VILLAGE ORGANIZATION

Peasant villages ranged in size from a few dozen households to as many as several hundred. Smaller communities were more common in northerly areas; larger villages prevailed in Ukraine and the Black Earth and steppe regions southeast of Moscow. In addition to the peasants’ houses, large villages might contain a church and, by the early nineteenth century, a tavern or a small store. The fields farmed by the peasants lay around the villages, as did pastures, forests, meadows, streams, and rivers. One or more dirt roads ran through the communities and away to the world beyond.

Peasants lived in small wooden cottages roofed with thatch or timber, surrounded by a fenced yard containing a shed or two, a vegetable garden, a cow or goat, some chickens, and perhaps a few pigs. The buildings, livestock, and tools belonged to the family, as distinct from the land, which was the landowner’s. Most dwellings had a main room furnished with a stove used for heating and cooking, benches, and a large table. There were also shelves and chests, the latter including those belonging to the women of the family, in which they stored their dowry linens and clothes. In the holy corner, a candle‑lit icon draped with embroidered cloths stood on a high shelf. During the winter, livestock sheltered in a lean‑to built against the side of the house or were stabled on the ground floor, while the people lived in the rooms above. Families added bedrooms as their families grew, if they could afford to. Most villages had a common well or two, from which the women carried home the household’s water; some of the larger families dug wells in their yards.

The peasants had structured their ways of farming and governing their communities to meet the demands of their overlords. The village was collectively responsible for producing crops and paying taxes and dues, so it made sense for the households in the community to pool their labor. Communal farming in turn required commune leaders. Chosen from and by the male heads of households, these men conducted negotiations with outsiders–landowners, estate managers, tax collectors, and military recruiters. They also made the major decisions about managing common areas, chiefly meadows and forests, and about farming the fields. The fields were divided into strips and assigned to families according to the number of able‑bodied workers in each household. Because families changed over time as a result of marriages, births, deaths, and the military draft, the elders periodically had to reassign the fields, in a process known as “repartition.”

All these practices reached their fullest development in the central Russian region. In the borderlands, looser controls prevailed because distance weakened the government’s reach, because the government and landowners wanted to attract settlers to these regions, and because the non‑Russian inhabitants–Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, Belarusians, Poles, and a host of less numerous peoples–had different customs of village governance and landowning. Over the decades, serfdom’s controls tightened in the south and west, but the commune and land repartition remained commonest among the Russians.

Most Russian landowners took a less direct role in managing their estates than did their contemporaries elsewhere in Eastern Europe. They were content to let the peasants make most of the farming decisions, run their village affairs, and police one another. Wealthy aristocrats such as Dashkova, who owned dozens of estates scattered across the empire, rarely even saw most of their properties. They entrusted management to bailiffs and stewards, most of whom came from the peasantry. Less affluent nobles, who were the great majority and who lived near their serfs, also tended to delegate substantial authority over day‑to‑day affairs to the elders in the villages. This lightened the workload for the landowners, and it lightened as well the burden of their control over the peasants.

PEASANT PATRIARCHY

Senior men ran their families and the villages. This reminds us that patriarchy regulates not just the relations between women and men but also those among men. Male peasants in Russia lived at the bottom of the power structure, so the list of people they had to obey was a long one. It included the landowner and his or her adult family members and representatives, any other nobles–male and female, old and young–that they might encounter, churchmen, and government agents. Within peasant families there was a hierarchy as well, with older men outranking younger ones. Indeed, many male peasants spent much of their lives under the control of their fathers or uncles, for most peasants were in their forties before they became heads of their own households, and few lived to be seventy. Elsewhere in Europe and in North America, sons chafing under their fathers’ power in this period demanded farms of their own or left the countryside for the cities. Serfdom denied most peasants in Russia these options.

Individual men fell short of the ideal of submission to those with authority over them, of course. There were sons who fought with their fathers and insulted their mothers. Peasants also cheated the landowner and lied to the tax collector. Opposition to senior men in the village was not often tolerated, and young men critical of their elders’ authority had to comfort themselves with the hope that they would live long enough to become family heads themselves. They could also take solace in their right to command the obedience of their wives and the younger members of their families.

