Simple Hardworking Christian Folks,or the Self-Image of Contemporary Belarusian Kolkhozniks

Introduction

The first researcher to investigate the Belarusian peasants’ sense of identity was probably Oskar Kolberg, who in the mid-1800s remarked: “Asked about who he was, a Belarusian peasant would usually reply: ‘I, Mister, am a local’ as if the term ‘local’ was for him the alpha and omega.” ¹ A few decades later, his follower Michał Federowski noted down the following response to the question “where do we come from?” as told by a peasant from Western Belarus: “Old folks say, our land was once a forest, and on it lived some pagans who didn’t believe in God. And who we came from? They say, until Jesus Christ there were no other folks but Jews; further on Jesus baptized them, so until this day we, their offspring, are Christians.” ² The collective identity of the inhabitants of Belarusian villages—variously understood, defined, and determined using different terminological formulae, such as image, self-image, or self-stereotype—never stopped to be of interest to consecutive generations of researchers.

In the 1930s, the Polish researcher Józef Obrębski, based on his study on ethnicity in the Polesia region, formulated his concept of an ethnic group’s self-image as “a negative of all the images through which it recognizes the reality of different ethnic groups” as well as a “stereotype in which some group turns its prejudice and irrational attitudes of sympathy and hostility towards a foreign group.” ³ He pointed to Polesia peasants’ recognition of intergroup cultural differences “in terms of religious differences” (perceived as the so-called natsyas); ⁴ and also to the persistence of their collective identity’s traditional form, constructed in relation to the stereotypes of their two historic social partners: lord and Jew. ⁵ Nowadays, Ryszard Radzik refers to Belarusian peasants at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of “non-ideological group ethnicity,” ⁶ while of his contemporaries there he writes: “Belarusian folk identity, the kolkhoz-sovkhoz identity, often alludes to the old category of ‘being from here.’ Saying of oneself ‘I am Belarusian’ is often . . . only or mainly an awareness of citizenship (or sometimes of religious identity). . . . Residues of religious divisions, characteristic of the pre-industrial era, still remain there.” ⁷

These few selected examples testify to a long tradition of research thought on the shape of the collective identity of Belarusian peasants and invite inquiry into its contemporary form: the duration and dynamic of the self-stereotype no longer of peasants, subject to their masters, but of today’s kolkhozniks (collective farmers), operating in a post-Soviet reality at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

When in 1993 I started my field research in Belarus, among other things, it was to search for answers to the question of category of the kolkhozniks’ collective identity, although at that time I problematized it otherwise. Over nearly two decades, the study was continued (in collaboration with students and colleagues) and included both the west and the east of the country (a number of villages in the Grodno region, the western and eastern Polesia, and the Mogilev and Vitebsk regions). ⁸ Now I can add my own link to the chain of ethnographic-anthropological reflections on the Belarusian peasant identity. ⁹

An anthropologist interested in the sociocultural self-awareness of Belarusian peasant kolkhozniks, grasping the structure and mechanisms of their collective identity and understanding their mentality, needs to ask questions and seek answers in an ethnographic dialogue with the subjects of her research. Such dialogue was my research experience while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, which was part of a qualitative study of kolkhoz villages ¹⁰ in Belarus. My source materials consist of about seven hundred interviews conducted, in the vast majority, with individuals more than sixty years of age. This selection of interviewees was not intentional; it merely testifies to the demographic specificities of the contemporary Belarusian village. ¹¹

My anthropological analysis and interpretation of the identity of contemporary kolkhozniks confirmed the aforementioned findings of my predecessors, often helping to strengthen and refine the latter with additional arguments, and also revealed that the features of the Belarusian muzhik’s self-stereotype those earlier researchers pointed to constitute a mutually interdependent configuration of distinctive attributes defining his identity still today. This configuration is analogous to the self-definition of the Polish peasant at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that was formulated by Ludwik Stomma; it consists of three elements: “1. I am a local, 2. I am a peasant-farmer, 3. I am a Catholic.” ¹²

The Belarusian kolkhoznik of today is a “local” person embedded in the microcosm of the neighborhood—the village, the collective farm, the parish; a person working the land, as opposed to a “master” living an easy life; and finally a Christian, who defines his religious identity in relation to the non-Christian Jew and to other faith-nations in the multireligious community in which he functions. He has an ambivalent sense of his own cultural well-being, connected to continuing class divisions of the past embedded in the social structure, and sees himself both in terms of the “victimized peasantry” ¹³ as well as the universal human community—communitas. ¹⁴

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Contemporary Belarusian kolkhozniks do not create or participate in translocal public discourse; they produce rather specific and limited written source material. This does not mean they do not possess or construct their own narrative identity. Their story, which lies on the outskirts and margins of the collective memory of Belarusians as a nation, is primarily, I think, one of collective “amnesia.” This “amnesia” could become a conscious property of the community thanks to anthropologists’ efforts to understand it.

