RUSSIAN SERFDOM
FIRST ARTICLE
«The emancipation of all the oppressed and
suffering is the vocation of the century».
Gervinus
The time has come when Russian serfdom should be made, if not an European, at least an English question. London, which has become the permanent oecumenical seat of council for all movements of liberty, emancipation, progression, can scarcely remain indifferent to such a question as that of white slavery in Russia[1].
White slavery in Russia has been too little attacked: perhaps because it has not been defended with the fierce tenacity of Transatlantic slaveholders. For it is to be remarked, that although many of the rich landholders in Russia passionately desire the maintenance of serfdom, no one is found to justify the institution ‒ no one to undertake its defence: not even the government.
It is nevertheless a question of capital importance. Indeed, the whole Russian Question, for the present at least, may be said to be included in that of serfdom. Russia cannot make a step in advance until she has abolished slavery. The serfdom of the Russian peasant is the servitude of the Russian empire.
The political and social existence of Western Europe formerly was concentrated in châteaux and in cities. It was essentially an aristocratic, or municipal existence. The peasant remained outside of the movement. The revolution took little thought of him. The sale of national property had no effect upon his condition, except to create a limited provincial bourgeoisie. The serf knew well enough that the land did not belong to him: he only looked for a personal and negative emancipation: an emancipation of the labourer. In Russia the reverse is the case.
The original organization of that agricultural and communistic people was essentially democratic. There were no châteaux, very few towns, and those few nothing but large villages. No distinction existed between the peasant and the citizen. The rural commune, as it still exists, is the exact image of the great communes of Novgorod, Pskow, Kiev. Moscovite centralization, indeed, destroyed the autonomy of the towns: but the humble word commune preserved its self-government, its trial by jury, its justices of the peace, till after the reign of Ivan the Terrible: that is to say, till the XVIIth century.
The soil was not as yet the subject of individual property: each rural commune held its allotment of land. Each of its members had the right to cultivate a portion of that holding, and each appropriated in effect the fruits of his own labour. Such is still the tenure of thirty million of peasants, de la couronne as they are called. Land, water, and woods were equally unrestricted by any feudal rights: fishing, hunting, and the navigation of rivers, were completely free. Moreover, the members of any commune could leave it and be admitted into another, or settle in the towns. The land was the basis of taxation; but the quality was considered; thus was differently taxed on either side of the Oka and the Volga.
The condition of the peasants of the crown has little changed. The government, far from comprehending the wisdom of the old institutions, instituted for the land-tax a uniform capitation tax, in its very essence profoundly unjust. In some localities the peasants inhabited a domain belonging to a private person. The session of the soil was made not to each peasant individually, but to the body of the cultivators, to the commune, on the condition of cultivating it at half profits, or of supporting some other charge or service. The non-proprietary communes were besides organized like all the rest, and the peasant abandoned I them at his own discretion.
It should not be forgotten that the proprietor of this soil thus farmed (loué) had absolutely nothing in common with the seigneur of Western nations. In fact he was nothing but a peasant like the rest, a peasant who had got rich, or who had served the crown.
Russia had never preserved an organized aristocracy: it was much less an institution than a customary fact (fait coutumier), vague and undetermined in character. The few Norman families who accompanied Rurick in the 10th century to Novgorod, were in less than a century after completely absorbed. The boyards who surrounded the Grand Prince and the appanaged princes, were almost all soldiers of fortune, who had achieved their titles by personal claims, and did not hand them down to their children.
There was no conquering race, and therefore there could be no real aristocracy. But a purely artificial aristocracy was in course of formation; a mongrel, heterogenous aristocracy, destitute of any legal basis.
The appanaged princes, mediatized in the XVIth century, and their descendants formed the first nucleus of this quasi-aristocracy; then came the Tartar Mirzas: then adventurers from all the countries of Europe: Poles, Servians, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Greeks. The boyards and other dignitaries finally surrendered their hereditary titles.
Serfdom was established, step by sup, at the commencement of the XVIIth century, and attained its development under the «philosophical» reign of Catherine II. This seems inconceivable, and it will take many years to make Europe comprehend the course of Russian serfdom. Its origin and its development form so extravagant and unparalleled a history, that they almost defy belief.
For ourselves, indeed, the monstrous and chaotic disorder of the régime to which we are accustomed from our birth, alone explains the phenomenon. In this institution, as in many others in Russia, there is an indefinable, indeterminate vagueness and looseness, an amalgam of customs not written and not practised; and this strange incoherence it is, perhaps, which renders them less intolerable and more intelligible.
How, indeed, is it possible to believe that one-half of a population of the same race, endowed with rare physical and intellectual faculties, should be reduced to slavery, not by war, not by conquest, not by revolution, but by a series of special by immoral concessions, by abominable pretensions?
Yet this is the fact; and a fact accomplished scarcely a century and a half ago.
On his very countenance the Russian peasant bears the evidence of this strange anomaly of recent growth.
He has nothing (it is the observation of Gustine, Haxthausen, Blazius, and all Russian travellers) of a slave in his features, but only an expression of profound dejection. He is, in truth, unhappy, and knows not his own identity in the strange position to which he is reduced. He has been caught unawares in the toils of the bureaucracy; driven by a blind government, at the crack of the knout, into the ambush laid for him by the seigneurs.
