Very interesting – I must echo the point that it is a pity Szamuely wasn’t around to comment upon how things turned out in the latter half of the 20th century. There is one other point in the article I want to pick up upon:
“For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong.”
I’m reminded of something Thomas Sowell wrote in one of his books about how the modern understanding of slavery, predictably these days incapable of viewing it through anything except the lens of modern moral assumptions, also fails to understand what freedom really constituted prior to the modern age. In fact, whether a person was officially owned as a slave or not, for most people freedom in the modern sense didn’t exist at all.
Most people existed somewhere upon a sliding scale of dependency upon patronage, with large costs and commitments at every level in exchange for very meagre returns. In a great many cases, serfdom, servitude and indenture were actually the best bet against starvation, and freedom would have represented a dangerous gamble.
This is not to say that anyone alive during such times should have been grateful to have no freedom, just that for most people it would have seemed a pointless and dangerous indulgence to expect or wish for. And much though England possesses a history proud of the fact that slavery was not institutionally apparent during times when it was so most of the rest of the world, that does not mean that most people did not exist in a state here that might as well have been slavery, for all the difference the label would have meant.
The modern concept of slavery is childish, seeming to assume that but a brutal and greedy ruling class, most people would have been doing what modern free people do. The truth, though, is that there was no economy, to speak of, for the vast majority of people, and that meant that there was nothing there for their potential freedom to do anything with anyway.
The point here is that no society before the modern age had either the wealth or the economic institutions to make freedom a viable choice for the vast majority of people. Could more people have been free had the ruling classes been more enlightened? Certainly, just not anywhere close to enough to change the harsh fact that slavery – or slavery in all but name – was unavoidable for the majority.
NB – none of this is intended to imply that the Atlantic slave trade was maybe a little less awful than the modern consensus supposes. It was every bit as awful as this. The simplistic analysis that it stands as an outlier in human atrocity though, well that’s another matter. The scourge of slavery was everywhere in human societies for most of human history, it’s just that we talk about some examples a lot more than the rest.
Great post.
That is why all this woke nonsense about BLM and Black slavery is so idiotic and ahistorical.
If i recall peasants were freed in Russia in about 1860s, so much later than slavery was abolished in UK.
Apart from few people like Douglas Murray no public figure is willing to ask obvious questions.
Like who delivered slaves to ships taking them from Africa to Caribbean and USA?
Since European did not colonise Africa interior till well past 1850s, who was it?
Obviously African tribes capturing and selling their neighbours.
None of it is ever discussed in uk media as we genuflect in front of BLM mob and their woke supporters in bbc, Guniard and academia.
Quite. In fact it was well known that white Europeans who ventured further ashore in tropical Africa than the shoreline were likely to die of malaria quite quickly – unlike native Africans, they had no resistance to the disease at all.
The only ones who tried it were actually Christian missionaries, and they had an average life expectancy under a year once they’d gone there. The sailors on slave ships never took the risk, and the popularised idea that raiding parties of European slavers attacked peaceful African tribes and kidnapped them is actually nonsense.
It is like the US blaming their massive drug and violence problem on the Mexican drug lords. If there was no buyer, the Mexican drug lord would not exist. If the US and England were not so eager to buy humans and enslave them, there would not have been a slave trade. Funny how it is always the other guy’s fault with you people. Please take some responsibility for the crimes against humanity you have committed over the centuries and are still doing so now in the middle east, raining misery and death upon peoples and nation who have done absolutely nothing to the western, supposedly civilized and so called christian, society.
Paul O
1 year ago
Excellent article and much needed for most of us in ‘The West’, where so many people seem to have become Russophobes over night, and passionate lovers of all things Ukrainian, whilst knowing next to nothing about the history of the region.
I can understand people supporting the underdog, but don’t recall seeing the same support for Iraqjs, Afghans or Libyans, when they were invaded.
Maybe in those cases the invaders had the moral high ground (some would say not) but was Bush/Blair/Obama’s desire to ‘liberate’ those countries and install ‘democracy’ really that much different to Putin’s desire to liberate the Donbas region, who have been in conflict with the Ukrainian govt installed by ‘the West’ in 2014.
