A History of the World (66 page)

Both the United States and Germany exploited technologies first developed in Britain. They stole patents, copied machines, debriefed British workers and set up their own technical colleges. This was inevitable. In an interconnected world, good ideas cannot be hidden. Anyway, key breakthroughs exploited in the British industrial revolution had themselves come from overseas – that early steam engine from France, but also the wet-spinning of flax and the Jacquard loom, and four-field crop rotation from Holland. The Japanese did the same after 1945; the Chinese are doing it now to Japan and the US. One day, with any luck, Africans will steal Chinese systems. Copying happens far more quickly than inventing.

For both the US and Germany the most important early technological innovation was the railway (though both also followed the British in digging new canals). In Britain, 1830 is often given as the year when the railway system really came of age; but it was also the year when the first US railway opened. By the 1860s, the Americans had nearly 30,000 miles of track and by 1870, 50,000 miles, compared with the 6,000 miles built in Britain during 1830–50 at the height of the ‘railway mania’. By 1875 Germany too had overtaken Britain in railway miles. A similar overleaping would happen with iron and steel; but both the US and Germany would soon move on to new technologies of their own, from the telegraph to more advanced chemicals and engines. In both cases industrialization drove, and was driven by, nationalism. In the US the railways knitted together a new, huge country. Whereas in Britain they had been built by private money and labour, which often had to fight politicians trying to obstruct new lines, in the US the government loaned army engineers to help. In Germany, though the first railways were designed to link the industrial towns, unification made the railways a key agent in binding the new nation into one.

Capitalist-industrialist theory emphasized openness and free markets, and argued that the more trade, the less national conflict. In practice, nationalism and capitalist industrialization marched in lockstep.
The American experience involved cartels, bribery scandals, political corruption and the brutal suppression of workers’ organizations, as well as the racist exclusion of some would-be industrial workers, such as the Chinese, by others, such as the Irish. Industrialization was a far more violent and less pure process than early writers on capitalism had hoped and expected. The theory, nice though it was, had emerged from the unique experience of the British as the first, unchallenged seedbed of this momentous change in human life. And there were many places where it would completely fail to take root.

From Card-player to Saint: Russia’s Lost Opportunity

The scene was a small but fashionable Russian resort town in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, Pyatigorsk, in the summer of 1853. An artillery officer, a keen but disorganized soldier who had been fighting Chechen rebels on behalf of the Czar, was in a bad way. He was in many respects a typical young aristocrat of his time. He had gambled away huge sums at gaming tables in St Petersburg, as well as here with army colleagues. His career was in the doldrums. He dreamt of a more modern Russia, less under the thumb of the Czar and his censors, while he wrote war stories. He had chased many women, not least using his position as a landowner to jump on serf girls, and constantly made plans to reform his life, then forgot them again. With his large brow and huge fringe, he was a striking figure – glaring, almost wolf-like.

Now his gambling debts were getting on top of him. A few months before, he had had to get his brother-in-law to sell a second village on his estate, along with its twenty-six serfs and their families – people were disposed of like so many coins. Now he realized he would have to sell the main house itself, the place built by his grandfather, where he had been born. He signed the chit. The grand house was duly bought by a rival landowner, who had it taken apart, loaded it all onto wagons and rebuilt it on his own land. Left behind were two much smaller wings of the house, a gaping hole between them.

Neither the casual selling of serfs to pay card debts nor the exploitation of serf women was unusual behaviour among Russia’s bored, pampered, discontented noble sons. But this man was Leo
Tolstoy, in his late twenties. The world’s greatest-ever novelist, he would become a figure of moral authority not only in Russia, where he would be idolized, but around the world. In later life, with his flowing patriarchal beard and dressed in a peasant smock, he would call for Russians to recover their peasant roots, immerse themselves in country life, educate their former serfs and pursue the highest Christian ideals. Returning to live in one of the wings of the formerly grand country house he had sold, Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, about 120 miles from Moscow, Tolstoy would spend much of the rest of his life trying to atone for his youthful sins. Part of the power of his writing in
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
derives from his ruthlessly honest exposure of his own addictions and selfishness, and the delight and zest with which he embraced rural Russia.