From time immemorial he has settled without fear on the seigneurial lands; he never drew a contract; nay, his master was as incapable of drawing a contract as himself. To this day he never draws a contract with his equals. All his agreements are transacted by a shake of the hand and a glass of brandy, and the act is as binding as if it passed under the seal of a notary. Just in this way companies of carriers used to transport merchandise from the frontiers of China to Nijni, without even a way — bill of the goods.
Deprived of means, destitute of organization, the old Moscovite administration scarcely ever reached the peasant; all it looked to was, that the taxes were more or less regularly paid, and its power not disputed. The peasant lived peaceably enough under the shelter of that charter given him by nature in Russia — protected by the impassable morasses, by the impenetrable and roadless mud. The State cared nothing for the peasant, or the peasant for the State. While he was dragging on this tranquil and reckless existence, an usurping czar, Boris Godounoff, and a few petty seigneurs, seduced by the example of the German chevaliers, who had introduced a cruel serfdom into their Baltic possessions about the end of the sixteenth century, fastened on the commune fetters drawn more tight from day to day. First, the right of passing from one commune to another was limited: it could only be exercised on one day in the year, on St. George’s day (Youri). Some time after, the privilege of that single day was abolished, without, however, as yet putting the personal rights of those cultivators of the land in question. Finally came a grand master, Peter the Great: he rivetted the chain by clasp formed à l’allemande.
Employés of the State, fresh shaved, bearing the titles of Landrat, Landfiscal, and I know not what other Swedish or German designations, scoured the villages, ridiculously costumed, publishing everywhere an edict, written in a balderdash of mangled Russian. These functionaries proceeded to a census; then they gave notice «that the dwellers on the seigneurial domains would be adscribed to the land and to the seigneur, if within a given delay they did not protest». The advent of those strangers in bizarre dresses had perhaps thrown the peasants into a state of vague apprehension: they were quite glad to see them go away without having done more harm! They had no notion of what was being said and done by those harmless visitors. Not only had the people no notion of what was going on, but the government itself knew nothing, and to this day is utterly blind to what it has done, and to what it maintains.
— in short, no one has ever explained what these words mean — «To be adscribed (fermes) to the land and to the lord».
«I am quite sure», wrote the emperor Alexander with his own hand, «that the sale of serfs, without that of the land, has been long forbidden by the law». He then asked the Council of State by virtue of what regulations peasants were sold individually? The
Council of Stale, knowing no law which authorized a sale of the kind, referred to the Senate. In vain were the archives of that corps searched for precedents: not a scrap could be found approaching to such an authorization; but ordonnances and laws in a contrary sense abounded. In ukase of Peter the First addressed to the Senate, the czar is indignant that men should be sold in Russia «like cattle»; and he ordains the preparation of a law prohibiting such a traffic, and prohibiting in general the sale of men without the land — «if possible». The Senate did nothing. A century later, it did worse than nothing. Too deeply interested in the maintenance of this traffic of human flesh, it resuscitated a tariff of registration (tarif de l’enregistrement), dating so far back as the reign of the empress Anne. This tariff maintained, among other things, that the duties were to be paid on the sale of men on the land (dans la terre). The Council of State, after long debates, acknowledged that this tariff was not a legal basis for their sales; drew up a new law, corrected and recorrected it, and finally sent it up to the minister of the interior. This took place at the lime of the Congress of Verona.
Council of Slate, minister, emperor, not a soul has ever breathed a word of it since.
This precious history is related to us by Nicholas Turgenieff. The author was then Secretary of State, and took part in drawing up the project of law in question. He terminates the recital by an anecdote profoundly sad in its significance. The President of the Council, Count Kotshubey, a man of that profoundly cynical humour which experience often brings with the loss of illusions, approaching Mr. Turgenieff after the sitting, said to him with a smile, half of bitterness, half of raillery: — «Only imagine, the emperor is persuaded that for the last twenty years men have been no longer sold in retail».
This anecdote makes one’s blood boil.
The emperor Nicholas introduced some restrictions to this sale of men. But he, too, unhappily did more harm in trying to do some good. Such is the result of half-measures and of arbitrary acts. The law in forbidding the noble who has no land to buy serfs, implicitly recognises the right of buying serfs in the noble who does possess land. This law was a mistake; it gave a legal basis to the sale of men, and opened the door to the most monstrous abuses, by omitting to regulate in the slightest degree this abominable traffic.
On the pretext of colonizing a piece of land, already covered with a surplus population, one may purchase entire families of servants, of cooks, of painters, of washerwomen, of musicians. The government, it is true, is too modest to allow the sale of serfs to be publicly announced in the journals; matters are transacted more decently. The public advertisements will not tell you of «a coachman», but of the services of a coachman. And besides, is not the Russian government bound with England by a solemn treaty to combat the slave trade? Has not the czar, too, declared every negro free who touches the soil of his empire? What business have the Russian serfs to be born white like their masters? The existence of this class of serfs is extra-legal, abandoned without regulation to the arbitrary will of the nobles.
The caprice, the interest, of the lord alone dictates his every act; his cruelty is tempered only by the knife or the axe of the peasant, and probably the difficulty of the situation will be thus cut through, for the nobles wait and do nothing, the government takes measures which it fails to execute. The nobles break their contract with the peasant, or they allow him to purchase his redemption by paying the maximum auction price. There remain only two resources for the oppressed — if he wishes to gain his freedom, the scythe and the axe. The blood then spilt will recoil on the ruling house of Romanoff, and what torrents must flow! The terrible example left us by Pugatcheff is warning enough!