I don’t know the answer, but I can’t help but think our collective ignorance about all of these areas is causing decades of conflicts and solving nothing.
Which is why I am so grateful for this educational and informative article.
Maybe a little more knowledge would make people in the west more ready to want (or even demand) diplomacy rather than be willing to fund constant decades long wars in these far of regions.
And maybe in the future we could try to value Iraqi, Libyan and Afghani lives just as much as we value Ukrainians.
You seem to think you’re well informed and then make claims about not recalling protests against previous wars – you really don’t remember the vast marches against the Iraq war?
Here’s a reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
Yes I remember the antiwar protest marches against the invasion of Iraq, but if you were around back then I am sure you remember things were very different to how they are today. The zeitgeist and nonstop MSM propaganda is totally different. And alas, I haven’t heard much about antiwar protests in 2022.
You are nothing more than a Russian stooge.
People who really know history of that part of Europe are aware of Ukraine independence referendum in 1991 when over 80% of people in Donbass voted for independence from Soviet Union.
So your claims of Putin desire to “liberate” Donbass are blatant lies and Russian propaganda.
Your claims about Ukraine government installed the by the West is another lie.
It was Yanukovich refusal to accept decision of Ukrainian parliament to sign agreement with EU which led to Maidan.
Traitor Ukrainian president then fled to Moscow.
Can you tell us why is it in Ukraine interest to be part of Russia?
What is Russia offer to Ukraine apart from poverty and genocide?
Whatever anyone’s views are about EU, you have to be brain dead to choose rubel over EU.
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
The origin of the word slave comes from the Slavic slaves captured and enslave in Muslim lands. An interesting article highlighting the different social history of Russia to the UK and continental Europe.
Tom Watson
1 year ago
A very interesting read, plenty to ponder.
Kate Dodson
1 year ago
Russia’s probably obsessed with slavery because they’d like to start up the practice again…particularly with Ukrainians who’ve been dispossessed and forcibly relocated to their territories.
0 0
1 year ago
Excellent piece. The banning of Dostoevsky in Milan parallels some of the so-called “woke” behavior here here in the US–and is redolent of the kind of behavior displayed here in WWI towards anything German (killing dachshunds, banning Beethoven etc,). “The more things change” etc. etc.
By the way, “The Russian Tradition” IS available via Amazon in both hardcover and paperback, albeit at steep prices.
I am not fan of Sanders and he is “useful Western idiot” as defined by Lenin.
However, praising someone and invading sovereign country are different things.
So yes, Russian should be banned from travelling to the West and working and performing there.
Waging War should have consequences for all citizens of Russia.
Unless they condemn the war publicly.
Then they are dissidents and we should welcome them as we did during Soviet Union era.
The photo on top speaks a thousand words
Is she ‘Mother Russia’ at home or is she Russia’s (Putin’s) ideal of a subserviant, subordinate neighbour?
I feel so sorry for what she and those beautiful houses represent!
Greta Hirschman
1 year ago
Catherine the Great defeated and took over the Khanate of Crimea, which was a slave trade hub. Once the slave trade ended, did serfdom in Russia became more unbearable?
Voltaire made a mockery of Russian’s domestic violence on his Persian Letters. The master-slave culture is reproduced at home.
Snapper AG
1 year ago
If you take everything the author said at face value, then Russia is not a modern nation that is capable of normal international relations. It’s like a mad dog that need to be contained by a strong fence of NATO armies.
Peter B
1 year ago
Garbage. Got to this statement “many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map.” No point reading further when such nonsense is being pushed.
I agree with your take on what you quote but it is worthwhile reading the whole article.
Maybe it’s the people i mix with but i don’t get the impression of a European racist reaction to Russia; however there is definitely a revulsion at the Putin regime’s barbarity.
OK, I’ll give it another try later.
But it’s pretty careless – even unprofessional – to put something like that in. I think this author is usually much better than this and was a bit shocked. The use of words like “many” without some quantification is also careless. Does “many” mean 50% ? 20% ? 2% 0.2% ? Those are all “many” in absolute numbers – but tell us nothing about the true proportion of Europeans who want Russia “wiped out”. I suspect that “many” is << 1%.
