And the The Welcome to Russian History Retold, episode 138, the Inserfment of the

last time we covered a brief history of the country of Belarus

And now I want to cover something and I'm doing this in consecutive weeks because the next podcast I'm going to do is about the

Crimean War and I think it's a very important topic obviously in lieu of what's going

on in the Ukraine and in Russia the world and I think that the American public is grossly

misunderstanding what's going on and even worse I think our government and the

media both liberal and conservative sides are getting it all wrong.

And I want to cover the Crimean War from the 1850s, but in a modern context of what's going

on here.

So I wanted to get to this one. And this episode is very near and dear to my heart because I believe it's one of the saddest moments of Russian history. And I want to cover this, you know, the encirfment of the Russian peasant.

Now, the encirfment of these peasants is without a doubt the saddest part of the history of the country,

lasting from 1450 to the different date

that you're going to hear most of the time to 1906 it is not surprising that there were thousands of revolts in Russia, partly because of it, with the big one occurring of course in 1917, while not a peasant revolt, it was this deep sense of, you know, sadness in the country I think.

And wanting to get out of this horrible time and it had just occurred and the end of it had just you know finished so

Let's get into it the tragedy of the life of a surf cannot be downplayed life in the cold environs of Russia was harsh to begin with,

but to have no control over your life.

Be beholden to a possibly cruel owner

and knowing that your children would suffer the same fate

must have been horrendous.

In America, we had our slavery issue, importing poor souls from Africa. In Russia we have the

surfment of their own people. How did an institution like serfdom come to be?

How could the Russian people allow themselves to be enslaved?

...