Victories of the Counter-Revolution 475
yet, while remaining on guard, and pending further elucidation, an American may
especially have reason, on somewhat a priori grounds, to suppose that the critique
made by recent East European historians may have some validity. It is now com-
monly thought in America, for example, that European university professors in
general, and historians in particular, have until recently most often been recruited
from the well- established and relatively affluent levels of society. It is increasingly
realized, also, how in American historical thinking such matters as Negro dissatis-
faction or former slave rebellions long tended to disappear from view. If a Russian
historian, such as M. M. Shtrange, tells us that bourgeois historiography has mini-
mized the extent of serf uprisings and lower- class discontent there is no inherent
reason to disbelieve him.
The other reason why it is difficult to deal with Eastern Europe is that as a cul-
tural area it is impossible to define. Especially in the eighteenth century there were
strong ties, reaching the point of close personal acquaintance and even frequent
intermarriage, between the upper classes of Russia and Poland on the one hand
and Germany and France on the other. German reached far to the east as a lan-
guage of business, and French as a language of business, government, diplomacy,
and polite intercourse. Books and periodicals in both languages conveyed news
and works of literary and intellectual content far into the Eastern plains. Politi-
cally, the same government in Vienna ruled over Germans, Slavs, and Hungarians,
and the same government in Berlin over Germans and Slavs, even before the Sec-
ond Partition of Poland, effected in 1793. It must be remembered also that, before
the great demographic changes of the nineteenth century, when rural migrants
poured into the cities in all areas of Western Civilization, the cities of Eastern
Europe were often of different nationality from their surrounding country. If Hel-
sinki was Swedish, and Bucharest partly Greek, most of these urban islands were
predominantly German. Thus Riga, Prague, and even Budapest (or rather Buda,
which was called Ofen in German) were essentially German colonies of many
generations of settlement, maintaining cultural contacts with Germany rather than
with the non- German populations within which they were located. Even at War-
saw, Moscow, and St. Petersburg many foreigners could be found both in the gov-
ernment and in the merchant communities.
In basic social structure, eastern Germany merged into Eastern Europe without
identifiable boundary. East of the Elbe river the peasantry was unfree. The fact was
politically significant, not so much for the weakening of the peasantry, as for the
enormous power that it gave the landowning class. The landowner also in a sense
owned his tenants, who were subject to his local surveillance and jurisdiction, pro-
vided him with labor services which were not compensated in wages, and could
neither leave the estate, nor marry, nor enter upon a new occupation without his
consent. Increasingly, and notably in Russia, the lords put their laboring people into
various new industries and skilled trades, even in distant cities, or in mines, allowing
them to receive wages upon the remittance of a fee to their masters. These institu-
tions, which had various legal names, but are called “serfdom” by historians, bore a
strong resemblance to the slavery and plantation system of the American South.
The resulting ascendancy of a landowning gentry was made even more marked in
Eastern Europe than in the Southern United States by a number of other consider-