XXVIII. THE SERFS…

XXVIII. THE SERFS

The Rural Population in Ancient Times--The Peasantry in the Eighteenth Century--How Was This Change Effected?--The Common Explanation Inaccurate--Serfage the Result of Permanent Economic and Political Causes--Origin of the Adscriptio Glebae--Its Consequences--Serf Insurrection--Turning-point in the History of Serfage--Serfage in Russia and in Western Europe--State Peasants--Numbers and Geographical Distribution of the Serf Population--Serf Dues--Legal and Actual Power of the Proprietors--The Serfs' Means of Defence--Fugitives--Domestic Serfs--Strange Advertisements in the Moscow Gazette--Moral Influence of Serfage.

Before proceeding to describe the Emancipation, it may be well to explain briefly how the Russian peasants became serfs, and what serfage in Russia really was.

In the earliest period of Russian history the rural population was composed of three distinct classes. At the bottom of the scale stood the slaves, who were very numerous. Their numbers were continually augmented by prisoners of war, by freemen who voluntarily sold themselves as slaves, by insolvent debtors, and by certain categories of criminals. Immediately above the slaves were the free agricultural labourers, who had no permanent domicile, but wandered about the country and settled temporarily where they happened to find work and satisfactory remuneration. In the third place, distinct from these two classes, and in some respects higher in the social scale, were the peasants properly so called.*

* My chief authority for the early history of the peasantry has been Belaef, "Krestyanye na Rusi," Moscow, 1860; a most able and conscientious work.

These peasants proper, who may be roughly described as small farmers or cottiers, were distinguished from the free agricultural labourers in two respects: they were possessors of land in property or usufruct, and they were members of a rural Commune. The Communes were free primitive corporations which elected their office-bearers from among the heads of families, and sent delegates to act as judges or assessors in the Prince's Court. Some of the Communes possessed land of their own, whilst others were settled on the estates of the landed proprietors or on the extensive domains of the monasteries. In the latter case the peasant paid a fixed yearly rent in money, in produce, or in labour, according to the terms of his contract with the proprietor or the monastery; but he did not thereby sacrifice in any way his personal liberty. As soon as he had fulfilled the engagements stipulated in the contract and had settled accounts with the owner of the land, he was free to change his domicile as he pleased.

If we turn now from these early times to the eighteenth century, we find that the position of the rural population has entirely changed in the interval. The distinction between slaves, agricultural labourers, and peasants has completely disappeared. All three categories have melted together into a common class, called serfs, who are regarded as the property of the landed proprietors or of the State. "The proprietors sell their peasants and domestic servants not even in families, but one by one, like cattle, as is done nowhere else in the whole world, from which practice there is not a little wailing."* And yet the Government, whilst professing to regret the existence of the practice, takes no energetic measures to prevent it. On the contrary, it deprives the serfs of all legal protection, and expressly commands that if any serf shall dare to present a petition against his master, he shall be punished with the knout and transported for life to the mines of Nertchinsk. (Ukaz of August 22d, 1767.**)

* These words are taken from an Imperial ukaz of April 15th, 1721. Polnoye Sobranye Zakonov, No. 3,770.

** This is an ukaz of the liberal and tolerant Catherine! How she reconciled it with her respect and admiration for Beccaria's humane views on criminal law she does not explain.

How did this important change take place, and how is it to be explained?

If we ask any educated Russian who has never specially occupied himself with historical investigations regarding the origin of serfage in Russia, he will probably reply somewhat in this fashion:

"In Russia slavery has never existed (!), and even serfage in the West-European sense has never been recognised by law! In ancient times the rural population was completely free, and every peasant might change his domicile on St. George's Day--that is to say, at the end of the agricultural year. This right of migration was abolished by Tsar Boris Godunof--who, by the way, was half a Tartar and more than half a usurper--and herein lies the essence of serfage in the Russian sense. The peasants have never been the property of the landed proprietors, but have always been personally free; and the only legal restriction on their liberty was that they were not allowed to change their domicile without the permission of the proprietor. If so-called serfs were sometimes sold, the practice was simply an abuse not justified by legislation."

This simple explanation, in which may be detected a note of patriotic pride, is almost universally accepted in Russia; but it contains, like most popular conceptions of the distant past, a curious mixture of fact and fiction. Serious historical investigation tends to show that the power of the proprietors over the peasants came into existence, not suddenly, as the result of an ukaz, but gradually, as a consequence of permanent economic and political causes, and that Boris Godunof was not more to blame than many of his predecessors and successors.*

* See especially Pobedonostsef, in the Russki Vestnik, 1858, No. 11, and "Istoritcheskiya izsledovaniya i statyi" (St. Petersburg, 1876), by the same author; also Pogodin, in the Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4.

Although the peasants in ancient Russia were free to wander about as they chose, there appeared at a very early period--long before the reign of Boris Godunof--a decided tendency in the Princes, in the proprietors, and in the Communes, to prevent migration. This tendency will be easily understood if we remember that land without labourers is useless, and that in Russia at that time the population was small in comparison with the amount of reclaimed and easily reclaimable land. The Prince desired to have as many inhabitants as possible in his principality, because the amount of his regular revenues depended on the number of the population. The landed proprietor desired to have as many peasants as possible on his estate, to till for him the land which he reserved for his own use, and to pay him for the remainder a yearly rent in money, produce, or labour. The free Communes desired to have a number of members sufficient to keep the whole of the Communal land under cultivation, because each Commune had to pay yearly to the Prince a fixed sum in money or agricultural produce, and the greater the number of able-bodied members, the less each individual had to pay. To use the language of political economy, the Princes, the landed proprietors, and the free Communes all appeared as buyers in the labour market; and the demand was far in excess of the supply. Nowadays when young colonies or landed proprietors in an outlying corner of the world are similarly in need of labour, they seek to supply the want by organising a regular system of importing labourers--using illegal violent means, such as kidnapping expeditions, merely as an exceptional expedient. In old Russia any such regularly organised system was impossible, and consequently illegal or violent measures were not the exception, but the rule. The chief practical advantage of the frequent military expeditions for those who took part in them was the acquisition of prisoners of war, who were commonly transformed into slaves by their captors. If it be true, as some assert, that only unbaptised prisoners were legally considered lawful booty, it is certain that in practice, before the unification of the principalities under the Tsars of Moscow, little distinction was made in this respect between unbaptised foreigners and Orthodox Russians.* A similar method was sometimes employed for the acquisition of free peasants: the more powerful proprietors organised kidnapping expeditions, and carried off by force the peasants settled on the land of their weaker neighbours.

* On this subject see Tchitcherin, "Opyty po istorii Russkago prava," Moscow, 1858, p. 162 et seq.; and Lokhvitski, "O plennykh po drevnemu Russkomu pravu," Moscow, 1855.

Under these circumstances it was only natural that those who possessed this valuable commodity should do all in their power to keep it. Many, if not all, of the free Communes adopted the simple measure of refusing to allow a member to depart until he had found some one to take his place. The proprietors never, so far as we know, laid down formally such a principle, but in practice they did all in their power to retain the peasants actually settled on their estates. For this purpose some simply employed force, whilst others acted under cover of legal formalities. The peasant who accepted land from a proprietor rarely brought with him the necessary implements, cattle, and capital to begin at once his occupations, and to feed himself and his family till the ensuing harvest. He was obliged, therefore, to borrow from his landlord, and the debt thus contracted was easily converted into a means of preventing his departure if he wished to change his domicile. We need not enter into further details. The proprietors were the capitalists of the time. Frequent bad harvests, plagues, fires, military raids, and similar misfortunes often reduced even prosperous peasants to beggary. The muzhik was probably then, as now, only too ready to accept a loan without taking the necessary precautions for repaying it. The laws relating to debt were terribly severe, and there was no powerful judicial organisation to protect the weak. If we remember all this, we shall not be surprised to learn that a considerable part of the peasantry were practically serfs before serfage was recognised by law.

So long as the country was broken up into independent principalities, and each land-owner was almost an independent Prince on his estate, the peasants easily found a remedy for these abuses in flight. They fled to a neighbouring proprietor who could protect them from their former landlord and his claims, or they took refuge in a neighbouring principality, where they were, of course, still safer. All this was changed when the independent principalities were transformed into the Tsardom of Muscovy. The Tsars had new reasons for opposing the migration of the peasants and new means for preventing it. The old Princes had simply given grants of land to those who served them, and left the grantee to do with his land what seemed good to him; the Tsars, on the contrary, gave to those who served them merely the usufruct of a certain quantity of land, and carefully proportioned the quantity to the rank and the obligations of the receiver. In this change there was plainly a new reason for fixing the peasants to the soil. The real value of a grant depended not so much on the amount of land as on the number of peasants settled on it, and hence any migration of the population was tantamount to a removal of the ancient landmarks--that is to say, to a disturbance of the arrangements made by the Tsar. Suppose, for instance, that the Tsar granted to a Boyar or some lesser dignitary an estate on which were settled twenty peasant families, and that afterwards ten of these emigrated to neighbouring proprietors. In this case the recipient might justly complain that he had lost half of his estate--though the amount of land was in no way diminished--and that he was consequently unable to fulfil his obligations. Such complaints would be rarely, if ever, made by the great dignitaries, for they had the means of attracting peasants to their estates;* but the small proprietors had good reason to complain, and the Tsar was bound to remove their grievances. The attaching of the peasants to the soil was, in fact, the natural consequence of feudal tenures--an integral part of the Muscovite political system. The Tsar compelled the nobles to serve him, and was unable to pay them in money. He was obliged, therefore, to procure for them some other means of livelihood. Evidently the simplest method of solving the difficulty was to give them land, with a certain number of labourers, and to prevent the labourers from migrating.

* There are plain indications in the documents of the time that the great dignitaries were at first hostile to the adscriptio glebae. We find a similar phenomenon at a much more recent date in Little Russia. Long after serfage had been legalised in that region by Catherine II., the great proprietors, such as Rumyantsef, Razumofski, Bezborodko, continued to attract to their estates the peasants of the smaller proprietors. See the article of Pogodin in the Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4, p. 154.

Towards the free Communes the Tsar had to act in the same way for similar reasons. The Communes, like the nobles, had obligations to the Sovereign, and could not fulfil them if the peasants were allowed to migrate from one locality to another. They were, in a certain sense, the property of the Tsar, and it was only natural that the Tsar should do for himself what he had done for his nobles.

With these new reasons for fixing the peasants to the soil came, as has been said, new means of preventing migration. Formerly it was an easy matter to flee to a neighbouring principality, but now all the principalities were combined under one ruler, and the foundations of a centralised administration were laid. Severe fugitive laws were issued against those who attempted to change their domicile and against the proprietors who should harbour the runaways. Unless the peasant chose to face the difficulties of "squatting" in the inhospitable northern forests, or resolved to brave the dangers of the steppe, he could nowhere escape the heavy hand of Moscow.*

* The above account of the origin of serfage in Russia is founded on a careful examination of the evidence which we possess on the subject, but I must not conceal the fact that some of the statements are founded on inference rather than on direct, unequivocal documentary evidence. The whole question is one of great difficulty, and will in all probability not be satisfactorily solved until a large number of the old local Land-Registers (Pistsoviya Knigi) have been published and carefully studied.

The indirect consequences of thus attaching the peasants to the soil did not at once become apparent. The serf retained all the civil rights he had hitherto enjoyed, except that of changing his domicile. He could still appear before the courts of law as a free man, freely engage in trade or industry, enter into all manner of contracts, and rent land for cultivation.

But as time wore on, the change in the legal relation between the two classes became apparent in real life. In attaching the peasantry to the soil, the Government had been so thoroughly engrossed with the direct financial aim that it entirely overlooked, or wilfully shut its eyes to, the ulterior consequences which must necessarily flow from the policy it adopted. It was evident that as soon as the relation between proprietor and peasant was removed from the region of voluntary contract by being rendered indissoluble, the weaker of the two parties legally tied together must fall completely under the power of the stronger, unless energetically protected by the law and the Administration. To this inevitable consequence the Government paid no attention. So far from endeavouring to protect the peasantry from the oppression of the proprietors, it did not even determine by law the mutual obligations which ought to exist between the two classes. Taking advantage of this omission, the proprietors soon began to impose whatever obligations they thought fit; and as they had no legal means of enforcing fulfilment, they gradually introduced a patriarchal jurisdiction similar to that which they exercised over their slaves, with fines and corporal punishment as means of coercion. From this they ere long proceeded a step further, and began to sell their peasants without the land on which they were settled. At first this was merely a flagrant abuse unsanctioned by law, for the peasant had never been declared the private property of the landed proprietor; but the Government tacitly sanctioned the practice, and even exacted dues on such sales, as on the sale of slaves. Finally the right to sell peasants without land was formally recognised by various Imperial ukazes.*

* For instance, the ukazes of October 13th, 1675, and June 25th, 1682. See Belaef, pp. 203-209.

The old Communal organisation still existed on the estates of the proprietors, and had never been legally deprived of its authority, but it was now powerless to protect the members. The proprietor could easily overcome any active resistance by selling or converting into domestic servants the peasants who dared to oppose his will.

The peasantry had thus sunk to the condition of serfs, practically deprived of legal protection and subject to the arbitrary will of the proprietors; but they were still in some respects legally and actually distinguished from the slaves on the one hand and the "free wandering people" on the other. These distinctions were obliterated by Peter the Great and his immediate successors.

To effect his great civil and military reforms, Peter required an annual revenue such as his predecessors had never dreamed of, and he was consequently always on the look-out for some new object of taxation. When looking about for this purpose, his eye naturally fell on the slaves, the domestic servants, and the free agricultural labourers. None of these classes paid taxes--a fact which stood in flagrant contradiction with his fundamental principle of polity, that every subject should in some way serve the State. He caused, therefore, a national census to be taken, in which all the various classes of the rural population--slaves, domestic servants, agricultural labourers, peasants--should be inscribed in one category; and he imposed equally on all the members of this category a poll-tax, in lieu of the former land-tax, which had lain exclusively on the peasants. To facilitate the collection of this tax the proprietors were made responsible for their serfs; and the "free wandering people" who did not wish to enter the army were ordered, under pain of being sent to the galleys, to inscribe themselves as members of a Commune or as serfs to some proprietor.

These measures had a considerable influence, if not on the actual position of the peasantry, at least on the legal conceptions regarding them. By making the proprietor pay the poll-tax for his serfs, as if they were slaves or cattle, the law seemed to sanction the idea that they were part of his goods and chattels. Besides this, it introduced the entirely new principle that any member of the rural population not legally attached to the land or to a proprietor should be regarded as a vagrant, and treated accordingly. Thus the principle that every subject should in some way serve the State had found its complete realisation. There was no longer any room in Russia for free men.

The change in the position of the peasantry, together with the hardships and oppression by which it was accompanied, naturally increased fugitivism and vagrancy. Thousands of serfs ran away from their masters and fled to the steppe or sought enrolment in the army. To prevent this the Government considered it necessary to take severe and energetic measures. The serfs were forbidden to enlist without the permission of their masters, and those who persisted in presenting themselves for enrolment were to be beaten "cruelly" (zhestoko) with the knout, and sent to the mines.* The proprietors, on the other hand, received the right to transport without trial their unruly serfs to Siberia, and even to send them to the mines for life.**

* Ukaz of June 2d, 1742.

** See ukaz of January 17th, 1765, and of January 28th, 1766.

If these stringent measures had any effect it was not of long duration, for there soon appeared among the serfs a still stronger spirit of discontent and insubordination, which threatened to produce a general agrarian rising, and actually did create a movement resembling in many respects the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant War in Germany. A glance at the causes of this movement will help us to understand the real nature of serfage in Russia.

Up to this point serfage had, in spite of its flagrant abuses, a certain theoretical justification. It was, as we have seen, merely a part of a general political system in which obligatory service was imposed on all classes of the population. The serfs served the nobles in order that the nobles might serve the Tsar. In 1762 this theory was entirely overturned by a manifesto of Peter III. abolishing the obligatory service of the Noblesse. According to strict justice this act ought to have been followed by the liberation of the serfs, for if the nobles were no longer obliged to serve the State they had no just claim to the service of the peasants. The Government had so completely forgotten the original meaning of serfage that it never thought of carrying out the measure to its logical consequences, but the peasantry held tenaciously to the ancient conceptions, and looked impatiently for a second manifesto liberating them from the power of the proprietors. Reports were spread that such a manifesto really existed, and was being concealed by the nobles. A spirit of insubordination accordingly appeared among the rural population, and local insurrections broke out in several parts of the Empire.

At this critical moment Peter III. was dethroned and assassinated by a Court conspiracy. The peasants, who, of course, knew nothing of the real motives of the conspirators, supposed that the Tsar had been assassinated by those who wished to preserve serfage, and believed him to be a martyr in the cause of Emancipation. At the news of the catastrophe their hopes of Emancipation fell, but soon they were revived by new rumours. The Tsar, it was said, had escaped from the conspirators and was in hiding. Soon he would appear among his faithful peasants, and with their aid would regain his throne and punish the wicked oppressors. Anxiously he was awaited, and at last the glad tidings came that he had appeared in the Don country, that thousands of Cossacks had joined his standard, that he was everywhere putting the proprietors to death without mercy, and that he would soon arrive in the ancient capital!

Peter III. was in reality in his grave, but there was a terrible element of truth in these reports. A pretender, a Cossack called Pugatchef, had really appeared on the Don, and had assumed the role which the peasants expected the late Tsar to play. Advancing through the country of the Lower Volga, he took several places of importance, put to death all the proprietors he could find, defeated on more than one occasion the troops sent against him, and threatened to advance into the heart of the Empire. It seemed as if the old troublous times were about to be renewed--as if the country was once more to be pillaged by those wild Cossacks of the southern steppe. But the pretender showed himself incapable of playing the part he had assumed. His inhuman cruelty estranged many who would otherwise have followed him, and he was too deficient in decision and energy to take advantage of favourable circumstances. If it be true that he conceived the idea of creating a peasant empire (muzhitskoe tsarstvo), he was not the man to realise such a scheme. After a series of mistakes and defeats he was taken prisoner, and the insurrection was quelled.*

*Whilst living among the Bashkirs of the province of Samara in 1872 I found some interesting traditions regarding this pretender. Though nearly a century had elapsed since his death (1775), his name, his personal appearance, and his exploits were well known even to the younger generation. My informants firmly believed that he was not an impostor, but the genuine Tsar, dethroned by his ambitious consort, and that he never was taken prisoner, but "went away into foreign lands." When I asked whether he was still alive, and whether he might not one day return, they replied that they did not know.

Meanwhile Peter III. had been succeeded by his consort, Catherine II. As she had no legal right to the throne, and was by birth a foreigner, she could not gain the affections of the people, and was obliged to court the favour of the Noblesse. In such a difficult position she could not venture to apply her humane principles to the question of serfage. Even during the first years of her reign, when she had no reason to fear agrarian disturbances, she increased rather than diminished the power of the proprietors over their serfs, and the Pugatchef affair confirmed her in this line of policy. During her reign serfage may be said to have reached its climax. The serfs were regarded by the law as part of the master's immovable property*--as part of the working capital of the estate--and as such they were bought, sold, and given as presents** in hundreds and thousands, sometimes with the land, and sometimes without it, sometimes in families, and sometimes individually. The only legal restriction was that they should not be offered for sale at the time of the conscription, and that they should at no time be sold publicly by auction, because such a custom was considered as "unbecoming in a European State." In all other respects the serfs might be treated as private property; and this view is to be found not only in the legislation, but also in the popular conceptions. It became customary--a custom that continued down to the year 1861--to compute a noble's fortune, not by his yearly revenue or the extent of his estate, but by the number of his serfs. Instead of saying that a man had so many hundreds or thousands a year, or so many acres, it was commonly said that he had so many hundreds or thousands of "souls." And over these "souls" he exercised the most unlimited authority. The serfs had no legal means of self-defence. The Government feared that the granting to them of judicial or administrative protection would inevitably awaken in them a spirit of insubordination, and hence it was ordered that those who presented complaints should be punished with the knout and sent to the mines.*** It was only in extreme cases, when some instance of atrocious cruelty happened to reach the ears of the Sovereign, that the authorities interfered with the proprietor's jurisdiction, and these cases had not the slightest influence on the proprietors in general.****

* See ukaz of October 7th, 1792.

