V. Klyuchevsky. Almsgiving in old Russia
Old Russian society, under the guidance of the Church over the centuries, diligently learned to understand and fulfill the second of the two great commandments, in which all the law and the prophets are summed up — the commandment to love one’s neighbor. In the midst of social disorder, lacking security for the weak and protection for the oppressed, the practice of this commandment was directed primarily in one direction: love of neighbor was understood above all as the feat of compassion for the suffering; its first requirement was personal almsgiving. The idea of this almsgiving was placed at the foundation of practical moral teaching; the need for this feat was cultivated by all the means of spiritual and moral pedagogy available at the time. To love one’s neighbor is, first of all, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to visit the prisoner. Love of humanity in practice meant love of the poor. Charity was not so much an auxiliary means of social welfare as it was a necessary condition for personal moral health: it was needed more by the lover of the poor himself than by the beggar. The healing power of almsgiving was thought to lie not so much in drying the tears of the sufferer by giving him a share of one’s property, as in looking upon his tears and sufferings, suffering with him oneself, and experiencing that feeling which is called love for mankind.
The Old Russian benefactor, the “Christ-lover,” thought less about raising the level of public well-being by his good deed than about elevating the level of his own spiritual perfection. When two Old Russian hands met, one extended with a request for Christ’s sake, the other with a gift in Christ’s name, it was hard to say which of them gave more alms to the other: the need of the one and the help of the other merged in an interaction of brotherly love between them both. That is why Old Russia understood and valued only personal, direct charity, alms given from hand to hand, and given “otai,” secretly, not only from the eyes of strangers but even from one’s own “left hand.” The beggar was for the benefactor the best intercessor, a prayerful mediator, a spiritual benefactor. “One enters paradise by holy almsgiving,” they used to say in olden times; “the beggar is fed by the rich man, and the rich man is saved by the beggar’s prayer.” The benefactor needed to see with his own eyes the spiritual benefit; the needy person had to see his benefactor in order to know for whom to pray. On the eve of great feasts, early in the morning, the tsars of Old Russia used to make secret visits to prisons and almshouses, where they personally distributed alms to prisoners and those under care; they also visited the destitute who lived apart. Just as it is difficult to study and treat illnesses from a drawing or a mannequin of a sick organism, so almsgiving given at a distance seemed to have little effect. By virtue of the same view of the significance of charitable deeds, begging was considered in Old Russia not an economic burden for the people, not an ulcer of the social order, but one of the chief means of the people’s moral education, a practical institute of public good conduct attached to the Church. Just as a clinic needs the sick in order to learn how to cure diseases, so in Old Russian society the orphan and the destitute were necessary in order to cultivate the ability and skill to love a person. Almsgiving was a supplementary act of church worship, a practical requirement of the rule that faith without works is dead. As a living instrument of the soul’s salvation, the beggar was needed by the Old Russian person at all important moments of his personal and family life, especially in moments of sorrow. From him he created an ideal image, which he loved to carry in his mind as the embodiment of his best feelings and thoughts. If by some miraculous act of legislation, economic progress, and medical knowledge all the beggars and destitute in Old Russia had suddenly vanished, who knows — perhaps the Old Russian almsgiver would have felt a certain moral awkwardness, like a man left without a staff on which he was accustomed to lean; he would have discovered a shortage in the store of means for his spiritual house-building.
It is difficult to say to what extent such a view of charity contributed to the improvement of Old Russian communal life. No methods of sociological study can calculate what amount of goodness this daily, silent, thousand-handed almsgiving poured into human relations, how much it accustomed people to love a person and weaned the poor from hating the rich. The significance of such personal almsgiving became more evident and tangible when the need for charitable help was caused not by the sorrows of individual unhappy lives but by a national physical calamity. The nature of our country has long been kind, but at times it was a willful mother to its people, who perhaps themselves provoked its capriciousness by their inability to deal with it. Crop shortages and harvest failures were not infrequent in Old Russia. The lack of economic communication and administrative resourcefulness turned local deficiencies in food supplies into famines.
Such a disaster occurred at the beginning of the 17th century, under Tsar Boris. In 1601, scarcely had the spring sowing ended when terrible rains began and continued all summer. Fieldwork ceased. The grain did not ripen; until August it was impossible to begin the harvest, and on the Feast of the Dormition an unexpected hard frost killed the unripe grain, which was left almost entirely in the fields. People fed on the remnants of old grain, and the following year they sowed with the half-frozen grain of the new harvest, somehow gathered; but nothing sprouted, everything remained in the earth, and a three-year famine ensued. The tsar spared no treasury, generously distributed alms in Moscow, undertook extensive construction to provide work for the needy. Hearing of this, people thronged to Moscow from the unfertile provinces, which intensified the distress in the capital. A high mortality began: in only three state-run paupers’ burial pits in the capital, where the tsar ordered the homeless victims to be collected, over two years and four months they counted 127,000. But the calamity was to a considerable extent artificial. There was still plenty of grain left from previous harvests. Later, when pretenders flooded Russia with bands of Poles and Cossacks, whose devastation halted sowing over vast areas, this reserve grain sufficed for many years not only for our own people but also for the enemies. At the first signs of a poor harvest, grain speculation began to unfold. Large landowners locked their storehouses. Buyers-up put money, household utensils, costly clothing into circulation to corner the marketable grain. Both groups kept grain off the market, waiting for high prices, rejoicing, as a contemporary put it, in profits, “not understanding the end of the matter, weaving snares of confusion, and unsettling the people.” Grain prices were driven to terrible heights: a quarter of rye from 20 contemporary kopecks quickly rose to 6 rubles, which equaled our 60 rubles, i.e., it became 30 times more expensive! The tsar took strict and decisive measures against the evil, banned distilling and brewing, ordered the buyers-up to be tracked down and mercilessly beaten with the knout in the marketplaces, their stocks to be inventoried and sold in small portions by retail, prescribed mandatory prices, and punished with heavy fines those who concealed their stores.
