The private slaves, who number about 23,000,000, pay a poll tax of eight rubles for every male to the crown, and must give half their time to their masters. They usually work three days in the week for the latter, and the other three for themselves. Their lord grants them five or six hectares of land, and often more, and all the produce they raise from them is their own. They are required furthermore to supply out of their numbers all the domestic servants requisite for their master's establishment, and to do extra duty labour of various kinds, dependent solely on the caprice of the latter. A peasant cannot quit his village without his master's permission, and if he exercises any handicraft trade whatever, he is bound to pay an annual sum proportioned to his presumed profits. This sum is called his obrok, and is often very considerable; in the case of agricultural and other peasants, it averages fifty rubles. But whatever be the position the serf may have attained to by his talents and his skill, he never shakes off his absolute dependence on his master, one word from whom may compel him to abandon all his business and his prospects, and return to his village. Many of the wealthiest merchants of Moscow have been named to me, who are slaves by birth, and who have in vain offered hundreds of thousands of rubles for their freedom. It flatters the pride of the great patrician families to have men of merit among their serfs, and many of them send young slaves into the towns, and supply them with all the means necessary for pursuing a creditable and lucrative calling.
All the hawkers and pedlars that go from village to village, and from mansion to mansion, from the banks of the Neva to the extremity of Siberia, are slaves, who bring in large profits to their masters; it frequently happens that a pometchik has no other income than that which he thus derives from his peasants.
Marriages between serfs can only take place with the consent of the lord. They are usually consummated at a very early age, and are arranged by the steward, who never consults the parties, and whose sole object is to effect a rapid increase in the population of his village. The average price of a whole family is estimated as ranging from 25l. to 40l.
A great deal has been often said of the boundless attachment of the serfs to their lords; I doubt that it ever existed; at any rate, it exists no longer. The slaves no longer regard with the same resignation and apathy the low estate which Providence has assigned them in this world; the more liberal treatment enjoyed by the imperial serfs, has inoculated them with ideas of independence, and they are all now ambitious of passing into the domain of the crown—a good fortune, which in their eyes is equivalent to emancipation. This tendency of the serfs to detach themselves from the aristocracy is a most important fact, and if the emperor succeeds in regulating this great social movement so that it may be effected without turbulence, he will have rendered a signal service to Russia, and have mightily contributed to the regeneration and future welfare of her people.
Every village has its mayor, called golova, and its starosts, whose number depends on that of the population, there being usually one for every ten families. They are all elected by the community, and to them it belongs to regulate the various labours performed by it, and to apportion and collect the taxes. Whatever petty differences may arise between the peasants, are settled before the starosts or council of elders, whose decisions are always received with blind submission.
Military service is the only corvée which the Russian peasants regard with real horror. Their antipathy to it is universal, and the regiments can only be recruited by main force. There is no conscription in Russia, but whenever men are wanted, an imperial ukase is issued, commanding a certain number to be raised in such or such a government. In the crown lands, it is the head man of the village aided by the district authorities, who selects the future heroes, and this is usually done in secret, in order to prevent desertion. The young men chosen are forthwith arrested, generally in the middle of the night, and remain fettered until they have been inspected by the surgeon, after which they are sent off in small detachments to the regiments, under the guard of armed soldiers. In the seignorial villages, the selection is made by the steward. But the business is here of more difficult execution than in the domains of the crown, and the unfortunate recruit is often chained to an aged peasant, who acts as his keeper, and cannot quit him day or night. I saw two young peasants thus chained to two old men, in a village belonging to General Papof; they spent their time quietly in drinking in the dram-shops, without exciting any surprise in the spectators. When we reflect on the privations and sufferings that await the Muscovite soldier, we cannot wonder at the intense repugnance the peasants entertain for the service.
The military spirit, so potent elsewhere, scarcely exists in the empire. Glory and honour are things for which the Russian serfs care very little, nor have they any conception of the magic that lies in the words "Our country," "Our native land." The only country they know is their village, their stove, their kasha, the patch of ground they daily cultivate, and that mud which a French grenadier lifted up with his foot, exclaiming, "And this they call a country!" "ils appellent cela une patrie!" At the same time, it is evident that this antipathy of the Russians for military service, is to be attributed as much to the political constitution of the empire, as to the character of the inhabitants; and as that constitution has hitherto been a national necessity, it would be unjust to charge as a crime upon the government, the unhappy moral condition of its armies. We shall speak at more length in another place, on the subject of the Russian soldiery.