The peasants’ code of masculinity praised attributes that served the community. Men were expected to be skilled at farming, physically strong, and hard‑working. Piety was highly regarded, as were frugality, courage, and cleverness. Peasants were encouraged to be good comrades with men their own age, both to facilitate harmony in the village and to build the alliances that would knit together the next generation of elders. A peasant man owed his wife protection and hard work; he owed his children support; and he also served as the boys’ taskmaster and instructor in the duties of manhood.⁴⁷

For their part, women were enjoined to obey older men, the men of their own generation within their family, and older women. They were also taught to be pious, diligent, and skilled at women’s work. Noblewomen lived under the same rules, but the prescriptions of feminine submission, as always, were leavened among the nobility by the prerogatives of class and age. Noblewomen, while submitting to their social equals and superiors, exercised power over all those below them in the social hierarchy. A peasant woman’s sphere of autonomy and authority was much smaller. Peasant women did own property, mainly their dowries, and they were entitled to inherit a “widow’s portion” of about one‑seventh of their husbands’ property. They could not run estates or manage their finances independently.

Peasant women could aspire to become the senior women of their households. The bolshuka (literally “the big one”) wielded significant authority over her children, daughters‑in‑law, and grandchildren. Among the peasants, as among the nobility, mothers were entitled to great respect from their male and female children, and their opinions and wishes were to be listened to. They also supervised the labor of the younger women in the household and were accustomed to ruling junior females with an iron hand. Widows could also become household heads. Rodney Bohac has found that between 1813 and 1861, women headed one‑third of the households in the villages of Manuilovskoe, a large estate in Tver province north of Moscow.⁴⁸

Widows who headed households with grown male children could, with luck and hard work, keep their families together. Those left only with underage youngsters faced a far bleaker future. The work was simply too grueling for one adult to manage on her own. “I had to learn to take complete charge of the household myself, as well as raise two small children,” lamented an aged peasant named Iguminshcheva in the 1890s.⁴⁹ Other families were unlikely to lend a hand because the peasants believed that it was a waste of resources to help a weak family limp along. The best course, they thought, was for a woman to find herself another husband, and that was the path that most young widows took.

FAMILY LIFE

The Russians were more insistent on getting people married and keeping them that way than were many other peoples in Europe. We have seen this as early as Appanage times, expressed in the belief that only older, preferably widowed women should become nuns. Under serfdom, the government assessed taxes according to the number of work teams in a household, and defined a work team as a husband and wife. Unmarried men were not given land allotments, and landowners punished families with unmarried adult children. In the late eighteenth century, V. G. Orlov, a wealthy nobleman, summed up prevailing attitudes in instructions to his estate managers: “It is highly necessary for all girls of marriageable age and bachelors who have achieved manhood to enter into marriage. This is an act pleasing to God; it safeguards morality and wards off many vices.” The landowner specified fines to be levied on parents who did not arrange for their sons to be wed by age twenty‑five, their daughters by twenty.⁵⁰

Few peasant parents required such coercion, for they agreed that marriage was essential to social order and family productivity. Since most villages were small communities where people knew each other well, it was probably often the case that parents began considering how to pair off their children long before those children reached marriageable age: sixteen to eighteen for the girls, eighteen to twenty for the boys.⁵¹ If the village was very small, peasants searched for marriage partners in neighboring villages, and so would periodically arrange gatherings to introduce eligible young people to each other. When a boy’s parents had decided to make an offer to a girl’s family, matchmakers, usually women who were related to the prospective groom, helped negotiate the marriage contract. That contract specified the contents of the bride’s dowry and the size of the fee (bride price) to be paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s to compensate them for the economic loss they would suffer when their daughter left home. After the wedding, a bride moved in with her husband’s family. If wife and husband came to love one another, that was all to the good, but if they did not, their relatives expected them to do their duty by living together with a minimum of acrimony.

Peasants took a cautious attitude toward romantic love and sexuality. They condemned homosexuality and policed the boundaries of masculine and feminine. Men judged effeminate were persecuted. Heterosexuality the peasants sought to confine within the bounds of marriage, but they were not as abstemious as the church wanted them to be. Indeed, peasants in the Russian Empire had one of the highest birthrates in Europe. They punished extramarital sex, because they considered it sinful and also because it caused trouble between families and thereby disrupted village life. Lovemaking by unmarried youths drew the least severe response; there were some occasions, such as the midsummer holiday of St. Ivan Kupala, when parents turned a blind eye as their children paired off for long walks in the woods. Also given fairly wide latitude were betrothed couples. The same cannot be said of adulterers, who drew upon themselves very public censure. Tabooed also was sexual misbehavior within families–incest, adultery between in‑laws, sexual abuse of daughters‑in‑law and children. All such offenses were defined as crimes in church law, but perpetrators were rarely brought to the authorities. Rather, the peasants preferred to mete out their own punishments, which ranged from shaming to physical assault. Because the villagers themselves policed sexual offenses, it is impossible to determine how common such crimes were.

