turgenev: losing baptized property

Ivan Turgenev. He was Russia’s Great Emancipator, helping abolish serfdom; he helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: writing short stories that showed what their lives were like…

---The synchronization of action through song was crucial for physically challenging tasks. In Russia, groups of 50 to 125 serfs were harnessed to boats and forced to pull them upriver. A brutal job, barge-hauling was despised by all. Serfs endured this work by singing a song known as the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” or “Hey, Ukhnem.” “Ukhnem” translates to the English equivalent of “heave-ho,” and comes from the “ukh” sound that serfs made with each collective tug. As the serfs pulled in unison, this song coordinated their efforts. American slaves employed song in a parallel way as they rowed together. ---click image for source...

—The synchronization of action through song was crucial for physically challenging tasks. In Russia, groups of 50 to 125 serfs were harnessed to boats and forced to pull them upriver. A brutal job, barge-hauling was despised by all. Serfs endured this work by singing a song known as the “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” or “Hey, Ukhnem.” “Ukhnem” translates to the English equivalent of “heave-ho,” and comes from the “ukh” sound that serfs made with each collective tug. As the serfs pulled in unison, this song coordinated their efforts.
American slaves employed song in a parallel way as they rowed together. —click image for source…

…In Russia, at least, the prospects for emancipation had suddenly improved with the accession of Alexander II. Turgenev was in Paris when, on February 19,1861,the manifesto abolishing serfdom was proclaimed, and he attended a special service of Thanksgiving at the Russian church. Standing next to him was his relative, the old Decembrist, Nicholas Turgenev. As words of the proclamation were read, he and Nicholas wept. “I still can’t beleive that we have lived to see this day,” he wrote a friend in Russia. But the two Turgenev’s were almost alone in their enthusiasm. As the sermon explaining he act began, most of the congregation of nobles who had just lost their “baptized property” without compensation walked out.

The serfs were equally disappointed by the terms of the proclamation. The one thing they wanted most, land, was denied them. Turgenev saw from the first that without such distribution, there could not be a stable and progressive country. During a visit to Russia a year after the emancipation he found conditions throughout the country to be most chaotic. Agriculture, if anything, was declining and not improving. The aristocrats were suddenly land poor, while the embittered serfs were being forced to pay exorbitant rents for their houses, garden plots and wood lots.

---The great mass of the people suffered severely by Peter's reforms. The peasants as tenants of the large landowners had enjoyed some liberty and were legally free men; they were by him assigned to the soil, which they were not permitted to leave. Thus they, too, passed into serfdom. If the proprietor sold the estate, the rural population went with it. The owners paid a poll-tax for their serfs. These unfortunates could also be sold without the land, but the czar made a law that "If the sale cannot be abolished completely, serfs must be sold by families without separating husbands from wives, parents from children, and no longer like cattle, a thing unheard of in the whole world." The citizens of towns were divided into three classes; to the first class belonged bankers, manufacturers, rich merchants, physicians, chemists, capitalists, jewelers, workers in metal, and artists; storekeepers and master mechanics were in the second; all other people belonged to the third. Foreigners could engage in business, acquire real estate; but they could not depart from the country without paying to the government one tenth of all they possessed.---click image for source...

—The great mass of the people suffered severely by Peter’s reforms. The peasants as tenants of the large landowners had enjoyed some liberty and were legally free men; they were by him assigned to the soil, which they were not permitted to leave. Thus they, too, passed into serfdom. If the proprietor sold the estate, the rural population went with it. The owners paid a poll-tax for their serfs. These unfortunates could also be sold without the land, but the czar made a law that “If the sale cannot be abolished completely, serfs must be sold by families without separating husbands from wives, parents from children, and no longer like cattle, a thing unheard of in the whole world.”
The citizens of towns were divided into three classes; to the first class belonged bankers, manufacturers, rich merchants, physicians, chemists, capitalists, jewelers, workers in metal, and artists; storekeepers and master mechanics were in the second; all other people belonged to the third. Foreigners could engage in business, acquire real estate; but they could not depart from the country without paying to the government one tenth of all they possessed.—click image for source…

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