Three years after that last gambling disaster in the Caucasus, Tolstoy was back at his estate, learning to live in the diminished house – the hole where the central section stood is now covered by trees but must then have been a daily embarrassment.

Tolstoy had taken part in the Russian defence of Sebastopol during the eleven-month siege in 1854/5 that would decide the outcome of the Crimean war. The conflict between Czarist Russia on the one side, and Britain, France and Turkey on the other, was really about Russia’s ambitions to drive ever further south through Asia, threatening other imperial powers. It had been a shock for all the armies involved. Great bravery on each side had failed to disguise the incompetence, poor equipment and outdated tactics of the British cavalry, the French infantry and the Russian forces too – but it was the Russians who eventually lost and the Czar’s prestige that fell furthest.

Russia had a new Czar, Alexander II, brought up by comparatively liberal intellectuals. He realized that from now on it was impossible to argue that Russia, having lost a war on her very doorstep, had successfully modernized. The Russian soldiers who had fought and died to defend their motherland were, for the most part, also serfs. That is, they were tied to the land and could be treated as chattels by their owners. The same had been true of the Russian armies that had defied Napoleon in 1812 and then defeated him in 1813. Then, some of the officers felt they had earned their freedom in battle. They were ignored; but the same feeling resurfaced with greater force after the Crimea.

Wars often radicalize, and defeats do so more than do victories. In
March 1856, Alexander gave a speech in which he warned the landowners that he intended to abolish serfdom from above, by law, rather than wait for it to abolish itself from below in some kind of uprising. Alexander and his advisers knew it would be difficult. Many landowners would be outraged. There were practical problems, such as creating a new system of law and local government in the countryside to replace the serf system. Then there was the embarrassing fact that many landowners were already broke: their lands and their serfs were mortgaged and technically owned by banks in Moscow and St Petersburg. Most land was useless and valueless without the serf labour that kept it fertile. The serfs would starve without land of their own, and they had no money. So this was a huge and convoluted project, and would be one of the most dramatic attempts at reform from above ever made. It was also awesome in scale. A census of 1857, four years before the serfs were freed, showed that more than a third of Russians, some twenty-three million people, were serfs. That compares with some four million black American slaves at the time.

Serfdom went back to feudal, even classical, times and originally meant simply agricultural labour that was tied to land, with a surplus to be handed over to the owner – church, baron or city. As we have seen, it had slowly died out in Western Europe, getting a hefty shove from the labour shortages caused by the Black Death. Even there, a few forms of serfdom remained until quite late – Scottish coalminers were serfs until 1799. To the east, serfdom was far more widespread. It had arrived later but was successfully imposed by landowners and monarchs for far longer. In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, serfs could be found in Poland, Prussia, Austria, Hungary and many of the smaller German states. Russian serfdom, however, was of a different scale and order.

The Russian serfs were not quite slaves (though the word ‘serf’ comes from the Latin for ‘slave’). Their owners could not kill them, or sell them abroad. Outright slavery, which mainly existed for house servants, had been abolished by Peter the Great in 1723. But from the 1550s onwards, the laws of Muscovy had given landowners ever greater powers over their peasants. A century later, full serfdom became general in the agricultural ‘black soil’ regions of central Russia. Serfs were tied to their landowners’ fields and villages, and harsh penalties were imposed for trying to escape. Often they were
forbidden to marry anyone from outside their estate. As Tolstoy had demonstrated, they could be bought and sold along with the land; those needed to farm the land were kept, while ‘surplus’ serfs could be sent to work for others. They could be freely punished by their owners: this included beating. Serf girls and women were often raped by their owners. Very few serfs were literate.

