Last Fall, while I was looking for a potential topic relating to the American Revolution in my research seminar, I stumbled upon an extremely interesting article written in the University of Hawaii at Hilo’s academic journal Hohonu about the little-known relationship between Tsar Alexander II and President Abraham Lincoln (which you can find here). Unfortunately, this paper itself ended up being a little too far from my topic for me to use, but I was immediately interested in learning more about how the abolitionist tendencies of Alexander II and Lincoln may have played a role in diplomacy between the two nations. I looked into the paper’s sources, hoping to find some more answers. I ended up going down a very strange and unexpected path that led me to explore the historiography of forced labor in Russia and America.

To be clear, this is not meant to be a takedown or attack on Robert Franklin’s article. This was an undergraduate paper written for a student journal and while it could have benefitted from editing and revision, it would not be fair to hold it to the same standards expected of post-graduate publications. Much of the information cited is from well-trusted and legitimate sources. Historians like Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, William Appleman Williams, and Frank Golder are well-known for their works on the history of Russian-American diplomacy and many of the quotes Franklin uses are directly from letters between Lincoln and the Tsar’s ministers, et cetera. However, I noticed that three names I had never heard before appeared frequently in the citations. I decided to find out more about these authors and their work.

The first thing that stood out to me was that none of the three, Albert Woldman, Michael Knox Beran, and Alexandre Tarsaidze, are or were trained historians. To be clear, I do not think that this is inherently problematic. Plenty of well-researched and highly regarded works of history have been written by sociologists, lawyers, and professionals from other fields, and it is shortsighted to disregard one’s work on the basis of what degree they have or do not have alone. Historians are not perfect at their jobs either, and books can shift in and out of popularity as new sources are uncovered and analyzed. That being said, a historian is overall more likely to publish well-documented and well-argued material than a non-historian.

With that in mind, we turn to former lawyer and judge Albert Woldman and his book Lincoln and the Russians. Woldman was a well-known expert on Lincoln and his 1938 biography, Lawyer Lincoln, received a warm review from the Ohio State Law Journal and was praised for its accessibility to both lawyers and laymen.² However, Lincoln and the Russians was received far more critically. Jay Monaghan, writing for the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, criticized Woldman for having “a few errors,” including giving an incorrect date for Lincoln’s assassination.¹ William Appleman Williams was critical of Woldman’s “oft-repeated assertion that ‘Russian autocracy would have been pleased to see American democracy destroyed'” and argued that Woldman’s thesis directly contradicted his sources.³ Woldman may have been an expert on Lincoln as a lawyer, but his venture into history was far less successful.

Like Woldman, Beran also has a background in law. He also has experience in opinion journalism and has written other books. However, neither of Beran’s two books written before Forge of Empires have anything to do with Russian history, nor perhaps anything to do with history at all. In a review of Beran’s second book, Jefferson’s Demons, Andrew Burstein expresses confusion as to why he is even reviewing the book as “Beran is not a historian, and Jefferson’s Demons does not qualify as history.”⁴ Burstein goes on to suggest that Jefferson’s Demons is better read as a “meditation,” or as “a whimsical, soulful, antiquarian fantasy” than as a serious work of scholarship. I could not find any academic reviews of Forge of Empires, but Burstein’s critique of Jefferson’s Demons does not exactly inspire confidence in Beran’s historical analysis.

The last of the three authors I looked into, Alexandre Tarsaidze, was the most bizarre of them all. Tarsaidze was a Georgian-born immigrant who left the Soviet Union in the 1920s and eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a public relations executive. According to Alla Zeide’s article in Ab Imperio titled “How the Russian Review Came to Be,” Tarsaidze spent his free time writing about Imperial Russia, publishing articles for both the Soviet and American versions of the Russian Review, and eventually started working for US military intelligence as well. He was also a regular contributor to the explicitly pro-Nazi newspaper Rossiya, and his authorship was apparently a constant source of anxiety for the editors of the Soviet edition of Russian Review.⁵

Tarsaidze’s, shall we say, “controversial” views also featured prominently in his other work. In a New York Times review written by the historian Alexander Dallin, Tarsaidze’s “staunchly conservative convictions” are evident throughout his 1953 book Czars and Presidents.⁶ “Staunchly conservative” is a bit of a euphemism; Tarsaidze’s book is anti-Soviet propaganda and Tsarist apologia that “discounts reports of abuse and trouble in Russia,” finds “‘comparable’ evils in American life,” and argues that the Bolshevik revolution and Cold War were Jewish conspiracies.

Apparently, Tarsaidze was quite influential among his friends and collaborators at the American version of Russian Review. Roger Dow’s 1947 article for The Russian Times called “Seichas: A Comparison of Pre-Reform Russia and the Ante-Bellum South” includes a note thanking Tarsaidze for granting him permission to use materials from an as-of-then unpublished book on Russian-American relations, presumably Czars and Presidents. Dow’s article is notable not only for being perhaps the earliest work comparing serfdom and slavery, but also for how it minimizes the horrors of forced labor to a degree bordering on apology and outright distorts facts. Some of the most stunning claims Dow makes are that there was “little difference” between serfdom and slavery “besides color,” that splitting up slave families was extremely uncommon and was “ordinarily through no fault of the masters,” that slavery worked “moderately well” in the South, and that “bond labor” was at worst “almost as bad as the Abolitionists in America and the intelligentsia in Russia have pictured it; at best it was a system that gave security and contentment to the weak as well as the strong.”⁷ According to Dow, slavery and serfdom were essentially the same besides the racial aspect, which he apparently concluded was not all that significant, and neither were as bad as their critics claimed. Besides, he concludes, they would have collapsed eventually anyway; forced labor was simply too wasteful and inefficient to stand up to capitalism.