My investigations concerning the collective identity of Belarusian kolkhozniks via personal interviews concentrated around the problem of long-lasting cognitive and axiological categories defining their identity which survived the twentieth century’s paroxysms of destruction, threatening the traditional peasant world: collectivization, secularization, war, and the Holocaust. By analyzing and interpreting their responses, I attempted to trace (in its social and historical context) the implicit values, norms, rules, basic semiotic oppositions, and distinctive attributes, in search of unbiased insight into the content, structure, and building process of my subjects’ collective identity.

The present-day kolkhozniks’ social world-view extends in their communicative memory back to the beginnings of the twentieth century, while in the realm of meaning it reaches back to archaic layers of cultural consciousness and the unconscious, from before the era of modernization and modern nationalisms. Their collective identity, expressed in premodern categories, primarily reflects the mentality of today’s older generation. However, this does not mean it will vanish with them; a change of mentality is, after all, a prolonged process.

Part One. Simple Hardworking Folks

My initial interest in the kolkhozniks’ narrative identity was born out of my surprise, at the beginning stages of my research, to their expressed acceptance of the collective-farm system. Although the brutal imposition of it by the authorities was a personal and traumatic experience for my older interlocutors, today throughout Belarus these folks declare almost in unison: “We were afraid of joining the kolkhoz. And now we got used to it and are afraid of being left without it. Because, how to live without the kolkhoz?” (B99Dwr.SS).

Collectivization—forced on the villages of Eastern Belarus at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s and on those in Western Belarus at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s—swept away an economically differentiated social stratum of self-supporting peasants, who were owners of their land and other means of agricultural production. It created an equalized group of expropriated peasants known as kolkhozniks, living as agricultural laborers on one huge estate, built on their formerly private land, and called the kolkhoz. Vivid memory of this traumatic change, shaped through long years of physical and psychological terror (executed through the political apparatus of the state) and transmitted to younger generations, evolved into a kind of founding myth, which became the kernel of social identity for these villagers—the folks who say of themselves: “We lived through our lives and saw nothing good—just work and suffering” (H03Jur.AK).

This founding myth, inscribed in the eschatological category of the end of the world and its new beginning, refers to the cruel and incomprehensible forces of destruction that removed from the local world all land-owning peasant farmers (concentrated only on what was their own) together with all attributes of their subjectivity, and imposed a new, modern serfdom. Yet the community of kolkhozniks, originally bound by fear, gradually started adapting to their new social and psychological conditions, thus reintegrating their aims and attitudes in accordance with the central value of peasant ethos—solidarity with life as it occurs. Their story about collectivization can therefore also be read as a testimony of satisfaction that the local community managed to survive.

What made the Belarusian peasants, as they phrased it, “get used to” the kolkhoz system? Why do they accept it today without wishing to change it? Answers to these questions can be sought, I believe, in the fatalistic peasant attitudes rooted in an archaic conception of fate, and in the system of traditional peasant values associated with an ethos of survival. Convinced that the “kolkhoz must be,” the kolkhozniks reproduce both the social patterns practiced by generations of their ancestors, as well as their premodern mental clichés. Functioning day after day in a network of ill-defined borders and informal relationships between what is individual (personal) and what is nationalized (belonging to the kolkhoz) property, in a peculiar symbiotic relationship between the individual and the institution of the kolkhoz, they perceive the contemporary socioeconomic context of their own existence as a specific continuation of the ancient manor estate, in which the predsyedatyel, the kolkhoz president, plays the role of a former landowner while they, the kolkhozniks, take the positions of former serfs or farmhands. The kolkhozniks’ collective identity is a continuation of peasant or serf identity from the era of the feudal manor. These old and lasting cognitive structures built into the peasant-serf-kolkhoznik identity cause kolkhoz villagers to interpret their social reality by referring to traditional worldviews that characterize people living in highly isolated cultures. And it is because of these structures that even today one meets young people who cannot imagine their lives without the kolkhoz. As explained to me by a twenty-three-year-old mechanic from the Svetlyi Put kolkhoz in the Grodno region: “The kolkhoz has to stay. Without it people would perish” (G98Nac.AK).

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An anthropologist may capture the self-image of the community under study, for instance, by seeking answers to key questions of collective identity, such as, “who are the others?” and then “transforming the negative into the positive to obtain a self-portrait of the group.” ¹⁵ From this theoretical premise one can demonstrate, by analyzing the notional terms used by the interlocutors, that the cognitive foundation of the Belarusian kolkhoznik is made of the three following oppositions: peasant–master, peasant–Jew, and Christian–Jew.

In my conversations with the subjects of this study, I noticed a significant regularity: in statements referring to their collective identity—including those used for self-definitions—the word muzhik (peasant) did not, in principle, appear as an autonomous category. Invariably, like the reverse coming with the obverse, the muzhik is accompanied by some “master”: an estate owner, a nobleman, an educated man, or a city dweller. As if in order to be able to characterize himself, the peasant first had to specify the master’s characteristics. After all, “essential social attitudes (of the former peasant), his social personality, are organized not around his own individuality but “around the master’s person,” ¹⁶ a figure representing the “social stereotype of the ‘other,’” ¹⁷ which is why the muzhik paints his self-portrait as a negative portrait.