What always astonishes me is the absolute, radical incapacity of the czars. Alexander contemplated, Nicholas was said to be preparing a measure of emancipation. After forty years what is the result? The absurd ukase of April 2, 1842.
But, it will be asked, what are the means at the disposal of the government? Its means? Suffice it to say, it could if it would. When did the Russian government grow so scrupulous in the choice of its means? Did it want for means when, in the 18th century, it introduced serfdom into Little Russia, and, in the 19th, organized military colonies? By what means did it cut up Poland into Russian provinces, and reduce the united Greek to the orthodox Russian church? Was the government of St. Petersburg over embarrassed? What crimes and cruelties has it ever flinched from in the accomplishment of its terrorist designs?
The emancipation of the peasant will happily not necessitate the cruelty, nor the immorality, which was indispensable in the perpetration of those crimes by the government. The whole people will be in favour of such a measure. All the civilized nobles, all those in Russia who can be called an «Opposition», are bound, at the risk of disavowing their principles, to support the government in this.
There will remain, then, none but the most retrograde section — the most tenacious of the privileges of the nobility. Well! this party has preached so vehemently the religion of passive obedience, that the government, for once, may demand a single practical illustration of its favourite doctrine. Besides, what rights do such persons possess? They have robbed the people by the grace of the czar, and the of the czar will arrest their robberies. There is no reason why the government should refuse an indemnity to the actual usufructuaries of a past iniquity. The government may propose a series of financial measures; the greater part of the property of the nobles is mortgaged in the banks of the State: overwhelmed with debts they cannot even pay the interest.
Let the State, instead of transforming foundling hospitals into shameful peasant markets[2], enter into an arrangement with the peasants on lands for sale, and content itself with receiving annuities therefrom.
If it were in want of disposable capital for the purpose, it has but to raise a loan exclusively applicable to that purpose; or rather it has but to hold aloof to let the nobles create committees in the provinces; lo let who will make collections and form associations. Two guarantees only would be required of the government; first, that the money should not be diverted from its destination; next, that there should be no prosecutions against persons of good will. Besides, what projects have been invented, published, and submitted to the government, since 1842? It has neither the courage nor the capacity to resolve to take some step. Perhaps it feels that its own hands are not pure, its heart not free from stain. At all events it does nothing.
But what is the people about? Does not a people which submits to such a tyranny deserve it? Yes, it deserves it, as Ireland deserves the famine, and as Italy deserves the yoke of Austria. I am so accustomed to hear that ferocious cry of vae victis, that it no longer excites my surprise. Up, and to arms against all that suffer, unpitied, unredressed! It is not enough that the landless labourer (proletaire) is poor, and starving: let us crown his bitter life with a derision more bitter still. The Russian peasant is a serf: let us reproach him with it; let us say that he has deserved his chain; and then turn away our eyes from his hideous sufferings. Still, before abandoning him for ever, let us thank those forgotten slaves for the wisdom which we have gained at the cost of cruel hunger of some — the fierce sweat of many — the brutal degradation of all; let us who are the double blossom of this glorious civilization, be grateful, whose smiling gardens are watered with the blood and tears of the poor.
I am ill at ease when I speak of the «People». It is the word most twisted from its meaning, and least understood in this «democratic» age. The idea attached to the word is, for the most part, vague, rhetorical, superficial. It is one moment vaunted to the skies, the next, dragged in the mire. Unhappily, the noble indignation of the heart, no less than the most exalted declamation, fails to express an exact and true notion of what is meant by the «People» — that large foundation of granite, cemented by immemorial traditions — that vast ground floor (rez-de-ckaussée), upon which is scaffolded the paltry baraque of our political institutions.
To the question, to what does the Russian people look? I answer — the commencement of a social revolution in Europe, and that, unconsciously, by the force of their position, and by instinct. Already, thanks to the socialistic movement, the question of emancipation has made immense progress. Government, nobles, people, no longer believe in the possible emancipation of the commune ‒ that is, of the peasant, without the land. And still regarded from the point of view of an absolute and imprescriptible right of possession, there is no visible solution of the problem. An emancipation, based on that which Alexander sanctioned for the serfs of the Baltic provinces, would, we do not hesitate to say, be one of those errors which destroy a nation. The question, now so simple, would be hopelessly entangled.
proletariat of twenty millions of men, in a country already so ill governed, that the free peasant and the petite bourgeoisie find no shelter against the vexations of an arbitrary police ‒ where, in a word, such a thing as personal security does not exist. The lords would coalesce, the government support the coalition! The communal element, the grand element of Slavonic life, would be utterly destroyed (frappé au coeur) — the commune would be broken up. We should witness the ruin of the only blessing which the Russian peasant has preserved — the base, the keystone, without which Russia would crumble into decay — without which that monstrous panautocracy which extends from Torneo to the Amur, would cease to exist.
I know that there are persons so rationally disposed that they would abandon a positive and certain pledge for the germ of a possible expectation. They would rejoice in the formation of a proletariat, because they would see in it the source of revolutionary expansion; but is every proletaire necessarily a revolutionist?
SECOND ARTICLE
The rustic labourer (prolétaire) is not, generally speaking, a revolutionist, like the operatives of great cities. In those dense hives of monopolized industry, in those huge Pandemonia of luxury and starvation, of beggary and debauch, of famished ignorance and blasé corruption, of squalid pauperism and insolent gold, of colossal financiers and blazoned Macaires, of whirling wealth, and maddening want, and cruel contrasts, — in great cities, no doubt, the working man becomes a revolutionist; not so in the solitude of the fields. It requires long centuries of suffering and a religions struggle to create a war of the peasants, as in the sixteenth century.
