Category Archives: labor

by | 15 March 2025 · 8:17 am

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

…

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

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by | 14 March 2025 · 4:46 am

Early Siberian Exile System

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-124:

The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich [by Boris Godunov]. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand. Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far-flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”

As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.

…

For centuries convicts began marching to Siberia from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in European Russia, often starting their march on the Vladimirka road. At the first post station, which was called Gorenki, from the word gore, meaning grief, family members who were not accompanying a convict to Siberia could get a last glimpse of their loved one. In his iconic Vladimirka, the Russian artist Isaac Levitan painted the view ahead of a marching exile: a dirt road stretching to the horizon under a vast sky. By the time of Kennan’s investigation, trains and then barges transported convicts into Siberia but many of them still had to march more than halfway across a continent to their final destinations in parties of three hundred or more guarded by Russian soldiers on foot and by mounted Cossacks.

The sight of an exile party stunned travelers in Siberia. In January 1828, a young woman making her way through Siberia in subzero temperatures to join her exiled fiancé heard a strange noise from her carriage. “It was the noise of the fetters … an entire party of people was in chains—some were even chained to a metal pole. These unfortunates were a terrible sight. To protect their faces from the cold they had covered them with some dirty rags into which they had cut holes for their eyes.” On an overcast morning in 1856, an English traveler observed, beneath a double row of birch trees on the Great Siberian Post Road, “a long line of drab-clad figures marching in the same direction as ourselves. We instinctively know what it is but can still hardly believe that a story so sad, so strange, so distant, is being realised before our eyes.” Kennan never carried out his plan to march with an exile party, possibly because he was denied permission but equally likely because he had observed the experience of the exile parties to be so dreadful.

No one seemed to question or care whether, after a forced march of thousands of miles, cold-blooded killers and an assortment of thieves, incorrigibles, misfits, malcontents, and regime enemies could become productive workers in the Siberian mines and factories. In fact many of the convicts who reached Eastern Siberia, according to one report from local authorities, “arrived exhausted, prematurely enfeebled, having contracted incurable diseases, having forgotten their trades, and having grown quite unaccustomed to labour.” Local Siberian officials regularly commandeered the healthiest convicts from the marching parties to meet their own needs, which further aggravated the shortage of able workers.

So many exiled convicts died on Siberian roads that the peasants, who had to dispose of the bodies, protested to the government in St. Petersburg, which only sent back orders to the local authorities to pay for the burials. Some convicts took years to reach their destinations but their time on the journey did not count as part of their sentence. One convict was on the road for eight years, but his eight-year sentence did not start until he finally entered a prison factory in Irkutsk. The authorities did not want the convicts to run out their sentences by feigning illness or otherwise finding ways to delay their arrivals at the prisons, factories, and mines.

Notwithstanding the human wastage, enough productive convicts reached their destinations to justify the exile system to the St. Petersburg and Siberian bureaucracies. As Kennan wrote, “One is surprised not that so many die but that so many get through alive.” Factories, salt works, distilleries, farms, and mines in Siberia continued to demand more workers and the regime continued to send them by, for example, allowing landowners and monasteries to turn over their troublesome serfs to the state for exile. Siberia became the jewel in the Romanov crown and played a role in the rise of the Russian Empire comparable to that of India in the ascension of the British Empire.

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by | 10 March 2025 · 3:12 am

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

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by | 9 March 2025 · 4:51 am

U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

Kennan never attended college because the Rebellion, as it was called in Norwalk [Ohio], broke out in 1861 and “turned all my thoughts, hopes and ambitions into a new channel.”

He was elated by the martial electricity in the air. “Patriotic by inheritance and training, and naturally adventurous, I was completely carried away by a desire to take part in the momentous struggle.” But he was too young to enlist without his father’s permission, which John Kennan was unwilling to give. He could only watch as friends joined the 55th Ohio Regiment, which mustered out in Norwalk in the early days of the war. In a festive atmosphere the ladies of Norwalk offered coffee, pies, and sweet cakes to the young soldiers of the 55th in their light blue trousers, dark blue jackets, and forage caps. Trains left Norwalk taking boys, who not long ago had been playing two-old-cat, to be cut down on battlefields from Second Bull Run to the Carolinas campaign.

