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"In 1840, there was more Africans enslaved in New York than there was in Charleston South Carolina," he said. "So if we didn't know all our history, then the conclusion [that blacks deserve reparations] might seem unfair."

And I suspect there was more Serfs in Russia and Prussia than Slaves in America at the time. Russia never gave a cent to the serfs when Tsar Alexander freed them but I think the government did pay the lords that owned the serfs money for their loss of value.

Therefore using 19th Century international actions as a guide it is the decendents of American Slave Owners who deserve reparations, not the slave decendents

Russian serfdom was an entirely different animal than American slavery. Serfs are often mischaracterized as slaves, largely in an effort to create a falsely linear history of Russian oppression to "justify" 20th century communist abominations. Serfdom was instituted not as a means of creating cheap labour but as what amounted to the bottom tax bracket. Being virtually tax-exempt as the serfs were (unlike the peasants or sans-culottes in France, or the poor anywhere else) simply required certain limitations on citizenship, such as patronage from a wealthy landlord.

While it is easy for an American with the benefit of hindsight to thumb his nose at such a system because it did not allow full liberty to every member of the nation, the fact remains that prior to WWI (which, incidentally, Russia became involved in as a result of treason on the part of the military rather than any warlike desires of the czar) Russia was an exceedingly good place to live, "a country where social mobility was greater than elsewhere, where titles had none of the nimbus they had in the West, where fortunes could be made overnight by intelligent and thrifty people regardless of their social background"(Erich von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited, pp130). Many people simply confuse the general hardships of the poor in the 19th century regardless of location for suffering specific to the institution of serfdom.

There were, in fact, many "urban" serfs practicing medicine, law, or engineering, after having received government subsidized higher education, and now choosing to remain serfs (despite the fact that their "freedom price" was well within their reach) to hang on to the ultimate tax loophole. Indeed, going as far back as Catherine II, Russian serfdom had a lot more in common with being an average citizen in the 18th century version of the modern European welfare state than with American or Brazilian slavery. Whether such a welfare state is an objectively good thing is a separate issue (and one that must be considered in the historical context); but there is little doubt that it is incomparably better than slavery.