** As an example of making presents of serfs, the following may be cited. Count Panin presented some of his subordinates for an Imperial recompense, and on receiving a refusal, made them a present of 4000 serfs from his own estates.--Belaef, p. 320.

*** See the ukazes of August 22d, 1767, and March 30th, 1781.

**** Perhaps the most horrible case on record is that of a certain lady called Saltykof, who was brought to justice in 1768. According to the ukaz regarding her crimes, she had killed by inhuman tortures in the course of ten or eleven years about a hundred of her serfs, chiefly of the female sex, and among them several young girls of eleven and twelve years of age. According to popular belief her cruelty proceeded from cannibal propensities, but this was not confirmed by the judicial investigation. Details in the Russki Arkhiv, 1865, pp. 644-652. The atrocities practised on the estate of Count Araktcheyef, the favourite of Alexander I. at the commencement of last century, have been frequently described, and are scarcely less revolting.

The last years of the eighteenth century may be regarded as the turning-point in the history of serfage. Up till that time the power of the proprietors had steadily increased, and the area of serfage had rapidly expanded. Under the Emperor Paul (1796-1801) we find the first decided symptoms of a reaction. He regarded the proprietors as his most efficient officers of police, but he desired to limit their authority, and for this purpose issued an ukaz to the effect that the serfs should not be forced to work for their masters more than three days in the week. With the accession of Alexander I., in 1801, commenced a long series of abortive projects for a general emancipation, and endless attempts to correct the more glaring abuses; and during the reign of Nicholas no less than six committees were formed at different times to consider the question. But the practical result of these efforts was extremely small. The custom of giving grants of land with peasants was abolished; certain slight restrictions were placed on the authority of the proprietors; a number of the worst specimens of the class were removed from the administration of their estates; a few who were convicted of atrocious cruelty were exiled to Siberia;* and some thousands of serfs were actually emancipated; but no decisive radical measures were attempted, and the serfs did not receive even the right of making formal complaints. Serfage had, in fact, come to be regarded as a vital part of the State organisation, and the only sure basis for autocracy. It was therefore treated tenderly, and the rights and protection accorded by various ukazes were almost entirely illusory.

*Speranski, for instance, when Governor of the province of Penza, brought to justice, among others, a proprietor who had caused one of his serfs to be flogged to death, and a lady who had murdered a serf boy by pricking him with a pen-knife because he had neglected to take proper care of a tame rabbit committed to his charge!--Korff, "Zhizn Speranskago," II., p. 127, note.

If we compare the development of serfage in Russia and in Western Europe, we find very many points in common, but in Russia the movement had certain peculiarities. One of the most important of these was caused by the rapid development of the Autocratic Power. In feudal Europe, where there was no strong central authority to control the Noblesse, the free rural Communes entirely, or almost entirely, disappeared. They were either appropriated by the nobles or voluntarily submitted to powerful landed proprietors or to monasteries, and in this way the whole of the reclaimed land, with a few rare exceptions, became the property of the nobles or of the Church. In Russia we find the same movement, but it was arrested by the Imperial power before all the land had been appropriated. The nobles could reduce to serfage the peasants settled on their estates, but they could not take possession of the free Communes, because such an appropriation would have infringed the rights and diminished the revenues of the Tsar. Down to the commencement of the last century, it is true, large grants of land with serfs were made to favoured individuals among the Noblesse, and in the reign of Paul (1796-1801) a considerable number of estates were affected to the use of the Imperial family under the name of appanages (Udyelniya imteniya); but on the other hand, the extensive Church lands, when secularised by Catherine II., were not distributed among the nobles, as in many other countries, but were transformed into State Domains. Thus, at the date of the Emancipation (1861), by far the greater part of the territory belonged to the State, and one-half of the rural population were so-called State Peasants (Gosudarstvenniye krestyanye).

Regarding the condition of these State Peasants, or Peasants of the Domains, as they are sometimes called, I may say briefly that they were, in a certain sense, serfs, being attached to the soil like the others; but their condition was, as a rule, somewhat better than the serfs in the narrower acceptation of the term. They had to suffer much from the tyranny and extortion of the special administration under which they lived, but they had more land and more liberty than was commonly enjoyed on the estates of resident proprietors, and their position was much less precarious. It is often asserted that the officials of the Domains were worse than the serf-owners, because they had not the same interest in the prosperity of the peasantry; but this a priori reasoning does not stand the test of experience.

It is not a little interesting to observe the numerical proportion and geographical distribution of these two rural classes. In European Russia, as a whole, about three-eighths of the population were composed of serfs belonging to the nobles;* but if we take the provinces separately we find great variations from this average. In five provinces the serfs were less than three per cent., while in others they formed more than seventy per cent. of the population! This is not an accidental phenomenon. In the geographical distribution of serfage we can see reflected the origin and history of the institution.

* The exact numbers, according to official data, were--Entire Population 60,909,309 Peasantry of all Classes 49,486,665

Of these latter there were--State Peasants 23,138,191 Peasants on the Lands of Proprietors 23,022,390 Peasants of the Appanages and other Departments 3,326,084 ---------- 49,486,665

If we were to construct a map showing the geographical distribution of the serf population, we should at once perceive that serfage radiated from Moscow. Starting from that city as a centre and travelling in any direction towards the confines of the Empire, we find that, after making allowance for a few disturbing local influences, the proportion of serfs regularly declines in the successive provinces traversed. In the region representing the old Muscovite Tsardom they form considerably more than a half of the rural population. Immediately to the south and east of this, in the territory that was gradually annexed during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, the proportion varies from twenty-five to fifty per cent., and in the more recently annexed provinces it steadily decreases till it almost reaches zero.

We may perceive, too, that the percentage of serfs decreases towards the north much more rapidly than towards the east and south. This points to the essentially agricultural nature of serfage in its infancy. In the south and east there was abundance of rich "black earth" celebrated for its fertility, and the nobles in quest of estates naturally preferred this region to the inhospitable north, with its poor soil and severe climate.

A more careful examination of the supposed map* would bring out other interesting facts. Let me notice one by way of illustration. Had serfage been the result of conquest we should have found the Slavonic race settled on the State Domains, and the Finnish and Tartar tribes supplying the serfs of the nobles. In reality we find quite the reverse; the Finns and Tartars were nearly all State Peasants, and the serfs of the proprietors were nearly all of Slavonic race. This is to be accounted for by the fact that the Finnish and Tartar tribes inhabit chiefly the outlying regions, in which serfage never attained such dimensions as in the centre of the Empire.

* Such a map was actually constructed by Troinitski ("Krepostnoe Naseleniye v Rossii," St. Petersburg, 1861), but it is not nearly so graphic as is might have been.

The dues paid by the serfs were of three kinds: labour, money, and farm produce. The last-named is so unimportant that it may be dismissed in a few words. It consisted chiefly of eggs, chickens, lambs, mushrooms, wild berries, and linen cloth. The amount of these various products depended entirely on the will of the master. The other two kinds of dues, as more important, we must examine more closely.

When a proprietor had abundance of fertile land and wished to farm on his own account, he commonly demanded from his serfs as much labour as possible. Under such a master the serfs were probably free from money dues, and fulfilled their obligations to him by labouring in his fields in summer and transporting his grain to market in winter. When, on the contrary, a land-owner had more serf labour at his disposal than he required for the cultivation of his fields, he put the superfluous serfs "on obrok,"--that is to say, he allowed them to go and work where they pleased on condition of paying him a fixed yearly sum. Sometimes the proprietor did not farm at all on his own account, in which case he put all the serfs "on obrok," and generally gave to the Commune in usufruct the whole of the arable land and pasturage. In this way the Mir played the part of a tenant.

We have here the basis for a simple and important classification of estates in the time of serfage: (1) Estates on which the dues were exclusively in labour; (2) estates on which the dues were partly in labour and partly in money; and (3) estates on which the dues were exclusively in money.

In the manner of exacting the labour dues there was considerable variety. According to the famous manifesto of Paul I., the peasant could not be compelled to work more than three days in the week; but this law was by no means universally observed, and those who did observe it had various methods of applying it. A few took it literally and laid down a rule that the serfs should work for them three definite days in the week--for example, every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday--but this was an extremely inconvenient method, for it prevented the field labour from being carried on regularly. A much more rational system was that according to which one-half of the serfs worked the first three days of the week, and the other half the remaining three. In this way there was, without any contravention of the law, a regular and constant supply of labour. It seems, however, that the great majority of the proprietors followed no strict method, and paid no attention whatever to Paul's manifesto, which gave to the peasants no legal means of making formal complaints. They simply summoned daily as many labourers as they required. The evil consequences of this for the peasants' crops were in part counteracted by making the peasants sow their own grain a little later than that of the proprietor, so that the master's harvest work was finished, or nearly finished, before their grain was ripe. This combination did not, however, always succeed, and in cases where there was a conflict of interests, the serf was, of course, the losing party. All that remained for him to do in such cases was to work a little in his own fields before six o'clock in the morning and after nine o'clock at night, and in order to render this possible he economised his strength, and worked as little as possible in his master's fields during the day.

It has frequently been remarked, and with much truth--though the indiscriminate application of the principle has often led to unjustifiable legislative inactivity--that the practical result of institutions depends less on the intrinsic abstract nature of the institutions themselves than on the character of those who work them. So it was with serfage. When a proprietor habitually acted towards his serfs in an enlightened, rational, humane way, they had little reason to complain of their position, and their life was much easier than that of many men who live in a state of complete individual freedom and unlimited, unrestricted competition. However paradoxical the statement may seem to those who are in the habit of regarding all forms of slavery from the sentimental point of view, it is unquestionable that the condition of serfs under such a proprietor as I have supposed was more enviable than that of the majority of English agricultural labourers. Each family had a house of its own, with a cabbage-garden, one or more horses, one or two cows, several sheep, poultry, agricultural implements, a share of the Communal land, and everything else necessary for carrying on its small farming operations; and in return for this it had to supply the proprietor with an amount of labour which was by no means oppressive. If, for instance, a serf had three adult sons--and the households, as I have said, were at that time generally numerous--two of them might work for the proprietor whilst he himself and the remaining son could attend exclusively to the family affairs. By the events which used to be called "the visitations of God" he had no fear of being permanently ruined. If his house was burnt, or his cattle died from the plague, or a series of "bad years" left him without seed for his fields, he could always count upon temporary assistance from his master. He was protected, too, against all oppression and exactions on the part of the officials; for the police, when there was any call for its interference, applied to the proprietor, who was to a certain extent responsible for his serfs. Thus the serf might live a tranquil, contented life, and die at a ripe old age, without ever having been conscious that serfage was a grievous burden.

If all the serfs had lived in this way we might, perhaps, regret that the Emancipation was ever undertaken. In reality there was, as the French say, le revers de la medaille, and serfage generally appeared under a form very different from that which I have just depicted. The proprietors were, unfortunately, not all of the enlightened, humane type. Amongst them were many who demanded from their serfs an inordinate amount of labour, and treated them in a very inhuman fashion.

These oppressors of their serfs may be divided into four categories. First, there were the proprietors who managed their own estates, and oppressed simply for the purpose of increasing their revenues. Secondly, there were a number of retired officers who wished to establish a certain order and discipline on their estates, and who employed for this purpose the barbarous measures which were at that time used in the army, believing that merciless corporal punishment was the only means of curing laziness, disorderliness and other vices. Thirdly, there were the absentees who lived beyond their means, and demanded from their steward, under pain of giving him or his son as a recruit, a much greater yearly sum than the estate could be reasonably expected to yield. Lastly, in the latter years of serfage, there were a number of men who bought estates as a mercantile speculation, and made as much money out of them as they could in the shortest possible space of time.

Of all hard masters, the last-named were the most terrible. Utterly indifferent to the welfare of the serfs and the ultimate fate of the property, they cut down the timber, sold the cattle, exacted heavy money dues under threats of giving the serfs or their children as recruits, presented to the military authorities a number of conscripts greater than was required by law--selling the conscription receipts (zatchetniya kvitantsii) to the merchants and burghers who were liable to the conscription but did not wish to serve--compelled some of the richer serfs to buy their liberty at an enormous price, and, in a word, used every means, legal and illegal, for extracting money. By this system of management they ruined the estate completely in the course of a few years; but by that time they had realised probably the whole sum paid, with a very fair profit from the operation; and this profit could be considerably augmented by selling a number of the peasant families for transportation to another estate (na svoz), or by mortgaging the property in the Opekunski Sovet--a Government institution which lent money on landed property without examining carefully the nature of the security.

As to the means which the proprietors possessed of oppressing their peasants, we must distinguish between the legal and the actual. The legal were almost as complete as any one could desire. "The proprietor," it is said in the Laws (Vol. IX, p. 1045, ed. an. 1857), "may impose on his serfs every kind of labour, may take from them money dues (obrok) and demand from them personal service, with this one restriction, that they should not be thereby ruined, and that the number of days fixed by law should be left to them for their own work."* Besides this, he had the right to transform peasants into domestic servants, and might, instead of employing them in his own service, hire them out to others who had the rights and privileges of Noblesse (pp. 1047-48). For all offences committed against himself or against any one under his jurisdiction he could subject the guilty ones to corporal punishment not exceeding forty lashes with the birch or fifteen blows with the stick (p. 1052); and if he considered any of his serfs as incorrigible, he could present them to the authorities to be drafted into the army or transported to Siberia as he might desire (pp. 1053-55). In cases of insubordination, where the ordinary domestic means of discipline did not suffice, he could call in the police and the military to support his authority.

* I give here the references to the Code, because Russians commonly believe and assert that the hiring out of serfs, the infliction of corporal punishment, and similar practices were merely abuses unauthorised by law.

Such were the legal means by which the proprietor might oppress his peasants, and it will be readily understood that they were very considerable and very elastic. By law he had the power to impose any dues in labour or money which he might think fit, and in all cases the serfs were ordered to be docile and obedient (p. 1027). Corporal punishment, though restricted by law, he could in reality apply to any extent. Certainly none of the serfs, and very few of the proprietors, were aware that the law placed any restriction on this right. All the proprietors were in the habit of using corporal punishment as they thought proper, and unless a proprietor became notorious for inhuman cruelty the authorities never thought of interfering. But in the eyes of the peasants corporal punishment was not the worst. What they feared infinitely more than the birch or the stick was the proprietor's power of giving them or their sons as recruits. The law assumed that this extreme means would be employed only against those serfs who showed themselves incorrigibly vicious or insubordinate; but the authorities accepted those presented without making any investigations, and consequently the proprietor might use this power as an effective means of extortion.

Against these means of extortion and oppression the serfs had no legal protection. The law provided them with no means of resisting any injustice to which they might be subjected, or of bringing to punishment the master who oppressed and ruined them. The Government, notwithstanding its sincere desire to protect them from inordinate burdens and cruel treatment, rarely interfered between the master and his serfs, being afraid of thereby undermining the authority of the proprietors, and awakening among the peasantry a spirit of insubordination. The serfs were left, therefore, to their own resources, and had to defend themselves as best they could. The simplest way was open mutiny; but this was rarely employed, for they knew by experience that any attempt of the kind would be at once put down by the military and mercilessly punished. Much more favourite and efficient methods were passive resistance, flight, and fire-raising or murder.

We might naturally suppose that an unscrupulous proprietor, armed with the enormous legal and actual power which I have just described, could very easily extort from his peasants anything he desired. In reality, however, the process of extortion, when it exceeded a certain measure, was a very difficult operation. The Russian peasant has a capacity of patient endurance that would do honour to a martyr, and a power of continued, dogged, passive resistance such as is possessed, I believe, by no other class of men in Europe; and these qualities formed a very powerful barrier against the rapacity of unconscientious proprietors. As soon as the serfs remarked in their master a tendency to rapacity and extortion, they at once took measures to defend themselves. Their first step was to sell secretly the live stock they did not actually require, and all their movable property except the few articles necessary for everyday use; then the little capital realised was carefully hidden.

When this had been effected, the proprietor might threaten and punish as he liked, but he rarely succeeded in unearthing the treasure. Many a peasant, under such circumstances, bore patiently the most cruel punishment, and saw his sons taken away as recruits, and yet he persisted in declaring that he had no money to ransom himself and his children. A spectator in such a case would probably have advised him to give up his little store of money, and thereby liberate himself from persecution; but the peasants reasoned otherwise. They were convinced, and not without reason, that the sacrifice of their little capital would merely put off the evil day, and that the persecution would very soon recommence. In this way they would have to suffer as before, and have the additional mortification of feeling that they had spent to no purpose the little that they possessed. Their fatalistic belief in the "perhaps" (avos') came here to their aid. Perhaps the proprietor might become weary of his efforts when he saw that they led to no result, or perhaps something might occur which would remove the persecutor.

It always happened, however, that when a proprietor treated his serfs with extreme injustice and cruelty, some of them lost patience, and sought refuge in flight. As the estates lay perfectly open on all sides, and it was utterly impossible to exercise a strict supervision, nothing was easier than to run away, and the fugitive might be a hundred miles off before his absence was noticed. But the oppressed serf was reluctant to adopt such an extreme measure. He had almost always a wife and family, and he could not possibly take them with him; flight, therefore, was expatriation for life in its most terrible form. Besides this, the life of a fugitive was by no means enviable. He was liable at any moment to fall into the hands of the police, and to be put into prison or sent back to his master. So little charm, indeed, did this life present that not infrequently after a few months or a few years the fugitive returned of his own accord to his former domicile.

Regarding fugitives or passportless wanderers in general, I may here remark parenthetically that there were two kinds. In the first place, there was the young, able-bodied peasant, who fled from the oppression of his master or from the conscription. Such a fugitive almost always sought out for himself a new domicile--generally in the southern provinces, where there was a great scarcity of labourers, and where many proprietors habitually welcomed all peasants who presented themselves, without making any inquiries as to passports. In the second place, there were those who chose fugitivism as a permanent mode of life. These were, for the most part, men or women of a certain age--widowers or widows--who had no close family ties, and who were too infirm or too lazy to work. The majority of these assumed the character of pilgrims. As such they could always find enough to eat, and could generally even collect a few roubles with which to grease the palm of any zealous police-officer who should arrest them. For a life of this kind Russia presented peculiar facilities. There was abundance of monasteries, where all comers could live for three days without questions being asked, and where those who were willing to do a little work for the patron saint might live for a much longer period. Then there were the towns, where the rich merchants considered almsgiving as very profitable for salvation. And, lastly, there were the villages, where a professing pilgrim was sure to be hospitably received and entertained so long as he refrained from stealing and other acts too grossly inconsistent with his assumed character. For those who contented themselves with simple fare, and did not seek to avoid the usual privations of a wanderer's life, these ordinary means of subsistence were amply sufficient. Those who were more ambitious and more cunning often employed their talents with great success in the world of the Old Ritualists and Sectarians.

The last and most desperate means of defense which the serfs possessed were fire-raising and murder. With regard to the amount of fire-raising there are no trustworthy statistics. With regard to the number of agrarian murders I once obtained some interesting statistical data, but unfortunately lost them. I may say, however, that these cases were not very numerous. This is to be explained in part by the patient, long-suffering character of the peasantry, and in part by the fact that the great majority of the proprietors were by no means such inhuman taskmasters as is sometimes supposed. When a case did occur, the Administration always made a strict investigation--punishing the guilty with exemplary severity, and taking no account of the provocation to which they had been subjected. The peasantry, on the contrary--at least, when the act was not the result of mere personal vengeance--secretly sympathised with "the unfortunates," and long cherished their memory as that of men who had suffered for the Mir.

