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EASTERN PEOPLE ON WESTERN PRAIRIES...
the total Russian population; of these peasants, just under half (approximately
46% of the total) were considered to be privately owned serfs, while the rest
were owned by the state.* Peasants and serfs were a considerable part of the
Russian consciousness. For example, one of the first Russian novels, Dead
Souls, published in 1842 by Nikolai Gogol, revolved around a tax scheme
made possible by the legal status of serfs. At the time, taxes were based on
property (including serfs). Censuses were rarely performed, so most estates
paid taxes on at least one or two serfs or “souls” who had actually died since
the last tax evaluation. The novel features a man attempting to buy these so
called “dead souls” and though it discusses serfdom at length, it does not
critique it or see a problem with the continued use of serfs, nor are the serfs
given the status of individual characters; the society it seeks to critique is
the small middle class of semi-urbanized townspeople and the lowest class
of noble landowners.* The individual serfs themselves were too low to be
considered, beyond their legal qualifiers as taxable property. Following
the official end of serfdom, former serfs made up much of the vast peasant
majority that continued to dominate the makeup of citizens of the Russian
Empire. While peasants could no longer be considered property, and were
not legally bound to the land as such, they remained attached to the land via
debts to landowners, the difficulty in travelling through the vast, often harsh,
northern, rural, European climate, and family, village, and kinship ties.
With only sixty years between the end of serfdom and the outbreak of the
October Revolution, Russian society remained largely rural and uneducated,
with little time for advancement socially, economically, or politically. In order
to avoid accidentally developing a teleological approach which suggests that
modern society inherently arises following the cessation of serfdom, two
things should be noted here. Firstly, if Russia was following the teleological
progression sometimes derived from the Western European experience, it
managed to cover advancements that took other countries several centuries
between the abolishment of serfdom in 1861 and the beginning of the Russian
Industrial Revolution experience that occurred around 1870.° Secondly, due
in part to its vast size and northern climate, it was far more difficult for
peasants to travel to urban centres in an attempt to improve their station
in life, greatly reducing relative levels of urbanization. Unlike France and
Germany, countries 27 and 48 times smaller than Russia respectively, Russia
had under a hundred major industrial production centres.® Russia did,
® David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made, London,
Longman, 1999, 204-205.
* Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. D. J. Hogarth, Standard ebooks edition, 2017.
° lan Inkster, Lessons of the Past? Technology Transfer and Russian Industrialization in
Comparative Perspective, Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1998), 309.
6 Ibid., 311.
+ Al +