Talk of dissolving the Russian commune! I should like to know whether the few Russians who propose such a measure have ever seriously reflected on the scheme. What would remain, I ask, if we tore out this vital nerve of our national existence? The Russian people has endured every loss, and has only preserved the commune. Is it at a time when it occurs to so many of the thinkers of Western Europe to deplore the excessive subdivision of the soil, that we should, with a blind levity, root up an institution which we have only to conserve passively, for it maintains itself spontaneously in the people and by the people, attached to it by interest and by tradition, as to the one sole right which rapacity and oppression have not yet wrung from their hands.
The commune is, I am aware, accused of being incompatible with individual liberty. Was this liberty wanting before the abolition of the day of Youri (St. George)? Did it not create, beside the permanent village, the moving commune, the voluntary association of (artisans) and that other purely martial commune of the Cossacks? That fixed rural commune left to individual liberty and initiative a part quite large enough, since it never ceased to provide for and to nourish its twin legitimate offspring — one the mounted and moving rampart of the country; the other, hatchet in hand, transporting himself wherever work invited him.
True, the members of the Cossack commune were not individually absorbed or effaced by them. Even those who may have read Gogol’s novel, «Taras Boulba», have little idea that a similar story occured in the time of Alexander I. An aged Cossack, who refused to submit to the ferocious discipline of the military colonies, after receiving himself a few thousand blows with a stick, witnessed in silence the barbarous punishment inflicted on his eldest son, and only opened his lips to inquire how it was that his younger son was spared. When he learned that the latter had purchased impunity by submission, the old father embraced his eldest son, cursed the son who had recoiled before the punishment, covered himself up in his casaquine, and perished on the spot.
Cossackry (la Cosacquerie) is a palpable proof that the popular life in Russia contained in itself the complement of the peaceble existence of the rural commune. Cossackry, in fact, threw open an escape for all reckless and impatient spirits thirsting for adventure, hungry after excitement, panting for dangerous exploits, and a wild independance. It corresponded perfectly with that principle of unrestrained turbulence which we express by the word oudal, and which is one of the characteristic features of the Slavonic race.
The Cossacks, indefatigable sentinels at the most exposed frontiers of their country, founded at these perilous outposts military, republican, and democratic communities, which were still in existence at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Theirs is a brilliant history. The Zaporogues were the knight-errants of the democratic commonalty. Unyielding, indomitable brigands, rather than subjects of any authority whatsoever, they seemed to inherit those vague presentiments, those prophetic instincts which distinguished the Norman races. Under Ivan IV, a band of Cossacks conquered Siberia. Their chief, Ermack, not content with having penetrated as far as Tobolsk, reared with a dying hand his standart at Irkoutsk. After him, another Cossack pushed on across icy wastes, as if he were drawn by some magnetic influence, to the Pacific Ocean: perhaps by a presentiment of the immense significance of Russia advancing her bounds to the very frontiers of America.
Nothing but the imbecility of the German government at St. Petersburg could have failed to comprehend such an institution as that of the Cossacks. Peter the Great was the first to oppress them, too happy to be furnished with a pretext by Mazeppas. Catherine reduced millions of them to slavery. Nicholas destroyed their democratic organisation by making nobles of their elected officers, and he tried even to corrupt their popular ballads. Such an institution was, of course, scarcely reconcilable with the military code of Russia. It was thought for wiser to create out of brutal violence those absurd military colonies than to permit some developments to a flourishing and profoundly popular institution.
It is not to be disputed that the communal life of the Russian villages and the republicanism of the Cossack camps would ill satisfy the aspirations of later European theorists. All was embryonic in their constitution. Individual liberty was everywhere where sacrificed to a democratic and patriarchal broutherhood. But who pulls down an unfinished house in the idea of rebuilding it on the same plan? It is no merit of ours to have preserved with an immutable quietism that communal institution which the German peoples had long lost amidst the vicissitudes of their history. But it is an advantage not to be thrown away. And we may surely profit by the dear-bought experience of our ancestors.
Western Europe sacrificed its communal institutions, and with them the peasants and the artisans, when it entered upon a richer and larger existence by a long and glorious struggle for the emancipation of an aristocratic and middle-class minority. It has had Catholicism, protestantism, its chivalry full of poetry, its tiers-état renowned for pertinacity, its Reformation, and finally its revolution, which half destroyed the Church and the Throne. Russia alone has remained aloof from the conquests and glories of her neighbours. Her people, utterly incapable of following, still less of attaining the European developments, has languished in misery ever since the era of Kiev. The yoke of the Mongols, Byzantinesque czars, Germanized emperors, lords like slaveholders, such have been her masters. Yet this people, while it has gained nothing, has at least not lost the commune, with the equality of all its members in the possession and in the distribution of the soil.
If, indeed, the Russian peasant has been reduced to serfage it has not been without severe struggle. The facile success of the spurious Dmetri, the enthusiasm of the people for him, his imitators crushed, but ever reappearing with formidable armies encamped before Moscow, all this story would be inexplicable but for the undercurrent of a strong, wide, deep popular movement. These protracted struggles of an entire people may not disturb the reign of the House of Romanoff but the falsified chronicles of the government could not pass over in silence the wars of the Stenko Razin, one of their chiefs, was at the head 200 000 men. During the reign of the czar Alexis more than 12 000 peasants were hanged. A century later the empress Catherine more than once turned pale at the reports of her generals on the insurrection of Pugatcheff. Pugatcheff committed a fatal error, since repeated by Kossuth. After the decisive capture of
Kasan he did not march straight on Moscow, where, according to the evidence of Castéra, 200 000 serfs awaited his army with breathless impatience. The common people (moujik) were decimated in the name of civilization, and Voltaire congratulated the Semiramis of the North on the victories of Bibikoff and Panine.
