Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689
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richard hellie
major industrial crop was flax, sown in some western areas, and occasionally
hemp and hops.
The Russians typically kept gardens, in which they raised cabbage (their
major source of Vitamin C), cucumbers, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, peas,
garlic and onions. The harsh climate was not favourable for raising fruit trees,
but some Russians grew apples (as many as ten varieties). Much rarer were
cherries, plums and raspberries. Mushrooms, berries and nuts were brought
in from forests.
7
As mentioned, Russian peasants lived in villages, not on isolated home-
steads. The villages ranged in size from a few households to several dozen.
8
Water for drinking, washing and cooking was either carried from a river or
brook or drawn from a village well. Each hut was enclosed in a yard (dvor)by
a wooden fence.
9
There was no general system of ‘village planning’ applicable
everywhere. In some places the common ancestor’s yard was in the centre
of the village with those of his descendants surrounding it, in other places
yards were next to each other facing a common ‘street’ in a land with neither
streets nor roads that a modern person would recognise.
10
The peasant’s gar-
den might be in his yard, or outside of it.
11
The purpose of the fence was to
keep the peasant’s livestock from straying at night. In the daytime, the village’s
livestock were put out to pasture in a common meadow where one or more
of the peasants tended the flock. A typical peasant had one horse for draught
purposes, a cow or two for milk, cheese and meat, a calf (the horses and cattle
were very small), occasionally sheep or goats, maybe pigs and some chickens
7 N. A. Gorskaia et al. (eds.), Krest’ianstvo v periody rannego i razvitogo feodalizma (Istoriia
krest’ianstva SSSR s drevneishikh vremen do velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii,
vol.ii)(Moscow:Nauka 1990), pp. 160, 214, 230, 240; A. D.Gorskii, Ocherkiekonomicheskogo
polozheniia krest’ian Severo-Vostochnoi Rusi XIV–XV vv. (Moscow: MGU, 1960), pp. 61–4.
8 A. Ia. Degtiarev observed that around 1500 in the Novgorod region 90 per cent of
the villages contained only one to five households: Russkaia derevnia v XV–XVII vekakh
(Leningrad: LGU, 1980), pp. 23,37.S.B.Veselovskii calculated that Volga–Oka settlements
were villages of only one to three households apiece: Selo i derevnia v Severo- Vostochnoi
Rusi XIV–XVI vv. (Moscow and Leningrad: OGIZ, 1936), p. 26. These low numbers have
been attributed to the Mongol conquest: the way to avoid being raided was to live in
villages so small that they were not worth raiding. In general, these figures rose by 1550.
In 1588, Nizhnii Novgorod villages contained almost nine households apiece (Degtiarev,
Russkaia derevnia,p.116). Low figures in the two-to-five households per village range can
also be found in E. I. Kolycheva, Agrarnyi stroi Rossii XVI veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1987),
p. 105. See also N. N. Voronin, K istorii sel’skogo poseleniia feodal’noi Rusi. Pogost, svoboda,
selo, derevnia (Leningrad: OGIZ, 1935).
9 A. A. Shennikov, Dvor krest’ian Neudachki Petrova i Shestachki Andreeva. Kak byli ustroeny
usad’byrusskikh krest’ian v XVI veke (StPetersburg: Russkoegeograficheskoeobshchestvo,
1993).
10 Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo v periody,p.158.
11 Gorskii, Ocherki,pp.60–2.
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which could be expected to lay less than one egg a week.
12
All of this provided
a poor, monotonous diet occasionally enlivened by alcohol. Mead (near-beer)
was a popular drink and at the end of the sixteenth century many peasants had
from two to five hundred beehives, whence came the mead.
13
The origins of
vodka are unclear. It was first mentioned in 1174, and probably came into its
own as a popular commodity in the relatively prosperous second half of the
fifteenth century.
14
Meat was rarely served in peasant households, but fish was
much more common.
15
Also in the yard was a privy, an outbuilding or barn for the livestock in cool
weather, a grain drier, a threshing floor and a shed for storing agricultural
implements, hay and grain reserves (including seed for the next growing sea-
son). The famous Russian bathhouse typically was not in a peasant yard (for
fear of fire, for one reason), but close to a source of water, such as a pond, lake
or river.
When it became bitterly cold, much (maybe all) of the livestock and food
stores such as cabbage moved inside. The major structure inside every peasant
hut was the stove, a structure built in one of the corners that occupied much
of the room in the hut. It was built of rock and mortar and had three cham-
bers for maximum extraction of heat. Had the Russian stove had a chimney,
80 per cent of the heat would have gone out of the chimney, so there was only
a smoke hole in the back of the stove which vented the smoke into the room.
