Introduction

‘Nowhere is a large family a greater blessing than among the Russian peasants. Sons always mean additional shares of land for the head of the family … In western Europe a large family is an immense burden and nuisance for the lower classes; in Russia a large family represents the peasant's greatest wealth’ So observed the German political economist August von Haxthausen of the peasantry of the central provinces of European Russia in the 1840s. Publication of the journal of his travels is credited with awakening the interest of educated Russian society in the peasantry, and leaving with Russian intellectuals the suggestion that Russia retained features of the traditional society that had disappeared in western Europe. Haxthausen attributed the large and complex households of central Russia to a unique cultural configuration and a peculiar Russian need for ‘secure family ties’. Frederick Le Play, travelling in the province of Orenburg in 1853, was also struck by the large size and complexity of serf households, which he attributed to the implacable authority of the peasant family patriarch.

These descriptions of the peasant family by two eminent western European observers, while arresting the attention of Russians and non- Russians alike, were not, however, the first to be written. One of the earliest published descriptions of serf peasant households appeared in Russia in 1829. It signalled growing awareness by gentry landlords that to improve rural estates something must be known about their basic units of labour and taxation – the serf family/household.