Lenin then cites a passage from Chernyshevsky, in relation to the Reform. The 1861 Reform, emancipating the serfs, actually brought great hardship, because, as serfs they had access to the land, and were able to provide food from it. The Reform freed the serfs, but they were, by the same token, freed from the land they farmed, unless they could afford to buy it. Millions could not, and were, thereby, ruined.
Given the police state in Russia, Chernyshevsky could not speak openly about the Reform, but did so in a roundabout way of analogy.
““Suppose I was interested in taking measures to protect the provisions out of which your dinner is made. It goes without saying that if I was prompted to do so by my kind disposition towards you, then my zeal was based on the assumption that the provisions belonged to you and that the dinner prepared from them would be wholesome and beneficial to you. Imagine my feelings, then, when I learn that the provisions do not belong to you at all, and that for every dinner prepared from them you are charged a price which not only exceeds the cost of the dinner” (this was written before the Reform. Yet the Messrs. Yuzhakovs assert now that its fundamental principle was to give security to the peasants!!) “but which you are not able to pay at all without extreme hardship. What thoughts enter my head when I make such strange discoveries? . . . How stupid I was to bother about the matter when the conditions did not exist to ensure its usefulness! Who but a fool would bother about the retention of property in certain hands without first satisfying himself that those hands will receive the property, and on favourable terms? ... Far better if all these provisions are lost, for they will only cause harm to my dear friend! Far better be done with the whole business, for it will only cause your ruin!”” (p 280-1)
In other words, Chernyshevsky, whose ideas the liberal Narodniks claimed heritage from, was under no illusion that the Reform was designed to benefit the mass of Russian peasants, because the land was not being gifted to them, but sold to them at a high price, a price the majority could not pay.
“It required the genius of a Chernyshevsky to understand so clearly at that time, when the peasant Reform was only being introduced (when it had not yet been properly elucidated even in Western Europe), its fundamentally bourgeois character, to understand that already at that time Russian “society” and the Russian “state” were ruled and governed by social classes that were irreconcilably hostile to the working people and that undoubtedly predetermined the ruin and expropriation of the peasantry. Moreover, Chernyshevsky understood that the existence of a government that screens our antagonistic social relations is a terrible evil, which renders the position of the working people ever so much worse.” (p 281-2)
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