Life Under the Tsars

[Tsarfan]

I mean, please do let us all recall the many mass rebellions under the tsars. There was Ivan Bolotnikov, there was Stenka Razin, there was Conrad Bulavin, there was Pugachev, and these were all major rebellions that took place before the nineteenth century. While in the nineteenth century itself, according to Riasanovsky's History of Russia, there were between 550 and 1,467 peasant rebellions in the decades leading up to emancipation, depending on which historian you believe. 32 per cent of these uprisings took place in the years immediately preceding emancipation. As Riasonovsky remarks on p. 410, "Interestingly, it was the Third Department, the gendarmerie, that had stressed the danger of serfdom during the reign of Nicholas I. Besides rising in rebellion, serfs ran away from their masters, sometimes by the hundreds and even by the thousands. On occasion large military detachments had to be sent to intercept them. Pathetic mass flights of peasants, for example, would follow rumors that freedom could be obtained somewhere in the Caucasus, while crowds of serfs tried to join the army during the Crimean War, because they mistakenly believed that they would thereby gain their liberty."

All this puts paid to Alexandra Feodorovna's idea that Russians "long to feel the whip," and by the way, also stands in complete contradiction to Tsarfan's assertion that Russian peasants only ever revolted when their ownership of the land was at stake! Apparently, they did prize their own personal liberty after all!

While I thoroughly enjoy debating with you, Elisabeth, I'm never quite comfortable with winding up completely at loggerheads with your viewpoint, which is usually very well-informed.  So I've been digging a bit more into these peasant uprisings to try to discern why they impress you as as signs of longing for personal liberty and why they impress me as fuelled more by a desire for land and improvement in the material conditions of peasant life.

In going over the four major rebellions you mention, I found an interesting progression (or regression, depending on your viewpoint) in what the rebellions sought to achieve.  The earliest two, the Bolotnikov rebellion of 1606 and the Razin rebellion of 1670, were the most ambitious in terms of seeking more that just land and economic improvement.  Bolotnikov sought both the overturn of tsar Vasili Shuysky and the complete abolition of serfdom.  Razin went further, seeking the establishment of an independent Cossack state and the restoration of traditional tribal values of social equality.

But, beginning with the rebellions of the Petrine era, the purpose for uprising began to be more about changing the rulers for ones that would grant land and lighten the yoke of taxation, rather than attacking the notion and institutions of autocratic rule.  The Bulavin rebellion drew much of its energy from resentment at Peter's westernization policies, the tax burdens they imposed, and the government's encroachments on the salt fields the Cossacks jealously guarded.

By the time of the Pugachev rebellion, any discussion about freedom was about nothing more than land grants and changing one master (the landowners) for another (the tsar).  For example, Pugachev's first ukase in September 1773 read:

"Inasmuch as you, my friends, served former tsars with your very flesh and blood, and as your fathers and grandfathers did, so for the sake of your fatherland should you serve me, the great sovereign emperor Pyotr Fedorovich."

And in his last ukase of June 1774, Pugachev wrote:

"It is declared for all the people to know, by this personal ukase We bestow on all those who formerly were peasants and in subjugation to the landowners, along with Our monarchic and paternal compassion, to be dutiful slaves  subject directly to Our crown."  [emphasis added]

And the serfs were perfectly willing to accept the notion (and the vocabulary) of entering into a new slavery under Pugachev.  In a petition to Pugachev submitted by the serfs of a province in Perm, they used the words "slaves" repeatedly in describing their relationship to their new master.  One example of several in that petition:

"We praised God that our beautiful sun of old, after having hidden beneath the ground, now rises in the East and in its mercy wishes to warm us, Your humble and loyal slaves, with its grace, so we peasants with one accord bow our heads to the very ground."

