Russia and Brazil: What Little Communities Contribute to Large Nations
St. Philaret’s Institute and the Chayanov Research Center of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, with the support of the academic journals “The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute” and “Peasant Studies” (“Krestyanovedenije”), recently held a roundtable discussion on “Historical and Contemporary Communitarian Experiences in Russia and Brazil”.
The choice of countries for comparison and exchange of experiences was purposeful: a guest from Brazil, Sérgio Schneider, Doctor of Sociology and Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, was invited to participate in the roundtable.
Also taking part in the roundtable were Alexandr Nikulin, Candidate of Economic Sciences, Director of the Chayanov Research Center at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Peasant Studies; Konstantin Oboznyj, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor, and Dean of the Faculty of History at St. Philaret’s Institute; Yuliya Balakshina, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor at St. Philaret's Institute and the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (RGPU); and Nataliya Ignatovich, a church historian and researcher of the works of Nikolaj Neplyuev.
“It seems to me that I first heard the name Sérgio Schneider from Alexandr Mikhajlovich about two years ago. The idea of meeting and discussing this cherished and fascinating experience — both in Brazil and in Russia — of bringing people together into unions or communities has long been floating around our Department of Church and Social History,” said Yuliya Balakshina, introducing the participants in the discussion. “Many of us have read the interview with Sérgio in “Peasant Studies”, and for those who haven’t, I’ll say that he is a person for whom communitarianism is not just a subject of theoretical research but also a matter of practical life experience. Sérgio comes from a rural Brazilian community and is of German descent: his ancestors moved to Brazil in 1827.”
The participants of the discussion agreed to define “communitarian” as non-hierarchical, self-organizing societal associations that strive to increase the common good without diminishing the personal essence of each separate human being involved. Manifestations of communitarianism can be found in various types of associations: from rural communities to urban workers’ cooperatives; from religious gatherings to friendly circles; from intellectual communes to creative unions.
“Both sociologists and anthropologists have long argued that the modernization of society should lead to the disappearance of communities. Yet nevertheless their existence persists in all societies. The definition of “community” has, however, changed over the past two hundred years,” says Sérgio Schneider. “In the past, communities were more formally structured as social entities, with social relationships within them cemented by religious ties. Over time, especially after World War II, with the development of the information society, both communitarianism and the organization of communality have undergone significant changes. Nevertheless, communities persist, and this poses a serious question for researchers — what do they contribute to society and to the nation?”
“My Russian colleagues and I have discussed the issue of the level of social potential — that is, the ability of local communities to come together into cooperatives and similar associations. We explored this question with Professor Nikulin because it is becoming an important factor in local development. And it is clear that where such communities, associations, cooperatives, and communes exist, it also has a very positive impact on economic development,” added the Brazilian researcher.
Alexandr Nikulin recalled the classic distinction between communal and societal ties introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies through the concepts of Gemeinschaft (small society, community) and Gesellschaft (large society). “Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution over the past two centuries — as Tönnies also noted — we have been able to observe the spontaneous growth of Gesellschaft-type societies: large cities, anonymous societies where people hardly know each other, and the decline of rural and other communal communities. Above all, these smaller communities were tied to the local culture of life on the land, because until recently, more than 90% of humanity lived a peasant lifestyle. We can also speak of the solid communitarian foundations of religious communities, and in traditional societies the religious and rural community were often intermingled as a sort of 'two for one,'” says Alexander Mikhailovich.
“But even in traditional communities, we find tremendous diversity in this very communitarianism and creativity in the development of ever-new forms,” the researcher continues. “Take, for example, the very first Christian communities, which later spread, and as a result, Christianity became a global religion. We see differentiation within Christianity itself, with various kinds of Christian communities emerging. And in modern times, for instance, Sérgio described to me in a very touching fashion how in his small German-Brazilian town had a strict division between Catholic communities and Protestant communities just half a century ago! In a religious sense, this is constant creativity.”