In speaking of the serfs I have hitherto confined my attention to the members of the Mir, or rural Commune--that is to say, the peasants in the narrower sense of the term; but besides these there were the Dvorovuye, or domestic servants, and of these I must add a word or two.

The Dvorovuye were domestic slaves rather than serfs in the proper sense of the term. Let us, however, avoid wounding unnecessarily Russian sensibilities by the use of the ill-sounding word. We may call the class in question "domestics"--remembering, of course, that they were not quite domestic servants in the ordinary sense. They received no wages, were not at liberty to change masters, possessed almost no legal rights, and might be punished, hired out, or sold by their owners without any infraction of the written law.

These "domestics" were very numerous--out of all proportion to the work to be performed--and could consequently lead a very lazy life;* but the peasant considered it a great misfortune to be transferred to their ranks, for he thereby lost his share of the Communal land and the little independence which he enjoyed. It very rarely happened, however, that the proprietor took an able-bodied peasant as domestic. The class generally kept up its numbers by the legitimate and illegitimate method of natural increase; and involuntary additions were occasionally made when orphans were left without near relatives, and no other family wished to adopt them. To this class belonged the lackeys, servant-girls, cooks, coachmen, stable-boys, gardeners, and a large number of nondescript old men and women who had no very clearly defined functions. If the proprietor had a private theatre or orchestra, it was from this class that the actors and musicians were drawn. Those of them who were married and had children occupied a position intermediate between the ordinary domestic servant and the peasant. On the one hand, they received from the master a monthly allowance of food and a yearly allowance of clothes, and they were obliged to live in the immediate vicinity of the mansion-house; but, on the other hand, they had each a separate house or apartment, with a little cabbage-garden, and commonly a small plot of flax. The unmarried ones lived in all respects like ordinary domestic servants.

* Those proprietors who kept orchestras, large packs of hounds, &c., had sometimes several hundred domestic serfs.

The number of these domestic serfs being generally out of all proportion to the amount of work they had to perform, they were imbued with a hereditary spirit of indolence, and they performed lazily and carelessly what they had to do. On the other hand, they were often sincerely attached to the family they served, and occasionally proved by acts their fidelity and attachment. Here is an instance out of many for which I can vouch. An old nurse, whose mistress was dangerously ill, vowed that, in the event of the patient's recovery, she would make a pilgrimage, first to Kief, the Holy City on the Dnieper, and afterwards to Solovetsk, a much revered monastery on an island in the White Sea. The patient recovered, and the old woman, in fulfilment of her vow, walked more than two thousand miles!

This class of serfs might well be called domestic slaves, but I must warn the reader that he ought not to use the expression when speaking with Russians, because they are extremely sensitive on the point. Serfage, they say, was something quite different from slavery, and slavery never existed in Russia.

The first part of this assertion is perfectly true, and the second part perfectly false. In old times, as I have said above, slavery was a recognised institution in Russia as in other countries. One can hardly read a few pages of the old chronicles without stumbling on references to slaves; and I distinctly remember--though I cannot at this moment give chapter and verse--that one of the old Russian Princes was so valiant and so successful in his wars that during his reign a slave might be bought for a few coppers. As late as the beginning of last century the domestic serfs were sold very much as domestic slaves used to be sold in countries where slavery was recognised as a legal institution. Here is an example of the customary advertisement; I take it almost at random from the Moscow Gazette of 1801:--"TO BE SOLD: three coachmen, well trained and handsome; and two girls, the one eighteen, and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking, and well acquainted with various kinds of handiwork. In the same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of age, can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair. In the same house are sold pianos and organs."

A little farther on in the same number of the paper, a first-rate clerk, a carver, and a lackey are offered for sale, and the reason assigned is a superabundance of the articles in question (za izlishestvom). In some instances it seems as if the serfs and the cattle were intentionally put in the same category, as in the following announcement: "In this house one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve." The style of these advertisements, and the frequent recurrence of the same addresses, show that there was at this time in Moscow a regular class of slave-dealers. The humane Alexander I. prohibited advertisements of this kind, but he did not put down the custom which they represented, and his successor, Nicholas I., took no effective measures for its repression.

Of the whole number of serfs belonging to the proprietors, the domestics formed, according to the census of 1857, no less than 6 3/4 per cent. (6.79), and their numbers were evidently rapidly increasing, for in the preceding census they represented only 4.79 per cent. of the whole. This fact seems all the more significant when we observe that during this period the number of peasant serfs had diminished.

I must now bring this long chapter to an end. My aim has been to represent serfage in its normal, ordinary forms rather than in its occasional monstrous manifestations. Of these latter I have a collection containing ample materials for a whole series of sensation novels, but I refrain from quoting them, because I do not believe that the criminal annals of a country give a fair representation of its real condition. On the other hand, I do not wish to whitewash serfage or attenuate its evil consequences. No great body of men could long wield such enormous uncontrolled power without abusing it,* and no large body of men could long live under such power without suffering morally and materially from its pernicious influence. If serfage did not create that moral apathy and intellectual lethargy which formed, as it were, the atmosphere of Russian provincial life, it did much at least to preserve it. In short, serfage was the chief barrier to all material and moral progress, and in a time of moral awakening such as that which I have described in the preceding chapter, the question of Emancipation naturally came at once to the front.

* The number of deposed proprietors--or rather the number of estates placed under curators in consequence of the abuse of authority on the part of their owners--amounted in 1859 to 215. So at least I found in an official MS. document shown to me by the late Nicholas Milutin.

XXIX. THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS

The Question Raised--Chief Committee--The Nobles of the Lithuanian Provinces--The Tsar's Broad Hint to the Noblesse--Enthusiasm in the Press--The Proprietors--Political Aspirations--No Opposition--The Government--Public Opinion--Fear of the Proletariat--The Provincial Committees--The Elaboration Commission--The Question Ripens--Provincial Deputies--Discontent and Demonstrations--The Manifesto--Fundamental Principles of the Law--Illusions and Disappointment of the Serfs--Arbiters of the Peace--A Characteristic Incident--Redemption--Who Effected the Emancipation?

It is a fundamental principle of Russian political organisation that all initiative in public affairs proceeds from the Autocratic Power. The widespread desire, therefore, for the Emancipation of the serfs did not find free expression so long as the Emperor kept silence regarding his intentions. The educated classes watched anxiously for some sign, and soon a sign was given to them. In March, 1856--a few days after the publication of the manifesto announcing the conclusion of peace with the Western Powers--his Majesty said to the Marshals of Noblesse in Moscow: "For the removal of certain unfounded reports I consider it necessary to declare to you that I have not at present the intention of annihilating serfage; but certainly, as you yourselves know, the existing manner of possessing serfs cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below. I request you, gentlemen, to consider how this can be put into execution, and to submit my words to the Noblesse for their consideration."

These words were intended to sound the Noblesse and induce them to make a voluntary proposal, but they had not the desired effect. Abolitionist enthusiasm was rare among the great nobles, and those who really wished to see serfage abolished considered the Imperial utterance too vague and oracular to justify them in taking the initiative. As no further steps were taken for some time, the excitement caused by the incident soon subsided, and many people assumed that the consideration of the problem had been indefinitely postponed. "The Government," it was said, "evidently intended to raise the question, but on perceiving the indifference or hostility of the landed proprietors, it became frightened and drew back."

The Emperor was in reality disappointed. He had expected that his "faithful Moscow Noblesse," of which he was wont to say he was himself a member, would at once respond to his call, and that the ancient capital would have the honour of beginning the work. And if the example were thus given by Moscow, he had no doubt that it would soon be followed by the other provinces. He now perceived that the fundamental principles on which the Emancipation should be effected must be laid down by the Government, and for this purpose he created a secret committee composed of several great officers of State.

This "Chief Committee for Peasant Affairs," as it was afterwards called, devoted six months to studying the history of the question. Emancipation schemes were by no means a new phenomenon in Russia. Ever since the time of Catherine II. the Government had thought of improving the condition of the serfs, and on more than one occasion a general emancipation had been contemplated. In this way the question had slowly ripened, and certain fundamental principles had come to be pretty generally recognised. Of these principles the most important was that the State should not consent to any project which would uproot the peasant from the soil and allow him to wander about at will; for such a measure would render the collection of the taxes impossible, and in all probability produce the most frightful agrarian disorders. And to this general principle there was an important corollary: if severe restrictions were to be placed on free migration, it would be necessary to provide the peasantry with land in the immediate vicinity of the villages; otherwise they must inevitably fall back under the power of the proprietors, and a new and worse kind of serfage would thus be created. But in order to give land to the peasantry it would be necessary to take it from the proprietors; and this expropriation seemed to many a most unjustifiable infringement of the sacred rights of property. It was this consideration that had restrained Nicholas from taking any decisive measures with regard to serfage; and it had now considerable weight with the members of the committee, who were nearly all great land-owners.

Notwithstanding the strenuous exertions of the Grand Duke Constantine, who had been appointed a member for the express purpose of accelerating the proceedings, the committee did not show as much zeal and energy as was desired, and orders were given to take some decided step. At that moment a convenient opportunity presented itself.

In the Lithuanian Provinces, where the nobles were Polish by origin and sympathies, the miserable condition of the peasantry had induced the Government in the preceding reign to limit the arbitrary power of the serf-owners by so-called Inventories, in which the mutual obligations of masters and serfs were regulated and defined. These Inventories had caused great dissatisfaction, and the proprietors now proposed that they should be revised. Of this the Government determined to take advantage. On the somewhat violent assumption that these proprietors wished to emancipate their serfs, an Imperial rescript was prepared approving of their supposed desire, and empowering them to form committees for the preparation of definite projects.* In the rescript itself the word emancipation was studiously avoided, but there could be no doubt as to the implied meaning, for it was expressly stated in the supplementary considerations that "the abolition of serfage must be effected not suddenly, but gradually." Four days later the Minister of the Interior, in accordance with a secret order from the Emperor, sent a circular to the Governors and Marshals of Noblesse all over Russia proper, informing them that the nobles of the Lithuanian Provinces "had recognised the necessity of liberating the peasants," and that "this noble intention" had afforded peculiar satisfaction to his Majesty. A copy of the rescript and the fundamental principles to be observed accompanied the circular, "in case the nobles of other provinces should express a similar desire."

* This celebrated document is known as "The Rescript to Nazimof." More than once in the course of conversation I did all in my power, within the limits of politeness and discretion, to extract from General Nazimof a detailed account of this important episode, but my efforts were unsuccessful.

This circular produced an immense sensation throughout the country. No one could for a moment misunderstand the suggestion that the nobles of other provinces MIGHT POSSIBLY express a desire to liberate their serfs. Such vague words, when spoken by an autocrat, have a very definite and unmistakable meaning, which prudent loyal subjects have no difficulty in understanding. If any doubted, their doubts were soon dispelled, for the Emperor, a few weeks later, publicly expressed a hope that, with the help of God and the co-operation of the nobles, the work would be successfully accomplished.

The die was cast, and the Government looked anxiously to see the result.

The periodical Press--which was at once the product and the fomenter of the liberal aspirations--hailed the raising of the question with boundless enthusiasm. The Emancipation, it was said, would certainly open a new and glorious epoch in the national history. Serfage was described as an ulcer that had long been poisoning the national blood; as an enormous weight under which the whole nation groaned; as an insurmountable obstacle, preventing all material and moral progress; as a cumbrous load which rendered all free, vigorous action impossible, and prevented Russia from rising to the level of the Western nations. If Russia had succeeded in stemming the flood of adverse fortune in spite of this millstone round her neck, what might she not accomplish when free and untrammelled? All sections of the literary world had arguments to offer in support of the foregone conclusion. The moralists declared that all the prevailing vices were the product of serfage, and that moral progress was impossible in an atmosphere of slavery; the lawyers held that the arbitrary authority of the proprietors over the peasants had no legal basis; the economists explained that free labour was an indispensable condition of industrial and commercial prosperity; the philosophical historians showed that the normal historical development of the country demanded the immediate abolition of this superannuated remnant of barbarism; and the writers of the sentimental, gushing type poured forth endless effusions about brotherly love to the weak and the oppressed. In a word, the Press was for the moment unanimous, and displayed a feverish excitement which demanded a liberal use of superlatives.

This enthusiastic tone accorded perfectly with the feelings of a large section of the nobles. Nearly the whole of the Noblesse was more or less affected by the newborn enthusiasm for everything just, humanitarian, and liberal. The aspirations found, of course, their most ardent representatives among the educated youth; but they were by no means confined to the younger men, who had passed through the universities and had always regarded serfage as a stain on the national honour. Many a Saul was found among the prophets. Many an old man, with grey hairs and grandchildren, who had all his life placidly enjoyed the fruits of serf labour, was now heard to speak of serfage as an antiquated institution which could not be reconciled with modern humanitarian ideas; and not a few of all ages, who had formerly never thought of reading books or newspapers, now perused assiduously the periodical literature, and picked up the liberal and humanitarian phrases with which it was filled.

This Abolitionist fervour was considerably augmented by certain political aspirations which did not appear in the newspapers, but which were at that time very generally entertained. In spite of the Press-censure a large section of the educated classes had become acquainted with the political literature of France and Germany, and had imbibed therefrom an unbounded admiration for Constitutional government. A Constitution, it was thought, would necessarily remove all political evils and create something like a political Millennium. And it was not to be a Constitution of the ordinary sort--the fruit of compromise between hostile political parties--but an institution designed calmly according to the latest results of political science, and so constructed that all classes would voluntarily contribute to the general welfare. The necessary prelude to this happy era of political liberty was, of course, the abolition of serfage. When the nobles had given up their power over their serfs they would receive a Constitution as an indemnification and reward.

There were, however, many nobles of the old school who remained impervious to all these new feelings and ideas. On them the raising of the Emancipation question had a very different effect. They had no source of revenue but their estates, and they could not conceive the possibility of working their estates without serf labour. If the peasant was indolent and careless even under strict supervision, what would he become when no longer under the authority of a master? If the profits from farming were already small, what would they be when no one would work without wages? And this was not the worst, for it was quite evident from the circular that the land question was to be raised, and that a considerable portion of each estate would be transferred, at least for a time, to the emancipated peasants.

To the proprietors who looked at the question in this way the prospect of Emancipation was certainly not at all agreeable, but we must not imagine that they felt as English land-owners would feel if threatened by a similar danger. In England a hereditary estate has for the family a value far beyond what it would bring in the market. It is regarded as one and indivisible, and any dismemberment of it would be looked upon as a grave family misfortune. In Russia, on the contrary, estates have nothing of this semi-sacred character, and may be at any time dismembered without outraging family feeling or traditional associations. Indeed, it is not uncommon that when a proprietor dies, leaving only one estate and several children, the property is broken up into fractions and divided among the heirs. Even the prospect of pecuniary sacrifice did not alarm the Russians so much as it would alarm Englishmen. Men who keep no accounts and take little thought for the morrow are much less averse to making pecuniary sacrifices--whether for a wise or a foolish purpose--than those who carefully arrange their mode of life according to their income.

Still, after due allowance has been made for these peculiarities, it must be admitted that the feeling of dissatisfaction and alarm was very widespread. Even Russians do not like the prospect of losing a part of their land and income. No protest, however, was entered, and no opposition was made. Those who were hostile to the measure were ashamed to show themselves selfish and unpatriotic. At the same time they knew very well that the Emperor, if he wished, could effect the Emancipation in spite of them, and that resistance on their part would draw down upon them the Imperial displeasure, without affording any compensating advantage. They knew, too, that there was a danger from below, so that any useless show of opposition would be like playing with matches in a powder-magazine. The serfs would soon hear that the Tsar desired to set them free, and they might, if they suspected that the proprietors were trying to frustrate the Tsar's benevolent intentions, use violent measures to get rid of the opposition. The idea of agrarian massacres had already taken possession of many timid minds. Besides this, all classes of the proprietors felt that if the work was to be done, it should be done by the Noblesse and not by the bureaucracy. If it were effected by the nobles the interests of the land-owners would be duly considered, but if it were effected by the Administration without their concurrence and co-operation their interests would be neglected, and there would inevitably be an enormous amount of jobbery and corruption. In accordance with this view, the Noblesse corporations of the various provinces successively requested permission to form committees for the consideration of the question, and during the year 1858 a committee was opened in almost every province in which serfage existed.

In this way the question was apparently handed over for solution to the nobles, but in reality the Noblesse was called upon merely to advise, and not to legislate. The Government had not only laid down the fundamental principles of the scheme; it continually supervised the work of construction, and it reserved to itself the right of modifying or rejecting the projects proposed by the committees.

According to these fundamental principles the serfs should be emancipated gradually, so that for some time they would remain attached to the glebe and subject to the authority of the proprietors. During this transition period they should redeem by money payments or labour their houses and gardens, and enjoy in usufruct a certain quantity of land, sufficient to enable them to support themselves and to fulfil their obligations to the State as well as to the proprietor. In return for this land they should pay a yearly rent in money, produce or labour over and above the yearly sum paid for the redemption of their houses and gardens. As to what should be done after the expiry of the transition period, the Government seems to have had no clearly conceived intentions. Probably it hoped that by that time the proprietors and their emancipated serfs would have invented some convenient modus vivendi, and that nothing but a little legislative regulation would be necessary. But radical legislation is like the letting-out of water. These fundamental principles, adopted at first with a view to mere immediate practical necessity, soon acquired a very different significance. To understand this we must return to the periodical literature.

Until the serf question came to be discussed, the reform aspirations were very vague, and consequently there was a remarkable unanimity among their representatives. The great majority of the educated classes were unanimously of opinion that Russia should at once adopt from the West all those liberal principles and institutions the exclusion of which had prevented the country from rising to the level of the Western nations. But very soon symptoms of a schism became apparent. Whilst the literature in general was still preaching the doctrine that Russia should adopt everything that was "liberal," a few voices began to be heard warning the unwary that much which bore the name of liberal was in reality already antiquated and worthless--that Russia ought not to follow blindly in the footsteps of other nations, but ought rather to profit by their experience, and avoid the errors into which they had fallen. The chief of these errors was, according to these new teachers, the abnormal development of individualism--the adoption of that principle of laissez faire which forms the basis of what may be called the Orthodox School of Political Economists. Individualism and unrestricted competition, it was said, have now reached in the West an abnormal and monstrous development. Supported by the laissez faire principle, they have led--and must always lead--to the oppression of the weak, the tyranny of capital, the impoverishment of the masses for the benefit of the few, and the formation of a hungry, dangerous Proletariat! This has already been recognised by the most advanced thinkers of France and Germany. If the older countries cannot at once cure those evils, that is no reason for Russia to inoculate herself with them. She is still at the commencement of her career, and it would be folly for her to wander voluntarily for ages in the Desert, when a direct route to the Promised Land has been already discovered.

In order to convey some idea of the influence which this teaching exercised, I must here recall, at the risk of repeating myself, what I said in a former chapter. The Russians, as I have there pointed out, have a peculiar way of treating political and social questions. Having received their political education from books, they naturally attribute to theoretical considerations an importance which seems to us exaggerated. When any important or trivial question arises, they at once launch into a sea of philosophical principles, and pay less attention to the little objects close at hand than to the big ones that appear on the distant horizon of the future. And when they set to work at any political reform they begin ab ovo. As they have no traditional prejudices to fetter them, and no traditional principles to lead them, they naturally take for their guidance the latest conclusions of political philosophy.

