I have never driven past this new city without going to see the locks here. The first person who conceived the idea of imitating nature in its positive actions and to create an artificial river in order to establish a better nexus connecting all the ends of the region deserves a monument for most distant posterity. When for natural and moral reasons current powers collapse, when their gilded fields become overgrown by brambles, and grass snakes, serpents, and toads hide in the ruins of the magnificent palaces of their proud rulers, then the curious traveler will find eloquent remains of their magnificence in commerce. The Romans built great roads, aqueducts whose durability amazes to this day and rightly so. But they had no concept of the interconnected waterways that currently exist in Europe. Our roads will never be the like those of the Romans. Our long winter and the hard frosts prevent it, but even without lining canals will take a long time to disappear.
More than a little delight was afforded me by the sight of the canal at Vyshny Volochok full of vessels loaded with grain and other merchandise being prepared to pass through the locks for their sailing onward to Petersburg. Here we could see the true abundance of the land and the surpluses of the landworker. Here, plain and visible in all its brilliance, was the powerful stimulus to human actions: the profit motive. But if at first glance my mind was pleased by the sight of prosperity, my rejoicing soon dissipated on the breaking down of my thoughts into parts. For I recalled that many landworkers in Russia do not work for themselves; and therefore in many regions of Russia the productivity of land demonstrates the oppressed lot of its inhabitants. My pleasure changed into indignation comparable to my feelings when in the summertime I walk on the pier at the customs station, gazing on the ships that transport to us America’s surpluses and her expensive products, like sugar, coffee, pigments, and other items in which the sweat, tears, and blood drenching them during their production have yet to dry out.
“Imagine,” my friend said to me once, “that the coffee poured into your cup, and the sugar dissolved in it, deprived someone just like you of rest, that they caused him to make exertions beyond his strength, caused his tears, groans, punishment, and abuse. Hard-hearted one, go on, dare to slake your throat.” The look of disapproval accompanying this speech shook me to my inner core. My hand began to tremble and the coffee spilled.
And you, O residents of Petersburg, who feed on the surpluses of the productive regions of our fatherland at magnificent feasts or at a friendly dinner, or on your own, when your hand picks up the first piece of bread designated for your satiety, stop and think. Might I not tell you the same thing that my friend told me about products of America? Might it not be through sweat, tears, and groaning that the fields on which it grew have been fattened? Blessed are you if the piece of bread you hunger after derives from grains originating in a field classified as state property; or at least in a field that pays quitrent to the landowner. But woe unto you if its dough is from grain collected in a granary belonging to a nobleman. Woe and despair resided there; it was branded with the curse of the Almighty who once in his wrath uttered: “Cursed is the ground in its needs.”74 Take care lest you be poisoned by the food you desire. The bitter tear of a pauper lies heavy on it. Cast it from your lips. Keep the fast, fasting can be true and useful.
A tale about a certain landowner will show that man forgets about the humanity of his fellow men due to his greed and that for an example of hard-heartedness we have no need to go to distant lands nor to search for wonders at the end of the world. They are being perpetrated in our realm before our eyes.
Mr. Someone, having not found in his government service what is commonly called happiness or not wishing to stoop to finding the like, left the capital, acquired a small estate, with, say, one hundred or two hundred souls, and decided to make his income in agriculture. He did not assign himself to the plow but intended in the most practical way conceivable to make all possible use of the natural vitality of his peasants and apply them to the cultivation of the land. He determined that the most reliable way to do this was to create out of his peasants instruments devoid of will and initiative; and he genuinely fashioned out of them in certain respects soldiers of a contemporary kind directed as a cohort—as a cohort racing headlong to war—who individually had no significance at all. To achieve his goal, he withdrew from them the small portion of plowland and meadows that noblemen normally give them for their essential subsistence in return for all the compulsory labors they require from their peasants. In a word, this landowner, Mr. Someone, forced all his peasants, their wives, and their children, to work all the days of the year for him. And lest they die of hunger he allocated them a fixed amount of bread known by the name of the monthly allocation.75 Those who did not have families did not receive the monthly allocation but, in the fashion of the Lacedaemonians, dined together in the manor house, for the maintenance of their digestion using cabbage soup without meat on meat days and on fast days bread and kvass. Reliable breakings of a fast used to take place probably during Easter week.76
For peasants maintained this way, clothing was produced that was proper and suited their situation. They made their own footwear for winter, that is baste shoes; foot wraps they received from their master while in the summer they went barefoot. Consequently, such prisoners had neither a cow nor horse nor ewe nor ram. They were deprived by their master not of permission to keep them but of the means to do so. Anyone who was a bit more prosperous, anyone who was moderate in their food consumption, kept some poultry, which sometimes the master would take for himself, paying whatever price he felt like.
Given this sort of arrangement, it is not surprising that tillage in Mr. Someone’s village was in a flourishing state. When everyone else had a poor harvest, his grain was four times more; when others had a good harvest his came to ten times or more. Within a short time, in addition to the two hundred souls he already possessed, he bought a further two hundred victims of his greed, and by treating them exactly as he had the first lot, he increased his property year by year, augmenting the number of people groaning in his fields. By now he counts them in the thousands and is famed as a land manager.
Barbarian, you are unworthy of the name of citizen! What good is it to the state to have several thousand more units of grain generated if those who produce it are treated on a par with the ox assigned to plow a difficult furrow? Or do we think that the welfare of citizens consists in the granaries being full of grain while stomachs are empty so that a single person rather than thousands blesses the government? The wealth of this bloodsucker does not belong to him. It has been accumulated through robbery and by law deserves severe punishment. There are, indeed, people who when gazing upon the opulent fields of this executioner make out of him an example of advancement in tillage. And you would like to be known as lenient bearers of the name of the guardians of general prosperity. Instead of encouraging coercion of this kind, which is what you consider the source of the state’s wealth, visit upon this villain of society a philanthropic vengeance. Destroy his agricultural equipment, burn his haycocks, barns, granaries, and scatter the ashes in the fields where his brutality took place, brand him as a common thief so that everyone who sees him will not only feel revulsion but shall avoid his approach in order not to be contaminated by his example.
