Let's sing a song guys

Yes, about our life,

Yes, about your goryushko:

That we all live in captivity

We have a reputation for serfdom ...

From folk songs

Duties and duties of serfs

On the socio-economic structure Russian Empire many scholarly works have been written. Thanks to the meticulousness of researchers, science was enriched with useful knowledge about the economic life of that time, such as, for example, the size of the average peasant plowing and the features of crop rotation in different provinces. But a multitude of these and other economic details are unable to convey the spirit of the era, without which all separate and even the most important data become a meaningless set of numbers.

About what Russia was like in the 18th - mid-19th centuries, what was the goal of the heavy sacrifices made by the people "on the altar of the fatherland" - professionals and amateurs, soilmen and Westerners argue tirelessly. The more remarkable is the objective evidence of a contemporary. In his book on the history of the Ryazan nobility, the chairman of the provincial archeographic commission A.D. Povalishin remarkably accurately characterizes the period of domination of serfdom: “ All in essence tended to give the landowner the means of living, decent to a noble nobleman.

Several hundred thousand "noble" Russian landowners, at the behest of the government, began to personify both the state and the nation. At the same time, millions of revision souls in Russia were referred to only as "louts" and "rude", "mean people." And the concept of "people" in its real sublime sense was found only in poetic works addressed to the distant past.

The exclusive position of the gentlemen was finally enshrined in the "Charter to the nobility", given by Catherine II in 1785. The text of the "letter" is full of enumeration of noble privileges and rights. But most of all, this document is remarkable for its omissions. And the most important of them is the complete non-reference in the text about serfs. This silence carried a terrible meaning - it finally turned the living Russian peasants into a simple material part of the landowners' property. As it should be in a slave-owning society, the whole meaning of the life of a serf, his purpose now consisted solely in providing for his master and satisfying any of his needs.

The forced population of an ordinary landowner's estate turned out to be rather motley, and each had his own duties in it. But the most numerous inhabitants of any estate were, of course, peasants. The range of peasant duties was extremely wide and was never limited to work on arable land. By order from the master's office, serfs had to perform any construction work, pay taxes in natural products, work in factories and factories arranged by their landowner, or leave their native lands forever and go on a long journey if the master decided to populate the lands acquired by him in other provinces .

According to Ivan Pososhkov, the author of one of the first Russian economic treatises, The Book of Poverty and Wealth, landlords in their economic activity guided simple rule: "Do not let the peasant grow, but shear him like a sheep naked."

One of the main ways of extracting profit from peasant labor was the taxation of dues. At first glance, this duty may not seem too burdensome. The quitrent peasant annually paid the master a certain amount of money and in all other respects had the opportunity to work and live relatively independently. The quitrent system was also convenient for the landowners. It provided a regular income from the estate and at the same time eliminated the need to delve into economic affairs. And yet, as a rule, estates located in non-chernozem provinces and where agriculture did not bring the necessary income were transferred to quitrent. In a subsistence economy, "live" money was a rarity. To pay off the landowner, the peasants went to work in the cities. There they were employed in factories, earned some kind of craft or became cab drivers. Often, entire villages and villages specialized in one or another craft. So, the village of Pavlovo on the Oka, the patrimony of the Sheremetevs, was famous for its locksmiths and blacksmiths, among whom there were quite a few wealthy.

But in most cases, quitrent peasants found themselves in an extremely difficult situation. The gentlemen, in addition to money, demanded the delivery of natural supplies - food, firewood, hay, canvas, hemp and flax. An example of natural lordly requisitions is a list from the estate of Colonel Avram Lopukhin in the village of Guslitsy: 3,270 rubles in money, 11,000 pounds of hay, oats, three-arshin firewood, 100 rams, 40,000 cucumbers, chopped cabbage 250 buckets, 200 chickens, 5,000 eggs, also berries, mushrooms, vegetables and other things - "how much is needed for household use."

A foreign traveler was shocked when he once witnessed the fulfillment of a natural duty on a noble estate: “Like bees, peasants carry large sacks of flour, cereals, oats and other living sacks, beef banners, pork carcasses, fat rams, many yard and wild birds, cow's butter, basket eggs, honeycombs or pure tubs of honey, the ends of canvases, bundles of household cloths.

