Owning the Earth by Andro Linklater

Author:Andro Linklater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The End of Serfdom and Slavery

In the 1850s, a Russian aristocrat who owned an estate, Yasnaya Polyana, about 120 miles south of Moscow kept a detailed diary of what life was like for someone of his class in the last days of the serf empire. Situated in fertile country, Yasnaya Polyana had measured almost ten thousand acres worked by eight hundred serfs when the nobleman inherited it in 1847, but he had already had to sell two thousand acres together with two hundred serfs to pay gambling debts he incurred, first as a student and later as an artillery officer in Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Following Russia’s defeat in 1857 by the combined armies of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, the aristocrat returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and his diary records many of the concerns that were common to any landowner: the state of the harvest, the slaughter of hogs, the collection of timber. But other entries could only have come from an owner with total control, including sexual rights, over those on his estate.

“A wonderful day,” he wrote for April 21, 1858. “Peasant women in the garden and by the well. I’m like a man possessed.” And the following month, “Today, in the big old wood. I’m a fool, a brute. Her bronze flesh and her eyes. I’m in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought. [She is] clean and not bad-looking, with bright black eyes, a deep voice, a scent of something fresh and strong and full breasts that lifted the bib of her apron.”

The one exceptional element in these encounters was the identity of the diarist, Count Leo Tolstoy; otherwise the sexual excitement of owning other people was as common to serfdom as to slavery. Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly more discreet in his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, but he was also more insightful than Tolstoy about its nature. “The whole commerce between master and slave,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”

Tolstoy’s reflections rarely went beyond paroxysms of self-loathing, mitigated by blaming the serf women for what had happened, but Jefferson was tormented by the injustice of the relationship and its corrosive effects, both personal and social—“can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”

The 1860s marked one of the great watersheds in the history of individual liberty when some forty-seven million serfs and four million slaves were set free, and the most powerful serf and slave economies in the world were destroyed. Each liberation was the outcome of war, but while the abolition of slavery in the United

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