Thanks. I’ve read it properly and it is indeed interesting. So I recant (and possible need to report in for re-education).
It certainly is interesting that Russian serfdom is largely forgotten these days when it was a reality only 160 years ago. Anyone who’s read Russian novels knows how the wealth of nobles was often measured in the number of “souls” they owned. I haven’t stopped reading Russian books (if only in translation). In fact, I restarted a few years ago and started reading Gogol. In all these novels you see clearly the detachment of the landowners from the peasants/serfs and the lack of innovation that resulted from this system. I think you could argue that serfdom – apart from being awful at a human level – was a woefully inefficient system economically.
But again, I find it offensive that someone is pushing the idea that “we” want to destroy Russia. I don’t believe we do. Provided they are good neighbours and don’t export violence and corruption (which is not currently true), they can run their own show how they like in my book.
You should read further, it’s a very useful article even allowing for that assertion, which I agree with you is complete rubbish.
jane baker
1 year ago
We are being fed a lot of old toffee about this Ukraine war. If you watch the pavlo from Ukraine you tube channel you will see that the conflict is being vastly overhyped by Westem media who now totally work to the government agenda. In this country we are so used to seeing teeny-tiny maps on our tv screen we have no comprehension how huge and vast the Ukraine really is. With all that fertile rich land I can see how the USA corporations want to annex it. I expect that a few sharp corporate lawyers enabled by a corrupt Ukraine government could quickly get land ownership transferred in a trice,all signed and sealed. I agree that Mr Putin is a deeply unpleasant man but he isn’t the real bad guy here.
Jeff Andrews
1 year ago
You could ask ‘why is Britain and America obsessed with Russia?’.
Britain has been exposed, again, as the mist bigoted xenophobic country in existence. So again, why is Britain obsessed with Russia?
Very interesting – I must echo the point that it is a pity Szamuely wasn’t around to comment upon how things turned out in the latter half of the 20th century. There is one other point in the article I want to pick up upon:
“For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong.”
I’m reminded of something Thomas Sowell wrote in one of his books about how the modern understanding of slavery, predictably these days incapable of viewing it through anything except the lens of modern moral assumptions, also fails to understand what freedom really constituted prior to the modern age. In fact, whether a person was officially owned as a slave or not, for most people freedom in the modern sense didn’t exist at all.
Most people existed somewhere upon a sliding scale of dependency upon patronage, with large costs and commitments at every level in exchange for very meagre returns. In a great many cases, serfdom, servitude and indenture were actually the best bet against starvation, and freedom would have represented a dangerous gamble.
This is not to say that anyone alive during such times should have been grateful to have no freedom, just that for most people it would have seemed a pointless and dangerous indulgence to expect or wish for. And much though England possesses a history proud of the fact that slavery was not institutionally apparent during times when it was so most of the rest of the world, that does not mean that most people did not exist in a state here that might as well have been slavery, for all the difference the label would have meant.
The modern concept of slavery is childish, seeming to assume that but a brutal and greedy ruling class, most people would have been doing what modern free people do. The truth, though, is that there was no economy, to speak of, for the vast majority of people, and that meant that there was nothing there for their potential freedom to do anything with anyway.
The point here is that no society before the modern age had either the wealth or the economic institutions to make freedom a viable choice for the vast majority of people. Could more people have been free had the ruling classes been more enlightened? Certainly, just not anywhere close to enough to change the harsh fact that slavery – or slavery in all but name – was unavoidable for the majority.
NB – none of this is intended to imply that the Atlantic slave trade was maybe a little less awful than the modern consensus supposes. It was every bit as awful as this. The simplistic analysis that it stands as an outlier in human atrocity though, well that’s another matter. The scourge of slavery was everywhere in human societies for most of human history, it’s just that we talk about some examples a lot more than the rest.
Great post.
That is why all this woke nonsense about BLM and Black slavery is so idiotic and ahistorical.
If i recall peasants were freed in Russia in about 1860s, so much later than slavery was abolished in UK.
Apart from few people like Douglas Murray no public figure is willing to ask obvious questions.
Like who delivered slaves to ships taking them from Africa to Caribbean and USA?
Since European did not colonise Africa interior till well past 1850s, who was it?