In addition, the peasants were obliged every year to put up carpenters for the construction of residential and commercial buildings in different estates, to dig ponds and so on at the worldly expense. They supported the steward and his family at their own expense. At the request of the landowner, the peasants on their own carts and horses set off on the road for various master's needs.

S.T. Aksakov begins his “Family Chronicle” like this: “It became crowded for my grandfather to live in the Simbirsk province, in his ancestral homeland, granted to his ancestors from the kings of Moscow ...” and household members. Of course, no one asked the resettled peasants whether it was crowded for them and whether they wanted to part with their native places. But more significant was the fact that all the costs of resettlement fell on the peasants themselves. S.T. Aksakov does not delve into economic details, so we will have to turn to the data on the estate of the mentioned A. Lopukhin. When he decided to transfer several peasant families from the Moscow region to his Oryol patrimony, fur coats, sledges and many other things were bought for them that were necessary for acquiring a household in a new place. This paternal concern of the landlord laid an additional burden on the peasants who remained in place, since everything was bought at their expense. But, in addition, those who remained had to pay dues for the resettled and perform other duties up to a new revision. There were too many expenses and duties, and their number was constantly increasing, as a result of which the Lopukhin peasants, in a petition addressed to the empress, complained that under the rule of their master they "came into extreme ruin and poverty."

True, there were landowners who tried not to burden their peasants too much. If they demanded, along with the quitrent money, certain duties in kind, including the delivery of products, then they did this not in excess of the established payments, but included them in the amount of the quitrent. But such scrupulous gentlemen were a real rarity, an exception to the general rule.

In general, everything on the estate, including the fate of the peasants, their well-being or ruin, depended entirely on the will of the owner. Neither law nor custom determined any other measure in the relationship between masters and serfs. A kind and wealthy, or just a frivolous landowner could appoint an easy quitrent and not show up on the estate at all for many years. But most often it happened differently, and the peasants, in addition to money and natural duties, also had to cultivate the master's land. So, for example, the peasants of one landowner in the Moscow district, in addition to the quitrent of 4 thousand rubles, plowed for the master 40 acres of spring bread and 30 acres of rye. During the year, they carried firewood, hay and table supplies to the capital's landowner's house, which required several hundred carts; built a new house in one of the estates, for which, in addition to their labor and timber, they spent about one thousand rubles from personal funds. The peasants of the Chief Provision Meister Alonkin, in a petition addressed to Emperor Paul, complained that the master had imposed on them a quitrent of 6 rubles per soul, and, moreover, was forcing them to cultivate the landowner's land in the amount of 600 acres. In addition, Alonkin “sends both men and women to work every day to dig ponds, and at work he mercilessly and inhumanly tortured me with beatings. Some of them died from these beatings, and other pregnant women, from merciless corporal punishment, threw out dead babies, and so through its very inhumanity everyone came to a poor brotherhood ...

It was not easier for the peasants even if the masters did not force them to perform unnecessary work, but preferred simply to increase the amount of dues. Often such payments were so high that they completely ruined the peasant economy. The peasants of General-Anshef Leontiev were driven to such extremes by the extortions of the landowner that they were eventually forced to eat alms. In vain begging their master to reduce the burden of payments, they turned to the empress with a desperate petition, in which they admitted that even if they sold “the last of their houses”, they would not be able to pay even a third of the dues assigned to them. At the same time, the steward, on the orders of Leontiev, “beats and tortures them mercilessly” with their wives and children.

The peasant N. Shipov recalled: “Our landowner had strange reasons for increasing the quitrent. One day a landowner and his wife came to our settlement. As usual, rich peasants, dressed in a festive way, came to him with a bow and various gifts; there were also women and girls, all dressed up and adorned with pearls. The lady looked at everyone with curiosity and then, turning to her husband, said: “Our peasants have such elegant dresses and jewelry; they must be very rich and it doesn’t cost them anything to pay us dues.” Without thinking twice, the landowner immediately increased the amount of dues.

There are many examples of such arbitrariness, they were common, and precisely because the peasants were considered simply as an animated means to provide their master with the necessary conditions for life, "befitting a noble nobleman." Povalishin tells about one of these "noble" landowners. A certain L., a squandered officer, after a long absence, suddenly rushed into his village and immediately significantly increased the already considerable dues. “What are you going to do,” the peasants complained, “the master must be paid, but there is nothing to pay. Recently he was here himself and collected dues. The sec of those who don't pay. You are my peasants, he told us, you must help me out; I have nothing but this overcoat ... One was told that there was nowhere to take it, he seced it, - sec like a dog; ordered to sell cattle, but no one bought. Who will buy hungry cattle - bones and skin? He tore off 1,000 rubles from those who were richer and left. He ordered the rest to be sent to him.

