Comment censored by Farid Zakaria's Global Public??? Square

This comment of mine has not been posted on your Dec. 18, 2011 blog for unknown reasons despite compliance with the Terms of Service, so I try to post it, belatedly,

Dear Fareed Zakaria,

You mention that "Historians have pointed out that the Russian nation was literally the property of the Czar, that serfs were more like slaves than simply peasant workers..."

For your information, Russian Empire abolished serfdom in 1861, more than fifty years before
the revolution and two years before emancipation proclamation in the US. For comparison, serfdom
was abolished in Austrian Empire, at that time ruling much of the Central Europe, in 1848
and Brazil empancipated its slaves in 1889.

Local self-government and trial by jury were established in 1864. By contrast, French Napoleonic
system of prefects was dragged long into the twentieth century.

Russian Empire became a constitutional monarchy in 1905 and by 1914, the start of the Great War, its
institutions were not particularly different from contemporary Germany and Austro-Hungary. A significant
fraction of the population of the Empire, namely, Congress Poland (1815-1831) and Duchy of Finland
(1814-1905) were endowed with separate constitutions written under heavy influence of Jeremy
Bentham. These constitutions at the time were simply the most democratic than any in
Europe, pre-1832 England included. No European country before the mid XIXth century had
universal male suffrage. Since 1906, Finns enjoyed universal suffrage (the only country after
Iceland and New Zealand).

All that said, Russian Empire was similar in level of development to contemporary Continental European
monarchies and far ahead of the European periphery (Balkans, Iberian peninsula, etc.).

You are either ignorant of textbook Russian history of which you allow yourself such absurd generalizations
as above, or, what is even worse, are consciously telling untruths for the sake of ideology. This is sad because
millions of Americans view you as one of the few remaining public intellectuals in the mass media.