Bearing this in mind, let us see how it affected the Emancipation question. The Proletariat--described as a dangerous monster which was about to swallow up society in Western Europe, and which might at any moment cross the frontier unless kept out by vigorous measures--took possession of the popular imagination, and aroused the fears of the reading public. To many it seemed that the best means of preventing the formation of a Proletariat in Russia was the securing of land for the emancipated serfs and the careful preservation of the rural Commune. "Now is the moment," it was said, "for deciding the important question whether Russia is to fall a prey, like the Western nations, to this terrible evil, or whether she is to protect herself for ever against it. In the decision of this question lies the future destiny of the country. If the peasants be emancipated without land, or if those Communal institutions which give to every man a share of the soil and secure this inestimable boon for the generations still unborn be now abolished, a Proletariat will be rapidly formed, and the peasantry will become a disorganised mass of homeless wanderers like the English agricultural labourers. If, on the contrary, a fair share of land be granted to them, and if the Commune be made proprietor of the land ceded, the danger of a Proletariat is for ever removed, and Russia will thereby set an example to the civilised world! Never has a nation had such an opportunity of making an enormous leap forward on the road of progress, and never again will the opportunity occur. The Western nations have discovered their error when it is too late--when the peasantry have been already deprived of their land, and the labouring classes of the towns have already fallen a prey to the insatiable cupidity of the capitalists. In vain their most eminent thinkers warn and exhort. Ordinary remedies are no longer of any avail. But Russia may avoid these dangers, if she but act wisely and prudently in this great matter. The peasants are still in actual, if not legal, possession of the land, and there is as yet no Proletariat in the towns. All that is necessary, therefore, is to abolish the arbitrary authority of the proprietors without expropriating the peasants, and without disturbing the existing Communal institutions, which form the best barrier against pauperism."

These ideas were warmly espoused by many proprietors, and exercised a very great influence on the deliberations of the Provincial Committees. In these committees there were generally two groups. The majorities, whilst making large concessions to the claims of justice and expediency, endeavoured to defend, as far as possible, the interests of their class; the minorities, though by no means indifferent to the interests of the class to which they belonged, allowed the more abstract theoretical considerations to be predominant. At first the majorities did all in their power to evade the fundamental principles laid down by the Government as much too favourable to the peasantry; but when they perceived that public opinion, as represented by the Press, went much further than the Government, they clung to these fundamental principles--which secured at least the fee simple of the estate to the landlord--as their anchor of safety. Between the two parties arose naturally a strong spirit of hostility, and the Government, which wished to have the support of the minorities, found it advisable that both should present their projects for consideration.

As the Provincial Committees worked independently, there was considerable diversity in the conclusions at which they arrived. The task of codifying these conclusions, and elaborating out of them a general scheme of Emancipation, was entrusted to a special Imperial Commission, composed partly of officials and partly of landed proprietors named by the Emperor.* Those who believed that the question had really been handed over to the Noblesse assumed that this Commission would merely arrange the materials presented by the Provincial Committees, and that the Emancipation Law would thereafter be elaborated by a National Assembly of deputies elected by the nobles. In reality the Commission, working in St. Petersburg under the direct guidance and control of the Government, fulfilled a very different and much more important function. Using the combined projects merely as a storehouse from which it could draw the proposals it desired, it formed a new project of its own, which ultimately received, after undergoing modification in detail, the Imperial assent. Instead of being a mere chancellerie, as many expected, it became in a certain sense the author of the Emancipation Law.

* Known as the Redaktsionnaya Komissiya, or Elaboration Commission. Strictly speaking, there were two, but they are commonly spoken of as one.

There was, as we have seen, in nearly all the Provincial Committees a majority and a minority, the former of which strove to defend the interests of the proprietors, whilst the latter paid more attention to theoretical considerations, and endeavoured to secure for the peasantry a large amount of land and Communal self-government. In the Commission there were the same two parties, but their relative strength was very different. Here the men of theory, instead of forming a minority, were more numerous than their opponents, and enjoyed the support of the Government, which regulated the proceedings. In its instructions we see how much the question had ripened under the influence of the theoretical considerations. There is no longer any trace of the idea that the Emancipation should be gradual; on the contrary, it is expressly declared that the immediate effect of the law should be the complete abolition of the proprietor's authority. There is even evidence of a clear intention of preventing the proprietor as far as possible from exercising any influence over his former serfs. The sharp distinction between the land occupied by the village and the arable land to be ceded in usufruct likewise disappears, and it is merely said that efforts should be made to enable the peasants to become proprietors of the land they required.

The aim of the Government had thus become clear and well defined. The task to be performed was to transform the serfs at once, and with the least possible disturbance of the existing economic conditions, into a class of small Communal proprietors--that is to say, a class of free peasants possessing a house and garden and a share of the Communal land. To effect this it was merely necessary to declare the serf personally free, to draw a clear line of demarcation between the Communal land and the rest of the estate, and to determine the price or rent which should be paid for this Communal property, inclusive of the land on which the village was built.

The law was prepared in strict accordance with these principles. As to the amount of land to be ceded, it was decided that the existing arrangements, founded on experience, should, as a general rule, be preserved--in other words, the land actually enjoyed by the peasants should be retained by them; and in order to prevent extreme cases of injustice, a maximum and a minimum were fixed for each district. In like manner, as to the dues, it was decided that the existing arrangements should be taken as the basis of the calculation, but that the sum should be modified according to the amount of land ceded. At the same time facilities were to be given for the transforming of the labour dues into yearly money payments, and for enabling the peasants to redeem them, with the assistance of the Government, in the form of credit.

This idea of redemption created, at first, a feeling of alarm among the proprietors. It was bad enough to be obliged to cede a large part of the estates in usufruct, but it seemed to be much worse to have to sell it. Redemption appeared to be a species of wholesale confiscation. But very soon it became evident that the redeeming of the land was profitable for both parties. Cession in perpetual usufruct was felt to be in reality tantamount to alienation of the land, whilst the immediate redemption would enable the proprietors, who had generally little or no ready money to pay their debts, to clear their estates from mortgages, and to make the outlays necessary for the transition to free labour. The majority of the proprietors, therefore, said openly: "Let the Government give us a suitable compensation in money for the land that is taken from us, so that we may be at once freed from all further trouble and annoyance."

When it became known that the Commission was not merely arranging and codifying the materials, but elaborating a law of its own and regularly submitting its decisions for Imperial confirmation, a feeling of dissatisfaction appeared all over the country. The nobles perceived that the question was being taken out of their hands, and was being solved by a small body composed of bureaucrats and nominees of the Government. After having made a voluntary sacrifice of their rights, they were being unceremoniously pushed aside. They had still, however, the means of correcting this. The Emperor had publicly promised that before the project should become law deputies from the Provincial Committees should be summoned to St. Petersburg to make objections and propose amendments.

The Commission and the Government would have willingly dispensed with all further advice from the nobles, but it was necessary to redeem the Imperial promise. Deputies were therefore summoned to the capital, but they were not allowed to form, as they hoped, a public assembly for the discussion of the question. All their efforts to hold meetings were frustrated, and they were required merely to answer in writing a list of printed questions regarding matters of detail. The fundamental principles, they were told, had already received the Imperial sanction, and were consequently removed from discussion. Those who desired to discuss details were invited individually to attend meetings of the Commission, where they found one or two members ready to engage with them in a little dialectical fencing. This, of course, did not give much satisfaction. Indeed, the ironical tone in which the fencing was too often conducted served to increase the existing irritation. It was only too evident that the Commission had triumphed, and some of the members could justly boast that they had drowned the deputies in ink and buried them under reams of paper.

Believing, or at least professing to believe, that the Emperor was being deceived in this matter by the Administration, several groups of deputies presented petitions to his Majesty containing a respectful protest against the manner in which they had been treated. But by this act they simply laid themselves open to "the most unkindest cut of all." Those who had signed the petitions received a formal reprimand through the police.

This treatment of the deputies, and, above all, this gratuitous insult, produced among the nobles a storm of indignation. They felt that they had been entrapped. The Government had artfully induced them to form projects for the emancipation of their serfs, and now, after having been used as a cat's-paw in the work of their own spoliation, they were being unceremoniously pushed aside as no longer necessary. Those who had indulged in the hope of gaining political rights felt the blow most keenly. A first gentle and respectful attempt at remonstrance had been answered by a dictatorial reprimand through the police! Instead of being called to take an active part in home and foreign politics, they were being treated as naughty schoolboys. In view of this insult all differences of opinion were for the moment forgotten, and all parties resolved to join in a vigorous protest against the insolence and arbitrary conduct of the bureaucracy.

A convenient opportunity of making this protest in a legal way was offered by the triennial Provincial Assemblies of the Noblesse about to be held in several provinces. So at least it was thought, but here again the Noblesse was checkmated by the Administration.

Before the opening of the Assemblies a circular was issued excluding the Emancipation question from their deliberations. Some Assemblies evaded this order, and succeeded in making a little demonstration by submitting to his Majesty that the time had arrived for other reforms, such as the separation of the administrative and judicial powers, and the creation of local self-government, public judicial procedure, and trial by jury.

All these reforms were voluntarily effected by the Emperor a few years later, but the manner in which they were suggested seemed to savour of insubordination, and was a flagrant infraction of the principle that all initiative in public affairs should proceed from the central Government. New measures of repression were accordingly used. Some Marshals of Noblesse were reprimanded and others deposed. Of the conspicuous leaders, two were exiled to distant provinces and others placed under the supervision of the police. Worst of all, the whole agitation strengthened the Commission by convincing the Emperor that the majority of the nobles were hostile to his benevolent plans.*

* This was a misinterpretation of the facts. Very many of those who joined in the protest sincerely sympathised with the idea of Emancipation, and were ready to be even more "liberal" than the Government.

When the Commission had finished its labours, its proposals passed to the two higher instances--the Committee for Peasant Affairs and the Council of State--and in both of these the Emperor declared plainly that he could allow no fundamental changes. From all the members he demanded a complete forgetfulness of former differences and a conscientious execution of his orders; "For you must remember," he significantly added, "that in Russia laws are made by the Autocratic Power." From an historical review of the question he drew the conclusion that "the Autocratic Power created serfage, and the Autocratic Power ought to abolish it." On March 3d (February 19th, old style), 1861, the law was signed, and by that act more than twenty millions of serfs were liberated.* A Manifesto containing the fundamental principles of the law was at once sent all over the country, and an order was given that it should be read in all the churches.

* It is sometimes said that forty millions of serfs have been emancipated. The statement is true, if we regard the State peasants as serfs. They held, as I have already explained, an intermediate position between serfage and freedom. The peculiar administration under which they lived was partly abolished by Imperial Orders of September 7th, 1859, and October 23d, 1861. In 1866 they were placed, as regards administration, on a level with the emancipated serfs of the proprietors. As a general rule, they received rather more land and had to pay somewhat lighter dues than the emancipated serfs in the narrower sense of the term.

The three fundamental principles laid down by the law were:--1. That the serfs should at once receive the civil rights of the free rural classes, and that the authority of the proprietor should be replaced by Communal self-government.

2. That the rural Communes should as far as possible retain the land they actually held, and should in return pay to the proprietor certain yearly dues in money or labour.

3. That the Government should by means of credit assist the Communes to redeem these dues, or, in other words, to purchase the lands ceded to them in usufruct.

With regard to the domestic serfs, it was enacted that they should continue to serve their masters during two years, and that thereafter they should be completely free, but they should have no claim to a share of the land.

It might be reasonably supposed that the serfs received with boundless gratitude and delight the Manifesto proclaiming these principles. Here at last was the realisation of their long-cherished hopes. Liberty was accorded to them; and not only liberty, but a goodly portion of the soil--about half of all the arable land possessed by the proprietors.

In reality the Manifesto created among the peasantry a feeling of disappointment rather than delight. To understand this strange fact we must endeavour to place ourselves at the peasant's point of view.

In the first place it must be remarked that all vague, rhetorical phrases about free labour, human dignity, national progress, and the like, which may readily produce among educated men a certain amount of temporary enthusiasm, fall on the ears of the Russian peasant like drops of rain on a granite rock. The fashionable rhetoric of philosophical liberalism is as incomprehensible to him as the flowery circumlocutionary style of an Oriental scribe would be to a keen city merchant. The idea of liberty in the abstract and the mention of rights which lie beyond the sphere of his ordinary everyday life awaken no enthusiasm in his breast. And for mere names he has a profound indifference. What matters it to him that he is officially called, not a "serf," but a "free village-inhabitant," if the change in official terminology is not accompanied by some immediate material advantage? What he wants is a house to live in, food to eat, and raiment wherewithal to be clothed, and to gain these first necessaries of life with as little labour as possible. He looked at the question exclusively from two points of view--that of historical right and that of material advantage; and from both of these the Emancipation Law seemed to him very unsatisfactory.

On the subject of historical right the peasantry had their own traditional conceptions, which were completely at variance with the written law. According to the positive legislation the Communal land formed part of the estate, and consequently belonged to the proprietor; but according to the conceptions of the peasantry it belonged to the Commune, and the right of the proprietor consisted merely in that personal authority over the serfs which had been conferred on him by the Tsar. The peasants could not, of course, put these conceptions into a strict legal form, but they often expressed them in their own homely laconic way by saying to their master, "Mui vashi no zemlya nasha"--that is to say. "We are yours, but the land is ours." And it must be admitted that this view, though legally untenable, had a certain historical justification.*

* See preceding chapter.

In olden times the Noblesse had held their land by feudal tenure, and were liable to be ejected as soon as they did not fulfil their obligations to the State. These obligations had been long since abolished, and the feudal tenure transformed into an unconditional right of property, but the peasants clung to the old ideas in a way that strikingly illustrates the vitality of deep-rooted popular conceptions. In their minds the proprietors were merely temporary occupants, who were allowed by the Tsar to exact labour and dues from the serfs. What, then, was Emancipation? Certainly the abolition of all obligatory labour and money dues, and perhaps the complete ejectment of the proprietors. On this latter point there was a difference of opinion. All assumed, as a matter of course, that the Communal land would remain the property of the Commune, but it was not so clear what would be done with the rest of the estate. Some thought that it would be retained by the proprietor, but very many believed that all the land would be given to the Communes. In this way the Emancipation would be in accordance with historical right and with the material advantage of the peasantry, for whose exclusive benefit, it was assumed, the reform had been undertaken.

Instead of this the peasants found that they were still to pay dues, even for the Communal land which they regarded as unquestionably their own. So at least said the expounders of the law. But the thing was incredible. Either the proprietors must be concealing or misinterpreting the law, or this was merely a preparatory measure, which would be followed by the real Emancipation. Thus were awakened among the peasantry a spirit of mistrust and suspicion and a widespread belief that there would be a second Imperial Manifesto, by which all the land would be divided and all the dues abolished.

On the nobles the Manifesto made a very different impression. The fact that they were to be entrusted with the putting of the law into execution, and the flattering allusions made to the spirit of generous self-sacrifice which they had exhibited, kindled amongst them enthusiasm enough to make them forget for a time their just grievances and their hostility towards the bureaucracy. They found that the conditions on which the Emancipation was effected were by no means so ruinous as they had anticipated; and the Emperor's appeal to their generosity and patriotism made many of them throw themselves with ardour into the important task confided to them.

Unfortunately they could not at once begin the work. The law had been so hurried through the last stages that the preparations for putting it into execution were by no means complete when the Manifesto was published. The task of regulating the future relations between the proprietors and the peasantry was entrusted to local proprietors in each district, who were to be called Arbiters of the Peace (Mirovuiye Posredniki); but three months elapsed before these Arbiters could be appointed. During that time there was no one to explain the law to the peasants and settle the disputes between them and the proprietors; and the consequence of this was that many cases of insubordination and disorder occurred. The muzhik naturally imagined that, as soon as the Tsar said he was free, he was no longer obliged to work for his old master--that all obligatory labour ceased as soon as the Manifesto was read. In vain the proprietor endeavoured to convince him that, in regard to labour, the old relations must continue, as the law enjoined, until a new arrangement had been made. To all explanations and exhortations he turned a deaf ear, and to the efforts of the rural police he too often opposed a dogged, passive resistance.

In many cases the simple appearance of the higher authorities sufficed to restore order, for the presence of one of the Tsar's servants convinced many that the order to work for the present as formerly was not a mere invention of the proprietors. But not infrequently the birch had to be applied. Indeed, I am inclined to believe, from the numerous descriptions of this time which I received from eye-witnesses, that rarely, if ever, had the serfs seen and experienced so much flogging as during these first three months after their liberation. Sometimes even the troops had to be called out, and on three occasions they fired on the peasants with ball cartridge. In the most serious case, where a young peasant had set up for a prophet and declared that the Emancipation Law was a forgery, fifty-one peasants were killed and seventy-seven were more or less seriously wounded. In spite of these lamentable incidents, there was nothing which even the most violent alarmist could dignify with the name of an insurrection. Nowhere was there anything that could be called organised resistance. Even in the case above alluded to, the three thousand peasants on whom the troops fired were entirely unarmed, made no attempt to resist, and dispersed in the utmost haste as soon as they discovered that they were being shot down. Had the military authorities shown a little more judgment, tact, and patience, the history of the Emancipation would not have been stained even with those three solitary cases of unnecessary bloodshed.

This interregnum between the eras of serfage and liberty was brought to an end by the appointment of the Arbiters of the Peace. Their first duty was to explain the law, and to organise the new peasant self-government. The lowest instance, or primary organ of this self-government, the rural Commune, already existed, and at once recovered much of its ancient vitality as soon as the authority and interference of the proprietors were removed. The second instance, the Volost--a territorial administrative unit comprising several contiguous Communes--had to be created, for nothing of the kind had previously existed on the estates of the nobles. It had existed, however, for nearly a quarter of a century among the peasants of the Domains, and it was therefore necessary merely to copy an existing model.

As soon as all the Volosts in his district had been thus organised the Arbiter had to undertake the much more arduous task of regulating the agrarian relations between the proprietors and the Communes--with the individual peasants, be it remembered, the proprietors had no direct relations whatever. It had been enacted by the law that the future agrarian relations between the two parties should be left, as far as possible, to voluntary contract; and accordingly each proprietor was invited to come to an agreement with the Commune or Communes on his estate. On the ground of this agreement a statute-charter (ustavnaya gramota) was prepared, specifying the number of male serfs, the quantity of land actually enjoyed by them, any proposed changes in this amount, the dues proposed to be levied, and other details. If the Arbiter found that the conditions were in accordance with the law and clearly understood by the peasants, he confirmed the charter, and the arrangement was complete. When the two parties could not come to an agreement within a year, he prepared a charter according to his own judgment, and presented it for confirmation to the higher authorities.

The dissolution of partnership, if it be allowable to use such a term, between the proprietor and his serfs was sometimes very easy and sometimes very difficult. On many estates the charter did little more than legalise the existing arrangements, but in many instances it was necessary to add to, or subtract from, the amount of Communal land, and sometimes it was even necessary to remove the village to another part of the estate. In all cases there were, of course, conflicting interests and complicated questions, so that the Arbiter had always abundance of difficult work. Besides this, he had to act as mediator in those differences which naturally arose during the transition period, when the authority of the proprietor had been abolished but the separation of the two classes had not yet been effected. The unlimited patriarchal authority which had been formerly wielded by the proprietor or his steward now passed with certain restriction into the hands of the Arbiter, and these peacemakers had to spend a great part of their time in driving about from one estate to another to put an end to alleged cases of insubordination--some of which, it must be admitted, existed only in the imagination of the proprietors.

At first the work of amicable settlement proceeded slowly. The proprietors generally showed a conciliatory spirit, and some of them generously proposed conditions much more favourable to the peasants than the law demanded; but the peasants were filled with vague suspicions, and feared to commit themselves by "putting pen to paper." Even the highly respected proprietors, who imagined that they possessed the unbounded confidence of the peasantry, were suspected like the others, and their generous offers were regarded as well-baited traps. Often I have heard old men, sometimes with tears in their eyes, describe the distrust and ingratitude of the muzhik at this time. Many peasants still believed that the proprietors were hiding the real Emancipation Law, and imaginative or ill-intentioned persons fostered this belief by professing to know what the real law contained. The most absurd rumours were afloat, and whole villages sometimes acted upon them.

