In reading my way through Russian history, alternating fiction with nonfiction, I’ve finally gotten around to a fat paperback I’ve had for a couple of decades, Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat
“…There’s sabotage everywhere, sabotage of tractors, combines, threshing machines, binders — sabotage everywhere. Is it really true? Are they really breaking everything on purpose? Who’s causing the damage? The kolkhozniks? Why should they? It turns out there’s no other answer for it: for hundreds of years our peasants have known only one piece of machinery, and that was the ax. Now we’ve put them to work on tractors and combine harvesters; we’ve given them trucks to drive, and they break them because they don’t understand them, because they are not trained, because they are ignorant in the technological and every other sense. So what can we do? Wait until the countryside becomes technically literate and overcomes its ancient backwardness? Wait until the peasants change the character it has taken them centuries to form? And meanwhile should we let them break the machinery and let them learn on it that way? We cannot condemn our machinery to demolition and destruction; it has cost us too much blood to get it. Nor can we wait — the capitalist countries will strangle us. We’ve only one method, it’s a difficult one, but it’s the only one, and that’s fear. Fear embodied in the single word wrecker. You damaged a tractor, it means you’re a wrecker, you get ten years. For a mowing machine or binder it’s also ten years. So now the peasant begins to think, he scratches his head, he starts to take care of his tractor, he gives a bottle to someone who may know just a fraction about machinery — show me, help me, save me. A few days ago I was strolling along the riverbank and I noticed a kid sitting in his motorboat and he’s crying: ‘I pulled the string, something broke, the motor won’t start, I’ll get five years for it.’ It was a very simple, primitive motor. I opened the lid and saw that a small lever had come loose, so I tightened it up and the motor started. But that boy would have been sentenced for damaging the motor, for sabotaging the plan for fish supply or something like that. That’s how they do things in the courts. And there’s no other way: we’re saving the machinery, saving our industry, saving our country and its future. Why don’t they do this in the West? I’ll tell you why. We manufactured our first tractor in nineteen thirty, but in the West they made their first one in eighteen thirty, a full hundred years before us. They’ve got generations of experience; there the tractor is private property and the owner looks after it. Here, property belongs to the state, so it has to be looked after by state methods.”
One thing I’ve always wondered about is how intelligent people who were part of the system of terror justified it to themselves, and this explanation, put in the mouth of a thoughtful NKVD officer, is very convincing; I’m sure people said more or less exactly that many times.
And now I’m off to read the sequel, Fear!
in the West they made their first one in eighteen thirty, a full hundred years before us. They’ve got generations of experience; there the tractor is private property and the owner looks after it.
And in the West after 1830, too, there was machine-wrecking, sometimes deliberate, sometimes on account of ignorance and lack of training, and the owner–landlord, capitalist–likewise exacted punishment, though not on the same scale or of the same severity. (E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class is decades old by now but I don’t think subsequent work has completely demolished the basic outlines of how the English peasantry was turned into an industrial proletariat within a couple of generations.) I don’t mean the Soviet authorities had no choice, once they’d opted for rapid “primary accumulation” under threat of attack, but to employ the means they did; of course they had alternatives, some of which might even have accomplished the same project more efficiently as well as less inhumanely. But this quote from Rybakov does, I agree, capture the thought process that must have seemed, to many, like simple and inexorable logic, with terror as its logical outcome.
Very interesting quote. I could honestly see myself being convinced by this argument if I were in the same position even though the outcome is clearly terrible. I’m not very well versed in Soviet history but it seems like these conclusions were reached simply because there was a high level of national pride assumed, as if the country wasn’t successful unless they were beating other countries.
On a language note, is there some peculiarality about Russian that would cause someone to confuse the name of a townhouse with the name of a street that includes many townhouses?
It must have been difficult to translate подворье because the word is pretty archaic, surviving mostly in the arcane language of the church. I was quite surprised to see it translated as “townhouse” (aka row-house in real estate lexicon?) – does the word “townhouse” also mean “merchant’s compound”? I guess in Hanseatic cities these residential-and-warehouse compounds really were townhouses, with a pulley by the attic to lift bales of goods. But the Russian подворье is derived from the word “courtyard”; it’s also residence and business at the same time, but more commonly a cluster of low-slung buildings than a Western four-level baroque row-house.
One of Rybakov’s fav topics was a conflict between “good locals” and “evil invaders”, the locals in this case being the children of old traditional neighborhoods of this town of seven hills. Therefore, the archaic place-names fit the subject perfectly. Especially fitting is a reference to Zaryad’ye, a neighborhood which had been completely demolished half a century ago, except for a handful of подворье compounds still left standing in the shadow of a monstrous hotel, where a popular movie theater kept the name “Zaryad’e”. Therefore, every Muscovite of Rybakov’e era readily identified the word Zaryad’ye with the world of old extinguished neighborhoods of traditional Moscow.
this explanation, put in the mouth of a thoughtful NKVD officer, is very convincing;
I’m sure it was, if you shared the disdain for the peasantry that was (arguably still is) common among urban elites. The “kulaks”, and there were many of them, oddly didn’t go around sabotaging their own personal equipment in the 1920s. And there also wasn’t much “sabotage” prior to 1918, although there was a great deal of machinery coming into Russia in the late 19th century. But that is a great passage – on the one hand it is just horrifically false as a description of what was really happening in the Soviet Union, but probably 100% correct as a reflection of how people actually justified their inhuman actions to themselves.
