--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
But the other and a bit more
> insidious and subtle role was
> played by the far more numerous lesser gentry - the
> so-called "szlachta" who
> economically were more or less equivalent to the
> Russian "kulaks" (rich
> peasants), but culturally aligned with big time,
> wealthy aristocratic land
> owners (the so called "magnates").
I don't think of kulaks as being rich enough to own serfs! Perhaps the connotations of the term have changed.
I think the abolition of serfdom by the Tsar Liberator Alexander II is an instance of something you see over and over again in Russian history: top-down reform by an enlightened government*. I think that a lot of people, including and perhaps especially on the "left," have problems with this phenomenon, since they fetishize "the masses" and "the grassroots" and seem to think that the state is always bad and trying to keep the people down. Similarly, they don't seem to notice that the current Russian government is more "progressive" on issues like immigration than 70-80% of the Russian population. :)
It's interesting to see what happened to the serfs after they were freed: a lot became sharecroppers on their former lord's estates, some moved to the cities and became lumpen or part of the embryonic working class, and some moved to the far reached of the Empire, like Siberia, where they could get land. Similar to what happened to slaves in the US after the abolition of slavery.
*E.g.: Peter the Great Catherine the Great Alexander II The Bolsheviks (in some ways) Gorbachev Putin
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