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18 results

  • 11 - Russian Slavery and Serfdom, 1450–1804

  • from PART IV - SLAVERY AND SERFDOM IN EASTERN EUROPE
  • Edited by David Eltis, Emory University, Atlanta, Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester, New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Slavery
    Published online:
    28 September 2011
    Print publication:
    25 July 2011, pp 275-296

  • Summary

    Medieval Russia (Ukraine, Belorussia, Great Russia) did not know serfdom. There was free land everywhere, and no elite social group that depended on agriculture for its livelihood. Population was very sparse, but perceived labor shortages could not be made up by attempts to enserf the peasants en masse. As the number of political jurisdictions multiplied, they had disputes over labor, but there were no political or judicial institutions that could enforce serfdom by binding peasants to the land. Those who indirectly depended on peasant agricultural output had to go to find the peasants to tax them. Agriculture, moreover, was of the slash-and-burn type, with the result that peasants farmed a different site roughly every three years. Landlords were few in the pre-1350 era, and any landlord who tried to control peasant labor had to contend with a peasantry used to moving, and who would pick up and move away from any landlord desirous of collecting rent. Slavery, by contrast, was an ancient institution in Russia and effectively was abolished in the 1720s. Serfdom, which began in 1450, evolved into near-slavery in the eighteenth century and was finally abolished in 1906. Serfdom in its Russian variant could not have existed without the precedent and presence of slavery.

  • 16 - The law

  • from Part II - The Expansion, Consolidation and Crisis of Muscovy (1462–1613)
  • Edited by Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006, pp 360-386

  • Summary

    This chapter illustrates the evolution of middle Muscovite law. The law tried to support institutions of private property and protect commerce and business. One of the main functions of law was to provide financial support for officialdom and, in a minor way, maintain the army. Finally, like all law everywhere, the Russkaia pravda served as a device for resolving conflicts, regulating compensation for damages, and creating a more humane society-replacing the law of the jungle. The chapter talks about the Muscovite Sudebniki, and two other Russian law codes, the Pskov Judicial Charter and the Novgorod Judicial Charter. The codes represent the best of north-west Russian law of the time, which was considerably more advanced than the contemporary law of Muscovy. The immunity charter was issued by a ruling prince to a private individual or Church body granting the immunity holder exemption either from taxation or from the jurisdiction of the issuer's court, or both.

  • 23 - The economy, trade and serfdom

  • from Part III - Russia Under the First Romanovs (1613–1689)
  • Edited by Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006, pp 539-558

  • Summary

    The Russian economy in the period 1613-89 was quite sophisticated. All commerce in Russia was based on cash or barter. Russia had no banks until the middle of the eighteenth century, and the merchants were not Rothschild-types who could proffer loans to the government or to each other. The Muscovite economy did not provide well for most Russians. Lesser yields led to famine and starvation, which occurred roughly once in every seven years in Russia. Monasteries also suffered from the dislocations caused by the Time of Troubles. The Odoevskii legislative commission was one of the most efficient in Russian history. 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 important written monument in all of Russian history before the nineteenth century, with perhaps the exception of the chronicles. The evidentiary bases for the status of slavery and serfdom differed dramatically.

  • 12 - The Peasantry

  • from Part II - The Expansion, Consolidation and Crisis of Muscovy (1462–1613)
  • Edited by Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006, pp 286-297

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the situation of the Russian peasant with that of the American farmer. Russian peasants lived in villages and not on isolated homesteads. The vast majority of the population in the years 1462-1613 were peasants who were becoming serfs, perhaps 85 percent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 percent were slaves. The period 1462-1613 witnessed intervention by the 'Agapetus state' in the lives of its subjects unparalleled in previous history. 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 two of the three basic factors of the economy, all the land and labour. This had little impact on peasant methods of farming or material culture, but it laid down the course for Russian history until 1991.

  • [no title]

  • Richard Hellie
  • Journal:
    Slavic Review / Volume 43 / Issue 3 / Fall 1984
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 January 2017, pp. 546-549
    Print publication:
    Fall 1984
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