At the End of Misery: More Misery

Reading about the emancipation of Russian serfs today. Interesting that this happened about the same time as the US abolished slavery (the 1860s)--Russian serfs, after all, were not all that different from slave. Unfortunately, it seems that emancipation actually led to lower standards of living and even more poverty for many Russians. It's as if... as long as the serfs were someone's property, those someones had some economic interest in their property not dying. But once the serfs were no one's property, then no one cared if they lived or died.

Sometimes history is sorrowful.