The Mentality of Kolkhoz Inhabitants

The article is based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research conducted since 1993 in kolkhoz villages of the Grodno region in northwestern Belarus, using qualitative methods aimed at elucidating the commonly shared opinion among the interviewed villagers that “the kolkhoz has to stay” because “people would perish wJthout it.” By analyzing the kolkhozniks’ opinions that were recorded during the fieldwork the author offers a number of possible explanations for the acceptance of kolkhoz life at the grass-roots level. She demonstrates that, in the Soviet system, which, in a way, preserved the structure of the feudal estate, a mythological way of thinking and the elements of a feudal outlook on life survived as well. The author points to peasant stoicism and pragmatism as well as fatalism to explain people’s adaptation to uneasy kolkhoz reality. This is the result of accepting the reality of life because of a mythological belief in the world structure and order. In this belief God is perceived at the top of a hierarchical structure of the world as its ultimate ruler. The corresponding human reality, that is, the social structure, is also hierarchical-with the president, or the government, at the top, their representatives and officials in the middle, and the simple folks—the kolkhozniks—at the bottom.In presenting the establishment ofkolkhozes into the life of Belarusian peasants, the author demonstrates how the Soviet authorities overcame peasant resistance against the new system and how the defeated people perceived their action-as a violent coup of the antisacrum against two fundamental values of peasant culture: religious faith and the farmer’s work. Describing further transformation that eventually produced a peculiar symbiosis of the kolkhoz and the kolkhozniks-a complicated system of mutual services, benefits, and dependencies that blurred the distinction between what belonged to the kolkhoz and what belonged to the people-the author demonstrates that this symbiosis also involves the district and the church. In Belarusian reality, both the kolkhoz and the church are postfeudal and post-Soviet institutions. Together they encompass and organize the life, work, and religious practice of the villagers in focusing on basic values of their culture. A direct interdependence between their way of life and mentality, on the one hand, and the functioning of the kolkhoz and the church, on the other hand, attests to the prolonged life of the feudal model, which cannot escape the researcher’s attention

Epistemology · Fatalism · Feudalism · Mythology · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Ruler · Social reality · Social science · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Law · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

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