Social and symbolic peasant–master relations should be looked at primarily through the prism of the interviewees’ cited myths about their origin, which show Cain or Ham as the peasant-muzhik’s mythical progenitor. The accounts presented the peasant as a repository of negative attributes specifying his depravity and inferiority as compared to the master (the mythical descendent of Abel/Yapheth). The higher and lower social status—conferred on the two archetypes by the power of the originary myth, thereby constituting their defining property and performing a model-creating and normative function—are considered permanently attached to the two social groups and acknowledged through antonymic attributes used in the interviewees’ narrative. The “better” counterpart of the “worse” peasant-kolkhoznik refers to the mythical notion of the master-nobleman archetype inscribed in their collective memory, and is seen primarily as a noble. This category encompasses sociolegal superiority over the peasant, wealth, connotations of Polishness, as well as the world of etiquette, defined as cultivation or culture, refinement, and politeness. The negative of nobility is simplicity, a feature constituting the stereotype and self-stereotype of the simple muzhik. The stereotype of simplicity attributed to Belarusian peasants consists of cultural primitivism, low economic status, and the contempt that those of the higher social echelons have for them. Having internalized the peasant-muzhik stereotype imposed in the distant past by the then dominant culture, the contemporary kolkhozniks—like their serf-ancestors—perceive their community “as ‘simple’ juxtaposed with that above.” ¹⁸

The noble master–simple muzhik opposition focuses on the crucial nonworking- working dichotomy that builds the peasant perception of social reality. The conviction that the masters’ business does not constitute working is a stereotype deeply rooted in peasant culture, where working means, exclusively, the physical toil of a farmer working the land. This understanding informs the opposition of the contemporary “masters”—represented by kolkhoz authorities or city intellectuals—as nonworking and kolkhozniks as people engaged in peasant work on the land.

One of the more telling self-definitions of a kolkhoznik was provided by an interviewee from the Grodno region: “A simple person, hardworking, how could he be a master?” (G93Pln.JD). In building the image of a member of his own group, he pointed out two distinctive characteristics—simplicity (or lack of education) and industriousness—and then contrasted these with the kolkhoznik’s structural opponent: an educated person who does no manual labor, implied by the term “master.” The distinctive oppositions working–nonworking and educated–uneducated belong to the semiotic basis of the kolkhozniks’ self-defining formulas. They describe their own community as a simple people, a hardworking people, an inferior people. All of these refer to the lower and necessarily worse-off position that kolkhozniks, just as their forefathers used to, assume in the social structure. This is why they tell the ethnographer, “When the man lives in the countryside, he is always the last one. We are the simple, ordinary kolkhozniks—not even considered human beings” (G98Biel.JM).

The kolkhozniks’ reading of social structure places the masters and peasants—in keeping with the notion of the myth of the origins—in a series of oppositions: working–nonworking; ruler–ruled; better–worse; of higher standing–of lower standing; cultivated–provincial; refined–coarse; rich–poor; educated–unschooled. The above-outlined oppositions, constructed on the basis of hierarchical complementarity, express themselves in all sorts of detailed accounts, from which emerges the self-image of the contemporary kolkhoznik—almost a direct continuation of the self-stereotype of the feudal serf.

The stereotype of simple speech appears in one of these accounts. Through its analysis I realized that languages spoken by village peasants and impoverished gentry from the area (the so-called simple Belarusian and Polish) to this day constitute a defining factor of their identity. The peasants’ Belarusian language is valued less than the former gentry’s Polish, considered cultivated and noble, which relates directly to the different social positions of both groups of speakers; for the negative stereotype of simple speech is consistent with the related stereotypes of peasant and village. The inferior value of simple Belarusian is contrasted with the superior value of the gentry’s languages (in Belarusian reality these languages are and have been for many centuries, Polish and Russian)—a long-lasting historical phenomenon, probably as old as the ancient antagonism between peasant and master, and the peasant’s longing for “nobility.”

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The negative stereotype of the simple muzhik—an internalized product of the symbolic violence of master toward peasant—does not, however, provide an exhaustive or exclusive portrait of the peasant–master relationship. An alternative, entirely different founding myth exists, which conversely values the two protagonists. According to this second myth the master, associated with the dog/devil, is located within the opposition human–inhuman, where the peasant is identified by the former category. The idea of peasant superiority over the symbolically degraded master—mainly expressed in name calling, ridiculing, and anecdotes—at the same time highlights the interdependence of the two stereotypes. The kolkhoznik’s story about the past and present, real and symbolic, master and muzhik, indeed teaches that there is no peasant without master. But it also shows that the categories of muzhik and master—though seemingly ascribed to groups (and individuals) since birth—are not static, but rather dynamic and situational. Mythical order and the resulting norm, which is present in the interviewees’ statements, is altered daily by the practice of life as it occurs, providing multiple examples countering the attributes seen in the stereotypical images. Thus, mutual distance is shrinking while the dichotomies, oppositions, peculiarities, and antagonisms tend toward neutralization. The structure proceeds toward communitas—a “community of equal individuals.” ¹⁹ Inhabitants of the former peasant villages and noblemen estates say the same thing about themselves: “we live together, work together, go to the kolkhoz together” (G93Pap.MS).

