Russia under the Old regime

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drifted into the huts. Each izba had its 'Red' or 'Beautiful' corner {krasnyi ugolok), where hung at least one ikon, that of the patron saint, most commonly St Nicholas. No guest spoke until he had made obeisance to the icon and crossed himself.* Hygienic provisions were rudimentary. Each village had a bathhouse (bania), copied from the Finnish sauna. Peasants visited it every Saturday afternoon to wash and put on fresh linen. The rest of the week they went unwashed. The everyday clothing was simple. Poorer peasants wore a combination of Slavic and Finnic dress, consisting of a long linen shirt, tied at the waist, and linen trousers, with boots made of bark or felt, all of home manufacture. Those who could afford to buy their clothing, tended towards oriental fashion. In the winter, the peasant wore a sheepskin coat called tulup. The women tied on their heads a kerchief, probably a legacy of the veil.

The Great Russian village was built on a linear plan: a wide, unpaved road was flanked on both sides by cottages with their individual vegetable plots. Farm land surrounded the village. Individual farmsteads located in the midst of fields were mainly a southern phenomenon. We now come to serfdom, which, with the joint family and commune, was one of the three basic peasant institutions under the old regime.

To begin with, some statistics. It would be a serious mistake to think that before 1861 the majority of Russians were serfs. The census of 1858-9, the last taken before Emancipation, showed that the Empire had a population of 60 million. Of this number, 12 million were free men: dvoriane, clergy, burghers, independent farmers, Cossacks and so forth. The remaining 48 million divided themselves almost equally between two categories of rural inhabitants: state peasants (gosudarstvennye krest'iane), who, although bound to the land, were not serfs, and proprietary peasants (pomeshchich'i krest'iane), living on privately owned land and personally bonded. The latter, who were serfs in? the proper sense of the word, constituted 37-7 per cent of the empire's population (22,500,000 persons).3 As Map 31 indicates, the highest concentration of serfdom occurred in two regions; the central provinces, the cradle of the Muscovite state, where serfdom had originated, and the western provinces, acquired in the partitions of Poland. In these two areas, more than half of the population consisted of serfs. In a few provinces the proportion of serfs rose to nearly 70 per cent. The farther one moved away from the central and western provinces, the less serfdom one encoun-

* The communist regime has made interesting use for its own purposes of such peasant symbols. Krasnyi, which to the peasant meant both 'beautiful' and 'red' has become the emblem of the regime and its favourite adjective. The coincidence between the words 'bol'shak' and Bolshevism - in both instances the source of authority - is self-evident.