Russia under the Old regime

H9

will never see a Russian peasant show either crude amazement or ignorant contempt for what is foreign. In Russia there is not one man who does not have his own living quarters. A poor man who goes into the world leaves his izba. This does not exist in other countries. Everywhere in Europe to own a cow is a sign of luxury; in Russia not to have one is a sign of dreadful poverty.7 Even Pushkin's magisterial authority is no substitute for statistical evidence. But his judgement merits more than casual attention because he happened to have known the Russian village from firsthand experience and to have been endowed, in addition, with a very commonsensical outlook.

As Pushkin notes, unlike the slave of north or Central America, the Russian serf lived in his own house, not in slave quarters. He worked in the fields under the supervision of his father or elder brother, rarely under that of a hired steward. On many Russian estates, the land of the proprietor, cut into narrow strips, was intermingled with that of the peasants, creating a situation quite unlike that on a typical plantation. And most important of all, the product of the serf's labour was his own. Although, legally speaking, the serf had no right to hold property, in fact he did so throughout the existence of serfdom - a rare instance where the disregard for law prevalent in Russia benefited the poor.

The relationship of the landlord to the serf also differed from that of master to slave. The pomeshchik owed his authority over the serf in the first instance to his responsibilities as the state's fiscal and recruiting agent. In these capacities he could wield a great deal of arbitrary power, and in the reign of Catherine n his mastery over the serf indeed approximated to that of a slave owner. Still, he never had title to the serf; he owned only the land to which the serf was attached. In the Emancipation settlement, landlords received no compensation for their peasants. The law strictly forbade traffic in serfs. Some landlords did so anyway in defiance of the law, but basically the Russian serf had the assurance that if he so chose he could live out his days in his izba and in the midst of his family. The recruitment obligation introduced by Peter i was for the peasants such a calamity precisely because it violated this entrenched tradition, tearing away year after year thousands of young men from their families. The peasants treated induction as a sentence of death. In time, it became possible to provide surrogates or to buy oneself exemption from military service, but this solution was available only to a few.

As previously noted, nearly half of the serfs in the empire - roughly, a quarter in the south, and three-quarters in the north - were tenants on rent. These peasants were free to come and go, and to engage in any occupation they chose. Their lives were free of landlord interference. For them, serfdom meant essentially the payment of a tax, either fixed or adjusted to income, to dvoriane who happened to own the land to which they were ascribed. Whatever the morality of such a tax, it was not an institution related to slavery; rather, it was a 'feudal' relic.

Serfdom in any meaningful sense was confined to peasants who performed exclusively or mostly labour services, and especially to those who belonged to landlords with small or medium-sized estates inhabited by fewer than a thousand 'souls'. It may be roughly estimated that between seven and nine million of corvee-obligated peasants of both sexes were in the latter category. This group, representing in 1858-9, 12-15 per cent of the empire's population, were serfs in the classical sense of the word; bound to the land, subject to the direct authority of their landlords, forced to perform for him any services demanded.

It is, of course, quite impossible to attempt any generalizations about the condition of so large a group, the more so that we are dealing with some fifty thousand landlords (the approximate number of those who had peasants on corvde). Until more scholarly studies on the subject become available, all we can go by are impressions. These do not bear out the picture, derived largely from literary sources, of widespread misery and oppression. The obvious injustice of serfdom must not be allowed to colour one's perception of its realities. Several Englishmen who wrote accounts of their experiences in Russia found that the Russian peasant's condition compared favourably with what they knew at home, especially in Ireland, thereby confirming independently Pushkin's estimate. The following two excerpts come from such accounts. The first is by an English sea captain who in 1820 undertook a four-year journey on foot across Russia and Siberia which gave him unique opportunities to observe rural life at first-hand:

I have no hesitation... in saying, that the condition of the peasantry here is far superior to that class in Ireland. In Russia, provisions are plentiful, good, and cheap; while in Ireland they are scanty, poor, and dear, the best part being exported from the latter country, whilst the local impediments in the other render them not worth that expense. Good comfortable log-houses are here found in every village, immense droves of cattle are scattered over an unlimited pasture, and whole forests of fuel may be obtained for a trifle. With ordinary industry and economy, the Russian peasant may become rich, especially those of the villages situated between the capitals.8

The second is by a British traveller who had gone to Russia for the express purpose of finding material which would cast on it a less favourable light than that found in the literature of the time:

On the whole... so far at least as mere [!] food and lodging are concerned, the Russian peasant is not so badly off as the poor man amongst ourselves. He may be rude and uneducated - liable to be ill-treated by his superiors - in-