In Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, the central character, Chichikov, is a conman who buys up dead serfs whose names still appear on the census and then makes a fortune by mortgaging them with the state bank.
‘So tell me, madam1,’ said Chichikov, ‘have many of your peasants died? … You could always let me have them, you know.’ ‘Let you have what?’ said the old woman. ‘The dead souls,’ said Chichikov. ‘I might even buy them from you.’ ‘But what do you want them for?’ asked the old lady. ‘I’ve never sold dead peasants before … You’re not cheating me are you? Perhaps other merchants will come and offer me a better price …’ ‘The woman’s a blockhead,’ Chichikov thought to himself. ‘Look here, madam,’ he said. ‘What do you think they can be worth? They’re nothing but bones and dust … now tell me yourself: what use are they?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps they could be used for something on the farm … you know, in an emergency …’
Gogol’s prose is deceptively simple: the more you read, the more you discover its strange, disconcerting density. Dead Souls is not simply a social critique – Gogol veers between his unique brand of absurdist humour and a strange, mystical crusade to regenerate the Russian nation. But its subject matter – the buying and selling of human beings, even after their death, the callousness and incompetence of the tsarist bureaucracy – is a sharp exposé of the practice of serfdom.
Dead Souls was completed in 1852, when the abolition of slavery was under serious discussion both in Russia and the USA. Serfdom had been such a key pillar of the Russian economy, providing the nation’s supply of bonded labour and recruits for the army, and underpinning the whole of its social structure, that previous tsars had baulked at the thought of tampering with it.
As early as Kievan times, when Oleg’s trading boats would transport captives down the Dnieper to be bartered in Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, slaves were a valuable commodity. Historians assume that these were prisoners seized by raiding parties and sold into a lifetime of servitude. But in later years, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there is evidence of free peasants forced by the burden of their debts to enter into bonded service. By the fifteenth century, the rules governing the acquisition of slaves had been codified in law. The Russkaya Pravda, the first collection of legal documents in Russian history, declares that ‘there be three types of slave’:
One may buy a slave2 before witnesses and pay a judge to register it. If a man do marry a female slave without her master’s approval, then shall he also become a slave. If a man do agree to take on the master’s tasks, then shall he be his slave. And for a debt of grain that is not worked off in time or paid in full, one will become a slave.
In practice, many peasants agreed to enter slavery voluntarily. A uniquely Russian institution known as krugovaya poruka (joint responsibility) had made local communities collectively liable for the payment of taxes, the enforcement of public discipline and the provision of conscripts to the army. In times of crop failure or economic hardship, such responsibilities were difficult to meet, and often the only solution was for whole villages to agree to become the property of powerful landholders.
In the mid sixteenth century, slaves began to be reclassified as serfs, attached to their master’s estate but now guaranteed certain rights of tenancy, including the transmission of the land to their sons. Some paid dues to the landholder for the use of the land (known as obrok) while others provided service labour (barshchina). In many ways, serfdom was beneficial to all concerned; the landholder gained a steady labour force and the peasants were afforded security and protection. Most masters were bright enough to realise it was in their interest not to ill-treat their serfs, and as a result the system spread rapidly. But serfdom cemented a collectivist mentality that would dominate Russia for centuries. The inherited willingness to pull together in the face of shared problems helped the nation expand into an empire and defend itself against its enemies. But it also hindered the development of private property, political freedoms and the law-governed institutions that Western Europe was slowly beginning to develop.
Early on, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, peasant families ran their own communities, engaged in a limited amount of private work for their own benefit and – by common custom – had the right, once a year, to leave their master during the week before St George’s Day in November. As long as the harvest had been completed and all their debts paid off, they could simply wave goodbye and take their services elsewhere. But the state had come to depend on the tax revenues that the serfs generated and their movement from one place to another made collection difficult. So in the 1590s Tsar Boris Godunov suspended the right of transfer and within a few decades the peasants were bound irrevocably to the land.
Over the next 200 years, their rights were progressively eroded until serfs began to be bought and sold as personal chattels. In the reign of Peter I (1682–1725) the peasants formally became the property of the landowner, tied to their master rather than to the land, and suffering at his whim. Their remaining civil rights were removed and their condition became more akin to the plight of the Negroes in the United States than to the relatively benign service of earlier years.
In numerical terms, serfdom reached its peak in the late eighteenth century under the supposedly liberal Catherine II. Wealth was commonly expressed as the number of ‘souls’ a nobleman owned. Both Peter the Great and Catherine adopted the practice of rewarding state service by the gift of human beings – a thousand serfs here, another 10,000 there. The figures involved were stupendous3. By 1796, the census showed that 17 million people out of a population of 36 million were in bonded service. A landowner had the right to beat his serfs and to send them to convict labour in Siberia if they failed to obey his commands.
