Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [483]
The industrialist was a wonderful talker. He would put his great arm round Nadezhda or one of the boys and discuss all manner of things with them, exactly as if they were adults. And it was on one of these afternoons that he gave them his view of Russia’s future. As usual, it was to the point.
‘It’s really quite simple,’ he told them. ‘Russia is now in a race against time. Stolypin, whom I personally support, knows he has to modernize Russia while he keeps the lid on the forces of revolution. If he succeeds, the Tsar will keep his throne; if not …’ He grimaced. ‘Chaos. Peasant and urban insurrection. Remember Pugachev, as they used to say.’
‘What must Stolypin do?’ Karpenko asked.
‘Three things, chiefly. Develop industry. Thanks to foreign capital that’s going well. Next, educate the masses. Sooner or later some kind of democracy will come, and the people aren’t ready for it. Stolypin is making progress there. Thirdly, he’s trying to reform the countryside.’ He sighed. ‘And that, I’m afraid, will be hard.’
The attempt to change the Russian peasant, Dimitri knew, lay at the heart of the great minister’s reforms. In the last two years, important changes had been made. The payments due to the former landowners, together with all arrears, had been entirely cancelled. The peasant had been given full civil liberties, the use of the same law courts as any other citizen, and an internal passport for travel without the permission of the commune, which he was now free to leave at any time. At last, half a century after the Emancipation, he was a free man in fact as well as theory. But there still remained one huge problem.
‘For what can be done about the commune?’ Vladimir wondered aloud.
Even now, the commune’s wasteful strip-farming of medieval times with its periodic redistributions had changed but little. Russian grain yield remained only a third of those in much of Western Europe. In his attempt to change this, Stolypin was trying to encourage peasants to withdraw from the commune, cultivate their own personal land, and be independent farmers. Laws were being passed; easy credit made available through the Peasant Bank. But progress so far was slow.
‘Isn’t Stolypin trying to make the peasant into a bourgeois, though – a capitalist?’ Dimitri objected.
‘Of course he is,’ Vladimir replied. ‘Unlike you, Dimitri, I’m a capitalist. But I do confess that it’s going to be very difficult to make it work.’
‘I’d have thought it would be easy,’ Karpenko remarked.
‘Yes, my friend.’ Vladimir tousled the boy’s head affectionately. ‘But that’s because you come from the Ukraine. Down there in the western provinces of White Russia there’s a tradition of independent farming. But in these central provinces, in Russia proper, the commune system is solid. And if you want to know why, just look at the village here. Look at Boris Romanov, the village elder.’
Dimitri and Karpenko had soon come to know Romanov. As village elder now, he was a figure of some power, which he clearly enjoyed. The family, with three strong sons, had the largest share of strips in the village now and Boris’s house had handsome carving round the eaves and painted shutters. Yet that spring, when Stolypin’s reforms had made some state land by the monastery available for purchase, and Vladimir had remarked to him – ‘Well, Boris Timofeevich, I dare say you’ll be buying some yourself’ – he had glowered and replied: ‘The commune’s buying it.’ And then, quietly but audibly: ‘And we’ll smoke you out too, one day.’
‘Nothing will persuade Romanov that the answer to everything isn’t to take this estate,’ Vladimir continued. ‘And do you know the irony? In many provinces there isn’t enough land – even if you dispossess every landowner