Naked Science: Russians are used to living by their own wits

Professor Nazarenko, what price did the medieval Russian peasant have to pay for the harvest to be grown if compared to the European one?

In those days, with equal labour costs, the Russian peasant’s grain yield was about two and a half to three times smaller than that of their colleague’s living in Northern France or Southern Germany. It is clear that somewhere in Egypt or Mesopotamia those yields were even higher. Yet if we take the rice-growing culture of the Far East, the yield there was also high. Here we have to primarily evaluate labour costs and not the land area. The Russian peasant had about seven times more land than the Japanese one, but its cultivation was approximately the same. And the labour costs of the Russian peasant were even higher, due to the fact that they had to prepare for the winter season. Such preparations were not necessary in most of Europe, and even more so in tropical and subtropical regions.

But the results of labour were rather modest, and the yield was approximately SAM 3, that is, Russian peasants collected only three times more grain than they had sown. It means that a third of the harvest had to be immediately set aside for the next year’s sowing. How substantial was the productivity of the Russian peasant and the Japanese one is demonstrated by taxation. In Russia, the level of taxation did not exceed 20 percent of the harvest. And that was not because the Russian feudal lords were good-hearted and the Japanese ones were evil because they had up to two-thirds of the harvest. The Russian peasant had no more to take — that was the reason.

The Japanese peasant could feed two samurai with his labour, while we needed five peasants to feed one landlord.

And it was very scarce feeding, at the level of the peasant himself. If the feudal lord wanted to live luxuriously, they needed significantly more serfs. Yet the point was not only in the landlords, but in the fact that the percentage of the population not connected with agriculture should have been low. That means it was impossible for us to feed many townspeople or many monks. It was also impossible to build many stone temples. There was no funding for their construction. With rare exceptions, stone fortresses are therefore unknown to us. They gradually begin to appear in Russia only in the late Middle Ages and during the early modern period. While in Spain, we see a huge cathedral in every tiny town. This is because there was a lot of surplus product that could be taken away from the peasant and put into construction. In our country, all the buildings were wooden, and most of them have not survived to this day.

Serfdom in Russia was abolished quite late. Is it also related to climatic and geographical factors?

Any feudalism involves restriction of the peasant’s freedom. And his activity itself implies such restrictions. After all, a peasant is not an IT specialist who can be remotely involved in software development working in Bali. A peasant always has grain in the ground which they are attached to, even if there is neither a landlord nor state power over them. And if there is such a power, it wants to collect taxes and tie the ploughman to this or that area even stronger. Yet sometimes the restriction of peasants’ freedom turns into true serfdom, when they can be sold and bought separately from the land.

Let us consider the wave of serfdom that swept through Europe. The peak of these processes fell on the 11th−12th centuries. Then serfdom gradually disappeared. In Western Europe, that happened in the 14th century. I mean personal dependence. Perhaps its disappearance was connected with the Black Death pandemic, but there are different points of view on this matter.

All these processes were slower in Eastern Europe, and this applies not only to Russia, but also to Poland, Czechia, and Hungary. These countries entered the historical arena a little later than France, Western Germany, Spain, and Italy. Social processes in Eastern Europe therefore took place a little later than in Western Europe. So, when serfdom had already disappeared in Western Europe, it only reached Eastern Europe. That was at the beginning of the 16th century. Then, simultaneously, peasants became enslaved in Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Eastern Germany. As to Russia, serfdom reached it in the 17th century. That means it is one and the same European process.

The abolition of serfdom swept from West to East in quite the same way. In the late 18th − early 19th century, personal dependence was abolished in Prussia and in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs. 50 years later, which is a very short period by historical standards, it disappeared in Russia.

Both the introduction of serfdom and its abolition in Russia lay within the framework of the same historical rhythms that were also characteristic of Europe. Russian serfdom had no specific historical development.

It is therefore unlikely that the climate had a decisive influence on these processes. Rather, there is another link. There is a theory that in all states that shifted to absolutism in the 16th−17th centuries, serfdom developed as a rule, and that the king, having concentrated absolute power throughout the country in his hands, had to toss some kind of bone to the nobles. It seemed to be the absolute power of the landlords over the serfs. Yet Poland falls out of this logical and harmonious concept. There was no absolutism in Poland, while serfdom there was exactly the same as in Hungary, Czechia, or Russia.