The heating season was about six months of the year,
16
so that for six months
of the year the peasants breathed a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and
over two hundred wood-smoke particles that clogged their throats and lungs.
The product was the infamous Russian smoky hut, one of the major features
of Russian civilisation from the time the Slavs moved east into Ukraine in
the sixth century, and then into the Volga–Oka mesopotamia in the eleventh–
thirteenth centuries, down until the 1930s. The smoke was so dense that it left
12 A. L. Shapiro et al., Agrarnaia istoriia severo-zapada Rossii XVI veka. Sever. Pskov. Obshchie
itogi razvitiia severo-zapada (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), p. 25. I must thank the authors
for sending me a copy of this book. See also their Agrarnaia istoriia (1971), pp. 33, 35,
168. Gorskaia makes the salient point that, although peasants raised chickens, chicken
meat, eggs and geese were typically reserved as rent payments for landlords (Gorskaia,
Krest’ianstvo v periody,p.160). For poignant examples, see Kolycheva, where peasants’
eggs and cheese are a major part of the rent obligation (Agrarnyi stroi ,pp.85, 88).
13 G. M. Karagodin, Kniga o vodke i vinodelii (Cheliabinsk: Ural LTD, 2000), p. 31; Gorskii,
Ocherki,pp.75–81.
14 Ibid., p. 45. Gorskaia opted for the sixteenth century (Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo v periody,
p. 160).
15 Ibid., p. 160; Gorskii, Ocherki,pp.82–6.
16 RichardHellie,The EconomyandMaterial Cultureof Russia (Chicago: UniversityofChicago
Press, 1999), p. 117 (Fig. 4. Monthly sales of firewood).
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a line around the wall about shoulder-high, where the bottom of the smoke
cloud hung. The air was so toxic that it disinfected the hut to the extent that
not even cockroaches could survive. The Russians had a saying: ‘If you want
to be warm, you have to suffer the smoke.’
17
Besides the stove, there were benches around the walls of the hut on which
the peasants sat during the day and slept at night, on mattresses stuffed with
hay or straw. Early tables were made of clay and immovable; movable tables
made of wood date from the seventeenth century.
18
Some huts had primitive
stools, but usually there were no chairs or other furniture except a trunk
(made of wood, leather, and/or woven bark, reeds and other materials) in
which the peasants kept their extra and out-of-season clothing. There was a
shelf protruding from one of the walls on which cooking utensils were kept.
Clay pots were used for storage or mixing. There were typically three or four
small windows (to prevent the heat from escaping) covered sometimes with
mica (in huts of the more well-to-do), more often with parchment made of
bull’s bladder. (The huts of the poor had no windows at all.) The windows
did not open, and during the coldest weather were covered over with mats
to conserve heat. Also to conserve heat, the front door was low and narrow.
Internallighting,suchastherewas(andthepeasant hutwasalwaysdarkinside),
was provided by splinters set alight or a burning wick in oil. Smoky, tallow
candles were used first in the seventeenth century, and more expensive wax
candles were used where there were many bees.
19
Most huts had dirt floors,
probably to facilitate cleaning up the excrement slurry during the coldest
months when all the livestock as well as the peasant family lived full time
in the hut.
20
Feeding the livestock over the winter was a real chore. Supplies
often ran out during the late winter or early spring, and the cries of the
starving animals could be heard throughout the village. Some animals were
so weak by spring that they could not stand and had to be carried out to
pasture.
Thanks to the prominence of rye in the Russian diet, the nutritional state of
the ‘average Russian’ was almost certainly better than one might have imag-
ined. That does not mean, however, that Russian nutrition was ideal. One
17 Richard Hellie, ‘The Russian Smoky Hut and its Possible Health Consequences’, RH 28
(2001): 171–84.
18 D. A. Baranov et al., Russkaia izba. Illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia. Vnutrennee prostranstvo
izby. Mebel’ i ubranstvo izby. Domashniaia i khoziaistvennaia utvar’ (St Petersburg:Iskusstvo,
1999), pp. 114–15.
19 Ibid., pp. 306–7.
20 Ibid. This volume is concerned primarily with the period 1700–1825, but much of it is
relevant to the earlier period because traditional life changed very slowly. As this book
notes, many huts did not have wooden floors even in the 1920s–1930s(p.55).
