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from slavery is not intended to exonerate serfdom; it is merely meant to shift attention from its imaginary to its real evils. It was unquestionably a dreadful institution, a disease whose scars Russia bears to this day. A survivor of Nazi concentration camps said of life there that it was not as bad as commonly believed and yet infinitely worse, by which he must have meant that the physical horrors meant less than the cumulative effect of daily dehumanization. Mutatis mutandis, and without drawing invidious comparisons between concentration camps and the Russian village under serfdom, we can say the same principle applies to the latter as well. Something fatal attends man's mastery over man, even when benevolently exercised, something which slowly poisons master and victim, and in the end disintegrates the society in which they live. We shall deal with the effects of serfdom on the landlords in the next chapter, and here concentrate on the influence it had on the peasant, especially on his attitude towards authority.
There exists broad agreement among contemporary observers that the worst feature of Russian serfdom was not the abuse of authority but its inherent arbitrariness, that is, the serf's permanent subjection to the unbridled will of other men. Robert Bremner, who in the passage cited above compared favourably the living standards of Russian peasants with those in Ireland and Scotland (pp. 151-2), goes on to say:
Let it not be supposed, however, that, because we admit the Russian peasant to be in many respects more comfortable than some of our own, we therefore consider his lot as,, on the whole, more enviable than that of the peasant in a free country like ours. The distance between them is wide -immeasurable; but it can be accounted for in one single word - the British peasant has rights; the Russian has none/12 In this respect the lot of the state peasant was not much different from that of a serf, at any rate until 1837 when he was placed in the charge of a special ministry (p. 70). Russian peasants did enjoy a great variety of customary rights. Although generally respected, they had no legally binding force which meant they could be violated with impunity. Prohibited from lodging complaints against landlords and indeed forbidden to appear in court, the peasant was completely defenceless vis-a-vis anyone in authority. Landlords, as we happen to know, made exceedingly rare use of their right to exile serfs to Siberia; but the mere fact that they could do so must have served as a very effective deterrent. This was only one of many manifestations of arbitrariness to which the serf was subjected. In the 1840s and 1850s, for example, anticipating emancipation, and hoping to reduce the number of peasants working in the fields so as to have fewer of them to share the land with, landlords quietly transferred to their manors to work as domestics over half a million serfs.
THE PEASANTRY
There was no recourse against such measures. Nor could anything be done to thwart well-meaning pomeshchiks who forced peasants to use unfamiliar farm machinery imported from abroad or to alter their routine of crop rotation. When the government of Nicholas 1, for the best of reasons, compelled some state peasants to set aside a part of their land for potatoes, they rebelled. From the peasant's viewpoint the master's motives were immaterial; good and bad intention alike appeared as an external will acting upon him. Unable to distinguish between the two he often repaid his would-be benefactors in a most cruel fashion.
Totally lacking in legally recognized personal rights, the peasant regarded all authority as by its very nature alien and hostile. He complied when confronted with superior strength, especially if it was applied decisively. But in his mind he never acknowledged the right of someone outside his village community to tell him what to do.
Rural violence was actually much less prevalent in imperial Russia than it is generally thought. Compared to most twentieth-century societies, the Russian countryside of the imperial age was an oasis of law and order. It is, of course, an easy thing to compute statistics of rural 'disturbances' and on this basis to argue a steady rise in violence. The trouble, however, lies with definitions. In imperial Russia any formal complaint against his peasants lodged by a landlord was classified by the authorities as a 'disturbance' (volnenie) whether it actually occurred or not, and without regard to the nature of the offence: refusal to obey an order, idleness, drunkenness, theft, arson, manslaughter and premeditated murder were indiscriminately lumped together. A catalogue of such occurrences resembles a police blotter and has about as much value in the computation of criminal statistics. As a matter of fact^the majority of the so-called peasant 'disturbances' involved not acts of violence but of ordinary insubordination (nepovinovenie).13 They performed the same function as do strikes in modern industrial societies and are equally unreliable as a gauge of social instability or political discontent.
Approximately once a century, Russian peasants went on a rampage, killing landlords and officials, burning estates and seizing properties. The first great jacquerie occurred in the 1670s under the leadership of Stepan (or Stenka) Razin, the second a century later (1773-5) under Emelian Pugachev. Both had their beginning on the periphery of the state, in land inhabited by Cossacks, and they spread like wildfire owing to the very weak administration in the provinces.There were no major peasant uprisings in nineteenth-century Russia, but two occurred in close succession in the twentieth, one in 1905, the second in 1917. A common quality of these major rebellions, as well as of the more localized ones, was the absence of political aims. Russian peasants almost never revolted against tsarist authority; indeed Pugachev claimed to
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have been the true tsar come to reclaim his throne from an usurper. Their hatred was directed against the agents of autocracy, those two classes which, under the dyarchic arrangement then in effect, exploited the country for their private benefit. From his intimate knowledge of the peasant, Leo Tolstoy foresaw that the muzhik would not support moves to subvert the autocratic system. 'The Russian revolution', he noted in his diary in 1865, 'will be directed not against the tsar and despotism, but against the ownership of land.'