Slavery, Part 1

~ Clarissa

About 40% of the entire population, or 23 million people, were serfs in the Russian Empire on the eve of the abolition that took place in 1861. Compare that to the 4 million US slaves, and you’ll see the magnitude of the issue.

We use a different word to refer to the slaves in the Russian Empire. We call them serfs. But they were property. They were bought and sold. Owners could do whatever they wanted with them.

There were no serfs in Siberia or the Far East, obviously. It was the European population of the empire that was enslaved. In a multiethnic empire, all slaves were white people enslaved by other white people. There’s no likelihood that my Ukrainian ancestors weren’t serfs. Of which I’m very proud and not remotely traumatized, but that’s a different story.

In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, one of the only two worthwhile leaders Russia ever had, signed the Liberation Manifesto freeing the slaves. Every church in the empire had the text of the manifesto read aloud after Sunday service because how else do you inform the illiterate slaves that they are now free?

Not only were the serfs freed, their houses and belongings were declared their own private property. They were given self-governance and voting rights within their self-governance units.

But signing the manifesto is not enough. How do the freed serfs feed themselves? And how do you make their owners agree to relinquishing their property, livelihood, and class position? I’ll talk about that in the next post.

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Published by Clarissa

12 thoughts on “Slavery, Part 1”

  1. This is something most Americans never considered, throughout history most enslaved people were the same race and ethnicity as their enslavers. This is something that shocks Americans, I took a class on the History of Slavery in college and I was the only student who did their paper on something other than Slavery in the US South. I did my paper on slavery in Dark Ages Europe and when I announced my topic, my classmates were honestly shocked that Europeans enslaved other Europeans from the same country, they literally had never heard of any other slavery but the American sort.

    When my brother and I binge watched Vikings over the summer, he was shocked that most of the slaves on the show were poor Scandinavians in debt or were sold into slavery by their impoverished families or foreigners captured in raids. It shocked him to see very blond people as slaves, since he’d only heard of black people as slaves in the US. It’s understandable since he has autism and didn’t learn much history in school, but it shows the solipsism of many Americans that they believe slavery only existed in the US South and only blacks were ever slaves

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    1. In the US about 13% of the population were enslaved. In the Russian Empire, at the height of serfdom it was over 45%. Almost a half!

      And they were all liberated peacefully, without any civil war.

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  2. Yes, much(most?) of the early British settlers of North America were either transported criminals or indentured servants, the latter slaves for a determined duration — some by their own choice to cover the cost of immigration, some determined by the Crown.

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    2. I live not far from Boston, Lincolnshire, and so want to point out that you have omitted all of the people who fled England seeking freedom to religiously persecute!
      /s
      That’s an interesting comment which I need to look at more closely – I was aware that the Australian settlers included large numbers of criminals, but I hadn’t realised that the UK court system was quite so organised so early as to be able to transport to the Colonies that became the USA.

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      1. Most of those transported were Catholics, Irish and Scots, considered traitors after Culloden or the Boyne. It was basically a death sentence if sent to the Carribean, those sent to the Americas were usually sold to owners as slaves for seven years. Nothing we would consider a court system, nor anything resembling civil rights ;-D

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        1. From what I’ve read, the indentures, since they were only good for seven years, were worked harder, and more likely than lifetime slaves to die before that first seven years was up.

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  3. It’s always been a bit well funny isn’t the word, but irritating how whenever anyone bring up slavery in America or of the Blacks in general, they focus solely on condemning the slave owners. I find this to be rather irritating, because for all those slave owners purchased slaves, they didn’t ship them across the seas, nor did they enslave them in the first place. It almost never gets mentioned that those who enslaved the Africans in the first place were other Africans, or Arabs who were typically also from Africa.

    Ignoring the first statement, what I really wanted to get into is the statement that was raised in the opening post.

    “How do the freed serfs feed themselves? And how do you make their owners agree to relinquishing their property, livelihood, and class position”

    This is a very interesting question. It also has massive effects everywhere as we in the South saw after the Yankees won the war. (Note : The following might have been different in Russia.) In the United States, there were two types of slaves. The earliest one in the United States was indentured servitude. This is categorized as slavery, but it really should be classified differently, because its an enforced payment where in the end the worker get what he or she served for. In this case typically being passage over the Atlantic, and occasionally small grants of land at the end of the servitude.

    The other type was chattel slavery, and in this type slaves were sold as property. Why this is important comes from when the War ended and the Yankees forced the South to free the slaves. These slaves were classified as property, they typically didn’t actually own anything other than the occasional personal item.

    This meant that when they were freed, they effectively had nowhere to live, no work, no food, and little to no personal possessions. This lead to worsening the already bad economic conditions in the South. The South was at the time already practically starving, and now even less farms were being worked as both the newly freed slaves scrambled to figure out what to do, and the locals scrambled to maintain law and order. The Yankees of course were absolutely no help as most simply didn’t care, and the few who thought about how this would work basically said let them all suffer.

    But it gets worse. The new laws being enforced also meant that the newly freed slaves were now allowed to both vote and hold office. In addition you had groups from the North deliberately trying to put newly freed slaves in positions of power and authority. (This is not a specific thing the Yankees did. Every nation that wins in a war tends to do this. While those who do so out of compassion think its the right thing to do, those who understand human nature, do so to cripple and hamstring their enemies.)

    So a year after the end of the war, starvation is everywhere, the blacks no longer have homes, work, etc. The plantation owners are having to sell because they were not in a position to hire all their former slaves. (Most agricultural businesses tend to make a lot of money, but nearly all of it is also tied up in expenses and paying back loans. The margin of profit looks like a lot but its really not.) So now both sides are angry, the Yankees have soldiers looting the South while supposedly keeping order. My grandmothers side of the family had a pot stolen and used for target practice. This was still being mentioned occasionally as of the early 2000s.

    On top of all this the newly freed blacks, most without education, or any understanding of how the economy worked, or how to maintain law and order were now not only able to vote, but hold office. This was a disaster and allowed to take place due to Yankee troops garrisoning the area.

    Basically it boils down to this. Proclamations like the slaves are now free is great, but if those in power don’t actually sit down and think how will this come about, then those type of proclamations can and will lead to mass starvation, and really bad times, for all parties involved.

    • – W

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    1. Thank you and this is crucial. That’s why the way it was handled by Alexander II, while imperfect, was a lot better than the American experience of the civil war and everything that followed. As a result, Americans still aren’t managing to move on from something that happened 1,5 centuries ago.

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