Such a visit by a nobleman to his patrimony is more like a robbery raid. But it was even harder for the peasants if the gentleman laid a hand on their belongings, and even affectionate, as his master was remembered by the former serf Savva Purlevsky.

The landowner arrived in the village with his wife and immediately walked down the street, carefully looking around everything, going into houses, asking the peasants about life. He behaved simply with the peasants, knew how to win over. He answered sedately to the greeting of the secular gathering, with visible respect for the assembled old people. The steward, on behalf of the village, bowed to the master, saying that with the whole world they pray to God for the health of the master and honor the memory of his recently deceased papa. The master smiled, answered: “And this, old people, is not bad. Thanks for the memory." But then somehow he suddenly got down to business that no one had time to come to his senses: “But do not forget that we need money now. We don't want to increase the dues, but here's what we'll do. Collect us a lump sum of two hundred thousand rubles. As you are all wealthy people, it is not difficult for you to fulfill our desire. A? What do you think?"

Since the peasants were silent in confusion from what they heard, the master took their silence for a positive answer: “Look, peasants, so that it is brought in properly!” But then the gathering exploded with shouts: “No, father, we can’t!” “Is it a joke to collect two hundred thousand!” "Where do we get them?"

And at home, look at what they have set up, ”the gentleman objected, grinning.

But the gathering did not let up: “We feed on fishing, we pay dues without surplus. What else?

Purlevsky continues: “Hearing such a decisive refusal, the master looked at us, smiled again, turned around, took the lady by the arm, ordered the steward to bring the horses and left immediately ... Two months later they again gathered a gathering, and then the master’s decree was read which frankly says: "On the occasion of a loan in the Board of Trustees of 325 thousand for twenty-five years, interest and repayment of the debt require about 30 thousand a year, which is supplied to the indispensable duty of the patrimonial board to collect annually from the peasants, in addition to the previous dues of 20 thousand; and all the annual fee of 50 thousand is spread out at the discretion of specially chosen people, so that no arrears are attributed to anyone, otherwise, under the responsibility of the steward, non-payers will be, the young - without a queue, were handed over to the soldiers, and those unfit for service - sent to work in Siberian iron factories.

In silent silence, interrupted by sighs, the reading of the formidable order ended. At that moment, for the first time in my life, I felt the sadness of my serfdom… Such a huge tax frightened everyone to the extreme. He seemed to us and illegal. But what was to be done? At that time, peasants were strictly forbidden to file complaints against the masters ... "

The quitrent was often an individual duty, when it was imposed not on the entire population of the estate, but on individual people who brought income to the master with their craft or art. The economic landowners, as a rule, carefully selected among the peasant children capable of this or that activity and gave them for training. Having matured, such serf masters and artisans regularly paid the master most of the money they earned.

Talented musicians, artists, artists were especially appreciated. They, in addition to bringing in significant income, contributed to the growth of the prestige of their master. But the personal fate of such people was tragic. Having received, at the whim of the master, a brilliant education, often living abroad and in St. Petersburg, where many, unaware of their origin, treated them as equals, having achieved mastery in their art, serf artists forgot that they were just an expensive toy. in the hands of the owner. At any moment, their imaginary well-being could be broken by the fleeting whim of the landowner.

The serf man of the landowner B., Polyakov, graduated from the Academy of Painting, received many awards and distinctions. Representatives of the most famous aristocratic families ordered portraits from him, and the artist received significant fees for each work. But his master wanted the artist to serve him as a postilion. In vain did Polyakov's teachers and patrons fuss about mitigating his fate. The landowner was inexorable, and the law was entirely on his side. The fate of Polyakov was tragic. A contemporary reports in his memoirs that he was extradited to the owner and “on the insistent order of his master, accompanied him on the back of the carriage around St. Petersburg, and he happened to throw out the steps of the carriage in front of those houses ... where he himself used to be honored as a gifted artist. Polyakov soon drank himself in a circle and disappeared without a trace. After that, the council of the Academy decided only that from now on, in order to avoid such unfortunate cases, not to accept serfs as students without a vacation pay from the landowner.

