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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 +