The establishment of absolutism always leads to the creation of a rigid vertical power structure. So we see the same processes both in Poland and in the Austrian Empire. A logical question arises. Why did absolutism appear in France under Louis XIV, whereas serfdom was not revived there? The 16th century Spain under Philip II was a true absolute monarchy (in Castile anyway), yet serfdom did not reappear there.

And the climatic factor does affect this aspect. Because Eastern European states have much less food resources than the countries of Western Europe. Both Spain and France solved these issues differently. They could collect much more taxes from richer towns or from world trade routes, or mine silver in America after all, as the Spaniards did. They had no need to enslave anyone.

At the same time, Prussia and Russia approved enslavement as one of the measures that promised the opportunity to use free labour, in addition to replenishment of the treasury with money. After all, it was a very important resource. The reforms of Peter the Great, if he had had the money only, would not have been implemented without it. The government would not have had the funds to organise a regular army and navy. And even recruitment is one of the forms of forced labour. In Russia, soldiers were not hired like in England; they were forced into service.

Did the state enslave peasants also to keep them in certain areas, so that they could not easily leave for more prosperous regions and sow wheat there?

The experience of the last 30 years is very important here, because all of our agriculture has gone south today. We practically do not have it in the non-chernozem zone, only Krasnodar Krai is agricultural. And this is absolutely logical from the market economy perspective. But this could not happen under feudalism. Because, firstly, there were completely different means of communication. Before the railways appeared, it had almost been impossible to deliver bread from the North Caucasus to St Petersburg, for example. And secondly, the feudal lords needed peasants’ labour to support their estates, so they could not resettle everyone to the south. Yet the tendency to move agriculture to more favourable areas appeared in the 19th century, even before the abolition of serfdom. Odessa then grew into the largest city in the south of Russia, because it was a port through which bread was being exported. So no one disregarded the climate aspect. Everything flourished much better in a favourable climate than in a bad one. Even the Stolypin reform was successful in those regions where the climate was better, and where it was worse, it failed.

Winter was a tough season for Russian peasants. In earlier periods, they had to heat their homes with a stove venting into the room. They had to keep cattle in the house so it could not be pinched with cold. They had to fell trees with an axe and not with a saw that was more convenient for that but was an expensive thing. And what did the peasants eat, particularly in winter? They obviously had a harder time than the European peasants.

Russian peasants spent a lot of effort to maintain their lives in winter. First of all, they had to collect firewood. What does any European fairy tale begin with? A boy or a girl is sent to the forest to bring brushwood. That means children did it there. And what do we have in Russia? "My father is chopping; I’m taking it home". This is a man’s job. So we see that the peasant ploughed all summer and chopped firewood all winter. They had to have a warm house and stoke a furnace every day. But the Russian peasant had hot meals every day and baked bread every week. And, for example, the French ploughman could afford to make a fire only once a week, or even once a fortnight. Even the English peasant could survive without heating their dwelling. There were times in the history of these countries when grain growers had hot meals only a few times a month.

Perhaps that is why hamburgers and all kinds of fast food are so popular with them now, while soups and cereals are popular with us?

It may very well be the reason, at least a part of it. Because what is the point of paying the feudal lord once again to collect brushwood if you can just eat dry bread? Therefore, when in the 18th century Russian travellers, say, in France observed that reality, they were horrified and wrote that the French peasant was so poor that they could not even make a fire in their house. And that the serf in Russia was happy because they ate hot porridge every day. But one must understand that the flip side of it was much more labour costs.

And so it has remained to this day. The modern Russian will not endure the cold that the Spaniard experiences during the two winter months relatively calmly. Because we are used to the fact that the house should be heated. And even if it is not, we turn on electric heaters. The Spaniard, on the other hand, is used to the fact that in the subtropics one can live for two months under two blankets and shiver a little, but they will not turn on the heaters. And it is very difficult for a Russian person to endure a subtropical winter, because it is useless to endure it in central Russia: you will die if you do not have a stove. This is a feature induced directly from our climate.