Ultor et redivivus. Taken prisoner and loaded with chains, he replied to the ignoble general who struck him with his hand, and to that facile outrage added words of insult: — «I am but a little crow, and the vulture is still hovering in the air»[3].
After a contest of a hundred and fifty years the people abandoned the struggle. Pugatcheff was the last of its leaders. It has never made its appearance since except in the commotion of Staraia Roussa in 1831. In that revolt it was horribly sanguinary; but what was to be expected in reprisal for the terrorism which founded and maintained the military colonies? As was the seed so must the harvest be.
Insurrection is at all times difficult among a people scattered over immense plains, inhabiting villages exposed and patched up of mere wooden huts. The only refuge of such a people is in the forests, and count Woronzoff has shown in the Caucasus how to deal with that
Besides, the irregularities of the administrative government confuse the popular notions. The peasant serf of a rich proprietor rejoices to find in his powerful master a sort of buckler against the vexations of employés and of the police. The condition of the serfs is not one of uniform hardship and degradation, hence the difficulty of any simultaneous insurrectional movement, or of any united organisation; hence the rebellions of the peasants remain isolated, local, and limited to single communes, rarely extending even to two or three.
According to the last census the number of male serfs in Russia was 11 380 000 (the women are not reckoned). Two-thirds of this number belong to lords who possess at least a thousand peasants a piece, and who generally demand nothing of their serf hut a pecuniary rent-service, for which they give them up the land entirely.
These peasants, and all who belong to rich lords, are usually, it may be imagined, far less miserable than those who are dependent upon petty gentry, and subjected to the rabot (à la corvée, or forced labour). Scarcely ever do the great lords live upon their lands; never more than a few months of the fine season, while the petty seigneur lives all the year round upon his estate, and strives to economize the forced expenses of his sojourn in the metropolis. Mean and restless by position he meddles with everything, turns all to profit, exacts all sorts of beyond the rent actually due, in the shape of eggs, mushrooms, linen, fruit, butter, milk, and poultry. And to solace his ennui he amuses himself in poaching on the conjugal manors of his dependents.
These small properties are dispersed at random over the whole extent of Russian territory in Europe. Siberia has the happiness not to know serfdom. Surrounded by vast domains, or by large free communes, the poor serfs remain utterly isolated from their neighbours. Not but that the Russian peasants feel intense commiseration for one another, but when has a mere mutual sentiment of pity ever armed the oppressed masses for the vindication of their rights? In 1839 and 1840, we saw, indeed, the beginnings of a coalition among the communes. In the districts of Simbirsk and of Tambow, the massacre of the lords looked like the execution of a plan. But usually matters do not take that course. The peasants of a commune are dumb and patient for years and years: they suffer and endure all miseries without a murmur. Suddenly, without a note of warning, they burst out, massacre the lord, butcher his family, burn his house; receive with dogged endurance the punishment of the and are hurried away to perish in the mines of Siberia. They know the result beforehand; but their situation was no longer tolerable. The causes of insurrections are worthy of serious attention. They generally spring from the encroachment of the lord upon the rights of the commune. The peasant feels himself victimized, without protection or redress: he is overworked, overtaxed, continually liable to excessive punishment from a hard and cruel taskmaster: but all this seems transitory and remediable. What he never does put up with, never submits to without a bloody protest, is the inter-meddling of the lord in the division of the communal lands, in the rights of pasture, in the affairs of the commune; then he feels himself struck in his last refuge, beyond which he sees nothing. Then the peasant murders his lord. But why, it may be asked, does not the peasant demand redress sooner? To complain of the violation of a right, one must have legal ground upon. Now the commune exists by itself,
According to the law, a peasant can address himself only to the marshal of the noblesse of the district. This marshal, the elected officer of the nobles, is their natural defender, both against the crown and against the people. The police never receives complaints against the lords, except in extraordinary criminal cases, which do not interest directly the peasant. The serf is allowed to inform against his lord, if the latter belongs to a secret society, or has commited a crime. The law permits three day’s work only in the week to be exacted of the serf on the lord’s land; and it is to a police elected by the noblesse lord or two. Then follows a long dreary interval of abuses, unpunished and unredressed.
