Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

In general, the men here use a very soft and specious language. They will tell you with the most benigu air that the Russian serfs are the happiest peasants upon earth. Do not listen to them, they deceive you : many families of serfs in distant cantons suffer even from hunger; many perish under poverty and ill treatment. In every class in Russia, humanity suffers ; and the men who are sold with the land suffer more than the others. It will be pretended that they are protected by a legal right to the necessaries of life; such right is but a mockery for those who have no means of enforcing it.

It will be further said that it is the interest of the nobles to relieve the wTants of their peasants. But does every man always understand his interests ? Among us, those who act foolishly lose their fortunes, and there is the end of it: but here, as the fortune of man consists in the life of a number of men, he who mismanages his property may cause whole villages to perish of famine. The government, when attracted by too glaring excesses, sometimes puts the unprincipled nobleman under guardianship; but this ever-tardy step does not restore the dead. The mass of sufferings and unknown iniquities that must be produced by such manners, under such a constitution, with so great distances and so dreadful a climate, may be easily imagined. It is difficult to breathe freely in Russia when we think of all these miseries.

The nobleman has, in the government of his estates, the same difficulties to contend with as regards the distances of places, the ignorance of facts, the influence of customs, and the intrigues of subalterns, that the emperor has in his wider sphere of action ; but