THE THREAD IN RADISHCHEV'S NEEDLE

by

Hugh R. Whinfrey

Economic arguments for the abolition of serfdom, in addition to moral arguments, were available to motivate the forces that led to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861. The oldest of those available economic arguments entered into the currency of the debate in what is generally regarded as the first organized collection of modern abolitionist arguments of any type in a purely Russian context: the 1790 publication of A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alexander Radishchev.

Therein Radishchev advanced, in addition to moral arguments, an economic argument based on the proposition that people will be more productive when they fully enjoy all the fruits of their labours and less productive when they do not.¹ The direct implication of the argument was that the emancipation of the serfs would then at some lucrative rate increase the aggregate wealth of the nation.

This paper will evaluate the relationship of this economic argument of Radishchev's to the historiography of the post-Emancipation decades.

The argument itself is not Radishchev's brainchild, being used by Mably in his work on Greek history which Radishchev translated into Russian.² But it is Radishchev who formally injected it into the Russian context. Moreover it was the first such injection of an economic argument based on a postulated scientific principle into the ensuing debate over serfdom, which was dramatically initiated by his book.

Modern economics validates this postulate under the guise of utility theory. It is to a large extent simple common sense anyway. In the role of a motivating factor in the Emancipation of 1861, it has a grandfatherly quality to all the economic arguments espousing the benefits of emancipation in generalized terms.

Radishchev added considerable emotional overtones to the concept. Placing the postulate in the "A Project for the Future" chapter of Journey, located at the beginning of the second half of the text, with thus the benefit of all the emotional preludes of the first half of the text, he writes:

But, to return to our more immediate concern with the condition of the agriculturists, we find it most harmful to society. It is harmful because it prevents the increase of products and population, harmful by its example, and dangerous in the unrest it creates. Man, motivated by self-interest, undertakes that which may be to his immediate or later advantage, and avoids that from which he expects no present or future gain. Following this natural instinct, everything we do for our own sake, everything we do without compulsion, we do carefully, industriously, and well. On the other hand, all that we do not do freely, all that we do not do for our own advantage, we do carelessly, lazily, and all awry. Thus we find the agriculturalists in our country. The field is not their own, the fruit thereof does not belong to them. Hence they cultivate the land lazily and do not care whether it goes to waste because of their poor work. Compare this field with the one the haughty proprietor gives the worker for his own meager sustenance. The worker is unsparing in the labors which he spends on it. Nothing distracts him from his work. ³

The legacy of the above quote in post-Emancipation expectations is captured by Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace in the depiction of governmental authorities after the Emancipation: "Most of them were evidently suffering from shattered illusions. They had expected that the Emancipation would produce instantaneously a wonderful improvement in the life and character of the rural population, and that the peasant would become at once a sober, industrious, model agriculturist." ⁴ This same 'shattering of illusions' is evident in the historiography of the Emancipation, with the literature divided into camps of those who believe in the 'illusion' and those who do not.

Riasanovsky notes that there are historians who have advanced favorable economic interpretations of the Emancipation, but then goes on to state that "the emancipation reform also deserves thorough criticism".⁵ Historians have generally based such criticism on the fact that "The period between the emancipation of the serfs and the Revolution of 1905 was marked by stagnation in agriculture." ⁶ This aggregate stagnation is usually offered as evidence that the terms and conditions of the Great Reforms hamstrung the peasants in numerous ways from achieving a nebulous sort of agrarian utopia. Geroid Robinson in his Rural Russia Under The Old Regime is particularly detailed in his evidence to this effect.⁷ Although he tries to overtly remain objective, his presentation of a large amount of critical data detailing exactly how the peasants were hamstrung compels the reader to presume that things could somehow have been much better. Robinson's perspective seems in fact to be permeated with the echo of unbridled economic expectations derived from the above quote from Journey. Hugh Seton-Watson in his The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914 admits to echoing Robinson.⁸

On the other extreme, absolutely devoid of this echo, is Stephen Wheatcroft's excellent systematic analysis of the components of this rural decline in his article "Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia." Wheatcroft actually directly touches on this point when, in discussing peasant rentals of land, he states: "Such a situation tends to support the argument that the peasantry was likely to be motivated far less by classical economic theories, with their emphasis on individual profit, than by concern for household subsistence needs - as Chaianov and others have argued."⁹

Boris Mironov, in his monograph "The Russian Peasant Commune After the Reforms of the 1860s", takes a position aligned with Wheatcroft's and indeed also cites Chaianov. Mironov writes "households were units of labor and consumption, based mainly upon the labor of family members and oriented not to make a profit but to achieve a balance between income and needs."¹⁰ On the subsequent page Mironov again asserts that "The economic behavior of the peasants was oriented not toward making a profit but toward satisfying the subsistence needs of their families." ¹¹

It should be noted that modern economics would disagree with both the timid assertion of Wheatcroft and the bolder assertions of Mironov and maintain that various 'externalities' were operating to produce the seeming contradictions, thereby 'correcting' the theory to conform to observed conditions thus maintaining the 'illusion'. "Externalities arise because property rights are not clearly defined." ¹² Geroid Robinson's work leaves no doubt that property rights were not so clearly defined as to prevent externalities from becoming a part of the equation of land usage and ownership with which the peasants had to concern themselves in this period.

