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Часть текста: 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...
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Часть текста: manner as the great Italian; and, in proof, permit me to beg your insertion of a few lines translated from Russian, and published in the last number of the «Kolokol» (№ 96, April 15). It is necessary to explain that on the 10th of April we had designed to celebrate with our fellow-labourers in the Russian printing-office, and our friends, the event of the emancipation of the peasants in Russia, and on the morning of that day arrived by telegraph the account of the massacres at Warsaw. We quote from the article referred to: Our fête was sombre, sinister: we have known few days more heavy, when the mind has been more painfully oppressed by conflicting sentiments; never before did lampions hang so close to tears. The time is still far distant when a Russian may hold a fête for any event whatever in gaiety of heart, with no sad thought behind, with no anxious care. We had grown young again at the great news of the emancipation of the peasants; we looked forward with hope and anticipated with emotion our proposed meeting, prepared to drink, for the first time in our lives, the health of the emperor Alexander II, liberator of the peasants. We knew perfectly well to what obloquy we should expose ourselves by this act on the part of a narrow-minded political puritanism and mean jealousies. But we also knew that this toast, pronounced by us at our table, would have an echo in the heart of the emperor Alexander, very different from that of an enthusiasm under censure of the gendarmes and warmed by the police. But our hand fell, our toast was chocked in the blood at Warsaw. The crime was too recent, the wounds still bled, the corpses had not had time to become stiff. The name of the czar expired on our ...