Evidence of such fates is found in many memoirists, Russians and foreigners. The Frenchman de Passenance tells the story of a serf musician. After learning his art in Italy from the best masters of music, the young man returned to his homeland at the request of the landowner. The master was pleased with his success and forced him to play in front of a crowded society that had gathered that evening in the master's house. Wanting to surprise his guests with it as a rare curiosity, the master ordered to play without interruption for many hours in a row. When the violinist asked permission to rest, the gentleman flared up: “Play! And if you are capricious, then remember that you are my slave; remember the sticks! Weaned from the customs established in his native country, driven to despair by fatigue and the hopelessness of his situation, the humiliated man ran out of the hall into the people's room and cut off his finger on his left hand with an ax. Passenance quotes him as saying: "Damn talent if it could not save me from slavery!"

This act, in the spirit of the ancient Romans, was not appreciated in the noble house. As a result, he could only have a cruel punishment in the stable and an eternal exile in a remote village, where the former musician had to take care of cattle or perform other menial work until the end of his days.

The realization of complete lack of rights and helplessness led to the fact that serfs, who for various reasons joined a different life for a short time and were again plunged into slavery, committed suicide or became an inveterate drunkard. These incidents, sometimes mentioned in the "noble" society as a funny anecdote, led foreign visitors to amazement and horror. They could not understand in what incomprehensible way in the Russian aristocrats the outward gloss of civilization and barbaric despotism are combined.

* * *

But most of the serfs were prudently delivered by their masters and the care of the government from the temptation of glory and mental anguish.

The vast majority of them not only did not study in Italy with the best painters and musicians, but never left their native village for the nearest county town. They worked all their lives in the corvee.

The reason for the extremely difficult situation of the corvée peasants, which was recognized by everyone, from private individuals to the empress herself, was the uncertainty of the size of their duties to the landowner. Throughout the 18th and until the middle of the 19th century, enlightened nobles submitted notes and reports “in the highest name” in which they proposed certain measures to change this situation. Catherine herself and her successors repeatedly stated the need to legally limit arbitrariness - but for the entire time of the existence of serfdom, the government did not dare to take any practical measures that could really alleviate the fate of the peasants.

The Cathedral Code of 1649 only silently stipulates the prohibition to force people to work on Sundays and public holidays. In the hundred years that have passed since the publication of the Code, landowners everywhere ignored these timid legislative restrictions. And forced by circumstances, the decision of Paul I “on three-day corvee”was exclusively advisory in nature and was almost never performed. Not only the number of corvee days, but also the duration of work during the day depended on the arbitrariness of the landowner. This duration was often such that it captured even part of the night, leaving the peasants not even the dark time of the day to work in their fields. In such a situation, the initiative of some of the nobles of the Oranienbaum and Yamburg districts of the St. Petersburg province, who defined clear working standards for their peasants, looked almost the height of humanity: no more than 16 hours / day in the summer months.

In the absence of rules in the same county, neighboring landlords practiced different terms of corvée. Some gentlemen introduced on their estates a custom that was completely ruinous for the peasant economy, when the serfs worked non-stop on the landowner's arable land until the entire circle of rural work was completed, and only after that they were released to their plots.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that many landlords came up with the idea of ​​completely liquidating individual peasant allotments and including them in the master's plowing. The peasants, deprived of any kind of personal economy, now completely turned into rural slaves. This ugly phenomenon of Russian reality during the times of the empire, which developed from corvee unlimited by law, was called "months."

Radishchev gives a detailed description of such a slave-owning plantation: “This nobleman Someone forced all the peasants, their wives and children to work for himself all the days of the year. And so that they would not die of hunger, he gave them a certain amount of bread, known under the name of the month. Those who did not have families did not receive a month, but, as was the custom of the Lacedaemonians, they feasted together in the master's court, using empty shti to keep the stomach in the meat-eater, and on fasting and fasting days, bread with kvass. True breaks happened only on Holy Week.

* * *

Ruthless exploitation brought the peasants not only to ruin, but to complete despair. They turned to their masters, begging them to at least somewhat enter into their position and reduce the heavy oppression, indicating that they were not able to pay the dues imposed on them and fulfill the duties. Here is one of the typical examples of such petitions: “Our sovereign! They ran to Your Excellency and tearfully asked us, your orphans, from the above-mentioned dues for the second half of the payment, for all our squalor and beggary, to release us until the next year, so that we would not be completely ruined from that, and from others burdening to defend. And about that, our sovereign, have mercy and make a merciful decree ... "

The hope for the pity and justice of the landowners was rarely justified, and as a rule, a "merciful" decree was not followed. On the contrary, a strict order flew from the master to the manager of the estate to stop the "rebellion", to teach the guilty and petitioners a lesson "at home" - that is, it is understandable - to flog, arrears and dues to collect in full.

