Russia under the Old regime

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temperate in his habits, and filthy in his person; but he never knows the misery to which the Irish peasant is exposed. His food may be coarse; but he has abundance of it. His hut may be homely; but it is dry and warm. We are apt to fancy that if our peasantry be badly off, we can at least flatter ourselves with the assurance that they are much more comfortable than those of foreign countries. But this is a gross delusion. Not in Ireland only, but in parts of Great Britain usually considered to be exempt from the miseries of Ireland, we have witnessed wretchedness compared with which the condition of the Russian boor is luxury, whether he live amid the crowded population of large towns, or in the meanest hamlets of the interior. There are parts of Scotland, for instance, where the people are lodged in houses which the Russian peasant would not think fit for his cattle.9 The evaluation of these witnesses carries the more weight that they had no sympathy whatever with serfdom or any other of the disabilities under which the vast majority of Russian peasants were then living.

It is particularly important to be disabused concerning alleged landlord brutality toward serfs. Foreign travellers to Russia - unlike visitors to the slave plantations of the Americas - hardly ever mention corporal punishment.* The violence endemic to the twentieth century and the attendant 'liberation' of sexual fantasy encourage modern man to indulge his sadistic impulses by projecting them on to the past: but the fact that he longs to maltreat others has no bearing on what actually happened when that had been possible. Serfdom was an economic institution not a closed world created for the gratification of sexual appetites. Isolated instances of cruelty are no evidence to the contrary. It is simply not good enough to cite the notorious case of one Saltykova, a sadistic landlady immortalized by historians, who whiled away her idle hours by torturing to death dozens of her domestic servants. She tells us about as much about imperial Russia as does Jack the Ripper about Victorian London. Where statistics happen to be available they indicate moderation in the use of disciplinary prerogatives. Every landlord, for example, had the power to turn unruly peasants over to the authorities for exile to Siberia. Between 1822 and 1833, 1,283 serfs were punished in this fashion; an annual average of 107 out of over twenty million proprietary serfs is hardly a staggering figure.10

For the serfs, the most onerous feature of landlord authority seems to have been interference with their family life and working habits. Landlords were eager to have serfs marry young, both because they wanted them to breed, and wished to put to work young women, who were customarily exempt from corvee until after marriage. Many landlords

Nor must it be forgotten that the Russian peasant did not share modern man's horror of this kind of punishment. When in the 1860s rural (volosC) courts were empowered to impose on peasants either monetary fines or physical punishment, it was found that most peasants, given the choice, preferred to suffer a beating.