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problem was an inadequate quantity of meat, caused primarily by the inabil-
ity of Russians to winter sufficient numbers of livestock. Although the elite
(clergy and laymen) had access to adequate quantities of fish, it is not clear
that the ‘average Russian’ did. The quantity and variety of fruits and vegeta-
bles available to the ‘average Russian’ was also inadequate. Thus Russians well
may have been deficient in Vitamin A, niacin, cobalamin, Vitamin D, calcium
and selenium. These deficiencies almost certainly made the Russians’ bod-
ies function at less than optimum levels, made them susceptible to disease
and diminished their energy levels. These factors, combined with the impact
of the smoky hut, contributed mightily in making the Russian the short-
lived, lethargic, marginally productive, minimallycreative (original) person he
was.
Peasant clothing was simple, nearly all of it home-made out of homespun
wool or flax/linen, sometimes hemp. On his head the peasant wore a cap
(kolpak) or felt hat (shapka). The woman wore a kerchief. The man’s coat was
a caftan (kaftan), a woman’s coat or long jacket was called a telogreia, a man’s
tunic was called an odnoriadka and his heavy-duty winter coat a sheepskin
shuba. A man’s basic garment was a shirt (rubakha, rubashka) and trousers
(porty, shtany); a woman’s a dress (rubakha, sarafan or letnik). Both sexes wore
stockings (chulki), linden bast shoes (lapti) in summer, ordinary leather shoes
in less clement weather (bashmaki (men’s) or koty (women’s)), and felt boots
(valenki) in snowy weather. Gloves (perchatki) and mittens (rukavitsy) com-
pleted the peasant outfit. Unmarried girls/women wore one braid, married
women two. Women also wore earrings, beads and necklaces. Wealthy peas-
ants, relatively few and far between, wore furs and expensive jewellery and
their houses contained metal utensils and other items purchased in the market,
even books.
21
Exhibiting wealth was risky, for the collective system of taxation
provided an incentive for poorer peasants to shift their burden to the more
prosperous.
Thepeasant’sagriculturalinventory washis personalpropertyandits nature
was determined by agricultural conditions and his crops. Because the podzolic
soil was so thin, there was no need for a plough that would turn over a deep
furrow. The famous two-pronged scratch plough (the sokha) was adequate to
stir up the soil for planting. It was smoothed out by a harrow, a lattice of four
or five boards crossing each other at right angles out of which protruded a
peg at each intersection to break up the clods of dirt. Both the scratch plough
and the harrow were light implements which could easily be pulled by one
21 A. I. Kopanev, Krest’ianstvo Russkogo Severa v XVI v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 211–13.
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horse, unless it was so mal-nourished that it could barely walk. The horse was
also employed to pull a sleigh in the winter, and a four-wheeled cart in the
summer. The peasant also possessed a scythe and sickle for harvesting grain
and cutting hay. It is likely that they were almost the only metal items in the
peasant’s possession, along with a flail, a chain at the end of a stick used to beat
the grains out of the stalk. Instead of stacking the harvested grain in shocks
to dry, the peasant probably put it into a drier, where moving air removed the
moisture while keeping post-harvest rain, hail and snow off the cut grain. An
axe completed the peasant’s inventory; this he used for cutting down trees in
the forest, fashioning logs for his house, cutting firewood for the stove and
preparingother woodenobjects. Peasantslivingnear navigablebodies of water
typically owned a variety of vessels: canoes, barges, flat-bottomed boats and so
on. Water mills are known to have appeared at least as early as the thirteenth
century.
22
The nature of peasant farming changed significantly more than once during
the period covered by the timespan of this chapter. At the end of the civil war
between Grand Prince Vasilii II and first his uncles and then his cousins in
1453, population density throughout Muscovy was very low, which led to the
initiation of the enserfment process. For our purposes right here, however, this
meant that free land waseverywhere, a fact observed by foreign travellers. This
allowed slash-burn/assartage agriculture to be practised everywhere. While
it involved quite a bit more strenuous labour than other forms of agriculture,
it was also more productive. A peasant moved into a plot of forest and cut it
down. He could use the felled trees for housing and fuel. The main point was,
however, that he set fire to what remained after the logs had been removed.
The resulting ashes produced a comparatively rich topsoil into which the
peasant could broadcast his seeds and harvest a fairly high yield. The high
soil productivity lasted about three years, and then the peasant moved on to
another newlyburned-over plot. It took about forty years for the soil to recover
its fertility in this extensive slash/burn agriculture, but while there was free,
forested land available, it was the most profitable form of farming available to
the Russian peasant.