And, in reality, they are all the same people. “Once you look closer, these nobles are the same kind of people we are” (G93Rdz.WZ). Reference to the humanistic, individualist sphere, neutralizes for them the differences appearing in stereotypical images of differing identities. One is reminded of the cognitive definition of humans provided by Anna Wierzbicka: “beings such as we are.” ²⁰ Kolkhozniks, when referring to this plane of human communitas, comment on cultural differences by saying: “The Lord God loves everyone. Nobles, reds, blacks, whites. . . . Everyone” (G98Gin.JWW).

Peasants and former minor gentry—while exhibiting a sense of intergroup distinctiveness situationally—are united by the identical character of their work—cultivating the land in the same kolkhozes or sovkhozes. This work clears away the old status differences and gives kolkhozniks a sense of common identity, notwithstanding the historical social distance, dichotomizing stereotypes, and perception of differences within their community. No matter who they once were, today they are muzhik-kolkhozniks and gentry-kolkhozniks, bound by the same fundamental values: land and labor.

The kolkhoznik narrative about masters and muzhiks, built of stereotypes and paradoxes—their differing identities, antagonisms, symbiosis, and vanishing dissimilarity—demonstrates that the opposition between these two types functions as a symbolic tool of segmentation and the imposition of a hierarchical order on social reality despite its relativity, situational nature, and actual sociohistorical circumstances. Whether it be an old patriarchal master contrasted with his feudal serfs, or an interwar wealthy estate baron with his farmhands, or neighboring petty nobles with village peasants at various periods of the past century, or the kolkhoz authorities with kolkhozniks, or else an educated city person with an uneducated rural one—there will always be those who are higher in the social hierarchy, and those who are below. This ongoing sequence of pairs testifies to the social currency of the models and values implied in the peasant–master dichotomy—the very fabric of the contemporary kolkhozniks’ collective identity.

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The opposition working peasant–nonworking master allows one to conclude that the kolkhozniks define themselves through the job of cultivating the land. “Even as small landowners, we were doing the drudge work. We labored and labored” (G98Nac.AC). Or: “Muzhik is a muzhik. And when was it ever good for a muzhik? You work and that’s it” (H03Auc.HJ). They perceive their condition through the prism of a mythical order, according to which the peasant was created for physical labor. Their self-stereotype, based on the medieval model of the peasant as a hard-working and pious man, goes back to the mythical progenitor of Adam, whose act of expulsion from Eden turned him into a farmer. His fate is a never-ending work-penance by the sweat of his brow; but at the same time, it is ploughman’s work, sanctified by God. “The Lord God said: Man, thou work and I shalt help thee” (G93Pap.AW). The stereotype of peasant labor and collective farm work embedded in this myth is thus of an ambivalent nature.

The negative pole of this stereotype (with its key phrase charna rabota—literally, “black work”—referring to hard, repetitive physical labor or drudgery) is most perceptible in peasant narratives full of lamentation and complaint about their difficult physical labor without end, understood as punishment for original sin, repentance, and suffering or misery. This extreme toil is punishing or torturous work, identified with a life of suffering and associated with a sense of injustice and humiliation. Collective farmers self-identify as charnaraboche ludye (people doing punishing work), and say about themselves: “My kak byli rabami, tak budyem rabami etymi” (G94Pap.MS) (“Once a slave, always a slave”). Interestingly, the old-Slavic word rab means “slave,” so charna rabota may also be understood as “black slavery.” The two meanings of charna rabota, revealing the equivalence of this work to slavery, indicate the peasants’ work was forced upon them; indeed, at the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe, the formerly free land cultivators on their small plots were massively turned into the no-longer-independent feudal serfs.

The positive pole—referring to the biblical model of the plowman’s holy work—speaks to the sacralization of peasant labor, and is associated with the archaic complex of sanctity of life, land, and crop. As farmers working in the (holy) land, kolkhozniks think of themselves as industrious, work-loving people, finding in their labor the meaning of life and also joy. This conception of work builds their sense of self-worth and dignity as well as their self-image of an industrious people who earn a good living through their own honest hard work—an image consistent with the peasant ethos. Working the land—as the distinctive trait distinguishing the stereotypical peasant from master—is also a fundamental value that constitutes the peasants’ ethos and collective identity.