CONCLUDING ARTICLE
Just before I left Russia, in 1846, a trial peculiar to those latitudes was creating great excitement in Moscow. A prince, possessing large domains in the province of Orel, had one of his serfs flogged. The serf died under the punishment. According to custom, a priest and his deacon, attended by the sacristan, were present at the burial, and drew up the registry certificate of the man’s death. The good priest signed; the good deacon signed the said certificate; but lo, on perusing their joint declaration, the sacristan made the sacristan made the remark that this was not a case on natural death, but a murder. The priest stared in amazement at the observation, and endeavoured to convince him of his error, and to persuade him to sign. The sacristan obstinately persisted in his refusal. As soon as the prince was informed of this difficulty, presuming that the sacristan would scarcely let such a good opportunity slip without improving it, he sent the poor wretch a few hundred roubles. Still the sacristan held out, and calling on the priest and deacon to attest the bribe, he disappeared from thence, to reappear at Orel, where he penetrated into the presence of his archbishop, and to him related the affair. The archbishop, unprepared for such an emergency, wrote to consult the governor, and the superior priest of the district. Now, the governor of Orel happened to be a near relative of the murderer. It may be imagined he spared no effort to hush up the affair altogether; but the inflexible sacristan stuck fast to his allegations. The affair got abroad, and placed the police in a situation of considerable embarrassment, for the crime was but too evident. The secret police gave information of the whole story to the emperor. The governor was removed; the inquest resumed on a different footing, proof after proof establisched the fact that the prince of Trubetskoi and his wife had been in the habit of practising the most abominable cruelties towards their serfs. Subterranean dungeons were discovered in the seigneurial mansion, in which prisoners languished in chains. Dungeons and irons, it should be understood, are equally foreign to Russian customs. The prince was tried, condemned, degraded, deprived of all his titles, and, accompanied by his worthy helpmate, packed off to Siberia. Nor did the emperor stop there, but ordered all the marshals of the district, since the installation of the prince in his domains, to be tried for the crime. As might be expected, however, this measure was not carried out. Ch. — the then Minister of Justice, was among these marshals, and the matter was not pushed any further, out of deference for one of the most mediocre of administrators.
The relations between the nobles and the peasants are anything but sound. Indeed they are as strained and insecure as reciprocal distrust can make them. The patriarchal relations of which Haxthausen speaks, where then did he find them? The great lords, in the time of Catherine II, treated their peasantry with a sort of aristocratic consideration and tutelary regard; the small proprietors also, because they had not yet cast off the manners of the peasants, among whom they lived in extreme simplicity. But the succeeding generation separated themselves more and more from the peasants, and from their simple manners. Civilization suggested to the nobility new wants, and with these wants new ways and means. The developments of industry and manufactures, the diffusion of the principles of political economy adapted to local habits, utilising the peasants. The seigneur, that «patriarch», that «chief of the clan», that «father of the commune», from an aristocrat became by degrees manufacturer, planter, slaveowner.
Mr. Haxthausen has seen all this, and is as well aware of it as I can be, but in his capacity of an absolutist demagogue he is, doubtless, obliged to pass it over in silence. This author, who has unfortunately marred his interesting work by an indescribably frantic passion for royalism[4], knows too well the organization of the Russian commune, not to have known that the power of the seigneur is an excrescence upon the commune into which it has entered as an element altogether foreign, parasitical, and destitute of normal basis. He succeeds as little in explaining, by a pretended patriarchalism the seigneurial prerogatives, as in justifying the oppressive despotism of Petersburg by the sublimity of obedience, It is he who takes the place of the father of the family; he is the representative, the guardian, the natural protector of the commune. What, then, is the office, the duty of the seigneur, that alien intruder who makes, from time to time, at more or less irregular intervals, irruptions upon his estates, like the Baskah Tartar upon the towns, and levies contributions? The staroste, on the other hand, is not, and cannot be, a despot; were he so disposed, the force of custom and traditional rights would crush the attempt. The unites commune (Mir) would, by its universal will, reduce him at once to the limits of his authority and of his duty. Elected by the free suffrage of all the working membres for a limited term, be knows well enough that he will have to become a simple moujik again if not reelected. He knows that after having governed the village he will be obliged (as M. Haxthausen so poetically describes) «to come and kneel before the common assembly, lay down before it the staff and insignia of his office, and ask pardon of the commune for any wrongs he may have committed against it».
Surely there is no want of another adoptive father, of a stepfather ’s share of its produce. If the seigneur were nothing more than the proprietor of the soil he could exact nothing but the rent of his land, but he afflicts the peasant with a capitation tax, he taxes his labour independently of the land, he ransoms his right of locomotion. Thus, to employ an admirable expression escaped from Mr. Haxthausen, «on the basis of a St. Simonism reversed, he makes the impost more severe in proportion as the subject of the impost has more talent».
Beyond the commune there should be nothing but the national unity, the res publica (Semskoie delo) or the directing power. The free communes are assembled by districts and, according to Russian law, every commune having its staroste, this aggregation of communes elects its popular chief, called golova. There is many a golova of the police. The police is exercised in the villages by centurions, and decurions elected; the distribution of taxes and of offices is administered by the golova and the ancients. It is a complete socialistic , and it worked very harmoniously till we became indoctrinated with the policy of German or Byzantine order.
One minister, Mr. Kisseleff, was capable of appreciating a part, at least, of the magnificent institutions on which the commune is based. His reform of the administration would have been almost the beginning of a recognition by the government of St. Petersburg of Russian common law, if the personnel of the administration were not so profoundly vicious. One of the great misfortunes of our government is, that it governs to excess. It mingles in and with everything and everybody; regulats everything, fidgets about everything: the length of the Jewish caftan on the Polish frontier; the length of hair worn by the students of our universities; at one moment it is recommending a husband to reprimand his wife, at another it is advising a young man not to lose all his fortune at cards. Our emperor is not only the head of the Church and of the Slate — he is also the principal clerk, and the busybody in chief. He marries, he unmarries; he manages all and mars all.
Mr. Kisseleff, while he preserved the grand communal institution, contrived to neutralize the purely national and healthy characteristics of his scheme by that excess of administrative intermeddling, that intemperance of regulation, in a country, too, to which all formalism is repugnant, and which, in truth, does not want any artificial supplement to the force of long habits and traditional customs. By way of administrative interference with all the affairs of the peasantry, he introduced a thief into every commune; he opened in every village an Australian mine of spoliation for his bureaucratic diggers. The probity of the minister is not here in question; but was he not old enough to know that the subaltern employés throughout Russia are nothing but patented brigands and veteran robbers?