Even allowing for the florid and stylized language used to address a ruler, these are not the words of petitioners who are fired to rebellion with a burning desire to acquire personal liberties in anything like the modern sense.  They wanted their plots of land and would take any tsar on virtually any terms who would give it to them.  (To be continued . . . )

[Tsarfan]

(Continued from prior post . . . )

As I consider all this, I think you are right that there were important strains in Russian peasant society of  longing for personal liberties and social equality.  But I think that, coming out of the rule of Peter the Great, tsarism had pretty much won the day.  By the end of his rule, the peasants were locked down even more tightly to the land in order to carry the tax burden of Peter's wars and westernization campaign; the Church had been permanently subordinated to the crown, and its role as a moral counterweight to autocracy was over; the stage was set for widening the rift between the newly-cosmopolitan nobility and the countryside; and the future tsars -- henceforth to be called emperors -- were to become less and less the "little fathers" of the Russian masses and more and more the lords of a major empire pursuing its new mission as a world power.

There would be future peasant rebellions . . . lots of them . . . but the demand would be for land grants and tax relief, not for personal freedom in a wider sense.  Where once the demand for personal freedom came with the roar of peasant rebellion, it was in the future to come first from the quiet scratchings of the intelligentsia's pens and then from the blast of terrorists' bombs.

What I see today in Russia's reaction to Putin is that long-ago abandonment of hope for real freedom and its replacement with a willingness to barter allegiance for a plot of land, a water-tight flat, or a social security check.  And it is a legacy bequethed to the people by the greatest of the tsars, not the most evil of the General Secretaries.

[Elisabeth]

(Continued from prior post . . . )

As I consider all this, I think you are right that there were important strains in Russian peasant society of  longing for personal liberties and social equality.  But I think that, coming out of the rule of Peter the Great, tsarism had pretty much won the day.  By the end of his rule, the peasants were locked down even more tightly to the land in order to carry the tax burden of Peter's wars and westernization campaign; the Church had been permanently subordinated to the crown, and its role as a moral counterweight to autocracy was over; the stage was set for widening the rift between the newly-cosmopolitan nobility and the countryside; and the future tsars -- henceforth to be called emperors -- were to become less and less the "little fathers" of the Russian masses and more and more the lords of a major empire pursuing its new mission as a world power.

There would be future peasant rebellions . . . lots of them . . . but the demand would be for land grants and tax relief, not for personal freedom in a wider sense.  Where once the demand for personal freedom came with the roar of peasant rebellion, it was in the future to come first from the quiet scratchings of the intelligentsia's pens and then from the blast of terrorists' bombs.

What I see today in Russia's reaction to Putin is that long-ago abandonment of hope for real freedom and its replacement with a willingness to barter allegiance for a plot of land, a water-tight flat, or a social security check.  And it is a legacy bequethed to the people by the greatest of the tsars, not the most evil of the General Secretaries.

I still disagree with you, Tsarfan. In your analysis of peasant revolts you've rather conveniently left out the rebellions of the nineteenth century, possibly for the precise reason that these revolts seem to have been much more connected to notions of personal liberty than previous ones. (But I would indeed be astonished if seventeenth-century Russian peasants had any notion whatsoever of personal liberty - it's arguable that most peasants in eastern Europe at this time could not have had such aspirations, it was simply a function of the time, or the "episteme" as Foucault would say. On the other hand, by the beginning of the nineteenth century such ideas of personal freedom had certainly filtered down to the Russian peasantry, even if in the crudest form.) For example, there were numerous peasant rebellions associated with Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early nineteenth century, because Russian peasants believed (with good cause, because Napoleon toyed with the idea) that the French emperor would free them from enserfment. Some historians even believe that Napoleon made a great mistake in not doing so. Of course, we'll never know the true answer to this question. But while I would grant you that the Russian peasantry's primary desire during the tsarist period (again, let me remind you, this period covers several centuries) was that of owning the land, a secondary consideration (which is not to be sneered or sneezed at) during the nineteenth and twentieth century, was that of gaining personal liberty.

