Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/40

 16 Thus, voluntary abdication followed on enforced humiliation, and this shadowy aristocracy, constrained at first, and then submissive, surrendered itself to a victorious absolutism, till a power which knew how to turn it to account and use it, to serve the needs and higher ends of Russia, had thus been consolidated, and even rendered indispensable.

And the same evolution repeats itself through every stratum of this society which is no society. Its progress is even more evident, perhaps, in the destiny of other classes, and notably in that of the peasant class.

The story I must here tell is a sad one. As a child, I saw the closing days of a régime which, in this humble sphere, only died out of Russia a little less than half a century ago, and the Emancipation of 1861 was then looked on as a belated act of justice and political wisdom. But, as a matter of fact, it was a premature and hasty measure, for the state of things it ended had only lasted two centuries and a half. Contrary to what had happened in every other European country, the serfdom of modern Russia was not the painful legacy of a barbarous age, but a new fact, coinciding with the country's entrance on the path of European civilization, and the contradictory consequence, in a certain measure, of that new phase of the national existence.

This is an unquestionable paradox. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, when in every European country, and even close by, in Poland, the personal bond between the agricultural population and the landowners was breaking, or slackening, at all events, under the action of the new social and economic laws which were reforming the old feudal world, Russia contrives to forge, all complete, the very chains which have hitherto been non-existent within her borders!

Up to this period most of the peasants dwelling on the land conquered or recovered by Russian colonies in the north-west had been free—in theory, at all events—and the social condition of the class had even undergone some improvement. These peasants, once called smerdi—a name indicating scorn, if not infamy—(smerdit, to smell nasty), were now known by another generic title, which, while testifying to the lack of corporative differentiation always to be a peculiarity of the social elements of their country, clearly indicated a rise in the social scale. Whether town or country dwellers, tilling the soil or following other avocations, they were all simply called Khrestianié (Christians).

They made up the contingent of agricultural or industrial