Human Rights in World History by Peter N. Stearns

Author:Peter N. Stearns [Stearns, Peter N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, General, Political Science, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780415507950
Google: iMfe5nRRzNwC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T01:16:22+00:00

The Russian experience

Russia’s official response to human rights interests during the first half of the 19th century can be summed up quite simply: frontal resistance. Beginning with Catherine the Great’s tightening of controls over publications, including imported materials, in the late 18th century, the Russian regime was dead set against the currents of reform bubbling up in Western Europe. It even participated actively in several efforts to put down uprisings in other areas, intervening for example against a Hungarian revolt as late as 1848–1849. Russians who advocated change were jailed, sent to Siberia, or exiled. At the policy level, human rights were actually in retreat.

Complete suppression, however, proved impossible. Individual writers (risking imprisonment) railed against the institution of serfdom, arguing both that it was contrary to human rights, an inherently unjust system, and that in practice it held back the Russian economy by generating the only grudging work performance from the oppressed peasantry. In 1825 a movement of liberal army officers, strongly influenced by Western ideas, rose against a new Russian emperor, seeking legal equality and an end to serfdom, and advocating limitations on the government and other reforms. Their political platform was vague, beyond the legal equality point, and their rising was firmly quashed. But this Decembrist revolt created lasting memories in Russia, keeping interest in political justice alive. Exiles like the poet Alexander Herzen (often based in London) kept up a steady stream of criticisms of the regime. Herzen at one point launched a newspaper, in exile, pointedly entitled the Free Russian Press.

Then, in the 1860s, reform finally arrived. The trigger was the issue of serfdom. An exceptionally severe rural labor system had developed in Russia over several centuries. Landlords wielded disproportionate control of the best land, but beyond this, they also exercised extensive rights over serfs to impose labor objections for their estates while exacting various payments. Further, they had substantial powers to punish serfs, not infrequently imposing stark physical discipline. The overall system was one of the harshest in world history short of outright slavery.

Obviously, Russian serfdom was an easy target for reformers concerned with legal equality and other rights. This is why it drew criticism from many individual Russians, including members of the upper class, who had been exposed to Western values. Even before 1800, Aleksandr Radishchev had attacked the “inequality of treatment” that serfdom imposed, while noting that many serfs—“dead to the law”—had no legal protections of any sort. Decembrists and other reformers, including the exiles, also blasted serfdom through the language of legal rights. Various writings attacking serfdom began to circulate extensively among the upper and middle classes, evading government censorship efforts and building a larger audience for ideas about social justice. By the 1850s, however, serfdom was vulnerable to other criticisms as well. It generated recurrent social unrest, which gave even an authoritarian government reasons for concern. The system also seemed inefficient, constraining the mobility and motivation of labor at a time when the Russian economy was measurably falling behind levels of industrializing Western Europe.

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