Still anxious to prove his courage, George Kennan sought the equally dangerous position as a field operator in the newly formed United States Military Telegraph Corps. Despite the word “Military,” the Corps was a civilian unit whose superintendent reported to the secretary of war. By the end of the war, the Corps had built fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines and transmitted over six million telegraph messages, which gave the Union a significant communications advantage over the Confederacy with its more limited telegraphic resources. President Lincoln was among the first to grasp the capacity of the telegraph to give him command and control from Washington over his forces in the field, a power no political leader had previously possessed without being on the battlefield.

Throughout the war Lincoln haunted the War Department’s telegraph office. He personally sent nearly one thousand telegrams to his commanders, some asking about troop dispositions in ongoing battles. “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?” Lincoln telegraphed during one battle. The incoming telegrams filled the telegraph office with blood and gore. “The wounded & killed is immense,” a field operator telegraphed to the War Department, where Lincoln paced anxiously during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. “The battle rages furiously. Can hardly hear my instrument.”

From the War Department a vast network of telegraph wires stretched to every theatre of the war and onto battlefields. Before a battle, field operators weighed down with telegraphs, relays, and sounders; mules loaded with rolls of telegraph wire; and covered wagons crammed with nitric acid batteries, moved into position. They set up their instruments on hard-tack boxes beneath tent flys, and in just hours men had strung five or six miles of wire along poles, fence posts and tree branches, and sometimes over rivers to connect brigades or divisions with the commanding generals. A field operator once held the ends of a severed wire together in his bare hands and read a transmission from his tongue, which felt the shocks of the incoming dots and dashes.

Field operators were shot, blown up by artillery shells, and, when captured by Confederates, at risk of being executed as spies since they wore no military uniforms. Kennan could not entirely convince himself that he had the courage to be a field operator, but his doubts only made him more anxious to put his nerve to a supreme test. “Had I not camped out many a night—or at least many a morning—in the Big Woods?” he asked himself. “And was I not quite as familiar with firearms as most of the volunteers who were then going to the front?” He wrote Anson Stager, the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps, whom Kennan had met before the war when Stager was a senior Western Union official, asking to join as a field operator. Stager was too busy to respond and instead Kennan received a letter from another official advising him to defer joining the Corps and “wait and see what would happen.”

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by | 8 March 2025 · 6:07 am

Railroad Telegraph Duties, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-35:

He became a messenger-boy and trainee in a railroad company telegraph depot in Norwalk [Ohio], working in a different office than his father’s. He was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and manager at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. In nineteenth-century America, children did menial and exhausting work in factories, farms, textile mills, and mines. Industrialists regarded the ideal machine as one so simple that a child could operate it. It was rare to give a young boy like George Kennan a serious responsibility like the signaling of trains.

As a train came through Norwalk, small boys peered through the depot’s windows to watch Kennan busily work his instrument to alert a central dispatcher of the train’s passing. The dispatcher then sent orders to the telegraph depot ahead of the train to give to its engineer: speed up, slow down (to arrive on schedule), halt at a siding, or make an unscheduled stop to pick up freight or passengers. At the depot ahead, a hapless employee went out to the side of the tracks and held out a five-foot pole with a large wire hoop, to which the dispatcher’s written order was attached. As the steam-whistling, smoke-belching train barreled toward the “hooper,” the brakeman reached down and, unless the hooper flinched, grabbed the wire hoop.

Initially Kennan functioned in a state of panic. “The excitement and responsibility of taking and transmitting orders upon which depended the safety of trains and passengers were a severe trial, at first, to my inexperienced nerves.” But he made no serious mistakes and “gradually acquired self-confidence, as the routine of railroad business became familiar to me.” Once he set up a field telegraph office at the scene of a train wreck, and on one local election night he helped his father receive the telegraphed tallies and announce them to an excited gathering.

