Serfdom in Russia
Accustomed, as we are in America, to think in terms of a farmer traditionally free, hewing his domain out of the forest or romantically conquering the plain with his plow,…
From: 1000 C.E. To: 1863 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Village Life Under the Soviets by Karl Borders, 1927.
What Went Before
Soviet Russia is overwhelmingly an agricultural country, and in spite of heroic measures for industrialization will continue so for many years to come. Eighty percent of her population live in villages. Seventy-five percent of all persons of working age in the Union are engaged in the actual cultivation of the soil.
There can be little wonder, then, that the "peasant question” should intrude even to the point of threatening Communist party solidarity today; no surprise that for generations the doggedly insistent demands of this great earthborn mass of toilers for more land have determined policies of state and prepared the ground for revolutions.
It is the purpose of this study to describe the life of the Russian village of today, after ten years of the Soviet regime; to estimate its gains, to report its ambitions. But no one can hope to understand the village of the present, without at least a passing acquaintance with the background out of which it has emerged, a past so like in its setting, so different in its hopes
Accustomed, as we are in America, to think in terms of a farmer traditionally free, hewing his domain out of the forest or romantically conquering the plain with his plow, it is particularly difficult for us to enter into a sympathetic understanding of this grandson of bondsmen, the Russian peasant.
Therefore a bit of history.
According to the record of chroniclers as far back as the eleventh century, the merchant princes of Kiev were famous as dealers in furs and slaves. The wealthy man in Constantinople who wanted a good servant went to the Russian slave merchants. But as the Russian noble or merchant in the following centuries began to acquire great tracts of land his slaves were needed at home to till the soil and their numbers were constantly increased from the captives made by forays on neighboring princes. It is significant that in the earliest Russian legislation right to the land was claimed through ownership of the slaves that tilled it. And the corollary of this idea became firmly implanted in the mind of the peasant, who for centuries was wont to say to his master, “We are yours but the land is ours.”
Down to the end of the sixteenth century the peasant was supposed to be free to move from place to place at will. Household servants continued to be held as actual slaves and were bought and sold as any other chattel. As a matter of fact, however, long before this time the peasant, too, had become for the most part actually attached to the soil, either by indebtedness to his master or by more open restraint. Consequently movement was possible only by running away, or by kidnapping expeditions by some powerful landowner into the villages of his weaker neighbor. This, of course involved separation from home and family and not freedom but simply a change of masters.
This actual state of serfdom was made legal by the State following the great census completed in 1628, just at the time the Plymouth fathers were carving out a place of freedom for themselves in America. The peasants were inscribed, and had to remain where they were found. They were made the property of the landowners and the landowners were responsible for the collection of the taxes from them. While technical differences were maintained between the household slave and the peasant farmer, for all practical purposes they now composed one great body of serfs. They were all alike bought and sold or given away at the will of the master.
This state of slavery was strengthened fifty years later by Peter the Great in his widescale drafts of labor for public works, such as the building of Petersburg, and in his zeal for exact record of the various classes of the State. The system reached its apex during the reign of Catherine the Great, which began in 1762. This prodigious dabbler in western European liberalism extended the scope of serfdom to the ends of the empire and greatly enlarged the control of serf-owners. She herself made presents of 800,000 partly free peasants of the State lands to various favorites during her reign.
It was not until almost exactly a hundred years later, in 1863, the same year in which Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was issued, that under Alexander II the last of the Russian serfs were liberated. According to Wallace (page 473) the extent of serfdom at this time is indicated by these figures:
Entire population 60,909,309
State Peasants 23,138,191
Peasants on the Lands of Proprietors 23,002,390
Peasants on Royal Family Lands, etc. 3,326,084
In other words more than two thirds of the entire population were in various stages of legal servitude to a comparative handful of their fellow men. The twenty-three million peasants belonging to private persons were the property of one hundred thousand landed proprietors. And of these the greater number were found on the enormous estates of the richer nobility.
One nobleman, Count Sheremetief, to again quote Wallace, possessed more than 150,000 male serfs or more than 300,000 souls.
Thus in a few brief strokes we have dismissed two hundred and fifty years of the most widespread form of open servitude which has extended into modern times. Not all of the story is a sad tale. Here and there, even as in the history of our own two and a half centuries of legal slavery, were found masters with a real interest in the welfare of their peasants and a genuine human understanding of their feelings.
But the law itself provided that, "The proprietor may impose on his serfs every kind of labor, may take from them money dues, and demand from them service, with the one restriction that they should not be thereby ruined, and that the number of days fixed by law should be left them for their own work.”
And further, "For all offenses committed against himself or against any one under his jurisdiction he could subject the guilty ones to corporal punishment not exceeding forty lashes with the birch or fifteen blows with the stick.” Worse still he could send any disobedient serf to the army or have him transported to Siberia, punishments infinitely more feared than a beating. That these provisions of the law were fully used and often exceeded, we have the ample testimony of literature and history. And the echoes of those days ring even into this generation.
Borders, Karl. Village Life Under the Soviets. Vanguard Printings, 1927.
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