Ameican Slavery and Russian Serfdom How They Compare

Kolchin's Unfree Labor

Kolchin uses primarily "printed primary materials" as his sources -- material that was either printed and published at the time of the events which he chronicles or collected by historians later (377). The fact that these materials are not hard to find and that they exist quite abundantly is what made this possible. Thus, what Kolchin does in his comparative history is to simply "order" the information and make sense of it: he has no difficulty gathering it; on the contrary, putting the pieces together to form a coherent whole or a convincing picture is his goal.

For example, Kolchin utilizes "records left by the masters (and their allies)" as sources as well as other records such as "diaries and reminiscences, plantation and estate records, and correspondence between owners and their administrative subordinates" as he builds his foundation of historical data (377). This is a solid foundation because it is using primary source documents (though sometimes they are collected in secondary sources) lifted straight out of the time and place under scrutiny to give a vivid account of the subject matter at hand.

Thus to compare Russian serfdom to American slavery, Kolchin examines the records of men like the American planter Jack P. Greene or John Spencer Bassett, whose surviving letters are collected in The Southern Plantation Overseer as Revealed in His Letters. To these he compares collections of letters sent from Russian nobles to their administrators -- works such as Akty khoziaistva boiarina B. I. Morozova and Krasnyi arkhiv, 77. Essentially, these are letters and records that have been preserved by other historians, which Kolchin uses so as to better understand how these two worlds in which slavery looms large compare to one another. However, as many of these collections are edited, it is debatable whether they are good sources for a historian to utilize in order to cultivate an undiluted or pure vision of history. Nonetheless, that objection aside, the sources do give a glimpse into the eras through the eyes of those dictating policies and directing the affairs.

The findings the Kolchin presents that one might not find were one only studying one world and not the other are that there appear to be consistencies as far as the justification of slavery goes, when one looks at Russia and the America. There is material that is printed and circulated that is pro-serfdom and pro-slavery -- tracts, etc., that are used to promote the ideology behind enslavement. This is one finding that one might not think about initially unless one were to view the two worlds simultaneously, because in America we are used to hearing about anti-slavery groups and abolitionists, but we do not stop to think about the other side -- the side that supported the slavery and offered reasons and justifications for it. So the finding that this material exists, not only here but in Russia too makes it a compelling insight into the era and the minds of the men and women who lived in that era.

Kolchin's principle thesis appears to be that the idea of unfair and unfree (slave) labor arose out of a movement among a particular class -- the land-owning class that sought to utilize the resources available through migration of persons and economic disparity. This thesis is supported by the idea that by the 16th century, Europe had changed drastically in terms of politicization, religion, and philosophy (Protestantism and materialism shaping up to take over where Christendom left off) with financial planners (bankers) becoming central to the idea of the state, with the Age of the Rothschilds coming in the 18th century. These factors all played together to contribute to the pro-slavery and pro-serfdom era on both sides of Europe -- in America, slavery was used to colonize the New World and in Russia, serfdom was a way of the life that the upper class utilized in order to maintain their large, substantial land holdings and the generational wealth passed down from family to family. This thesis can be evaluated against the historical fact that both Russia and the New World were largely shaped by the demise of Christendom and the advent of Enlightenment ideology, which certainly made use of slavery throughout the 18th century.