American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Abstract

In the more than three decades since Peter Kolchin authored his seminal study Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), a dynamic scholarship has emerged that challenges notions of American exceptionalism by illuminating the important and complex ways that the United States and Russia have mirrored each other despite the obvious differences in the two countries' political and economic systems. This work includes but is not limited to Dale E. Peterson's Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (2000), Kate Brown's, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and Margaret Peacock's Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (2014). Amanda Brickell Bellows adds to this alternative, insightful perspective on Russian-American relations and complements Kolchin's foundational work by closely analyzing the outpouring of cultural products that emerged in Russia and the United States in the decades following the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and chattel slavery in 1865. She contends that the visual and textual representations of Russian serfs, peasants, enslaved African Americans, and free Blacks that appeared in popular literature, illustrated periodicals, oil paintings, advertisements, and photographs served similar objectives in the societies of Russia and the United States in the postemancipation era. Bellows argues that Russian and American writers, artists, and businessmen used these varied means of popular cultural expression to articulate their perspectives and anxieties regarding the transformations wrought by abolition, especially those that surrounded rural to urban migration.