Russia under the Old regime

152

from slavery is not intended to exonerate serfdom; it is merely meant to shift attention from its imaginary to its real evils. It was unquestionably a dreadful institution, a disease whose scars Russia bears to this day. A survivor of Nazi concentration camps said of life there that it was not as bad as commonly believed and yet infinitely worse, by which he must have meant that the physical horrors meant less than the cumulative effect of daily dehumanization. Mutatis mutandis, and without drawing invidious comparisons between concentration camps and the Russian village under serfdom, we can say the same principle applies to the latter as well. Something fatal attends man's mastery over man, even when benevolently exercised, something which slowly poisons master and victim, and in the end disintegrates the society in which they live. We shall deal with the effects of serfdom on the landlords in the next chapter, and here concentrate on the influence it had on the peasant, especially on his attitude towards authority.

There exists broad agreement among contemporary observers that the worst feature of Russian serfdom was not the abuse of authority but its inherent arbitrariness, that is, the serf's permanent subjection to the unbridled will of other men. Robert Bremner, who in the passage cited above compared favourably the living standards of Russian peasants with those in Ireland and Scotland (pp. 151-2), goes on to say:

Let it not be supposed, however, that, because we admit the Russian peasant to be in many respects more comfortable than some of our own, we therefore consider his lot as,, on the whole, more enviable than that of the peasant in a free country like ours. The distance between them is wide -immeasurable; but it can be accounted for in one single word - the British peasant has rights; the Russian has none/12 In this respect the lot of the state peasant was not much different from that of a serf, at any rate until 1837 when he was placed in the charge of a special ministry (p. 70). Russian peasants did enjoy a great variety of customary rights. Although generally respected, they had no legally binding force which meant they could be violated with impunity. Prohibited from lodging complaints against landlords and indeed forbidden to appear in court, the peasant was completely defenceless vis-a-vis anyone in authority. Landlords, as we happen to know, made exceedingly rare use of their right to exile serfs to Siberia; but the mere fact that they could do so must have served as a very effective deterrent. This was only one of many manifestations of arbitrariness to which the serf was subjected. In the 1840s and 1850s, for example, anticipating emancipation, and hoping to reduce the number of peasants working in the fields so as to have fewer of them to share the land with, landlords quietly transferred to their manors to work as domestics over half a million serfs.