American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-emancipation Imagination

Since Peter Kolchin's landmark comparison of Russian serfdom and American slavery, works by Alessandro Stanziani and others have approached the topic of bound labor from a comparative perspective. Although Kolchin has also attempted to situate emancipation in the US South globally, the topic of emancipation has received far less attention from a comparative perspective than bonded labor itself. This state of affairs in the field makes Bellows's well-researched monograph as timely as it is compelling.The legacies of Russian serfdom and American slavery haunt us to this day. In the case of American slavery, this legacy is a matter of daily debate in the courts, in the press, and in the streets. This book reminds us that these legacies are, in addition to material factors, constructed imaginings of the past and contemporary life. Making use of an untapped reservoir of sources hiding in plain sight, Bellows tells the story of how societies that were remarkably different in many ways experienced the transition from servile to free labor in similar ways. In both societies the visual and literary arts, as well as other types of visual culture like advertisements, reflected and shaped attitudes toward the servile institutions of the past and the position of the emancipated in the present. In narrating this comparative history, the book offers an explanation of how history is rewritten in the popular mind, of the role played in this construction of collective memory by artists, authors, and advertisers, and of how these constructed memories were used as tools to explain and manage the social and economic changes taking place around them.There are striking similarities in the ways that Russian and American artists and their audiences produced and consumed cultural archetypes reflective of elite perceptions of the servile past. In both cases, nostalgic portrayals of the past provided an instrument that former owners could use to resist further diminution of their power and status by Washington or Saint Petersburg. Cultural productions portrayed the serf estate and the slave plantation as benevolent places where owners kept the unpredictable, potentially violent, and backward characteristics of their property in check. Emancipation, from this nostalgic perspective, had given such features of the peasant and the enslaved person free rein. One didn't have to go to a gallery or read a book to encounter these images, as the expansion of ad-driven consumer capitalism conveyed the same images and messages in periodicals and on placards. The discussion of such advertisements and ephemera in chapter 5 is one of the highlights of the book. Whatever the media, the powerful role of these imagined pasts solidified elite attitudes, justified their attempts to turn back the clock to an imagined golden age, and shaped policy.Through comparison, the book also highlights two key differences between these post-emancipation societies. The first difference is the place of race in the white American psyche, including the particular fear evoked by Reconstruction legislation guaranteeing Black equality. This resulted in racially motivated violence and attempts to reduce formerly enslaved people to their previous condition in all but name. Cultural works proved particularly adept at fixing images of African American racial inferiority in ways that justified white violence and oppression. The second difference is the ambivalent position of the Russian peasant (in contrast to the formerly enslaved) in Russian elites' own self-conceptions of identity. Emancipated serfs received their freedom and a land allotment, but their legal inferiority remained. At the same time, the peasantry, for all its backwardness, still represented the soul of Russia. The peasant was thus inferior on some levels but, unlike the African American, could not be condemned entirely by elites without denying some part of their own identity.No two entities would seem to defy comparison more than the United States and the Russian Empire, if for no other reason than that politicians, ideologues, and historians have invested a lot of time in demonstrating their exceptionalism, manifest destinies, and divinely ordained missions. Yet Amanda Bellows's demonstration of the role played by literature and visual culture in shaping both societies' post-emancipation worlds indicates that similarities between the two were at least as important as the differences

Aesthetics · Art · Emancipation · Political science · Serfdom · Sociology · State (computer science · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law