Small potatoes: April 2011

Been reading Orlando Figues' book "A People's Tragedy" about the Russian Revolution and his description of the peasantry was surprising to me, so I thought I'd bore all my reader with a monologue on it and my thoughts on the links between land ownership and freedom vs. dependence and control of people. Yeah, yeah, 'bore off' yourselves...

Bolsheviks have stumbled into power and the cities are starving. Inflation means money is useless, government troops have been requisitioning grain and horses from the peasants (90% of the population of Russia) for the civil war effort and the average peasant in the muddy field is sick of it all and wants to be left alone. He has a dream of "volia", which is to be left alone to get on with the important things in life: growing food and having a laugh without some prats in uniforms taking his produce and making him work for nothing for some fat squire.

Here's a quote:

The real root of the urban crisis was the peasantry's reluctance to sell foodstuffs for paper money. With the wartime collapse of consumer production and the huge inflation of prices, peasants could buy less and less with the rouble fortunes they were being offered for their produce. Government efforts to buy the food at fixed prices, going back to 1916, had only encouraged the peasants to withdraw from the market. They reduced their production, shifted to crops not subject to state control, or hid their surpluses from the gorvernment's procurement agents. Many peasants used their grain to fatten up the cattle, or sold it to black-market traders from the towns, while many others turned it into vodka.

Ok: so those who make the important things, like food, are being shafted and so have said "bugger you lot" to the urban population, and kept it to themselves apart from a bit of bartering for tools, etc. And booze.

Cottage industries boomed, largely undetected by statisticians, as the peasants sought to manufacture all those household products they had once bought from the towns but which were now either unavailable or too expensive for them to buy. Rural craftsmen fashioned simple ploughs and sickles out of old scrap iron. Flax and hemp were grown for clothes and rope; timber was cut to make wheels and furniture; reeds were gathered to make baskets; clay was dug for pottery; and oil-producing seeds were grown for fuel. Old rural handicrafts that had gone to the wall in the age of steam were now resurrected.

The peasants were fat and content (for the most part - the north wasn't), and would have happily gone on living like this until the end of the world if the Bolsheviks hadn't turned up with an army and shafted them in the name of socialism. Which is ironic because the peasants had been true socialists all along. Each village was it's own commune. Every year the leaders (generally the eldest people there) held a council whereby all the land was divided between the villagers - everyone got a chance to farm every bit of land. Property ownership was alien: God made the earth so no-one had the right to buy of sell it, and property (houses, tools, etc) belonged to the Family, and the head of the household did not have the right to buy or sell anything because their unborn relatives might want it! It all had to be agreed by everyone first. Anyone who worked the land was seen more like a family member than for example, a son who left and went to work in a city.

A peasant meeting. Wellies and dressing gowns keeping it surreal.

There was a fly in the ointment though: the landlord. Peasants were actual slaves before the Revolution and not much better afterwards, being used as chess pieces by both regimes for labour and soldiery. They had to work the landlords land for nothing as "rent" for their land, pay taxes to a government they never saw or heard from, serve in their armies, and get flogged and hanged for minor misdemeanours. Being natural pacifists they practised passive resistance, giving the impression to outsiders of being slow-witted and useless, but it was a cover-up. They'd often get the village idiot to be their official "head man" while dealing with government, etc while the real leaders carried on as normal!

I've forgotten where I'm going with this. Oh yeah: land and freedom. Russia is described in the book as essentially two civilisations: Western Urban and Eastern Rural. One aggressive and national (and international) and one passive and local. The urban minority governed in their own interests (mainly - there were some politicians who helped the rural people, but they were rare) and in effect mined the rural populace for materials and labour for their own interests. They looked down on the peasants, and either mocked or patronised them (holding them up to be an ideal, which happens a lot elsewhere) but never realised that they were only there because of them, and as the Revolution proved, were useless to them. When urban and rural populations were sundered, one thrived and one declined - until it put the boot in.

The peasants got their Volia for a few short years, and proved that they could live well without outside interference, but it was taken away again all too soon in the name of "socialism". By the way, peasants are described as selfish, cunning and permanently drunk as well, but if you were the product of generations of slavery and humiliation, I bet you would be too.

Give every person their fare share of the Earth, leave them in peace and watch true civilisation grow (ignore the vodka and beards). Meddle and think you know best what others want and need, and you get what we have today: gross inequality, famine, etc, etc.

We're having to delay loads of sowings because we're away for 8 days soon, and I still haven't finished the carrot bed! It's all going to pot! W.G.D (When Gite Done) I will be playing a bit of catch-up in the garden, plus last year we got a bad frost in May and loads of things were set back (like my awful spuds) so hopefully things will even out. Here are some dull vegetable pictures:

Early spuds looking good.

Spring cabbages finally looking like spring cabbages - just in time for me to rip them out and plant onions!

Seedlings (toms, peppers, chillies, aubergine, okra, tomatilloes, grapes), and some "Mispoona" going to seed. Polytunnel smells of honey - reminding me of yet another thing on the List: bees.