Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

the year when a peasant could assert the right of departure if his landlord did not wish to grant it to him. At about the same time (late sixteenth century), Moscow offices began to keep track of the debts owed by peasants to their landlords.

Rich landlords in need of working hands would sometimes redeem the obligations of indebted peasants and settle them on their own properties. Many peasants were shifted about in this fashion, the flow occurring usually from small pomestia to large votchiny and monasteries. But a peasant relieved of his debts in this way gained little, for he soon fell in debt to his new landlord. The redemption of debtors resembled more traffic in human beings than the exercise of the right of free movement.

For the indebted peasant, the only way out of his predicament was flight. He could escape to landlords powerful enough to shield him from pursuers, or to the steppe areas newly opened to colonization, or to the self-governing communities of so-called 'Cossacks' formed by runaways from Russia and Poland on the Don and Dnieper. To impede such flights, the government carried out between 1581 and 1592 a cadaster which became an official record of peasant residence. From these lists it was possible to establish where a runaway peasant had his home. In 1597 the government decreed that peasants who had run away since 1592, if caught, were to be sent back to their landlords; those who had managed to make good their escape before 1592 were safe. No distinction was drawn between indebted peasants and others; the assumption was that residence, as recorded in the 1581-92 cadasters, was proof of attachment to the given locality. (It was this decree, since lost, which misled early historians into believing that in 1592 a general law had been passed fixing peasants to the land.) At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the statute of limitations on the return of runaways was periodically renewed, always going back to the base year of 1592. Finally the Code of 1649 did away with any time limit on the retrieval of runaway peasants. It forbade anyone to harbour them, decreeing that runaways were to be sent back to their villages no matter when they had departed and that those who had concealed them owed compensations to their landlords for any losses they might have incurred. It is customary to date full-scale serfdom in Russia from this date, although it was a fact of life a good fifty years earlier.

Stricdy speaking, the peasants fixed to the land did not belong to their landlords; they were glebae adscripti. In documents of the Muscovite period, serfs, called krepostnye, were always distinguished from slaves, kholopy. From the government's point of view, the distinction made sense; a slave did not pay taxes, he was not liable to any of the obligations subsumed under tiaglo, and he was member of no community.