Of course, relations between the peasants and the landlords developed in different ways, they did not always begin and end with punishments and oppression. Some owners painted detailed sets of rules for their estates and forced not only serfs to follow them, but made them obligatory both for managers and for themselves. There were those who, contrary to the permissiveness provided by the laws, independently limited the amount of dues, the number of corvee days; and if, in addition, they demanded contributions in kind, then only on account of the amount of dues, as, for example, Suvorov did in his estates. Other gentlemen supported the peasants in the famine years.

And yet these details did not change the main thing in the mutual position of serfs and nobles to each other - the legislation and the government of the empire, the entire course of the development of Russian statehood, in fact, turned the peasants into the working inventory of the landowner's estate. Such a utilitarian view of the peasants, of course, led not only to a constant increase in demands for an increase in the number and size of their duties, but also suggested a natural way to collect them. Therefore, violence and the whip will forever remain symbols of the serf era.

Slavophile A. Koshelev, after becoming acquainted with the environment of the district nobility, wrote: “A good landowner is a happy accident, a rare exception to the general rule; the vast majority of owners, of course, are not like that ... but even among landlords who are considered good, the life of peasants and courtyard people is extremely difficult.

The serfs of the just, though demanding Suvorov, nevertheless complained to him that they had come "in extreme decline and ruin", and in reality this was true. But the reaction of the famous commander to the requests of his “slaves” is more remarkable - having got bored with burdensome peasant appeals, he drew up instructions on how to apply from now on to the name of the landowner. The list of these rules was in fact nothing more than a mocking joke, and was intended to confuse inexperienced, almost entirely illiterate peasants. Here is this document: “You should speak by articles and articles. Every thing, every part of every thing to interpret in detail and take into account, one part to consider with the other; compare burden with utility. Without deciding one part to another, do not proceed. If in which part there is a big obstacle, an imaginary impossibility, misunderstanding and confusion, leave it to the end. Start solving parts with the easiest parts ... having white paper, on one half of the page, mean obstacles, misunderstandings, doubts; on the other half of the page to facilitate, explain, refute and destroy them. This is sometimes done by similitude and substitution. Observe and look at my rules of the world.

Not understanding the aristocratic jokes and not receiving an answer to their aspirations, the serfs had no choice but to turn to the imperial throne in search of protection from oppression. The texts of many of these petitions, which have survived to this day, sincerely and artlessly describe what the peasants had to endure from their masters.

On behalf of his illiterate fellow villagers, a certain literate Akim Vasilyev turned to Alexander I: “Our owner began to oppress with exorbitant dues and other duties, forcing them to fulfill the requirements with threats and tyranny to such an extent that many of my trustees, having been punished mercilessly, died, while others, fearing to undergo the same fate, hid for a long time, leaving their homes and families. Enduring tyranny and ruin for four years ... my trustees, not finding the means to rid themselves of such a violent yoke, entrusted me to intercede at the throne of Your Imperial Majesty for the most merciful view of the unfortunate fate of loyal subjects ... "

From other appeals: “Falling to Your Grace to the throne, our most merciful sovereign, with our most faithful third (! - B T.) petition ... this lady of ours completely ruined us and brought us to extreme misery, so that she took away our arable land from us peasant land and hay meadows and our peasant bread she took away into her possession. All property was stolen, our horses and cows were taken into their possession, we were driven out of our houses ... Most merciful sovereign, look with your most merciful and philanthropic eye to us, the great suffering and perishing from our lady Zdraevskaya, that we cannot hide death from her attack!

“Weakened at the master's work, neither in winter nor in summer does he give a single day to work for himself, nor the resurrection; that’s why everyone went into the world, we feed on the name of Christ ... "

“Our aforementioned master completely ruined the peasants with his unwilling work ...”

