Page 42 [42]
VICTORIA MCGOWAN
Bessarabians, and others) ended up in rural Alberta between 1905 (after the
first failed revolution) and 1930, where they created communities marked by
distinct traits, such as lower education levels, close kinship circles, language,
and a strong sense of group versus “others.” These traits, though not quite so
obvious now as they were decades ago, created a unique social and political
culture in Alberta that continues to impact Alberta and Canada today, and
by extension, continues to make the distant echoes of the Russian Revolution
felt in modern global society.
To understand how the October Revolution and its predecessor, the failed
Russian Revolution of 1905, created a new political culture halfway around the
world, we must first examine the following: who these revolutions affected,
how they affected people, and why only specific groups of these people came
to Alberta between 1905 and 1930. In order to understand these changes,
we must first look at pre-revolutionary Russian society, which established
the behaviours of future refugees. Prior to the revolutions, and indeed after
both revolutions, the vast majority of Russian citizens were semi-illiterate,
uneducated peasants, usually working in unfavorable relationships with
landholders or landholding groups, and with little chance to move out of poverty
or into a better life. For the purposes of this paper, we will define “peasant”
as an impoverished agrarian worker involved in subsistence farming with low
education and low social status. While there were many poor urban workers
as well who had a significant role to play in both revolutions, they were not
primarily the people who made up the outward flow of refugees from Russia
to Canada. The second definition required for this paper will understand the
term “Russia” to mean the geographical area of the pre-revolutionary Russian
Empire, and “Russian citizen” to mean the peoples within who were under the
authority of the government of the Russian Empire, which included ethnic
Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Bessarabians, Rumanians, and many others.
Serfdom in Russia began as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as
it did in many other European states. However, in many Western European
states, serfdom, which was essentially slightly less restrictive slavery, had
begun to wane centuries prior to the Russian Revolution. In England, serfdom
ended during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and in France, serfdom had
de facto ended by the mid-fourteenth century, though it was not formally
abolished until the French Revolution. In Russia however, serfdom existed
until its formal abolishment in 1861, though it essentially continued
unhindered, albeit with somewhat different legal contexts.” In 1857, sixty years
prior to the October Revolution and only four years before the abolishment
of serfdom, the official census listed peasants as making up more than 79% of
2 Evsey D. Domar — Mark J. Machina, On the Profitability of Russian Serfdom, The Journal of
Economic History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec. 1984), 919.
* 40 +