The solution of continuity between the world of employés, and the people, as between the people and the government, is evident enough. The government of Petersburg is a temporary, provisional government; it is a terrorist dictatorship; a caesarism carried ad absurdum. Its people is the and that only so far as it is the enemy of the people. Mr. Haxthausen tries to prove the contrary — that the imperial power such as it exists now is necessary, national, logical, and popular. This very catholic censor appeals to the quasi-atheistical philosophy of Hegel in support of the schismatic emperor. We know that Hegel has turned a good many heads by presenting the simplest theory in the world as most extraordinary — «all that really is reasonable». Nothing can be clearer; and without entering into scholastic distinctions between the be and the seem, we concede that every phenomenon has its être, and that an absolute absurdity is absolutely impossible. One need not be a great master in metaphysics to be aware that where there is effect there must be a cause. the normal notion of man monstrosity is included as a disturbing possibility from without, but in no sense is it admitted as a rule. A pure and simple inquiry into such monstrosities would have been strictly proper in Russia, but Mr. Haxthausen arms himself with the accursed philosophy of Hegel for quite another purpose. He draws the conclusion that the imperial power in Russia is the best government possible! «Only one thing is wanting», continues our holy doctor, «to this government to be perfect — to be Catholic». Donoso Cortez at Madrid was wont to announce the end of the world if England were not speedily reconciled to catholicism.
Since the separation of the Russian government from the Russian people two Russias have been face to face. On the one hand, Russia governmental, rich, armed, not with the bayonet only, but with all the resources of chicane borrowed from the chanceries of the despotic States of Germany. On the other, Russia, poor, agricultural, laborious, communal, and democratic; Russia disarmed, conquered (conquisita) their Russia, to the Russia of courtiers and officers, of French fashions and German manners, that other coarse-bearded, barbarous moujik Russia, incapable of appreciating that imported civilization which has descended on it by the grace of the Throne and for which the ignorant peasant openly professes the most unmitigated disgust. And why should he regard that
«How cross you have been these last few days», — said the count, — one of those male concubines in the suite of the empress Catherine, to one of his parasites.
The individual to whom these words were spoken, half in question, half in reproach, was a poor nobleman, the ignoble butt of the ignobler pleasantries of the blasé favourite. The buffoon, a fat, bloated, greedy fellow, used to wait every day eagerly for the moment to devour the count’s dinner. The latter, perceiving the voracity of the wretch, bethought himself of a singulary funny contrivance. He had a horse collar bought, and fastened round the buffoon’s neck, and thus harnessed he was let loose upon the dishes and the wines. He represented very accurately a wild beast gorging himself with the food, and leaving plates and bottles empty. The host was infinitely amused at the beast and his guests too.
‒ Oh! how much cause have I to be sad, — said the harnessed nobleman. — Of all the persons in your suite, I only have the misfortune not to be the object of your bounty.
‒ How do you mean?
‒ Have not you given Cossacks to all the rest? I only am excluded from your favours.
‒ What do you think of this fellow? he is not such a fool as he looks. What, you, too, want Cossacks?
‒ Why not? replied the fool, — they cost you nothing.
‒ Well, indeed, what do they cost me? Well, you shall have some Cossacks.
‒ Count! you are joking!
‒ No, on my word.
And Caliban covered with kisses the hand of his worthy protector.
This was just at the time when Little Russia was being reduced to feudal servitude. Catherine II, that «Mother of her country», possessed by lusts untameable gave away 300 000 male peasants as the price of one of her Babylonian orgies.
The count had but to speak to keep his word, and the nobleman went away into Little Russia lord and master of a commune of Cossacks.
I cannot resist recounting a second act of this drama.
Last year, passing over the St. Gothard, I perceived a Russian name on a traveller’s album. Below that name another traveller had written a biographical notice not without interest. The Russian chamberlain of H. M. I., etc., a proprietor in Little Russia, had during several years martyred his serfs and his servants. Immensely rich, but of insatiable rapacity, he wore them out by his exactions and his tyranny. In 1850, when he was living on his domains, the serfs driven to desperation resolved to make a signal example of their lord. Breaking one night into his house, armed, and showing him a bunch of rods newly cut, they offered him the choice of death or corporal chastisement. The chamberlain reasonably chose correction. It was duly administered. When the punishment was over the serfs exacted of him a written promise not to divulge the events of that night. He wrote and signed that noble promise, and what is more, — he kept it, for fear of worse.
in administering the nocturnal castigation, and he felt not unnaturally convinced that the lord in naming him for the contingent was satisfying indirectly a vengeance long suppressed. Military conscription, it should be remembered, is regarded with horror by the Russian peasant. The young conscript resolved to take his revenge. Before the assembled military council de recensement he declared aloud that he was made a soldier only because he had thrashed his lord the chamberlain. He was thought, mad.
«Ah! you think me mad, do you?» he replied; «here is something to convince you».
And he drew from his pocket and read out loud the seigneurial document.
surprise they drew up a report of the circumstance. The Russian code had not provided for a case of thrashing a chamberlain.