As is known, first civilisations emerged in the most climatically friendly regions such as: Egypt; the Fertile Crescent; and the valleys of the Yangtze and the Indus. And only then less favourable areas were opened up. Russia was one of the last frontiers in this regard. Take Chukotka for instance. No civilisation emerged there. We can speak of culture only. By civilisation I mean an urban society, with a division of labour and a productive economy.

Can the traditional patriarchy of Russian society with its strict division into male and female duties also be a result of the harsh climate?

The division of labour by gender in modern society is passing away because we now have washing machines, microwave ovens, multicookers and other devices that make life easier. The same thing was with marriage, which was very strong while the woman could not earn money herself to support her children and had no way to survive without a man. If we turn to factory production, it becomes clear that the woman is drawn into exactly the same labour as the man. The objective basis for the division of labour is therefore vanishing. Only particular cultural stereotypes remain. They will also go away after two or three generations, because they will become obsolete. The climate here is rather an indirect factor, and the main one is reaching certain milestones in the development of society. In India, for example, the climate is wonderful, but there is more patriarchy there than in the relatively colder Netherlands.

Does the climate still affect our economy? After all, we have a heating issue, while in the south air conditioning problems arise.

Of course, both the climatic and geographical factors continue to influence the economy. You can judge for yourself. One can survive without an air conditioner, but with our frosty winters there would be no life without heating. Our population is scattered over a vast territory, that meaning we have to build many roads for communication.

Thus, for each production unit, we are forced to build more roads than the European countries. We cannot fully use the waterways either, because they freeze in winter. Otherwise the Northern Sea Route would long ago have become the main route for transporting Chinese goods to Europe. And despite the long route, despite the Somali pirates, the waterway around India remains more profitable. This is the tribute we continue paying to our climate. Not to mention the fact that we have to buy and use equipment and petrol for snow removal.

You are talking about roads. The eternal question is: why are they so bad?

The most dangerous feature of our climate is zero crossings in spring and autumn. They occur several hundred times a year. Water seeps into each little crack and then freezes and bursts everything around it. Our roads, buildings and ships get therefore deteriorated much faster than in the tropics. If we take Italy, the Baths of Caracalla have been standing without a roof for the recent two thousand years. In Russia, any building without a roof will collapse within a century or even faster. And that is fully relevant to the Russian roads.

Yes, we can build a road using pure titanium and it will be durable, but it will not make economic sense. Roads in Spain and Italy have survived because there are almost no zero crossings. The Roman bridge in Cordoba was in operation until the 1960s, and only then it was closed to traffic. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind that the construction of our roads will either be much more expensive than in Europe, or of much lower quality.

Catherine the Great is credited with the phrase "Drunken people are easier to manage". In Russia, either the population was made accustomed to drinking, or, on the contrary, the government launched anti-alcohol campaigns. Did climatic and geographical factors somehow affect the level of alcohol misuse in our country?

This is a fake, of course. Catherine the Great never said that. And the heavy drinking of the Russian people is also a myth. In my opinion, it is connected with the following. Europe is characterised by two types of alcohol consumption, the northern one and the southern one. The latter is wine. Diluted wine, to be exact. The fact is that it is very difficult to find fine clear water in the south of Europe because of water blooming. And the only way not to die of gastrointestinal disorders is to drink diluted wine. So even children have been drinking it since antiquity. And no one drinks too much, because the portions of wine are small and the wine itself is light.

And in northern Europe, which includes not only Russia but also Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, there is a different type of alcohol consumption. There is good water there, so, since the earliest times, people have been drinking water to quench their thirst. Alcoholic drinks were originally taken during pagan rituals in order to speak to the gods. In the south of Europe, this was done in a different way, by smoking cannabis, for example.

And in the north of Europe, there was a tradition of getting heavily drunk several times a year to communicate with the gods. Christianity fought against pagan rituals very hard, so the tradition vanished and drunkenness was disconnected from the pagan holiday. That meant in Christian Europe one could drink on any day of the month. Now it is inherent not only in Russia, but also in other countries of Northern Europe. In terms of the amount of alcohol consumption per capita, our country is not the leader in the Old World. Scandinavia is well ahead in this aspect.

