Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Russian society, law and economy
moreover, many heads adopted a new practice regarding household divisions.
Rather than allowing their sons to leave and set up their own households after
they married, heads actively prevented their sons from breaking away. Instead,
many adult sons, together with their wives and children, continued to live
under the same roof as their parents until their fathers died. Married brothers
and their families sometimes continued to live together afterwards. The preva-
lence of household divisions after the deaths of their heads in much of central
Russia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries meant that
many village communities contained substantial proportions of households
with large numbers of peasants and complex structures. Large and complex
peasant households typically contained seven to ten or larger numbers of peo-
ple, more than one married couple, and two or three generations. In contrast,
the earlier practice of household divisions before the death of their heads had
led to small, simple households. There were regional variations. Household
divisions after the heads’ death, resulting in large, complex households, were
less widespread in forested regions where agriculture was less important.
There were several reasons for the development and spread of large, com-
plex households. Between 1645 and 1678, the state switched from a tax assessed
on land to a flat-rate household tax. By living in smaller numbers of larger
households, therefore, peasants could reduce the amount of taxes they paid.
The household tax was replaced by the poll tax in 1719–24, but large, complex
households persisted for other reasons. They were an effective way of organ-
ising labour for agriculture and to meet the growing demands on peasants for
obligations. Larger households were better able to meet the massive demands
for labour at peak times in the agricultural calendar, in particular haymaking
and harvesting. Large and complex households served as welfareinstitutions as
their multi-generational structure meant they usually contained enough able-
bodied adults to support the children, elderly and infirm, who were not able
to work or look after themselves. Maintaining large and complex households
was also a risk-averse strategy. Larger households with a number of adults and
more than one married pair were better able than smaller households to cope
with the premature deaths of adults or the conscription of a young man into
the army.
22
22 See Aleksandrov, Obychnoe pravo,pp.42–69; P. Czap, ‘“A Large Family: The Peasant’s
Greatest Wealth”: Serf Households in Mishino, Russia, 1814–1858’, in R. Wall (ed.), Family
Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 105–51;R.
Wall, ‘The Perennial Multiple Family Household, Mishino, Russia 1782–1858’, Journal of
Family History, 7 (1982): 5–26; C. D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the
Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
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Living in large and complex households may have been more viable than
smaller, nuclear families, but it imposed constraints and burdens on their
members. The younger generation of adults, male and female, lived under the
authority of the older generation and bore the brunt of the burden of work
in the household and on its land. The younger generation of women were
subject both to their husbands and to their mothers-in-law, and sometimes
had to fend off the advances of their fathers-in-law. Generation and gender
were axes of tension and conflict inside large households, and led sometimes
to demands from their younger members for household divisions.
23
It was not
unusual for adult males to reach middle age before they became heads of their
own households.
According to custom, there was a gendered division of labour inside house-
holds. The men were responsible for work in the arable fields, and usually did
all the ploughing, harrowing and sowing. Men also looked after the horses.
Women’s customary roles, for which they had sole responsibility under the
direction of the wife of the household head, were looking after the household,
the children, the kitchen garden and small livestock. Women were required to
enter the ‘male domain’ of the fields, however, to help out with the backbreak-
ing tasks of haymaking and harvesting. Female peasants played a far larger role
in field work, taking over this customary male role, if their menfolk were away
for long periods as migrant labourers. Some villages in Kostroma province, in
the Central Non-Black Earth region, became known as ‘women’s kingdoms’
for this reason.
24
Many village communes in central Russia, especially the Central Black
Earth region, adopted a new form of land tenure over the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. In manyvillages, peasants began to hold their arable
land in communal, rather than household, tenure and adopted one of the most
famous practices of rural Russia: periodic redistribution of strips of arable land
between households to take account of changes in their size. Households that
increased in size, for example following the marriage of a son, were allocated
more land at the expense of those that had got smaller, as a result, for example,
of division or death. It is sometimes asserted that this practice reflected some
communal ethos in the soul of the Russian people. Scholars who have delved
more deeply into its origins have found practical motives. Village communes
23 Hoch, Serfdom,pp.84–90; C. A. Frierson, ‘Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided’, RR 46
(1987): 35–51.
24 Smith, ‘Peasant Agriculture’, pp. 375–9; B. A. Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women,
Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 34–63.
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shared out the total burdenof obligations demanded from them by landowners
and the state, for which they were jointly responsible, between their member
households. As these obligations increased over the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, it made practical sense for communes to try to ensure
that households could support themselves without needing the assistance of
their neighbours and, crucially, meet their shares of the communal obligations.