Obviously African tribes capturing and selling their neighbours.
None of it is ever discussed in uk media as we genuflect in front of BLM mob and their woke supporters in bbc, Guniard and academia.
Quite. In fact it was well known that white Europeans who ventured further ashore in tropical Africa than the shoreline were likely to die of malaria quite quickly – unlike native Africans, they had no resistance to the disease at all.
The only ones who tried it were actually Christian missionaries, and they had an average life expectancy under a year once they’d gone there. The sailors on slave ships never took the risk, and the popularised idea that raiding parties of European slavers attacked peaceful African tribes and kidnapped them is actually nonsense.
It is like the US blaming their massive drug and violence problem on the Mexican drug lords. If there was no buyer, the Mexican drug lord would not exist. If the US and England were not so eager to buy humans and enslave them, there would not have been a slave trade. Funny how it is always the other guy’s fault with you people. Please take some responsibility for the crimes against humanity you have committed over the centuries and are still doing so now in the middle east, raining misery and death upon peoples and nation who have done absolutely nothing to the western, supposedly civilized and so called christian, society.
Excellent article and much needed for most of us in ‘The West’, where so many people seem to have become Russophobes over night, and passionate lovers of all things Ukrainian, whilst knowing next to nothing about the history of the region.
I can understand people supporting the underdog, but don’t recall seeing the same support for Iraqjs, Afghans or Libyans, when they were invaded.
Maybe in those cases the invaders had the moral high ground (some would say not) but was Bush/Blair/Obama’s desire to ‘liberate’ those countries and install ‘democracy’ really that much different to Putin’s desire to liberate the Donbas region, who have been in conflict with the Ukrainian govt installed by ‘the West’ in 2014.
I don’t know the answer, but I can’t help but think our collective ignorance about all of these areas is causing decades of conflicts and solving nothing.
Which is why I am so grateful for this educational and informative article.
Maybe a little more knowledge would make people in the west more ready to want (or even demand) diplomacy rather than be willing to fund constant decades long wars in these far of regions.
And maybe in the future we could try to value Iraqi, Libyan and Afghani lives just as much as we value Ukrainians.
You seem to think you’re well informed and then make claims about not recalling protests against previous wars – you really don’t remember the vast marches against the Iraq war?
Here’s a reminder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
Yes I remember the antiwar protest marches against the invasion of Iraq, but if you were around back then I am sure you remember things were very different to how they are today. The zeitgeist and nonstop MSM propaganda is totally different. And alas, I haven’t heard much about antiwar protests in 2022.
You are nothing more than a Russian stooge.
People who really know history of that part of Europe are aware of Ukraine independence referendum in 1991 when over 80% of people in Donbass voted for independence from Soviet Union.
So your claims of Putin desire to “liberate” Donbass are blatant lies and Russian propaganda.
Your claims about Ukraine government installed the by the West is another lie.
It was Yanukovich refusal to accept decision of Ukrainian parliament to sign agreement with EU which led to Maidan.
Traitor Ukrainian president then fled to Moscow.
Can you tell us why is it in Ukraine interest to be part of Russia?
What is Russia offer to Ukraine apart from poverty and genocide?
Whatever anyone’s views are about EU, you have to be brain dead to choose rubel over EU.
The origin of the word slave comes from the Slavic slaves captured and enslave in Muslim lands. An interesting article highlighting the different social history of Russia to the UK and continental Europe.
A very interesting read, plenty to ponder.
Russia’s probably obsessed with slavery because they’d like to start up the practice again…particularly with Ukrainians who’ve been dispossessed and forcibly relocated to their territories.
Excellent piece. The banning of Dostoevsky in Milan parallels some of the so-called “woke” behavior here here in the US–and is redolent of the kind of behavior displayed here in WWI towards anything German (killing dachshunds, banning Beethoven etc,). “The more things change” etc. etc.
By the way, “The Russian Tradition” IS available via Amazon in both hardcover and paperback, albeit at steep prices.
