Russia under the Old regime

THE PEASANTRY

compelled their serfs to marry as soon as they were of age, if not earlier, and sometimes even chose partners for them. Sexual licence was not uncommon; there are enough authenticated stories of landlords who staffed regular harems with serf girls. All of this the peasants deeply resented, and on occasion repaid with arson or murder. Landlord interference with the peasant's working routine was an even greater cause of discontent. The intention did not matter: a well-meaning landlord, eager, at his own expense, to improve the lot of his peasants was as disliked as a ruthless exploiter. 'It is enough for a landlord to order that the soil be ploughed one inch more deeply', Haxthausen reports, 'to hear the peasant mutter: "He is not a good master; he torments us." And then woe to him if he lives in the village!'11 Indeed, a solicitous landlord, because he tended to meddle more with the working routine of his serfs, was often more despised than his callous neighbour whose only care was for higher rents.

The impression one gains is that the serf accepted his status with the same fatalism with which he bore the other burdens of peasant existence. He was grudgingly prepared to set aside a part of his working time and of his income as tribute to the landlord because that was what his ancestors had always done. He also bore patiently his landlord's eccentricities, provided they did not touch what mattered to him the most: his family and his work. His principal grievance had to do with land. He was deeply convinced that all the land - arable, meadow, forest - was rightfully his. From the earliest times of colonization, the peasant carried away the belief that virgin land belonged to no one and that cultivated land was the property of him who cleared and tilled it. This conviction was strengthened after 1762, when dvoriane were freed from compulsory state service. The serfs understood in some instinctive way the connection between the dvorianstvo's service obligations and their own servitude. Word spread in the villages that at the same time that he had issued the Manifesto of dvorianstvo's liberties in 1762, Peter in had issued another edict turning the land over to the peasants, but the dvoriane had suppressed it and thrown him into jail. From that year onwards the peasants lived in the expectation of a grand 'black repartition' of the country's entire private landholdings, and nothing would persuade them they were wrong. To make matters worse, the Russian serf had got into his head the totally mistaken notion that while he belonged to the landlord, the land - all of it - was his, whereas in fact neither happened to be true. This belief intensified tension in the countryside. Incidentally, it suggests that the peasant had no strong feelings against serfdom as such. This de-emphasis of brutality and insistence on distinguishing serfdom