I should also point out that there was a massive "flight" on the part of the peasantry during the entire time that serfdom was becoming institutionalized, that is, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And that those peasants who successfully fled enserfment to set up their own free landholdings in Siberia and the Caucasus came to be regarded, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as unusually independent-minded and free-spirited... to the extent that even under the last tsars these Russian peasants tended to take great pity on the prisoners exiled to Siberia by the tsarist government, even supplying them with food and water during their journey eastwards. This particular brand of passive resistance to the state of course died a quick death under the Soviets, when it was met with harsh reprisals.

[Tsarfan]

I still disagree with you, Tsarfan. In your analysis of peasant revolts you've rather conveniently left out the rebellions of the nineteenth century, possibly for the precise reason that these revolts seem to have been much more connected to notions of personal liberty than previous ones . . . .

For example, there were numerous peasant rebellions associated with Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early nineteenth century, because Russian peasants believed (with good cause, because Napoleon toyed with the idea) that the French emperor would free them from enserfment . . . .  But while I would grant you that the Russian peasantry's primary desire during the tsarist period (again, let me remind you, this period covers several centuries) was that of owning the land, a secondary consideration (which is not to be sneered or sneezed at) during the nineteenth and twentieth century, was that of gaining personal liberty.

Yes, and there were something on the order of 500 peasant rebellions during the reign of Nicholas I and outbreaks of peasant revolts later in the century.  But what I find more telling is that the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks were constantly frustrated in their efforts in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries to get the peasants enlisted to their cause in any meaningful way.  While the peasants clearly remained hungry for land after Alexander II released them from enserfment, they were otherwise very conservative and not much interested in the larger issue of breaking the yoke of autocracy.

Perhaps we're talking across a definitional divide here, Elisabeth.  If by "personal liberty" one means release from enserfment, then I agree that the peasants sought that consistently over time.  If by "personal liberty" one means a desire to think and act for oneself, to take responsibility for one's own welfare, to be freed from an autocratic government that admitted no right to any voice in policy decisions that affect one's life -- which is what I take the term to mean -- then I think the peasants were a no-show.  To the extent that desire existed in Russia, it rested primary with the intelligentsia.

I understand your point about the peasants' passive resistance to the tsars demonstrated by their sympathy for exiles.  But to me, the operative word in that phrase is not "resistance", but "passive."  Outside of India, I know of no people who have seized control of their fates by passive resistance.  And that worked mostly because the empire had become a moral embarassment to Britain, not offset by meaningful economic returns.  In Russia -- after the Stalin era in particular -- about all passive resistance to the government produced was very low manufacturing productivity rates of very shoddy consumer goods.  In fact, the whole soviet regime seemed to collapse more out of exhaustion and boredom with itself than due to an uprising by the people it had served so monstrously. 

And I think that is why Putin will be able to pull off his slow grab for dictatorial power.  Russian resistance to bad government has always been too passive . . . and it remains so today.

[Elisabeth]

Yes, and there were something on the order of 500 peasant rebellions during the reign of Nicholas I and outbreaks of peasant revolts later in the century.  But what I find more telling is that the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks were constantly frustrated in their efforts in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries to get the peasants enlisted to their cause in any meaningful way.  While the peasants clearly remained hungry for land after Alexander II released them from enserfment, they were otherwise very conservative and not much interested in the larger issue of breaking the yoke of autocracy.

I don't think you can overestimate the strength of the mistrust between the larger peasant population and the urban revolutionaries or radical intelligentsia. This was certainly evident in the 1870s, when Russian urban intellectual youth initiated the "going to the people" movement, and were met with (to my mind) very understandable hostility and misunderstanding on the part of the peasantry. A vast cultural divide separated Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries from the peasantry, not to mention the fact that the peasantry was far more immediately aware of the exact price one paid in rebelling against the tsarist authorities (as witnessed by the violent repressions of peasant rebellions for the last three hundred or more years). On the other hand, you are underestimating the popularity of the Socialist Revolutionaries among the peasantry at the turn of the twentieth century. As I recall, after the March Revolution they got the bulk of the peasantry's vote when it came to electing the Constituent Assembly that was supposed to draw up Russia's new constitution in January 1918 (but was instead forcibly disbanded by the Bolsheviks).

