RUSSIAN PEASANTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 December 1922, Page 2

RUSSIAN PEASANTS

GORKI’S NEW BOOK.

Maxim Gorki has written a new book (says “The Times’s” Riga correspondent), which is about to appear in Russian and German. The most important subject of

this new work is the Russian peasant, whom Gorki now paints in the darkest colours as a monster of primitively cunning brutality. A few extracts will show how far Gorki’s views have changed during the past few years on the people whom he really ought to know and understand.

“I think,” he says, “that just as a sense of humour is the Englishman’s exceptional peculiarity, the Russian people’s outstanding quality is a sense of special cruelty. There is a diabolical sharpness about Russian cruelty, something exquisite and refined.”

“I believe,” continues Gorki, “that women are nowhere else so pitilessly and terribly beaten as in the Russian village, and probably no other country has such advisory maxims as : ‘Beat your wife with the butt-end of an axe; if she falls down, sniffs, gasps, she is deceiving; give her some more!’ Or, ‘A wife is twice kind; on her wedding day and at her funeral.’ Or, ‘Do what you like with women and cattle!’ Or, ‘The more you beat your wife, the better will be your soup.’ “Children are always thoroughly beaten. Russians like beating generally, and it is all the same whom they beat.”

About the civil war Gorki writes; —

“I asked some participants in the civil war whether they did not feel any compunction against killing one another, and they said:—‘No, we don’t mind it; he has a gun, I have a gun, we are equal. One kills the other, more room for the rest.’ One replied: “War at home is nothing. Against strangers it is difficult; it goes against the grain. It is much easier to kill Russians. There are so many of us; we have no order. Burn a village; what is it? It would burn down of itself sooner or later in any case. Besides, that is our own matter, a sort of manoeuvre, as it were, for the sake of experience. But when I was in Prussia at the beginning of the war, you can’t think how sorry I was for the people there, their villages, their towns, their order. What we destroyed, and didn’t know why ! Truly, I was pearly glad when I got wounded; I was so sick of it all.’ ” Gorki relates that a scientific <■.' in the Urals was met in 1921 by a peasant with these words: —“You are scholars; tell me what to do. A Bashkir killed my cow ; I, of course, killed the Bashkir. But now 1 have stolen a cow from the Bashkir’s family; will anything be done to me?” He was asked whether he did not expect to be punished for killing the man, but he quietly answered, “Oh, that is nothing; men are now cheap.” The peasantry, Gorki says, has become very ill-disposed towards the towns, regarding the townspeople as parasites, living on the labour and products of the country, and producing only unnecessary things with which they impose on the simplicity of the country-people. Then Gorki goes on to deal with the well-fed Russian peasant’s attitude towards those suffering from famine. He quotes a “real Russian peasant” as follows: — “Don’t cry in Riazan about the poor harvest at Pskoff. The evil is great. Many people are dying. Who is dying? The weak, | the worn-out. All the better for those who remain alive. We don’t notice that the war cleared much space, but now they say millions are dying out. We shall notice that. Think of it! Reckon five acres of land to each who dies. What a lot of free land we shall have !” Gorki declares that the Russian nation is “a community of semi-savage people.” He then goes on:—“The cruel form of the revolution I explain by tho exceptional brutality of the Russian people” Gorki nevertheless looks upon the future of the Russian people optimistically. "Now,” he says, “we may with conviction affirm that at the price of the intellectual and working classes, the Russian peasantry has come to life. As with the Jews whom Moses led out of the Egyptian bondage, the semi-savage, foolish, apathetic inhabitants of the Russian villages, including the monsters described above, will die out, and their place will be taken by a new race, literate, intelligent, and courageously healthy. I do not think this will be a very gentle or kind people; but it will be an active people, suspicous, and indifferent to everything for which it can have no direct need.”