Historians of unfreedom view serfdom and slavery as separate and distinct forms of bondage. Serfdom was a tenurial relationship: enserfed peasants were bound to the land they tilled but were not themselves the property of manorial overlords. In serf societies, land could be sold but the people who worked it could not. Serfs held customary tenurial rights and access to manorial courts for dispute resolution. Enslaved laborers, on the other hand, were themselves considered property; they could be bought and sold like property. They had no legal rights, including no formal property rights of their own and no access to civil institutions (like courts).
This distinction was not always so clear-cut, though, in literatures about unfreedom. For many early modern writers, the term “feudal” could be applied to any society that exhibited formal hierarchies and oppressive systems of bondage, including the nineteenth-century United States (as Keidrick Roy has recently shown). Since then, new knowledge about specific societies, derived from detailed analyses carried out over many decades of research, has made historians wary of such broad generalizations. We ask ourselves: how we can compare forms of unfreedom in the past, given that they were embedded in such diverse social, political, and economic contexts?
Peter Kolchin has accepted this challenge—twice. His award-winning 1987 study was a comparison of two seemingly disparate systems of bondage: slavery in the US and serfdom in Russia (Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom). Now he has produced this follow-up volume, in which he compares the end of slavery and serfdom in these same two societies. Like the first volume, Emancipation required Kolchin to synthesize an impressively vast secondary literature in multiple languages. It is, like the earlier study, an engaging read, full of detailed examples from specific localities that highlight similarities (and differences) between the two societies. But, like the first book, it also lacks a clear analytical framework or overarching narrative beyond the most general (both groups faced challenges, both underwent transformations).
Still, there is much value in this comparative exercise. Kolchin’s detailed descriptions can help bring a bigger picture into clearer focus. His first volume, for instance, helped this reader to better understand the ways in which Russian serfdom differed from European versions; that it was more like slavery in certain key respects. Similarly, a larger contrast emerges from the rich detail in Emancipation, a contrast that could form the basis for an overarching narrative about these two societies. Three aspects in particular stood out to me: differences in institutional and administrative development; differences in the nature and role of civil society; and the importance of existing narratives about freedom.
On the first of these, the juxtaposition of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the US and the peace mediators in Russia is a useful starting point. These entities were created to help the newly emancipated negotiate the path to freedom. Both were woefully understaffed and underfunded. Both faced hostility from entrenched interests in their efforts to assist former slaves and serfs. Both were relatively short-lived initiatives. But a closer look at their respective activities hints at vast differences in the institutional context in which they were embedded.
Officials in the Freedmen’s Bureau helped freed people navigate an existing civil infrastructure to which their new status gave them access: markets, contracts, courts, schools. The Freedmen’s Bureau created a school system for the newly emancipated, assisting with funding for day-to-day operations and the employment of teachers. It pushed for fairness in courts where southern judges were more inclined to rule in favor of white planters than former slaves. And it helped the formerly enslaved navigate the new world of contract labor, where at first planters held the upper hand, then in remarkably short order “…laborers made increasingly sophisticated use of the contracting process to better their conditions” (148). Some freed people accumulated enough in earnings to purchase property to which they could finally hold legal title. In the US, the land and labor markets, law and courts, contracts, and school systems were well established. It was freed people’s access to them that was new.
The administrative infrastructure in Russia was, by comparison, underdeveloped. Serfdom had enabled the crown to rely on noble landlords in the localities to perform administrative tasks such as the allocation of land among serfs, the levying and collection of state and local taxes, the maintenance of local infrastructure, the provision of conscripts for the military, and the administration of justice on estates. Thus, emancipation in Russia required something even more difficult than the integration of former serfs into an existing civil infrastructure: it required the creation of the infrastructure itself. A whole new set of institutions had to be designed and implemented alongside the Emancipation Act. Among these were foundational entities like rural peasant courts and representative organs of local governance (the zemstva). So, emancipation meant that everyone, including those tasked with staffing these new entities, had to suddenly navigate a whole new legal and political landscape. In this way, the peace mediators faced a less institutionally stable environment (even considering the upheavals of war in the US).
