Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689
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Other than these developments, the social stratification front was relatively
quietbetweentheendofthe TimeofTroublesandtheendof theSmolenskwar.
Recovery took most of the social energy there was, and Patriarch Filaret, father
of Tsar Michael, ran a tight ship while he was at the helm of the Russian state
between 1619 and 1633. After his death, self-serving and corruption became the
order of the day in the Russian government between 1633 and 1648. The ruling
elite were occupied with allotting lands to themselvesand looting the treasury.
Witnessing that orgy of corruption, the members of the middle service class
decided that it was time to get theirs. So, in 1637 they initiated perhaps the
most famous petition campaign in Russian history for the completion of the
enserfment of the peasantry.
30
They enumerated the troubles the five-year
statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitiveserfs caused them. They noted
that ‘contumacious (literally, strong) people’ (sil’nye liudi) used the statute of
limitations to conceal fugitives; once the statute of limitations had expired,
the ‘contumacious people’ would send the fugitives back whence they had
come to recruit other fugitives. The only solution, said the petitioners, was to
repeal the statute of limitations. The government responded by extending the
statute of limitations from five to nine years.
31
The provincial cavalrymen found this concession to be of little help, so in
1641 again petitioned for a repeal of the statute of limitations. The govern-
ment responded by extending the statute of limitations from nine to fifteen
years.
32
Here one must stop to examine the context of these petitions. After
the conclusion of the Smolensk war, which ended in a ‘draw’ because the
Poles surrendered their claim to the Russian throne but refused to return
the great fortress of Smolensk to the Russians, the government turned its
attention from the western front to the southern front. The Crimean Tatars
were still a major threat to Muscovy; their annual slave raids had carried off
tens of thousands of Russians into the slave markets of the Crimea, and their
raids diverted the Russians during the Smolensk war from concentrating their
full attention on Smolensk. So the Muscovites began to wall off the southern
frontier by constructing what became known as the Belgorod fortified line
in the years 1636–54. This moved the formal frontier of Muscovy hundreds of
miles south of the Oka and added tens of thousands of hectares of some of
the best agricultural land in the world to Muscovite control. Those directing
30 N. A. Gorskaia et al., 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. 379–80.
31 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.167–76.
32 Ibid., pp. 178–91.
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The economy, trade and serfdom
the Belgorod Line operation wanted the region between the line and the Oka
settled for strategic purposes. The new settlers could be recruited for military
purposes for service on the fortified line if necessary, and as farmers added
significantly to the GNP of Muscovy while providing ready food to the frontier
forces. Peasants were delighted to oblige by migrating to the frontier because
their incomes rose farming the rich chernozem vis-
`
a-vis what they could get
from the poor podzol soils north of the Oka; besides that, south of the Oka,
they had no landlords to worry about or pay rent to. Government officials
behind the Belgorod Line were reluctant to return fugitives to their places of
origins north of the Oka.
Thus in the years after 1636 the middle service-class cavalry landholders
north of the Oka came to know that every time they would report for their
annual military service, their peasants would use their absence to move to
a frontier region where they could not possibly locate them, both because
of the distances involved and because of the hostility of the frontier officials
should by some stroke of luck they manage to find their fugitives. Slaves reg-
istered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery were accurately enough described
so that in a judicial contest for the return of a fugitive slave, the central records
could be brought to the courtroom and a reasonable decision made whether
the person being contested was the slave described in the government docu-
ment. But in the case of peasant serfs, no such records existed.
33
In a hostile
frontier courtroom, a serf-hunter could claim that the contested person x
was his fugitive serf Ivan son of Pavel, x could respond that he was Nikolai
son of Aleksei, that this was a case of mistaken identity – and the judge
almost certainly would throw out the plaintiff’s claim for x. The provin-
cial cavalrymen, who only had 5.6 peasant households apiece, were hardly
wealthy to begin with. When their labour force began to vanish, they became
desperate.
Fifteen years proved to be of no more use to the middle service class than
had nine or five. So, in 1645 they submitted a third petition asking for the
repeal of the statute of limitations. This time, the government, in transition
from Tsar Michael to Tsar Alexis, caved in and promised to repeal the statute
33 A decree of 30 March 1688 tried to compensate for this inadequacy by requiring the reg-
istration of purchased and ceded/exchanged hereditary estate and service landholding
serfs in the Service Landholding Chancellery (SLC) while loans and similar documents
were to be registeredin the Slavery Chancellery (SC). Thismeasure could not be effective
because the SLC was already overburdened with trying to keep track of the ownership
and possession of much of the land in Russia, and could not possibly cope with keeping
records on all the serfs as well. The SC’s task was much more manageable. See RZ, 9 vols.
(Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1984–94), vol. iv: Zakonodatel’stvo perioda stanovleniia
absoliutizma, ed. A. G. Man’kov (1986), pp. 102–3.
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of limitations – once a new census had been taken.
34
The census was taken,
in 1646–7, but the government was taken over (in the name of Alexis) by
his tutor, Boris Ivanovich Morozov. Morozov was one of the most able men
ever to head a Russian government, but also one of the most greedy and
corrupt. Contemporaries reported that he had a ‘thirst for gold as others thirst
for water’. Morozov tried to rationalise and simplify the taxation system,
which consisted of countless imposts on almost everything that moved or was
stationary. Morozov got the idea of annulling many of them and consolidating
them into a tax on salt. What Morozov forgot was that the demand for salt
is elastic. With a dramatic rise in the price of salt because of the new tax,
the consumption fell dramatically, and the reform collapsed. The rage against
Morozov, however, did not collapse, but was only strengthened by many of his
other activities. Of a rather minor if ancient Muscovite family, but not a noble,
he began life with modest peasant holdings and ended it as the largest serf-
holder in Muscovy. He enriched himself both with lands and peasants and with
state property. He surrounded himself with a loyal cadre of equally rapacious
individuals. Not only did he ‘forget’ the 1645 promise to repeal the statute
of limitations, all the while he was luring away other landholders’ peasants
and dispatching them to distant properties he appropriated for himself on the
Volga. He issued orders to his estate stewards to conceal fugitives even as his
days in active government service were expiring in 1648.
35
Morozov was so corrupt that the townsmen of Moscow could no longer
endure it. They composed a petition to Alexis and tried to present it to him
on 1 June 1648, as he rode through Moscow. That monumental document
was translated into Swedish by a visitor at the time in Moscow and survives
both in the original Middle Russian and in Swedish.
36
When the petitioners
tried to present the document to Alexis, his accompanying musketeer guards
tore it up and threw it into their faces. This touched off two days of rioting
in Moscow in which a considerable portion of the city was burned, and two
of Morozov’s collaborators were torn to bits by the mob and their remains
cast on some of the many dung heaps gracing the city’s streets.
37
Morozov
was saved from a similar fate only by the personal intervention of the tsar,
who promised that Boris Ivanovich would never again serve in the Muscovite
government.
34 Ibid., pp. 191–6.
35 Hellie, Enserfment,pp.133–8, 188–9.
36 Hellie, Muscovite Society,pp.198–205.
37 Richard Hellie, ‘Patterns of Instability in Russian and Soviet History’, Chicago Review of
International Affairs 1 (1989): 3–34.
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In their petition the people of Moscow complained about the Morozov gang
corruption and asked for the compilation of a new law code, with references
to the Byzantine lawgivers Constantine and Justinian. The government, which
wasfrightened outof its witsas the rioting spreadtoa dozenothertowns, made
several responses. First, Morozov and his cohort were permanently purged
from the government and replaced with another group. Second, a commission
of five men, headed by N. I. Odoevskii, was appointed to compile the laws.
And third, calls were issued for the election of delegates to an Assembly of the
Land (zemskii sobor), a proto-parliamentary body which originated in 1566 and
was called at times when major national issues needed to be resolved, such as
war and peace, dynastic succession and major legal issues. A full Assembly of
the Land consisted of two chambers. The upper chamber contained members
of the upper service class and the clergy. The lower chamber had elected
delegates from the towns and the provincial middle service class. It is known
that at least some of the 1648 delegate elections were vigorously contested.