One way to do this was to share out the land between households, as well as
the obligations, and to make sure households’ land allotments were roughly in
conformance with their ability to work the land. When the sizes of households
changed, moreover, it wasnecessary toadjust their land allotments accordingly.
Communes also adopted the new system of land tenure in response to the
growing pressure of population increase on the land. Rising obligations and
population density are not the full explanation for the origins of communal and
repartitional land tenure. The key to understanding the new system seems to
be taxation. The introduction of the flat-rate tax on households in 1645–78 and,
more importantly, the poll tax in 1719–24 were further reasons for communes
to share out land fairly evenly to try to ensure that all households had the
means to meet their shares of the communal obligations. Since the poll tax
was periodically reassessed on the basis of new head counts of the numbers
of tax-payers, moreover, it was expedient for communes to redistribute land
to take account of changes in the numbers of peasants, i.e. tax-payers, inside
households. The connection between the household and poll taxes and the
origins of communal and repartitional land tenure is further suggested by the
fact that this system of land tenure did not develop in Ukraine, Belorussia and
the Baltic region, which had their own systems of serfdom and substantial
populations, but where, crucially, the poll tax was introduced only in the late
eighteenth century, in some cases long after they had been annexed to the
Russian Empire. In all these western parts of the empire, individual household
land tenure persisted. If households had more land than they could cultivate,
they hired labourers from households that were short of land. Thus, in the
west of the empire, as in most of the rest of Europe, labour, rather than land,
moved around between households.
25
Communal and repartitional land tenure have distracted the attention of his-
torians from the other important functions of village communes.Although the
land was farmed by individual households, communes oversaw the operation
25 See D. Atkinson, ‘Egalitarianism and the Commune’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune
and Peasant Community in Russia (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 7–19;S.
Hoch, ‘The Serf Economy and the Social Order in Russia’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Serfdom
and Slavery (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 311–22.
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of the three-field system, which required all households to observe the com-
mon crop rotation and not, for example, sow grain in their strips in the fallow
field. In addition, communes organised assistance for households that were
experiencing short-term difficulties, but were likely to recover and once again
be able to make their contribution to the village’s obligations. For exam-
ple, a small household that had lost its only adult male to illness, but con-
tained teenage boys, was a good bet for the future. Households that were
persistently weak, for example due to alcohol abuse by their members, were
not deemed worth supporting. In addition, communes mediated in disputes
between households and maintained law and order in the villages. Commu-
nal elders, who were heads of their own households, backed each other up
in maintaining their authority over the younger generation. Communes thus
sought to support the system of large, complex households by trying to pre-
vent younger peasants from breaking away. Household heads and elders of
village communes found some coincidence of interests, moreover, with noble
and state authorities. They all had a mutual interest in maintaining authority in
the villages and ensuring that communes were able to meet their obligations,
in which the largest part of the burden was borne by the young adults. The
older generation used a variety of means to maintain their authority, ranging
from public shaming and corporal punishment to exile from the village or
selection of recalcitrant peasants as conscripts for the long term of military
service from which few returned. The degrees of exploitation and social con-
trol, including maintenance of the complex household system, seem to have
been at their greatest on magnate estates in the Central Black Earth region,
where serfs performed onerous labour obligations, such as the Gagarin estate
of Petrovskoe in Tambov province, in the late eighteenth and first half of the
nineteenth centuries.
26
Exploitation and oppression provoked some peasants to protest against the
landowners and state authorities. In the central regions of Russia in the period
between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, peasants mostly
eschewed large-scale violent protests in favour of more limited forms of action.
Open protests usually took the form of non-violent confrontations, often
accompanied by the submission of petitions or complaints or the initiation of
law suits. Peasants complained about and sought redress for specific grievances
such as excessive exploitation, cruel treatment and rejections of requests for
26 See V. A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII–nachalo XIX v.) (Moscow: Nauka,
1976); Hoch, Serfdom; E. Melton, ‘Household Economies and Communal Conflicts on
a Russian Serf Estate, 1800–1817’, JSH, 26 (1993): 559–85; R. Bohac, ‘The Mir and the
Military Draft’, SR 47 (1988): 652–66.