“By falling at the most sanctified feet of Your Imperial Majesty, we dare to explain: as this lord of ours began to rule over us, we do not have a day or a night of rest from his work, driving us out, male and female, both on holidays and on highly solemn days, and forever we are at work at distilleries ... He crossed up to several hundred people with whips, sparing neither the old nor the small, so that in that place he left three small ones, and three large ones, slightly alive and mutilated, who are now dying ... "

“They began to beat us and beat us without mercy so that without a trace they left us beaten and exhausted, barely alive, up to 100 people. After this, on the orders of our Mr. Vikulin, his clerk came to our villages and beat our two belly women until they threw dead babies out of their bellies, and then these women lost their lives from beatings. The same clerk of our three peasants took their lives ... Your Imperial Majesty! If we remain in his possession further, then he will not leave even half of us alive ... "

How fair were the complaints of the peasants and how cynical and consumerist the attitude of the masters was towards them, can be seen from the following frank letter from one landowner of the Kazan province to his headman regarding the collection of arrears: “Don’t write to me about the peasants, that they are poor and go around the world. : me it's a knife; I want to ruin thieves and bring them worse than before - they are so dear to me; almost I am allowed to walk around the world with a body from them. I hope and hope to collect up to 1000 rubles without any hesitation ... "

The "most merciful" sovereign was also in no hurry to respond to the peasants' prayers. In the vast majority of cases, the hopes of serfs for fair protection from the imperial throne were not justified. Instead, petitioners who dared to violate the decrees on the ban on complaining about their masters were punished with whips and returned back to the landowners.

The Romanovs were the largest owners of serf "souls" in Russia. IN early XIX century in the personal possession of members of the imperial family was about 3 million peasants. But it was not this circumstance that forced the government to remain deaf to the petitions of their enslaved subjects. The government tried not to interfere in the relationship between the landlords and the serfs, since it was interested in the absolute power of the landowner over the peasants on the estate in order to properly make payments to the state treasury.

After Peter I introduced the poll tax, which was imposed on the entire "ignoble" male population of the empire, the task arose to ensure the proper receipt of money. To do this, they first resorted to an extremely peculiar method invented by the “reformer tsar”. For each military unit, villages and volosts were recorded that were obliged to support it, and this military formation in peacetime, he lodged in the area assigned to him, serving as a reliable guarantee of the timely payment of taxes. The benefit, according to Peter, was that the necessary funds for the maintenance of the army had to go directly to those for whom they were intended, bypassing intermediary bureaucratic instances.

In practice, the implementation of this idea looked like this: in addition to the ruinous expenses for building barracks and providing the military with everything necessary, the peasants suffered from arbitrary extortions, violence and robberies, since the soldiers did not embarrass themselves with delicate treatment of civilians. The officers of the units stationed in the villages treated the villagers as if they were their own serfs, which also caused conflicts with local landowners who did not want to sacrifice their rights.

Subsequently, and very soon, such a system of collecting taxes was abandoned, placing exclusively on the noble landowners the duty to monitor the collection of taxes from their peasants without arrears. From 1722, the landlords were made responsible for the payment of the poll tax by the peasants, and also carried out whole line other administrative and police functions.

But the nobility used the expansion of their powers almost exclusively for personal purposes, not being too zealous in caring for state interests. Tax arrears accumulated over many years, while quitrent money and other duties that the peasants owed to the masters were received, as a rule, without delay and in full.

Debts also arose largely due to the fact that the peasants were simply unable to pay the necessary amount of tax to the state. After all, they paid a poll tax from their plots, which they often did not have time to cultivate because they either worked daily on corvee, or collected funds for the master's dues.

In addition, the state required the peasants to perform other duties, among which was the obligation to lay roads, transport various goods on their horses and carts, and so on. Sometimes peasants were taken away from their families and farms for many months, sent to road or construction work. Hard work was not paid by the government in any way, only in rare cases a meager food ration was issued, but most often the unwitting builders had to feed themselves at their own expense. The landlords were forced to put up with such a distraction of their serfs for state needs, but immediately after their return home they tried to make up for lost time, drove them to corvee, demanded payment of dues, which often increased during the period of absence of the peasants. In case of a delay or a request for a delay, they flogged, put on stocks and, in the literal sense of the word, beat out everything necessary for noble life from the serfs, along with the last forces.

* * *

With all the variety, or rather, the infinite number of peasant duties, one of the most difficult was recruiting duty. “And the horror of the people at the word“ set ”was like the horror of execution,” Nekrasov wrote about her, and these poetic lines very accurately convey both the attitude towards recruitment and its significance in the life of peasants who were afraid to fall under the “red cap”.