The fullest incarnation of this value transcends the peasant–master opposition; it finds its personification in the peasant who is his own master—the farming owner of his plot, house, and all necessary tools. This is the model of a good haspadar, which is fundamental for the kolkhoznik’s collective identity. The stereotype of the work of the good haspadar involves not only the very process of laboring but also the land and buildings owned with all the resources and goods produced by one’s own effort—the highly valued work of one’s own hands. Prosperity is understood as the result of God’s blessings, happiness realized. The peasant-master model as one who creates his subjectivity through his own work on his own land—rather than being an object in the hands of a master, like a feudal serf or kolkhoznik-farmhand—is a direct continuation of the pre-kolkhoz social ideal of the wealthy land-owning peasant (haspadar-bahatyr).

This model also applies to the main enemy of the Soviet collective farm system—the kulak, as demonstrated by a very emotional and popular narrative on “dekulakization” at the time of forced collectivization. The kulak, defined by the fact that he worked his land with great commitment, was equated with rabatyaha (an industrious man)—the embodiment of the peasant’s (but not the master’s) ideal of a diligent man: the haspadar. “He who toiled, became a kulak” (H03Zah.MH). “They worked hard, didn’t hang around, so they had everything. So they became kulaks” (H03Aks.JJD).

The narrative of “dekulakization” demonstrates that the category of one’s own—one’s own land, one’s own workshop, work on one’s own—despite the destruction caused by collectivization, remained the central value around which kolkhozniks’ everyday activities are focused. As descendants of haspadars, they feel accomplished and satisfied when working at the only place where no master oversees them—the mini-plots adjacent to their living cabins, which constitute merely the remnants of their former property that they were allowed to keep for themselves. Many of them even find attributes of their former plot-owning autonomy in present-day collective farms, where to be “master of oneself” constitutes having the means of subsistence. “Now, to tell the truth, it’s not so bad in the kolkhoz. One can live. There used to be many masters. Nowadays, everyone’s his own master. Because, you go, work, and you’re gonna be the master” (G98Nac.JN).

The model of the good haspadar, the core of the kolkhozniks’ collective identity, embraces the fundamental values of the community, such as working the land and faith in God, and emphasizes the universal dimension of peasant dignity. Most importantly, one cannot include among the elements of the image of their own group those that are secondary and derivative, coming from “ideas held about neighboring ethnic groups, and the latter’s ideas about them.” This is an autonomous model, “a group’s own and innate idea about itself,” ²¹ in which the subjective collective consciousness dominates over the feeling of distinctiveness from the cultural Other.

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Let us now consider the opposition peasant–Jew. The image of Jews constitutes the third element of the tripartite state of society from feudal times, peasants–nobility–Jews, which structures the kolkhozniks’ social worldview and still functions as its model, in search of current social content to fill it. In the symbolic scheme, the image of Jews as those who do not work the land, and are not Christians, has a role in shaping the collective identity of Belarusian villagers, according to similar rules to those that existed during the time of their ancestors. The Jew, equally “nyetrudolubivy” (averse to hard physical labor) as a noble, is defined by his not working the land. “The Jews did no work, nothing. They had little shops and did the trading. And our people toiled at the land” (B96Ozr.FJ). Business is the area of activity assigned to the Jew. In order for the peasant to be able to work, the Jew has to occupy himself with exchanging the products of the peasant’s labor into money and goods. In order for the peasant to be able to not move from his village, the Jew—the merchant and go-between—must be constantly on the move. Because of the Jew’s “non-working,” he assumes attributes normally associated with the image of a noble, which a stereotypical muzhik does not possess: above all wealth, education, and culture. In the kolkhozniks’ contemporary version, the stereotype of the Jew—perceived as a “learned man” who “reads books, lives like a human” (B95Olm.KS)—is closer to the modern intelligentsia than to the postfeudal estate owner. The relationship of these two group stereotypes is expressed in the opposition simple muzhik–smart and cunning Jew.

In the opposition village–city (or town), the Jew is ascribed to the latter, a category that implies a number of nonpeasant positions within the kolkhoznik perception of social structure. These are reflected in the sequence city–office–power, in which the folk perception of the social world would necessarily place the figure of Jew as a constitutive agent. Presently, an excellent candidate to fit the category of a stereotypical Jew would be an office worker or manager (nachalnik) whose link to the historical Jew would be such that by not working the land, and by working with his head and not his hands, he is located higher in the social hierarchy than the kolkhoznik. Professionals, intelligentsia, white-collar workers, specialists in trade and services, and the like, all are encompassed by the common category of the symbolic Jew. Sometimes, an ethnographer coming from outside the local community is classified as such too.

The negative reflection of the Jewish stereotype underscores the distinctive characteristics of the kolkhoznik’s self-image as a simple man working the land, who—in contrast to the constantly moving Jew—is settled, rooted in the local community of the local people. In this worldview, in which the complement to the settled peasant is the traveling nonpeasant Jew, the peasant cannot exist without the Jew.