With the rise of Moscow and the consolidation of the Muscovite state
in the decades after 1453, internal wars ceased and the population began to
expand. The years 1480–1570 are generally termed in the literature as a period
of economic upsurge.
23
Extensive agriculture of the slash-burn type became
22 Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo v periody,p.214.
23 A. L. Shapiro, Russkoe krest’ianstvo pered zakreposhcheniem (XIV–XVI vv.) (Leningrad: LGU,
1987), p. 3.
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less possible. That this was happening was readily observable by 1500.
24
By 1550
the movement from slash-burn agriculture
25
to the more intensive three-field
system had progressed to the point that it was expressed in the Law Code
(Sudebnik) (see Chapter 16).
26
In the traditional three-field system, one field
was planted in the spring and harvested in the autumn; a second field was
planted in the autumn and harvested the following summer; and the third
field was fallow. What is here called ‘the second field’ produced the highest
yields because there was no frantic rush to plant in the spring or to harvest in
the autumn because of the short growing season, but rather leisurely sowing
could be done in the summer/autumn and rather leisurely harvesting in the
mid-summer. In the winter field the sown seeds typically sprouted before
snowfall;in theabsenceofsnow cover,thesprouts might freeze and die, butthis
happened infrequently enough so that it was not a major risk factor. Article 88
of the Sudebnik of 1550 permitted peasants who had moved on St George’s
Day (26 November), after the winter crop had been sown, to return in the
following summer to harvest that crop.
27
Historians assume that the use of
the three-field system was fairly widespread by 1550. Along with this went a
system of strip-farming in which fields were divided into long, narrow strips.
The strips were allotted to the peasants in a fashion which spread the risks of
farming (insect infestations, blights, hail storms) equally among the peasants
of a given locale.
28
This,however,wasnotfatedtolast.ParanoidTsarIvantheTerriblelaunched
his psychotic oprichnina in 1565 in which he split the Muscovite tsardom into
two parts: the oprichnina, which he ran himself, and the zemshchina (the rest
of the state), run by the seven boyars who typically were in charge of the state
when the sovereign was absent. Ivan’s henchmen, the notorious oprichniki,
among their many barbarous acts ‘collected as much rent from their peasants
in one year as usually was collected in ten years’.
29
By 1572 this put the peasants
24 G. E. Kochin, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo na Rusi v period obrazovaniia Russkogo tsentralizovannogo
gosudarstva, konets XIII–nachalo XVI v. (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1965), pp. 129–75,
431–4; Gorskii, Ocherki,pp.32–7, 55.
25 V. P. Petrov, Podsechnoe zemledelie (Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 1968).
26 Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo v periody,pp.230–2.
27 RichardHellie (ed. and trans.),MuscoviteSociety (Chicago: University of Chicago Syllabus
Division, 1967, 1970), pp. 105–6.
28 Donald N. McCloskey, ‘Scattering in Open Fields’, Journal of European Economic History
9 (1980): 209–14, among many other essays on the same theme.
29 RichardHellie, ‘What Happened? HowDid he Get away with it? IvanGroznyi’sParanoia
and the Problem of Institutional Restraints’, RH 14 (1987): 199–224; Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo
v periody,pp.263–5; Kolycheva gives examples from the 1570s where 80 to 100 per cent
of the land was fallow, in the years 1584–86 in Moscow province 86.6 per cent (Agrarnyi
stroi,pp.182–3, 191).
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to flight, much as had done Vasilii II’s civil war, as the agriculturalists moved
north of the Volga,
30
east of Kazan’ into the Urals and Siberia, south along
the Volga and to some extent into the lands south of the Oka. The result was
that ensuing censuses found up to 85 per cent of the heartland of Muscovy,
especiallyaround Moscowand Novgorod,abandoned and the right of peasants
to move on St George’s Day was gradually abolished.
31
Also often abandoned
was the three-field system of agriculture, which was not to become widely
used again until the second half of the eighteenth century.
32
Slavery and the beginnings of enserfment
The vast majority of the population in the years 1462–1613 were peasants who
were becoming serfs, perhaps 85 per cent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 per
cent were slaves.
33
Relatively insignificant numbers of townsmen, clergy and
government servicemen comprised the rest of the population. This balance
reflectedthe very lowproductivityof agriculture, whichrequirednearlyevery-
one to farm. Even townsmen, most clergymen and even many servicemen
raised much of their own food.