38
The Ulozhenie of 1649
The Odoevskii legislative commission was one of the most efficient in all Rus-
sian history. Its members sent requests to the major chancelleries requesting
that they send them their statute books, scrolls on which laws were entered
as they were made. About ten of the forty chancelleries participated in that
process. The commission extracted the most relevant provisions from the
statute books and grouped them into what became the twenty-five chapters
of the Law Code of 1649 (Sobornoe Ulozhenie), the most important written
monument in all of Russian history before the nineteenth century – with
perhaps the exception of the chronicles. On 1 October 1648, the delegates to
the Assembly of the Land assembled with the petitions and demands of their
constituents. About 7 per cent of the 968 articles of the Ulozhenie resulted
from the petitions brought to the Assembly of the Land, including one for
the repeal of the statute of limitations for filing suits for the recovery of fugi-
tive serfs. The Odoevskii Commission read its draft to the delegates of each
chamber, who voted each article either up or down. The provisions demanded
by the delegates were integrated in with the Odoevskii Commission’s draft
extracted from the chancellery records. The whole project was completed in
January 1649, and on 29 January the delegates who were willing signed the
38 Hellie, Enserfment,pp.134–45, et passim; Richard Hellie, ‘Zemskii sobor’, in MERSH,
vol. xlv (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1987), pp. 226–34.
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scroll copy of the Ulozhenie. This point must be stressed, for it is known that a
number of the upper chamber clerics refused to sign the document to protest
against the beating the Church had taken in the document on issues ranging
from a semi-secularisation of the Church (a lay governmental chancellery, the
Monastery Chancellery, was appointed to manage much of the Church; this
was an ancestor of Peter the Great’s Holy Synod) to issues on Church prop-
erty discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The scroll copy, which is still
extant, was taken to the state typography, and then 1,200 copies were pub-
lished. This was the second civil (non-religious) book published in Muscovy.
The 1,200 copies sold out rapidly, and a second printing of another 1,200 copies
was ordered immediately, which sold out in a couple of years.
39
The entire
Ulozhenie is a printed manifestation of the dictum of the Nobel Prize-winning
economist James Buchanan that governments will acquire more power when-
ever the opportunity arises. The Ulozhenie gave the government power over
nearly all of society, thus consolidating its almost total control over two of
the major economic factors (land and labour).
40
The third factor, capital, was
39 Richard Hellie, ‘Muscovite Law and Society: the Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reflection of
the Political and Social Development of Russia since the Sudebnik of 1589’, unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1965; Richard Hellie, ‘The Ulozhenie of 1649’,
MERSH, vol.xl (Gulf Breeze, Fla.:Academic International Press, 1985), pp. 192–8; Richard
Hellie, ‘Early Modern Russian Law: The Ulozhenie of 1649’, and ‘Ulozhenie Commentary:
Preamble and Chapters 1–2’, RH 15 (1988): 155–224; Richard Hellie, ‘Commentary on
Chapters 3 through 6’, RH 17 (1990): 65–78; Richard Hellie, ‘Commentary on Chapters
7–9’, RH 17 (1990): 179–226; Richard Hellie, ‘Commentary on Chapter 11 (The Judicial
Process for Peasants)’, RH 17 (1990): 305–39; Richard Hellie, ‘The Church and the Law in
Late Muscovy: Chapters 12 and 13 of the Ulozhenie of 1649’, CASS 25 (1991): 179–99.
40 Perhaps a chapter such as this should discuss in detail the evolution of the exploitation of
the peasants/serfs in this period, but space limitations and other considerations prevent
such a presentation. Soviet scholars did much work on this issue, but never systematised
their findings. The problems are immense. One is the passage of time, and the facts that
rents were always changing. Another is the fact that there were numerous forms of rent,
ranging from labour rent (barshchina) in which a serf farmed his lord’s land to money
or in kind rent (obrok) to any possible combination of these forms of rent. Geographical
variations were important. Perhaps most important was the variety of landowners and
landholders ranging from the state itself to the tsar, from the Church (consisting of
the patriarch, monasteries, individual institutions) to magnate landowners down to
provincial cavalry landholders. With the passage of time, pure ‘rent’ gets mixed up with
taxes. The general assumption is that rent and taxes took about a third of a peasant’s
harvestand his time (if properly priced), the peasant could consume about a third of what
he produced, and he had to saveabout a third of his harvestfor seed for the following year.
See e.g. A. N. Sakharov, Russkaia derevnia XVII v. Po materialam Patriarshego khoziaistva
(Moscow: Nauka, 1966), pp. 66–7;N.A.Gorskaia,Monastyrskie krest’iane Tsentral’noi
Rossii v XVII veke. O sushchnosti i formakh feodal’no-krepostnicheskikh otnoshenii (Moscow:
Nauka, 1977), pp. 239–339; Iu. A. Tikhonov, Pomeshchich’i krest’iane v Rossii. Feodal’naia
renta v XVII – nachale XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), pp. 117–305. Tikhonov’s table 59
shows the vast variations in rents on service landholdings in this period (p. 297). See also
L. V. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow:
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still largely in private hands, although the discussion above about technology
transfers indicates that the government, which also was the largest merchant,
had considerable control over this factor as well.