In the province of Moscow, for instance, one Commune sent a deputation to the proprietor to inform him that, as he had always been a good master, the Mir would allow him to retain his house and garden during his lifetime. In another locality it was rumoured that the Tsar sat daily on a golden throne in the Crimea, receiving all peasants who came to him, and giving them as much land as they desired; and in order to take advantage of the Imperial liberality a large body of peasants set out for the place indicated, and had to be stopped by the military.

As an illustration of the illusions in which the peasantry indulged at this time, I may mention here one of the many characteristic incidents related to me by gentlemen who had served as Arbiters of the Peace.

In the province of Riazan there was one Commune which had acquired a certain local notoriety for the obstinacy with which it refused all arrangements with the proprietor. My informant, who was Arbiter for the locality, was at last obliged to make a statute-charter for it without its consent. He wished, however, that the peasants should voluntarily accept the arrangement he proposed, and accordingly called them together to talk with them on the subject. After explaining fully the part of the law which related to their case, he asked them what objection they had to make a fair contract with their old master. For some time he received no answer, but gradually by questioning individuals he discovered the cause of their obstinacy: they were firmly convinced that not only the Communal land, but also the rest of the estate, belonged to them. To eradicate this false idea he set himself to reason with them, and the following characteristic dialogue ensued:--Arbiter: "If the Tsar gave all the land to the peasantry, what compensation could he give to the proprietors to whom the land belongs?"

Peasant: "The Tsar will give them salaries according to their service."

Arbiter: "In order to pay these salaries he would require a great deal more money. Where could he get that money? He would have to increase the taxes, and in that way you would have to pay all the same."

Peasant: "The Tsar can make as much money as he likes."

Arbiter: "If the Tsar can make as much money as he likes, why does he make you pay the poll-tax every year?"

Peasant: "It is not the Tsar that receives the taxes we pay."

Arbiter: "Who, then, receives them?"

Peasant (after a little hesitation, and with a knowing smite): "The officials, of course!"

Gradually, through the efforts of the Arbiters, the peasants came to know better their real position, and the work began to advance more rapidly. But soon it was checked by another influence. By the end of the first year the "liberal," patriotic enthusiasm of the nobles had cooled. The sentimental, idyllic tendencies had melted away at the first touch of reality, and those who had imagined that liberty would have an immediately salutary effect on the moral character of the serfs confessed themselves disappointed. Many complained that the peasants showed themselves greedy and obstinate, stole wood from the forest, allowed their cattle to wander on the proprietor's fields, failed to fulfil their legal obligations, and broke their voluntary engagements. At the same time the fears of an agrarian rising subsided, so that even the timid were tranquillised. From these causes the conciliatory spirit of the proprietors decreased.

The work of conciliating and regulating became consequently more difficult, but the great majority of the Arbiters showed themselves equal to the task, and displayed an impartiality, tact and patience beyond all praise. To them Russia is in great part indebted for the peaceful character of the Emancipation. Had they sacrificed the general good to the interests of their class, or had they habitually acted in that stern, administrative, military spirit which caused the instances of bloodshed above referred to, the prophecies of the alarmists would, in all probability, have been realised, and the historian of the Emancipation would have had a terrible list of judicial massacres to record. Fortunately they played the part of mediators, as their name signified, rather than that of administrators in the bureaucratic sense of the term, and they were animated with a just and humane rather than a merely legal spirit. Instead of simply laying down the law, and ordering their decisions to be immediately executed, they were ever ready to spend hours in trying to conquer, by patient and laborious reasoning, the unjust claims of proprietors or the false conceptions and ignorant obstinacy of the peasants. It was a new spectacle for Russia to see a public function fulfilled by conscientious men who had their heart in their work, who sought neither promotion nor decorations, and who paid less attention to the punctilious observance of prescribed formalities than to the real objects in view.

There were, it is true, a few men to whom this description does not apply. Some of these were unduly under the influence of the feelings and conceptions created by serfage. Some, on the contrary, erred on the other side. Desirous of securing the future welfare of the peasantry and of gaining for themselves a certain kind of popularity, and at the same time animated with a violent spirit of pseudo-liberalism, these latter occasionally forgot that their duty was to be, not generous, but just, and that they had no right to practise generosity at other people's expense. All this I am quite aware of--I could even name one or two Arbiters who were guilty of positive dishonesty--but I hold that these were rare exceptions. The great majority did their duty faithfully and well.

The work of concluding contracts for the redemption of the dues, or, in other words, for the purchase of the land ceded in perpetual usufruct, proceeded slowly. The arrangement was as follows:--The dues were capitalised at six per cent., and the Government paid at once to the proprietors four-fifths of the whole sum. The peasants were to pay to the proprietor the remaining fifth, either at once or in installments, and to the Government six per cent. for forty-nine years on the sum advanced. The proprietors willingly adopted this arrangement, for it provided them with a sum of ready money, and freed them from the difficult task of collecting the dues. But the peasants did not show much desire to undertake the operation. Some of them still expected a second Emancipation, and those who did not take this possibility into their calculations were little disposed to make present sacrifices for distant prospective advantages which would not be realised for half a century. In most cases the proprietor was obliged to remit, in whole or in part, the fifth to be paid by the peasants. Many Communes refused to undertake the operation on any conditions and in consequence of this not a few proprietors demanded the so-called obligatory redemption, according to which they accepted the four-fifths from the Government as full payment, and the operation was thus effected without the peasants being consulted. The total number of male serfs emancipated was about nine millions and three-quarters,* and of these, only about seven millions and a quarter had, at the beginning of 1875, made redemption contracts. Of the contracts signed at that time, about sixty-three per cent, were "obligatory." In 1887 the redemption was made obligatory for both parties, so that all Communes are now proprietors of the land previously held in perpetual usufruct; and in 1932 the debt will have been extinguished by the sinking fund, and all redemption payments will have ceased.

* This does not include the domestic serfs who did not receive land.

The serfs were thus not only liberated, but also made possessors of land and put on the road to becoming Communal proprietors, and the old Communal institutions were preserved and developed. In answer to the question, Who effected this gigantic reform? we may say that the chief merit undoubtedly belongs to Alexander II. Had he not possessed a very great amount of courage he would neither have raised the question nor allowed it to be raised by others, and had he not shown a great deal more decision and energy than was expected, the solution would have been indefinitely postponed. Among the members of his own family he found an able and energetic assistant in his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, and a warm sympathiser with the cause in the Grand Duchess Helena, a German Princess thoroughly devoted to the welfare of her adopted country. But we must not overlook the important part played by the nobles. Their conduct was very characteristic. As soon as the question was raised a large number of them adopted the liberal ideas with enthusiasm; and as soon as it became evident that Emancipation was inevitable, all made a holocaust of their ancient rights and demanded to be liberated at once from all relations with their serfs. Moreover, when the law was passed it was the proprietors who faithfully put it into execution. Lastly, we should remember that praise is due to the peasantry for their patience under disappointment and for their orderly conduct as soon as they understood the law and recognised it to be the will of the Tsar. Thus it may justly be said that the Emancipation was not the work of one man, or one party, or one class, but of the nation as a whole.*

* The names most commonly associated with the Emancipation are General Rostoftsef, Lanskoi (Minister of the Interior), Nicholas Milutin, Prince Tchererkassky, G. Samarin, Koshelef. Many others, such as I. A. Solovief, Zhukofski, Domontovitch, Giers--brother of M. Giers, afterwards Minister for Foreign Affairs--are less known, but did valuable work. To all of these, with the exception of the first two, who died before my arrival in Russia, I have to confess my obligations. The late Nicholas Milutin rendered me special service by putting at my disposal not only all the official papers in his possession, but also many documents of a more private kind. By his early and lamented death Russia lost one of the greatest statesmen she has yet produced.

XXX. THE LANDED PROPRIETORS SINCE THE EMANCIPATION

Two Opposite Opinions--Difficulties of Investigation--The Problem Simplified--Direct and Indirect Compensation--The Direct Compensation Inadequate--What the Proprietors Have Done with the Remainder of Their Estates--Immediate Moral Effect of the Abolition of Serfage--The Economic Problem--The Ideal Solution and the Difficulty of Realising It--More Primitive Arrangements--The Northern Agricultural Zone--The Black-earth Zone--The Labour Difficulty--The Impoverishment of the Noblesse Not a New Phenomenon--Mortgaging of Estates--Gradual Expropriation of the Noblesse-Rapid Increase in the Production and Export of Grain--How Far this Has Benefited the Landed Proprietors.

When the Emancipation question was raised there was a considerable diversity of opinion as to the effect which the abolition of serfage would have on the material interests of the two classes directly concerned. The Press and "the young generation" took an optimistic view, and endeavoured to prove that the proposed change would be beneficial alike to proprietors and to peasants. Science, it was said, has long since decided that free labour is immensely more productive than slavery or serfage, and the principle has been already proved to demonstration in the countries of Western Europe. In all those countries modern agricultural progress began with the emancipation of the serfs, and increased productivity was everywhere the immediate result of improvements in the method of culture. Thus the poor light soils of Germany, France, and Holland have been made to produce more than the vaunted "black earth" of Russia. And from these ameliorations the land-owning class has everywhere derived the chief advantages. Are not the landed proprietors of England--the country in which serfage was first abolished--the richest in the world? And is not the proprietor of a few hundred morgen in Germany often richer than the Russian noble who has thousands of dessyatins? By these and similar plausible arguments the Press endeavoured to prove to the proprietors that they ought, even in their own interest, to undertake the emancipation of the serfs. Many proprietors, however, showed little faith in the abstract principles of political economy and the vague teachings of history as interpreted by the contemporary periodical literature. They could not always refute the ingenious arguments adduced by the men of more sanguine temperament, but they felt convinced that their prospects were not nearly so bright as these men represented them to be. They believed that Russia was a peculiar country, and the Russians a peculiar people. The lower classes in England, France, Holland, and Germany were well known to be laborious and enterprising, while the Russian peasant was notoriously lazy, and would certainly, if left to himself, not do more work than was absolutely necessary to keep him from starving. Free labour might be more profitable than serfage in countries where the upper classes possessed traditional practical knowledge and abundance of capital, but in Russia the proprietors had neither the practical knowledge nor the ready money necessary to make the proposed ameliorations in the system of agriculture. To all this it was added that a system of emancipation by which the peasants should receive land and be made completely independent of the landed proprietors had nowhere been tried on such a large scale.

There were thus two diametrically opposite opinions regarding the economic results of the abolition of serfage, and we have now to examine which of these two opinions has been confirmed by experience.

Let us look at the question first from the point of view of the land-owners.

The reader who has never attempted to make investigations of this kind may naturally imagine that the question can be easily decided by simply consulting a large number of individual proprietors, and drawing a general conclusion from their evidence. In reality I found the task much more difficult. After roaming about the country for five years (1870-75), collecting information from the best available sources, I hesitated to draw any sweeping conclusions, and my state of mind at that time was naturally reflected in the early editions of this work. As a rule the proprietors could not state clearly how much they had lost or gained, and when definite information was obtained from them it was not always trustworthy. In the time of serfage very few of them had been in the habit of keeping accurate accounts, or accounts of any kind, and when they lived on their estates there were a very large number of items which could not possibly be reduced to figures. Of course, each proprietor had a general idea as to whether his position was better or worse than it had been in the old times, but the vague statements made by individuals regarding their former and their actual revenues had little or no scientific value. So many considerations which had nothing to do with purely agrarian relations entered into the calculations that the conclusions did not help me much to estimate the economic results of the Emancipation as a whole. Nor, it must be confessed, was the testimony by any means always unbiassed. Not a few spoke of the great reform in an epic or dithyrambic tone, and among these I easily distinguished two categories: the one desired to prove that the measure was a complete success in every way, and that all classes were benefited by it, not only morally, but also materially; whilst the others strove to represent the proprietors in general, and themselves in particular, as the self-sacrificing victims of a great and necessary patriotic reform--as martyrs in the cause of liberty and progress. I do not for a moment suppose that these two groups of witnesses had a clearly conceived intention of deceiving or misleading, but as a cautious investigator I had to make allowance for their idealising and sentimental tendencies.

Since that time the situation has become much clearer, and during recent visits to Russia I have been able to arrive at much more definite conclusions. These I now proceed to communicate to the reader.

The Emancipation caused the proprietors of all classes to pass through a severe economic crisis. Periods of transition always involve much suffering, and the amount of suffering is generally in the inverse ratio of the precautions taken beforehand. In Russia the precautions had been neglected. Not one proprietor in a hundred had made any serious preparations for the inevitable change. On the eve of the Emancipation there were about ten millions of male serfs on private properties, and of these nearly seven millions remained under the old system of paying their dues in labour. Of course, everybody knew that Emancipation must come sooner or later, but fore-thought, prudence, and readiness to take time by the forelock are not among the prominent traits of the Russian character. Hence most of the land-owners were taken unawares. But while all suffered, there were differences of degree. Some were completely shipwrecked. So long as serfage existed all the relations of life were ill-defined and extremely elastic, so that a man who was hopelessly insolvent might contrive, with very little effort, to keep his head above water for half a lifetime. For such men the Emancipation, like a crisis in the commercial world, brought a day of reckoning. It did not really ruin them, but it showed them and the world at large that they were ruined, and they could no longer continue their old mode of life. For others the crisis was merely temporary. These emerged with a larger income than they ever had before, but I am not prepared to say that their material condition has improved, because the social habits have changed, the cost of living has become much greater, and the work of administering estates is incomparably more complicated and laborious than in the old patriarchal times.

We may greatly simplify the problem by reducing it to two definite questions:

1. How far were the proprietors directly indemnified for the loss of serf labour and for the transfer in perpetual usufruct of a large part of their estates to the peasantry?

2. What have the proprietors done with the remainder of their estates, and how far have they been indirectly indemnified by the economic changes which have taken place since the Emancipation?

With the first of these questions I shall deal very briefly, because it is a controversial subject involving very complicated calculations which only a specialist can understand. The conclusion at which I have arrived, after much patient research, is that in most provinces the compensation was inadequate, and this conclusion is confirmed by excellent native authorities. M. Bekhteyev, for example, one of the most laborious and conscientious investigators in this field of research, and the author of an admirable work on the economic results of the Emancipation,* told me recently, in course of conversation, that in his opinion the peasant dues fixed by the Emancipation Law represented, throughout the Black-earth Zone, only about a half of the value of the labour previously supplied by the serfs. To this I must add that the compensation was in reality not nearly so great as it seemed to be according to the terms of the law. As the proprietors found it extremely difficult to collect the dues from the emancipated serfs, and as they required a certain amount of capital to reorganise the estate on the new basis of free labour, most of them were practically compelled to demand the obligatory redemption of the land (obiazatelny vuikup), and in adopting this expedient they had to make considerable sacrifices. Not only had they to accept as full payment four-fifths of the normal sum, but of this amount the greater portion was paid in Treasury bonds, which fell at once to 80 per cent. of their nominal value.

* "Khozaistvenniye Itogi istekshago Sorokoletiya." St. Petersburg, 1902.

Let us now pass to the second part of the problem: What have the proprietors done with the part of their estates which remained to them after ceding the required amount of land to the Communes? Have they been indirectly indemnified for the loss of serf labour by subsequent economic changes? How far have they succeeded in making the transition from serfage to free labour, and what revenues do they now derive from their estates? The answer to these questions will necessarily contain some account of the present economic position of the proprietors.

On all proprietors the Emancipation had at least one good effect: it dragged them forcibly from the old path of indolence and routine and compelled them to think and calculate regarding their affairs. The hereditary listlessness and apathy, the traditional habit of looking on the estate with its serfs as a kind of self-acting machine which must always spontaneously supply the owner with the means of living, the inveterate practice of spending all ready money and of taking little heed for the morrow--all this, with much that resulted from it, was rudely swept away and became a thing of the past.

The broad, easy road on which the proprietors had hitherto let themselves be borne along by the force of circumstances suddenly split up into a number of narrow, arduous, thorny paths. Each one had to use his judgement to determine which of the paths he should adopt, and, having made his choice, he had to struggle along as he best could. I remember once asking a proprietor what effect the Emancipation had had on the class to which he belonged, and he gave me an answer which is worth recording. "Formerly," he said, "we kept no accounts and drank champagne; now we keep accounts and content ourselves with kvass." Like all epigrammatic sayings, this laconic reply is far from giving a complete description of reality, but it indicates in a graphic way a change that has unquestionably taken place. As soon as serfage was abolished it was no longer possible to live like "the flowers of the field." Many a proprietor who had formerly vegetated in apathetic ease had to ask himself the question: How am I to gain a living? All had to consider what was the most profitable way of employing the land that remained to them.

The ideal solution of the problem was that as soon as the peasant-land had been demarcated, the proprietor should take to farming the remainder of his estate by means of hired labour and agricultural machines in West European or American fashion. Unfortunately, this solution could not be generally adopted, because the great majority of the landlords, even when they had the requisite practical knowledge of agriculture, had not the requisite capital, and could not easily obtain it. Where were they to find money for buying cattle, horses, and agricultural implements, for building stables and cattle-sheds, and for defraying all the other initial expenses? And supposing they succeeded in starting the new system, where was the working capital to come from? The old Government institution in which estates could be mortgaged according to the number of serfs was permanently closed, and the new land-credit associations had not yet come into existence. To borrow from private capitalists was not to be thought of, for money was so scarce than ten per cent. was considered a "friendly" rate of interest. Recourse might be had, it is true, to the redemption operation, but in that case the Government would deduct the unpaid portion of any outstanding mortgage, and would pay the balance in depreciated Treasury bonds. In these circumstances the proprietors could not, as a rule, adopt what I have called the ideal solution, and had to content themselves with some simpler and more primitive arrangement. They could employ the peasants of the neighbouring villages to prepare the land and reap the crops either for a fixed sum per acre or on the metayage system, or they could let their land to the peasants for one, three or six years at a moderate rent.

In the northern agricultural zone, where the soil is poor and primitive farming with free labour can hardly be made to pay, the proprietors had to let their land at a small rent, and those of them who could not find places in the rural administration migrated to the towns and sought employment in the public service or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises which were springing up at that time. There they have since remained. Their country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and dilapidation. In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale profitable, the estates are in a very different condition. The owners cultivate at least a part of their property, and can easily let to the peasants at a fair rent the land which they do not wish to farm themselves. Some have adopted the metayage system; others get the field-work done by the peasants at so much per acre. The more energetic, who have capital enough at their disposal, organise farms with hired labourers on the European model. If they are not so well off as formerly, it is because they have adopted a less patriarchal and more expensive style of living. Their land has doubled and trebled in value during the last thirty years, and their revenues have increased, if not in proportion, at least considerably. In 1903 I visited a number of estates in this region and found them in a very prosperous condition, with agricultural machines of the English or American types, an increasing variety in the rotation of crops, greatly improved breeds of cattle and horses, and all the other symptoms of a gradual transition to a more intensive and more rational system of agriculture.

