«Дезертиры, шпионы и куманисты»: некоторые эпизоды из повседневной жизни крестьян Пермской губернии во второй половине 1919 года

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of the peasants’ everyday life in 1919. The basis is archival documents presenting four criminal cases: two murders, torture and malfeasance. Using comparative historical and typological methods the author showed how peasants from different districts of Perm province reacted to the events in the village. A causal analysis of the links between historical events made it possible to identify the general patterns of the considered social phenomena and processes among the peasantry. The history of everyday life is relevant to this day. It is impossible to study historical facts without addressing this topic. The peasantry constituted the majority of the country's population, and therefore was a kind of indicator of the ongoing internal political changes in the country. The life of the peasants in each region of the country had its own characteristics. It depended on the natural and climatic conditions, the standard of living, and the social composition of the population. The civil war showed that interference in the life of peasants could change their social appearance. The war imbalanced the life of the village for a long time, destroyed social ties, and led to senseless human casualties. The cited archival documents, in a way, are the episodes from peasants’ life in a certain period of time. As long as the author's goal was to convey the era of war the documents are given in the form in which they have survived to this day: with the preservation of spelling, punctuation and style. Due to the absence of editorial revision in them a picture of complex relationship in the village opens up the tragic events unfold with the forced participation of peasants. It becomes clear what the norm was for them and what was the main thing in their life - justice or legality. The peasants’ attitude towards life and death had been changed during the Civil War. Life lost its value, and death began to be perceived as something ordinary and inevitable.