Leon Trotsky: The Ordinary Village

(Unspoken words about the village in general. Correspondents' competition on "medical" topics. The sore spot of a sick village medicine. A saving "prison").

[y own translation of the Russian text in “Vostnochnoe Obozrenie” {Eastern Outlook} No. 70, 29 March/11 April 1901, reprinted in Sochineniya, Vol. 20, Moscow-Leningrad 1926, compared to the German translation. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

Something fatal gravitates over the modern village with its needs and demands ... These needs and inquiries do not leave newspaper and magazine columns, divide the writing fraternity into numerous parties and are occasionally fiercely interpreted in the large public ... But all these are, in the benign and dismissive words of Uspensky, "newspaper rags", all this "humanity" is somehow terribly tragically cut off from the village itself, like a huge paper kite hanging in the air on a thin, thin cord ...

The city, too, has dire needs and cruel demands, but the city, if it is far from always able to "satisfy itself” on its own initiative, then is nevertheless argues, condemns, or at least shows a tendency to this kind of "behaviour". The indigenous villager, due to lack of culture, lack of publicity, lack of rights, is completely deprived of the opportunity to discuss his own affairs, and therefore the city dweller, the product of urban culture, signs for him, the illiterate, even without his personal request ... Finally, "a completely extraneous agency", not connected with the village or with the journalism discussing its needs, is called to knit and decide the fate of the village.

One gets roughly such a picture. The village is being plundered economically by kulaks, physically - by syphilis and all sorts of epidemics, and finally, from the spiritual side, it is in some kind of concentrated darkness; it abides and it is silent.

People in touch with newspaper "rags" and in general with all kinds of "humanism" try, as far as possible, to reflect in the mirror of journalism the bitter rural reality, just to reflect, but ... Oh, if only the flowers weren't frosty, oh, if it were a "mirror" not a "frame"...

Finally, a special closed department, standing with its back to the mirror of journalism, if not completely with its back, then by no means en face, decides and knits, knits and decides without, however, overwhelming success in this direction.

Take village medicine, for example. It was written, written, written about the medical helplessness and defencelessness of the Siberian village ... Something like a sport, a correspondents' competition, has been established in this field. “The length of our medical district”, writes one correspondent, “is 100 versts, its width is 80 versts.” “And here”, another interrupts him, “two hundred in length and two hundred in width, but there are no roads”. “No, what's that!” - the third is choking, - “here it's simply 'without measure in length, without end in width', and, besides this, all our medical personnel have a stable-stationary way of thinking, and the site includes such places of settlement, the very existence of which is under the sign of administrative doubt.”

All these correspondences are printed and read, then summarised in the form of editorials, feuilletons; they form temporary cadres of "paramedics-ists" and "antiparamedics-ists", and then they are consigned to oblivion.

The indigenous rural, muzhik population continues to die by "throat" and "belly", and by all other means, completing this process silently and with concentration, apparently completely convinced of its fatality. In the guise of its intellectual, more or less random elements, the village, apparently, does not agree to calm down and die, either without medical assistance or without newspaper lament, for anything, and continues to plead, plead endlessly, complaining about the forces of nature and on the inattention of the authorities, and on the unshakable stationary mindset of the medical staff.

It is very easy for us to imagine that readers, living in a city provided with medical care, with the most benevolence to the village unwittingly lose the ability to penetrate the mood and feelings of village correspondents, crying, crying out to heaven, pleading and demanding the reduction of medical districts and an increase in medical staff. Such readers - and after all, the satisfaction of the correspondents' desires depends, at least in part, on some of them - at best, scan with their eyes the correspondents' lamentations from the banks of the Angara, of the Ilim, of the Kuta or other similar places, similar to each other, like two tears ...

And yet - verdammte Pflicht und Schuldigkeit¹! (damn duty!) - I want to say a few words all about the same village medicine, in fact, about one of the most painful areas of this sore issue - about the village mentally ill.

In order not to blur in general reasoning, I will give two or three specific examples from the practice of the last 3-4 years of the fourth section of the Kirensky district.

A muzhik brings his wife, a mentally ill woman, to the village Nizhneilimsky, the centre of the precinct. The question is: what to do with her? In an emergency room with three bunks (for the entire area), she cannot be placed: there is no place, and there is no one to look after her. Send her to Irkutsk? But for this it is necessary to contact "Irkutsk", and on this subject it is necessary to determine the specific nature of the mental illness, which cannot be done without observation. For observations, sometimes lasting for quite a long time, it is necessary to place the patient at least temporarily in Nizhneilimsky, and there is nowhere to place her. Neither the bailiff, nor the peasant's governor dare to send the patient to Irkutsk at their own risk. The "volost" refuses (for lack of everything) to give her any room, besides the reception room, where she is not admitted. Finally, her husband refuses to take her back: he has only small children in his family, which means that he would have to look after his wife, who requires constant and attentive care, constantly and this should completely ruin him.

Everyone is right. The doctor is "right" who does not admit a patient to an outpatient ward, since it is impossible to place her there. The local administration is "right" that refuses to send the patient to Irkutsk at public expenditure, because the local administration is not given such a right. Finally, the muzhik who does not want to take his wife home is "right" since caring for her will inevitably lead him to misery. As a result of this general "legal claim" the muzhik still took his wife home (apparently his "legal claim" turned out to be of a lower grade!) - and the finale of this whole story was played out behind the scenes ...

They bring a mentally ill muzhik, who has nowhere “to go”, because in his village there is "no life" for him. The story described above is played out, but as a result, the patient is not taken back, but placed for observation in ... a "prison" (jail), which in this, as in several other cases, appears in the role of the psychiatric department of the Nizhneilimsky admission ward. On the fourth day of his imprisonment (!?), the unfortunate patient died, having thus envied everyone's hands ...

We will not give more examples, since they all slightly vary the same basic theme.

The last case cited brings to mind by natural association another episode from the field of care for the weak in a Siberian village.

Although this episode does not relate to the question we have raised, it is so "interesting" that I cannot restrain myself from conveying it to the readers with eagerness. In one and the same Siberian village there were two old bachelors: one - an exiled "insurgent", with his leg shot through in Siberia, in the "incident" on the Circum-Baikal Railway; the other - an old homeless soldier who served in Siberia and participated in the Circum-Baikal subjugation in his time. The old, mutilated, homeless old men found their last refuge in one and the same volost "prison". There, these two "enemies" could with leisure indulge in memories of the incident in which one was the oppressor, and the other was subjugated. Spectacular fictional fantasy! the reader will interrupt me. No: no more than an unconscious play of circumstances, albeit full of socio-dramatic meaning! But at the same time, what a really grateful topic for artistic treatment!

All in one. The prison as a place of moral admonition for drunken brawlers! The prison as an outpatient psychiatric ward! A prison as a place for care for crippled settlers and homeless invalids! In a word, the prison is a panacea for all village ulcers, a place and a means of resolving the tangled issues of village existence.