The most formidable obstacles to emancipation in Russia were resolved in ways that ultimately undermined freedom itself. Serfs were emancipated with land, whether they wanted it or not. They were forced to pay for this land, which was not granted to them in individual title. Rather, it was allocated collectively to communes as were the corresponding redemption fees. Communal authorities allocated land and fees among individual households. Withdrawal from the commune was only possible once a household had paid off its share of the cost of the land; alienation of the land or departure from the commune (even for temporary work) required community permission. This enabled an under-administered state to manage land allocation and the levying and collection of redemption fees and other obligations, but only by continuing to tie peasants to land. Russian peasants still migrated to urban areas in the period after emancipation, but obligations to the commune kept them firmly tethered to their villages, where, as Kolchin notes, freed people in the US south were increasingly mobile, without formal restrictions on their movement (203–5).
A second, related difference in the social structure of these two societies is brought to light by Kolchin’s study. In the southern US, a vibrant civil society provided vital assistance to the newly freed Black population. Voluntary organizations—religious, political, educational—had robust roots in American democracy. The same institutional framework that made it possible to contract, hold property, participate in politics, and express oneself freely also supported the formation of voluntary associations to practice religion, pursue political objectives, engage in charitable works, and a host of other activities. Kolchin highlights the proliferation of independent Black Christian churches in the US south and their significance to the struggle for freedom. Churches provided access to literacy and education and various forms of communal care for parishioners. They could also be (and often were) sites of political organization (298–301). Furthermore, the open nature of political organization and activism in the US offered ready models of engagement for freed people. Formerly enslaved Americans spent years observing their fate being hotly debated in the public sphere. When they were free to participate in civil society themselves, they made use of the existing scaffolding—forms of organization and discourses—to support their efforts.
In imperial Russia, civil society was anemic by comparison. Kolchin’s comparative exercise is challenged here, as there were no obvious analogies in the Russian countryside. Voluntary associations were neither encouraged nor well supported by the institutional structure, especially for the poor majority. Peasant religion and peasant cultural practices were not manifestations of civil society, but examples of rural cultures and belief systems that existed in some form in all pre-modern societies. And the Russian peasant commune was hardly a voluntary organization. (To be fair, Kolchin does not try to make a case that it was.) The asymmetry in the coverage of these aspects of civil life is remarkable.
Finally, Kolchin’s comparative study casts interesting light on the importance of narratives about freedom. Both enslaved Americans and Russian serfs had ways of articulating to themselves the injustice of bondage, including the view that land rightly belonged to those who tilled it (as in the oft-cited Russian expression “we belong to the Tsar but the land belongs to us,” 213). But what stands out about the American case (to this Russianist) is the significance of a greater national narrative about freedom and equality. Freed people in the southern US knew that they had rights, that they were entitled to equal treatment before the law. They knew that freedom and equality were fundamental to the very idea of America, that they were enshrined in the country’s founding documents. This narrative—a nation founded on liberty—served as both inspiration and legal justification in their fight for freedom.
None of this is to deny that freed people in the nineteenth-century US faced formidable challenges that their Russian counterparts did not know. Russian serfs were in the majority in Russia: the majority ethnic group, the majority socio-legal stratum (peasant), and (mostly) the majority religion (Orthodox Christian). Formerly enslaved Americans were, on the other hand, a racial minority brought to a foreign country against their will. The existence of formal legal rights and access to courts did not guarantee they would prevail against racist attitudes and concerted efforts to undermine their freedom. But these were valuable tools they could—and did—employ in their struggle for real emancipation. Moreover, these institutional differences have important implications for Kolchin’s claims about emancipation and the transition to “capitalism” and for our understanding of the divergent economic and political trajectories of these two societies since the mid-nineteenth century.
