THE DEVELOPMENT AND OVERTHROW OF THE RUSSIAN SERF-SYSTEM
Close upon the end of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite ideas of Right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great, and compressed into a code.
Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death.
But hidden in this tough mass was one law of greater import than all others. Thereby were all peasants forbidden to leave the lands they were then tilling, except during the eight days before and after Saint George's day. This provision sprang from Ivan's highest views of justice and broadest views of political economy; the nobles received it with plaudits, which have found echoes even in these days;2 the peasants received it with no murmurs which History has found any trouble in drowning.
Just one hundred years later, there sat upon the Muscovite throne, as nominal Tzar, the weakling Feodor I.; but behind the throne stood, as real Tzar, hard, strong Boris Godounoff.
Looking forward to Feodor's death, Boris makes ready to mount the throne; and he seeswhat all other "Mayors of the Palace," climbing into the places of fainéant kings, have seenthat he must link to his fortunes the fortunes of some strong body in the nation; he breaks, however, from the general rule among usurpers,bribing the Church,and determines to bribe the nobility.
The greatest grief of the Muscovite nobles seemed to be that the peasants could escape from their oppression by the emigration allowed at Saint George's day.
Boris saw his opportunity: he cut off the privilege of Saint George's day; the peasant was fixed to the soil forever. No Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry,3] but, through this decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants upon it, just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges.
To this the peasants submitted, but over this wrong History has not been able to drown their sighs; their proverbs and ballads make Saint George's day representative of all ill-luck and disappointment.
A few years later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse,a serf-caste bound to the glebe.
The great waves of wrong which bore serfage into Russia seem to have moved with a kind of tidal regularity, and the distance between their crests in those earlier times appears to have been just a hundred years,for, again, at the end of the next century, surge over the nation the ideas of Peter the Great.
The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a great European power.
And the praise due to this work can never be diminished. Time shall but increase it; for the world has yet to learn most of the wonderful details of his activity. We were present a few years since, when one of those lesser triumphs of his genius was first unfolded.
It was in that room at the Hermitageadjoining the Winter Palaceset apart for the relics of Peter. Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American industry,one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of inventors' rights.
Suddenly from the inventor,4 pulling over some old dust-covered machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were natural indeed. In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself: specimens of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten machine of Peter's.
Yet, though Peter fought so well, and thought so well, he made some mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme lack,lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.
Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall,"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;"or when, at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it;or, in his reviews and parade-fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.
Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an army to learn his opponent's game,in his building of St. Petersburg, where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the first year.
But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his dealings with the serf-system.
Serfage was already recognized in Peter's time as an evil. Peter himself once stormed forth in protestations and invectives against what he stigmatized as "selling men like beasts,separating parents from children, husbands from wives,which takes place nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow." He declared that a law should be made against it. Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.
For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron. He never stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands, as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia, as a forced growth.
In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs. These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they before had; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.5
And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more. Cold-blooded officials were set at taking the census. These adopted easy classifications; free peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under a single denomination. So serfage became still more difficult to be distinguished from slavery.6
As this base of hideous wrong was thus widened and deepened, the nobles built higher and stronger their superstructure of arrogance and pretension. Not many years after Peter's death, they so over-awed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes of the Empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from the soil. So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.
But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler from whom the world came to expect much.
To mount the throne, Catharine II. had murdered her husband; to keep the throne, she had murdered two claimants whose title was better than her own. She then became, with her agents in these horrors, a second Messalina.
And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more. Cold-blooded officials were set at taking the census. These adopted easy classifications; free peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under a single denomination. So serfage became still more difficult to be distinguished from slavery.6
As this base of hideous wrong was thus widened and deepened, the nobles built higher and stronger their superstructure of arrogance and pretension. Not many years after Peter's death, they so over-awed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes of the Empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from the soil. So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.
But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler from whom the world came to expect much.
To mount the throne, Catharine II. had murdered her husband; to keep the throne, she had murdered two claimants whose title was better than her own. She then became, with her agents in these horrors, a second Messalina.
To set herself right in the eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of skepticism which in that age made or marred European reputations. She flattered the fierce Deists by owning fealty to "Le Roi Voltaire;" she flattered the mild Deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she flattered the Atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself.
Her murders and orgies were soon forgotten in the new hopes for Russian regeneration. Her dealings with Russia strengthened these hopes. The official style required that all persons presenting petitions should subscribe themselves "Your Majesty's humble serf." This formula she abolished, and boasted that she had cast out the word serf from the Russian language. Poets and philosophers echoed this boast over Europe, and the serfs waited.