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assistance in times of dearth. In addition, and as a matter of routine, peasants
resorted to low-level ‘weapons of the weak’ of the type used by oppressed and
exploited peoples in many societies. They worked badly on their landowners’
land when performing their labour services, stole estate property, accidentally
broke new machinery that threatened to make more work, paid less than the
full amount of their cash dues late, feigned incomprehension of orders, hid
in the woods for a few days to escape punishment, and a whole manner of
similar tactics. In using limited forms of protest, however, peasants did not
and could not hope to overturn the whole social system. Indeed, for most
peasants, it is likely that such a notion existed only in the magical world of
folklore and in the afterlife promised by the Christian religion. In the real
world, peasants used their various tactics of protest to try to blunt the edges
of their exploitation and carve out some living space for themselves. The
trick was not to push the authorities too far and provoke a strong or violent
response in which the peasants knew they were likely to be subjected to harsh
repression.
27
Rather than engage in protest, many peasants, including the
younger generation of men and women, seem grudgingly to have accepted
their lot, worked hard to support their households and village communities,
and to meet those obligations they were not able to evade or reduce. The daily
grind of fieldwork from the early spring to the early autumn was punctuated
by church and village festivals at which drink flowed freely and peasants could
let off steam and, perhaps, imagine a better world.
28
The living standards of most peasants in central Russia between the late
seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries can certainly not be described as
prosperous, but it would be a mistake to assume that the majority lived in
grinding poverty. It seems safe to conclude that in most years and in many
villages, the practices and customs peasants developed in the wider contexts
of exploitation and the environmental conditions were adequate to support
the growing numbers of peasants. There were variations in living standards.
Some peasants were subjected to greater degrees of exploitation by their
landowners than others. There were variations over time. Peasants ate best
in the autumn, after the crops had been gathered in and livestock had been
slaughtered. The weeks prior to the next harvest, on the other hand, could
27 See R. Bohac, ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance: Serf Opposition to Gentry Exactions, 1800–
1861’, in E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of
European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 236–60;P.
Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1987), pp. 257–313; D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of
Reform, 1825 –1855 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992).
28 See M. M. Gromyko, Mir russkoi derevni (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991).
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be very difficult. Peasants were dependent also on fluctuations in agricultural
production caused by the climate. Individual households’ levels of prosperity
were in part a function of their size and the ratio of able-bodiedadults to all their
members. Larger households and those with high proportions of members
who could work hard seem to have been better off than smaller households
and those with larger numbers of young or elderly peasants. Differences in
living standards of this type would even out over the life-cycle of households
as children grew up and married and older peasants died off. A few peasants
were able to do well from trade, especially in parts of the Central Non-Black
Earth region. In such areas, longer-term differences in livingstandards between
the elites and poor of villages emerged. Factional politics inside villages also
played a role; households of communal elders generally looked after their own
interests at the expense of their neighbours.
29
As a result of migration, ever larger numbers of peasants lived in the outlying
regions of the north or south-east of European Russia and in Siberia. Peasants
in these regions persisted long into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
with the customs and practices that had been common in central Russia prior
to the late seventeenth century. Thus, peasants in outlying regions contin-
ued to use more extensive systems of cultivation. Slash-and-burn agriculture
remained widespread in the forested regions of the north and Siberia. The
equivalent system on the open steppes was field-grass husbandry: peasants
burned the steppe grasses, cultivated the very fertile, virgin black earth for a
few years, before preparing new fields and leaving the old ones to return to
the steppe. Change came, but only very late. On the steppes of the North Cau-
casus, for example, long-fallow systems were the norm as late as the 1880s,
but the three-field system was making inroads by the end of the century.
Livestock husbandry remained a large part of the rural economy in outlying
regions, where pasture remained plentiful, throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
30
Many peasants in outlying regions continued to live in
small, simple households throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As in central Russia, however, there was a trend towards larger households
with more complex structures from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
29 See R. E. F. Smith and D. Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and
Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 327–56; E. Melton,
‘Proto-industrialization, Serf Agriculture and Agrarian Social Structure: Two Estates in
Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Past and Present 115 (1987): 69–106; E. Melton, ‘Household
Economies’.
30 See A. M. Anfimov (ed.), Krest’ianstvo Severnogo Kavkaza i Dona v period kapitalizma
(Rostov-on-Don: Izd. Rostovskogo universiteta, 1990), p. 56; J. Pallot and D. J. B. Shaw,
Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
pp. 112–35.
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centuries.
31
Peasant households in outlying regions continued to hold their
land in household tenure. Indeed, this was compatible with the prevailing
extensive systems of land use. Communal and repartitional land tenure spread
only slowly to outlying regions, for example the North Caucasus and Western
Siberia, only in the wake of the spread of the three-field system towards the
end of the nineteenth century.
