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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoA country being mostly agrarian doesn’t by itself say much about freedom.
Sure. I guess my point is that ending serfdom didn’t seem to change much about where people lived, implying that people likely still did the same things as under the old system.
This article looks at literacy, and it looks like literacy was ~21% in 1897 (<5% before the end of serfdom), and it doubled over the next 20 years. 40% is a huge increase, but still atrociously low. Literacy is pretty important to other freedoms, so if the majority still wasn’t literate at the peak, that doesn’t sound promising when comparing rights to today. Maybe they were on a better trajectory, idk.
I haven’t studied it extensively, so I could be very mistaken, but it seems like a case of rose colored glasses.
I guess I struggle to see pre-socialist Russia as better than modern Russia, unless we’re merely looking at trajectory.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They were. Russia between 1905 and 1914 was developing faster than at any point under Bolsheviks.
Not entirely, one can call NEP sort of a continuation of those few years.
In quality, not in quantity. Most people were illiterate and rural, but those who were literate had better quality of that literacy, so to say. Among those capable of touching power it was more decentralized, however strange that would seem. Quality of those people was better too, it wasn’t an organized mafia group. They had professors in the parliament and they didn’t have thieves there.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Interesting, I’ll have to read up on pre-Soviet Russia then. I also don’t know to what extent Putin’s power is limited. If you have any resources comparing modern Russia to pre-Soviet Russia, I’d be interested in reading more.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To no extent, but it’s more of a gang than a monarchy.
I’ll look for them, what I say is a digest of a lot of little things learned, so.