The Ulozhenie became known everywhere almost immediately and was
referred to by those with legal interests for decades thereafter. The major
changes in the law were announced by public criers. For the purposes of this
chapter, the major items of interest were contained in the Ulozhenie’s chapter 11
(serfdom,34 articles), chapter 19 (townsmen,40 articles),and chapter20 (slaves,
119 articles). The Assembly of the Land added little to chapter 20, which
was a codification of the practices of the Slavery Chancellery. On the other
hand, much of chapters 11 and 19 came from petitions by the delegates to the
Assembly of the Land. The principles of these three chapters interacted with
one another in the production of the system which was to last in Russia –
even beyond the abolition of personal serfdom in 1861 – until the reforms of
1906 onwards.
The first principle of serfdom was that the peasant could not move without
his lord’s permission. The same was true for the townsmen (for whom the
town was the ‘lord’). According to articles 1 and 2 of chapter 11, this was true for
all peasants, regardless of whether they lived on lay or Church seigniorial land,
or on land that had no lord, ‘taxable land’, that still belonged to the peasants or
to the state. Later on, in the eighteenth century, the provisions for seigniorial
and state peasants diverged, but this was not the case in 1649. Second, there
was the issue of the return of fugitives. Here the measures for serfs resembled
more those for slaves than for townsmen. For the return of slaves, there had
never been a statute of limitations for the filing of suits for the recovery of
fugitives. Now, the same applied to serfs. As mentioned earlier, however, the
evidentiary bases for the status of slavery and serfdom differed dramatically.
SlaveswereregisteredintheMoscowSlaveryChancellery;otherwisetheywere
not slaves. There was no formal registration forserfs, so the issue arose of what
evidence would apply in the case of disputes involving serfs. The Ulozhenie
preferred written evidence, and mentioned the land cadastres compiled in
1626, the recently compiled 1646–7 census, or records transmitting possession
of lands to servicemen. In practice, such written evidence overrode the clause
in the Ulozhenie which declared that a peasant was supposed to live where
his/her grandfather had lived. On the other hand, there were no provisions
for the return of townsmen who had fled prior to the Ulozhenie; for them,
Rosspen, 1998), pp. 483–5;Z.A.Ogrizko,Iz istorii krest’ianstva na Severe feodal’noi Rossii
XVII v. (Osobye formy krepostnoi zavisimosti) (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1968), pp. 26–57;
Aleksandrov et al., Krest’ianstvo,p.154.
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the binding process began on 29 January 1649, and continued indefinitely
into the future. No definitive explanation for the difference has ever been
offered, but one may surmise that the Odoevskii commission believed that
townsmen were involved in a trade whose disruption would be economically
deleterious, whereas peasants moved their agricultural site regularly because
of soil exhaustion and thus transportation back to a legal lord’s estate would
be little more disruptive than moving to a new site on the same estate in
slash/burn (assartage) agriculture,or rotatingaround in the three-fieldsystem.
Of course the explanation may have been more political than economic, that
the delegates from the middle service-class cavalry at the Assembly of the Land
were more persuasive/intimidating than were the urban delegates.
A major issue that concerned all three population categories was that of
marriage. If one or two fugitives wed while one or both were in flight from
their lawful owners or places of residence, what should happen to the couple?
The Russian Orthodox Church was adamant that marriage was inviolable.
In response to this simple dogma, a simple solution for fugitives was found:
receiving fugitive slaves, serfs and townsmen was illegal, so whoever received
the fugitive was penalised by losing the couple. However, the family was not
inviolable, so that if they had children, the law-breaking harbourer of the
fugitive could keep the offspring born while in his ‘care’ even though he (or
it: a town) lost the parents. If the fugitives married while on ‘neutral ground’,
such as on the frontier where there were no lords, then the lords cast lots to
determine possession. The winner got the couple and had to pay the loser 10
roubles. If a female fugitive serf married a frontier serviceman, he could keep
her for 50 roubles. This was an impossible sum, presumably meant to deter
servicemen from marrying fugitive women and the women from fleeing to
the frontiers.