Creat was the embarrassment of the minister; he referred to the emperor. The emperor, who had kept his chamberlain by his side as long as he only thrashed his peasants, was indignant with him as soon as he got trashed himself. He expelled him from his service and from the empire. The serfs were left unpunished. Ever since our ex-chamberlain has been parading, by order of his master, his striped back and shoulders through all the capitals of the civilized world, and he inscribes his name on Mont St. Gothard.
And to make his story all the more piquant, let me add, that this measled and mangled chamberlain — this cruel and cowardly seigneur, is no ohter than the noble grandson of the noble-man — of that gluttonous buffoon who was let loose upon a commune of serfs. The thrashers were the descendants of those poor Cossacks bent to the yoke, and cast as a prey to a greedy mountebank.
Well! what do you say to this harnessed father, this striped son, and to the emperor Nicholas carrying on the propaganda by sending this chamberlain on his travels.
I shall conclude my letter by some new details on Russian society.
There is no law of primogeniture in Russia. Peter the First tried to implant it among us, but the manners of the people resisted it, and at his death the decree was revoked. Nicholas has permitted one or two privileged families of the highest aristocracy to indulge in this caprice; but that is only an anomaly, an absurdity the more.
The rule is for the sons to have en equal share in the distribution of the father’s property. For the nobles it constitutes a rapid descent to poverty. A lord who owned two thousand serfs, held a good position. His two sons are left, each with half the fortune of their father, while they, in their turn, leave a moiety of it to their children. At the same time, the price of everything is increased, more rapidly than the income of the estates on the number of the serfs. Civilization introduces into the families of aristocracy luxurious tastes, and wants unknown to our forefathers, so that, with an estate lessened by three-fourths, the grandson has to supply demands twelve times greater than those of his grandfather. We must not forget, this important, phase in the question — the manners of the nobles. No people in Europe is more unfitted for habits of order and economy than the Russians and Poles. We must see how, in the course of two or three generations, fortunes, whether great or small, are made, and lost, and passed from hand to hand. The Russians are greedy, very greedy of money, but careless than their neighbours for property in land. They love money, for the pleasure of throwing it away. Economy is unknown amongst us. There is no middle class between niggards and spendthrifts.
eats up the remaining income, the estate, before long, is sold by auction, the surplus, if there is a surplus, is paid to the ex-lord, and, when he has eaten that, his eyes are opened to his ruin.
One man, in order to relieve his embarrassments, gives himself up to play, without restraint; another begins to drink, from very despair, and dies in his debauchery; another, better advised, takes some official employment, and robs unscrupulously. This man prospers, but his son will be ruined. Between the years 1812 and 1840, a small minority strove to constitute themselves exceptions to the general rule. They were, for the most part, men educated out of Russia, great admirers of political economists, like Say and Malthus. They became industrious, and assumed the manners of the bourgeoisie; but they were few in number, and had few disciples.
But what said the commune in the midst of this eternal come and go of proprietors, this parcelling out of estates, this continual change? The thousand serfs, who obeyed one lord, were each time scattered over three or four communes, varying in extent, each having their own individuality, their own organization, and distinct lands. The lord will have a single management for the whole of his estate. If a distribution takes place, he is compelled to complete the communal lots by means of pecuniary arrangements, and concessions of various kinds. This is practicable, but only up to a certain point. We come to the division of the commune itself — sometimes two or three brothers have undivided possession of a village, more or less important. But this division can be effected in spite of them. If the portion of one of them is seized for debts, will the new proprietor submit to the unity of possession, the common management? He will hasten, more frequently, to get rid of it.
portions of lords are overwhelmed with embarrassments, with complications, with inextricable disorders, the peasants fall into the same ruin.
The parcelling out of communes, the increase of estates, enclosed and intermixed in every direction, has enforced minimum of serfs, after which no further distribution is allowed. The next step is to fix an indemnity, and to decide on the question of expropriation. Evidently the rights of the nobility do not appear so sacred to the government, when fairly put to the test? how otherwise could the right become weakened in proportion to the number of the peasants?
In 1845 it was permitted to the nobles of Toula to unite under the presidency of the prefects and the marschals. The question was, how to devise measures for the emancipation of the serfs of the province.
Moscow waited for the same powers. From 1842 to 1846 the agitation among the nobility increased, the journals became so bold as to publish articles on emancipation. It would have been well if the government had given some aid to the nobility in the accomplishment of this object; but the hatred of everything that is called liberty or emancipation is so thoroughly ingrained in this family in incurable autocrats, that Nicholas hastily threw all such projects to the winds, on the first arrival of the news of the 24th of February.
serfdom in Russia. The peasant continues deprived of all protection but, that of the customary law (la loi coulumiere): he may be dragged from his family, from his commune, although that maison de police for disobedience. Ho may condemn him to military conscription, or pack him off to the mines of Siberia at his own expense. In the two latter cases, the serf at least becomes free. Lastly, it is an established and constant practice to sell serfs, if not separately, at least by family. No land need be given to the peasants except just enough to allow them to vegetate miserably. The lord is under no obligation to his servants beyond supplying them with just enough food and clothing to prevent them perishing of hunger and of cold.
foul complicity of a government that talks of its strength, with a noblesse that boasts of its enlightenment. The mask must be torn from these slaveholders of the North, who go lounging and lisping over Europe, mingling with your affairs, assuming the rank of civilized beings, — nay, of liberal-minded men, who read «Uncle Tom’s Cabin» with horror, and shudder when they read of sellers of black flesh. Why, these same brilliant spies of the are the very men who on their return to theirs domains rob, flay, sell the white slave, and are served at table by their living property.