" the main attraction of 'the cause' lay not so much in the satisfaction which they might derive from seeing the people's daily lives improved, as in their own romantic search for a sense of 'wholeness' which might give higher meaning to their lives and end their alienation from the world."

As for bourgeois intellectuals' commitment to 'the people', it was essentially abstract. They loved Man but were not so sure of individual men. M. V Petrashevsky, the Utopian theorist, summed it up when he proclaimed: 'unable to find anything either in women or in men worthy of my adherence, I have turned to devote myself to the service of humanity'. IN THIS IDEALIZED ABSTRACTION OF 'THE PEOPLE' there was not a little of that snobbish contempt which aristocrats are inclined to nurture for the habits of the common man. How else can one explain the authoritarian attitudes of such revolutionaries as Bakunin, Speshnev, Tkachev, Plekhanov and Lenin, if not by their noble origins? It was as if they saw the people as agents of their abstract doctrines rather than as suffering individuals

"In The Criminal for example, Chekhov tells the true story of a peasant who was brought to court for stealing a bolt from the railway tracks to use as a weight on his fishing tackle. He fails to understand his guilt and in trying to justify himself repeatedly talks of 'we' (the peasants of his village): 'Bah! Look how many years we have been removing bolts, and God preserve us, and here you are talking about a crash, people killed. We do not remove all of them — we always leave some. We do not act without thinking. We do understand."


Belinsky wrote in 1837: 'Our people understand freedom as volia, and volia for the people means to make mischief. The liberated Russian nation will not head for the parliament but will run for the tavern to drink liquor, smash glasses, and hang the nobility, whose only guilt is to shave their beards and wear a frock-coat instead of a peasant tunic.

'Hit your wife with the butt of the axe, get down and see if she's breathing. If she is, she's shamming and wants some more.'
'The more you beat the old woman, the tastier the soup will be.'
'Beat your wife like a fur coat, then there'll be less noise.'
A wife is nice twice: when she's brought into the house [as a bride] and when she's carried out of it to her grave.'
For a man that has been beaten you have to offer two unbeaten ones, and even then you may not clinch the bargain
Oh, it's a jolly life, only there's no one to beat

It was still a common practice in some parts of Russia for a peasant bride to be deflowered before the whole village; and if the groom proved impotent, his place could be taken by an older man, or by the finger of the matchmaker. Modesty had very little place in the peasant world. Toilets were in the open air. Peasant women were constantly baring their breasts, either to inspect and fondle them or to nurse their babies, while peasant men were quite unselfconscious about playing with their genitals. Urban doctors were shocked by the peasant customs of spitting into a persons eye to get rid of sties, of feeding children mouth to mouth, and of calming baby boys by sucking on their penis.

"Thousands of radical students, Mikhail Romas among them, poured into the countryside during the 1870s in the naive belief that they could win over the peasantry to their revolutionary cause. Finding in the world of the village a reflection of their own romantic aspirations, they convinced themselves that they would find in the ordinary peasants soul-mates and allies in their socialist struggle. Some of them tried to dress and talk like peasants, so much did they identify themselves with their 'simple way of life'. One of them, a Jew, even converted to Orthodoxy in the belief that this would bring him closer to the 'peasant soul'. These romantics conceived of the village as a collective and harmonious community that testified to the basic socialist instincts of the Russian people. Among the peasantry, wrote one of the Populist leaders, 'there is more attentiveness to the worth of the individual man, less indifference to what my neighbour is like and what I appear like to my neighbour'. Such was their idealized view of the peasants that many Populists even contended that in sexual matters they were more moral and celibate than the corrupted urban population. So, for example, they believed that prostitution did not exist among the peasants (even though the majority of urban prostitutes were originally peasant women); that there was no rape or sexual assault in the village (despite the peasant custom of snokhachestvo which gave the household patriarchs a sexual claim on their daughters-in-law in the absence of their husbands); and that whereas syphilis (which was endemic throughout Russia) might have been venereal in the depraved cities, in the villages it was caused more innocently by the peasant custom of sharing wooden spoons and bowls.
These romantic missionaries were shattered by the reality they encountered in the countryside. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasantry, and were soon arrested by the police. Looking back on the experience from prison and exile, moderate Populists such as Romas were convinced that the basic problem had been the peasantry's isolation from the rest of society. Through the centuries of serfdom the only outsiders they had met had been the gentry and state officials, so it was hardly surprising that they were wary of the student agitators. What was needed now was years of patient work to build up the bonds of trust between the peasants and the Populist intelligentsia. Hence Romas had come to Krasnovidovo. His efforts were in vain. From the start the villagers were suspicious of
his co-operative. They could not understand why its prices were so much cheaper than the other retail outlets. The richest peasants, who were closely linked with the established merchants, intimidated Romas and his allies. They filled one of his firewood logs with gunpowder, causing a minor explosion. They threatened the poorer peasants who began to show an interest in the co-operative; and brutally murdered one of his assistants, a poor peasant from the village, leaving his horribly mutilated body in several pieces along the river bank. Finally, they blew up the co-operative (along with half the rest of the village) by setting light to the kerosene store. Romas's enemies blamed him and Gorky for the fire, and set the angry peasants on them. But the 'heretics' fought themselves free and fled for their lives.
Romas accepted defeat philosophically, putting it down to the ignorance of the villagers. He refused to give up his belief in the peasants' socialist potential and when, fifteen years later, Gorky met him again, he had already served another ten-year sentence of exile in Siberia for his involvement in the Populist movement. But for Gorky the experience was a bitter disillusionment. It led him to the conclusion that, however good they may be on their own, the peasants left all that was fine behind them when they 'gathered in one grey mass':
Some dog-like desire to please the strong ones in the village took possession of them, and then it disgusted me to look at them. They would howl wildly at each other, ready for a fight — and they would fight, over any trifle. At these moments they were terrifying and they seemed capable of destroying the very church where only the previous evening they had gathered humbly and submissively, like sheep in a fold.
The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasants, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric*

These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The Populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception, threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity.

Romantic observers took the villagers self-imposed conformity as a sign of social harmony. "