We also know very little about the emotional side of peasant family life. Anthropologists studying peasants around the world have found that children are looked after by and form attachments to many relatives and neighbors. Their parents, occupied with the unending demands of subsistence agriculture, welcome this diffusion of responsibilities and its consequent dilution of emotional ties. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this was the case in Russia as well. Yet the sources also document deep attachments between mothers and their children. This is hardly surprising in a culture that venerated maternal love and enforced maternal authority. In many parts of Russia, girls sang laments when they were betrothed, mourning the fact that they were moving from the loving protection of their mothers to strange new families where people might not be so nice to them. The same fears appear in the memoirs of the noblewomen Labzina and Dolgorukaia.

Less direct evidence of peasant mothering comes from the descriptions of nannies in nineteenth‑century memoirs. The common practice was for noble children to be given as infants into the care of a nanny, usually a servant who might herself be married with her own children. The nanny was the child’s constant companion, taking care of all its physical needs, teaching manners and morals, and accompanying the child on journeys. Many memoirists remembered feeling closer to their nannies than to their mothers; they portrayed these women as kind, loving caregivers and stalwart defenders of their charges. This evidence suggests that peasant women believed a good mother was a strong, no‑nonsense guardian of her children. If she had the time, when work was done, she would also sing lullabies and tell fairy stories.⁵²

Alliances between women were crucial to the well‑being of individual peasant women, families, and the community. Within the family, daughters worked together, took care of younger siblings, and shared confidences. Girls also struck up lasting friendships with girls from other families, and grown women relied on one another’s support during the mundane tasks of daily life and in moments of special celebration or crisis. Women gathered together to birth babies, excluding men. Women also nursed one another’s families through illnesses, and when death came, they washed the bodies of the dead, dressed them, then kept vigil until the funeral and keened laments, as their ancestors had done for generations.

WOMEN’S WORK

Women’s lives were patterned by the seasons, as are those of all farmers. In the winter, which lasted five months even in southerly regions, women occupied themselves with handcrafts, particularly spinning, weaving, and sewing. They gathered together to do this work, and sometimes young men came around to serenade them and to chat with the teenaged girls. Women, men, and children also fed and watered the livestock and mucked out the animals’ bedding. There was always cooking and washing to be done, water to be hauled, livestock to be fed, cows and goats to be milked, eggs to be gathered, cheese and butter to be made, and children to be supervised. Women, particularly the older ones, also nursed sick people and animals, and helped out at the birth of babies in the bathhouses or barns. Holy days required attendance at church. Peasant women also whiled away the long winter nights telling fantastic tales about demons and angels, evil spirits that lurked in the rivers, clever peasants, and talking animals.

When spring broke up the ice in the rivers and brought green shoots to the fields, the pace of village life quickened. First came Easter, the major holiday of the Christian year. Women baked special breads that village elders presented to the landowner, along with salt and eggs, to symbolize the life and fertility that returned with the spring. The landowner responded with gifts of food. The community then attended a long mass in the village church, and afterward held a feast at which musicians played and young people danced, dressed in their holiday clothes. With Easter concluded, the peasants turned to planting. The work eased up a bit in June, after the seed was sown, but by July the hay was ready to mow. From that point until early September, families walked out to the fields at first light, which came very early in these northerly latitudes, and toiled there through the long summer days to bring in the harvest.

The traditional division of labor persisted under serfdom, with regional and ethnic variations. Men did the sowing, because the peasants associated it with the male function in conception. In some Russian villages, the first stalks of ripe grain were cut by an elderly woman of good character–probably because the Earth was conceptualized as a female force that had to be supplicated by a virtuous, grandmotherly woman before its bounty was taken. The peasants still assigned men the heavier work such as plowing and fencing, and women the lighter, such as gleaning the rye fields and reaping oats, flax, and hemp. The terms “heavy” and “light” are relative, for hours of bending over to pick up stalks of grain or cut flax left backs aching and hands bleeding. Women also prepared the day’s food for the harvesters and sometimes went back to the villages to fetch it during the dinner break at midday. Mothers of babies brought them to the fields, swaddled and strapped to backboards, then set them aside in the shade, to be nursed when they cried. Little ones too small to help out with the work were looked after by girls as young as eight.