As discussed in Chapter 16, slavery was one of the oldest social institutions
in Russia and one of the major concerns of law. As a proportion of all law,
the quantity dedicated solely to slavery can only be described as staggering.
Slavery in fact was so important in Russia that a special central governmental
office was created around 1550 to deal solely with slavery matters. Russia
30 Relatively precise numbers for the beginning and middle of the sixteenth century, the
1580s, and 1620s can be found in Shapiro et al., Agrarnaia istoriia (1978), pp. 9, 136.
31 RichardHellie, Enserfmentand MilitaryChangein Muscovy (Chicago:UniversityofChicago
Press, 1971), pp. 96–7 et passim; Degtiarev, Russkaia derevnia,pp.77, 88.
32 Gorskaia notes that in the 1570sand1580s much of the land lay fallow, but contends that
this was only because of a shortage of labour and did not represent an abandonment of
the three-field system per se (Gorskaia, Krest’ianstvo v periody,p.235).
33 Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Alekseev presents evidence that at least on one occasion slaves comprised from 17 to
30 per cent of the population (Agrarnaia istoriia,p.122), but that was exceptional. The
major problem with counting slaves in this period is that the only reliable numbers are
of the slaves who engaged in agriculture, and they comprised about 2 per cent of rural
households. While occasionally the sole ‘farmer’ a cavalryman had was a slave, the vast
majority of slaves were not engaged in production, but were household slaves who were
not counted in the ‘census records’ (land cadastres) of the time. As discussed more in
Chapter 23, productive (= farming) slaves presented a real problem to the government.
The general rule was that slaves owned nothing, could produce nothing, and therefore
could not be taxed. That farming slaves produced nothing was blatantly false, of course,
so the government gradually began to tax them. A 1678 census revealed that many serfs
had nominally/legally been converted into slaves, so in 1679 the government solved the
problem by converting all farming slaves into taxpaying serfs.
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was the sole country in history to have one governmental department in the
capital devoted solely to the issue of slavery. Major changes in the institution
occurred during the period covered by this chapter. As has been discussed,
society was in chaos after the reign of Ivan IV, and Boris Godunov, acting in
the name of the mentally challenged Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, tried to stabilise
the situation by history-making measures enacted in the 1590s involving both
slaves and peasants. The one involving slaves radically changed the nature of
the institution. By this time the major slavery institution was limited service
contract slavery (kabal’noe kholopstvo). A Russian – typically a low-energy, low-
initiative down-and-outer – approached another Russian and asked him to buy
him. The transaction was phrased in terms of a loan: the ‘borrower’ took a
sum (perhaps 1, 2 or 3 roubles) from the ‘lender’ and agreed to work for him
for a year in lieu of paying interest on the loan.
34
In ancient Parthia, this was
known as antichresis. If the borrower failed to repay the loan in a year, he
became the full slave of the lender. Almost no such ‘loans’ were ever repaid,
and both parties realised from the start that the transaction was in reality a
self-sale into perpetual slavery. Over the course of the sixteenth century limited
service contract slavery replaced full slavery as the major relief institution for
those desiring to sell themselves into slavery. The difference was that kabal’noe
kholopstvo offered hope for a year of manumission, whereas full slavery from
the outset was for life and hereditary. The trouble for the government was that
slavery usually took an individual off the tax rolls, which the government did
not like. Therefore on 25 April 1597, the typically activist government, by fiat,
changed the nature of kabal’noe kholopstvo. The sale/loan was no longer for a
year, but for the life of the creditor. Upon the death of the creditor, the slave
was freed – presumablyto go back onto the tax rolls. What the government did
not understand was that the dependency created by slavery made it impossible
for the freedman to exist on his own, with the result that he soon sold himself
back into slavery, often to the heirs of the deceased. The government was
unable to ‘solve’ this problem until Peter the Great by fiat in 1724 converted all
household slaves into household serfs (all males, from newborns to decrepit
geriatrics, were called ‘souls’) who all had to pay taxes.
The farming peasantry were also in chaos as a result of Ivan’s psychotic
reign. Serfdom dates back to the 1450s, with the introduction of St George’s
Day (26 November) for indebted monastery peasants, who could only move
on that date.
35
The Sudebnik of 1497 extended St George’s Day to all peasants.
34 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.240–2.