American Morse Code (also called Railroad Morse or land-line Morse) in those days differed from current International Morse Code, which latter is better adapted for transmission through undersea cables.

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by | 10 February 2025 · 6:18 am

Communist Bloc Consumerism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 652-656:

When Nikita Khrushchev made his “hare-brained” predictions of the imminent victory of Communism in 1961, he directly invited competition with the West, blithely telling delegates of the twenty-second Party Congress that their country would attain a living standard within two decades that would be higher than that of any capitalist country. Part of his optimism stemmed from the belief that the command economy’s problems lay not in planning but in the crude methods of plan calculation; in the view of party experts, the increased use of mathematical methods and computerization would generate improvements in quantity and quality of production.

But the nature of the competition depended on what was meant by “living standard.” Capitalism featured an endless array of consumer goods: dozens of types of automobiles (in new styles every year); countless varieties of cheese, or bread, or sweets, or consumer durables; fashions of clothing for every imaginable taste—as well as tastes that advertising had made imaginable. Socialism would not replicate this dazzling variety, in part because the provision of luxury goods seemed to contradict the higher proletarian morality. East German Communists called the Western race to buy goods in the latest style “consumption terror.” But once the distortions of suppressing the consumer sector disappeared, what exactly was the right balance between the frugal self-sacrificing ethos of Stalinism and the boundless decadence of capitalist culture? How much living space did socialist citizens require: would families have their own houses, or would they share communal apartments? Did socialist citizens drive cars or ride together in buses? Would they share meals at large common tables in cafeterias or occasionally dine in restaurants? What would those restaurants serve?

These questions were new if not revolutionary. The founders of state socialism had not considered the regime’s purpose to be individual consumption of goods and services; they did not disregard consumption entirely but subordinated it to the building of Communism. State socialism was a society based on productive labor. Once it had transformed the workplace and created a set of modern industries producing wealth, distribution would take care of itself. Communism would be the bounty from which all other goods would flow. But now that Communism was fading to an ever-more distant future, functionaries found themselves focusing on distribution more than ever before. Social scientists have depicted the regimes not as “Communist” but as “centers for redistribution,” and dictatorships “over needs.” Yet the functionaries who dictated needs through the state plan still wanted to know what people desired.

In Hungary, state functionaries began their research during the Stalinist period, when employees in the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Commerce had quietly surveyed the preferences of consumers, asking questions about specific goods whose quality they hoped to improve. East Germany’s Communists studied consumption from within the Ministry of Trade and Supply, but also created an Institute for the Study of Demand in 1961, renamed the Institute for the Study of the Market in 1966.

Beginning in the late 1950s, state planners throughout the bloc conceived of their populations as “shoppers,” and small specialty stores gave way to supermarkets and department stores, with expanded assortments of “nonessential” goods, not only responding to, but in a sense, provoking demand. In 1963 the Luxus department store opened in downtown Budapest. It sold goods of exceptional quality, beautifully presented—often at exorbitant prices. After years of privation, window shopping was again an urban experience, and East Europeans began to differentiate products by quality, reflecting the “growing importance of consumer choice in constituting one’s social identity.” The state provided abundant information on how and what to consume, through advertising as well as advice magazines, whether the topic was home decoration, fashion, cooking, or cars. By 1973, advertising represented 3 percent of national expenditure.