One final issue, the abasement of the person of the serf which began in the
reign of Ivan IV (see Chapter 12 above) remains to be discussed. The Ulozhenie
surprisingly has little to say about that, even though the chapter on slaves is
the second longest in the law code and thus the Odoevskii commission cannot
be suspected of having been squeamish on this topic. One may surmise that
the legislators wanted to concentrate on the principle at hand, the perpetual
binding of the peasants to the land, not its possible derivative which could
easily enough turn into its opposite, the binding of the peasant to the person
of a lord. The culmination of this fate of the serfs waited until the early
eighteenth century, to last until 1861. But the forebodings of what was to
come are evident in the Ulozhenie. Ominous is article 3 of chapter 15 which
permits a hereditary landowner (votchinnik) to issue a manumission charter
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The economy, trade and serfdom
freeing his serf, but denies that privilege to a service landholder (pomeshchik).
This, of course, equates one category of serfs with slaves, both of whom can
become freedmen (nearly the sole category of free people in Muscovy). This
also served as a vehicle for an owner of a hereditary estate to transfer his
peasants to another holding. Article 7 of chapter 16 permits outright someone
who acquired waste lands to move peasants from his other lands to populate
those waste lands. Nothing is said about the consent of the serfs in this process,
which probably enhanced economic efficiency at the expense of the personal
freedom of the serfs.
Another ominous sign of the abasement of the peasant is in article 141 of
chapter 10. It had long been assumed that a slave was an extension of his owner,
and that putting pressure on a slave would force his owner to comply with the
law. This article extends that provision to the serf: if a defendant hid from a
bailiff, the bailiff could detain either his slave or his serf to force him to appear.
Chapter 10, article 161 establishes the procedures for conducting a general
investigation (poval’nyi obysk). Members of the middle service class (dvoriane
and deti boiarskie) were to be interrogated separately, and their testimony was
to be recorded separately from that of their slaves and serfs. Notice here that
again the serfs are linked with slaves, and both are less full witnesses than their
masters. (Further on, however, article 163 decrees that serfs who lied in such
investigations were to be fined a rouble, but nothing was said about slaves who
lied at all; their owners were fined 30 roubles for their own perjury. Article 261
contains further evidence that slave status had not yet been fully extended to
serfs. A member of the middle service class who did not pay his debts could
be placed in a righter (pravezh), a form of stocks, where force would be used
to compel the debtor to pay. His slave could be put in the righter instead of
the debtor, but this did not extend to serfs.) On the other hand, debts could
be collected both from the slaves and the serfs of a landholder or estate owner
(art. 262). In 1642 peasants had been denied the right to make contracts which,
upon default, would have led to their formal enslavement.
At the request of the provincial cavalry delegates to the Assembly of the
Land,apracticeborrowedfromthehistoryofthetownsmenwassoonadopted:
the mass dragnet. The difficulty of finding fugitive serfs in the condition of
constant labour shortage and the willingness of other lords to take them in
was a constant theme of Russian history.
41
The same was true, of course, for
townsmen, exceptthattownsmen werelikelytoflee from one townto another;
41 Richard Hellie, ‘Migration in Early Modern Russia, 1480s–1780s’, in David Eltis (ed.),
Coerced and Free Migration. Global Perspectives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2002), pp. 292–323.
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the number of urban settlements was limited, and it was comparatively easy
for a dragnet to go through urban areas and identify those who did not legally
belong there. The magnitude of the difficulty of such endeavours in the vast
Russian countryside and the new frontier areas can only be imagined. It was
modestly facilitated by the Russian practice of living in villages, however,
rather than on isolated farmsteads. Be that as it may, after the Ulozhenie, the
government formed dragnet teams which scoured the countryside for fugitive
peasants.
42
No doubt the legal practice of the mass inquisition (poval’nyi obysk)
gave the Russian government practice in running dragnets; the mass inquisi-
tion could be called for by litigants, and a team of investigators would go out
to the area to survey the region to ask up to several hundred people such a
question as, ‘Who owned the spotted cow with the crooked horn?’ Whichever
litigant got the majority won the case. When hunting for fugitive serfs (slaves
were thrown in, too), the interrogators asked everyone to prove that he/she
lived where he/she was at the moment. If no proof could be offered, the
assumption was that the object of the inquisition must belong somewhere
else. Torture could be used to find out where that somewhere else was. Then
the fugitives were loaded on carts and returned where they belonged. Records
survive revealing that some investigators returned more than a thousand
runaways.