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The image of the Jew, similar to that of the noble, is ambivalent. On one hand, kolkhozniks gladly recall their former Jewish neighbors, clearly assigning positive values to the subjects of their narrative. They paint a picture of good-neighborly symbiosis, in which the distinctiveness created by social distance and symbolic otherness does not stop the flow of cultural exchange or inhibit personal contacts. The interviewees’ personal experience corrects and verifies the stereotypical perception of Jews, in effect neutralizing the distinctiveness of the two groups. Intergroup differences, in this case, have an exclusively classifying function, without symbolic and emotional overlays. The latter are nullified while their Jews are perceived as the same kind of people. “They’re the same kind of people we are. They’re no different. . . . Just the same” (M04Szm.ZI).

The image of the Jew as the familiarized other as sketched in the kolkhozniks’ narratives, also has a second, hidden side: the aggression of Christian peasants toward Jews, related in the form of jokes, teasing, and mocking. This ritual aggression, having the sanction of social consent, served as a symbolic reconstitution of the otherness of the two groups. In the years preceding World War Two, under the influence of anti-Semitic propaganda of the Catholic Church as well as of Polish fascist organizations, this ritual aggression escalated, going far beyond the limits of symbolic violence. For this reason, my investigations into the role of Jews as significant others in relation to Belarusian peasants, and into the function of their stereotype on constructing the collective identity of kolkhozniks, led to questioning the interviewees about their attitudes toward the Holocaust.

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In the accounts collected about the extermination of the Jews, the common emotion that stands out is fear. These are stories of fear in the face of a world that has lost all of its former order, both in the sociopolitical and cognitive–axiological sense. In this fear-filled chaos, the peasants’ ever-present fatalistic streak meant that one was dealt one’s role, be it as victim, executioner, ally of one side or another, or finally, as witness. The collective attitude of the witness is painted in various colors of emotion, from empathy, grief, and even despair, to indifference or hostility toward the victims. The apocalyptic image of the Holocaust remembered by peasant observers-witnesses is a vision of the end of the world known to them of Christian–Jewish coexistence. It has been transformed into a mythical narrative reading like a morality play.

The kolkhoznik story of the Holocaust, occurring within the broader context of war, takes place in a world disconnected from the category of nationality. This is the peasant’s universal world of God and man, and simultaneously the particular (or local) world of the neighborhood. Framed in mythical-eschatological terms, the story is also an individual, personal one, at once a narrative of the end of the world as well as an account about intimately known executioners, victims, and witnesses—members of the local community of narrators. This account, speaking of the end of our Jews, takes the form of a peasant lament whose main theme is sympathy and sorrow: “Till this day I have a heartache” (H03Słb.PŻ). Its striking feature consists of the neutralization of the peasant–Jew opposition to emphasize the common humanity of peasants and Jews in the face of the cosmic catastrophe of war. All the more important then, that the kolkhoznik memory of the extermination of the Jews is closely intertwined with their memory of the extermination of peasants—committed by Nazi penal military units charged with village pacification. Resulting from these traumatic events, written into the collective memory of things experienced, is the feeling of a common fate with the Jewish inhabitants of small towns, who were murdered by the Nazi firing squads or buried alive, and the Belarusian peasants who were either killed or burned alive by such squads. Hence, these Jews and peasants were remembered in the same way—as innocent victims. “So, what were they guilty of? Same kind of people we are” (G93Dub.MSA).

Trying to comprehend the Holocaust, the kolkhozniks interpret the image of the world undergoing a catastrophe, in archaic, mythical terms. They attempt to return to it a cognitive and axiological harmony. On one hand, they do so by appealing to the idea of safeguarding the ethical order and empathizing with the human cosmos (the moving, bleeding, and moaning of the earth, the groaning of the air). The eschatological image of the bleeding earth (“The earth was trembling and bleeding for the whole week” [H03Krk.BR]) is also associated with the mythical precedent of the innocent victim: Abel, killed by fratricide, whose blood from the earth cries out to God for vengeance.

On the other hand, the interviewees’ interpretation refers to the mythical idea of divine justice, fundamental to peasant thinking, which manifests itself as divine punishment understood in terms of revenge—in this case, God’s revenge on the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ. “If God gave us this war, surely this was to kill them all, because they were enemies . . . , because they, these Jews, sold Jesus Christ for sure. . . . Surely, He gave them this, thinking, ‘I’ll show you!’” (M04Mas.JS). The kolkhozniks’ story of the Holocaust, therefore, seems to say that the Jews are innocent victims and guilty at the same time, that they represent both Abel and Judas. They are Christ’s killers and also Christ’s death on the cross—the most innocent of all victims—a pre-figuration of their own fate. Perhaps such intensity of ambivalence can only be embraced by an archaic mytho-religious sensibility. For, the myth, “regardless of the material in which it would operate, . . . it has to fulfill its task, which is a recapitulation of the Whole.” ²²

Part Two. Christian Folks

Just as the identity of the peasant as a farmer, or one working the land, is not possible without an image of “nonworking” represented by master and Jew, his identity as a Christian, without the image of the Jew, does not exist. The mythical Jew, embodying all that country-folk thinking considers non-Christian, is the essential negative of the Belarusian muzhik’s self-image as a Christian, whether Orthodox or Catholic. The image of Christ’s crucifixion, a fundamental element of Christian identity, cannot be invoked here without also evoking the image of the Jews as god-killers who crucified him—without the stereotype of the Jew as non-Christian (or, in the extreme case, anti-Christian).

