The "Theory of Generations" and the Problem of Migrants
Here is a portrait of this very gigantic petty-bourgeois wave. A still from the film "Man with a Gun."
And God told him that his descendants would be exiles in a foreign land and would be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years.
Acts of the Apostles, 7:8
Acts of the Apostles, 7:8
From stories about the little-known. Today, continuing the theme of the impact of generational issues on society as a whole, we will look, firstly, at the portrait of the average Russian at the beginning of the 20th century, and secondly, we will consider the issue of the migration of Russian peasants to cities.
There are many value judgments on the question of what Russians were like at that time, but I'd like to cite just one: that of A.P. Chekhov. Here's what he wrote:
...a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopkeeper, chorister, schoolboy and student, brought up on deference to rank, kissing priests' hands, worshipping other people's thoughts, giving thanks for every piece of bread, being flogged many times, going to class without galoshes, fighting, torturing animals, loving to dine with rich relatives, hypocritical both to God and to people without any need, only from the consciousness of his own insignificance... waking up one fine morning, he feels that in his veins flows no longer slave blood, but real human blood...
This phrase is largely autobiographical and therefore requires clarification. Clearly, such people, "squeezing the slave out of themselves drop by drop," already existed at the time. But the question is: what percentage of them were they compared to those who remained in this situation or were stuck in an intermediate position? Clearly, there were significantly more of them than the "Chekhovians," and it was they who set the tone in Tsarist Russia at that time. Moreover, this is clearly written about a first-generation city dweller, the most "terrible" from a social psychology perspective, because such people equally experienced the pressures of a peasant upbringing until the age of five and the pressures of an urban environment, where they ran around to school without galoshes.
And here it's worth remembering what the peasant psychology of that time was like, what lay at its core? At its core lay a truly horrific paternalism, or "fatherism." Peasant labor is hard. It was even harder at a time when peasants in the Russian Empire often survived at the point of starvation. What united people under these conditions? Only one thing—the authority of the father-patriarch and unquestioning obedience to him. Bestuzhev-Lada wrote very well about this in his small but insightful study, "History your parents."
Moreover, paternalism demanded obedience not only to one's own father but to all the other "fathers" in the village, defining a certain standard of behavior and, precisely because of this, demanding that a person "be like everyone else." Be like everyone else in work, in rest, in entertainment—in everything. As soon as a person showed himself to be different, grave consequences immediately fell upon him: fellow villagers would not marry his daughters, would not give their girls to his sons, would not socialize with him, and would even call him derogatory nicknames. The pressure of such an attitude was severe and often provoked a person to leave for the city. Incidentally, kulaks were disliked in the villages not only for their "blood-sucking" but also for the very fact that they were "not like everyone else." This attitude toward peasants who had "made it" is well described in the novel "The Hunchbacked Bear" by Yevgeny Permyak.
People raised under paternalism subsequently developed an unconscious attraction to... strong personalities, all sorts of "fathers," "leaders," and "caudillos," all because they were accustomed to believing that they could easily solve all your problems (without having to think about them yourself!); the main thing was to follow the "father's" orders and work tirelessly. And in the village, the father would beat those who disobeyed with a belt or reins, and he was perfectly within his rights. These people were accustomed to this attitude from childhood. Before they were five!
But circumstances changed. Need and hardship in Russia reached their peak, and what happened happened—the February bourgeois revolution. But why was there such a significant gap between February and October? V.I. Lenin answered this question, too, and exhaustively:
Russia is now seething. Millions and tens of millions, politically dormant for ten years, politically crushed by the terrible oppression of Tsarism and the backbreaking labor of landowners and factory owners, have awakened and are drawn to politics. And who are these millions and tens of millions? Mostly small proprietors, petty bourgeois, people standing in the middle between capitalists and wage workers. Russia is the most petty-bourgeois of all European countries.
A gigantic petty-bourgeois wave swept over everything, suppressing the conscious proletariat not only by its numbers, but also ideologically, i.e., it infected and captured very broad circles of workers with petty-bourgeois views on politics.
The petty bourgeoisie in life depends on the bourgeoisie, living itself in a proletarian way, and not in a proletarian way (in the sense of a place in social production), and in the way of thinking it follows the bourgeoisie.
In the interests of improving grain production technology and the scale of production, as well as developing rational large-scale farming and public control over it, we must work within the peasant committees to establish large-scale model farms on each confiscated landowner's estate, under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Laborers' Deputies. The Party of the Proletariat must explain that the system of small-scale farming under commodity production is incapable of freeing humanity from mass poverty and oppression.
