Russia. A History

If any population did roughly correspond to our conception of the primordial peasant wedded to the land, it was the serfs. According to the poll-tax census of the 1760s, Russia had 5.6 million male serfs (56.2 per cent of the peasant population). For all practical purposes, Russian serfs were invisible to Russian law and justice: subject to their squires (who collected dues, designated recruits, and meted out punishment), the serf had virtually no identifiable status in the imperial system. It is, in that sense, ironic that the Russian term for serfdom—‘serf law’ (krepostnoe pravo

)—was distinctive precisely for the absence of ‘law’ to regulate the mutual relations between squire and serf. In this legal vacuum nobles could—and did—modify the obligations of serfs at will, not to mention sell and relocate them. By the late eighteenth century Russian ‘serfdom’ bore less in common with Old World serfdom than with New World slavery.

Some developments did, however, work in the serfs’ favour. In purely economic terms, the poll-tax (set at 70 copecks per male soul in the first half of the century) remained at the same level—notwithstanding the sharp inflation of succeeding decades. In real terms, then, the material burden of the poll-tax declined substantially. In addition, the natural growth of the population diminished the per capita burden of other obligations, especially recruitment, but also such duties as portage and temporary road work. And, given the exigencies of state service, many nobles had little opportunity to meddle in the daily lives of their peasants. If a recent historian’s findings for the village of Petrovskoe in Tambov province are typical, or even widespread, some serfs exercised considerable collective control over their working and life routines.

Still, the second half of the eighteenth century marked a major deterioration in serfs’ legal status. Many squires, as we shall see, had strong incentives and new opportunities to intercede in village life, encroach on its quotidian autonomy and assert new powers of regulation and control. Peasant communities, moreover, had few legal mechanisms of resistance; no longer full-fledged subjects (ceasing, after 1741, to take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign), serfs—in contrast to state peasants—did not even have the right to petition the emperor. Except for serious crimes or disputes involving other estates, the landlord exercised virtual private-law authority on his estate. He had final authority over serf marriages, although as a practical matter these were typically arranged by the peasant families and councils of elders. When an important piece of legislation filtered down to the locality it was often the landlord’s responsibility to have it read aloud by the local priest, bailiff, or scribe. And, in moments of ‘disobedience’ and rebellion, the landlord could summon governmental authorities to send police or troops to restore order and punish the intransigent.

How did the serfs respond to all these changes? At one level, it seems unlikely that serfs were well informed about the law and its impact on what they deemed to be tradition. After all, serf communities had few contacts with anyone from the government and conducted their day-to-day relations mostly within their own institutions—the household and commune. Nor did they have much opportunity to become more familiar with the law: they could not legally file petitions and—in contrast to state peasants—did not participate in the Legislative Commission of 1767–8 (an experience that, especially through the preparation of ‘instructions’, raised the legal consciousness of other groups). Nevertheless, as the ethnographer M. M. Gromyko has argued, serfs probably had some familiarity with law and, with time, increasingly invoked decrees (real or bogus) in the defence of their rights and justice. A higher awareness of the outside world was particularly likely given the peasants’ non-agrarian activities (especially for those who travelled regularly to towns to trade or work) and the geographic dispersion and intermixture of social categories, whereby the most diverse status groups—from serf to state peasant—lived in close proximity. It was, in short, no accident that in the 1770s and subsequent decades, serfs became increasingly restive and exhibited their own judgement on this consummately ‘immoral economy’.

Nobility