32
Thus, the newer practices and customs of
peasant life spread little by little from the central to some outlying regions
over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peasants in the more remote
parts of Russia adopted more intensive ways of using the land and organising
their labour in response to the increasing population density as a result of nat-
ural growth and, in particular, immigration, from central regions. Peasants
altered the ways they did things in reaction also to the growing demands for
obligations that spread outwards from the centre.
∗∗∗
Peasants in Imperial Russia adapted and altered their customs and practices
again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to cope with further
changes. The legislation of 1861 that set in motion the abolition of serfdom
was followed by similar reforms for the peasants who lived on the lands of
the state and the tsar’s family. By the end of the century, most peasants were
buying their land allotments by paying instalments in ‘redemption’ schemes
administered by the government. The state also reformed the main demands
it made on the peasantry. The poll tax was phased out and replaced by taxes
on sales and businesses in the 1880s. The system of military conscription
was reformed in 1874. The maximum term of service was cut to seven years,
and young men from all levels of society, not just the lower orders, were liable
to serve. Conscripts were selected by ballot, moreover, not on the whim of
local authorities. A much larger proportion of young men served in the army
than before the reform. In marked contrast to the previous system, however,
most conscripts came home and resumed their previous lives after a few years’
service. The imperial government implemented other reforms. Elected district
and provincial councils (zemstva), with peasant representatives, were set up in
manyprovinces in the 1860s, and new local courts wereestablishedforpeasants.
These reforms were part of wider changes. There were improvements in
transport with the construction of a national railway network, a national
31 See E. N. Baklanova, Krest’ianskii dvor i obshchina na russkom severe: konets XVII–nachalo
XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), pp. 31–40; N. A. Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia sem’ia
v Zapadnoi Sibiri,pp.42–76.
32 Anfimov, Krest’ianstvo Severnogo Kavkaza,p.56; J. Channon, ‘Regional Variation in the
Commune: The Case of Siberia’, in Bartlett, Land Commune,pp.72–7.
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market developed, industrialisation began to take off, and as a result there were
more opportunities for wage labour in industry and commercial agriculture.
Peasants became more mobile, migrating to the empire’s rapidly growing
cities as well as to Siberia and other far-flung regions. Peasants’ horizons were
broadened also by the growth of formal schooling and the spread of literacy in
the villages. These processes should not be seen solely as changes from outside
that were disrupting a ‘traditional’ way of life. Russian peasants were used to
adapting to changes, and in late Imperial Russia they shaped the changing
world they lived in just as much as they themselves were altered. A further
development in this period was rapid population growth. Between 1857 and
1917, the number of peasants inside the mid-seventeenth-century borders of
Russia increased three times, a rate of natural growth that to some extent
prefigured the population explosion in the developing world in the latter part
of the twentieth century.
Historians have debated whether peasants in late Imperial Russia were
becoming more involved in and identifying with wider society. From the 1860s,
more peasants than ever before came into contact with people, institutions and
ideas from outside peasant life. The main areas of contact were the new local
councils and courts, the reformed army, the growing cities and the new village
schools.One line of interpretation has emphasised the extent to which peasants
took over, or ‘peasantised’, many of these institutions (with the exception of
the local councils) and transformed them in their image. It has been argued that
customary norms of rural justice survived in spite of new courts, soldiers in the
reformed army were simply ‘peasants in uniform’, the cities were swamped
by migrants from the villages who brought their customs to urban areas,
and peasants used schools to learn skills that they could use for their own
purposes but sought to prevent their children from being socialised into an
‘alien’ culture. This view stressed the vitality, adaptability and endurance of
peasant society and culture in Russia.
33
There is a great deal of evidence to
support this view, at least in the short term. For example, peasants tried to
subvert the Stolypin land reforms of 1906–11 that were intended to create
a stratum of richer peasants who supported the tsarist regime.
34
There is
another line of argument that, in the longer-term, peasant society and culture
were changing rather more significantly, and peasants were becoming more
involved in a wider, national society. The new courts, the reformed army, the
33 See B. Eklof and S. Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant (Boston, Mass: Unwin
Hyman, 1990).
34 J. Pallot, Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
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Russian society, law and economy
growing cities, the schools and wider literacy were parts of this process of
change, sites of cultural contact where new identities were formed. Towards
the end of Imperial Russia, peasants seem to have been starting to construct
newer, wider identities as they sought to adapt to and deal with the changing
world of which they were a part.
