Russia under the Old regime

144

tered. In most of the borderlands, including Siberia, serfdom was unknown.

The state peasantry was made up of a variety of disparate groups. Its nucleus consisted of inhabitants of crown estates and the remnant of 'black peasants', the majority of whom the monarchy had distributed to its service personnel. Both these groups had been bound to the land in the second half of the sixteenth century. To them were added in the eighteenth century: peasants from secularized monastic and church holdings; sundry non-Russians, among them Tatars, Finnic peoples inhabiting central Russia, and the nomads of Siberia and central Asia; and individual farmers unattached to any of the regular estates, including dklassi dvoriane. Because they neither paid rent nor performed labour on behalf of landlords, state peasants were required to pay a higher soul tax than proprietary peasants. They were not allowed to leave their villages without authorization of officials. Otherwise they were quite free. They could inscribe themselves in the ranks of urban tradesmen by paying the required licence fee, and indeed from their ranks came a high proportion of Russia's merchants as well as manufacturers and industrial workers. Although they did not hold title to the land which they tilled, they disposed of it as if they did. Activity of peasant speculators moved the government in the middle of the eighteenth century to issue decrees severely limiting commerce in state land; it is doubtful, however, whether these had much effect. At this time, too, the authorities forced state peasants, who until then had held their land by households, to join communes. The bane of the state peasant's existence was the extorting official, against whom there was no recourse. It was to remedy this situation that Nicholas i instituted in the late 1830s a Ministry of State Domains charging it with the administration of state peasants. At this time, state peasants were given title to their land and allowed to form organs of self-government. From then on, they were, for all purposes, freemen.

Within the category of proprietary peasants, that is, serfs proper, a distinction must be made between peasants who fulfilled their obligations to the landlord exclusively or primarily by paying rent, and those who did so with labour services or corvee. The distribution of the two in large measure corresponds to the division between the forest zone in the north and the black earth belt in the south and south-east.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it shifted decisively to the black earth belt, the main area of agriculture in Russia lay in the central region of the taiga. It has been noted that the soil and the climate here are such that they normally allow the inhabitants to sustain life, but not to accumulate much surplus. It is for this reason that a large number of peasants in the forest zone, especially those living near Mos- cow, remained farmers in name only. They continued to be attached to the commune in which they were born and to pay the soul tax and their share of rent, but they no longer tilled the land. Such peasants roamed the country in search of income, working in factories or mines, hiring themselves out as labourers, or peddling. Many of the cab drivers and prostitutes in the cities, for example, were serfs who turned over part of their earnings to their landlords. Rent-paying serfs often formed cooperative associations called arteli (singular, artel') which worked on contract for private clients and divided the profits among their members. There were numerous arteli of masons and carpenters. One of the most famous was an association of bank messengers whose members handled vast sums of money, with their organization's guarantee, apparently with utmost reliability. In the 1840s, in the north-eastern provinces of Russia between 25 and 32 per cent of all male peasants were regularly living away from their villages.4 In some localities, the serfs leased their land to other serfs from neighbouring villages or to itinerant farmhands, and themselves went over to full-time manufacture. Thus there arose in the first half of the nineteenth century in northern Russia numerous villages where the entire serf population was engaged in the production of a great variety of commodities, headed by cotton fabrics, a branch of industry which serf manufacturers came virtually to monopolize.

Because agriculture in the north brought small returns, landlords here preferred to put their serfs on rent (obrok). Experience demonstrated that, left to their own devices, peasants knew best how to raise money; and rich peasants meant high rents. Masters of affluent serf merchants and serf manufacturers, of the kind we shall discuss in the chapter devoted to the middle class, imposed in the guise of rent a kind of private income tax which could run into thousands of rubles a year. On the eve of emancipation, 67-7 per cent of the proprietary serfs in seven central provinces were on obrok; here corv6e tended to be confined to smaller estates with one hundred or fewer male serfs. The northern serf had more land at his disposal, because his soil being less productive the landlord was less interested in it. Unless very rich, the landlord here tended to turn over the estate to his serfs for a fixed rent and move into the city or enter state service. The average land allotment per male soul in the north was 11 -6 acres, compared to 8-6 acres in the black earth belt.

In the south and south-east, proprietary peasants faced a different situation. Here the fertility of the soil encouraged landlords to settle down and take over the management of their estates. The process began in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it became pronounced only in the nineteenth. The more the northern landlords curtailed agriculture, the greater was the inducement to intensify it in the south, in so far as the northern provinces offered a growing market for food produce.