Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter
Kolchin Harvard University Press, 517 pp., $25.00 Writing about
Mary Chesnut’s family in antebellum South Carolina, Edmund
Wilson remarked that “comparisons with Russia seem inevitable
when one is writing about the old South.” Of course Tocqueville
could not have foreseen the almost simultaneous abolition of
Russian serfdom and American slavery in the 1860s, events that
drew attention to their parallel histories. But even that
riveting coincidence failed, for all the attention it got, to
evoke the comparative study by historians that might have been
reasonably expected. Modern historians have to some extent
broken out of the national boundaries traditionally set for the
study of American slavery and produced a number of works
comparing it with bondage elsewhere. But the partners chosen to
be compared have so far been confined largely to New World slave
societies or South Africa. Among causes inhibiting comparisons
of American slavery with Russian ser