Knowing how to “live” in history

The Day’s readers may remember a thematic series devoted to the 150th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire. Our newspaper’s regular contributors — the philosophers Igor Chubais (Moscow) and Serhii Hrabovsky (Kyiv) — have attempted to take a broad look at those events, touching upon not an abstract and theoretical but quite an urgent question of today: Was imperial Russia, in a way, an “extratemporal” state i.e. is it doomed to go through the same cycles of historical development over and over again? We offer our readers the polemical reflections of both academics.

 The 150th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom

When I reflected on the peasant reform, I arrived at the conclusion that, to begin with, we are living in a state that does not recognize history, in a state that has colossal historical experience which it constantly ignores — occasionally highlighting some events of the past, and reinterpreting, denying and hushing up the other. The Soviet-post-Soviet regime prohibits drawing a general and integrated picture of history because it is unable to learn its lessons, because the current shape of the state is incompatible with and runs counter to the history of our Fatherland. Pre-Soviet Russia was a creator of and a participant in global history. The Soviet-post-Soviet quasi-state exists outside history.

What are the grounds to assert that we have been outside time since the Bolshevik coup? I will try to prove this by presenting three storylines. Let us turn to the peasant reform.

Line one: our idea of serfdom.

I will begin with a small, albeit essential, explanation.

Owing to a number of circumstances, I learned history in a way that is opposite to the usual one. The Russian history that I was taught in a Soviet school was skin-deep and boiled down to a bottom line about a “wretched, downtrodden, uneducated, ‘bast-shoe,’ uncouth...” Russia. I can remember that a host of informal movements and associations, including the Russia Revival Movement, sprang up during perestroika. I could not understand what could be revived from a backward tsarist state. A year after the collapse of the USSR I abandoned my public activities — it seemed to me that all political issues had been settled and we lived in a free country, and resumed my research in hope of unraveling the mysteries and meanings of the Russian civilization.

I began studying my country’s history from square one and, thank God, the first book I came across was Sergei Solovyov’s Public Readings on Russian History. This small book changed me. I became aware of what a great country historical Russia used to be and how terribly the Leninist social science distorted and falsified its image. Since then I have read a host of texts written before and after that fatal October. But all that was written “after the event” is secondary for me — I pass it through the filter of Russian science. Many present-day authors are, unfortunately, in the opposite situation: they and their mentors are still looking at Russian statehood through the prism of the Bolshevik ideology that in fact has not been removed from the system of education (unlike schools in other countries, post-Soviet schools did not undergo lustration).

Now let me get back to the question: “What is our idea of serfdom?” I will single out a few typical errors.

A lot of school-leavers are convinced that the enslaved accounted for at least 90 percent of the population in 1861. In reality, they made up a little more than a fourth — to be more exact, 28 percent of all the residents. Serfdom also existed in one form or another in other European countries, for example, in Austria-Hungary. So Russia was not an exception.

It is absolutely wrong to identify serfdom with slavery, which we have never practiced. A serf had a house, a plot of land, and a family of his own. Since the times of the Great Northern War, serfs were to pay a tax to the state treasury (slaves never pay taxes!). I will also add a fact that the defilers of their own history won’t remember: slavery in America was abolished two years later than serfdom was in Russia.

Incidentally, serfdom, by contrast with the kolkhoz system, was economically viable: it kept and could continue to keep the country well fed. Moreover, to quote Russian historians Vishniakova and Picheta, our peasant serfs “were happier” than the free ones in the West because the free ones were landless and usually turned into powerless farm hands. Unlike them, our serfs were formally deprived of land and property, but in reality they treated the land plot they annually cultivated as one of their own. It looked like USSR apartments: housing was state-owned, but nobody could be evicted and every family saw its “square meters” as their own.

I will point out some other particularities that distinguish real serfdom from Soviet-post-Soviet myths. Under the existing regulations, in the case of crop failure or any other force majeure, the landlord was obliged to feed and take care of the peasants who belonged to him. To use Marxian parlance, a 1/2 level of exploitation was a norm — a peasant worked three days a week for his master and the remaining three for himself. One can judge the current “free” society by a different ratio: Elena Baturina’s income, declared in 2008, equaled the average monthly pay of 50,000 Russian teachers.

