THE DEMANDS OF SERFDOM

Serfdom, the binding of peasants to lifelong service to the landowners on whose estates they were born, developed across Eastern Europe in the early modern period, long after it had waned in the West. By the eighteenth century it was practiced in Russia, many of the eastern German principalities, Poland, the Austrian Empire, and the Balkans. Serfdom then came under heavy criticism during the Enlightenment, and by the mid‑nineteenth century it had been abolished almost everywhere. The Austrian Empire was one of the last to end it, in 1848. This left Russia alone in preserving an institution widely considered unjust and economically backward. Nicholas accepted these criticisms, but feared the destabilizing effects of emancipation.

His fears were warranted, if only because there were so many peasants in Russia. In Nicholas’s time they constituted 85 percent of the population. Their numbers had increased from an estimated 9 million individuals in 1697 to 32 million in 1857. Half of these people were females. A majority were serfs. They included ethnic Russians (the majority), as well as Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic peasants. A small minority of the serfs worked in mining and manufacturing. The rest farmed.⁴⁴

The least oppressed were state and crown serfs, who belonged to the government, the royal family, and, until 1762, the church.⁴⁵ They constituted a little less than 50 percent of all serfs in the eighteenth century, a bit more than that in the nineteenth. The state was a less demanding master than the nobles, and so state and crown serfs paid lower dues and taxes and were supervised less closely than were the so‑called seigniorial peasants, who lived on nobles’ estates. The government also made efforts to improve the situation of its serfs. In 1801 it permitted them to own land and go into business as traders or factory owners. Thereafter periodic efforts were made to ensure that these serfs had adequate amounts of land.

The bondage of the peasants who served nobles was worse, because they had to meet most of the demands the government made on state, crown, and seigniorial serfs as well as those made by their landlords. The government taxed them and required them to perform occasional services such as repairing roads or supplying horses and wagons to the army and postal service. They had to turn over some of their young men for lifelong service in the military. And they had to provide their village priests with plots to farm, pay them to perform christenings, weddings, and funerals, and bear some of the cost of maintaining church buildings.

These exactions were laid on top of those imposed by the landowners. The landowners were entitled to a substantial share of the crops grown on the estates and could also require serfs to do construction and maintenance and work as house servants. Furthermore, seigniorial serfs were governed by their masters. Landowners had to give permission for a serf to travel away from home or marry a serf who belonged to another master. Serfs who misbehaved could be exiled to a distant estate or, in the case of men, sent into the army. Landowners could also discipline serfs by beating them with a vicious multi‑thonged whip called the knout.

The few laws limiting the nobles’ power were rarely enforced. Landowners bought and sold serfs, even though such transactions were illegal. They arranged the marriages of serfs without the consent of either parents or brides‑to‑be. Sexual relationships, consensual and abusive, between serfs and masters were common. Murdering serfs was illegal, but Catherine issued laws that denied serfs the right to take complaints against their landowners to the courts. Brutal landowners could be brought to justice only if other landowners reported them to the authorities.

By the nineteenth century, one third or more of Russia’s landowners were women, many of whom, in keeping with tradition, personally managed their properties. Did they exercise their powers differently from men? The reports are mixed. There were exemplary female landowners such as Ekaterina Dashkova, the earnest believer in serfdom who toiled alongside her peasants. In the early nineteenth century, Sophia Stroganova established a village school and supervised the improvement of farming on her estates. She was one of the few female members of the Free Economic Society, which publicized progressive farming techniques. Dashkova’s and Stroganova’s polar opposite was Daria Saltykova, who was convicted of murdering thirty‑eight of her serfs in the late 1760s.

Between monsters like Saltykova, who appear to have been few, and progressive women like Dashkova and Stroganova, also exceptional, the majority of women probably lay. In her memoirs, Anna Labzina praised her mother’s solicitude for her serfs, and suggested thereby that such solicitude was expected of women. Nineteenth‑century memoirists speak of affectionate relationships between house servants and their owners, especially between nannies and the children they tended. But literary sources also speak of the routine abuse of serfs, particularly house servants, by their mistresses. All this evidence is too anecdotal to support reliable generalizations about gender differences. It does document the virtually unlimited power female and male landowners held over the people who provided their daily bread.⁴⁶