Yet the "drinking Russians" stereotype remained. Its formation was influenced by foreign travellers. In the Netherlands, for example, it was customary in the 16th−17th centuries to drink only inside the tavern. You could drink yourself to any state, the main thing was to do it in-house, otherwise you would be arrested. In Russian taverns that emerged in the 16th century, there were no seats. They sold vodka there but you had to drink it either at home or in the street. Because there was no tradition to eat and drink anywhere but home. And therefore, apparently, we had more drunks in the street. Foreign travellers saw that and thought: if the drunks are in the street already, then what are they doing inside the tavern? So we have no reason to believe that Russians drank more than the Dutch or the British in those days. Moreover, peasants have been drinking beer and not vodka since the earliest times. Beer was a seasonal drink. It was brewed and drunk in autumn. There was no more beer in winter, so there was nothing to drink. As to making the population accustomed to drinking, the case was as follows. Until the mid-19th century, there was wine tax-farming. It was a special tax collection system, when a rich merchant paid a certain amount to the state in advance and got a monopoly on this or that activity. That was a result of the weakness of the government machine. The state was unable to organise the collection of certain incomes itself and sold them at auction. The low quality of alcohol therefore became a problem for wine tax-farming. And when the state wine monopoly was introduced in 1895, the quality of vodka increased dramatically. That immediately affected the situation with the drinking population. In general, I believe that in our country there must be a state-owned wine monopoly. An example of that is Sweden, where there is such a system. The treasury will get more revenues, and the population will be spared the danger of poisoning.

According to the World Health Organization, the consumption of alcoholic beverages in Russia has greatly decreased in the recent 15 years. What was the reason for that in your opinion?

Our drinking culture has changed a lot. We have approached the South European type of drinking. We started drinking much less vodka and much more wine. We gained more expertise with wine. Moreover, the Finns note that the Russians have always drunk differently than they do. When drinking, we always have some food and a chat. The Finnish drink a bottle of vodka in one gulp and depart to the astral plane to communicate with the gods. We have also made our leisure more diverse. Although we have much less free time now, because we work much more than in the Soviet times and vacations have become fractional. That is one or two weeks, not a month, as before. People therefore want high-quality leisure, like skydiving, a pottery workshop, or wine tasting. That has to be a leisure to remember.

Is it possible to single out any Russian national features related to the climate?

The climate gives rise to a certain type of economy, and that, in turn, induces the development of certain skills that are unconsciously passed on from generation to generation. One of them is the ability to brace yourself and work very quickly and hard for a certain period, after which the Russian person relaxes. Think about how many students read for the exam on the night before it. It is difficult to make a Russian person work at the same pace every day. This is the method of the Japanese and Chinese.

Another feature is that Russians do not pay enough attention to formalisation of the results of their work. Russian peasants could not afford sanding alleys and growing rose bushes. They could only do what was required for survival. The maximum was carving roosters for the window surround on long winter evenings. But any kind of improvement of the space around is not characteristic of our peasants, because they simply did not have time for that. Today this trait can be qualified as a certain untidiness. After crossing the border of Russia and Finland, this becomes very clearly visible, so you grow ashamed.

Another national trait of ours is independence in decision-making.

In our geographical reality, where people have always lived at a great distance from each other, the authorities somewhere in Moscow could not reach out to a person in Siberia, so that person lived by his or her own wits. Because of that, Russians first turn on the device and then read the manual. After all, it is interesting why it has died down. Russians are used to defying the rules. "The law is like a pillar. You cannot jump over it, but you can pass it by."

The same about the notorious Russian hope for a chance. In the conditions of risky farming, the harvest was not only unguaranteed, but generally turned out to be the result of a random combination of circumstances. Russians are therefore accustomed not to worry about that. If everything worked out well, it is great. If not, let us continue working. In the conditions of rice farms, it was still possible to guarantee some result. In Japan, peasants had to weed their fields very carefully every day, and still a tsunami could suddenly hit their shore. The Chinese are simply thorough people used to painstaking work. The Japanese are also thorough, but they have also developed the habit of stoically enduring any natural disasters.