Interestingly, Rybakov established himself as a children’s adventure writer in 1940s and even got a Stalin’s Prize. His ‘Kortik’ (Dagger) and ‘The Bronze Bird’ about adventures of two boys during and after the Russian Civil War have long been top teenage read in Russia/USSR. I’ve recently re-read them (to retell my children) and admired the solid plot construction.
I am glad you liked the novel, it is an important work that deserves more recognition. His style is deceptively simple, he doesn’t play with words or the turn of phrase, but the depth of characterisation and its succinctness is absolutely astonishing.
I’m sure it was
I hope it’s clear that I meant “convincing” in the sense “a convincing rendition of what such people thought.”
His style is deceptively simple, he doesn’t play with words or the turn of phrase, but the depth of characterisation and its succinctness is absolutely astonishing.
Exactly, and thanks for the recommendation of ‘Kortik’ and ‘The Bronze Bird’; I’ll have to give them a try.
MOCKBA: But the Russian подворье is derived from the word “courtyard”; it’s also residence and business at the same time, but more commonly a cluster of low-slung buildings than a Western four-level baroque row-house.
Scandinavian gård, cognate with Eng yard, is the generic word for “farm”, “backyard”, “apartment building(s sharing a backyard)” and “commercial building”. In Sweden modern police stations are called Polisgården.
I wonder how common this is cross-linguistically. Is it special for us recently urbanized North-Eastern Barbarians? (But I probably shouldn’t read too much into it — it’s a simple extension of the meaning “yard” … “court” … “Hof”.)
In my reading of Anna Karenina, I just got to the following passage (I’m reading in Russian, but I’ll quote the Garnett translation; it’s the start of III:24), which reminded me of the Rybakov quote in the post:
Lyovin’s answer was to give up and let the peasants go back to the old ways, not to start shooting people, but he was dealing with the same problem.
The question of the technological gap between Russia and the West always interested me.
It’s complex and not straightforward issue – in some cases, the gap between invention in the West and adoption in Russia is a few years, in some cases it’s decades.
Very difficult to figure out why.
In case of tractors, Rybakov (or his Communist character) is lying – the tractors of 19 century were steam-powered tractors, they were expensive, certainly not common and failed to have any wide ranging impact on agriculture – and Russia of course imported them immediately and had small domestic industry which manufactured them – back in 19th century.
But tractors which Russia had started making in 1930 were modern, diesel tractors and they were invented in the West in 1917.
13 years
An example of Western technology which took embarrassingly long time to adopt – denim textile which is used to make jeans.
mid19th century American invention which Soviet textile industry tried, but failed to replicate in 1970-1980s.
Oh, in the 8 years that passed I learned a lot more about the original Jewish ghetto of the XIX c. Moscow, and about the narrow meaning of the word подворье in the official lingo of Moscow city administration in those years.
Although generally a “residential-commercial compound”, in the period Moscow podvor’ye more narrowly meant “a guesthouse”. They were located in the business district East of the Kremlin (where Glebovskoe Podvor’ye was located as well), and typically linked with charity causes (some of the best known guesthouses belonged to the monasteries).
“Glebov’s Yard” at Znamensky lane was no exception. Its original owner, a certain Glebov, went blind at the end of his life, and deeded his property for guesthouse conversion with the proceeds to finance an eye clinic. By 1826, the first visiting Jews were directed to stay at Glebov’s, and in time, the two-story property has become all-Jewish. Like most lower-ranking guesthouses, it gradually evolved into a slum-like tenement (while the best ones converted into regular hotels).
You can see its pictures here:
https://zen.yandex.ru/media/moscowstories/evreiskoe-getto-u-samogo-kremlia-5b045b46799d9d1ff70ab6bb
… and the map is here … you can see it was an oblong yard opening to Znamensky lane to the North, and with some imagination it might have been called “a miniature street”
https://www.zaryadyepark.ru/history/istoriya_evrejskogo_poseleniya_v_zaryadye.html
the added details in the link explain that Dmitry Glebov, a poet and a translator (!), contributed to three charitable causes: stipends for 10 girls in a shelter, beds for 5 patients in a hospital, and an eye clinic
PS Scandinavian gård, cognate with Eng yard
and of course Russian “gorod” city
Great information, thanks!
And of course Levin’s peasants were simply disinterested and lacked old fashioned economic motivation to embrace new ways. While the ca. 1930 “tractorists” in the USSR were well-paid, per unit of work, and highly respected as the standard-bearers of the Communist agenda. I used to spend summers in a 1930’s tractor-driver’s compound, it was the best one in the village, and everyone spoke in awe of the days when the farm work still earned cash and fame. The tractor manufacturing was a dual-purpose industry in any case, a military-industrial complex’s darling spec’d from the get-go to accommodate manufacturing of the heavier-frame tanks, and of course Russia was always more nimble with copy-catting military technologies than with civilian industries or agriculture.
Kalashnikov actually wanted to design agricultural machines…