THE TASKS OF THE PROLETARIAT IN OUR REVOLUTION
(DRAFT PLATFORM OF THE PROLETAR PARTY)
Written on April 10 (23), 1917; afterword - May 28 (June 10) 1917
Published in September 1917 in Petrograd as a separate brochure by the Priboy publishing house.
Signature: V. Lenin
A gigantic petty-bourgeois wave swept over everything, suppressing the conscious proletariat not only by its numbers, but also ideologically, i.e., it infected and captured very broad circles of workers with petty-bourgeois views on politics.
The petty bourgeoisie in life depends on the bourgeoisie, living itself in a proletarian way, and not in a proletarian way (in the sense of a place in social production), and in the way of thinking it follows the bourgeoisie.
In the interests of improving grain production technology and the scale of production, as well as developing rational large-scale farming and public control over it, we must work within the peasant committees to establish large-scale model farms on each confiscated landowner's estate, under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Laborers' Deputies. The Party of the Proletariat must explain that the system of small-scale farming under commodity production is incapable of freeing humanity from mass poverty and oppression.
THE TASKS OF THE PROLETARIAT IN OUR REVOLUTION
(DRAFT PLATFORM OF THE PROLETAR PARTY)
Written on April 10 (23), 1917; afterword - May 28 (June 10) 1917
Published in September 1917 in Petrograd as a separate brochure by the Priboy publishing house.
Signature: V. Lenin
So, not only were the peasant masses the bearers of a paternalistic psychology, they were also smallholders with their own, also very specific, worldview, psychology, and behavioral patterns. Quite a mess, wasn't it? And so this entire mass "flooded" into the cities, dramatically altering their social structure, which became especially noticeable after the end of the Civil War, when many hereditary city dwellers, including hereditary workers, were killed at the front or even emigrated. So, if we follow Lenin's understanding of events—and we have no reason to doubt its accuracy—it was precisely in the cities that a sharp rise in petty-bourgeois consciousness occurred, despite the fact that the country was declaring a socialist transformation of society. A paradox, eh? And it was resolved by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). But the Bolsheviks understood that the NEP was temporary, that they would easily abandon it as soon as... as soon as the dominant force of the new Soviet society became not the backward peasantry, but the advanced working class.
It's no coincidence that as early as 1925, the country was holding the so-called Industrialization Congress (the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)). And note that in Comrade Stalin's speeches at this and all subsequent congresses, he began his reports by emphasizing the numerical growth of the working class, viewing it as an exclusively positive development. But... This raises an interesting question. Clearly, Stalin was unaware of the "theory of generations." But he could not have been unaware that all the "new workers" he spoke of were merely yesterday's peasants. Moreover, the use of the American assembly-line labor system also does not contribute to the development of proletarian class consciousness, since what kind of professional worker can emerge from someone who "tightens nut number 7"? He will remain a peasant at heart and suffer from the duality of his generally rather primitive consciousness. And he will also solve the problem of his "suffering" in the traditional way – with vodka! This is precisely why, by the way, the level of drunkenness in the USSR increased sharply in the cities at the end of the 1920s, which has been the subject of numerous dissertation studies using examples from many regions of Russia, including the Penza region.
However, the country and I.V. Stalin himself had no choice in this matter. Following Marxist-Leninist doctrine (and he could not physically follow any other at the time), he, as a Marxist, had to simultaneously prepare the country for participation in the world revolution and, at the same time, as a man of state interests, strengthen it against external aggression. "We'll be crushed if we don't get through this period in 10-15 years!"—that was what he had said, and it was absolutely true. In other words, he had no choice. Industrial growth had to be ensured, which meant increasing the size of the working class at any cost. And the simplest and most obvious solution in this case was the migration of a significant portion of the USSR's population from rural areas to cities.
Incidentally, by 1961, the number of rural and urban residents in the USSR had already become equal. However, the country's urban population was now completely different from before. Fourth- and even third-generation urbanites had become rare, while first- and second-generation urbanites were now dominant.
I'd like to point out that I'm not trying to suggest that peasants are "bad" and city dwellers "good." Far from it. What I'm talking about is the alignment of the psychology of upbringing children up to the age of five with the environment. And any reasonable person can't help but agree that the rural environment, especially in those distant times, was different from the urban environment, even though in 1961, the vast majority of streets in Penza, as in the villages, were unpaved!
But there was also the issue of education, which was closely intertwined with the issue of migration. However, we'll look at that next time...
To be continued ...
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