The more the peasants were regarded as property, objects rather than human beings, the more they suffered at the hands of their masters, and the worse the stories of barbarity grew. Just outside the town of Troitsk, 20 miles south of Moscow, I went looking for the former estate of Darya Saltykova, a wealthy eighteenth-century aristocrat. It took me some time to find it because none of the locals seemed willing to help; most just shook their head and walked away. I was eventually given directions for the hamlet of Krasnaya Pakhra. As I approached, I spotted a blue-domed church on the top of a hill and next to it a neoclassical manor house covered in scaffolding that was clearly being renovated (‘for an oligarch’, the workmen whispered). The setting was idyllic4, but the place had a gruesome history. Darya Saltykova had taken possession of the manor in 1755 (the church was her private chapel) and had spent the next seven years personally torturing and murdering over a hundred of her serfs. Like many landowners of the time, she had a private jail on her estate and in her case it was equipped with torture chambers, where she poured boiling liquids over her prisoners, tied them to burning irons or immersed them in freezing water.
It is clear even today that this was the mansion of a very grand family, and Saltykova had connections in high places. So when the peasants tried to report her crimes, they found themselves put on trial for slander. But two brave serfs managed to smuggle a written complaint directly to the empress, Catherine the Great. It is a sad, pathetic document. One of the men says he was made to watch as Saltykova first accused his wife of failing to wash a floor properly and then systematically beat her to death with clubs and whips. He writes that Saltykova told him: ‘If you report this, you will gain nothing except that you yourself will be flogged to death.’ The empress read the men’s denunciation and Saltykova was put on trial. She was sentenced to an hour in the stocks and then confined to a nunnery. A light sentence, but any punishment of a landowner was quite exceptional.
Serfdom by the nineteenth century had developed into the worst form of slavery. But hundreds of thousands of small landowners risked losing everything if serfdom were abolished, and they stubbornly resisted reform. Despairing of justice, many serfs ran away to Siberia or the wild territories of the south, where they joined rebellious Cossacks in the great peasant revolts (see here).
Like Negroes in the southern United States, serfs had no legal rights, no means of redress and no escape; they and their descendants were slaves in perpetuity. But unlike in the United States, where the rest of society enjoyed freedom and democracy, serfdom in Russia was the ultimate reflection of the despotism and lack of legality that pervaded the whole of Russian society.
Russia’s conscience once again resided in its writers, artists and poets. In the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I was shown the magnificent peasant paintings of Ilya Repin. Peasant scenes had been a staple of Russian art down the centuries, but Repin brought to the genre an emotive and obliquely propagandist power. The faces of the toiling labourers in his Barge Haulers of the Volga (1870–3) are charged with human dignity in the depths of pain. His Religious Procession in Kursk (1880–3) is a masterpiece of conflicting expressions: tsarist soldiers on horseback whip the crowds of peasants as priests in gilded robes avert their gaze. The effect is intentionally shocking, and it brought Repin into conflict with the censor.
Much of Russia’s literature in the nineteenth century reads like a despairing attempt to expiate the intelligentsia’s guilt over the horrors of serfdom. Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin agonise over it, and, in A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), Turgenev pays tribute to the nobility of the serfs while hinting at the moral vacuity of the aristocracy. Tolstoy, in the autobiographical character of Lyovin from Anna Karenina (1873–7), and in novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), holds up the Russian peasant as the fount of humanity and wisdom. When, towards the end of his life, Tolstoy was sent a recording device by Thomas Edison, he chose to record his polemic tract ‘I Cannot Remain Silent’ (1908), which includes a paean of praise to the Russian peasant. His recorded words evoke the sense of shame that had hung over the nation for much of the nineteenth century:
Today I read in the newspaper5 that we have executed by hanging 20 peasants in the town of Kherson – 20 of the very people by whose labour we all live, the peasants whom we are guilty of degrading with all the forces of society, with the vodka we pour down their throats, the terrible conditions and laws under which we make them live, the military conscription and the false beliefs we impose on them and use to deceive them. These were 20 of the very people whose goodness, simplicity and hard labour are the sole foundation and guarantee of our Russian way of life … the way we treat them seems so awful to me that I cannot remain silent … I for one cannot agree to go on living in the unspeakable society that does these things.
The intelligentsia idealised the peasants; but few of them had any first-hand experience of peasant life. Tolstoy, Turgenev, even Nekrasov, all came from the landed gentry. For them and for the social reformers who followed their lead, the peasants remained an intellectual cause to be fought for, rather than real people to be consulted and understood. The Europeanised upper classes and the illiterate masses were two separate nations living in a single country. The yawning gap between intellectuals and peasants would result in a fiasco of mutual misunderstanding when the revolutionaries tried to incite the masses later in the century. But before then an epochal change was brewing: the death of the tyrannical Nicholas I in 1855 had brought a new man to the throne, determined to do something radical about the crying iniquity of serfdom.