…

Thanks to the reorientation toward consumerism, socialist industries produced wealth that transformed people’s lives. The number of Czechoslovaks with automobiles rose from 19 percent in 1970 to 47 percent in 1985; with refrigerators, from 70.1 percent in 1970 to 96.7 percent in 1985; with color TVs, from 0.8 percent in 1976 to 26.8 percent in 1985.22 In Hungary, the trend was similar: television subscriptions went up twenty-fold from 1956 to 1962, car ownership multiplied by eleven times from 1960 to 1970; and from 1960 to 1980, the number of apartments went up by 50 percent. In the 1960s, Hungary’s population as a whole “enjoyed abundant, nutritious meals for the first time in history.” The rising affluence was reflected in ever higher salaries, which in turn stimulated increasing consumption. The Hungarian government boosted incomes by 20 percent after the 1956 revolution, and then 3–4 percent every year until the late 1970s. In Poland, wages increased by 41 percent between 1971 and 1975; in Czechoslovakia, they went up by almost 20 percent.

Excepting some highly rewarded experts and a few “shock workers” held up as models, Stalinism had aimed at reducing everyone to a common standard. That time of “distortion” was over, but what would follow was not clear. People were rewarded not according to need (though basic needs were guaranteed) but according to the value of what they contributed. But how would a socialist state measure value? Under capitalism, physicians might earn twenty times as much as unskilled laborers; how much higher should their salaries be under socialism? If physicians’ salaries were too low, students might not endure the years of tedium and hard work required for a medical degree. But if the income the state plan budgeted for white collar workers was high, they might come to seem a leading class in a society where class distinctions were supposedly fading.

…

Ultimately, the regimes in question opted against significant differentials in income. The Gini coefficients (statistical measures of social inequality) of state socialist societies were the lowest on earth (the Czechoslovak figure was the lowest measured anywhere). The cream of the intelligentsia and members of the upper party bureaucracy had privileged access to goods and services, but, as we shall see in greater detail, this was modest in comparison with the advantages in consumption enjoyed by Western elites. In the 1980s, physicians and engineers in the Soviet Bloc had salaries not much higher than those of skilled workers, and sometimes lower. Still, gradations emerged, more strongly in Poland with its widespread unofficial or “gray” economy. The power of society to produce and reproduce differentiations by status—if not class—was something the regime did not fully control.

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by | 9 February 2025 · 4:54 am

De-Stalinizing Czechoslovakia, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 623-625:

The Czechoslovak party leadership had a special fear of questions about Stalinism because they knew questions about that period’s crimes pointed directly to them. Antonín Novotný, Antonín Zápotocký, and Václav Kopecký all supported the purges and judicial murders of their comrades, and a few leaders had personally enriched themselves by taking things from the households of the comrades whom they had sent to the gallows. On festive occasions, some set their tables with the best silverware and linens of their murdered comrades. Yet the Czech Communist Party apparatus over which they presided was well rooted in factories and working-class neighborhoods, and it was able to draw on the deepest, most confident, and disciplined cadre reservoirs in Central Europe. It was not easily shaken.

The party had easily dealt with challenges from within Czechoslovak society. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, writers had demanded the lifting of censorship and freedom for authors who had been arrested. University campuses and some state ministries and party organizations were briefly transformed into hotbeds of critical discussion. The regime’s response was to focus criticism on Interior Minister Alexej Čepička for fostering a cult of personality, while resisting suggestions that former leader Klement Gottwald or anyone else was guilty of misdeeds. There was no mention of Rudolf Slánský. More importantly, within days of Khrushchev’s speech, party leaders took steps to improve people’s living standards, especially those with low incomes. The advanced Czechoslovak industrial base continued to churn out high-quality products, and so the population lived in relative affluence thanks to the sacrifices and investments made by earlier generations.

By the early 1960s, Czechoslovak industry began to wobble. Between 1949 and 1964, less than 2 percent of the value of the stock of machinery was retired, and its productivity had declined. For the first time, the Czechoslovak economy registered negative growth. Though the entire Soviet Bloc was confronted with problems of growth in the early 1960s, this was the most extreme case. Some radical rethinking was necessary. In a sense, the sluggish economy combined with impatient calls for destalinization from Moscow to send Czechoslovakia on the path toward serious and wide-ranging reform. Teams of Czech and Slovak economists led by former Mauthausen inmate Ota Šik urgently recommended taking decision making away from party bureaucrats—who calculated success in tons produced and not in terms of efficiency—and placing it in the hands of scientists, engineers, and trained managers. In line with ideas coming out of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Šik commission stipulated that decisions on production, pricing, and wages should not be handed down from an anonymous bureaucracy, comprising about 8,500 functionaries of the national party apparatus, who were out of touch with local needs. Instead, decisions should be made locally, at the plant and community levels.

