvele hjar in bytsje
en loek de stove oan. De stiennen flier joech al kâld op. Hiel hoeden
bistoppe se syn lytse foetsjes mei de wollen skelk en skouwde it
lampke hwet toside.
Sa sieten se der in set hiel stil togearre. De lea bifoel hjar,
stadichwei gyngen hjar eagen ticht. In sefte rêst fen slomme loek
oer hjar fyn, koairoun kopke, deis al fen in bulte tearen skeind, nou
yn it lampeljocht noch ris wer fen jeugd ’s wjerskyn formoaijke. Hja
dreame.... Wibe wie wer thús. Hja seach him oankommen, sa ’s ’r
gien wie, net skeind fen brânmark ef beulshânnen. Hja seach syn
stil, bleek antlit ûnder ’e breedskadige hoed, de blydskip yn syn
eagen, hja fielde syn hân op hjar earm.... yn greate oandwaning
sonk se swijgsum oan syn boarst.
„O myn wiif,” sei ’r, „hast my sa mist?” en de triennen forstikten
syn lûd. En hja seach him foar hjar út gean by ’t finster lâns yn ’e
hûs.
Do waerde se ynienen kjel wekker. De lytse gûlde, de lampe
barnde mei in lange, walmige, útbarnde piid. It wie in dream.... o
alles in dream.... en de wirklikheit noch o sa swier to dragen. Mar
dochs.... spoarde der immen om ’t hûs? Wie der hwa foarhûs?
Bûtedoar helle de jounwyn oan, hjerstich rûzden de tokken fen ’e
beammen. Hja wreau hjar de eagen út.... seach nou wer klear, neat
oars as it earmlike, wolbikende keammerke en hjar popke, det mei
lytse klokjes syn jountate bigoan to drinken, it teare lichemke ticht
tsjin hjar oan en ’e hantsjes op ’t waerme fel fen hjar boarst....
Krekt as glied de drôfenis ynienen op dit stuit dochs fen hjar ôf, in
ôfdroegen kleed, woe hjar siele der net mear fen witte.... It wie
frjemd, mar it wie sa. En moediger, as se yn tiiden west hie, klaeide
se it popke út en lei it neist hjar yn ’e weach. En waerde dy nachts
trijeris wekker.
De oare deis stie hiele Optwizel op iene ein. Myn goede guant
noch ta, de frijheitsbeam fornield! Der lei ’r omkeile, de blikkene
hoed yn moster totrape, de tokken der ôf en wech-en-der-wear
smiten, de sidene sjerp yn fodden toskûrd, de pompierene slingers
ta hwet jiske bitard. De Optwizelers skodhollen en stiene der forslein
omhinne. Keuning kaem, breinroer, eksteur mei syn assistinten, it
„Geregte van Achtkerspelen” Geuke Ljibbes en fen der Kooij yn ’t
ferdek hielendal fen Stynsgea en hja gyngen húske-bylâns en der hja
in skalk each op hiene, moasten mar ris biswarre, hwer hja dy
nachts tahâlden hiene. Elts foar oar wist to biwizen, det ’r thús west
hie en net omstoatskaefd dy nachts. De lêsten wierne om alven
hinne út „de Swarte Jagtwagen” wei gien nei hûs ta en hiene gjin
onrie bispeurd.
Der waerde in preemje útloafd fen hûndert goudgoune yn in
gloednij sidene slúfkepong en hwa scoe dy net fortsjinje wolle yn
dizze minne tiiden, nou ’t in fjirder bûter mar achttsjin goune gauw
en in melke kou mar in goed sauntich goune? Jouns yn ’e sûphuzen
leine de oandragers op ’e loer en Saterdeijounen by de skearbaes en
hwet letter yn ’e hjerst scoene se op ’e Bûtenposter en Kollumer
marke op hjar openst wêze, mar’t joech nin byt.
In lyts wike letter stie Grytsje by de wei en altyd al wer seagen
hjar eagen mei langjende loaitsen de kant út nei ’t Westen, hwer de
hearrewei de bocht makket om de harbarge De Benthem en yn ’e
Harstewei forrint. Der lei Ljouwert, der wie hjar man, der gyng al
hjar forlangst nei út.
Hja seach de postwein oankommen yn ’e fierte.... o sa stadich,
hwent de wei wie suver in modderpoel nou mei de hjerstrein en de
wiete bledden, dy-t by tûzenen foelen, hird en glêzich fen ’e
nachtfroast.
Hja seach him yn ’e stúdzje wei oankommen en stilhâlden by „de
Swarte Jagtwagen”, de reisgers stapten út en yn. En o! wie det net
in bikende stap? Hja lei de hân tsjin hjar wyld-bounzjend hert oan....
ien amerij bleau se hast biseffeleas stean hwer se stie, do seach se
noch ien kear det út en roan do mei hasten yn ’e hûs en helle de
lytse poppe út syn widzke en rôp lûd om de oare bern. Boartsjende
wei kamen se der oan. Hwerom rôp mem sa en hwet seach mem