A preserved document has revealed to us one of the private charitable activities that were then going on below, in the localities, while the tsar fought the national disaster from above. At that time there lived on her estate a widowed gentlewoman, the wife of a wealthy provincial nobleman, an ordinary kind woman of old Russia, modest, afraid of setting herself above those around her in any way. She was distinguished from others only, perhaps, by the fact that pity for the poor and wretched—a feeling with which a Russian woman is born—was in her more delicate and deeper, showed itself more intensely than in many others, and, developing through continual practice, gradually filled her whole being, became the basic stimulus of her moral life, the minute-by-minute attraction of her ever-active heart. Even before her marriage, while living with her aunt after the death of her parents, she would sew clothing for all the orphans and feeble widows in her village, and often the candle in her room would not be extinguished before dawn.
After her marriage, her mother-in-law entrusted her with the management of the household, and the daughter-in-law proved to be an intelligent and competent housekeeper. But the habitual thought of the poor and wretched never left her amid domestic and family cares. She deeply assimilated the Christian commandment of secret almsgiving. Sometimes her husband would be sent off on the tsar’s service somewhere to Astrakhan for two or three years. Left at home and passing her lonely evenings, she would sew and spin, sell her handiwork, and secretly distribute the proceeds to beggars who came to her at night. Not considering herself entitled to take anything from the household stores without her mother-in-law’s permission, she once resorted to a little stratagem for a charitable purpose, which it is permissible to recount because her respectful son did not conceal it in his mother’s biography. Ulyana was very moderate in food, only dining, not taking breakfast or afternoon meal, which greatly worried her mother-in-law, who feared for the young daughter-in-law’s health.
There came one of the not infrequent crop failures in Russia, and famine struck the Murom region. Ulyana redoubled her usual secret almsgiving and, needing new resources, suddenly began to demand full breakfasts and afternoon meals for herself, which, of course, went to feed the hungry.
Her mother-in-law half-jokingly remarked to her: “What has come over you, my daughter? When there was an abundance of bread, one could not call you to breakfast or afternoon meal, and now, when everyone has nothing to eat, such an appetite for food has seized you.” — “When I had no children,” answered the daughter-in-law, “food did not enter my mind, but when the children began to be born, I grew weak and can in no way eat enough, not only by day but often by night too I am drawn to eat; only I am ashamed, mother, to ask you.” The mother-in-law was satisfied with the explanation of her good little liar and allowed her to take as much food as she wished, both day and night.
She was already advanced in years when the last and most severe charitable trial befell her. The crafty devil, hater of good, who had long been bustling around this woman, so vexatious to him and always put to shame by her, once in anger threatened her: “Just wait! You’ll be feeding strangers for me, when I make you, in your old age, die of hunger.” Such a kindly pious combination explains in the biography the origin of the calamity that befell the good woman. Having buried her husband, raised her sons, and placed them in the tsar’s service, she already thought of the eternal ordering of her own soul, but still before God her love for her neighbor glowed, as a wax candle nearing its end glows before an icon. Love of the poor did not allow her to be a provident housekeeper. She calculated her domestic provisions for only one year, giving away the rest to the needy. The poor were for her a kind of bottomless savings box, into which with insatiable miserliness she kept hiding and hiding her savings and surpluses. At times there was not a kopeck left in her house from almsgiving, and she borrowed money from her sons, with which she sewed winter clothing for the poor, while she herself, already near sixty, went the whole winter without a fur coat.
The beginning of the terrible three-year famine under Tsar Boris found her in her Nizhny Novgorod estate completely unprepared. From her fields she had gathered not a single grain; there were no reserves; nearly all the livestock had perished from lack of fodder.
But she did not lose heart. She set to work energetically, sold off the remaining cattle, clothing, dishes, everything of value in the house, and with the money she bought bread, which she distributed to the starving. She never sent a single supplicant away empty-handed and was especially concerned about feeding her household servants. In those days many calculating masters simply drove their serfs from their estates so as not to feed them, yet they did not grant them release papers, so that later they could return to bondage. Abandoned to their fate amid universal panic, the serfs took to theft and robbery. Ulyana strove above all to prevent her own household people from reaching that state and kept them with her as long as she had any strength.
Finally she reached the ultimate degree of poverty, stripping herself so bare that she had nothing to wear to church. Having exhausted her strength, having expended all her bread to the last grain, she announced to her serf household that she could no longer feed them; whoever wished could take their bondage documents or letters of release and go with God to freedom. Some departed from her, and she saw them off with prayer and blessing; but others refused freedom, declaring they would not go, would sooner die with their mistress than abandon her.
She sent her faithful servants through the forests and fields to gather tree bark and goosefoot, and she began to bake bread from these substitutes, with which she fed herself, her children, and her serfs, even managing to share with the beggars, “for at that time the beggars were without number,” her biographer notes laconically. Neighboring landowners reproachfully said to these beggars: “Why do you go to her? What can you get from her? She herself is dying of hunger.”
“Well, we’ll tell you,” the beggars replied. “We have been through many villages where we were given real bread, but even that didn’t taste as good to us as the bread of this widow—what’s her name?”
Many beggars could not even call her by name. Then the neighboring landowners began to send to Ulyana for her wondrous bread; having tasted it, they found that the beggars were right, and they said to one another with amazement: “Her serfs are masters at baking bread!” With what love must one give a beggar a chunk of bread—even if chemically imperfect—for that chunk to become the subject of a poetic legend as soon as it is eaten!
From the book Historical Portraits
V. O. KLYUCHEVSKY
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