The gap between the grander Russian landowners, who spoke French and enjoyed frequent trips to St Petersburg, or abroad, and their serfs was as large as that between English rulers of the Raj and ordinary Indians, or Caribbean sugar plantation owners and African slaves. The closest parallel is with the American plantations where, just as on the Russian estates, entire communities lived cut off from city life, with their own bakeries, orchards, accommodation, stables, granaries and justice system. So Russian serfdom was hardly unique in the oppressive atmosphere it generated. For near-subsistence farmworkers, in any part of the world, who had to send some of their crop and livestock to owners, degrees of freedom were largely theoretical. The rise of Russian serfdom coincided, after all, with that of full-blown absolutism in France. Peasants led lives not much freer under the Bourbons than those of Russian serfs under the Romanovs.

Yet Russian serfdom had unique aspects that made Russia feel fundamentally different from Western European societies. For a start, there was no ethnic divide in Russia between owner and serf. They were all the same mix, mostly Slav with some Tatar and sometimes some German. Master, mistress and servants looked alike and had similar names. Serfs, living for generations on the same dark soil, sharing the old stories and the old music, devoutly adhering to the Orthodox religion, seemed to many liberal Russian landowners more ‘real’, more authentically Russian than they were themselves. To numerous writers and intellectuals Russia seemed uniquely cursed, but when at times radicals tried to ‘go towards’ the serfs and befriend them, these sceptical, conservative-minded peasants regarded them with bafflement or hostility.

For tens of thousands of poorer landowners there was not even a big cultural divide between them and their human ‘property’. Serfs cooked in the master’s kitchen, suckled and brought up his children, told stories around the fire and taught the lore of the countryside to the little nobles growing up amongst them. They shared hunting trips.
Serfs could be the talented craftworkers, musicians, decorators and builders that their owners relied on for goods and services, as better-off Western Europeans relied on free, waged workers. Landowners could be asked by the patriarchs of serf families to resolve family disputes. So there was an intimacy in Russian serfdom as experienced in houses and villages remote from the cities, that some Russian landowners felt to be both more embarrassing and more emotionally touching than rural servitude in some other places.

Russian serfdom was not in any sense a form of early capitalism. The slavery of the sugar and cotton plantations came about because humans were used as field machinery in a new system of trade and capital accumulation. Russian agriculture was actually held back by serfdom, since nobody – not the landlord, worried about revolt, nor the serf, who did not own the land he worked on – had an urgent interest in investment for agricultural improvement. Above all, serfdom in Russia cannot be understood without bearing in mind that the Russian autocratic system, which we saw beginning to harden as far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible, felt dangerously unstable.

The Czars were at the top of the pile, but they were regularly murdered in palace coups, often led by senior officers; or later, assassinated. The nobility, which had been organized in strict order of rank – according to the Table of Ranks of 1722 – were formally the servants, even the slaves, of the Czar; and for much of this period they owed him service, to be conducted in state offices – the army, the law and local government. They often depended on the Czar for their incomes, since the Russian agricultural output was so low; and ultimately, on the Czar’s authority to keep them above the serfs. Protests and peasant rebellions were frequent enough – nearly eighteen hundred outbreaks of ‘disorder’ were recorded between 1826 and 1856 – to keep them on their toes.
¹⁴
Yet the Czar could not possibly rule Russia without the nobility. Even after Czar Peter III freed them from their obligation to serve him, in 1762, the formal system of serfs-serve-nobles-then-nobles-serve-Czar remained the idea behind the Russian state. At times it seems to have felt more like a three-way stand-off.

The great rebellion against this state of affairs had happened after the Russians’ war with Napoleon, which during 1812–14 brought many young Russian aristocrats deep into Western Europe. In Paris they imbibed the new spirit of the Enlightened age. It tasted better
than vodka. When they marched home again, they felt newly ashamed and embarrassed by the archaic, fossilized nature of the Czarist state.