Russia under the Old regime

102

Slavery was inconvenient to the government, and it issued many decrees forbidding subjects to pledge themselves as slaves, as a consequence of which the number of kholopy in Muscovy declined steadily. But from the serf's point of view, the distinction between himself and a kholop was not all that significant. Because the Russian monarchy had no apparatus of provincial administration to speak of, Russian landlords traditionally enjoyed very broad prerogatives over the population of their estates. S. B. Veselovskii, who first called attention to the historical role of manorial justice in medieval Russia as a prelude to serfdom, showed that even during the appanage period it had been generally recognized that what a landlord did with his tenants was his private business.10 The attitude, of course, remained. Although it no longer issued immunity charters, the Muscovite monarchy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was content to leave peasants on private estates to the mercy of their landlords. Once the peasants became fixed to the land, landlords were held liable for their serfs' taxes: a responsibility which inevitably enhanced their manorial authority.

This trend had ominous consequences for the peasantry, because the monarchy kept on transferring large quantities of court and black land to its servitors. In the 1560s and 1570s, it handed over to the service class as pomestia much of the black earth on the southern and southeastern frontier conquered from Kazan and Astrakhan. Upon its accession to the throne in 1613, the Romanov dynasty, wishing to solidify its position, also generously distributed land. By the early seventeenth century black lands had almost disappeared from the heartland of the Moscow state, and with them vanished most of the independent peasants living in self-governing communities. Kliuchevskii estimated that in the second half of the seventeenth century, of the 888,000 households subject to tiaglo in Russia, 67 per cent stood on land held by boyars and dvoriane (10 and 57 per cent, respectively), and 13-3 per cent on that held by the church. In other words, 80-3 per cent of the tiaglo households were under private control. The crown owned outright only 9-3 per cent. The remainder consisted partly of households of black peasants (about 50,000, most of them in the north, a small remnant of what had once been the major class of Russian peasants), and of trading (posad) communities (about 43,000).ll For all practical purposes then, by the end of the seventeenth century four out of every five Russians had ceased to be subjects of the state, in the sense that the state had relinquished to their landlords nearly all authority over them. This condition was formalized in the Code of 1649. Among the hundreds of articles defining the power of landlords over their peasants there is not one which sets on it any limits. The 1649 code recognizes peasants as chattel, by making them personally liable for debts of bankrupt landlords, for-