They urged that market mechanisms (above all, prices) be employed, so that enterprises would gain incentives to produce things that people wanted. They would do so by retaining profit (which in the command economy went to the center), and by rewarding employees according to their contributions. Basic changes like this were meant to have far-reaching consequences, for example, creating incentives to apply modern technologies to production. They would be a way of returning Czech lands to earlier prominence. But making plants more productive would also mean letting less-productive—indeed, unneeded—workers go.

These ideas for reform represented a growing consensus among leading economists throughout the bloc, extending to the Soviet Union. The ultimate problem, everywhere, was that workers as well as large production facilities were protected from market pressures and could not be fired or closed even if radically inefficient. In the post-Stalin period, outright terror was no longer an option. But for the time being, there was optimism. In the mid-1960s, economists felt that central planning would be qualitatively improved by employment of advanced mathematical models and computerization. They thought the deeper problem lay in the crude methods used in plan calculations.

As Stalinists were edged out of the leadership, younger, more enlightened figures entered the cultural bureaucracy, some of whom felt remorse and shame for the recent period of Stalinist extremism. A harbinger of new openness was an international Franz Kafka conference in Prague in 1963 under the aegis of Eduard Goldstücker, a professor of literature and former diplomat who had been condemned to death under Stalinism but had his sentence commuted for work in uranium mines. Now he was now minister of culture. Kafka (1883–1924) had spent his short life almost entirely in the city’s center, working in a law office during the day and writing all night after a nap. His stories evoked the disorienting anonymity of modern life, and by depicting human ciphers caught in webs of inscrutable and merciless bureaucracies, his writings seemed to foretell the fate of the region. Up to this time, Kafka had been a nonperson in Czech cultural life, and to discuss his work seemed to be a move toward waking up from the nightmares he had foreseen. Some of the hardline East German Communists invited to Goldstücker’s conference registered discomfort because they sensed that once unleashed, Kafka’s challenge would act like acid on the power of the state socialist bureaucracy.

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by | 7 February 2025 · 6:24 am

Indian Slavery in California

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 248-250:

Foreign visitors who ventured out of Don Guadalupe’s home and onto his nearby Rancho Petaluma were able to gain a great deal more insight. At its peak in the early 1840s, this 66,000-acre ranch was tended by seven hundred workers. An entire encampment of Indians, “badly clothed” and “pretty nearly in a state of nature,” lived in and around the property and did all the work. As Salvador Vallejo recalled, “They tilled our soil, pastured our cattle, sheared our sheep, cut our lumber, built our houses, paddled our boats, made tiles for our houses, ground our grain, killed our cattle, dressed their hides for the market, and made our unburned bricks; while the women made excellent servants, took good care of our children and made every one of our meals.” The Vallejos were quick to paint a picture of benevolent patriarchy. “Those people we considered as members of our families,” Salvador Vallejo remembered. “We loved them and they loved us. Our intercourse was always pleasant: the Indians knew that our superior education gave us a right to command and rule over them.”

But what seemed pleasant and natural to the Vallejos was decidedly less so to the Indians. Some workers at Rancho Petaluma were former mission Indians. As administrator of the mission of San Francisco de Solano, Don Guadalupe had ample opportunity not only to dispose of mission lands and resources (in fact, his Sonoma home, the military barracks, and the entire plaza lay on former mission lands) but also to bind ex-neophytes to his properties through indebtedness. Faced with dwindling resources and loss of land, former mission Indians had little choice but to put themselves under the protection of overlords like the Vallejos. Other Indian laborers had been captured in military campaigns north of Sonoma. As comandante (commander) of the northern California frontier, Don Guadalupe had a guard of about fifty men to keep order in the region and prevent Indians from stealing cattle. He also used his guardsmen to procure servants. He was not alone in doing so. Especially after the secularization of the missions in 1833, Mexican ranchers sent out armed expeditions to seize Indians practically every year—and as many as six times in 1837, four in 1838, and four in 1839.

