Twilight Of The Tsar Analysis

The Twilight of the Tsar:
Russian Peasantry at the Turn of the Century

Throughout European history, there has been a trend towards romanticizing the agrarian lifestyle. From the whitewashing of folktales to Stalin-era propaganda musicals, the idealized peasantry are presented as harmonious, cheerful, and cooperative. This view was especially prevalent in imperial Russia at the end of the 19th century, with many writers believing that the Russian peasantry’s “cooperative and communitarian” nature would serve as a model for a future socialist Russia (xv). In an attempt to correct this “naive” view, the Russian ethnographer Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia spent four years observing several villages around her home estate, chiefly the village of
The typical household consisted of a man and his wife, his sons, their wives and children, and unmarried daughters. Two characteristics defined the household’s relationships: violence and work. Violence between husband and wife, brother and sister, and worker and animal was commonplace. Often, wives were beaten as punishment for failing to fulfill their husband’s wishes (21). Older sisters (around nine or ten years of age) were entrusted with the care of their younger siblings (25). Semyonova notes that as the child grows, so do the frequency and severity of the sister’s punishments (28). Being constantly surrounded by violence engendered a set of beliefs in the peasant child: that might makes right, and that deceit to avoid punishment is a virtue
At several points, Semyonova writes of the abnormally high rates of infant mortality in the villages (7). Coinciding with an increase in fertility and not enough food to go around, this leads us to an unpleasant reality of peasant life: infanticides, abortions, and intentional miscarriages were a common method of population control (57). In very real terms, women held the power of life and death in Russian peasant society.
Semyonova’s bleak account of Russian peasantry stands in stark contrast to the romanticized view so common among upper-class Russians. Peasant villages were places of brutal violence, death, sickness, and hard labor. Yet this is the view we need to see and understand. At the time Semyonova performed her research, Russia was barely twenty years away from the most significant period of change in its history – and a revolution that would change the world. By virtue of their numbers, the peasants (and those who claimed to speak for them) would come to play a major role in the decades of turmoil