A few more issues. All Soviet children learned in school the horrible story of Darya Saltykova, dubbed Saltychikha. Like all the other things in Soviet history, this story simplified and doctored the real events. If you take a closer look at this picture, you will see that what happened to the young landlady was not at all a typical case. She suffered from a nervous breakdown which occurred when she caught her beloved man cheating on her with a servant girl. Saltykova’s tyranny came to an end immediately after two serfs had managed to run to a police station and tell them about what was going on. Following this, Darya was secured to a pillory, had her hair cut off, and was sent to a convent. Can you imagine that somebody will run today to the cops and tell them emotionally that someone is stealing from his office, university, or garden-growing cooperative? I am afraid that, as a result, this whistle-blower will sooner be put inside a madhouse than a criminal case be opened against the corrupt scum.

Speaking of the Soviet mythologization of serfdom (this concoction was especially needed in the times of collectivization and kulak-baiting), one should take into account another important detail. The abolition of serfdom was not a one-off unique epoch-making event. The process of social estates’ emancipation was brought into play as early as the late 18th century. It is landlords themselves and the nobility who were in fact enslaved. The Russian Army’s officer corps consisted of nobles who were obliged to serve until they were gravely wounded or reached an age when they were physically unable to shoulder the military burden. The position of the noble-born civil servants was a little different, but they, too, could not leave service at their own wish. The situation did not radically change until 1785, when Catherine the Great proclaimed the Charter for the Freedoms and Privileges of the Nobility. Following this, the other estates of Russian society, including burghers and merchants, won new rights and freedoms. (The Cossacks were free from the very beginning.) As a result, in those slow-moving times, it took Russian society fewer than 80 years to liberate itself.

Line two. Why was serfdom abolished? (For those who do and do not study history lessons.)

While the custodians of Soviet mythology reflect on their picture of reality, I will present a different story on the theme “Was there history then and is there history now?” Let me ask again: why on earth was serfdom abolished?

The question is all the more relevant because I wrote about serfdom’s economic effectiveness a little earlier in this article. Yes, the estates were becoming emancipated, but why were peasants liberated in 1861 and not in 1881 or, say, 1831? The chronological link of this very important decision becomes clear if you can see its real historical context.

And the context was that from the early 18th century on, over almost 150 years, the Russian Army remained the strongest in Europe. But after the 1709 victory over Charles XII near Poltava, the victory over Napoleon and the Russian parade in Paris in 1814, the country suffered an unexpected defeat in the Crimean war 40 years later. Naturally, this defeat did not even remotely resemble the fights of the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War: the enemy did not besiege Petersburg or reach Moscow and the Volga, but still an Anglo-Franco-Turkish force did land in the Crimea and shelled Sevastopol. I will add that in this war the Russian squadron of Admiral Nakhimov (by other sources, Nachimsohn) sank a threefold larger Turkish fleet in the Battle of Sinop. Incidentally, Nakhimov wielded an undeniable authority not only because he displayed conspicuous gallantry and heroism whenever it was needed. There were other reasons, too: lower-rank servicemen were never forced to build dachas for their superiors. On the contrary, Nakhimov would hand out almost all his pay to sailors.

Still, in spite of all these details, the defeat in the Crimean War was all too obvious, and in 1856 Russia had to sign a disadvantageous Treaty of Paris. After the emperor’s death, a year before the end of the war, it was widely rumored that Nicholas I did not die a natural death but poisoned himself, when he talked the physician-in-ordinary Mandt into giving him the poison. Moreover, Nicholas ordered in good time that his body should not be autopsied and embalmed. What is important here is not that historians question the authenticity of this version but that the 19th-century public opinion could not even dare to think that the anointed sovereign did not react to the news of defeat.

And how did the government really respond to serious errors in Russia’s policies? The response was a series of reforms carried out by Alexander II. Within five years of the end of the war, peasants were granted freedom and the tsar carried out the military, legal, and higher-education reforms. In a word, Russia did have a history — not only in the form of books by Karamzin, Solovyov, and then Klyuchevsky, which have been republished over the past 150 years (not a single Soviet manual of history is of any interest today), but also as a real basis for making strategic governmental decisions. (I want now to bury the shameful post-Soviet myth about “failure of all Russian reforms,” from Ivan III and Peter the Great to Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin. There were so many great social transformations! When shall we get rid of not only Soviet toponymy but also of Soviet mythology?!)

As for today, the absence of history is almost evident. The USSR does not exist for 20 years, the CIS has turned into “a cloud in pants,” though an aggressive Kurginian still holds sway on TV channels. We are constantly being told that the USSR collapsed due to somebody’s shady schemes and almost the entire progressive mankind is dreaming to resuscitate it. And a well-known presidential decree forbids drawing conclusions from the Great Patriotic War — by contrast with the Crimean War.