Moral and intellectual instruction have hitherto made very little way among the slave population. Attempts indeed have been made to found schools in some of the crown villages, but these attempts have been always ill-directed, and necessarily unsuccessful. Religion which everywhere else constitutes the most potent instrument of civilisation, can have in Russia no favourable effect on the improvement of the people. Consisting solely in fasts, crossings, and outward ceremonies, it leaves the mind totally uninfluenced, and in no respect acts as a bar to the demoralisation which is gradually pervading the immense class of the serfs. The peculiar circumstances of the Russian towns and villages are also perhaps among the greatest obstacles to intellectual progress. The advance of civilisation depends in a great measure on facility of intercourse. When a population is compact, and its several members are continually in presence of each other, each man's knowledge is propagated among his compatriots, facts and opinions are discussed, and men become mutually enlightened as to what is thought and done around them. From this continual interchange of mental wealth, there naturally arises an amount of enlightenment and capacity that tends greatly to extend the domain of thought. But let any one cast his eyes on Russia, and he will be struck by the unfavourable manner in which its population is distributed. Not only are the great centres of population very thinly scattered over the surface, but the several dwellings too in the towns are placed very wide apart, and those of the villages still more so. Every man is isolated, every man lives by and for himself, or at least within a very contracted sphere. Social meetings are rare, and in winter almost impossible; in a word, it is not at all unusual for people not to know their neighbours on the opposite side of the street; hence the invariable nesnai (I do not know) with which the Russian replies to every question the traveller puts to him, ought not to astonish or incense the latter. At first I was disposed to think this ignorance was pretended, and to attribute it to sulkiness and indolence; but I afterwards perceived that it was occasioned in much greater measure by the absurd style of building adopted in the country.
Another thing that tends to enervate the Russians and keep them in their brutified condition, is the immoderate use of brandy, to which both men and women are addicted. It is truly deplorable that the government feels constrained to favour the sale of that pernicious liquor which forms its most important source of revenue. How often have I seen the dram-shops full of women dead drunk, who had left their poultry yards tenantless, and sold their household furniture to gratify their fatal passion.
A thing by which I have always been much struck in Russia, is the stationary uniformity which prevails over the whole surface of the empire, both in ideas and in physical productions. You see everywhere the same plans and arrangements of the buildings, the same implements, and the same agricultural practices and modes of carriage. Contact with foreigners has as yet had no influence on the Sclavonic population, and the prosperity generally enjoyed for sixty years by the German colonies has done little in the way of example. Is this intellectual insensibility the result of servitude exclusively? I think not. Servitude may indeed repress, but it cannot extinguish, the various qualities with which nature has endowed us; and if the Russians are still so backward, and give so little promise of improvement, we must explain the fact by the nature of their race, by their still infant state as a nation, and their want of precedents in civilisation. At the same time there is no reason to despair of them. In our opinion, the future civilisation of Russia rests in a great measure on the contingency of a religious reformation; but as that reformation could not but be hazardous to absolute power by awakening ideas of independence and resistance to oppression, the government impedes it by every means in its power, and labours unceasingly to reduce all the inhabitants of the empire to religious uniformity, as is proved by its conduct towards the United Greeks of Poland, and towards the Douckoboren and the Molokaner. I had opportunities of observing among the members of the two latter communities, how great an influence a change of religion may have on the character and intellect of the Russians. The Douckoboren and the Molokaner differ essentially in this respect from the other subjects of the empire. Activity, probity, intelligence, desire of improvement, all these qualities are developed among them to the highest degree, and after having consorted with the Germans for fifteen years, they have completely appropriated all the agricultural ameliorations, and even the social habits of those foreign colonists. Among the Russian peasants on the contrary, whether slave or free, a complete immobility prevails, and nothing can force them out of the old inevitable rut. All the efforts and all the encouragements of the government have hitherto been of no avail.