Perhaps we're talking across a definitional divide here, Elisabeth.  If by "personal liberty" one means release from enserfment, then I agree that the peasants sought that consistently over time.  If by "personal liberty" one means a desire to think and act for oneself, to take responsibility for one's own welfare, to be freed from an autocratic government that admitted no right to any voice in policy decisions that affect one's life -- which is what I take the term to mean -- then I think the peasants were a no-show.  To the extent that desire existed in Russia, it rested primary with the intelligentsia.

I understand your point about the peasants' passive resistance to the tsars demonstrated by their sympathy for exiles.  But to me, the operative word in that phrase is not "resistance", but "passive."  Outside of India, I know of no people who have seized control of their fates by passive resistance.  And that worked mostly because the empire had become a moral embarassment to Britain, not offset by meaningful economic returns.  In Russia -- after the Stalin era in particular -- about all passive resistance to the government produced was very low manufacturing productivity rates of very shoddy consumer goods.  In fact, the whole soviet regime seemed to collapse more out of exhaustion and boredom with itself than due to an uprising by the people it had served so monstrously. 

And I think that is why Putin will be able to pull off his slow grab for dictatorial power.  Russian resistance to bad government has always been too passive . . . and it remains so today.

I think to some extent we are arguing across a definitional divide. On the other hand, I'd like to see you hold up African Americans to such strict standards of "resistance" as you seem to do the Russian peasantry. (And BTW, you are forgetting Martin Luther King, Jr. in your summation of successful movements espousing passive resistance to evil - but I agree, this method of political protest only works in relatively democratized countries.) Perhaps I am wrong, but I can recall only one major revolt on the part of African American slaves in the nineteenth century, that of Nat Turner. But somehow no one ever hurls at African Americans the accusation that they were passive in the face of governmentally enforced oppression. Whereas the Russian peasantry revolted (very violently) time and time again against tsarist authorities from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries (and thereafter, even under the much more brutal repressive powers of the Soviets) and yet they're labelled "passive." It's a double standard, and one which I believe needs to be corrected!

[Tsarfan]

Perhaps I am wrong, but I can recall only one major revolt on the part of African American slaves in the nineteenth century, that of Nat Turner. But somehow no one ever hurls at African Americans the accusation that they were passive in the face of governmentally enforced oppression. Whereas the Russian peasantry revolted (very violently) time and time again against tsarist authorities from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries (and thereafter, even under the much more brutal repressive powers of the Soviets) and yet they're labelled "passive." It's a double standard, and one which I believe needs to be corrected!

In fact, there were over 250 known slave uprisings on North American soil.  Among the better-known ones are not only Nat Turner's rebellion, but those of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey.  And, even though it was not technically a U.S. rebellion, there was the famous Amistad mutiny.

While I do understand your point and think there is some validity to it, I think one also has to recognize some of the differences between the plight of an American slave and a Russian serf.  Serfs (and later peasants) were the largest single component of the Russian population, approximating 80% even in the late 19th century.  If a group of serfs or peasants struck out in rebellion, they often had time to assemble in large numbers before they encountered the armed forces of the police or the state.  Also, as was demonstrated in Pugachev's rebellion, they could often count on support from local clergy in spreading their message.  The landscape of rebellion was very different for a slave.  They did not constitute nearly as large a percentage of the population, even in plantation regions, as did serfs.  And any black slave who was seen off his owner's land by almost any white person -- not just a government official -- was in mortal danger.  And there were virtually no institutions in the deep south which would provide any support or even countenance any sympathy for a slave uprising.  Consequently, the logistical challenge of mounting a slave rebellion was significantly more daunting than launching a serf rebellion.

