Radishchev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow employs many rhetorical techniques in order to convince his audience that serfs did not deserve to be under the degree of bondage that they suffered at that time. I am not informed as to the literacy rates in 18th century Russia, but I would assume that most of Radishchev’s readers were educated members of the bureaucracy in some form.

I want to focus on the Gorodnya section of this piece; here, Radishchev works to portray a particular serf as a true man in order to make his treatment, especially at the hand of a woman, seem unjust. This particular serf was brought up and educated alongside his master’s son, so that “there was hardly any difference between us, except that the cloth of his coat was perhaps better” (274). His master even so far as admits to him, “You have more of an inclination for learning and morality than my son” (274). However, when his old master dies, the serf is subjected to the oppressive rule of his new master’s wife, who just so happens to have “a very ugly soul and a hard and cruel heart,” although he was essentially brought up in the same manner as this woman’s husband (275). Radishchev makes sure to emphasize the “humiliation” the serf feels at her hand; the serf calls her to her face “inhuman woman” and states at the beginning of the story that his fate depended on the “arbitrary whims of a woman” (275). By using this framing of gender, Radishchev seems to argue that serfdom, at least as portrayed here, is an inversion of the natural order. He knows his audience can agree that it is not right or just for a woman to have the power to subject a man to her will. By skillfully convincing readers that serfs are in fact men, Radishchev proves serfdom to be an emasculating, and therefore unjust, state of being.