Abstract
The Russian peasant family was a patriarchal institution in which men held power over women, elders over youth, adults over children and mothers-in-law over daughters-in-law.1 The male head of household was responsible for maintaining order within the household and had the right to dispose of the labor power of its members and to take crucial decisions concerning their lives. Within the household the bol’shak was expected to assert his authority and to control female sexuality; the anxieties aroused by these responsibilities may explain the prevalence of wife-beating. Outside the household the head’s authority extended into village life, since the mir, to which only heads of household belonged, ordered the life of the peasant community. Gender identities were thoroughly enmeshed with the age hierarchies of the household, serving to maintain male dominance and to enforce male as well as female conformity to prescriptive norms. The inequality of men and women was perceived to be part of the natural order, it being assumed that men had God-given authority to rule over women by virtue of their superior physical and moral strength. Full masculine status was achieved only with marriage, and it was marriage that entitled a man to a share in communal land. ‘Without a wife and family, a peasant is not a peasant.’ Single men were not considered ‘peasants’ (muzhiki), since they had no entitlement to a land allotment.2
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For a detailed account of the different types of artel’, see I. Eremeev (ed.), Gorod S-Peterburg s tochki zreniia meditsinskoi pomoshchi (St Petersburg, 1897).
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Cited in Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: the Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907 (Berkeley, 1992), 242.
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Carole Pateman’s path-breaking work contrasts classic patriarchalism of the seventeenth century, where masculine political creativity is rooted in the procreative power of the father, with contract theory where men act as brothers in order to transform themselves into a civic fraternity. She argues that in so doing, the ‘brothers’ split apart the two dimensions of political right that were formerly united in the figure of the father: patriarchal right is extended to all men, but the civil sphere gains its universal meaning only in opposition to a private sphere which subordinates nature and women. C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988), 77–133.
Buzinov, Za Nevskoi Zastavoi, 18. Buzinov’s identification with the family of workers here appears to come about a result not just of the repudiation of the authority of the father, but of the threat of maternal re-engulfment. Such a reading is in line with ‘object relations’ psychoanalysis, which posits that whilst a boy’s sense of self begins in union with the feminine, his sense of masculinity arises against it. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, 1978).
Hunt suggests that during the French Revolution, revolutionaries, having slain the king, sought to replace him with a different kind of family, one in which parents were effaced and children, especially brothers, acted autonomously. She draws the idea from Freud who used the term to denote the neurotic’s fantasy of ‘getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them with others who, as a rule, are of higher social standing’. L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London, 1992), xiii.
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Smith, S.A. (2002). Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg. In: Clements, B.E., Friedman, R., Healey, D. (eds) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501799_6
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