I think another element also came into play when looking at attempts at flight instead of rebellion.  Russian serfs, especially during Peter I's reign, succeeded by the thousands in escaping their serfdom and fleeing westward into eastern Europe, where many established a foothold and prospered.  The prospect of flight for an American slave was dim, indeed.  First, his black skin gave his status away immediately.  And, unless, he could make contact with the underground railroad in the later years of slavery, where would he go?  Until the mid-19th century, an escaped slave anywhere on North American soil was subject to being restored to his master upon demand.  Without a boat or an ability to swim across the oceans, there was no equivalent of eastern Europe to which he could trek.

I know you will take the comment about serf escapes during Peter's reign as proof that Russian serfs, in fact, were not passive in their acceptance of serfdom.  And you will be right up to a point.  Not all serfs were passive.  They revolted and they fled in untold numbers over the centuries.  But we finally have to judge history by outcomes.  And the outcome in Russia has been that a group that never constituted less than 80% of the population  has never succeeded in taking control of its political fate, despite having seen the cruelty of serfdom, the disadvantages of peasantry, and the horrors of the soviet state. 

[Elisabeth]

Tsarfan, I think my point was not that African American slaves were passive, but that none of their rebellions, no matter how valiant or praiseworthy or numerous, were ever even remotely threatening to the federal government of the United States of America. Whereas in tsarist Russia, from the time of Ivan Bolotnikov in the early seventeenth century onward, massive peasant rebellions were a constant threat to the imperial government, and later, in the decades immediately after the October Revolution, to the Soviet one as well (at least as far as Lenin and Stalin were concerned).

I agree that the situation of African American slaves was more dire than that of the Russian serfs. But that's precisely the point. Enserfment itself differed from slavery in that it meant the serf was only unfree insofar as he was tied to the land owned by someone else. So why wouldn't Russian serfs envision freedom as freedom to own the land themselves - thereby attaining personal freedom?

Of course their concept of personal freedom was different from that of American slaves - their experience of oppression was in and of itself very different.

Again, this idea that the Russian peasantry was historically passive is a myth - the Russian people might seem passive now, but IMO that's the result of almost a century of brutalization under the Soviets. The back of the Russian peasantry (i.e., the Russian people) was finally broken in the early 1930s with collectivization. As the great Russian poet Mandelshtam wrote of the Soviet era:

My age, my beast, who will be able to look into the pupils of your eyes and stick together the vertebrae of two centuries with his blood?
[....] Your spine has been smashed, my beautiful, pitiful age.
 

[Tsarfan]

Again, this idea that the Russian peasantry was historically passive is a myth - the Russian people might seem passive now, but IMO that's the result of almost a century of brutalization under the Soviets. The back of the Russian peasantry (i.e., the Russian people) was finally broken in the early 1930s with collectivization.

I certainly agree that the soviet era was brutally repressive.  But I think you are letting the tsars off too lightly for responding to virtually every attempt by the people to secure more freedom by new rounds of repression.  Peter I bound the people more tightly to the land as a result of their resistance to his westernization policies and their attempts to flee their servitude.  The rebeliions of Catherine's reign, triggered in part by her considered use of serfs to purchase noble cooperation with her policies and to reward her court favorites, were met with her abandoning her professed earlier aspirations to liberalize Russia.

Russia was by no means unique in having peasant (or even noble) uprisings throughout its history.  They occurred from England eastward over the centuries.  But Russia was unique (at least among western nations) in that none of them ever succeeded in nudging government policy onto a fundamentally different course for a sustained period of time.  When the successful revolution finally came, it was not at the hands of the peasants but due to the paralysis of an incompetent regime under a paralyzed ruler.