It must be admitted, however, that even in the Black-earth Zone the proprietors have formidable difficulties to contend with, the chief of which are the scarcity of good farm-labourers, the frequent droughts, the low price of cereals, and the delay in getting the grain conveyed to the seaports. On each of these difficulties and the remedies that might be applied I could write a separate chapter, but I fear to overtax the reader's patience, and shall therefore confine myself to a few remarks about the labour question. On this subject the complaints are loud and frequent all over the country. The peasants, it is said, have become lazy, careless, addicted to drunkenness, and shamelessly dishonest with regard to their obligations, so that it is difficult to farm even in the old primitive fashion and impossible to introduce radical improvements in the methods of culture. In these sweeping accusations there is a certain amount of truth. That the muzhik, when working for others, exerts himself as little as possible; that he pays little attention to the quality of the work done; that he shows a reckless carelessness with regard to his employer's property; that he is capable of taking money in advance and failing to fulfil his contract; that he occasionally gets drunk; and that he is apt to commit certain acts of petty larceny when he gets the chance--all this is undoubtedly true, whatever biassed theorists and sentimental peasant-worshippers may say to the contrary.* It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the fault is entirely on the side of the peasants, and equally erroneous to believe that the evils might be remedied, as is often suggested, by greater severity on the part of the tribunals, or by an improved system of passports. Farming with free labour, like every other department of human activity, requires a fair amount of knowledge, judgment, prudence, and tact, which cannot be replaced by ingenious legislation or judicial severity. In engaging labourers or servants it is necessary to select them carefully and make such conditions that they feel it to be to their interest to fulfil their contract loyally. This is too often overlooked by the Russian land-owners. From false views of economy they are inclined to choose the cheapest labourer without examining closely his other qualifications, or they take advantage of the peasant's pecuniary embarrassments and make with him a contract which it is hardly possible for him to fulfil. In spring, for instance, when his store of provisions is exhausted and he is being hard pressed by the tax-collector, they supply him with rye-meal or advance him a small sum of money on condition of his undertaking to do a relatively large amount of summer work. He knows that the contract is unfair to him, but what is he to do? He must get food for himself and his family and a little ready money for his taxes, for the Communal authorities will probably sell his cow if he does not pay his arrears.** In desperation he accepts the conditions and puts off the evil day--consoling himself with the reflection that perhaps (avos') something may turn up in the meantime--but when the time comes for fulfilling his engagements the dilemma revives. According to the contract he ought to work nearly the whole summer for the proprietor; but he has his own land to attend to, and he has to make provision for the winter. In such circumstances the temptation to evade the terms of the contract is probably too strong to be resisted.

* Amongst themselves the peasants are not addicted to thieving, as is proved by the fact that they habitually leave their doors unlocked when the inmates of the house are working in the fields; but if the muzhik finds in the proprietor's farmyard a piece of iron or a bit of rope, or any of those little things that he constantly requires and has difficulty in obtaining, he is very apt to pick it up and carry it home. Gathering firewood in the landlord's forest he does not consider as theft, because "God planted the trees and watered them," and in the time of serfage he was allowed to supply himself with firewood in this way.

** Until last year (1904) they could use also corporal punishment as a means of pressure, and I am not sure that they do not occasionally use it still, though it is no longer permitted by law.

In Russia, as in other countries, the principle holds true that for good labour a fair price must be paid. Several large proprietors of my acquaintance who habitually act on this principle assure me that they always obtain as much good labour as they require. I must add, however, that these fortunate proprietors have the advantage of possessing a comfortable amount of working capital, and are therefore not compelled, as so many of their less fortunate neighbours are, to manage their estates on the hand-to-mouth principle.

It is only, I fear, a minority of the landed proprietors that have grappled successfully with these and other difficulties of their position. As a class they are impoverished and indebted, but this state of things is not due entirely to serf-emancipation. The indebtedness of the Noblesse is a hereditary peculiarity of much older date. By some authorities it is attributed to the laws of Peter the Great, by which all nobles were obliged to spend the best part of their lives in the military or civil service, and to leave the management of their estates to incompetent stewards. However that may be, it is certain that from the middle of the eighteenth century downwards the fact has frequently occupied the attention of the Government, and repeated attempts have been made to alleviate the evil. The Empress Elizabeth, Catherine II., Paul, Alexander I., Nicholas I., Alexander II., and Alexander III. tried successively, as one of the older ukazes expressed it, "to free the Noblesse from debt and from greedy money-lenders, and to prevent hereditary estates from passing into the hands of strangers." The means commonly adopted was the creation of mortgage banks founded and controlled by the Government for the purpose of advancing money to landed proprietors at a comparatively low rate of interest.

These institutions may have been useful to the few who desired to improve their estates, but they certainly did not cure, and rather tended to foster, the inveterate improvidence of the many. On the eve of the Emancipation the proprietors were indebted to the Government for the sum of 425 millions of roubles, and 69 per cent. of their serfs were mortgaged. A portion of this debt was gradually extinguished by the redemption operation, so that in 1880 over 300 millions had been paid off, but in the meantime new debts were being contracted. In 1873-74 nine private land-mortgage banks were created, and there was such a rush to obtain money from them that their paper was a glut in the market, and became seriously depreciated. When the prices of grain rose in 1875-80 the mortgage debt was diminished, but when they began to fall in 1880 it again increased, and in 1881 it stood at 396 millions. As the rate of interest was felt to be very burdensome there was a strong feeling among the landed proprietors at that time that the Government ought to help them, and in 1883 the nobles of the province of Orel ventured to address the Emperor on the subject. In reply to the address, Alexander III., who had strong Conservative leanings, was graciously pleased to declare in an ukaz that "it was really time to do something to help the Noblesse," and accordingly a new land-mortgage bank for the Noblesse was created. The favourable terms offered by it were taken advantage of to such an extent that in the first four years of its activity (1886-90) it advanced to the proprietors over 200 million roubles. Then came two famine years, and in 1894 the mortgage debt of the Noblesse in that and other credit establishments was estimated at 994 millions. It has since probably increased rather than diminished, for in that year the prices of grain began to fall steadily on all the corn-exchanges of the world, and they have never since recovered.

By means of mortgages some proprietors succeeded in weathering the storm, but many gave up the struggle altogether, and settled in the towns. In the space of thirty years 20,000 of them sold their estates, and thus, between 1861 and 1892, the area of land possessed by the Noblesse diminished 30 per cent.--from 77,804,000 to 55,500,000 dessyatins.

This expropriation of the Noblesse, as it is called, was evidently not the result merely of the temporary economic disturbance caused by the abolition of serfage, for as time went on it became more rapid. During the first twenty years the average annual amount of Noblesse land sold was 517,000 dessyatins, and it rose steadily until 1892-96, when it reached the amount of 785,000. As I have already stated, the townward movement of the proprietors was strongest in the barren Northern provinces. In the province of Olonetz, for example, they have already parted with 87 per cent. of their land. In the black-soil region, on the contrary, there is no province in which more than 27 per cent. of the Noblesse land has been alienated, and in one province (Tula) the amount is only 19 per cent.

The habit of mortgaging and selling estates does not necessarily mean the impoverishment of the landlords as a class. If the capital raised in that way is devoted to agricultural improvements, the result may be an increase of wealth. Unfortunately, in Russia the realised capital was usually not so employed. A very large proportion of it was spent unproductively, partly in luxuries and living abroad, and partly in unprofitable commercial and industrial speculations. The industrial and railway fever which raged at the time induced many to risk and lose their capital, and it had indirectly an injurious effect on all by making money plentiful in the towns and creating a more expensive style of living, from which the landed gentry could not hold entirely aloof.

So far I have dwelt on the dark shadows of the picture, but it is not all shadow. In the last forty years the production and export of grain, which constitute the chief source of revenue for the Noblesse, have increased enormously, thanks mainly to the improved means of transport. In the first decade after the Emancipation (1860-70) the average annual export did not exceed 88 million puds; in the second decade (1870-80) it leapt up to 218 millions; and so it went up steadily until in the last decade of the century it had reached 388 millions--i.e., over six million tons. At the same time the home trade had increased likewise in consequence of the rapidly growing population of the towns. All this must have enriched the land-proprietors. Not to such an extent, it is true, as the figures seem to indicate, because the old prices could not be maintained. Rye, for example, which in 1868 stood at 129 kopeks per pud, fell as low as 56, and during the rest of the century, except during a short time in 1881-82 and the famine years of 1891-92, when there was very little surplus to sell, it never rose above 80. Still, the increase in quantity more than counterbalanced the fall in price. For example: in 1881 the average price of grain per pud was 119, and in 1894 it had sunk to 59; but the amount exported during that time rose from 203 to 617 million puds, and the sum received for it had risen from 242 to 369 millions of roubles. Surely the whole of that enormous sum was not squandered on luxuries and unprofitable speculation!

The pessimists, however--and in Russia their name is legion--will not admit that any permanent advantage has been derived from this enormous increase in exports. On the contrary, they maintain that it is a national misfortune, because it is leading rapidly to a state of permanent impoverishment. It quickly exhausted, they say, the large reserves of grain in the village, so that as soon as there was a very bad harvest the Government had to come to the rescue and feed the starving peasantry. Worse than this, it compromised the future prosperity of the country. Being in pecuniary difficulties, and consequently impatient to make money, the proprietors increased inordinately the area of grain-producing land at the expense of pasturage and forests, with the result that the live stock and the manuring of the land were diminished, the fertility of the soil impaired, and the necessary quantity of moisture in the atmosphere greatly lessened. There is some truth in this contention; but it would seem that the soil and climate have not been affected so much as the pessimists suppose, because in recent years there have been some very good harvests.

On the whole, then, I think it may be justly said that the efforts of the landed proprietors to work their estates without serf labour have not as yet been brilliantly successful. Those who have failed are in the habit of complaining that they have not received sufficient support from the Government, which is accused of having systematically sacrificed the interests of agriculture, the mainstay of the national resources, to the creation of artificial and unnecessary manufacturing industries. How far such complaints and accusations are well founded I shall not attempt to decide. It is a complicated polemical question, into which the reader would probably decline to accompany me. Let us examine rather what influence the above-mentioned changes have had on the peasantry.

XXXI. THE EMANCIPATED PEASANTRY

The Effects of Liberty--Difficulty of Obtaining Accurate Information--Pessimist Testimony of the Proprietors--Vague Replies of the Peasants--My Conclusions in 1877--Necessity of Revising Them--My Investigations Renewed in 1903--Recent Researches by Native Political Economists--Peasant Impoverishment Universally Recognised--Various Explanations Suggested--Demoralisation of the Common People--Peasant Self-government--Communal System of Land Tenure--Heavy Taxation--Disruption of Peasant Families--Natural Increase of Population--Remedies Proposed--Migration--Reclamation of Waste Land--Land-purchase by Peasantry--Manufacturing Industry--Improvement of Agricultural Methods--Indications of Progress.

At the commencement of last chapter I pointed out in general terms the difficulty of describing clearly the immediate consequences of the Emancipation. In beginning now to speak of the influence which the great reform has had on the peasantry, I feel that the difficulty has reached its climax. The foreigner who desires merely to gain a general idea of the subject cannot be expected to take an interest in details, and even if he took the trouble to examine them attentively, he would derive from the labour little real information. What he wishes is a clear, concise, and dogmatic statement of general results. Has the material and moral condition of the peasantry improved since the Emancipation? That is the simple question which he has to put, and he naturally expects a simple, categorical answer.

In beginning my researches in this interesting field of inquiry, I had no adequate conception of the difficulties awaiting me. I imagined that I had merely to question intelligent, competent men who had had abundant opportunities of observation, and to criticise and boil down the information collected; but when I put this method of investigation to the test of experience it proved unsatisfactory. Very soon I came to perceive that my authorities were very far from being impartial observers. Most of them were evidently suffering from shattered illusions. They had expected that the Emancipation would produce instantaneously a wonderful improvement in the life and character of the rural population, and that the peasant would become at once a sober, industrious, model agriculturist.

These expectations were not realised. One year passed, five years passed, ten years passed, and the expected transformation did not take place. On the contrary, there appeared certain very ugly phenomena which were not at all in the programme. The peasants began to drink more and to work less,* and the public life which the Communal institutions produced was by no means of a desirable kind. The "bawlers" (gorlopany) acquired a prejudicial influence in the Village Assemblies, and in very many Volosts the peasant judges, elected by their fellow-villagers, acquired a bad habit of selling their decisions for vodka. The natural consequence of all this was that those who had indulged in exaggerated expectations sank into a state of inordinate despondency, and imagined things to be much worse than they really were.

* I am not at all sure that the peasants really drank more, but such was, and still is, a very general conviction.

For different reasons, those who had not indulged in exaggerated expectations, and had not sympathised with the Emancipation in the form in which it was effected, were equally inclined to take a pessimistic view of the situation. In every ugly phenomenon they found a confirmation of their opinions. The result was precisely what they had foretold. The peasants had used their liberty and their privileges to their own detriment and to the detriment of others!

The extreme "Liberals" were also inclined, for reasons of their own, to join in the doleful chorus. They desired that the condition of the peasantry should be further improved by legislative enactments, and accordingly they painted the evils in as dark colours as possible.

Thus, from various reasons, the majority of the educated classes were unduly disposed to represent to themselves and to others the actual condition of the peasantry in a very unfavourable light, and I felt that from them there was no hope of obtaining the lumen siccum which I desired. I determined, therefore, to try the method of questioning the peasants themselves. Surely they must know whether their condition was better or worse than it had been before their Emancipation.

Again I was doomed to disappointment. A few months' experience sufficed to convince me that my new method was by no means so effectual as I had imagined. Uneducated people rarely make generalisations which have no practical utility, and I feel sure that very few Russian peasants ever put to themselves the question: Am I better off now than I was in the time of serfage? When such a question is put to them they feel taken aback. And in truth it is no easy matter to sum up the two sides of the account and draw an accurate balance, save in those exceptional cases in which the proprietor flagrantly abused his authority. The present money-dues and taxes are often more burdensome than the labour-dues in the old times. If the serfs had a great many ill-defined obligations to fulfil--such as the carting of the master's grain to market, the preparing of his firewood, the supplying him with eggs, chickens, home-made linen, and the like--they had, on the other hand, a good many ill-defined privileges. They grazed their cattle during a part of the year on the manor-land; they received firewood and occasionally logs for repairing their huts; sometimes the proprietor lent them or gave them a cow or a horse when they had been visited by the cattle-plague or the horse-stealer; and in times of famine they could look to their master for support. All this has now come to an end. Their burdens and their privileges have been swept away together, and been replaced by clearly defined, unbending, unelastic legal relations. They have now to pay the market-price for every stick of firewood which they burn, for every log which they require for repairing their houses, and for every rood of land on which to graze their cattle. Nothing is now to be had gratis. The demand to pay is encountered at every step. If a cow dies or a horse is stolen, the owner can no longer go to the proprietor with the hope of receiving a present, or at least a loan without interest, but must, if he has no ready money, apply to the village usurer, who probably considers twenty or thirty per cent, as a by no means exorbitant rate of interest.

Besides this, from the economic point of view village life has been completely revolutionised. Formerly the members of a peasant family obtained from their ordinary domestic resources nearly all they required. Their food came from their fields, cabbage-garden, and farmyard. Materials for clothing were supplied by their plots of flax and their sheep, and were worked up into linen and cloth by the female members of the household. Fuel, as I have said, and torches wherewith to light the izba--for oil was too expensive and petroleum was unknown--were obtained gratis. Their sheep, cattle, and horses were bred at home, and their agricultural implements, except in so far as a little iron was required, could be made by themselves without any pecuniary expenditure. Money was required only for the purchase of a few cheap domestic utensils, such as pots, pans, knives, hatchets, wooden dishes, and spoons, and for the payment of taxes, which were small in amount and often paid by the proprietor. In these circumstances the quantity of money in circulation among the peasants was infinitesimally small, the few exchanges which took place in a village being generally effected by barter. The taxes, and the vodka required for village festivals, weddings, or funerals, were the only large items of expenditure for the year, and they were generally covered by the sums brought home by the members of the family who went to work in the towns.

Very different is the present condition of affairs. The spinning, weaving, and other home industries have been killed by the big factories, and the flax and wool have to be sold to raise a little ready money for the numerous new items of expenditure. Everything has to be bought--clothes, firewood, petroleum, improved agricultural implements, and many other articles which are now regarded as necessaries of life, whilst comparatively little is earned by working in the towns, because the big families have been broken up, and a household now consists usually of husband and wife, who must both remain at home, and children who are not yet bread-winners. Recalling to mind all these things and the other drawbacks and advantages of his actual position, the old muzhik has naturally much difficulty in striking a balance, and he may well be quite sincere when, on being asked whether things now are on the whole better or worse than in the time of serfage, he scratches the back of his head and replies hesitatingly, with a mystified expression on his wrinkled face: "How shall I say to you? They are both better and worse!" ("Kak vam skazat'? I lûtche i khûdzhe!") If, however, you press him further and ask whether he would himself like to return to the old state of things, he is pretty sure to answer, with a slow shake of the head and a twinkle in his eye, as if some forgotten item in the account had suddenly recurred to him: "Oh, no!"

What materially increases the difficulty of this general computation is that great changes have taken place in the well-being of the particular households. Some have greatly prospered, while others have become impoverished. That is one of the most characteristic consequences of the Emancipation. In the old times the general economic stagnation and the uncontrolled authority of the proprietor tended to keep all the households of a village on the same level. There was little opportunity for an intelligent, enterprising serf to become rich, and if he contrived to increase his revenue he had probably to give a considerable share of it to the proprietor, unless he had the good fortune to belong to a grand seigneur like Count Sheremetief, who was proud of having rich men among his serfs. On the other hand, the proprietor, for evident reasons of self-interest, as well as from benevolent motives, prevented the less intelligent and less enterprising members of the Commune from becoming bankrupt. The Communal equality thus artificially maintained has now disappeared, the restrictions on individual freedom of action have been removed, the struggle for life has become intensified, and, as always happens in such circumstances, the strong men go up in the world while the weak ones go to the wall. All over the country we find on the one hand the beginnings of a village aristocracy--or perhaps we should call it a plutocracy, for it is based on money--and on the other hand an ever-increasing pauperism. Some peasants possess capital, with which they buy land outside the Commune or embark in trade, while others have to sell their live stock, and have sometimes to cede to neighbours their share of the Communal property. This change in rural life is so often referred to that, in order to express it a new, barbarous word, differentsiatsia (differentiation) has been invented.

Hoping to obtain fuller information with the aid of official protection, I attached myself to one of the travelling sections of an agricultural Commission appointed by the Government, and during a whole summer I helped to collect materials in the provinces bordering on the Volga. The inquiry resulted in a gigantic report of nearly 2,500 folio pages, but the general conclusions were extremely vague. The peasantry, it was said, were passing, like the landed proprietors, through a period of transition, in which the main features of their future normal life had not yet become clearly defined. In some localities their condition had decidedly improved, whereas in others it had improved little or not at all. Then followed a long list of recommendations in favour of Government assistance, better agronomic education, competitive exhibitions, more varied rotation of crops, and greater zeal on the part of the clergy in disseminating among the people moral principles in general and love of work in particular.

Not greatly enlightened by this official activity, I returned to my private studies, and at the end of six years I published my impressions and conclusions in the first edition of this work. While recognising that there was much uncertainty as to the future, I was inclined, on the whole, to take a hopeful view of the situation. I was unable, however, to maintain permanently that comfortable frame of mind. After my departure from Russia in 1878, the accounts which reached me from various parts of the country became blacker and blacker, and were partly confirmed by short tours which I made in 1889-1896. At last, in the summer of 1903, I determined to return to some of my old haunts and look at things with my own eyes. At that moment some hospitable friends invited me to pay them a visit at their country-house in the province of Smolensk, and I gladly accepted the invitation, because Smolensk, when I knew it formerly, was one of the poorest provinces, and I thought it well to begin my new studies by examining the impoverishment, of which I had heard so much, at its maximum.