“It was no coincidence that the idea of sobornost (conciliarity), proposed by Aleksej Stepanovich Khomyakov, and the related idea of communality, resonated so deeply in people’s hearts at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,” says historian Nataliya Ignatovich. “In the context of preparations for the Local Council of the Russian Church, this became especially relevant. Many spoke about sobornost, but what is most important is that in addition to all the talk they also made practical attempts to organize life based on conciliar and communal principles.”
Perhaps the most striking such attempt was the Orthodox Exaltation-of-the-Holy-Cross Labour Brotherhood, founded by the wealthy aristocrat Nikolaj Nikolaevich Neplyuev in the late 19th century. “He began his career as a diplomat at the Imperial Embassy in Munich, but one day, after returning from a ball held by the Bavarian Prince Regent, he had a dream in which he found himself in a peasant hut surrounded by peasant children. The relationships with them and the entire atmosphere of interaction were filled with deep love,” recounted Nataliya Ignatovich. “This dream turned his life upside down. He returned to his family estate in Yanpol, gotan agricultural education at the Petrovskij Agricultural Academy, and took in ten peasant children. Interestingly, from the very beginning of his efforts he consulted with local residents and priests about whom he should take in. Later, he established several lower agricultural schools on his estate at Vozdvizhensk. These were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Property. The first graduates of the Vozdvizhensk school elected to create an Orthodox Christian labour brotherhood.”
In 1901, Nikolaj Nikolaevich donated his entire fortune to the Brotherhood. As the researcher explained, this included several factories: a distillery, a brick factory, several sawmills, and a few others. The Brotherhood also had workshops, a fruit factory, dairy and cheese-making facilities, butter production, meat-smoking and winemaking units, a retail shop and warehouses for the society, and a hospital. “The grain yield in the Brotherhood’s farm was three times higher than the average in the Chernigov Region and five times higher than on similar lands in the Yampol district,” said Nataliya Dmitrievna. “In the collective farm that emerged on the site of the Brotherhood during Soviet times, such yields were only replicated half a century later, and even then, only in the record-breaking harvest year of 1971.”
The Brotherhood maintained several fruit orchards. The Brotherhood’s breeder, Semyon Fyodorovich Chernenko, was already working with Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin by the 1920s, after the Brotherhood had been forcibly disbanded. The Brotherhood’s farm also included a breeding laboratory, a meteorological station, Abyssinian wells, and zenith lanterns. Electricity was installed at Vozdvizhensk in 1915. In 1919, the Brotherhood purchased several dynamo machines and installed an oil engine in the mill building, thereby setting up its own power station. The Brotherhood installed a Siemens telephone network in 1898 and upgraded it in 1910. Radio came to Vozdvizhensk in 1926 (notably, the first radio broadcasting hub in the USSR was launched in Moscow, in 1925). Black-and-white photography had been practiced in the Brotherhood since the 1890s and color photography was introduced in 1916. The first tractor appeared in the Brotherhood in 1919 (mass tractor production began in the USA in 1917, while in the USSR, industrial tractor models started being produced only in 1923, and mass tractor manufacturing in the country began in the 1930s).
“The Brotherhood was ultimately destroyed by the Soviet authorities. Yet, for a full twelve years after 1917 they were unable to bring it under control,” says Nataliya Ignatovich. “After the leadership — the elders of the Brotherhood — were repressed in 1924–1925, the Brotherhood still managed to hold on for a few more years. It was only in 1929, when the remaining members were gathered in a hall and sent into exile one by one, with their names called out, that the brothers had to leave Vozdvizhensk. May simply couldn’t endure the blow, and died.”
“It’s significant that at the core of this model of brotherhood was not an economic idea, but a religious one,” says Yuliya Balakshina. “Above all, Neplyuev wanted to revive a Christianity that would not be nominal, where Christians would live according to what he called the 'discipline of love.' First, he established schools where he raised children based on this foundation of Christian life. Later, he realized that he couldn’t release his pupils into a world where relationships were entirely different from what he had taught them — and thus the Brotherhood was born. What Nataliya Dmitrievna spoke about is particularly interesting for the Russian experience because it was not fundamentally an economic enterprise, but a religious community that began to yield significant economic results.”