This thread started by discussing Pushkin's exile and the censorship under which he lived and worked.  It mentioned that in the early 20th century, the secret police were following English duchesses around, presumably lest they ignite a revolution by their mere presence on Russian soil.  On other threads we have discussed the police penetration of the Church's attempts at the turn of the 20th century to relieve the plight of urban workers.

Yes, the soviets attained heights of repression that would have left Peter I and his successors in awe and maybe even disgust.  But the Peters, and the Catherines, and the Alexanders, and the Nicholas's made their contributions.

[LisaDavidson]

Thank you, Tsarfan and Elizabeth, for providing us with a truly interesting exchange of views that also manages to be respectful to you both.

My hat's off to you, I really needed to read this today.

[Elisabeth]

Thank you, Lisa, for your kind remarks. It's always nice to know one's efforts are not going unappreciated. I do wish, however, that more people would join in this debate about the Russian peasantry. I'd like to hear other people's opinions, too.

I certainly agree that the soviet era was brutally repressive.  But I think you are letting the tsars off too lightly for responding to virtually every attempt by the people to secure more freedom by new rounds of repression.  Peter I bound the people more tightly to the land as a result of their resistance to his westernization policies and their attempts to flee their servitude.  The rebeliions of Catherine's reign, triggered in part by her considered use of serfs to purchase noble cooperation with her policies and to reward her court favorites, were met with her abandoning her professed earlier aspirations to liberalize Russia.

Russia was by no means unique in having peasant (or even noble) uprisings throughout its history.  They occurred from England eastward over the centuries.  But Russia was unique (at least among western nations) in that none of them ever succeeded in nudging government policy onto a fundamentally different course for a sustained period of time.  When the successful revolution finally came, it was not at the hands of the peasants but due to the paralysis of an incompetent regime under a paralyzed ruler.

This thread started by discussing Pushkin's exile and the censorship under which he lived and worked.  It mentioned that in the early 20th century, the secret police were following English duchesses around, presumably lest they ignite a revolution by their mere presence on Russian soil.  On other threads we have discussed the police penetration of the Church's attempts at the turn of the 20th century to relieve the plight of urban workers.

Yes, the soviets attained heights of repression that would have left Peter I and his successors in awe and maybe even disgust.  But the Peters, and the Catherines, and the Alexanders, and the Nicholas's made their contributions.

Where exactly did I say the tsars did not make these contributions? Tsarfan, excuse me for saying so, but you're putting words into my mouth here. I specifically drew attention to the fact that while serfdom was becoming institutionalized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasant flight (and major rebellions) were the result. How is this letting the tsars off the hook?

My point was that after collectivization under Stalin, this glorious or inglorious (depending on your point of view) history of peasant revolts in Russia suddenly and abruptly ceased. Forever. Why do you think that was? The answer seems to me fairly obvious. Whereas the tsars had never aimed to destroy the peasantry, merely to curb it, and keep it harnessed in serfdom or a somewhat lesser degree of servitude, Stalin aimed to break the back of the peasantry once and for all. And he did this by destroying the better class of peasants, those who had shown the most intelligence and entrepeneurial skill in benefiting from Stolypin's reforms of the early twentieth century. But he went even further than this. He also targeted any peasant who was not literally impoverished. That meant that even "middle" peasants, who by Western standards would have been considered quite poor, also found themselves on trains headed for Siberia.

I think your standards for being active as opposed to passive are too high. By your standards, anyone who makes a valiant attempt to overturn the status quo, but nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, fails, is by definition "passive." You also claim that the Russian peasantry did not influence imperial policy. But indeed they did do so, for the continued unrest amongst the peasantry was the primary reason that Alexander II abolished serfdom. Already under Nicholas I, the imperial government had become mightily concerned by the number of peasant rebellions taking place in the countryside. Even Nicholas, the so-called Gendarme of Europe, realized that serfdom was a doomed institution, that it had to be ended - he just didn't know how to go about it without losing the allegiance of the nobility. (And in fact the Russian nobility never recovered economically from the abolition of serfdom. Thereafter they were a class in decline.)

