Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
The Lash and the Knout
By C. Vann Woodward
Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
by Peter Kolchin
Harvard University Press, 517 pp., $25.00
Writing about Mary Chesnut's family in antebellum South Carolina, Edmund Wilson remarked that 'comparisons with Russia seem inevitable when one is writing about the old South.'[1] Russian serfdom and American slavery present a challenge to historical comparison that would seem all but irresistible. Yet the challenge has been around a long time without attracting a taker. Alexis de Tocqueville should have been the one to start the ball rolling a century and a half ago. He was one of the first to recognize the significant comparability of the two nations, the one marching east, the other west, each fated, he wrote in 1835, 'to sway the destinies of half the globe.' Tocqueville was also keenly interested in slavery, yet he never compared the systems of servitude in the two countries in Democracy in America except to say, somewhat inaccurately, that in the American and Russian conquests of expansion, 'the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude.'[2] Of course Tocqueville could not have foreseen the almost simultaneous abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery in the 1860s, events that drew attention to their parallel histories. But even that riveting coincidence failed, for all the attention it got, to evoke the comparative study by historians that might have been reasonably expected.
Review, 5219 words
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