Russia

by Donald Mackenzie Wallace

* See ukaz of October 7th, 1792.
** As an example of making presents of serfs, the following
may be cited. Count Panin presented some of his
subordinates for an Imperial recompense, and on receiving a
refusal, made them a present of 4000 serfs from his own
estates.—Belaef, p. 320.
*** See the ukazes of August 22d, 1767, and March 30th,
1781.
**** Perhaps the most horrible case on record is that of a
certain lady called Saltykof, who was brought to justice in
1768. According to the ukaz regarding her crimes, she had
killed by inhuman tortures in the course of ten or eleven
years about a hundred of her serfs, chiefly of the female
sex, and among them several young girls of eleven and twelve
years of age. According to popular belief her cruelty
proceeded from cannibal propensities, but this was not
confirmed by the judicial investigation. Details in the
Russki Arkhiv, 1865, pp. 644-652. The atrocities practised
on the estate of Count Araktcheyef, the favourite of
Alexander I. at the commencement of last century, have been
frequently described, and are scarcely less revolting.

The last years of the eighteenth century may be regarded as the turning-point in the history of serfage. Up till that time the power of the proprietors had steadily increased, and the area of serfage had rapidly expanded. Under the Emperor Paul (1796-1801) we find the first decided symptoms of a reaction. He regarded the proprietors as his most efficient officers of police, but he desired to limit their authority, and for this purpose issued an ukaz to the effect that the serfs should not be forced to work for their masters more than three days in the week. With the accession of Alexander I., in 1801, commenced a long series of abortive projects for a general emancipation, and endless attempts to correct the more glaring abuses; and during the reign of Nicholas no less than six committees were formed at different times to consider the question. But the practical result of these efforts was extremely small. The custom of giving grants of land with peasants was abolished; certain slight restrictions were placed on the authority of the proprietors; a number of the worst specimens of the class were removed from the administration of their estates; a few who were convicted of atrocious cruelty were exiled to Siberia;* and some thousands of serfs were actually emancipated; but no decisive radical measures were attempted, and the serfs did not receive even the right of making formal complaints. Serfage had, in fact, come to be regarded as a vital part of the State organisation, and the only sure basis for autocracy. It was therefore treated tenderly, and the rights and protection accorded by various ukazes were almost entirely illusory.

*Speranski, for instance, when Governor of the province of
Penza, brought to justice, among others, a proprietor who
had caused one of his serfs to be flogged to death, and a
lady who had murdered a serf boy by pricking him with a
pen-knife because he had neglected to take proper care of a tame
rabbit committed to his charge!—Korff, "Zhizn Speranskago,"
II., p. 127, note.

If we compare the development of serfage in Russia and in Western Europe, we find very many points in common, but in Russia the movement had certain peculiarities. One of the most important of these was caused by the rapid development of the Autocratic Power. In feudal Europe, where there was no strong central authority to control the Noblesse, the free rural Communes entirely, or almost entirely, disappeared. They were either appropriated by the nobles or voluntarily submitted to powerful landed proprietors or to monasteries, and in this way the whole of the reclaimed land, with a few rare exceptions, became the property of the nobles or of the Church. In Russia we find the same movement, but it was arrested by the Imperial power before all the land had been appropriated. The nobles could reduce to serfage the peasants settled on their estates, but they could not take possession of the free Communes, because such an appropriation would have infringed the rights and diminished the revenues of the Tsar. Down to the commencement of the last century, it is true, large grants of land with serfs were made to favoured individuals among the Noblesse, and in the reign of Paul (1796-1801) a considerable number of estates were affected to the use of the Imperial family under the name of appanages (Udyelniya imteniya); but on the other hand, the extensive Church lands, when secularised by Catherine II., were not distributed among the nobles, as in many other countries, but were transformed into State Domains. Thus, at the date of the Emancipation (1861), by far the greater part of the territory belonged to the State, and one-half of the rural population were so-called State Peasants (Gosudarstvenniye krestyanye).

Regarding the condition of these State Peasants, or Peasants of the Domains, as they are sometimes called, I may say briefly that they were, in a certain sense, serfs, being attached to the soil like the others; but their condition was, as a rule, somewhat better than the serfs in the narrower acceptation of the term. They had to suffer much from the tyranny and extortion of the special administration under which they lived, but they had more land and more liberty than was commonly enjoyed on the estates of resident proprietors, and their position was much less precarious. It is often asserted that the officials of the Domains were worse than the serf-owners, because they had not the same interest in the prosperity of the peasantry; but this a priori reasoning does not stand the test of experience.

It is not a little interesting to observe the numerical proportion and geographical distribution of these two rural classes. In European Russia, as a whole, about three-eighths of the population were composed of serfs belonging to the nobles;* but if we take the provinces separately we find great variations from this average. In five provinces the serfs were less than three per cent., while in others they formed more than seventy per cent. of the population! This is not an accidental phenomenon. In the geographical distribution of serfage we can see reflected the origin and history of the institution.

* The exact numbers, according to official data, were—Entire
Population 60,909,309
Peasantry of all Classes 49,486,665
Of these latter there were—State Peasants
23,138,191
Peasants on the Lands of Proprietors 23,022,390
Peasants of the Appanages and other Departments 3,326,084
—————
49,486,665

If we were to construct a map showing the geographical distribution of the serf population, we should at once perceive that serfage radiated from Moscow. Starting from that city as a centre and travelling in any direction towards the confines of the Empire, we find that, after making allowance for a few disturbing local influences, the proportion of serfs regularly declines in the successive provinces traversed. In the region representing the old Muscovite Tsardom they form considerably more than a half of the rural population. Immediately to the south and east of this, in the territory that was gradually annexed during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, the proportion varies from twenty-five to fifty per cent., and in the more recently annexed provinces it steadily decreases till it almost reaches zero.

We may perceive, too, that the percentage of serfs decreases towards the north much more rapidly than towards the east and south. This points to the essentially agricultural nature of serfage in its infancy. In the south and east there was abundance of rich "black earth" celebrated for its fertility, and the nobles in quest of estates naturally preferred this region to the inhospitable north, with its poor soil and severe climate.

A more careful examination of the supposed map* would bring out other interesting facts. Let me notice one by way of illustration. Had serfage been the result of conquest we should have found the Slavonic race settled on the State Domains, and the Finnish and Tartar tribes supplying the serfs of the nobles. In reality we find quite the reverse; the Finns and Tartars were nearly all State Peasants, and the serfs of the proprietors were nearly all of Slavonic race. This is to be accounted for by the fact that the Finnish and Tartar tribes inhabit chiefly the outlying regions, in which serfage never attained such dimensions as in the centre of the Empire.