It's the Russian elites who have failed the mass of the people throughout Russian history, time and time again. Not intentionally, of course. But I blame them as much as the Russian peasantry for the ultimate triumph of Lenin and his crew.
 

[Tsarfan]

It's the Russian elites who have failed the mass of the people throughout Russian history, time and time again. Not intentionally, of course. But I blame them as much as the Russian peasantry for the ultimate triumph of Lenin and his crew. 

In this, we are in complete accord.

Where exactly did I say the tsars did not make these contributions?

Perhaps I read too much into your remark that, "the Russian people might seem passive now, but IMO that's the result of almost a century of brutalization under the Soviets."  Besides, Elisabeth, you know how informative and entertaining I find it to debate you.  We have to avoid getting into too much agreement too fast.

I think your standards for being active as opposed to passive are too high. By your standards, anyone who makes a valiant attempt to overturn the status quo, but nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, fails, is by definition "passive." You also claim that the Russian peasantry did not influence imperial policy. But indeed they did do so, for the continued unrest amongst the peasantry was the primary reason that Alexander II abolished serfdom. Already under Nicholas I, the imperial government had become mightily concerned by the number of peasant rebellions taking place in the countryside. Even Nicholas, the so-called Gendarme of Europe, realized that serfdom was a doomed institution, that it had to be ended - he just didn't know how to go about it without losing the allegiance of the nobility. (And in fact the Russian nobility never recovered economically from the abolition of serfdom. Thereafter they were a class in decline.)

We have let this argument become too focused on the peasants and their fortitude in rebellion.  I really began it with my observations that the tsars maintained an unrelenting campaign to uphold absolutist rule, using harsher methods over a more sustained period, than their western counterparts.  And I argued that  induced more passivity into the Russian political landscape than was to be found further westward.  And I still think it did . . . and that the artifacts of it are still redounding to Putin's benefit today.

Perhaps what this comes down to is that the Russian peasantry was not as totally passive as I have seemed to argue, partly from the hyperbole that comes with advancing an argument on a contentious point.  What it really comes down to is that the thing that made the real difference was the more determined resistance of the Russian monarchy to any  inroads on its prerogative.  I still don't give the peasants a pass on this.  They were too large a component of the population to be held completely unaccountable for what their governments have done to them.  But perhaps I have assigned too much blame to them.

My point was that after collectivization under Stalin, this glorious or inglorious (depending on your point of view) history of peasant revolts in Russia suddenly and abruptly ceased. Forever. Why do you think that was? The answer seems to me fairly obvious. Whereas the tsars had never aimed to destroy the peasantry, merely to curb it, and keep it harnessed in serfdom or a somewhat lesser degree of servitude, Stalin aimed to break the back of the peasantry once and for all. And he did this by destroying the better class of peasants, those who had shown the most intelligence and entrepeneurial skill in benefiting from Stolypin's reforms of the early twentieth century. But he went even further than this. He also targeted any peasant who was not literally impoverished. That meant that even "middle" peasants, who by Western standards would have been considered quite poor, also found themselves on trains headed for Siberia.

And this revolves around that difference you have often argued between an autocratic state and a totalitarian one.  The tsars had a different purpose in their handling of peasant issues than did Stalin:  to maintain themselves and their system in unfettered power, but not to overhaul the entire political, social, economic, and religious structure of the state.

But it still begs the question of how did Stalin get by with it.  I cannot imagine the American government having maintained slavery for as long as it did if 80% or more of the population had been slaves.  And, getting closer to Stalin, I cannot imagine Hitler having pulled off the Holocaust if 80% of the German population had been Jews.  Hitler is an interesting case regarding this point.  The state he created was as totalitarian in its ideology and its aspirations as Lenin's and Stalin's.  Yet Hitler could not hope to pull it off without forging accords with the military, the Junkers, and the industrialists.  To me, the differences between their methods and their successes lay not in differences between the two men.  The differences lay in the political heritages against which they each operated. 