(On the origin of this expression and how stubbornly the peasants resisted military service, S.V. Maksimov cites information in the book 4 Winged Expressions, published in 1890: “They put on a hat not red, but only one that did not have a visor, but in the old days, indeed, every deliverer who put a recruit in his place was obliged to supply him with a red cap, a reed, and so on.

Even now, quite vigorous-looking and talkative old men still talk about the recent times of recruitment, when not only the recruits themselves, but also their families ran away from the harsh hardships of the 25-year-old tight strap of soldiery. Entire artels of cheap workers and entire villages of secret migrants were made up of "deserters" in secluded and remote places (for example, in Olonets Karelia, in Povenets district near the borders of Finland).

In zemstvo houses there were chairs, arshins wide and one and a half long; clogged with a breakdown and an iron chain in a sazhen. The chain was placed around the neck and closed with a lock. However, it did not help: they ran successfully, so for 15 years or more they did not appear in their native places.

They will announce the set, collect a gathering from each yard for a person, put them in the fly on the street. The headman asks ... from the householders:

Where are children?

We don't know. There are no recruits at home - they fled.

Parents do not know where they are stored. The head itself will ask these fathers and growl:

Service is necessary.

We do not know where the children are on the run ...

Go out into the street and take off your boots, and take off your clothes down to one shirt.

And with bare feet they will expose their fathers to the snow and frost.

Chill, wait a minute: tell me about the children. And if you don't say it, it won't happen.

We don't know where the children are!

They will send to shoot on the roofs of the houses; order to starve the cattle in the yards ...

We don’t know where the children are, they are on the run! ..

They cut an ice hole in the river. Retreating five sazhens, they cut through another. They put a rope around the parents' necks and dragged the children from the hole to the hole, just as a fishing net is steamed for winter fishing, into the "liner" (fishing rods on lines along the ridge with bait or sparkles, on saffron cod, herring, etc.).

And parents run away. And they run. The houses are empty...

The landowner, giving his serf as a recruit, received money from the treasury as compensation for the loss of workers, so the surrender of recruits to the state was one of important articles income from the landlords. The character of Knyazhnin's comedy, Simple-minded, speaks of such an "economic" gentleman:

Three thousand he saved up at home for ten years
Not by bread, not by cattle, not by raising calves,
But by the way, they trade people in recruits ...

Exactly the same arbitrariness dominated in the distribution of recruitment among the peasants, as in all other manifestations of serf life. Only a few landowners observed the order in the household when sending people to recruits, even more rarely distributed the queue only among the crowded peasant households, and those among themselves - according to the number of men fit for service in them, from larger to smaller.

Everywhere the nobles used their unlimited power over the serfs, not observing any rules, breaking the queues, even if they were established by the rural society - "MipoM", pursuing only one goal: the observance of their material gain or other interests.

Quite often, entire villages and villages were bought exclusively in order to sell the entire male population of them into recruits. The traffickers, who were not too discriminating in their means of enrichment, made fortunes on such operations. For other landlords, the recruitment of serfs was a convenient opportunity to get rid of objectionable ones. Similar examples of selfish, everyday "tyranny" were encountered almost more often than examples of hunting for commercial profit. Mardarii Appolonych Stegunov, from Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter, speaks with unconcealed irritation about his "disgraced peasants": "Especially there are two families; even the deceased father, God grant him the kingdom of heaven, did not favor them, did not complain painfully ... I, to tell you frankly, from those two families, and without a queue, gave them to the soldiers, and so put them in some places; Yes, they are not translated, what will you do? .. "

The soldier's service was hard. Service life in imperial army was 25 years old. In the 19th century, it gradually decreased, but it was still very long. And if we leave aside the old anecdotes about caring “father-commanders” that migrated to school readers, then the real life of ordinary Russian “miracle heroes”, with their foreheads shaved at recruiting stations, will turn out to be extremely gloomy.

