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.