I agree that “The Russian Tradition” is a very engaging read. Copies are available for purchase here: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=tibor%20szamuely&bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advs-_-Result&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&rollup=on&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=the%20russian%20tradition&xdesc=off&xpod=off
Fascinating article. Brings into light the absurdity of boycotting Russian vodka, art and athletes. If we applied the same logic in the U.S. we’d cancel Senator Bernie Sanders, who traveled to Russia and advocated for their way of life:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bernie-sanders-praised-communist-cuba-and-the-soviet-union-in-the-1980s
I am not fan of Sanders and he is “useful Western idiot” as defined by Lenin.
However, praising someone and invading sovereign country are different things.
So yes, Russian should be banned from travelling to the West and working and performing there.
Waging War should have consequences for all citizens of Russia.
Unless they condemn the war publicly.
Then they are dissidents and we should welcome them as we did during Soviet Union era.
Very interesting article, thank you.
Seconded.
The photo on top speaks a thousand words
Is she ‘Mother Russia’ at home or is she Russia’s (Putin’s) ideal of a subserviant, subordinate neighbour?
I feel so sorry for what she and those beautiful houses represent!
Catherine the Great defeated and took over the Khanate of Crimea, which was a slave trade hub. Once the slave trade ended, did serfdom in Russia became more unbearable?
Voltaire made a mockery of Russian’s domestic violence on his Persian Letters. The master-slave culture is reproduced at home.
If you take everything the author said at face value, then Russia is not a modern nation that is capable of normal international relations. It’s like a mad dog that need to be contained by a strong fence of NATO armies.
Garbage. Got to this statement “many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map.” No point reading further when such nonsense is being pushed.
I agree with your take on what you quote but it is worthwhile reading the whole article.
Maybe it’s the people i mix with but i don’t get the impression of a European racist reaction to Russia; however there is definitely a revulsion at the Putin regime’s barbarity.
It is worth reading further. The rest of the article is very interesting, and not the kind of apology for Putin this sentence suggests.
OK, I’ll give it another try later.
But it’s pretty careless – even unprofessional – to put something like that in. I think this author is usually much better than this and was a bit shocked. The use of words like “many” without some quantification is also careless. Does “many” mean 50% ? 20% ? 2% 0.2% ? Those are all “many” in absolute numbers – but tell us nothing about the true proportion of Europeans who want Russia “wiped out”. I suspect that “many” is << 1%.
Thanks. I’ve read it properly and it is indeed interesting. So I recant (and possible need to report in for re-education).
It certainly is interesting that Russian serfdom is largely forgotten these days when it was a reality only 160 years ago. Anyone who’s read Russian novels knows how the wealth of nobles was often measured in the number of “souls” they owned. I haven’t stopped reading Russian books (if only in translation). In fact, I restarted a few years ago and started reading Gogol. In all these novels you see clearly the detachment of the landowners from the peasants/serfs and the lack of innovation that resulted from this system. I think you could argue that serfdom – apart from being awful at a human level – was a woefully inefficient system economically.
But again, I find it offensive that someone is pushing the idea that “we” want to destroy Russia. I don’t believe we do. Provided they are good neighbours and don’t export violence and corruption (which is not currently true), they can run their own show how they like in my book.
You should always finish an article, otherwise you may never understand the point of it.
Well said. And the point of it to me was that we really don’t know much about the history of the world we live in.
You should read further, it’s a very useful article even allowing for that assertion, which I agree with you is complete rubbish.
We are being fed a lot of old toffee about this Ukraine war. If you watch the pavlo from Ukraine you tube channel you will see that the conflict is being vastly overhyped by Westem media who now totally work to the government agenda. In this country we are so used to seeing teeny-tiny maps on our tv screen we have no comprehension how huge and vast the Ukraine really is. With all that fertile rich land I can see how the USA corporations want to annex it. I expect that a few sharp corporate lawyers enabled by a corrupt Ukraine government could quickly get land ownership transferred in a trice,all signed and sealed. I agree that Mr Putin is a deeply unpleasant man but he isn’t the real bad guy here.
You could ask ‘why is Britain and America obsessed with Russia?’.
Britain has been exposed, again, as the mist bigoted xenophobic country in existence. So again, why is Britain obsessed with Russia?
When, and in what way, were Britain exposed as the most bigoted xenophobic country in existence?
Only if the entire country was populated by people like Jeff Andrews !