35 Ibid., ch. 7; Hellie, Enserfment,chs.4–6; V. V. Mavrodin (ed.), Materialy po istorii krest’ian
v Rossii XI–XVII vv. Sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad: LGU, 1958), pp. 39–110;A.E.Vorms
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Then in the 1580s the government began to repeal the right of peasants to
move on St George’s Day who lived on the lands of selected landholders. In
1592 this prohibition was extended ‘until further notice’ to all peasants. The
purpose was to stabilise the labour force of the provincial middle service-
class cavalry, who could not render military service in the absence of peasant
rent-payers. Thus with a flourish of the pen Boris Godunov’s hypertrophic
government changed the legal status of more than nine-tenths of the Russian
population. Enserfment, especially as it descended into a slave-like condition,
unquestionably would have been impossible without the fact that the Russians
were accustomed to enslaving their own people.
Boris did not end his 1590s social legislative spree with the above. He added
another provision to the enserfment decree, a statute of limitations on the
recovery of fugitive serfs. There was no statute of limitations on the recovery
of fugitive slaves, but Boris decided that hunters of fugitive serfs should be
given five years to locate their chattels and file a suit for their recovery. Five
years seems like a long time, but Russia is a big country, and was getting
bigger all the time as mentioned above. Once a Russian serf had fled into
any of the areas outside the Volga–Oka mesopotamia, finding him became
almost impossible. Various elements of the Russian government wanted all
of those areas inhabited by scarce Russians, and in fact encouraged migration
into those areas. The struggle for scarce labour resources had yet another
element: serfs could and did flee not only to the new territories, but also to
lands of larger lay and monastic landlords. Such magnates (in the 1630s called
‘contumacious people’ – sil’nye liudi, literally, ‘strong people’) had estates in
many places, and could move fugitives from one estate to another so that
a pursuer could never find them. The five-year statute of limitations was a
licence to the magnates and regional recruiters to recruit the peasant labour
force of the Moscow heartland middle service-class cavalry. The sequel to this
is discussed in Chapter 23.
In 1607 Tsar Vasilii IV Shuiskii promulgated an important edict on fugitive
serfs and slaves.
36
The first important thing was that he linked the two cate-
gories of population. Secondly, he extended the statute of limitations to fifteen
years for the hunting down and filing suits for fugitive serfs. The linking of serfs
with slaves by Shuiskii was an important landmark in the abasement of the
Russian peasantry. The St George’s Day measures ‘only’ bound the peasants
to the land so that they would be there as rent-paying fixtures for the next
et al. (eds.), Pamiatniki istorii krest’ian XIV–XIX vv. (Moscow: N. N. Klochkov, 1910),
pp. 14–50. The literature on enserfment is vast. See the bibliography for additional titles.
36 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.137–41.
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tenants of the land, rather like immovable structures left by one holder of the
land for the next one. This was ‘legalised’ by the state in two forms of state
charters. One, issued to the landholder, called a vvoznaia gramota, informed
him that the peasants of such-and-such a parcel were to pay him traditional
rent. In the first half of the sixteenth century, it is likely that the landholder
did not even collect the rent himself, but a third party did. The second charter,
called an ‘obedience charter’ (poslushnaia gramota), was issued to the peas-
ants, and informed them that so-and-so was now the holder of the land and
that they should pay him the traditional rent. But Ivan IV during his mad
oprichnina introduced a dramatic change into the ‘obedience charter’: instead
of ordering the peasants to pay traditional rent, they were ordered to ‘obey
their landholder in everything’. This gave the landholders complete control
over their peasants. This was responsible for much of the peasant chaos that led
to the repeal of the right to move on St George’s Day. But for the long run, the
personal abasement of the peasant was equally important. The 1607 Shuiskii
decree enhanced this abasement, which was adumbrated by the simultaneity
of the 1592 and 1597 decrees changing the status of the slaves and the peasants.
The period 1462–1613 witnessed intervention by the ‘Agapetus state’
(see Chapter 16) in the lives of its subjects unparalleled in previous history.
Much of the institution of slavery was radically changed, while the freedom
of the peasantry was radically abased. At the end of his reign Peter the Great
abolished slavery by converting slaves into serfs. Peter’s heirs by the end of the
eighteenth century converted the serfs into near-slaves, the property of their
lords (owners). The ‘Agapetus state’ was so powerful because it claimed and
exercised control over – almost without opposition – two of the three basic
factors of the economy, all the land and labour.
37
This had little impact on
peasant methods of farming or material culture, but it laid down the course
for Russian history until 1991.
37 Richard Hellie, ‘Thoughts on the Absence of Elite Resistance in Muscovy’, Kritika 1
(2001): 5–20. The third factor, capital, was almost irrelevant in this period.
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