[RichC]

I agree that the situation of African American slaves was more dire than that of the Russian serfs. But that's precisely the point. Enserfment itself differed from slavery in that it meant the serf was only unfree insofar as he was tied to the land owned by someone else. So why wouldn't Russian serfs envision freedom as freedom to own the land themselves - thereby attaining personal freedom?

Not true.  In practice Russian serfdom amounted to slavery.  By tradition, for example, the Lord had the right to take the virginity of all of his young female serfs, typically on her wedding night -- while the groom waited outside.  Members of peasant families were broken up at "slave" auctions.

I would advise anyone who is interested in Russian Serfdom to read "Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the 9th to the 19th Century" by Jerome Blum.  Published in 1961, by Princeton University Press.

Of course their concept of personal freedom was different from that of American slaves - their experience of oppression was in and of itself very different.

Again, this idea that the Russian peasantry was historically passive is a myth - the Russian people might seem passive now, but IMO that's the result of almost a century of brutalization under the Soviets. The back of the Russian peasantry (i.e., the Russian people) was finally broken in the early 1930s with collectivization.

There's actually a school of thought that equates collectivization with the reestablishment of serfdom in Russia.   The Bosheviks were going back to tried and true models perfected under the Tsars.

[RichC]

One also needs to keep in mind that slavery DID exist in Russia up to the 18th century.  I'm not talking about serfdom here, but outright slavery.  The interesting thing about this is that Russians did something that few other societies have ever done (to my knowledge).  They enslaved their own people.

It's no accident, in my view, that the world's first totalitarian state took root in Russia.

[Elisabeth]

Tsarfan and I are more or less in accord, as much as I hate to draw an end to this debate. It's been so entertaining!

RichC, serfdom was indeed differientiated from slavery under tsardom - hence you had the separate legal categories of slave and serf before the eighteenth century. Nor do I agree that the Russians were alone in enslaving their own people. The Greeks and Romans and even myriad peoples of Africa did the same, for millennia. In Russia, moreover, it's arguable that slavery at least originated as much out of philanthropic motives as the desire to pin down mobile labor. I know this is a controversial theory (although I believe it is not that controversial), but it seems to me logical that if there was a surplus of labor, as there seems to have been in early medieval Russia, that noble households would take on the responsibility of maintaining an unnecessary labor force for the sole purpose of staving off greater social problems. You could see this same motivation even behind many of the wealthier noble households in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - Westerners often commented about how in Russia there were always six servants sitting around on the off chance of being available to open a door, whereas one person could have done the job just as well or better. Arguably the same impulse - toward full employment - was operative in the Soviet period, when it took at least three people to handle the simplest buying and selling  transactions in a shop (one at the display case to take the order, another one to take the payment for it, and yet a third to give out the receipt). As someone who experienced the full Soviet shopping experience firsthand, I can say that the amount of frustration involved for the consumer (three separate queues!) was no doubt compensated for by the fact that three people were employed where one would have been more than adequate!

[Terence]

One also needs to keep in mind that slavery DID exist in Russia up to the 18th century.  I'm not talking about serfdom here, but outright slavery.  The interesting thing about this is that Russians did something that few other societies have ever done (to my knowledge).  They enslaved their own people.

It's no accident, in my view, that the world's first totalitarian state took root in Russia.

Rich's comment intrigued me.  Currently the USA is often castigated for it's history of slavery, yet I know this wasn't an American invention.

When you say the Russians enslaved their own Rich, didn't some Africian cultures also do the same?  And I'm completely at a loss for details, is the idea of slavery foreign to Asian cultures?  I suspect it wasn't, but I'm not sure of the history.

T