35
The older historiography of late Imperial Russia painted a picture of grow-
ing poverty in increasingly overcrowded villages as peasants, allegedly bur-
dened with high payments and reduced land allotments by the terms of the
abolition of serfdom, struggled to survive. The bad harvest and famine of
1891–2 and the rural revolutions of 1905–7 and 1917–18 were seen as the culim-
inations of a growing crisis in rural Russia.
36
There is no doubt that many
peasants believed that they should have been given all the land free of charge
in 1861, nor that there was poverty in the villages. As radical intellectuals took a
growing interest in the peasantry in the second half of the nineteenth century,
moreover, educated Russians became acutely aware of the low living standards
of their fellow Russians in rural areas. Contemporaries in the government and
society blamed rural poverty on the peasants’ ‘backward’ methods of cultiva-
tion, and believed that village communes and their communal practices were
barriers to change. Furthermore, Russian scientists and agronomists became
increasingly concerned about the impact of agriculture on the environment.
Attention was concentrated on deforestation, soil erosion and climate change.
In the 1870s, the Free Economic Society sponsored Vasilii Dokuchaev’s path-
breaking study of the fertile black earth, which was one of Russia’s greatest
natural resources, but suffered from recurring poor harvests.
37
In the aftermath
of the bad harvest of 1891, members of the society expressed concerns not only
that Russian agricultural techniques were not able to cope with droughts in
the steppe regions, but that they may have been contributing to changes in
the environment that made droughts more likely.
38
35 SeeG.Popkins,‘Peasant Experiences of the Late Tsarist State: District Congressesof Land
Captains, Provincial Boards and the Legal Appeals Process, 1891–1917’, SEER 78 (2000):
113–14; J. A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass
Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); J. Brooks, When
Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1981–1917 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985). See also C. J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community
in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
36 See G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1932), pp. 94–116.
37 V. V. D o k u c h a e v , Russkii chernozem (St Petersburg: Deklaron i Evdokimov, 1883).
38 ‘Besedy v i Otdelenii Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva po
voprosu o prichinakh neurozhaia 1891 goda i merakh protiv povtoreniia podobykh
urozhaev v budushchem’, Trudy Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva
(1892), no.1: 67–144.
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Peasants and agriculture
There are other ways of looking at peasant living standards in late Imperial
Russia. In spite of the views of contemporaries, peasants and radicals, it seems
that the alleged negative aspects of the terms of the abolition of serfdom
have been overstated. In time, the reforms of the 1860s–80s led to a reduction
in the burden of exploitation on the peasantry. While the population was
growing rapidly, so were opportunities for wage labour. In spite of periodic bad
harvests, on average grain yields were increasing as some peasants did adopt
new techniques, and some village communes actively promoted innovation.
39
The growth of the railway network, moreover, created new opportunities to
produce for the market, and meant that grain could be moved to deficit areas
in times in dearth. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
grain production per capita, i.e. allowing for population growth, and after
exports have been deducted, was also increasing. On average, therefore, it
seems that there was a slow improvement in peasant standards of living in
the last decades of Imperial Russia. New research into the physical stature of
the population provides further evidence for improving living standards. This
conclusion does not deny, however, that there were areas, such as the densely
populated Central Black Earth region, where poverty was widespread, or that
there were short-term crises, for example in 1891–3 and 1905–8.
40
Finally, it remains to consider how peasants adapted or altered the customs
and practices that made up their ways of life in the changing world of late Impe-
rial Russia. A mixed picture emerges. Rather than undermining aspects of the
peasants’ ways of life, at least in the short term, some of the changes taking
place reinforced practices that had evolved earlier in different circumstances
and for other reasons. The complex household system persisted. Young male
migrant workers and married men who were conscripted into the army left
their wives and children with their parents while they were away, thus main-
taining multi-generational households. Migrant workers sent part of their
wages home to support these households. Peasants responded to the rapid
39 E. Kingston-Mann, ‘Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation: A Preliminary
Inquiry’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy,pp.23–51. For contrasting views
of ‘backwardness’, see D. Kerans, Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia, 1861–
1914(Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2001) and Y. Kotsonis,
Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia,
1861–1914 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999).
40 See S. L. Hoch, ‘On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant
Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia’, SR 53 (1994): 41–75; B. N. Mironov, ‘New
Approaches to Old Problems: The Well-Being of the Population of Russia from 1821 to
1910 as Measured by Physical Stature’, SR 58 (1999): pp. 1–26; S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and
the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter,
Peasant Economy,pp.128–72.
391