After the fields were shorn, the peasants processed the fruits of the harvest. Women and men threshed the grain, a laborious process that sometimes continued into the winter months. Women also pickled cabbage, beets, cucumbers, and mushrooms, and dried berries and mushrooms. This work had begun in midsummer, as the first produce and wild plants ripened. Women also prepared raw cabbages, onions, garlic, carrots, and radishes for storage in root cellars. There were fish to salt, and chickens and hogs to butcher. When most of this work ended in October, village women settled down to the slower rhythms of winter.

SPIRITUALITY

We have already seen that Muscovites believed that the supernatural world played a very real part in their daily lives. Their descendants in imperial Russia, nobles and peasants, felt the same. Peasant women believed that God, Jesus, and the angels watched over them, doling out temptations, rewards, and punishments. The Virgin hovered near God’s throne, interceding for sinful humans and sometimes coming to Earth to reveal herself. The saints also looked out for ordinary people, and women felt that the female saints, headed by the Holy Mother, paid special attention to them. There were shrines scattered across the Russian Empire to which peasant women made pilgrimages to pray and to seek healing from a miracle‑working icon or a holy monk or nun.

Peasant women in Russia believed, as did peasant women all over Europe, that evil spirits were active in their world. Satan headed a huge company of demons and sprites who were at best mischievous, at worst dangerous. Demons possessed people and made them ill. Nasty female spirits, the rusalki, lay in wait in the rivers to attack the unsuspecting. The peasants also continued to believe that sometimes their neighbors used black magic against them.

Poised between benign and malicious spirits, peasant women endeavored to propitiate both. They prayed in the approved Christian way, wore crosses, and kept candles burning in the icon corners of their houses. They dabbled in white magic, preparing potions and making up spells and incantations. At certain places–bathhouses, crossroads, forests, and riverbanks–and at certain times–during childbirth, at midnight, on midsummer’s eve–the barrier between the natural and the supernatural weakened, raising the risk of evil enchantments. So women passed down through the generations defensive spells and prayers. One, to be said by a mother over a child about to set out on a journey, concluded, “And may you be, my child, protected by my strong word… in the night and at midnight, every hour and half‑hour, on the road and on the path, sleeping and waking, from the evil force, from unclean spirits; may you be kept safe from sudden death, from grief and misfortune; may you be saved on the water from drowning, guarded from being burned in fire.”⁵³

The church deeply disapproved of much of this, seeing it as a survival of pagan superstitions, which it was. The spells to ward off evil spirits very likely came down from the distant past when the ancestors of the Slavs and the Rus were animists. Over the centuries, the beliefs and the spells had persisted, veneered with Christianity. This mixture of pagan and Christian ideas was common throughout the rest of Europe, for everywhere peasants were vulnerable to a host of calamities, from bad weather to disease, the natural causes of which they poorly understood. Magical beliefs provided explanations and offered ways of coping, as they still do for people around the world.

Russian peasant women also sometimes beat their children, quarreled, flirted with one another’s husbands, passed on poisonous gossip, lied, and stole. In short, they were no more consistently virtuous or consistently selfish than any other group of human beings. In general, their ways of doing things were well adapted to the exigencies of their situation. That the population and food production of rural Russia increased steadily during the period 1700–1861 is a testament to the ingenuity with which peasants, female and male, responded to their demanding environment.

Urban Women

There were many other groups of women in the expanding Russian Empire. Within the Russian heartland, towns contained, as they had for centuries, artisans, laborers, market vendors, and small traders. At the top of the urban pyramid were the merchants, whose tax burdens and economic privileges were set out in government charters. Russia’s merchantry never enjoyed the corporate rights that had defined the merchants of France or England as important members of their societies since the medieval period. Furthermore, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russia’s economy did not experience the rapid expansion that fostered the growth of cities and empowered the middle classes in Western Europe. Consequently the merchants remained politically insignificant and wedded to Muscovite traditions well into the nineteenth century.

The lives of poorer women in the cities ran along traditional tracks as well. They participated in the economic ventures of their families as urban women had in past. Most lived in households containing nuclear families, that is, parents and minor children. The homes of wealthier merchants also included live‑in servants and employees. Senior women managed the housework, as had their predecessors in the era of The Domostroi. Poorer women sold wares and food in public markets, worked in taverns, and assisted male artisans in manufacturing consumer goods such as textiles, tools, and utensils. Poverty was an endemic problem that particularly afflicted widows. Daniel Kaiser has found that such women made up 55 percent of the urban poor in ten Russian cities in the early eighteenth century. Some of those women received help from relatives or charities, although not enough, evidently, to raise them out of poverty.⁵⁴