Alexander II had come to power with Russia in turmoil. The Crimean War had brought the country to its knees and Alexander’s first task was to conclude the humiliating Treaty of Paris, the peace settlement that would put an end to the fighting in 1856. He seems to have decided very early in his reign that there would have to be changes in the way Russia was run. Alexander reformed the army and introduced universal conscription, but he shied away from the expansionist belligerence of his predecessors. He began work on a new legal code and granted greater powers of self-government to rural and municipal authorities. But his greatest reform came on 3 March 1861. On the sixth anniversary of his accession, Alexander II issued the ‘Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs’. It brought freedom to 23 million Russians who for centuries had been little more than slaves.
By the Grace of God6, We, Alexander II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, announce to our faithful subjects: We have become convinced that the task of improving the condition of the serfs is a sacred mission that Divine Providence has called upon us to fulfil … On the basis of these new arrangements, the serfs will receive in time the full rights of free rural inhabitants. The nobles, while retaining their property rights on the lands belonging to them, will grant the peasants perpetual use of the land in return for a specified obligation; and, to assure their livelihood as well as to allow the fulfilment of their obligations to the government, will sign over to them a portion of arable land fixed by the said arrangements, as well as other property.
The liberation of the peasants was the biggest shake-up in Russian society since the time of Peter the Great. It affected virtually every member of the population, placed the whole economic and social structure on a new footing, and created shock waves that would rumble through the nation for decades.
The reform was long overdue. Serfdom had been abolished nearly everywhere in Europe, and in the United States, where abolition proposals had split the Union, civil war would break out in the following month. In Russia, peasant unrest had been growing since the end of the Napoleonic invasion, turning to violent uprisings during and after the recent military disaster of the Crimean War. The serfs, who’d fought bravely in both campaigns, expected their ‘Little Father’, the tsar, to reward them by giving them the land, which they had regarded since time immemorial as the collective property of the Russian people.
But the majority of landowners were opposed to reform, and Alexander had to force it through. It was, he told the aristocracy, ‘better to liberate the peasants from above7 … rather than wait till they win their freedom by uprisings from below’. The manifesto is full of pleas for restraint that betray the very real fear of conflict and possibly violence.
We count on the nobles to reach8 a friendly understanding with the peasants and to reach agreements on the extent of the land allotment and the obligations stemming from it … Russia will not forget that the nobility, motivated by its respect for the dignity of man and its Christian love of its neighbour, has voluntarily renounced serfdom, and has laid the foundation of a new economic future for the peasants … Until that time, peasants and domestics must be obedient towards their nobles, and scrupulously fulfil their former obligations … Aware of the unavoidable difficulties of this reform, We place Our confidence above all in the graciousness of Divine Providence, which watches over Russia … and We rely upon the common sense of Our people …
At first, the peasants gave the emancipation decree a gleeful welcome, as the future anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin describes in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899):
I was still in bed9, when my servant, Ivanov, dashed in with the tea tray, shouting, ‘Prince, freedom! The manifesto is posted on the walls … People are reading it out aloud so the others can understand it …’ In a couple of minutes I was dressed, and out. A comrade was coming in with a copy of the manifesto. ‘It was read out at early mass in St Isaac’s Cathedral,’ he said. ‘There were … peasants there and they all understood what it meant. When I came out of church, two of them were standing in the gateway and they said to me with a mocking grin. ‘Well, sir? Are you going now?’ And he mimicked how they had ushered him out. Years of expectation were in that gesture of sending away the master …
Kropotkin was an opponent of the tsarist regime, but even he was caught up in the mood of rejoicing:
We ran, rather than marched10 back … The same enthusiasm was in the streets. Crowds of peasants and educated men stood in front of the palace, shouting hurrahs, and the tsar could not appear without being followed by demonstrative crowds running after his carriage … Oh, Alexander, why did you not die on that day? Your name would have been transmitted in history as that of a hero!
But when the peasants learned what was in the fine print of the emancipation – and there were nearly 400 pages of it – the mood soured. In a bid to appease the nobles, Alexander had fatally fudged the whole reform.
In the shadow of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, I found evidence of how Alexander’s flirtation with reform would eventually be rewarded. A new and rather grandiose statue, 30 feet high and surrounded by bronze lions, fountains and towering white colonnades, had been erected by public subscription, proclaiming in foot-high letters: ‘To Alexander, the Tsar Liberator’. Lower down on the plinth were the words: ‘Freed millions of serfs from bondage, introduced independent local councils and regional self-government, ended the war in the Caucasus’. Alexander also expanded education, introduced a more impartial court system and eased censorship; Russia, ironically, was the first country to translate and publish Marx’s Das Kapital (1872). His reforms were a real step towards the creation of civil society and a law-governed state.
