Word: peasant
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...agribusinesses have been split into small-acreage plots by revolutionary farm workers, and production has dropped. Elsewhere in the countryside, farmers have grabbed land belonging to "feudal lords." Ironically, some feudal families, in the name of the revolution, have forcibly reclaimed land that had been distributed to peasant farmers during the Shah's reign. To reduce urban unemployment, the new regime is pressing a "return to the village" policy, hoping to send back to the farms some of the millions of peasants who migrated to cities during the past generation...
...Uttar Pradesh, the vigorous woman in the beige sari electioneering under a roadside arbor was a haunting apparition from India's political past. Raising an orange-colored bullhorn, she repeated her blunt and simple slogan: "Banish poverty!" Seizing upon the issue of most urgent concern to her peasant audience-the high price of onions -she promised not only to fight inflation but to bring the bounty of the welfare state closer to home. "I don't know whether you've had any government aid here," she shouted grandly, "but if you vote...
...reality. Many were foreigners who roamed the gigantic empire seeking ethnographic oddities, the odder the better. Precursors of Soviet socialist realism, these photographers turned real people into "typical specimens" for the fashionable genre pictures of the times. The wandering holy man, the street musician, the Cossack and especially the peasant, in all his scruffy permutations, were persuaded to assume artful poses. One French photographer of the 1880s in Russia was fixated on funny-looking hats, which he set askew on his subjects' heads when it suited his composition. The result often verged on caricature...
...exotic peoples and tribes that, like the Russians who colonized them, have long since lost much of their cultural distinctiveness. Another kind of excursion was plotted by the late English scholar Max Hayward, whose introduction covers the entire span of Russian history, with diverting digressions on such topics as peasant life, Cossack lore, the liberal intelligentsia and Russian tycoons. A 15-page miracle of compression, the essay is a learned, graceful and witty commentary on the book's fugitive images of every day life...
Viewers will recognize many of the photographs from their reading of Russian literature. One magnificent, sprawling landscape of the Dikanka estate in the Ukraine, complete with manor house, onion-domed church and clusters of khaty, or peasant huts, is a breathtaking evocation of Gogol's stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. So many Russians of genius spent their childhoods in such manor houses, with their colonnaded porticoes and vast, cool rooms teeming with relatives, family retainers and hangers-on. Nearly all of Russia's 19th century writers were members of the much maligned gentry, and their fiction...