Mexican ranchers pioneered the other slavery in California, but American colonists readily adapted to it. They acquired properties of their own and faced the age-old problem of finding laborers. Their options were limited. No black slaves existed in California, at least not in the open, as Mexico’s national government had abolished African slavery in 1829. Asian workers were still rare. In the early 1840s, Don Guadalupe kept four Native Hawaiians at Rancho Petaluma, as did a neighboring American rancher named John Sinclair and some others. The “coolie” (Asian) trade began after the gold discoveries of 1848 and would reach significant numbers only years later. Indian labor was the only viable option. Although the indigenous population of Alta California had been cut by half during the Spanish and Mexican periods—roughly from 300,000 to 150,000—Indians still comprised the most abundant pool of laborers. Short of working the land themselves, white owners had to rely on them.

Traces of the earliest Euro-American settlers are still visible in northern California. John Sutter was the proprietor of a large fort by the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers that is now a major tourist attraction in midtown Sacramento. George C. Yount was the first Euro-American to settle permanently in the Napa Valley; the wine-sipping town of Yountville is named after him. Pierson B. Reading was the recipient of a huge land grant that would give rise to the city of Redding. And Andrew Kelsey, a ruthless entrepreneur, built a ranching operation just south of Clear Lake that is now the town of Kelseyville. These foreigners were acquisitive, possessed good business sense, and were quick to appreciate the advantages of coerced Indian labor.

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by | 6 February 2025 · 1:59 am

Rise of Debt Peonage in Mexico

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 238-240:

The trappings of debt peonage were in place in Mexico as early as 1587, when an Indian from Michoacán recounted how some Spaniards had advanced him money “at a far higher price than it was worth and then seized my possessions and took me and my wife and children, and they have kept us locked up for twelve years, moving us from one textile factory to another.” The Indian did not know the amount he still owed or how much money he and his family had earned during their twelve years of forced servitude. But he was certain that peonage was worse than slavery because unlike the Africans with whom he toiled, he was not allowed to wander the streets freely even on Sundays. Over the centuries, debt peonage spread. As the Spanish crown abolished Indian slavery in 1542, prohibited the granting of new encomiendas in 1673, and phased out repartimientos after 1777, debt peonage gained ground.

After Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the process gained momentum. States throughout the country enacted servitude and vagrancy laws. The state of Yucatán, for example, regulated the movement of servants through a certificate system. No servant could abandon his master without having fulfilled the terms of his contract and could not be hired by another employer without first presenting a certificate showing that he owed “absolutely nothing” to his previous employer. In Chiapas the state legislature introduced a servitude code in 1827 allowing owners to retain their workers by force if necessary until they had fulfilled the terms of their contracts. Lashes, lockdowns, and shackles were commonly used. The same was true in Coahuila. In 1851 the state legislature there allowed owners to flog their peons. Interestingly, the governor opposed the measure because it would affect more than one-third of all the people of Coahuila, according to his calculations. Peonage in neighboring Nuevo León may have been just as common and was especially galling because it was customary to transfer debts from fathers to sons, thus perpetuating a system of inherited bondage. In these ways, servitude for the liquidation of debts spread all over Mexico. Although Mexico’s faltering economy kept the demand for workers in check in the early decades after independence, once economic growth resumed later in the century, employers went to great lengths to procure and retain coerced laborers.