But that, sadly, is only half the story. The liberation of the serfs in 1861 failed to satisfy the peasants’ hopes because it set a two-year transition period before the measures took effect and, even worse, it didn’t give them the land. Instead, it specified that peasants’ holdings must be bought from the aristocracy at a price set by the government. Since few serfs had the money, the state offered them an 80 per cent loan, but they were locked into repaying it – with annual interest of 6 per cent – for a period of 49 years.fn1 It meant the peasants were forced to carry on working for their old masters, paying out more than they had done in the past and often with less land to show for it. Soon the government was sending police and troops to enforce their loan repayments, causing clashes and resentment.
Emancipation disappointed and angered nearly everyone. At the bottom of the inscription on Alexander’s statue, I read the sorry punchline: ‘Perished,’ it says, ‘on the first of March 1881 … as the result of a terrorist act’.
That ‘terrorist act’ was carried out in St Petersburg. I found the spot, by the side of the former Catherine Canal leading from the Winter Palace to the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. It was on the route the tsar habitually took every Sunday morning and at a certain point on the embankment by the Pevchesky Bridge the roadway becomes particularly narrow, bounded by iron railings and the canal. The royal carriage, guarded by a detachment of Cossacks, was forced to slow down and edge its way through the milling crowds.
Among them was Nikolai Rysakov, a member of the radical revolutionary organisation, Narodnaya Volya (‘The People’s Will’). He threw a bomb at the royal procession, but in the excitement of the moment, or jostled by the crowd, his aim failed him and the bomb fell short of the tsar’s carriage, exploding among the Cossacks and knocking Rysakov into a fence. Alexander was unharmed. Against his bodyguards’ advice, he insisted on getting out of his carriage to check on the condition of the injured men. But as he did so, another terrorist, Ignaty Grinevitsky, threw a second bomb. Grinevitsky was standing so close that he was killed instantly by the blast and the tsar was sent flying. The chief of police ran to his aid:
I was deafened by the blast11, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Through the smoke and the snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s voice crying weakly, ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and ran to the Tsar. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking he was merely wounded, I tried to lift him but I saw his legs were shattered and the blood was pouring out of them. Twenty people lay wounded on the ground. Some were crawling or struggling to throw off bodies that had fallen on them. In the crimson snow I saw bits of clothing, epaulettes, sabres and bloody chunks of human flesh.
Why did the man who brought emancipation, peace and the possibility of democracy to Russia end up with his legs blown off and his face shattered, bleeding to death from a stomach ripped open from his groin to his throat? The question is all the more poignant because in the minutes before he set off on his last, fatal carriage ride, Alexander had just put his signature on a document that could have changed Russia for ever. The draft constitution Alexander signed that Sunday morning in March 1881 was an attempt to reinvigorate and widen the social reform he had begun 20 years earlier with the emancipation of the serfs.
Alexander implicitly recognised that the failure of his previous reforms to satisfy liberal demands had contributed to the growth of social unrest and revolutionary violence. So he was once again, he declared, committed to seeking a widening of consultative democracy.
The so-called Loris-Melikov Constitution, named after the reform-minded minister who wrote it, spoke of ‘inviting society12 to take part in the formulation of policy’. It proposed a further relaxation of censorship and an expansion of the powers of locally elected councils, including the right to send delegates to a national assembly that would play a role in the formulation of legislation. It was not, of course, the constitutional democracy the revolutionaries were demanding, but it was a first step. Alexander’s assassination, by the revolutionaries themselves, put an end to any hopes of progress for a generation.
Alexander’s initial measures of 1861 had shown the Russian people that change was indeed possible, and they were emboldened by that knowledge to demand an ever wider, ever faster pace of reform. But he failed to respond to their demands, and by the time revolutionary violence persuaded the tsar to experiment again with reform, it was already too late. The leading revolutionary and Narodnaya Volya activist Vera Figner summed up the views of a growing social class that wanted freedom and democracy. Tsarist power, she contended, would never be able to deliver what they were demanding; the only solution was revolution:
The policies of Count Loris-Melikov13 deceived no one. The government’s real attitude towards society, the people and the party hadn’t changed one jot. The count was still determined to repress the people; he was just substituting prettier methods for the usual crude ones.
The rhetoric is similar to that of young radicals down the ages. But in Russia, people believed the rhetoric and acted on it. Where did the young men and women who murdered Alexander and plotted against the tsarist state spring from? What drove them to such violence? And what was the vision of Russia that persuaded them to sacrifice themselves in the name of a political cause?
fn1 Alexander and his advisers were aware of the financial burden the loan system would impose on the peasantry, but Russia’s finances were in a parlous state after the disaster of the Crimean War and the state could hardly afford to be any more generous.