Since the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649, which is the social charter of Russian absolutism, the enserfment of the
Russian peasantry, which had already begun two centuries earlier, was definitively
established. From that moment on Russian serfs were irreversibly bound to the soil
of their master. Moreover, the towns were subjected to tight controls and sealed off
from the rest of the country. The urban poor were considered as state serfs. Only
taxpayers (that is, the aristocracy and the rich merchant class) could be legal residents.
No inhabitant could leave without royal permission.[28] Rural migration was definitively stopped. Serfdom, however, was not in the interest
of the private landowners alone. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian
state owned land with twenty million serfs on it. This was 40 percent of the peasant
population.[29] This population was literally the property of the state. A population that has
practically no rights, not even the ability to move freely around the home country,
cannot have the personal pride and individual satisfaction of free people. In such
a case, the home country’s imperial conquests provide an ersatz satisfaction. Feelings
of powerlessness and a lack of personal pride and individual accomplishment are compensated
by a process of identification with the power and the glory of their country. The
lack of personal respect that they receive as individuals is compensated by the respect—and
fear—that their home country inspires. “If a man is proud of his Belief, his Fatherland,
his People,” one can still read in an anonymous Russian publication of 2007 attacking
democracy, “he finds internal pride in himself as a representative of this great people
and great country.”[30] This mechanism can be observed in a population of serfs that has been enslaved,
as well as in a population that gives up its original freedom and enslaves itself for the sake of national glory. John Stuart Mill already described this mechanism
in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), where he wrote:
There are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than
the desire of personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are
found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other. Each one of their number is willing,
like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal freedom of action into
the hands of his general, provided the army is triumphant and victorious, and he is
able to flatter himself that he is one of a conquering host, though the notion that
he has himself any share in the domination exercised over the conquered is an illusion.
A government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its
hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part
of guardian or director, is not to the taste of such a people.[31]
According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk this tendency to compensate one’s
lack of personal self-respect by indulging in the imperialist glory of one’s home
country can be observed especially in the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These are for him “experiments in collective self-esteem and self-aggrandizement,
directed by the mass media.” The foreign policy of these national states, “insofar
as it included imaginary competition, was always dramatized by tensions of respect
and disrespect.”[32] This element of surrogate satisfaction must not be underestimated. It clearly still plays an important role in present-day
Russia, where citizens, whose political freedoms are more and more restricted, long
for “national greatness” and a recovery of “Russia’s glorious past.”[33]