Unfortunately, Dow’s article remained the only comparative study on slavery and serfdom for forty years. Finally, in 1987, Peter Kolchin’s groundbreaking comparative study of slavery and serfdom, Unfree Labor, was published. Many of Kolchin’s conclusions are opposite of Dow’s, and his work is exhaustively researched and well-argued. Most notably, Kolchin neither downplays the significance of race nor downplays the brutality of either system. Kolchin also writes that “unlike Russia (or other New World slave societies after the abolition of the slave trade), the South in the mid-nineteenth century did not face the imminent collapse of its labor system.”⁸ In contrast to Dow’s argument that slavery was doomed to failure because of capitalism’s ascendency, Kolchin concludes that slavery in the South largely collapsed due to external forces (namely, abolitionists in the North). Moreover, serfdom’s collapse had little to do with an inability to compete with capitalism. Russia had not industrialized as extensively as the North, and the master class was less willing to go to the lengths that Southern slaveowners were to protect their respective institutions. The racial ideology of slavery raised the stakes for white Southerners such that the general public was overall supportive of maintaining slavery while in Russia that was simply not the case. Unlike Dow, Kolchin actually took into consideration that it took a Civil War to end slavery.

Kolchin’s book ends with the abolition of slavery in 1865, leaving the door open for a future author to publish a book examining the ways life changed afterwards for newly freed people. Published just last year, Amanda Brickell Bellows’ book American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination analyzes how depictions of serfs and slaves in the public eye changed after abolition. Her work details the back-and-forth that existed as the former master class sought to soften the images and stories of forced labor while freedmen countered with works of their own. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom leaves doors of its own open, and a book studying how images of slavery and serfdom were used during the Cold War would be a fascinating topic for future studies.

So, what can we take away from this long, strange tale? Although it still has a long way to go, the historiographies of slavery and serfdom have come a very long way since 1947. Kolchin and Bellows, unlike Dow, contextualized serfdom and slavery as systems that were related but very distinct in important ways. Not least of which was racial ideology. Instead of pining for a mythologized (and racist) past, their books acknowledge that slavery and serfdom were brutal regimes that evolved in very different ways, producing unique outcomes on either side of the world. There remains a great deal of work to be done on culture and representation during and after emancipation, but we have finally taken the first few steps.

---

Returning to the paper that sparked this essay, Franklin’s conclusions are especially noteworthy in light of all of this information. After reading Dow’s article, I was left wondering what he could have possibly taken from Tarsaidze’s writings. At first, the two topics seemed to be unrelated. What did Russian-American diplomacy have to do with slavery and serfdom? As it turns out, more than I had expected. Franklin, like other scholars before him, acknowledges that Russian-American friendship was largely a product of their shared opposition to British and French intervention. But as Franklin also writes, “Russia and America shared the similar systems of serfdom and slavery respectively, and shared the problems inherent with holding a large amount of the population in bondage.”⁹ After the abolitionist thread vanished and the Emancipator and Liberator were replaced by their reactionary successors, Americans and Russians gradually drifted apart. After the Bolshevik Revolution blew the memory of friendship into obscurity, far-right revisionists attempted to claim the history for themselves by blaming the most vulnerable members of society for the failures of an evil system. It took forty years to reclaim the past from them, but the future looks brighter than ever.

---

Works cited:

1. Monaghan, Jay. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1953): 142-43. doi:10.2307/1897571.
2. Gramlich, Charles L. Ohio State Law Journal 4, no. 2 (1938): 278-282.
3. Williams, William Appleman. Science & Society 17, no. 4 (1953): 363-64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40400222.
4. Andrew Burstein. The Journal of American History 91, no. 2 (2004): 611-12. doi:10.2307/3660729.
5. “How the Russian Review Came to Be: Documents with Commentary.” Ab Imperio, no. 4 (October 2012): 307–37. doi:10.1353/imp.2012.0137.
6. Alexander Dallin, “Our Russian Friends; CZARS AND PRESIDENTS: The Story of a Forgotten Friendship. By Alexandre Tarsaidze. Illustrated. 383 Pp. New York: McDowell, Obolensky. $6.50. Russian Friends,” The New York Times, June 22, 1958, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1958/06/22/archives/our-russian-friends-czars-and-presidents-the-story-of-a-forgotten.html.
7. Dow, Roger. “Seichas: A Comparison of Pre-Reform Russia and the Ante-Bellum South.” The Russian Review 7, no. 1 (1947): 3-15. doi:10.2307/125328.
8. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor. 370.
9. Robert Franklin, Unlikely Bedfellows. https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Vol10x19TsarAlexanderIIandPresidentAbrahamLincoln.pdf