“God forbid to see a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless…"
A. S. Pushkin
"The Russians harness for a long time, but they jump quickly …". This is about longsuffering, humility, and resignation of Russian peasants of the not so distant past. And when these qualities were "strengthened" by the tyranny of the masters, cruelty, which were also unpunished, then … It turned out what it turned out. Forbearance and humility poured into peasant lynching, incredibly cruel and therefore terrible. The gentlemen were not just killed (it would be too mild a punishment), but they were killed "with special cruelty", investing in the action itself all the hatred of the owner for despair, for pain and humiliation.
"Whipping a peasant." The work of a self-taught sculptor, a shoemaker from the famous "shoe" city of Kimry - Ivan Abalyaev.
Many historians believe that lynching is nothing more than an indicator of the actually high spiritual culture of the peasants who defended their honor, not allowing themselves to be reduced to the position of slaves.
The owner treated the serf like a working cattle, not wanting to know that such a worker is also a human being. Only the peasants themselves remembered this very well. Another striking example from those times. The landowner, having arrived at the field, sees the grass cut by the workers, and for some reason it seemed to him that they began to mow the hay ahead of time. Calling the headman, he shakes a bunch of grass in front of his nose, reprimanding for hay cut too early. Having dispersed, he orders the headman to be flogged. The poor man was whipped with whips. The master, who has gone into a rage, orders to immediately deliver the father of the fined headman. Father also got a grass in the face: henceforth there will be science. And for the sake of ostrastka and him, an 80-year-old man, he was whipped here and there. Having thrown the peasants stripped with whips in the meadow, the master threatened to continue the execution the next day. But … the headman did not live to see the morning. Unable to endure the shame, he hanged himself.
The attitude towards peasant women was also very free. The unfortunate ones endured violence against themselves because they had nowhere to go. If one of the older men intervened, they were flogged with whips, sent into exile in Siberia, sold to the side or sent to the army. Many did not want to put up with this situation. Married peasant women and courtyard girls in the manor's estates often "laid hands on themselves": some threw a noose around their necks without taking off the shame, and some drowned themselves in a pond. Sometimes it was only in this way that it was possible to avoid the "attention" of a lustful landowner and defend one's honor. The sexton of a village church told one such sad story about how two girls died, fleeing from the lord's excessive attention: one drowned in the river, and the owner ordered the other to be brought to him and personally beat her with a stick. The poor thing fell ill and did not get out of bed for two weeks, and then she died.
As mentioned above, despair from unbearable living conditions, an almost animal fear of waiting for punishment pushed the peasants to extreme measures.
If you look at the chronicle of suicides of that time, then the gaze opens up terrible pictures. For example, the story of how the courtyard girl of the landowner Zhitova, deciding to take her own life, cut her neck with scissors. The landowner Tatarinov punished his people so severely that one, without suffering humiliation, killed himself. It is even worse when children commit suicide due to abuse. This happened to the eight-year-old girl from the landowners Shchekutyevs, who could no longer endure the beatings, threw herself into the lake.
The number of tragic cases of voluntary departure from life has only grown from year to year. And so it went on until the abolition of serfdom. Regardless of the period when the murder occurred, as well as the way it was committed, the reason was almost always the same.
Another example from the life of serfs. There was a landowner Kuchin, who "was dashing and often beat his peasants." The hatred of the peasants was so great that all the serfs agreed to participate in the murder of the landowner. However, only a few were chosen for this case. At night, secretly making their way into the bedroom, they entered and, sneaking up, began to choke him with a pillow, while several people were holding him tightly by the arms and legs. Kuchin tried to escape, begged for mercy, crying out: "Or am I not your breadwinner?" But no one heeded those words. The massacre was short. The corpse was drowned in the river. Another "daring fellow", the landowner Krakovetsky, did not give the peasant women livelihood, persuading them to cohabitation, and "taught" the obstinate with batogs. One of the peasants, for the sake of appearance, agreed to a date, agreeing to meet at the threshing floor. The girl was smart and had agreed in advance with her friends and the landowner's coachman. The "ardent lover" came on a date and was about to settle down with the "young lady" in the hay, when the accomplices, as if on command, ran out of hiding. The coachman hit the owner on the head, and the girls, throwing a rope around his neck, strangled him, and then threw the corpse into the ditch. So the landowner Krakovetsky ended his life ingloriously.
One more example. Lieutenant Tersky had an intimate relationship with the wife of a serf peasant. Arriving somehow with a fair amount of drinking from the guests, the lieutenant forced the woman to go with him to the threshing floor. The frightened peasant woman told her husband. He followed, caught up with the master, knocked him down and began to beat him with a stick, and his wife - with fists. The lieutenant, beaten to death, was thrown under the bridge.
In the Kostroma village, serfs broke into the house of the owner at night, beat them with their hands and feet, then hit their heads on the floor. Those involved in the murder fled, leaving the landowner to die. In the Moscow region, the peasants beat the master almost to death, and stabbed his wife to death. Another landowner was shot with a gun through the window. The landowner Khludenev, who lived on an estate near Ryazan, was strangled by the servants in bed …
Since the summer of 1842, a wave of lynching, murder of landowners, as well as officials, which drove the peasants to extremes, swept throughout Russia. In the Yaroslavl province, the peasants' patience overflowed with the "fun" of the landowner Schepochkin, who invented "wondrous fun" for himself: under pain of punishment, he forced the courtyard girls and women to strip naked and, in this form, ride down the slide, which was built for the master's children, and in the meantime watched the "process" with undisguised interest.
There was no limit to the anger of the peasants. The landowner was executed in a special way: three of his serfs pushed a barrel of gunpowder into the oven in the master's house and set it on fire at night. The manor house was blown to pieces. The owner himself and his wife were killed. In one Novgorod estate, the peasants lay in wait for their master, who was returning late at night from the guests, dragged him out of the sleigh and whipped him, or, as the peasants said, "taught the hind mind." Beaten and barely alive, then thrown into the forest.
In the autumn of the same year, a wave of popular revenge reached the Karacharovo estate and its voluptuous owner Heinrich Sonn. It is not known what was the reason for the reprisal - either the ruined peasant life or the defiled maiden honor, it is only known that in September 1842, near the Suchek River, in a forest thicket, Heinrich Sonn was found dead.
In total, in 1842, according to the report "On the state of affairs in the Russian Empire", 15 murders were recorded. There were also 6 more attempted murders. The official language of the report told that these crimes took place mainly on the territory of the Great Russian provinces. And the reason was "one for all" and it consisted in the hatred of the peasants towards their owners for their cruel treatment, humiliation, inability to protect themselves and their families from the tyranny of the owners.
Only with the abolition of serfdom did the peasant breathe more or less freely. But it was still so far to complete freedom …
