Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 273 offers unique insight into the shaping of both points of view. A discussion of this broader context and of the literature which has helped illuminate it would have made this a better book. Richard Paul Fuke Department of History Wilfrid Laurier University Peter Kolchin. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. xiv + 517 pp. Entrenched systems of bonded labor finally ended in Russia and America in the l 860s, and their functioning in the century that led to both liberations is the subject of Peter Kolchin's comparative analysis. This comprehensive work, gestating over fifteen years, takes advantage of a recent flurry of research on the social, economic and psychological implications of serfdom and slavery. Scholars of American and Russian history will see new perspectives through the double-lens provided by Kolchin; they will also find forced or inconsistent parallels and contrasts. But such will ever be the fate of the comparative historian-to endure the quibbles of specialists. Kolchin begins by calling Russian serfdom a form of slavery, albeit a ''peculiar variety.'' Like others who share this view, Kolchin emphasizes the condition of the Russian serfs during the landowning gentry's "golden age" under Catherine the Great. He then places the nineteenth-century "slavery" practiced in Russia and that in America at opposite ends of the European "periphery" (one of a number of images in the book difficult to sort out), with other contemporaneous varieties falling between (e.g., those of the British West Indies, Cuba and Brazil). And here, right at the beginning, is where the Russian historian can justifiably insist on a sharper distinction. By definition, the slave is his master's property, and Americans clearly bought, sold, and freed black laborers. As Kolchin points out, the American Emancipation was the largest surrender of private property in the history of the United States. But in the Russian Emancipation, the gentry relinquished title to land, not persons. Since serfdom had evolved within a system that mandated service obligations from all subjects, Imperial law-however much the gentry abused it-bound a serf to the land and merely to part-time service to the landowner. The demands of the state for service transcended the economic ambitions of the gentry. 274 Shorter Book Reviews Another similarity singled out by Kolchin is the strength of elitist thinking among both American and Russian landowners. On the one hand, Kolchin explains convincingly that American slaveowners were elitist and racist in their common judgment that blacks were incapable of taking care of themselves. He is on shaky ground, however, in contending that most Russian landowners held that inherent inferiority of mind and character naturally relegated members of the serf class to dependent status; for the record shows that increasing numbers of the landed gentry-including officials and intellectuals rooted in that class-favored civic equality for all Russians as their just due. Kolchin himself describes grounds for self-righteousness about bondage in the American South which have no parallels in Russia. As he points out, the bonded laborers in America were pagan blacks forcibly transported to an alien land by mercenaries. Once transported, they could not cope on their own, and the plantation owners who gave them a subordinate place in a genteel, Christian way of life could easily claim to be their saviors and benefactors. The Russian serfs, in contrast, had lived generation after generation on native ground, speaking the same language, revering and serving the same Tsar, and attending the same church as their landlords. Moreover, the Russian landowners faced the logic that once the Tsar in the late eighteenth century had granted them freedom from state service, he should grant the same freedom to the serfs. - As for the living conditions of the unfree in the nineteenth century, Kolchin contends that, on the whole, slaves in the American South fared the best among bonded workers worldwide. The benign natural environment-in which winters were mild and food grew easily-was a factor, but Kolchin also cites the conscientious personal management of plantations by their owners. He in tum maintains-less convincingly-that the Russian owner of the "settled...