A muckraking American journalist named John Kenneth Turner had unique access to this expanding world of servitude and provided the most detailed portrait of its workings. Posing as a millionaire investor, Turner traveled to Yucatán in 1908. He made his way to Mérida, a town that boasted extravagant mansions and was surrounded by about 150 henequen haciendas. The planters there received the American warmly. These “little Rockefellers,” as Turner called them, had grown rich by selling rope and twine made from the henequen plant. In the early years of the century, Yucatán’s total exports of henequen had reached nearly 250 million pounds a year. But a panic in 1907 had cut severely into their profits, “so they needed ready cash, and they were willing to take it from anyone who came,” Turner explained. “Hence my imaginary money was the open sesame to their club, and to their farms.”

Turner’s disguise as a prospective investor also allowed him to ask freely about how workers were hired. “Slavery is against the law; we do not call it slavery,” the planters told him again and again. They generally referred to the Mayas, Yaquis, and even Koreans working at their haciendas as “people” or “laborers,” never as slaves. The “henequen kings” were quite forthcoming about how debt served as a tool of coercion. “We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider they are in debt to us,” the president of the Agricultural Chamber of Yucatán told Turner. “And we do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt.” In spite of this verbal obfuscation, the fact was that an Indian worker could be acquired for $400 (400 pesos) in Yucatán. “If you buy now, you buy at a very good time,” Turner was told. “The panic has put the price down. One year ago the price of each man was $1,000.” Obviously, the reason the going rate was uniform was not that all peons were equally in debt, but that there was a market for them irrespective of their debt. “We don’t keep much account of the debt,” clarified one planter, “because it doesn’t matter after you’ve got possession of the man.” After paying the price, Turner was told, he would get the worker along with a photograph and identification papers. “And if your man runs away,” another planter added reassuringly, “the papers are all the authorities require for you to get him back again.”

Turner asked candidly about how to treat his workers. “It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary,” opined Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Agricultural Chamber, “for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing.” The American journalist witnessed a formal beating, with all the workers assembled, during one of his hacienda visits. The young man received fifteen lashes across his back with a heavy, wet rope. All henequen plantations had capataces, or foremen, who carried canes to prod and whack the Indians. Turner wrote, “I do not remember visiting a single field in which I did not see some of this punching and prodding and whacking going on.”

Slavery in Mexico in the twentieth century? “Yes, I found it,” wrote Turner in his extraordinary exposé, published on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. “I found it first in Yucatan.” According to him, the slave population of Yucatán consisted of 8,000 Yaqui Indians forcibly transported from Sonora; 3,000 Koreans, who had departed from the port of Inchon and were on four- or five-year labor contracts; and between 100,000 and 125,000 Mayas, “who formerly owned the lands that the henequen kings now own.” Turner estimated that in all of Mexico, there may have been 750,000 slaves, a figure that is almost certainly exaggerated but that underscores the expansion of the other slavery during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

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by | 3 February 2025 · 5:17 am

Miners in Latin America, 1573-1820s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 123-124:

Beyond northern Mexico, coerced Indian labor played a fundamental role in the mining economies of Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, the Andean region, and Brazil. Yet the specific arrangements varied from place to place. Unlike Mexico’s silver economy, scattered in multiple mining centers, the enormous mine of Potosí dwarfed all others in the Andes. To satisfy the labor needs of this “mountain of silver,” Spanish authorities instituted a gargantuan system of draft labor known as the mita, which required that more than two hundred Indian communities spanning a large area in modern-day Peru and Bolivia send one-seventh of their adult population to work in the mines of Potosí, Huancavelica, and Cailloma. In any given year, ten thousand Indians or more had to take their turns working in the mines. This state-directed system began in 1573 and remained in operation for 250 years. Other mines of Latin America, such as the gold and diamond fields of Brazil and the emerald mines of Colombia, depended more on itinerant prospectors and private forms of labor. But even though the degree of state involvement and the scale of these operations varied from place to place, they all relied on labor arrangements that ran the gamut from clear slave labor (African, Indian, and occasionally Asian); to semi-coercive institutions and practices such as encomiendas, repartimientos, debt peonage, and the mita; to salaried work. Mines all across the hemisphere thus propelled the other slavery.

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