American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows Chelsea C. Gibson (bio) American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination. By Amanda Brickell Bellows. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 320. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) Those who study both the United States and Russia have long identified a curious similarity in the paths of the two countries. In 2007, David S. Foglesong, for example, noted that Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often imagined Russia as their "imaginary twin" or "dark double," a country distinct yet familiar.1 Almost two centuries earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville argued the two countries had discovered "their greatness at almost the same time," as they rapidly expanded their land and population. The only difference to Tocqueville was that Russia used "servitude" as its greatest instrument, while the United States used "freedom."2 This latter observation, of course, was a rosy estimation of the United States, which enslaved millions of African Americans in Tocqueville's time. The twin systems of serfdom and slavery have been the topic of several studies—too few, in this reader's estimation—including, most notably, Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), which follows the institutions until their complicated abolition in the 1860s. But few scholars have chosen to compare the aftermath of emancipation in Russia and the United States. Amanda Brickell Bellows in her new book, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, has happily chosen to tackle the topic. Bellows's study compares "textual and visual mass-oriented depictions of former serfs and enslaved African Americans" in the roughly four decades following emancipation (5). She argues that we can use these sources to better understand how American and Russian culture made room for these newly freed populations. At the same time, these images helped construct a collective memory of emancipation in their respective countries. The book comprises six thematic chapters that explore myriad cultural sources that helped the two populations evaluate the effects of emancipation, including fiction, poetry, periodicals, lithographs, oil paintings, advertisements, and photographs. Indeed, Bellows deserves credit just for the sheer volume of sources she chose to include, highlighting the unique challenges of a comparative history. Importantly, she made sure to choose cultural products that included the voices of the formerly enslaved and enserfed populations. She uses these sources to make two basic arguments: first, that elites' desires in both countries to retain power resulted in either idealized or dismissive cultural images of freedpeople and peasants; and, second, that the unique situations of both countries resulted in ultimately "divergent depictions" of the two groups (7). [End Page 592] This is a book that will serve scholars well, especially those who may know only one side of the historiography. Bellows offers a thorough survey of each of the aforementioned subjects, and the book is packed with visuals, especially assisting the reader in the chapter on oil paintings. She does not make this argument explicitly in her introduction, but I found that her chapters also tell an important story about the growing tension between agricultural and industrial life in the late nineteenth century. The two emancipated populations came to represent the idealized before-time, a moment in which life was simple and social relationships were familial, yet safely hierarchical. Both cultures, for example, lamented the loss of the mother-like "mammy" or "niania" (nanny) (81). And in many of Bellows's examples, when freedpeople or peasants moved to the city, they were met with destitution, prostitution, and death. These cultural products seemed to serve two purposes: on one hand, to police the social power of a formerly bonded population; and, on the other hand, to preserve an idealized agricultural world to which Americans and Russians could escape, even if only in their imaginations. The comparative model helps highlight how and why the experiences of freedpeople and peasants diverged so significantly because of race. As Bellows notes throughout the book, tsarist subjects by and large did not revile their peasant population as a racial other; instead, the Slavophile movement widely celebrated peasant culture (narodnost') as the nation...