Emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 happened almost simultaneously but in a more peaceful way than the abolition of slavery in the United States. There were many more serfs in Russia than there were slaves in America; in Russia, emancipation re-engineered the life and work of many millions (Kolchin 1987). Since serfs were property, the state-sponsored program of withdrawing this property from its legal owners was perceived as illiberal, even revolutionary. The gentry were left with little in way of a role in post-emancipation Russia. Around 1857, the government discussed and rejected a project to provide them with the functions of the rural police - to turn the former owners into the sheriffs of their former serfs (Saltykov- Shchedrin 1936: 5/73); later, the reformers built a mechanism of local governance that was led by the elected gentry. With emancipation, the state compensated the owners and the former serfs had to pay their redemption fees back to the state. Almost everyone - peasants, nobles, state officials, and public intellectuals - was unhappy about the details of emancipation, but they did serve to prevent or defer major outbursts of violence. In 1913, an underground activist, Vladimir Lenin, wrote a short essay, "Russians and Negroes," which argued that though the emancipation of Russian serfs and American slaves had taken place almost simultaneously, the procedures and results were different. Slaves received their freedom as the result of a violent war, serfs as the result of a peaceful reform. Precisely because of this difference, observed Lenin, "there are more traces of slavery kept among the Russians than among the negroes" (Lenin 1967: 22/346). Thus, in 1913, Lenin believed that the reforms of 1861 in Russia had deferred an American-style civil war, not prevented it. Great violence was necessary after which the races, or estates, would truly mix together. Lenin did what he could to realize this prophesy: he succeeded with the first part but failed with the second.
A Trip to the Countryside
Since the establishment of the Empire, Russian and foreign explorers had traveled into its lands with the thrill of discovery. Mostly organized by Germans on Russian service, the eighteenth-century expeditions went to Siberia, to the Caucasus, to the southern steppes, and also into the heartlands (Moon 2010). The enlightened voyagers of this period appreciated their travels to the central, and also exotic, parts of the Empire. Having led a huge expedition to Kamchatka in the 1730s, Gerhard Friedrich Muller died while exploring the countryside around Moscow (Black 1986; Muller 1996). Responding to Abbe Raynal's History of Two Indies, Radishchev wrote his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In the nineteenth century, a trip through European Russia was included in the nobleman's Grand Tour along with visits to Paris and Rome (Kozlov 2003). Nineteenth- century literature depicts many of these travels to a strange land that was populated by compatriots, including the officials who suspected every visitor of being an inspector-general. Responding to Byron's Childe Harold Plilgrimage, in which the protagonist travels to the exotic Mediterranean, Pushkin wrote "Onegin's Journey," in which the eponymous character travels through Russian provinces, from Novgorod to Astrakhan and then to Odessa (see Hokanson 2010: 126). Pushkin's drafts demonstrate how in this journey Onegin traded his pan-European dandyism for an improvised nationalism, a development that became emblematic for the mid-nineteenth century. Grand Duke Konstantin, arguably the most liberal member of the dynasty, urged the government to focus on Russia's central parts, which "all share one faith and nationhood." He advised disposing of those edges that were impossible to protect and cultivate, and "keeping only those which it is possible to keep" (Istoriia 1997: 3/386; Dameshek and Remnev 2007). Under Konstantin's pressure, the Navy Ministry and the Russian Geographical Society organized systematic travels into the depths of Russia. Together, political liberalism and cultural nationalism turned their focus towards the heartlands.
On June 21, 1826, the Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboedov entertained himself with a day trip from St. Petersburg to Pargolovo, a village near the capital, now a suburb. Having had posts in the colonial administration of the Caucasus and the military mission to Persia, Griboedov had recently been brought back to St. Petersburg. He spent six months under arrest for being involved in the recent rebellion of the troops in the capital, but the inquest resulted in an acquittal and Griboedov was preparing to head back to Tiflis (now Tbilisi). But then his comedy, Woe from Wit, was forbidden from being presented on the stage. In the midst of this turmoil, the local festivities in Pargolovo proved memorable:
Beneath us, on the banks of a quiet stream, along the wooded alleys, we spotted groups of girls; we chased them, wandering for an hour or two; suddenly we heard the ringing sounds of singing and dancing, female and male voices. . . . Songs of motherland! Where have you come from the sacred banks of the Dnieper and the Volga? - We returned: that hill was already full of fair-haired peasant girls, with ribbons and necklace, and also a boy choir; I liked two boys, with courageous features and free movements, more than others.
After chasing the local girls for an hour or two, the group of gentlemen joined the local festivities. At this idyllic moment, Griboedov's findings in Pargolovo turn from the banal to the astonishing:
Leaning on a tree, I turned my eyes from the loud-voiced singers to the damaged class of the half-Europeans to whom I also belong. It was all wild for them, all that we saw and heard: these sounds were incomprehensible to them, these outfits seemed strange. What black magic has made us alien among ourselves! The Finns and the Tunguses are more easily admitted to our community, grow higher than us, become models for us, but our own people, the folk of our own blood, are separated from us, and for ever! If by any chance a foreigner got here, one who would not have known the Russian history of the century, he would conclude from the sharp difference of mores that our masters and our peasants originate from two different tribes, which have not had enough time to mix their mores and customs. (Griboedov 1999b: 276)
With his fresh colonial experience, Griboedov grasped the meaning of the event better than others. Common Russians in Pargolovo seemed "strange," "incomprehensible," even "wild" to the dwellers of St. Petersburg. Griboedov described a trip to the nearest suburb as if he was a romantic traveler visiting a distant land, enjoying the girls and songs of noble savages but misunderstanding their meaning, toying with an idea of mixing with them, and admitting to his sorrow that it was impossible. In the Caucasus, Griboedov would have been in these situations often, though his future marriage to a Georgian princess demonstrated that there, in a truly exotic land, the cultural gap was less noticeable. But Pargolovo was different from Tbilisi: there was no exoticism in the village, only a gap. The civilized Finns were close to Pargolovo and the wild Tunguses were far away in Siberia, but they had a better chance of being absorbed into the imperial elite than Russian peasants, said Griboedov. The contrast between geographical proximity and cultural distance could not have been stronger. Space did not matter; this was an empire in which social distances were greater than geographic ones, which themselves were huge. This empire's heart of darkness throbbed in places like Pargolovo.