bliid!....
In wylde reinfleach snjitte hjar in pear felle reindrippen yn ’t antlit,
hja mirk ’t net iens. Hja stie der mei hjar popke op ’e earm to
wachtsjen by ’t potrak ûnder ’e felreade hjerstige kornoelje.
Unforweeglik stie se der en dochs! o dochs! ien siddering fen ljeafde
en blydskip elts feseltsje fen hjar hiele lichemke en it hert, in
bounzjende blide klok oan ’e kiel ta....
Sá seach se him oankommen, hjar stille bleke man. Fen fierrens
sochten syn eagen hjarres en loaiken al mar djip yn hjarres, al
ljeafde en neat oars.
„Grytsje, wy binn’ wer by inoar”, sei ’r mei in oneinige tearens yn
syn swier lûd,” en hy lei hiel foarsichtich syn earm om hjar hinne as
in steunder. Hja hie ’t fennoaden, hja trille sa, det hja hie der sa wol
hinnesige kind, as hja det ljeave soarchsume hâld net om hjar hinne
field hie. En hoeden naem ’r it popke fen hjar oer en biseach him op
en del en kitele him ûnder ’t fette kintsje en sei, hy like krekt op
mem en wie wol tsjien poun groeid yn al dy tiid. En sa gyngen se yn
’e hûs.
De bern sochten wer hjar hael yn ’e skûrre en op ’e wei, elkmis in
stik koeke yn ’e hân en in grou sûkerslak yn ’e mûle en boartene hjar
bliid. De druk, dy-t it hûs bineare, wie der net mear, hwet it west
hie, biseften se net, mar det it der west hie, bispeurden se wol mei it
fynfielich forstean fen ’t bernegemoed. En do-t Lubbert
boadskiprinne moast for heit en Jan Hindriks, de bûrman oer ’e wei
en Sjoerd Harts en Douwe Everts oansizze moast, heit wie wer frij
en fen de iene in fijfje krige en fen ’e oare in bûsfol moaije apels en
fen ’e tredde jild for in nije draek, do sprong de jonge hast út syn fel
fen blidens.
En hwet waerde me det in joun! De bern yntiids op bêd en hja
sieten wer by inoar as yn ’t earst fen hjar trouwen, in krom bêste
kofje op ’e koal en in stik marich fol resinen der by! Beide seine se
net sa folle, mar hja fielden elts foar oar de rykdom fen it by-inoar
wêzen sa inerlik, krekt as seagen se inoar hjoed for ’t earst as
sadanigen, inoar foarbiskikt fen ivichheit.—
Hy markbite wûndre skoan, ho fol as hjar it moed wie en
forstânnich wei praette ’r oer neat oars as blide dingen. Ho goed ’r it
hawn hie yn ’t blokhús, de kofje wol lang net sa goed as by ’t wiif,
mar it iten, nou det wie net sa min. Wie ’r net fleurich? Hy sei ’r mar
net by, det minhear Ripperda fen alles en noch hwet slûke hie yn syn
tichthúshokje, selst toeback en woarsten, hwer de cipier earlik syn
part fen krige.
En do einliks de greate dei! trije hûndert goune losjild skikten se
him ta en do hoechde ’r de lêste fjirtsjin dagen net mear út to sitten!
Frij! frij! as in fûgel yn ’e wiide blauwe loft. „En ’t brânmark?” frege
hja lytsmoedich. „Ea kom, hja wie dochs wol wizer,” en hy glimke op
syn stille menear en striek it tichte hier hwet fen ’e foarholle en liet
hjar mei de hân der oer fiele. Det it raer knypt hie, as hy hie to
pronk stean moatten op ’t Blokhúsplein for in giseling fen fyftich
stokslaggen op ’e bleate rêch en in pea fen ’t gleon izer der op ta, hy
hâldde det mar foar him! Mar hwet hie me det in nacht west, do-t it
op ’e neil barnde as it losjild komme scoe ef net!
En de oerstjûre weagen fen hjar earm moed bêdde ’r sa stadich
del mei syn sêfte wirden fol treast en ljeafde, ont ’r om hjar reade
weake mûle wer it glimke spile, det syn sit hie yn de efkes opkrolle
mûlshoeken en det hy der sa jerne seach en hja him it popke
ôfkrige, om him syn jounmiel jaen to kinnen, kûs togearre foar ’t
knappende houtfjurke. En hy tanke yn stiltme syn God for dit
hearlike weromsjen fen al syn ljeaven.—
Diselde joune hiel, hiel let, hast yn ’e foarnacht al, slûpte der
immen de finnen út, nei de Sânsleat ta. In swiere bile foel der mei in
plomp yn. Sá liet Wibe Lubberts him de fjouwer wike iensum-sitte
bitelje[9]. Hja skeinden him yn syn eare as frij man yn in frij lân, hy
formoarzele hjar symboal ta grús en winske der by, hjar macht

