I read War and Peace a couple of years ago for the first time to see what all the fuss was about. There’s a scene where one of the characters is hunting with his prize borzoi and mentions that he paid a family of serfs for the dog. He didn’t give the family money for the dog – he gave the family in exchange for the dog. Imagine being the serf family and having to move to a new shitty estate for that.

It’s fun to pretend that Tsarist Russia was the last place that still had serfs (until 1861) but that is unfortunately not the case.