Serfdom in the Russian Empire and slavery in the United States were abolished within two years of each other. There are surprisingly close parallels in the subsequent history of the two previously enslaved peoples, which explain many of the issues their countries are still facing.
The differences are obvious, the most fundamental being the African race of the enslaved North Americans. This made them identifiable and easy to isolate, whereas some former serfs could smoothly move into the ruling cliques, both during the rapid development of the Russian Empire around the turn of the 20th century and, especially, after the Bolshevik takeover.
In general, after the 1917 revolution class boundaries in Russia broke down, the peasantry was by and large destroyed and yesterday’s peasants became industrial workers and city dwellers. However what Russians call narod, of which the English word “the people” is only a very approximate equivalent and which in the 19th century meant peasantry, still exists. It is a distinct class from nachalstvo — the bosses — and vlast’ — the government, even though those latter groups now consist of men and women one generation out of narod.
The educated people in Russia always admired “the people” and their piety, and saw narod as a repository of the famous Russian soul. As if to underscore this connection, African Americans used soul — in particular in music — as a way to assert their identity during the civil rights movement.
Both serfdom and slavery were abolished by “benevolent” acts of their respective governments. They were reforms from above; in fact, most of the pressure to get rid of those inhuman and immoral institutions came from abroad, rather than resulted from revolts or restiveness of the enslaved themselves.
This gave rise to a pernicious myth in both countries, expressed in Russian literature in the 19th century and American works such as, most famously, Gone with the Wind — that Russian peasants and American Blacks felt that they had been better off under the enlightened paternalism of their owners than on their own.
That was probably untrue but if it were true it was the result of the manner in which the liberation happened. In both countries, they were not given any land or compensated for years of unpaid work. They became subsistence farmers or were forced to return to their old estates as day laborers.
Even starting from this very low point, both groups could have improved their economic condition, but they encountered tremendous obstacles. The 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which successful Black-owned businesses were destroyed, has been recently publicized, but, more importantly, keeping African Americans down was institutionalized across the South.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the 1917 revolution specifically declared an aim to dispossess prosperous farmers and to turn peasants into the rural proletariat. In practice, it meant destroying the peasantry physically. The Holodomor killed 3.5 million in Ukraine, but millions of peasants were forcibly moved, sent to the Gulag, and starved to death across the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s regime was murderous without parallel in world history (but later matched by Mao’s China and by the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia). While lynching was a common practice, nothing on an even remotely similar genocidal scale was ever seen in the American South. However, the poverty of Soviet peasants was on the same scale as the poverty of rural Blacks.
Moreover, economic impoverishment was supplemented by the rollback in political rights. Jim Crow was not exactly a return to slavery but in terms of segregation, restricted opportunities and trampled human dignity it was comparable. Moreover, Blacks were deprived of political power early on, just 12 years after the end of the Civil War.
Soviet peasants, meanwhile, were herded into collective farms, effectively becoming state-owned serfs. They weren’t even paid salaries but received payment in kind. They didn’t have passports which meant that they couldn’t move.
Passports or not, the communists couldn’t prevent a steady flight to the cities. In the 1930s peasants were trying to escape starvation and from the 1950s onward poverty and backwardness were driving them out of their villages. Young men drafted to the military all too often didn’t return home but settled in cities—especially since major urban centers had a strong need for blue-collar labor.
Those who stayed behind typically sank into despair and drunkenness. Russia’s urbanization rate, at 75%, is now higher than Switzerland’s and Italy’s.
Black Americans moved north, to cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, to escape both poverty and Jim Crow. Obviously, they remained Black in northern cities, but Russians also remained narod even though they now lived in prefab apartment blocks on the outskirts of Russian cities.
In the process, new generations of these urban dwellers have lost their piety and have experienced a breakdown of traditional family ties. That was true of both African Americans and The Russian lower middle class.
America’s civil rights movement began in the late 1950s and Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Ten years later Soviet peasants, who at the time made up 40% of the population, finally got their passports for the first time.
In the US, the 1990s and 2000s were a period of greatest racial harmony. Bill Clinton was sometimes called the first Black president. After 9/11 many Americans, regardless of their race, religion or national origin, felt great national solidarity in the face of a foreign attack. The election of an actual Black president in 2008 raised hope of a truly “post-racial” society, but in actuality marked the start of a racist reaction.
The 1990s was also the time of greatest freedom in Russia. Yeltsin’s Russia was far from a true democracy, but it was nonetheless the most democratic period in Russian history. Putin moved cautiously at first but by 2008, with his war on Georgia, anti-democratic reaction in Russia was in full bloom.
Obviously, there’s no chance of serfdom or slavery being brought back in any form. But otherwise, the backsliding has been significant. In the US, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been hollowed out by a plethora of restrictive state bills aimed specifically to limit the Black vote. Cuts in government support for education and safety net are rapidly whittling down the economic progress achieved by many African Americans.
In Russia, meanwhile, elections no longer mean anything. Meanwhile, the pervasive kleptocracy is condemning generations of Russian narod, already one of the poorest in Europe, not just to powerlessness but to poverty as well.
