A Land to Call Their Own Russian Peasants, the Question of Modern Citizenship and Land Disputes in the Ufa Governorate, 1861-1917
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A Land to Call Their Own Russian peasants, the question of modern citizenship and land disputes in the Ufa governorate, 1861-1917 Paul van Dijk 3489396 Supervisor: Ido de Haan Master thesis Date: 5-5-2018 Word count: 50609 Voor Emma & Voor Ian 2 Diep in de tijd. Het kalme ademen van miljoenen jaren… … We waden al haast door de schaduwen. — Tommy Wieringa 3 Preface Finally! The work is done. I cannot believe it’s over. The sudden freedom feels strange after so much hardship this thesis imposed on me. Maybe the fact that today is Liberation Day in the Netherlands has to do with it. The tears in my eyes remind me of my dear friend Ian. Losing him made me doubt whether I could even finish this thesis. I had lost my ability to write and to analyse. Now, after all this time, I feel proud that I persevered. I did it and I cannot believe it’s finally over. At the same time, they are the tears of a tremendous joy. My topic was not always easy, but my choice brought me to Ufa in Russia, where it was great meeting people who were eager to show their city and country. It was also fantastic to speak to Russian scholars and students who had different and interesting perspectives on what I considered to be certainties of Russian history and perhaps of life in general. Working in the Ufa archive was an amazing experience that made me especially appreciate the digitization of the Dutch archives. Ploughing through paper catalogues and waiting hours for a limited number of files was an indispensable experience for my development as a researcher. The study of the archival materials itself reminded me why I love history so much: I have become addicted to the gratification of getting to know the smallest villages, even those far up the tiny rivers into the mountains, and solving the little ‘puzzles’ that were the weal and woe of people long gone. It is also the pleasure of finding out what was really going on in their lives and discerning larger developments that relate to what I have already learned – or not, of course. A sigh. I actually cannot believe it’s already over. Writing this thesis has been a great personal journey and I would like to use the opportunity here to thank those who guided and inspired me along the way – as is only natural for a student of history. First and foremost, I would have never been able to finish my work without Ido de Haan, whose infinite patience and keen ability to know very well what to say to keep me motivated were of vital importance. Obviously, his academic expertise was important too. It feels only right to recognize the help Liesbeth van de Grift provided me in the early stages of writing my thesis. Unfortunately, she could not prevent me and my thesis from falling apart. Marsil’ N. Farkhshatov has been absolutely instrumental for the successful conclusion of this thesis. His kindness and friendliness truly made me quickly feel at home when I first arrived in Ufa and he introduced me to the Bashkir academia, provided me with crucial Russian-language books on my topic and arranged for all the documents necessary to work in the archives and libraries of Ufa. He also made me realize that in the Soviet Union, the alphabet started with M of Marx. The fact that indexes in Soviet works literally started with Marx or Lenin meant that I had to explore Marxist theory in order to properly understand the 4 Soviet approaches to the agrarian relations between Bashkirs and Russian peasants, but also the work of post-Soviet historians who base themselves on their Marxist predecessors. I would like to thank the Ufa archive director Julaj Kh. Juldashbaev for his assistance during my work in his archive and the pleasant small-talk during the quiet hours in the afternoon. At Utrecht University, I really appreciated the work and effort of the director of my programme, Oscar Gelderblom. Not only did he write at a moment’s notice several official letters required for archival access in Russia, but he also helped me to set up the Working group for Russian history at the UU in 2016-2017. I am very proud of the group’s research manual on Russian history for Dutch students as well as the conference on revolutions we managed to organize. Oscar also introduced a much needed sense of humanity to our study that helped me start dealing with my grief. For the same reason, I would like to single out Guido de Bruin, whose compassion and patience with my dear Emma allowed her to resume her study in 2012. For that, I am forever grateful. Maarten Prak was always kind and really helped me develop my writing. Arch Getty and Carla de Glopper both have been pivotal for me, because they have taught me essential archival and palaeographical skills as well as the joy of letting history itself run through your fingers. The same goes for Remco Raben, to whom I owe my desire to look beyond the borders of the familiar. Thanks to him, today I implore everyone to learn languages and get to know different cultures, because in his words, ‘every language has a word for work and love.’ He truly broadened my horizon. At the University of Amsterdam, Alla V. Podgaevskaja and Eric Metz gave me what I desired for so long. Here I learned Russian, which is still far from perfect, but has at least allowed me to talk to Russians, read books and most importantly, to make sense of the archival materials. In Amsterdam, I also met Michael Kemper (and his Ph.D. students Alfrid, Danis and Gulnaz), Sudha Rajagopalan and Christian Noack, who were all terrific teachers and provided me with invaluable knowledge of Russian imperial history, Russian peasant studies and Bashkir history respectively. Jeroen van Zanten and Jan Hein Furnée were equally inspiring and have only deepened my love for the historical profession. Finally, I really appreciate the warm conversations with Chinggis Zendedel at his kitchen table about Russian history and Persian poetry. I also love the discussions about history and current affairs with my dear friend Genji Yasuhira, who has also helped me a lot by listening to and commenting on my stories about Russians and Bashkirs. Finally, I cannot even begin to express how important the support of my beloved Emma Spijkerman has been the last years. I have been there for her, but she certainly has been there for me too through all my ups and downs, reading and discussing my findings. On more than one occasion, she was the one that helped me structure my thoughts and lifted my spirits when I needed it the most. I also like to think that I have learned a lot from my fellow students in Amsterdam and Utrecht, I will miss you. I still cannot believe it’s already over. 5 Contents Longing for a home: an introduction ____________________________________________ 8 Picking the fruits of the earth ________________________________________________ 22 A metamorphosis of land and people? _________________________________________ 40 ‘With nothing but an axe in their belt’ __________________________________________ 68 Conclusion ______________________________________________________________ 95 Glossary _______________________________________________________________ 110 Appendix A _____________________________________________________________ 113 Appendix B _____________________________________________________________ 116 Appendix C _____________________________________________________________ 119 Appendix D _____________________________________________________________ 121 Bibliography ____________________________________________________________ 137 6 Map 1.1. Location of Bashkiria in the Russian empire (c. 1900).1 1 Map taken from C. Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552- 1917 (Bloomington 2016) 204 (map 7.1). 7 Longing for a home: an introduction ‘“The land lies near a river, and the whole prairie is virgin soil.” Pakhom plied him with questions, and the tradesman said: “There is more land there than you could cover if you walked a year, and it all belongs to the Bashkirs. They are as simple as sheep, and land can be got almost for nothing.”' — Leo N. Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886). In 1649, the tsar of Muscovy Aleksei Michailovich Romanov gave his blessing to a new law code, the Ulozhenie, which among many other things reasserted several non-Russian peoples’ right to own and work the land they inhabited. This included the Muslim Bashkirs, a Turkic semi-nomadic people that inhabited the region between the Volga-Kama rivers and the southern Urals and who had received the right to their land when they pledged their allegiance to tsar Ivan the Terrible in the years after his conquest of Kazan in 1552. In an effort to regulate the empire’s land relations, it was laid down in the Ulozhenie that neither greater and lesser boyars nor people of any other rank were allowed to ‘take, lease or buy, mortgage or rent for many years’ the Bashkirs’ lands, under pain of losing the gained lands to the tsar and even worse: the perpetrator would fall into the ‘Sovereign’s disgrace’.2 However, some 250 years later it had become clear that the Bashkir lands had not been safe from Russian peasant immigrants who had travelled there in search of a land to call their own, defying the sovereign’s disgrace. Reviewing the year 1911, the provincial statistics committee of the Ufa governorate, the largest of Bashkiria’s provinces, was pleased to report that in the span of a few decades since the 1860s, with the help of government loans an enormous share of Bashkir land had been transferred into the hands of Russian peasants, who had recently received their personal freedom and the right to own land during the Great Reforms which had started in 1861.3 The purchase of Bashkir lands involved many parties, including merchants, peasants and even imperial officials who bought enormous portions of land for ridiculously low prices and resold them at huge profits.