From the railway station at Viazma, where I arrived one morning at sunrise, I had some twenty miles to drive, and as soon as I got clear of the little town I began my observations. What I saw around me seemed to contradict the sombre accounts I had received. The villages through which I passed had not at all the look of dilapidation and misery which I expected. On the contrary, the houses were larger and better constructed than they used to be, and each of them had a chimney! That latter fact was important because formerly a large proportion of the peasants of this region had no such luxury, and allowed the smoke to find its exit by the open door. In vain I looked for a hut of the old type, and my yamstchik assured me I should have to go a long way to find one. Then I noticed a good many iron ploughs of the European model, and my yamstchik informed me that their predecessor, the sokha with which I had been so familiar, had entirely disappeared from the district. Next I noticed that in the neighbourhood of the villages flax was grown in large quantities. That was certainly not an indication of poverty, because flax is a valuable product which requires to be well manured, and plentiful manure implies a considerable quantity of live stock. Lastly, before arriving at my destination, I noticed clover being grown in the fields. This made me open my eyes with astonishment, because the introduction of artificial grasses into the traditional rotation of crops indicates the transition to a higher and more intensive system of agriculture. As I had never seen clover in Russia except on the estates of very advanced proprietors, I said to my yamstchik:

"Listen, little brother! That field belongs to the landlord?"

"Not at all, Master; it is muzhik-land."

On arriving at the country-house I told my friends what I had seen, and they explained it to me. Smolensk is no longer one of the poorer provinces; it has become comparatively prosperous. In two or three districts large quantities of flax are produced and give the cultivators a big revenue; in other districts plenty of remunerative work is supplied by the forests. Everywhere a considerable proportion of the younger men go regularly to the towns and bring home savings enough to pay the taxes and make a little surplus in the domestic budget. A few days afterwards the village secretary brought me his books, and showed me that there were practically no arrears of taxation.

Passing on to other provinces I found similar proofs of progress and prosperity, but at the same time not a few indications of impoverishment; and I was rapidly relapsing into my previous state of uncertainty as to whether any general conclusions could be drawn, when an old friend, himself a first-rate authority with many years of practical experience, came to my assistance.* He informed me that a number of specialists had recently made detailed investigations into the present economic conditions of the rural population, and he kindly placed at my disposal, in his charming country-house near Moscow, the voluminous researches of these investigators. Here, during a good many weeks, I revelled in the statistical materials collected, and to the best of my ability I tested the conclusions drawn from them. Many of these conclusions I had to dismiss with the Scotch verdict of "not proven," whilst others seemed to me worthy of acceptance. Of these latter the most important were those drawn from the arrears of taxation.

* I hope I am committing no indiscretion when I say that the old friend in question was Prince Alexander Stcherbatof of Vasilefskoe.

The arrears in the payment of taxes may be regarded as a pretty safe barometer for testing the condition of the rural population, because the peasant habitually pays his rates and taxes when he has the means of doing so; when he falls seriously and permanently into arrears it may be assumed that he is becoming impoverished. If the arrears fluctuate from year to year, the causes of the impoverishment may be regarded as accidental and perhaps temporary, but if they steadily accumulate, we must conclude that there is something radically wrong. Bearing these facts in mind, let us hear what the statistics say.

During the first twenty years after the Emancipation (1861-81) things went on in their old grooves. The poor provinces remained poor, and the fertile provinces showed no signs of distress. During the next twenty years (1881-1901) the arrears of the whole of European Russia rose, roughly speaking, from 27 to 144 millions of roubles, and the increase, strange to say, took place in the fertile provinces. In 1890, for example, out of 52 millions, nearly 41 millions, or 78 per cent., fell to the share of the provinces of the Black-earth Zone. In seven of these the average arrears per male, which had been in 1882 only 90 kopeks, rose in 1893 to 600, and in 1899 to 2,200! And this accumulation had taken place in spite of reductions of taxation to the extent of 37 million roubles in 1881-83, and successive famine grants from the Treasury in 1891-99 to the amount of 203 millions.* On the other hand, in the provinces with a poor soil the arrears had greatly decreased. In Smolensk, for example, they had sunk from 202 per cent, to 13 per cent. of the annual sum to be paid, and in nearly all the other provinces of the west and north a similar change for the better had taken place.

These and many other figures which I might quote show that a great and very curious economic revolution has been gradually effected. The Black-earth Zone, which was formerly regarded as the inexhaustible granary of the Empire, has become impoverished, whilst the provinces which were formerly regarded as hopelessly poor are now in a comparatively flourishing condition. This fact has been officially recognised. In a classification of the provinces according to their degree of prosperity, drawn up by a special commission of experts in 1903, those with a poor light soil appear at the top, and those with the famous black earth are at the bottom of the list. In the deliberations of the commission many reasons for this extraordinary state of things are adduced. Most of them have merely a local significance. The big fact, taken as a whole, seems to me to show that, in consequence of certain changes of which I shall speak presently, the peasantry of European Russia can no longer live by the traditional modes of agriculture, even in the most fertile districts, and require for their support some subsidiary occupations such as are practised in the less fertile provinces.

* In 1901 an additional famine grant of 33 1/2 million roubles had to be made by the Government.

Another sign of impoverishment is the decrease in the quantity of live stock. According to the very imperfect statistics available, for every hundred inhabitants the number of horses has decreased from 26 to 17, the number of cattle from 36 to 25, and the number of sheep from 73 to 40. This is a serious matter, because it means that the land is not so well manured and cultivated as formerly, and is consequently not so productive. Several economists have attempted to fix precisely to what extent the productivity has decreased, but I confess I have little faith in the accuracy of their conclusions. M. Polenof, for example, a most able and conscientious investigator, calculates that between 1861 and 1895, all over Russia, the amount of food produced, in relation to the number of the population, has decreased by seven per cent. His methods of calculation are ingenious, but the statistical data with which he operates are so far from accurate that his conclusions on this point have, in my opinion, little or no scientific value. With all due deference to Russian economists, I may say parenthetically that they are very found of juggling with carelessly collected statistics, as if their data were mathematical quantities.

Several of the Zemstvos have grappled with this question of peasant impoverishment, and the data which they have collected make a very doleful impression. In the province of Moscow, for example, a careful investigation gave the following results: Forty per cent. of the peasant households had no longer any horses, 15 per cent. had given up agriculture altogether, and about 10 per cent. had no longer any land. We must not, however, assume, as is often done, that the peasant families who have no live stock and no longer till the land are utterly ruined. In reality many of them are better off than their neighbours who appear as prosperous in the official statistics, having found profitable occupation in the home industries, in the towns, in the factories, or on the estates of the landed proprietors. It must be remembered that Moscow is the centre of one of the regions in which manufacturing industry has progressed with gigantic strides during the last half-century, and it would be strange indeed if, in such a region, the peasantry who supply the labour to the towns and factories remained thriving agriculturists. That many Russians are surprised and horrified at the actual state of things shows to what an extent the educated classes are still under the illusion that Russia can create for herself a manufacturing industry capable of competing with that of Western Europe without uprooting from the soil a portion of her rural population.

It is only in the purely agricultural regions that families officially classed as belonging to the peasantry may be regarded as on the brink of pauperism because they have no live stock, and even with regard to them I should hesitate to make such an assumption, because the muzhiks, as I have already had occasion to remark, have strange nomadic habits unknown to the rural population of other countries. It is a mistake, therefore, to calculate the Russian peasant's budget exclusively on the basis of local resources.

To the pessimists who assure me that according to their calculations the peasantry in general must be on the brink of starvation, I reply that there are many facts, even in the statistical tables on which they rely, which run counter to their deductions. Let me quote one by way of illustration. The total amount of deposits in savings banks, about one-fourth of which is believed to belong to the rural population, rose in the course of six years (1894-1900) from 347 to 680 millions of roubles. Besides the savings banks, there existed in the rural districts on 1st December, 1902, no less than 1,614 small-credit institutions, with a total capital (1st January, 1901) of 69 million roubles, of which only 4,653,000 had been advanced by the State Bank and the Zemstvo, the remainder coming in from private sources. This is not much for a big country like Russia, but it is a beginning, and it suggests that the impoverishment is not so severe and so universal as the pessimists would have us believe.

There is thus room for differences of opinion as to how far the peasantry have become impoverished, but there is no doubt that their condition is far from satisfactory, and we have to face the important problem why the abolition of serfage has not produced the beneficent consequences which even moderate men so confidently predicted, and how the present unsatisfactory state of things is to be remedied.

The most common explanation among those who have never seriously studied the subject is that it all comes from the demoralisation of the common people. In this view there is a modicum of truth. That the peasantry injure their material welfare by drunkenness and improvidence there can be no reasonable doubt, as is shown by the comparatively flourishing state of certain villages of Old Ritualists and Molokanye in which there is no drunkenness, and in which the community exercises a strong moral control over the individual members. If the Orthodox Church could make the peasantry refrain from the inordinate use of strong drink as effectually as it makes them refrain during a great part of the year from animal food, and if it could instil into their minds a few simple moral principles as successfully as it has inspired them with a belief in the efficacy of the Sacraments, it would certainly confer on them an inestimable benefit. But this is not to be expected. The great majority of the parish priests are quite unfit for such a task, and the few who have aspirations in that direction rarely acquire a perceptible moral influence over their parishioners. Perhaps more is to be expected from the schoolmaster than from the priest, but it will be long before the schools can produce even a partial moral regeneration. Their first influence, strange as the assertion may seem, is often in a diametrically opposite direction. When only a few peasants in a village can read and write they have such facilities for overreaching their "dark" neighbours that they are apt to employ their knowledge for dishonest purposes; and thus it occasionally happens that the man who has the most education is the greatest scoundrel in the Mir. Such facts are often used by the opponents of popular education, but in reality they supply a good reason for disseminating primary education as rapidly as possible. When all the peasants have learned to read and write they will present a less inviting field for swindling, and the temptations to dishonesty will be proportionately diminished. Meanwhile, it is only fair to state that the common assertions about drunkenness being greatly on the increase are not borne out by the official statistics concerning the consumption of spirituous liquors.

After drunkenness, the besetting sin which is supposed to explain the impoverishment of the peasantry is incorrigible laziness. On that subject I feel inclined to put in a plea of extenuating circumstances in favour of the muzhik. Certainly he is very slow in his movements--slower perhaps than the English rustic--and he has a marvellous capacity for wasting valuable time without any perceptible qualms of conscience; but he is in this respect, if I may use a favourite phrase of the Social Scientists, "the product of environment." To the proprietors who habitually reproach him with time-wasting he might reply with a very strong tu quoque argument, and to all the other classes the argument might likewise be addressed. The St. Petersburg official, for example, who writes edifying disquisitions about peasant indolence, considers that for himself attendance at his office for four hours, a large portion of which is devoted to the unproductive labour of cigarette smoking, constitutes a very fair day's work. The truth is that in Russia the struggle for life is not nearly so intense as in more densely populated countries, and society is so constituted that all can live without very strenuous exertion. The Russians seem, therefore, to the traveller who comes from the West an indolent, apathetic race. If the traveller happens to come from the East--especially if he has been living among pastoral races--the Russians will appear to him energetic and laborious. Their character in this respect corresponds to their geographical position: they stand midway between the laborious, painstaking, industrious population of Western Europe and the indolent, undisciplined, spasmodically energetic populations of Central Asia. They are capable of effecting much by vigorous, intermittent effort--witness the peasant at harvest-time, or the St. Petersburg official when some big legislative project has to be submitted to the Emperor within a given time--but they have not yet learned regular laborious habits. In short, the Russians might move the world if it could be done by a jerk, but they are still deficient in that calm perseverance and dogged tenacity which characterise the Teutonic race.

Without seeking further to determine how far the moral defects of the peasantry have a deleterious influence on their material welfare, I proceed to examine the external causes which are generally supposed to contribute largely to their impoverishment, and will deal first with the evils of peasant self-government.

That the peasant self-government is very far from being in a satisfactory condition must be admitted by any impartial observer. The more laborious and well-to-do peasants, unless they wish to abuse their position directly or indirectly for their own advantage, try to escape election as office-bearers, and leave the administration in the hands of the less respectable members. Not unfrequently a Volost Elder trades with the money he collects as dues or taxes; and sometimes, when he becomes insolvent, the peasants have to pay their taxes and dues a second time. The Village Assemblies, too, have become worse than they were in the days of serfage. At that time the Heads of Households--who, it must be remembered, have alone a voice in the decisions--were few in number, laborious, and well-to-do, and they kept the lazy, unruly members under strict control. Now that the large families have been broken up and almost every adult peasant is Head of a Household, the Communal affairs are sometimes decided by a noisy majority; and certain Communal decisions may be obtained by "treating the Mir"--that is to say, by supplying a certain amount of vodka. Often I have heard old peasants speak of these things, and finish their recital by some such remark as this: "There is no order now; the people have been spoiled; it was better in the time of the masters."

These evils are very real, and I have no desire to extenuate them, but I believe they are by no means so great as is commonly supposed. If the lazy, worthless members of the Commune had really the direction of Communal affairs we should find that in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where it is necessary to manure the soil, the periodical redistributions of the Communal land would be very frequent; for in a new distribution the lazy peasant has a good chance of getting a well-manured lot in exchange for the lot which he has exhausted. In reality, so far as my observations extend, these general distributions of the land are not more frequent than they were before.

Of the various functions of the peasant self-government the judicial are perhaps the most frequently and the most severely criticised. And certainly not without reason, for the Volost Courts are too often accessible to the influence of alcohol, and in some districts the peasants say that he who becomes a judge takes a sin on his soul. I am not at all sure, however, that it would be well to abolish these courts altogether, as some people propose. In many respects they are better suited to peasant requirements than the ordinary tribunals. Their procedure is infinitely simpler, more expeditious, and incomparably less expensive, and they are guided by traditional custom and plain common-sense, whereas the ordinary tribunals have to judge according to the civil law, which is unknown to the peasantry and not always applicable to their affairs.

Few ordinary judges have a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the minute details of peasant life to be able to decide fairly the cases that are brought before the Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical notions of the peasantry. These are often very different from those of the upper classes. In cases of matrimonial separation, for instance, the educated man naturally assumes that, if there is any question of aliment, it should be paid by the husband to the wife. The peasant, on the contrary, assumes as naturally that it should be paid by the wife to the husband--or rather to the Head of the Household--as a compensation for the loss of labour which her desertion involves. In like manner, according to traditional peasant-law, if an unmarried son is working away from home, his earnings do not belong to himself, but to the family, and in Volost Court they could be claimed by the Head of the Household.

Occasionally, it is true, the peasant judges allow their respect for old traditional conceptions in general and for the authority of parents in particular, to carry them a little too far. I was told lately of one affair which took place not long ago, within a hundred miles of Moscow, in which the judge decided that a respectable young peasant should be flogged because he refused to give his father the money he earned as groom in the service of a neighbouring proprietor, though it was notorious in the district that the father was a disreputable old drunkard who carried to the kabak (gin-shop) all the money he could obtain by fair means and foul. When I remarked to my informant, who was not an admirer of peasant institutions, that the incident reminded me of the respect for the patria potestas in old Roman times, he stared at me with a look of surprise and indignation, and exclaimed laconically, "Patria potestas? . . . Vodka!" He was evidently convinced that the disreputable father had got his respectable son flogged by "treating" the judges. In such cases flogging can no longer be used, for the Volost Courts, as we have seen, were recently deprived of the right to inflict corporal punishment.

These administrative and judicial abuses gradually reached the ears of the Government, and in 1889 it attempted to remove them by creating a body of Rural Supervisors (Zemskiye Natchalniki). Under their supervision and control some abuses may have been occasionally prevented or corrected, and some rascally Volost secretaries may have been punished or dismissed, but the peasant self-government as a whole has not been perceptibly improved.

Let us glance now at the opinions of those who hold that the material progress of the peasantry is prevented chiefly, not by the mere abuses of the Communal administration, but by the essential principles of the Communal institutions, and especially by the practice of periodically redistributing the Communal land. From the theoretical point of view this question is one of great interest, and it may acquire in the future an immense practical significance; but for the present it has not, in my opinion, the importance which is usually attributed to it. There can be no doubt that it is much more difficult to farm well on a large number of narrow strips of land, many of which are at a great distance from the farmyard, than on a compact piece of land which the farmer may divide and cultivate as he pleases; and there can be as little doubt that the husbandman is more likely to improve his land if his tenure is secure. All this and much more of the same kind must be accepted as indisputable truth, but it has little direct bearing on the practical question under consideration. We are not considering in the abstract whether it would be better that the peasant should be a farmer with abundant capital and all the modern scientific appliances, but simply the practical question, What are the obstructions which at present prevent the peasant from ameliorating his actual condition?

That the Commune prevents its members from adopting various systems of high farming is a supposition which scarcely requires serious consideration. The peasants do not yet think of any such radical innovations; and if they did, they have neither the knowledge nor the capital necessary to effect them. In many villages a few of the richer and more intelligent peasants have bought land outside of the Commune and cultivate it as they please, free from all Communal restraints; and I have always found that they cultivate this property precisely in the same way as their share of the Communal land. As to minor changes, we know by experience that the Mir opposes to them no serious obstacles.

The cultivation of beet for the production of sugar has greatly increased in the central and southwestern provinces, and flax is now largely produced in Communes in northern districts where it was formerly cultivated merely for domestic use. The Communal system is, in fact, extremely elastic, and may be modified as soon as the majority of the members consider modifications profitable. When the peasants begin to think of permanent improvements, such as drainage, irrigation, and the like, they will find the Communal institutions a help rather than an obstruction; for such improvements, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken on a larger scale, and the Mir is an already existing association. The only permanent improvements which can be for the present profitably undertaken consist in the reclaiming of waste land; and such improvements are already sometimes attempted. I know at least of one case in which a Commune in the province of Yaroslavl has reclaimed a considerable tract of waste land by means of hired labourers. Nor does the Mir prevent in this respect individual initiative. In many Communes of the northern provinces it is a received principle of customary law that if any member reclaims waste land he is allowed to retain possession of it for a number of years proportionate to the amount of labour expended.

But does not the Commune, as it exists, prevent good cultivation according to the mode of agriculture actually in use?

Except in the far north and the steppe region, where the agriculture is of a peculiar kind, adapted to the local conditions, the peasants invariably till their land according to the ordinary three-field system, in which good cultivation means, practically speaking, the plentiful use of manure. Does, then, the existence of the Mir prevent the peasants from manuring their fields well?

Many people who speak on this subject in an authoritative tone seem to imagine that the peasants in general do not manure their fields at all. This idea is an utter mistake. In those regions, it is true, where the rich black soil still retains a large part of its virgin fertility, the manure is used as fuel, or simply thrown away, because the peasants believe that it would not be profitable to put it on their fields, and their conviction is, at least to some extent, well founded;* but in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where unmanured soil gives almost no harvest, the peasants put upon their fields all the manure they possess. If they do not put enough it is simply because they have not sufficient live stock.

* As recently as two years ago (1903) I found that one of the most intelligent and energetic landlords of the province of Voronezh followed in this respect the example of the peasants, and he assured me that he had proved by experience the advantage of doing so.

It is only in the southern provinces, where no manure is required, that periodical re-distributions take place frequently. As we travel northward we find the term lengthens; and in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where manure is indispensable, general re-distributions are extremely rare. In the province of Yaroslavl, for example, the Communal land is generally divided into two parts: the manured land lying near the village, and the unmanured land lying beyond. The latter alone is subject to frequent re-distribution. On the former the existing tenures are rarely disturbed, and when it becomes necessary to give a share to a new household, the change is effected with the least possible prejudice to vested rights.

The policy of the Government has always been to admit redistributions in principle, but to prevent their too frequent recurrence. For this purpose the Emancipation Law stipulated that they could be decreed only by a three-fourths majority of the Village Assembly, and in 1893 a further obstacle was created by a law providing that the minimum term between two re-distributions should be twelve years, and that they should never be undertaken without the sanction of the Rural Supervisor.

