‘Deep People’ More Likely to Be ‘Gravedigger’ of Putin’s Russia than Liberal Opposition, Degtyanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 26 – For the second time in a little over a century, Russian liberals are dismissing “the deep people” of Russia outside of Moscow as the chief prop of the bloody regime; but as before 1905 so now again, they are wrong, Andrey Degtyanov says, because again “the deep people” are more likely to be the gravedigger of the regime than the liberal opposition.

            The first Russian revolution didn’t fit the models of liberal theories, he says; instead, “the deep people under the openly archaic medieval slogan ‘the land is God’s’ unleashed a massive peasant war against ‘the evil blood-sucking landowners.’” Something very similar appears to be happening once again (region.expert/kitezh/).

            The peasants weren’t interested in modern parties or a division of power and they didn’t have political programs of the kinds that the much-ballyhooed political parties had developed. Instead, they wanted and created a mass of peasant republics run by peasant assemblies; and those proved more important than anything the parties could do, Degtyanov says.

            The peasants wanted “land and freedom,” not “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and they sought to achieve it by “the direct democracy of the rural assembly, an ideal more anarchist than liberal,” and more archaic than modern.  But as Nicholas Berdyaev observed, the Russian people have always been more informed by anarchism than by liberalism.

            Only two political figures understood this: Petr Stolypin on the right and Vladimir Lenin on the left. “The first attempted to liquidate by agrarian reform the social matrix of the deep people in revolt; the second from the point of view of western Marxism fell into the open heresy of populism,” with talk about “’the toiling people’” and then “’the power of the Soviets.’”

            After 1917, the peasant revolt destroyed the rear of the White Movement; and after the Whites lost, it came very close to destroying the Bolshevik regime with its slogan of “’soviets without communists,’” Degtyanov says. Fearful of where things were heading, Lenin retreated into the New Economic Policy, the NEP.

            Stalin destroyed much of the matrix for such revolts by collectivization and industrialization. But some of the ideas lived on, although at the time of perestroika, few wanted to pay any attention to those who had thought deeply about the peasant revolt such as the great economist of the 1920s, Aleksandr Chayanov.

            But now these ideas and the society on which they are based are again having their day, the historian says. “The protest movement in the regions in a strange way is reproducing many elements of peasant anarchism” of a century ago – seeking to defend land against imperial corporations and organizing not by political party but by informal meetings of local people.

            Intriguingly, Degtyanov says, this is happening in Moscow city and oblast themselves where people only a generation of so removed from the villages are reviving old means of protest.  “The local protests in the capital … are still not anti-imperialist” but rather like their earlier counterparts are directed against local owners who oppress them.

            But like in regions further from the capital, “the regionalist Moscow opposition is more typically formed from a multitude of local protest groups about social and economic issues than around a specific leader of the next ‘Beautiful Russia of the Future.’”  And that is likely to determine what that future will be.

            Indeed, the historian says, “the gravedigger of the imperial reincarnation [that is Russia today] is more likely to be the 86 percent of the population who form ‘the deep people’ that the Facebook liberal opposition” who drink coffee at Starbucks and ignore what the people around them are really like and really want.

            If that trend is realized, then there is “a real chance that Moscow will be transformed from the imperial capital to one of the Russian regions and the Muscovite Republic will be one of the equal participants of the genuinely federative treaty-based state.” In short, there as elsewhere, “present-day Russian regionalism can emerge from archaic peasant roots.”

            In this situation, everyone should remember that in 1917, the man behind the idea of creating a federal state based on horizontal treaty relationships was none other than the chief theoretician of Russian anarchism, Petr Kropotkin.