About the freedom of our Russian ancestors and Europeans, or how they distort history

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This work is exclusively for history buffs, and I was written based on the impressions of viewing Albert Norden's book "Uncrowned Sovereigns".

In this book, I was interested in a few of the facts given on the topic of freedom of German citizens. The fact is that in our historical science the conclusion is that the Russians were slaves until 1861 because they were in serfdom. But in the West!

I’m not going to prove that the serfs were not slaves at all, but if we compare their position and worldview with the situation of people in the West, then this conclusion requires clarification in order to clearly understand what actually happened, and what was the view of our the people to the question of their freedom.

Let me remind you that before 1590 there was no serfdom in Russia at all. Even the pre-revolutionary Course of Russian History by V. O. Klyuchevsky reported about the Russians: “The peasant was a free cultivator, sitting on foreign land under an agreement with the landowner; his freedom was expressed in a peasant exit or refusal, i.e. in the right to leave one site and go to another, from one landowner to another. … The Code of Law of Ivan III established one mandatory period for this - a week before the autumn day of St. George (November 26) and the week following that day. However, in the Pskov land in the XVI century. there was another legal term for the peasant exit, namely the Philip conspiracy (November 14). This means that the peasant could leave the site when all the field work was over and both sides could settle mutual scores. And only after the death of Ivan the Terrible, in 1590, Boris Godunov issued a decree banning the transfer of peasants from one owner to another.

But even after that, the peasant did not become the property of the landowner.

In general, to understand the Russian mentality, one must take into account that in the Middle Ages, the peasant turned to the tsar, officially calling himself "your orphan", and the nobleman - "your servant." And after that, the peasants turned to the tsar with “you”, and the nobles with “you”. In the Russian mentality, the family consisted of peasants, burghers, priests (people) and the tsar himself. They saw themselves as family, and the king was the father of the people. And the nobles were servants hired by the king to protect the state - the same people. Therefore, a peasant is an orphan of a tsar, a child of a tsar without a mother, and a nobleman is a tsar's slave.

Unlike the West, the Russian noblemen had no more rights in relation to the peasants than the company commander had to his soldier. The Russian nobleman could only restore discipline, whipping the peasant for misdemeanors, and, in extreme cases, return him to the tsar - give him up as a soldier. But the nobleman could neither put in prison, nor, moreover, execute the peasant. This was the business of the father-king, only his judgment.

A nobleman could do what looked like a sale - he could give a peasant to another nobleman and receive money for it. And it really would look like a sale, if you do not take into account that the peasant for the nobleman was the only source of income with which the nobleman in the army protected the same peasants. By transferring the source of his income to another nobleman (and only to him), the nobleman was entitled to compensation. Of course, with such a sale, the law excluded the separation of families.

Before the idiot Tsar Peter III, the nobleman had serfs only as long as he served and his children served. The service was terminated - the serfs (land) were taken away. Note that the service of a Russian nobleman to the prince, like the service of a person to his family, had no time limits. Having left for the service at the age of 15, a nobleman could sit in a fortress on the border thousands of kilometers from his estate until a ripe old age and never see his serfs. The difficult conditions in which Russia found itself demanded the same hard service to her. I note that when Peter the Great began to drive the nobles into the service en masse, moreover, three-quarters of them served in the army as privates until old age, then some noblemen began to enroll in serfs.

The Russian was not anybody's slave!

Yes, he was assigned to a nobleman to ensure his readiness to fight for Russia, but that was all. Yes, then Peter III, out of his stupidity, changed the situation and introduced "the freedom of the nobility", forcing Russia to wash with blood in the civil war for people's justice (this war was called the "Pugachev revolt"). But even this change, made by Peter III, did not lead to the personal slavery of the Russians - the Russian was never anybody's personal slave, not even the slave of the tsar.

Yes, there was serfdom, but it was not so simple. Only those who, thanks to their mastered profession, were firmly convinced that they took a safe place in society and were not subject to accidents, sought to get away from the nobleman, to free themselves, to redeem themselves. Moreover, even the status of a serf did not interfere with anything, there were serfs and doctors, and lawyers, and artists and musicians. Count Shuvalov had a millionaire serf who had dozens of his ships in the Baltic. He paid Shuvalov a quitrent the same as all his serfs (20 rubles a year), and did not think to redeem himself "free" until his son fell in love with the daughter of a Baltic baron. Agree that such a crazy idea - to marry a daughter to a serf - did not seduce the baron - after all, the baron himself could even hang his serf. Shuvalov wandered off - it was a pity to lose an object for bragging in front of other nobles - but gave the shipowner his freedom.

For example, the Ukrainian poet T. G. Shevchenko made sense to redeem from his landowner Engelhardt. By the time of the ransom, it became clear that he was a good artist and would live on his own. But why did the servants and peasants need freedom? To fall under the oppression of officials who live for one day?

Arguing about serfdom, they habitually recall the insane Saltychikha, who tortured dozens of her serfs in a paroxysm of her mental illness, but even I did not know for a long time the details of how the court of Catherine II mercilessly dealt with her (and her accomplices) when Saltychikha's crime was revealed. First, Saltychikha spent 11 years in an underground prison without light and human communication, and then for another 24 years (until the end of her life) in a cell with a window through which anyone could watch her - in fact, she ended her life as an exhibit in a menagerie. Saltychikha's accomplices went to life hard labor.

For mockery of the serfs, the landlords were "shaved" into soldiers, and for their murder they were chained to a wheelbarrow in Siberia. And this for the landowners was not the worst end yet.

The Russian people had the concept of "suffering for peace." It was about a situation where it was impossible to bring the landowner to his senses, and the tsarist officials were on his side. And then the serfs of this landowner cast lots, and those serfs on whom the lot fell went and killed the landowner with his entire family (so that the children would not take revenge on the peasants later). The house of the landowner was burned, and the killers themselves went and surrendered to the authorities. There was no death penalty, these murderers of the landowner were assigned life-long penal servitude, the tsar sent the families of the convicted to Siberia at public expense to places of penal servitude (marriages are made in heaven, and it is not for the tsar to dissolve them), so that families live near the convict. And these convicted murderers were the “victims for peace”. Accordingly, the world (community) collected money and sent it to Siberia to the “victims for peace” until their death.

Now back to Norden's book The Uncrowned Sovereigns. This book is about the Fugger dynasty of Germans, whose history in Germany can be traced back for 500 years. The dynasty began with an enterprising textile merchant, then the Fuggers became the most powerful clan of world bankers and industrialists who owned the copper and silver industries in Europe. The Fuggers with their money not only financially financed the then European wars, but also determined the election of the Habsburgs to emperor. Of course, these financial rulers were awarded titles, and the Fuggers themselves acquired numerous estates in Germany.

And so I was interested in the description of the relationship between the nobility and the people then ruled in Europe. Here are some quotes:

Norden notes that this Fugger estate was in Saxony, and the elector (king) of Saxony in the 1540/41 reporting year had 42,893 guilders of all income. And the Fuggers in 1546 received an income of 27,395 guilders from the Saxon estates. The European nobles knew how to strip three skins from freedom-loving Europeans!

And another quote about the relationship of the German nobles with the German serfs (again, pay attention to the year).