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until its subsequent suppression. The Polish
Bund continued to operate until World War II,
and remnants of the organization existed in the
United States as late as the 1960s.
burlaki
Barge haulers. From the 16th to 19th centuries,
burlaki
hauled vessels along Russia's rivers with
the help of towing ropes. To generations of 19th-
century intellectuals, the use of men as draught
animals was one of the most powerful symbols of
capitalist exploitation. They were especially
prevalent along the northern routes connecting
Moscow and
ARCHANGEL
on the White Sea, the
Volga route from Moscow to
ASTRAKHAN
, and the
Dnieper River route in the Ukraine.
Burlaki
were
hired at the beginning of the navigation in river
towns like Nizhnii-Novgorod, Saratov, Rybinsk,
and Kiev. Until the abolition of
SERFDOM
in 1861,
most were serfs, hailing from land-hungry
provinces along the Volga River, who had been
temporarily released from their labor duties by
their landlords. Occasionally they were joined by
town dwellers and déclassé elements. Wages
were not enough to cover expenses for the whole
trip, and barge haulers were forced to borrow
from the following years' wages. Although the
terms of labor were fixed in written agreements,
employers often arbitrarily reduced the previ-
ously agreed wage upon payment. Most
burlaki
were hired during winter, a time when prices fell
and barge haulers needed advance payments.
Usually they were hired in artels, groups of four
to six, sometimes 10 to 40 men, which then
merged to form larger artels of up to 150 men,
bound by mutual guarantees. Haulers were paid
only at the end of the season, so often they came
home already in debt. Technical progress and the
growth of steamship navigation in the 19th cen-
tury brought an end to the need for bargemen.
By midcentury there were about 150,000 barge-
men, almost half a million fewer than at the
beginning of the century, and their numbers con-
tinued to decline rapidly. By the beginning of the
20th century,
burlaki
had mostly disappeared,
their memory celebrated in cultural icons, such as
REPIN
's painting
Volga Boatmen,
stories by
GORKY
and the journalist
GILIAROVSKY
, and
Song of the
Volga Boatmen,
later a staple of Russian folk music.
Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich
(1870-1953)
writer
The recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in
1933, Bunin represents the last link to the “clas-
sical” tradition of nineteenth-century realist lit-
erature of
TOLSTOY
and
TURGENEV
. He was born in
Voronezh into a provincial gentry family, and his
most representative work draws deeply from
this rural background. Working as a journalist,
he first received literary recognition for his
poetry, and was awarded the Pushkin Prize in
1901. Although generally apolitical, he initially
joined Maksim
GORKY
's group of revolutionary
and proletarian writers. The early, somewhat
detached lyrical prose of works like
Antonovskie
iabloki
(
Antonov Apples
) (1900) gave way to a
more somber, even gloomy set of works about
the Russian countryside. Typical of this vein are
Derevnia
(
The Village
) (1910), a portrayal of the
poverty-stricken life of the Russian peasant, and
Sukhodol
(
Dry Valley
) (1912), where he portrays
the life of a disintegrating manor house from the
viewpoint of one of its female servants. A well-
traveled man, he wrote his best-known work,
Gospodin iz San Franzisko
(
The Gentleman from San
Francisco
) in 1916. It is a biting satire on Western
bourgeois life, especially the power of money. He
emigrated in 1920, setting in the south of
France. His major postrevolutionary works treat
ageless themes such as love (
Mitya's Love,
1925)
and the past (
The Life of Arseniev,
1930) in the
context of the Russia he left behind. Although
Bunin never returned to Russia, he never left it
behind, arranging for the transfer of his papers
to Moscow shortly before his death. After his
death, his works were published in the Soviet
Union in large editions and he received posthu-
mous recognition as a great Russian writer.
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