The great Empress spurred hope by another movement. She proposed to an academy the question of serf-emancipation as a subject for their prize-essay. The essay was written and crowned. It was filled with beautiful things about liberty, practical things about moderation, flattering things about "the Great Catharine,"and the serfs waited.
Again she aroused hope. It was given out that her most intense delight came from the sight of happy serfs and prosperous villages. Accordingly, in her journey to the Crimea, Potemkin squandered millions on millions in rearing pasteboard villages,in dragging forth thousands of wretched peasants to fill them,in costuming them to look thrifty,in training them to look happy. Catharine was rejoiced,Europe sang paeans,the serfs waited.7
She seemed to go farther: she issued a decree prohibiting the enslavement of serfs. But, unfortunately, the palace-intrigues, and the correspondence with the philosophers, and the destruction of Polish nationality left her no time to see the edict carried out. But Europe applauded,and the serfs waited.
Two years after this came a deed which put an end to all this uncertainty. An edict was prepared, ordering the peasants of Little Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day of publication should find them. This was vile; but what followed was diabolic. Court-pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises, enticed hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung;in an hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and Catharine II. was made infamous forever.
So, about a century after Peter, there rolled over Russia a wave of wrong which not only drowned honor in the nobility, but drowned hope in the people.
As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must have sunk within them. For Paul I., Catharine's son and successor, was infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained by public opinion. He had been born with savage instincts, and educated into ferocity. Tyranny was written on his features, in his childhood. If he remained in Russia, his mother sneered and showed hatred to him; if he journeyed in Western Europe, crowds gathered about his coach to jeer at his ugliness. Most of those who have seen Gillray's caricature of him, issued in the height of English spite at Paul's homage to Bonaparte, have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen the portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps at St. Petersburg know well that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not.
And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought into his every fibre. He insisted on an Oriental homage. As his carriage whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop, descend into the mud, and bow themselves. Himself threw his despotism into this formula,"Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is no one noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I speak."
And yet, within that hideous mass glowed some sparks of reverence for right. When the nobles tried to get Paul's assent to more open arrangements for selling serfs apart from the soil, he utterly refused; and when they overtasked their human chattels, Paul made a law that no serf should be required to give more than three days in the week to the tillage of his master's domain.
But, within five years after his accession, Paul had developed into such a ravenous wild-beast that it became necessary to murder him. This duty done, there came a change in the spirit of Russian sovereignty as from March to May; but, sadly for humanity, there came, at the same time, a change in the spirit of European politics as from May to March.
For, although the new Tzar, Alexander I., was mild and liberal, the storm of French ideas and armies had generally destroyed in monarchs' minds any poor germs of philanthropy which had ever found lodgment there. Still Alexander breasted this storm,found time to plan for his serfs, and in 1803 put his hand to the work of helping them toward freedom. His first edict was for the creation of the class of "free laborers." By this, masters and serfs were encouraged to enter into an arrangement which was to put the serf into immediate possession of himself, of a homestead, and of a few acres,giving him time to indemnify his master by a series of payments. Alexander threw his heart into this scheme; in his kindliness he supposed that the pretended willingness of the nobles meant something; but the serf-owning caste, without openly opposing, twisted up bad consequences with good, braided impossibilities into possibilities: the whole plan became a tangle, and was thrown aside.
The Tzar now sought to foster other good efforts, especially those made by some earnest nobles to free their serfs by will. But this plan, also, the serf-owning caste entangled and thwarted.
At last, the storm of war set in with such fury that all internal reforms must be lost sight of. Russia had to make ready for those campaigns in which Napoleon gained every battle. Then came that peaceful meeting on the raft at Tilsit,worse for Russia than any warlike meeting; for thereby Napoleon seduced Alexander, for years, from plans of bettering his Empire into dreams of extending it.
Coming out of these dreams, Alexander had to deal with such realities as the burning of Moscow, the Battle of Leipsic, and the occupation of France; yet, in the midst of those fearful times,when the grapple of the Emperors was at the fiercest,in the very year of the burning of Moscow,Alexander rose in calm statesmanship, and admitted Bessarabia into the Empire under a proviso which excluded serfage forever.
Hardly was the great European tragedy ended, when Alexander again turned sorrowfully toward the wronged millions of his Empire. He found that progress in civilization had but made the condition of the serfs worse. The newly ennobled parvenus were worse than the old boyars; they hugged the serf-system more lovingly and the serfs more hatefully.8