Equally important as this aspect of the Jewish stereotype—establishing antagonistic, mutually exclusive identities of Jews as non-Christians, and Christians as non-Jews—is the genealogical aspect: “the first faith was Jewish” (G97Rou.AR). For kolkhozniks it is clear that “we descend from them. Because Jesus Himself was a Jew. And then He was baptized” (G93Ser.MP.WP). The ritual conversion of a Jew into a Christian—both in terms of the community and the individual—is a repetition of the mythical precedent of Jesus-the-Jew being baptized (christened) in the River Jordan. “In the Jordan it was John-the-Baptist who baptized Jesus. That’s why there is faith now. They have to baptize. Look, they baptize infants. If an infant isn’t baptized, he’s a Jew. That’s why the baptism” (G98Gin.AD). According to this logic, the Christian–Jewish distinction boils down to the opposition baptized–unbaptized (christened–unchristened). In the kolkhozniks’ worldview, an unchristened person is a Jew, while baptism (christening) is the ritual act defining man as a social being—an individual ascribed to a specific faith-nation (vyera-natsya) (Orthodox, that is the Russian faith; or Catholic, the Polish faith). The command “one must baptize” is therefore a fundamental imperative to the identity of the muzhik-Christian, it defines the norm.

Christening (baptism), as the symbolic kernel of kolkhoznik identity, constitutes that identity’s core value, which is, among other things, confirmed by the frequent self-definition “We Christian people—baptized people.” Etymological-symbolic roots and phonetic associations of this formula (Christ–christening–cross) reveal a metaphorical–metonymic sequence of concepts. The Christian (i.e., human) identity of kolkhozniks is defined by christening (baptism), the symbolic essence of which comes down to the sign of cross. There is a good reason why the Russian word for peasant is krest’yanin; in both Old Russian and Old Orthodox Slavic it means the “Christian” and the “man” (human being). The kolkhoznik-Christian is a person who has been christened/crossed; he is convinced that he is not allowed to take off “the cross hanging on his neck . . . it protects from evil, from the devil” (H03Jur.PP).

The essential role of christening and the cross to kolkhoznik’s identity clearly showed up in conversations carried out in the commonly considered “non-religious” Eastern Belarus—the area of heaviest persecution during the Soviet campaign against religion. For interviewees from the area, who either lost a significant part of the competence of the relevant institutional religion, or had no opportunity to assume it in the first place, the magic–apotropaic sign of the cross, older than the Christian religion, remained the permanent (often the only) determinant of “belief existing in the human soul.” “They know how to cross themselves and that’s it” (M04Nes.LS). In addition to the cross, there are some other distinctive identity traits of the kolkhoznik as a person of belief: a conviction that there is “something in Heaven” that could be (but not necessarily is) called God; a Christian icon in the house; not working/observing holidays; a taboo on swearing; and, finally, christening. This kind of belief needs no name and is independent of institutional religion; it conditions both the humanity of a christened/crossed person as well as the permanence of his or her social cosmos. Its continuance depends on the individual’s conduct—dependent on God’s presence in this individual’s soul, and on whether his conduct is consistent with the peasant moral code. Hence, it follows that the opposition faith–faithlessness, finally opposes life to death. “One should believe in some God. If we didn’t believe, perhaps this world would not exist” (M04Szm.ZI).

*

An analysis of the structure of the kolkhozniks’ identity as Christians in relation to non-Christian-Jews, leads to the conclusion that, in their worldview, the definition of a human as “a being who believes in God” is of fundamental importance. Emerging from this finding is the phenomenon of a mental map of local faiths—a matrix characterizing the multireligious society in which the kolkhozniks operate. Interrelation between faith-nations (called vyera or natsya by the locals) is sanctioned and organized by the folk myth about human diversification produced by the collapse of the Tower of Babel. Religious groups resulting from this mythical precedent—each of which received from God its own language—form a multipolar system of classification. It is based on the opposition of Jews versus Christians (using the criterion of baptism), who in turn (using the criteria of prayer language and the specific form of the cross) are divided into Orthodox (called Russians by the locals) and Catholics (called Poles). Depending on the local social environment, these three obligatory components of the “map” can be accompanied by people of other faiths, such as Muslims or neo-Protestants (called Baptists by the locals). The mythical order—faiths, natsyas, languages—referring to the cultural cosmos-ordering belief that “each natsya must believe in their own” (G93Pap.AW), creates a specific model of cultural borderland, with its principal norm, “there is one God, but many faiths,” testifying to the equal status of all faiths. It is the foundation of the nonantagonistic strategy of their coexistence in a common social and symbolic space. This is a premodern, nonhierarchical, and nonfundamentalist model of religious identity, set in cultural diversity not upon the principle of an excluding alternative but rather upon the principle of an ecumenical conjunction. This is a model the sense of which the kolkhozniks articulate as follows: “There is one God in the universe, but the faith may be . . . , that is . . . everyone believes in his own way. Still God, no matter what, is just one. . . . Same God is for them as for us. There are no different gods” (G98Nac.SA). Or: “There are different natsyas at God’s. God has us all—Russians and Poles, and Jews, and Belarusians. We go there all, after we die” (G93Rou.SR).