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The Soviet Experiment Russia the USSR and the

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Russia The 20th Century The Cambridge History of Russia

The Sociology of the Soviet Union The Family in the

Russia and the Soviet Union An Historical Introduction

Russia and the USSR 1855 1991 Autocracy and

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia 5 The Years of

Roads to Glory Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish

Fortress Russia Conspiracy Theories in the Post Soviet

Music for the Revolution Musicians and Power in Early

New York Oxford

Oxford New York

Copyright © 2011, 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Printed in the United States of America

part i CRISIS AND REVOLUTION 1

1 The Imperial Legacy 3

2 The Double Revolution 47

3 Socialism and Civil War 68

4 Nationalism and Revolution 110

part ii RETREAT AND REBUILDING 137

5 The Evolution of the Dictatorship 139

6 Socialism in One Country 157

Retreat and Retrenchment 176

7 NEP Society 188

8 Culture Wars 213

part iii STALINISM 233

9 The Stalin Revolution 235

10 Stalin’s Industrial Revolution 252

The New Class of Bosses 265

11 Building Stalinism 273

12 Culture and Society in the Socialist

13 Collective Security and the Coming

14 The Great Fatherland War 336

15 The Big Chill: The Cold War Begins 363

The Soviets in Eastern Europe 375

16 Late Stalinism at Home and Abroad 389

part iv REFORM AND STAGNATION 411

17 From Autocracy to Oligarchy:

18 The Paradoxes of Brezhnev’s Long Reign 447

part v REFORM AND REVOLUTION 477

19 Reform and the Road to Revolution 479

20 The Second Russian Republic

Figure 1.1 Volga peasants, 1905. 15

Figure 10.3 Sergo Orjonikidze, member of the Politburo, visits

Changes to the Second Edition

T rying to understand Russia or the Soviet Union has preoccupied serious

as “socialism”; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s revolution (1985–91), which tried to dis-

LAND AND PEOPLE

attempted to compete with more industrialized and technologically more sophis-

foreign challenge and domestic pretensions to greatness, that would be repeated

Peasants lived in simple, small cottages that outsiders experienced as dark,

AUTOCRACY, NOBILITY, REFORMS, AND REACTION

Figure 1.1 Volga peasants, 1905 (RIA Novosti).

One of Alexander III’s ministers, fearful of Western-style innovations that would

THE COMING OF CAPITALISM