To begin with, it must be stressed that a serf was not a slave and a pomestie was not a plantation. The mistake of confusing Russian serf-
* Because of the relative profitability of farming in the south it should come as no surprise that this area had a greater proportion of large farms than the north. In 1859, m f ur typical northern provinces (Vladimir, Tver, Iaroslavl and Kostroma) only 2a per cent of the serfs lived on properties of landlords who owned over a thousand serfs. In the black earth region (Voronezh, Kursk, Saratov and Kharkov) the corresponding figure was 37 per cent.
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dom with slavery is at least two centuries old. While studying at the University of Leipzig in the 1770s, an impressionable young Russian gentleman, Alexander Radishchev, read Abbe Raynal's Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Commerce of the Europeans in the Indies. In the Eleventh Book of this work there is a harrowing description of slavery in the Caribbean which Radishchev connected with what he had seen in his native land. The allusions to serfdom in his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) were among the first in which the analogy between serfdom and slavery was implicitly drawn by stressing those features (e.g. absence of marriage rights) which indeed were common to both. The abolitionist literature of the following decades, written by authors raised in the spirit of western culture, turned the analogy into a commonplace; and from there it entered the mainstream of Russian and western thought. But even when serfdom was in full bloom, the facile identification was rejected by keener observers. Having read Radish-chev's book, Pushkin wrote a parody called Journey from Moscow to St Petersburg in which the following passage occurs:
Fonvizin, who [late in the eighteenth century] travelled in France, writes that in all conscience the condition of the Russian peasant seems to him more fortunate than that of the French farmer. I believe this to be true... Read the complaints of English factory workers; your hair will stand on end. How much repulsive oppression, incomprehensible sufferings! What cold barbarism on the one hand, and what appalling poverty on the other. You will think that we are speaking of the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, of Jews working under Egyptian lashes. Not at alclass="underline" we are talking about the textiles of Mr Smith or the needles of Mr Jackson. And note that all this are not abuses, not crimes, but occurrences which take place within the strict limits of legality. It seems there is no creature in the world more unfortunate than the English worker... In Russia, there is nothing like it. Obligations are altogether not very onerous. The soul tax is paid by the mir; the corvee is set by law; the obrok is not ruinous (except in the neighbourhood of Moscow and St Petersburg, where the diversity of industry intensifies and stimulates the greed of owners). The landlord, having set the obrok, leaves it up to the peasant to get it whenever and by whatever means he chooses. The peasant engages in whatever enterprises he can think of and sometimes travels two thousand kilometres to earn money... Violations are everywhere numerous; crimes are dreadful everywhere. Take a look at the Russian peasant: is there a trace of slavish degradation in his behaviour and speech? Nothing need be said of his boldness and cleverness. His entrepreneurship is well known. His agility and dexterity are amazing. A traveller journeys from one end of Russia to the other, ignorant of a single word of Russian, and he is everywhere understood, everyone fulfils his requests and enters into agreements with him. You will never find among the Russian people that which the French call un badaut [an idler or loafer]: you
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will never see a Russian peasant show either crude amazement or ignorant contempt for what is foreign. In Russia there is not one man who does not have his own living quarters. A poor man who goes into the world leaves his izba. This does not exist in other countries. Everywhere in Europe to own a cow is a sign of luxury; in Russia not to have one is a sign of dreadful poverty.7 Even Pushkin's magisterial authority is no substitute for statistical evidence. But his judgement merits more than casual attention because he happened to have known the Russian village from firsthand experience and to have been endowed, in addition, with a very commonsensical outlook.
As Pushkin notes, unlike the slave of north or Central America, the Russian serf lived in his own house, not in slave quarters. He worked in the fields under the supervision of his father or elder brother, rarely under that of a hired steward. On many Russian estates, the land of the proprietor, cut into narrow strips, was intermingled with that of the peasants, creating a situation quite unlike that on a typical plantation. And most important of all, the product of the serf's labour was his own. Although, legally speaking, the serf had no right to hold property, in fact he did so throughout the existence of serfdom - a rare instance where the disregard for law prevalent in Russia benefited the poor.
The relationship of the landlord to the serf also differed from that of master to slave. The pomeshchik owed his authority over the serf in the first instance to his responsibilities as the state's fiscal and recruiting agent. In these capacities he could wield a great deal of arbitrary power, and in the reign of Catherine n his mastery over the serf indeed approximated to that of a slave owner. Still, he never had title to the serf; he owned only the land to which the serf was attached. In the Emancipation settlement, landlords received no compensation for their peasants. The law strictly forbade traffic in serfs. Some landlords did so anyway in defiance of the law, but basically the Russian serf had the assurance that if he so chose he could live out his days in his izba and in the midst of his family. The recruitment obligation introduced by Peter i was for the peasants such a calamity precisely because it violated this entrenched tradition, tearing away year after year thousands of young men from their families. The peasants treated induction as a sentence of death. In time, it became possible to provide surrogates or to buy oneself exemption from military service, but this solution was available only to a few.
As previously noted, nearly half of the serfs in the empire - roughly, a quarter in the south, and three-quarters in the north - were tenants on rent. These peasants were free to come and go, and to engage in any occupation they chose. Their lives were free of landlord interference. For them, serfdom meant essentially the payment of a tax, either fixed or adjusted to income, to dvoriane who happened to own the land to which they were ascribed. Whatever the morality of such a tax, it was not an institution related to slavery; rather, it was a 'feudal' relic.