Political Thought of Yu by Loren David Calder

Author:Loren David Calder [Calder, Loren David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780824080525
Google: xS1DAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 4988818
Publisher: Garland
Published: 1987-01-15T00:27:23+00:00

CHAPTER V

The Laboratory of Serfdom

Vladimir Klyuchevsky described the peasant problem as “the most difficult question ever resolved by the Russian people in the whole course of their history.”599 The Great Emancipation of 1861 which ‘resolved’ the problem was described by Terence Emmons, a less illustrious but nevertheless competent present-day American historian, as “an epochal event in the life of the Russian state and … in the history of human bondage,” at one point, and at another, as “probably the most ambitious piece of social engineering in the history of modern Europe to the twentieth century.”600 The condition of serfdom abolished by emancipation was a rigid system of control over the peasants which had evolved over five centuries. At critical junctures in its evolution, such as 1497, when Ivan III restricted the peasants’ right to move, and 1649, when Tsar Alexis issued a statute placing the peasants in bondage, legislation was promulgated to confirm conditions which already existed in fact. By 1856 the iniquitous situation created by serfdom threatened a horrendous social catastrophe, so that the autocratic government of Axexander II acted deliberately to forestall it by legislative measures designed to establish entirely new conditions between landlords and peasants. Samarin and other enlightened and progressive noblemen like him, conscious of the inefficiencies and injustices of serfdom and fearful of a violent revolution if timely changes were not made, played an important role in drafting this legislation.601

599V.O. Klyuchevsky, “Krepostnoy vopros nakanune ego zakonodatel ‘nogo vozbuzhdeniya. Razbor vtorogo toma sochinepiy Yu. F. Samarina,” Sochineniya (Moscow, 1959) VII, 114.

600P.A. Zaionchkovsky, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, ed. and trans S. Wobst, Intro. Terence Emmons (Gulf Breeze, Florida: Academic International Press, 1978), p.vii and viii.

601Klyuchevsky calls Samarin “an educated and intelligent landlord, who long before the legislative solution of the peasant question thought much about how to resolve it … it forced him, a philosopher and theologian, to become an agricultural boss (khozyain).” Klyuchevsky “Krepostnoy vopros,” p. 107. Zaionchkovsky, the outstanding Soviet historian, identifies the Slavophils K.S. and I.S. Aksakov, I.V. and P.V. Kireyevsky, A.S. Khomiakov, and A.I. Koshelev as liberal thinkers and states that “pre-reform liberalism was undoubtedly a progressive ideology.” Zaionchkovsky, pp. 32-33.

Samarin brought wide experience and great knowledge to the task of destroying serfdom. He had studied the question of peasant reform in Latvia. He had studied peasant-landlord relationships in the Ukraine when inventories were being introduced to regulate those relationships. Personal service in both of these regions had helped to broaden his experiential base, as had administering his father’s estates in the Samara region. As a scholar he had devoted serious study to the political and economic aspects of reform, and in addition he had a firm ideological commitment to freeing the peasantry. Undoubtedly, this preparation made it possible for him to speak out as an authority and promoted his career as an agent of peasant reform.

A simple measure of Samarin’s commitment to reform is the extensiveness of his writings on the subject. They comprise three volumes of his Sochineniya, and encompass 1,534 pages of text.

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