Modern economics also asserts that externalities are a manifestations of 'incorrect' pricings of goods, and therefore one party is gaining something at the expense of another party.¹³ Mironov, by offering the nature, cause, and benefactor of the major externality at work in this situation, in fact, goes so far as to describe the 'smoking gun' that allows his position to be refuted. In remarking that the state recognized both familial and communal forms of property ownership, Mironov concludes that "The state did so for the simple reason that this best guaranteed collective responsibility of the peasantry before the state and prevented the transfer of land to a prosperous elite and the formation of a landless peasantry incapable of fulfilling its obligations to the state." ¹⁴ Historians in general seem to agree that the state benefited in the short-run from the post-Emancipation status of the commune. Much of the criticism of the economics of the reforms revolves around the problems of collective ownership and collective responsibility. Mironov has thus perhaps unwittingly used the rationalism of modern economic theory as a part of his argumentation to refute it's validity. The contradiction can be resolved however by concluding that Mironov has a hidden political agenda in his essay.

The quote from Radishchev's Journey also echoes throughout the question of the externalities of communal economics. Radishchev's economic postulate seemingly presumed that the emancipation would be complete individual freedom, not simply freedom from the landlords leaving bondage to the commune still in place. The tendency among historians to use this 'partial' emancipation as a scapegoat for the ensuing economic stagnation reflects not merely an attachment the utopian expectations conceptualized by Radishchev but also a rigid attachment to the format within that conceptualization under which 'progress' would take place, including specifically freedom from the restrictions of the commune.

Esther Kingston-Mann's revisionist article "Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation: A Preliminary Inquiry" advances the thesis that in the post-Emancipation context the commune, with all its restrictions on individual liberties, was the most economically efficient method of land tenure and social organization.¹⁵ She clearly posits the possibility that the commune may in fact have provided incentives to maximize production efforts beyond the output levels motivated by individual private property. Her evidence is really mostly condensed anecdotes, coupled with a sprinkling of statistics and a very daring conceptualization. It is however enough to provoke serious consideration of the proposition.

Kingston-Mann's article is really an attempt to reconcile the post-Emancipation reality of peasant life with modern economic principles by postulating that an intermediate corporate body, the commune, acted under the profit-seeking motive. There is indeed a strong flavor throughout the article of her unwavering attachment to rationalization along the lines of aggregate economic efficiency. In other words she is trying to maintain the 'illusion' in the same sense as Robinson and Seton-Watson, but as opposed to Wheatcroft and Mironov.

Kingston-Mann dispenses with Wheatcroft and Mironov, who both questioned the profit motive, by "field-workers of the 1880s and 1890s documented an almost fanatic peasant concern that investments of labor or capital be justly rewarded." ¹⁶ She also distances herself from the pervasive bitterness of the older Robinson school, which seems to be founded on a strict belief in the virtues of private property, by "Comparisons between the economic virtues of communal and private tenure were thus easiest to make at very high levels of abstraction." ¹⁷

It seems like there was a gap in the continuity of the historiography, just waiting for Kingston-Mann to come along and fill it. By her position, we can now accept that the government was acting in its own economic self-interest by hobbling the emancipated peasants, that the peasants were acting in their own economic self-interest by accepting being hobbled upon emancipation, that modern economic theory still reigns supreme without contradiction, and that the expectations of increased productivity and innovation, the legacy of Radishchev, were in fact realized in the decades following the Emancipation.

There is one major complication however to a general acceptance of her unifying position - one must accept that communal forms of property and labor organization are sometimes economically superior to private property and individualism. This may be true, but it is an issue intertwined with current political dogmas, which perhaps explains the timidity of Kingston-Mann in introducing her thesis, when she has more than enough evidence to warrant a firm stance.

Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace in his classic work Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution has a flavor akin to Kingston-Mann's work in that he describes peasant practices without the bitterness of Robinson, and seems quite willing to accept that the commune in its context could be the most economically efficient form of organization. He however doesn't seem to be as overly concerned as the other historians examined in this paper with modern dogmatic issues regarding economics, an advantage of his having lived in the last century. After reading Wallace's book it is hard to imagine that he was anyone other than a sage stoic Scottish gentleman with upper-class sentiments trying to be scrupulously factual, though not necessarily even-handed. To seem to be fair by offering some criticism, his text relies more on anecdotes than statistics of dubious origin.

Wallace's attitude towards the Radishchev quote is shown earlier in this paper. Throughout Journey a utopian ideal of the Emancipation ceaselessly streams out of Radishchev's writing, aimed directly and accurately at the Russian spirit. Wallace seems to be paternalistic about these utopian expectations, taking them in stride, but not letting them alter his course. The same cannot be said of the other historians examined here.

Seattle, March 1993.

Endnotes

Bibliography