So I have to repeat: yes, we won in the war, but we never understood in which one precisely.

Yes, Stalin won, and not only in the Great Patriotic War but also in the concurrent civil war. For the first time in the 11 centuries of our Fatherland’s history, during a war, one million people (not just Vlasov alone) took up arms against their own government. This third force comprised the Russians and people of other ethnicities that populated the USSR. The guerrilla resistance to Bolshevism, which ended in the early 1950s (not in 1945), was widespread not only in the Baltic republics and western Ukraine, but also in primordial Russian regions.

There were great and very great victories in the history of Russia, but was the USSR victorious if the Soviet state collapsed 46 years after a red flag had been hoisted on the Reichstag, the global socialist camp and the world communist movement ceased to exist, and what seemed to be a victorious Soviet communist idea is now defunct?

We received no honest and clear answers to these questions neither 5 nor 65 years after the end of the war. But when we receive them at last, Russia will need more radical transformations that the reforms of Alexander II. 

 Knowing how to live is a difficult job that dates back to the Antiquity. It was at that time that the confrontation of the philosophers and the barbarians formed the knowledge of living in history as a complicated chain of qualitative changes, where everything depends on fate, the gods, kings, and heroes, where man and civic humankind choose and implemented a destiny by themselves in accordance with their own persuasions. History exists where there are citizens who create it. Where non-civil, and sometimes very stable, societies function (sometimes for centuries and even millennia) the course of history seems to be dying out or twisting into rings of perpetual rotation.

The history of Russia graphically demonstrates the difficulty of the problems linked with the real historicalness of national life and the awareness of this historicalness. Igor Chubais’s article is another confirmation of this.

We can only welcome the fervor of its main provisions about today’s Russia or Stalin’s “great victory.” But, for some reason, the author favorably compares the pre-1917 Russian Empire to the Bolshevik era and the present day, as a generally normal state capable of organically responding to foreign and domestic challenges, aimed at carrying out successful reforms and settling the burning issues, including serfdom, the 19th century’s chief problem. This raises serious doubts about Chubais’s arguments and conclusions.

Let us come back to the beginning. Was pre-Soviet Russia a participant in history? It surely was. But to what extent and in what periods? Muscovy was not a permanent participant in erstwhile European phenomena both economically and politically. Yes, conflicts periodically erupted with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it periodically tried to establish itself on the Baltic coast, but in general this was something mysterious and incomprehensible on, or even beyond, the fringes of European life. Even the Ottoman Porte and some other states were better prepared for this life. The contemporary French thinker Alain Besancon notes: “While the Kremlin found entertainment in watching a bear dancing on a hot iron plate, the Bakhchisarai khan’s court watched Moliere’s comedies.” The battles of Syni Vody (1362), Grunwald (1410), Khotyn (1621, 1673), and Vienna (1683), as well as others, which shaped the political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe for a century ahead, were fought without the participation of Muscovites.

But almost all those events involved Ukrainians and Belarusians who had never left the horizons of the European realm. This is, incidentally, one of the main problems of not only writing “joint history manuals” but also of shaping a common historical vision at the grassroots level.

The name Peter’s Village, that of a Russian-made coffee sold in Ukraine, is indicative here. This is hyped as Russia’s first coffee, a symbol of adherence to civilization. Meanwhile, well before this, Bohdan Khmelnytsky had treated Muscovites envoys to coffee (which made them spit) and then Yurii Kulchytsky taught the Viennese to drink it. And Vienna in turn taught Europe to do so. So the craze for coffee came from Europe to Muscovy a solid fifty years after the Ukrainian elite had been using it, and now this Peter’s Village is being brought here: look, we civilized you!

Actually, a common intellectual and sociocultural space between Muscovy and Europe began to form, albeit only at the highest elite level, in the late 17th century (before Peter I), which enabled the former to embrace at least some of European civilization’s achievements — above all, of a technological, rather than organizational and social, nature — not as “alien heresy” but as indispensable and practical things. Having ignored the school of Magdeburg Rights and bereft of self-contained universities, Muscovite cities were anything but the breeding grounds of freedom. To become free in Muscovy, an individual had to run away to where there were no genuine cities at all — to the faraway frontiers, to the Cossacks. This essentially remained the case later on, when the barbarian Russian Empire emerged in Eastern Europe, and Chubais in fact admits this when he asserts that even the nobility, let alone the peasants, were not free in the empire (let us add burghers to this). That was unfreedom from bottom to top, which had never existed in Europe (“the king is only the first nobleman”). Therefore, history there was the result of the free (sometimes too free and even simply mad) actions of society.