Faith as the defining element of a human being has a universal dimension: it is a category that encompasses all natsyas, both Christian and non-Christian. It is not specific to the muzhik-kolkhoznik. It becomes specific only after the definition of a human being is narrowed by the Christian–Jew opposition to form “the one who believes in God and is christened.” The kolkhoznik-Christian is just such a person, he believes in God and is christened. Evoking the remaining oppositions peasant–master and peasant–Jew, which result in the self-definition of the muzhik-kolkhoznik as a simple and hard-working local person, we conclude that Belarusian kolkhozniks at the turn of the twenty-first century, like their ancestors, constitute a simple and hard-working Christian nation.

*

Interpretation of the narrative identity of Belarusian kolkhozniks needs to be supplemented with an analysis of the atheization process retained in my interviewees’ memories and statements. The Soviet authorities brought this destructive process to the fundamental domain of values (other than land ownership and cultivation), that of faith, which defines the peasant identity. The image of the communists—perpetrators of this destruction that paralleled collectivization, who were seen at the time as demonic aliens threatening the very existence of the subject group—evokes a fundamental Slavic myth. According to its structure and message expressed in the Christianized language, the crusade of Soviet communists against religion amounted to a war waged by the Devil against God. In alliance with the Devil, communists established a dichotomy of work and faith, which was incomprehensible to the traditional peasant world, and conducted a struggle aimed at winning the power over people’s souls. The kolkhozniks interpreted this struggle in mythical terms, with a sequence of oppositions: faith–lack of faith (atheism), God–Devil, good–evil, work–holiday. The stereotypical image of communists found its place in the traditional image of a world focused on the sacred. In the space divided into the variety of faith-nations, they represented a peculiar antination, which—according to the structural pattern of perception of the religious groups—was described as “devils who believe in nothing” (G97Mej.FK). Therefore, this group must remain outside the “post-Babelian” community of believers, that is, humans, even if their Marx-Engels religion is conceptualized in terms of faith. “And where is this devil idea of Marx-Engels coming from? That is, their religion. Because they took everything out of religion and, that is, they made this party. . . . They made their religion, communism” (G93Pap.AW).

The promoters and warriors of the communist antireligion finally lost their pursuit of a new form of collective identity for peasants-kolkhozniks. The kolkhozniks were spared from the disintegration of their collective identity as a people believing in God by mythical mechanisms of God’s punishment for those who commit sacrilege, and by a new noninstitutional organization of religious practices based on kinship-neighborly ties. “They didn’t trash our faith, but we trashed theirs, communism” (G98Szw.SJ). Long-lasting mental structures, which assigned sense and consistency to the image of social reality, collective identity, and the personality of individuals, finally came victorious.

Conclusion

Contemporary, postfeudal identity of Belarusian villagers as “local kolkhoznik Christians,” indelibly marked by the stigma of the old social state, is inextricably intertwined with a mythical worldview and a linguistic image of the world woven with stereotypes. Immune to modern ideological, nationalistic, and political designs is a universal, humanist peasant identity with its anthropology, centered on the relationship of the human and the divine, proclaiming “God created all human beings, to be human” (G93Pap.AW). The principal values forming this group’s identity have nothing to do with nation, motherland, state, or language; they consist of working the land and faith in God. This is the identity of a prenationalistic peasant community whose founding myth speaks of a people persecuted, designed to occupy the lowest position in the social hierarchy. As a result of the petrifaction of the old model of the feudal estate by the Soviet kolkhoz system, we encounter in today’s Belarusian countryside probably one of the last remnants of premodern mentality and social identity still extant in Europe.

Identity perceived in the terms outlined above brings to the knowledge of Belarusian collective identities content associated with the contemporary post-peasant ethos. A student of this content needs to remember that it is embedded in the field of myth and its petrified slivers—stereotypes. Such a student should also realize that the image of Belarusian kolkhozniks’ collective identity emerging from the anthropological analysis and interpretation of their narratives of identity has little in common with the widespread category of Homo sovieticus and the common stereotype of the kolkhoz, understood as a place of social disintegration and cultural demoralization. The above anthropological reflections prove a deconstruction of the kolkhoz stereotype and its hero—in sum, a being admirably coping with extremely difficult living conditions and, at the same time, a contemporary living embodiment of the archaic Homo religiosus.