According to Konstantin Obozniyj, one of the most serious challenges to communitarian principles in Russian history has been tied to serfdom and lack of personal freedom, which has prevented the potential of communality from being realized and bearing fruit. Another significant problem has been that the majority of the peasant population in Russia during the 18th and early 19th centuries had no experience of private property or land use — and if communitarianism did manifest, it did so in very particular forms. “Neplyuev’s experience in this sense is unique; it’s a 'custom-made product,' difficult to replicate or mass-produce,” says Oboznij. “Try finding a landowner who would care not about his own profit or leaving an inheritance for his descendants, but about the people living nearby in barbaric darkness — this is far from just economic; it's alsosocial and spiritual.”
“And then there is Bolshevism and Soviet power, which is perhaps an even greater obstacle to communitarianism than was serfdom. After all, communitarianism in its best and brightest manifestations is always linked to freedom — it respects the freedom of the “other” and the experience of personal creativity, whether you’re raising calves, sewing patchwork quilts, or engaging in some other craft and joining together with like-minded people for that purpose,” continued Oboznyj.
“And when we speak of the 20th century, we can see the experience of communitarianism in very unexpected manifestations, such as volunteer movements,” the historian explained. “There’s a stereotypical Soviet belief that the volunteer detachments, which tried to offer counter-revolutionary resistance against the new Bolshevik authorities, consisted of landowners, nobles, officers, and generals — i.e., those who had something to lose. But the example of the Northwestern Army, which was formed in Pskov in 1918, wonderfully demonstrates that this resistance included a great many ordinary peasants and fishermen who valued their freedom, the place where they lived, what they did, and who were thinking seriously about what this new form of power would bring. For instance, in General Yudenich’s army, one of the most combat-ready units was the Talab Regiment, composed almost entirely of fishermen. The Talab Islands are islands on Lake Pskov.”
“So, the Russian people undoubtedly had and still have powerful potential for communitarian and conciliar principles, but there have always been obstacles. These principles were often suppressed by external conditions. By and large, we are still living in a post-Soviet reality, with a Soviet imprint. Although some older people might speak of how nice it was to live under the collective farm system, this is a later experience which compares Soviet times to the devastation of the countryside they experienced in the 90s, and forgets entirely about the devastation that befell previous generations during the 20th century. There are real family tragedies tied to forced relocations, the dispossession of kulaks, etc. These took countless lives and crippled many families — there are many people who can never be brought back. And those who were forcibly gathered into collective farms often lost the last remnants of their skills for free, creative labor and became slaves of that system. This brings us back to the question of that creativity and freedom that are undoubtedly essential for any bright and optimistic form of communitarianism,” concluded Oboznyj.
“As for the question of who is more communitarian — I believe that both Brazil and Russia have a remarkable tradition of their own local communitarianism, connected to global traditions as well, because these are vast multinational countries,” Alexandr Nikulin confidently asserts. “In our sociological field studies, we also raised questions about this local, community-type solidarity in Brazil and Russia and concluded that we could learn something from each other. For example, in terms of a form of communitarianism like cooperativism, Russia was one of the leading countries in the early 20th century, which was reflected in both zemstvo studies and by research done by the Chayanov Centre. Later, during the Soviet Bolshevik period, an attempt was made to nationalize communitarianism through collective farms (kolkhozes) and state farms (sovkhozes), which yeilded more destruction than positive consequences. But when I visited Brazil, I was deeply impressed by the development of communitarian cooperative practices. It felt as though I had traveled back in time a hundred years to the Russia of the 1920s — with the enthusiasm of that era, which was religious but not necessarily socialist, with its drive for the creation such communities.”