A certain number of Communes have made the experiment of transforming the Communal tenure into hereditary allotments, and its only visible effect has been that the allotments accumulate in the hands of the richer and more enterprising peasants, and the poorer members of the Commune become landless, while the primitive system of agriculture remains unimproved.

Up to this point I have dealt with the so-called causes of peasant impoverishment which are much talked of, but which are, in my opinion, only of secondary importance. I pass now to those which are more tangible and which have exerted on the condition of the peasantry a more palpable influence. And, first, inordinate taxation.

This is a very big subject, on which a bulky volume might be written, but I shall cut it very short, because I know that the ordinary reader does not like to be bothered with voluminous financial statistics. Briefly, then, the peasant has to pay three kinds of direct taxation: Imperial to the Central Government, local to the Zemstvo, and Commune to the Mir and the Volost; and besides these he has to pay a yearly sum for the redemption of the land-allotment which he received at the time of the Emancipation. Taken together, these form a heavy burden, but for ten or twelve years the emancipated peasantry bore it patiently, without falling very deeply into arrears. Then began to appear symptoms of distress, especially in the provinces with a poor soil, and in 1872 the Government appointed a Commission of Inquiry, in which I had the privilege of taking part unofficially. The inquiry showed that something ought to be done, but at that moment the Government was so busy with administrative reforms and with trying to develop industry and commerce that it had little time to devote to studying and improving the economic position of the silent, long-suffering muzhik. It was not till nearly ten years later, when the Government began to feel the pinch of the ever-increasing arrears, that it recognised the necessity of relieving the rural population. For this purpose it abolished the salt-tax and the poll-tax and repeatedly lessened the burden of the redemption-payments. At a later period (1899) it afforded further relief by an important reform in the mode of collecting the direct taxes. From the police, who often ruined peasant householders by applying distraint indiscriminately, the collection of taxes was transferred to special authorities who took into consideration the temporary pecuniary embarrassments of the tax-payers. Another benefit conferred on the peasantry by this reform is that an individual member of the Commune is no longer responsible for the fiscal obligations of the Commune as a whole.

Since these alleviations have been granted the annual total demanded from the peasantry for direct taxation and land-redemption payments is 173 million roubles, and the average annual sum to be paid by each peasant household varies, according to the locality, from 11 1/2 to 20 roubles (21s. 6d. to 40s.). In addition to this annuity there is a heavy burden of accumulated arrears, especially in the central and eastern provinces, which amounted in 1899 to 143 millions. Of the indirect taxes I can say nothing definite, because it is impossible to calculate, even approximately, the share of them which falls on the rural population, but they must not be left out of account. During the ten years of M. Witte's term of office the revenue of the Imperial Treasury was nearly doubled, and though the increase was due partly to improvements in the financial administration, we can hardly believe that the peasantry did not in some measure contribute to it. In any case, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them, under actual conditions, to improve their economic position. On that point all Russian economists are agreed. One of the most competent and sober-minded of them, M. Schwanebach, calculates that the head of a peasant household, after deducting the grain required to feed his family, has to pay into the Imperial Treasury, according to the district in which he resides, from 25 to 100 per cent, of his agricultural revenue. If that ingenious calculation is even approximately correct, we must conclude that further financial reforms are urgently required, especially in those provinces where the population live exclusively by agriculture.

Heavy as the burden of taxation undoubtedly is, it might perhaps be borne without very serious inconvenience if the peasant families could utilise productively all their time and strength. Unfortunately in the existing economic organisation a great deal of their time and energy is necessarily wasted. Their economic life was radically dislocated by the Emancipation, and they have not yet succeeded in reorganising it according to the new conditions.

In the time of serfage an estate formed, from the economic point of view, a co-operative agricultural association, under a manager who possessed unlimited authority, and sometimes abused it, but who was generally worldly-wise enough to understand that the prosperity of the whole required the prosperity of the component parts. By the abolition of serfage the association was dissolved and liquidated, and the strong, compact whole fell into a heap of independent units, with separate and often mutually hostile interests. Some of the disadvantages of this change for the peasantry I have already enumerated above. The most important I have now to mention. In virtue of the Emancipation Law each family received an amount of land which tempted it to continue farming on its own account, but which did not enable it to earn a living and pay its rates and taxes. The peasant thus became a kind of amphibious creature--half farmer and half something else--cultivating his allotment for a portion of his daily bread, and obliged to have some other occupation wherewith to cover the inevitable deficit in his domestic budget. If he was fortunate enough to find near his home a bit of land to be let at a reasonable rent, he might cultivate it in addition to his own and thereby gain a livelihood; but if he had not the good luck to find such a piece of land in the immediate neighbourhood, he had to look for some subsidiary occupation in which to employ his leisure time; and where was such occupation to be found in an ordinary Russian village? In former years he might have employed himself perhaps in carting the proprietor's grain to distant markets or still more distant seaports, but that means of making a little money has been destroyed by the extension of railways. Practically, then, he is now obliged to choose between two alternatives: either to farm his allotment and spend a great part of the year in idleness, or to leave the cultivation of his allotment to his wife and children and to seek employment elsewhere--often at such a distance that his earnings hardly cover the expenses of the journey. In either case much time and energy are wasted.

The evil results of this state of things were intensified by another change which was brought about by the Emancipation. In the time of serfage the peasant families, as I have already remarked, were usually very large. They remained undivided, partly from the influence of patriarchal conceptions, but chiefly because the proprietors, recognising the advantage of large units, prevented them from breaking up. As soon as the proprietor's authority was removed, the process of disintegration began and spread rapidly. Every one wished to be independent, and in a very short time nearly every able-bodied married peasant had a house of his own. The economic consequences were disastrous. A large amount of money had to be expended in constructing new houses and farmsteadings; and the old habit of one male member remaining at home to cultivate the land allotment with the female members of the family whilst the others went to earn wages elsewhere had to be abandoned. Many large families, which had been prosperous and comfortable--rich according to peasant conceptions--dissolved into three or four small ones, all on the brink of pauperism.

The last cause of peasant impoverishment that I have to mention is perhaps the most important of all: I mean the natural increase of population without a corresponding increase in the means of subsistence. Since the Emancipation in 1861 the population has nearly doubled, whilst the amount of Communal land has remained the same. It is not surprising, therefore, that when talking with peasants about their actual condition, one constantly hears the despairing cry, "Zemli malo!" ("There is not enough land"); and one notices that those who look a little ahead ask anxiously: "What is to become of our children? Already the Communal allotment is too small for our wants, and the land outside is doubling and trebling in price! What will it be in the future?" At the same time, not a few Russian economists tell us--and their apprehensions are shared by foreign observers--that millions of peasants are in danger of starvation in the near future.

Must we, then, accept for Russia the Malthus doctrine that population increases more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and that starvation can be avoided only by plague, pestilence, war, and other destructive forces? I think not. It is quite true that, if the amount of land actually possessed by the peasantry and the present system of cultivating it remained unchanged, semi-starvation would be the inevitable result within a comparatively short space of time; but the danger can be averted, and the proper remedies are not far to seek. If Russia is suffering from over-population, it must be her own fault, for she is, with the exception of Norway and Sweden, the most thinly populated country in Europe, and she has more than her share of fertile soil and mineral resources.

A glance at the map showing the density of population in the various provinces suggests an obvious remedy, and I am happy to say it is already being applied. The population of the congested districts of the centre is gradually spreading out, like a drop of oil on a sheet of soft paper, towards the more thinly populated regions of the south and east. In this way the vast region containing millions and millions of acres which lies to the north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia is yearly becoming more densely peopled, and agriculture is steadily encroaching on the pastoral area. Breeders of sheep and cattle, who formerly lived and throve in the western portion of that great expanse, are being pushed eastwards by the rapid increase in the value of land, and their place is being taken by enterprising tillers of the soil. Further north another stream of emigration is flowing into Central Siberia. It does not flow so rapidly, because in that part of the Empire, unlike the bare, fertile steppes of the south, the land has to be cleared before the seed can be sown, and the pioneer colonists have to work hard for a year or two before they get any return for their labour; but the Government and private societies come to their assistance, and for the last twenty years their numbers have been steadily increasing. During the ten years 1886-96 the annual contingent rose from 25,000 to 200,000, and the total number amounted to nearly 800,000. For the subsequent period I have not been able to obtain the official statistics, but a friend who has access to the official sources of information on this subject assures me that during the last twelve years about four millions of peasants from European Russia have been successfully settled in Siberia.

Even in the European portion of the Empire millions of acres which are at present unproductive might be utilised. Any one who has travelled by rail from Berlin to St. Petersburg must have noticed how the landscape suddenly changes its character as soon as he has crossed the frontier. Leaving a prosperous agricultural country, he traverses for many weary hours a region in which there is hardly a sign of human habitation, though the soil and climate of that region resembles closely the soil and climate of East Prussia. The difference lies in the amount of labour and capital expended. According to official statistics the area of European Russia contains, roughly speaking, 406 millions of dessyatins, of which 78 millions, or 19 per cent., are classified as neudobniya, unfit for cultivation; 157 millions, or 39 per cent., as forest; 106 millions, or 26 per cent., as arable land; and 65 millions, or 16 per cent., as pasturage. Thus the arable and pasture land compose only 42 per cent., or considerably less than half the area.

Of the land classed as unfit for cultivation--19 per cent. of the whole--a large portion, including the perennially frozen tundri of the far north, must ever remain unproductive, but in latitudes with a milder climate this category of land is for the most part ordinary morass or swamp, which can be transformed into pasturage, or even into arable land, by drainage at a moderate cost. As a proof of this statement I may cite the draining of the great Pinsk swamps, which was begun by the Government in 1872. If we may trust an official report of the progress of the works in 1897, an area of 2,855,000 dessyatins (more than seven and a half million acres) had been drained at an average cost of about three shillings an acre, and the price of land had risen from four to twenty-eight roubles per dessyatin.

Reclamation of marshes might be undertaken elsewhere on a much more moderate scale. The observant traveller on the highways and byways of the northern provinces must have noticed on the banks of almost every stream many acres of marshy land producing merely reeds or coarse rank grass that no well-brought-up animal would look at. With a little elementary knowledge of engineering and the expenditure of a moderate amount of manual labour these marshes might be converted into excellent pasture or even into highly productive kitchen-gardens; but the peasants have not yet learned to take advantage of such opportunities, and the reformers, who deal only in large projects and scientific panaceas for the cure of impoverishment, consider such trifles as unworthy of their attention. The Scotch proverb that if the pennies be well looked after, the pounds will look after themselves, contains a bit of homely wisdom totally unknown to the Russian educated classes.

After the morasses, swamps, and marshes come the forests, constituting 39 per cent. of the whole area, and the question naturally arises whether some portions of them might not be advantageously transformed into pasturage or arable land. In the south and east they have been diminished to such an extent as to affect the climate injuriously, so that the area of them should be increased rather than lessened; but in the northern provinces the vast expanses of forest, covering millions of acres, might perhaps be curtailed with advantage. The proprietors prefer, however, to keep them in their present condition because they give a modest revenue without any expenditure of capital.

Therein lies the great obstacle to land-reclamation in Russia: it requires an outlay of capital, and capital is extremely scarce in the Empire of the Tsars. Until it becomes more plentiful, the area of arable land and pasturage is not likely to be largely increased, and other means of checking the impoverishment of the peasantry must be adopted.

A less expensive means is suggested by the statistics of foreign trade. In the preceding chapter we have seen that from 1860 to 1900 the average annual export of grain rose steadily from under 1 1/2 millions to over 6 millions of tons. It is evident, therefore, that in the food supply, so far from there being a deficiency, there has been a large and constantly increasing surplus. If the peasantry have been on short rations, it is not because the quantity of food produced has fallen short of the requirements of the population, but because it has been unequally distributed. The truth is that the large landed proprietors produce more and the peasants less than they consume, and it has naturally occurred to many people that the present state of things might be improved if a portion of the arable land passed, without any socialistic, revolutionary measures, from the one class to the other. This operation began spontaneously soon after the Emancipation. Well-to-do peasants who had saved a little money bought from the proprietors bits of land near their villages and cultivated them in addition to their allotments. At first this extension of peasant land was confined within very narrow limits, because the peasants had very little capital at their disposal, but in 1882 the Government came to their aid by creating the Peasant Land Bank, the object of which was to advance money to purchasers of the peasant class on the security of the land purchased, at the rate of 7 1/2 per cent., including sinking fund.* From that moment the purchases increased rapidly. They were made by individual peasants, by rural Communes, and, most of all, by small voluntary associations composed of three, four, or more members. In the course of twenty years (1883-1903) the Bank made 47,791 advances, and in this way were purchased about eighteen million acres. This sounds a very big acquisition, but it will not do much to relieve the pressure on the peasantry as a whole, because it adds only about 6 per cent. to the amount they already possessed in virtue of the Emancipation Law.

* This arrangement extinguishes the debt in 34 1/2 years; an additional 1 per cent, extinguishes it in 24 1/2 years. By recent legislation other arrangements are permitted.

Nearly all of this land purchased by the peasantry comes directly or indirectly from the Noblesse, and much more will doubtless pass from the one class to the other if the Government continues to encourage the operation; but already symptoms of a change of policy are apparent. In the higher official regions it is whispered that the existing policy is objectionable from the political point of view, and one sometimes hears the question asked: Is it right and desirable that the Noblesse, who have ever done their duty in serving faithfully the Tsar and Fatherland, and who have ever been the representatives of civilisation and culture in Russian country life, should be gradually expropriated in favour of other and less cultivated social classes? Not a few influential personages are of opinion that such a change is unjust and undesirable, and they argue that it is not advantageous to the peasants themselves, because the price of land has risen much more than the rents. It is not at all uncommon, for example, to find that land can be rented at five roubles per dessyatin, whereas it cannot be bought under 200 roubles. In that case the peasant can enjoy the use of the land at the moderate rate of 2 1/2 per cent. of the capital value, whereas by purchasing the land with the assistance of the bank he would have to pay, without sinking fund, more than double that rate. The muzhik, however, prefers to be owner of the land, even at a considerable sacrifice. When he can be induced to give his reasons, they are usually formulated thus: "With my own land I can do as I like; if I hire land from the neighbouring proprietor, who knows whether, at the end of the term, he may not raise the rent or refuse to renew the contract at any price?"

Even if the Government should continue to encourage the purchase of land by the peasantry, the process is too slow to meet all the requirements of the situation. Some additional expedient must be found, and we naturally look for it in the experience of older countries with a denser population.

In the more densely populated countries of Western Europe a safety-valve for the inordinate increase of the rural population has been provided by the development of manufacturing industry. High wages and the attractions of town life draw the rural population to the industrial centres, and the movement has increased to such an extent that already complaints are heard of the rural districts becoming depopulated. In Russia a similar movement is taking place on a smaller scale. During the last forty years, under the fostering influence of a protective tariff, the manufacturing industry has made gigantic strides, as we shall see in a future chapter, and it has already absorbed about two millions of the redundant hands in the villages; but it cannot keep pace with the rapid increasing surplus. Two millions are less than two per cent. of the population. The great mass of the people has always been, and must long continue to be, purely agricultural; and it is to their fields that they must look for the means of subsistence. If the fields do not supply enough for their support under the existing primitive methods of cultivation, better methods must be adopted. To use a favourite semi-scientific phrase, Russia has now reached the point in her economic development at which she must abandon her traditional extensive system of agriculture and adopt a more intensive system. So far all competent authorities are agreed. But how is the transition, which requires technical knowledge, a spirit of enterprise, an enormous capital, and a dozen other things which the peasantry do not at present possess, to be effected? Here begin the well-marked differences of opinion.

Hitherto the momentous problem has been dealt with chiefly by the theorists and doctrinaires who delight in radical solutions by means of panaceas, and who have little taste for detailed local investigation and gradual improvement. I do not refer to the so-called "Saviours of the Fatherland" (Spasiteli Otetchestva), well-meaning cranks and visionaries who discover ingenious devices for making their native country at once prosperous and happy. I speak of the great majority of reasonable, educated men who devote some attention to the problem. Their favourite method of dealing with it is this: The intensive system of agriculture requires scientific knowledge and a higher level of intellectual culture. What has to be done, therefore, is to create agricultural colleges supplied with all the newest appliances of agronomic research and to educate the peasantry to such an extent that they may be able to use the means which science recommends.

For many years this doctrine prevailed in the Press, among the reading public, and even in the official world. The Government was accordingly urged to improve and multiply the agronomic colleges and the schools of all grades and descriptions. Learned dissertations were published on the chemical constitution of the various soils, the action of the atmosphere on the different ingredients, the necessity of making careful meteorological observations, and numerous other topics of a similar kind; and would-be reformers who had no taste for such highly technical researches could console themselves with the idea that they were advancing the vital interests of the country by discussing the relative merits of Communal and personal land-tenure--deciding generally in favour of the former as more in accordance with the peculiarities of Russian, as contrasted with West European, principles of economic and social development.

While much valuable time and energy were thus being expended to little purpose, on the assumption that the old system might be left untouched until the preparations for a radical solution had been completed, disagreeable facts which could not be entirely overlooked gradually produced in influential quarters the conviction that the question was much more urgent than was commonly supposed. A sensitive chord in the heart of the Government was struck by the steadily increasing arrears of taxation, and spasmodic attempts have since been made to cure the evil.

In the local administration, too, the urgency of the question has come to be recognised, and measures are now being taken by the Zemstvo to help the peasantry in making gradually the transition to that higher system of agriculture which is the only means of permanently saving them from starvation. For this purpose, in many districts well-trained specialists have been appointed to study the local conditions and to recommend to the villagers such simple improvements as are within their means. These improvements may be classified under the following heads:

(1) Increase of the cereal crops by better seed and improved implements.

(2) Change in the rotation of crops by the introduction of certain grasses and roots which improve the soil and supply food for live stock.

(3) Improvement and increase of live stock, so as to get more labour-power, more manure, more dairy-produce, and more meat.

(4) Increased cultivation of vegetables and fruit.

With these objects in view the Zemstvo is establishing depots in which improved implements and better seed are sold at moderate prices, and the payments are made in installments, so that even the poorer members of the community can take advantage of the facilities offered. Bulls and stallions are kept at central points for the purpose of improving the breed of cattle and horses, and the good results are already visible. Elementary instruction in farming and gardening is being introduced into the primary schools. In some districts the exertions of the Zemstvo are supplemented by small agricultural societies, mutual credit associations, and village banks, and these are to some extent assisted by the Central Government. But the beneficent action in this direction is not all official. Many proprietors deserve great praise for the good influence which they exercise on the peasants of their neighbourhood and the assistance they give them; and it must be admitted that their patience is often sorely tried, for the peasants have the obstinacy of ignorance, and possess other qualities which are not sympathetic. I know one excellent proprietor who began his civilising efforts by giving to the Mir of the nearest village an iron plough as a model and a fine pedigree ram as a producer, and who found, on returning from a tour abroad, that during his absence the plough had been sold for vodka, and the pedigree ram had been eaten before it had time to produce any descendants! In spite of this he continues his efforts, and not altogether without success.

It need hardly be said that the progress of the peasantry is not so rapid as could be wished. The muzhik is naturally conservative, and is ever inclined to regard novelties with suspicion. Even when he is half convinced of the utility of some change, he has still to think about it for a long time and talk it over again and again with his friends and neighbours, and this preparatory stage of progress may last for years. Unless he happens to be a man of unusual intelligence and energy, it is only when he sees with his own eyes that some humble individual of his own condition in life has actually gained by abandoning the old routine and taking to new courses, that he makes up his mind to take the plunge himself. Still, he is beginning to jog on. E pur si muove! A spirit of progress is beginning to move on the face of the long-stagnant waters, and progress once begun is pretty sure to continue with increasing rapidity. With starvation hovering in the rear, even the most conservative are not likely to stop or turn back.