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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 +