Creating a legal caste of peasant serfs, the Ulozhenie forbade them to leave
their caste. Earlier, a down-and-out peasant could sell him/herself into slav-
ery, but this was now forbidden. The government was always short of military
personnel, and occasionally peasants joined the middle service-class cavalry
or the lower service-class musketeers, artillerymen or cossacks. That was also
categorically forbidden. Becoming a townsman had also been an option. It
is doubtful that the townsmen reproduced themselves, and they always wel-
comed additions to their numbers who would share the tax burden. Moreover,
there were no guilds to keep interlopers out. But rural to urban migration was
also forbidden. Nevertheless, it persisted, in spite of the law. After the Ulozhenie,
the townsmen on several occasions asked that amnesties be granted to fugitive
peasants currently living in their midst. The government, anxious to collect
the cash taxes paid by townsmen, agreed in 1684, 1685 and 1688 not to return
fugitive serfs who had been registered in a town in the 1678 census. In 1693,
42 This practice continued for years thereafter, for without continuing enforcement the
legal stratification of society would have been a farce. The distinguished Leningrad/St
Petersburg historian A. G. Man’kov claimed that the fifty-two article decree of 2 March
1683 to the state’s fugitive serf and slave hunters was the most important legislative
document of the second half of the seventeenth century (RZ, vol. iv,p.79).
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this date was moved up to 1684.
43
Regrettably, I know of no way to calculate
the economic cost to the Russian economy up until 1689 of the prohibition
against rural–urban migration, but there must have been some – just as there
unquestionably must have been economic costs from the stratification of the
entire society. The fact was that the Muscovite state exhibited its maximalist
tendencies in the social sphere, regardless of the economic costs.
In spite of the Ulozhenie, peasants continued to flee, both to other landlords
and to the frontiers. About the latter little could be done, and it is not clear
that the government was opposed to the settling of the frontier areas in any
case.
44
But the government learned that there was something it could do to
inhibit lords from receiving fugitives. The first step was a fine, which had
no impact. Then the government decided to confiscate an additional peasant
besides the fugitive being returned. This had no impact. So the government
raised the number to two. This also had no impact. But when the number was
raised to four, would-be recipients of others’ fugitive serfs drove them out en
masse.
45
Historians have been able to learn of only a handful of enforcements
of this sanction. For the savage Peter the Great, this was still insufficient, so
he decreed the death penalty for the receiver of another’s serf. Whether this
sanction was ever effected is unknown.
The post-Ulozhenie era was replete with legislation on serfs, as we have
seen. The last measure which must be mentioned came about as a result of
the census of 1678, which uncovered the fact that vast numbers of serfs, now
differinglittlefromslaves,hadleftthe taxrollsbysellingthemselvesintoslavery.
The following year the government solved this problem on 2 September 1679
by unilaterally converting all slaves engaged in agriculture into serfs, that is,
putting them on the tax rolls.
46
This left household slavery as the sole exit for
the exploited peasantry, a fact uncovered in the census of 1719. Peter liquidated
that problem on 5 February 1722, and again on 19 January 1723, by making
all household slaves subject to the soul tax (a head tax on all males), thus
extinguishing the institution of slavery in favour of serfdom.
47
43 Ibid., pp. 146–7; PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1952–63), vyp. vii: Pamiatniki prava
perioda sozdaniia absoliutnoi monarkhii. Vtoraia polovina XVII v., ed. L. V. Cherepnin (1963),
pp. 298–301. See also the decree of 5 March 1677, permitting peasants of the Saviour
monastery who had settled in the town of Iaroslavl’ after the Ulozhenie to remain there
(PRP,vyp.vii,p.297). In 1699 a similar decree was issued for Kazan’ (ibid., p. 302).
44 Hellie, Enserfment,p.250.
45 Ibid., pp. 252–3. Additionally, fines of 20 roubles per year per fugitive were to be collected,
and offending estate stewards were to be beaten with the knout: Vorms, Pamiatniki,
pp. 84–6.
46 Hellie, Slavery,pp.686, 697.
47 Ibid., p. 698.
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