Indeed, the Charter for the Freedoms of the Nobility really opened up new horizons to Russia (could the poet Pushkin have grown and established himself in a barrack-room atmosphere?). But at what price? Two years before, serfdom had been fully extended to what used to be the Hetman’s State. And was it really freedom even for the nobility, if there was neither freedom of speech and conscience nor any elementary political liberties? The eminent thinker Chaadayev called his semi-free friends “bastards of Europe,” and was officially declared insane for having “wrong viewpoints.” It was not until after 1861 that the Russian Empire began to gradually embark on the road of reforms. But it did not become free because any forms of civic activity (especially political life) remained outlawed unless sanctioned by the government. Suffice it to recall the tragic destinies of those thousands of young people who “went to the people” in the mid-1870s with, at first, peaceful and educational intentions. It is the government that forced them to take up arms and turn into “urban guerrillas” who intended to destroy the empire.

Let us now dwell on a fundamental difference between the liberation of serfs in the Russian Empire and of black slaves in the US. In the latter case it was really a historic event: a bitter political struggle, years of debate in the free press, and, finally, the John Brown revolt and the civil war. Conversely, Russia could only discuss this problem and seek ways of solving it without any publicity — either in early-19th-century Masonic lodges or in certain associations of mid-century courtiers, or around an officer’s glass of vodka. “The 1861 reform caused a sever hunger for land in the countryside. This was exacerbated by a fast demographic growth of the rural population. As a result, agrarian overpopulation became one of the most characteristic economic features of the Ukrainian post-reform countryside. In 1914, 6 million out of 9.5 million of Ukrainian villagers were the descendants of serfs. They inhabited the same 4 million dessiatinas of land which had belonged in the 1860s to twice as small a number of their ancestors, whereas 7,000 Russian and Polish landlords inhabited 7.7 million dessiatinas,” historian Yaroslav Gritsak says. Only flaming idiots, pardon the expression, could carry out this kind of “reform” — after all, this inevitably lead to the 1917 peasant revolution.

Incidentally, 28 percent of serfs in the Russian Empire’s population is something like “average temperature in the hospital.” Shortly before the emancipation, in 1853, serfs accounted for a little more than half the population of the Kyiv, Volyn, and Podillia gubernias and about a third in the Chernihiv, Poltava, and Katerynoslav gubernias. Only in the Kherson gubernia did they constitute a small number (six percent). So it was a burning problem because the majority of the population located on the vast territories was in fact in a state of slavery. Here are a few dates. In 1760 landlords were granted the right to deport peasants not only to Siberia but also to hard labor. In 1767 peasants were strictly forbidden to file complaints against their masters. This last date is telling. In 1762 two serfs, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives Saltykova had flogged to death, which Chubais calls an “untypical occurrence,” miraculously managed to pass the petition over to Empress Catherine II who had just ascended the throne. Showing her adherence to the law, Catherine ordered this glaring case (75 deaths!) to be investigated in showpiece manner and punish the guilty. At the same time, she banned filing such complaints in the future…

Aptly enough, Pushkin referred to serfs as “slaves.”

I would also like to note that Chubais’s arguments in favor of serfdom strongly resemble those in favor of slavery in the US: who will care for the unfortunate Negroes better than a planter under the surveillance of an educated government? But in this case it is, naturally, not Negroes but just the stupid rabble which the landlord must even keep well-fed in case of a crop failure. And the rest must be just the small excesses of which Taras Shevchenko wrote:

We sell or lose at cards / The people… Not Negroes / But ordinary Christians…

So the government, scared by the Crimean War debacle, finally liberated them. But please do not call those times “slow” and say: what is 80 years in that era? In the same period the United States of America managed to create itself, win the war of independence, adopt two constitutions (the second of which, with some amendments, is still in force), wage another war of independence, expand its territory dozens of times over, and establish a powerful industry — only to split over the Negro slavery issue. And France in Europe? The 1789 revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a republic, Bonaparte, an empire, the conquest of almost the entire continental Western Europe, restoration, the 1830 revolution, a republic again, and an empire again… But the main thing is the Napoleonic Code, which laid the groundwork for continental civil law and, naturally, a victory over the Russian Empire in the above-mentioned Crimean War.

This “autocratic stupidity” and this distorted historical development, which also continued in the USSR as spirals of a closed time, is still keeping Russia (and partly Ukraine which is under the powerful influence of Moscow) in its current condition. Meanwhile, Great History keeps weaving its chimerical and still unread patterns.