Taking into account the rigid division of the lower and higher military ranks according to the class principle, as well as the well-known peculiarity of the army environment to preserve and strengthen the social vices existing in civil society, it is obvious that the “officer-private” relationship was built largely on the principle of “landlord-serf”. The father of the famous in Russian history civil war General P.N. Wrangel, Baron N.E. Wrangel, whose childhood fell on the years before the abolition of serfdom, recalled the military order of the era of Emperor Nicholas I: “They were beaten with whips and whips in the trading areas,“ across the green street ”, that is, with“ gauntlets ”, with sticks“ drove ”on parade grounds and arenas. And up to twelve thousand blows were given ... ”Under the predecessors of Nicholas, they did not skimp on whips and rods for soldiers' backs, all the more.

Returning to the soldiers was one of the most common and, at the same time, cruel methods of punishment for serfs. But to some of them, especially to the serfs, it still seemed preferable to serving in the master's house. Radishchev gives an example of such a recruit, who looked cheerful and even cheerful among a crowd of recruits driven from the surrounding villages and sobbing relatives: “Learning from his speeches that he was a man of the lord, I was curious from him to find out the reason for the extraordinary pleasure. To my question about this, he replied:

If, my lord, a gallows were placed on one side, and a deep river on the other, and, standing between two deaths, it would inevitably have to go right or left, into a noose or into the water, what would you choose? .. I think, and everyone else would have chosen to throw themselves into the river, in the hope that, having swum to the other bank, the danger had already passed. No one would agree to test whether the noose is firm with his neck. That was my case. A soldier's life is hard, but loops are better. It would be nice if that were the end, but to die a languid death, under a batozh, under cats, in shackles, in a cellar, naked, barefoot, hungry, thirsty, with constant reproach; my lord, although you consider serfs to be your property, they are often worse than cattle, but, unfortunately for their bitterest, they are not without sensitivity.

Formally, according to existing laws, representatives of all taxable estates could be called up for military service. The law allowed only merchants to pay off the recruiting duty, but both the townspeople and the state peasants often avoided service in the army. They acted like this: they bought the serf from the landowner, having received a free letter for him, assigned him to their parish, and after that, by the decision of "Mipa", they handed over to the soldiers. Another way to avoid recruitment was to put up a "hunter", also from serfs. But the "hunter" or volunteer had to be a free man. Therefore, the landowner, receiving money from the buyer for him, signed a vacation sheet, which he handed out to the buyer, secretly from the “hunter”. When the “volunteer” deceived in this way was brought to the recruiting presence, he was deliberately not informed that he was now free and had the right to refuse to enter the soldiers, although the rules required officials to announce this circumstance.

The schemes of such "operations" were worked out to the smallest detail and repeated throughout the country with each recruitment. D. Sverbeev, the author of curious memoirs, wrote that, to his chagrin, gentlemen known for their wealth, humanity, and education did not disdain such frauds: “I learned all the details of such tricks from one of the gentlemen who traffic in people, the Mozhaisk landowner Prince Krapotkin , who, at the home of the chairman of the Mozhaisk recruiting office, asked me to accept him and me immediately as a hunter of a man sold by him to one volost head of state peasants. The chairman expressed his full consent to that, I also agreed, but I had the stupidity to warn the prince right there that I would demand a vacation pay, give it to the hunter and add that he could now go or not go into recruits. “Forgive me, you will spoil my whole business,” the prince answered with irritation, and the recruit-hunter was not presented to us, he was taken to Moscow, to the provincial presence, where he was accepted without further explanation.

If for a few slaves who wanted to break free in any way, service in the army could seem attractive, then for the vast majority of peasants it was often really more terrible than death. In any case, the upcoming 25 years of soldiering meant for the recruit the end of his former life, the severance of all personal ties.

The nobles often sent family peasants to soldiers, separating them from their wife and children. Moreover, the law left those born before the departure of the father to the army in the property of the landowner, and their mother-soldier, as the wife of the recruit was called, became free from the master. But such a norm looked more like a mockery. A soldier, even a widow, most often did not have the opportunity to use her freedom. The whole way of life, small children, the lack of minimum material means to start a new life kept her in the same place. But there the position of a woman left without the support of her husband in the house of her father-in-law became even more difficult than before. She performed the most hard work, endured beatings and abuse, and, according to the sad testimony of an eyewitness, “she washed every piece of bread with tears and blood.”

The people treated the service in the imperial army no better than they did hard labor, but the authorities also sent recruits to serve as hard labor criminals. According to M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, “the rite of sending obstinate slaves to the recruiting presence was performed in the most insidious way. The intended subject was slowly monitored so that he did not run away or hurt himself, and then at the appointed moment they suddenly surrounded him from all sides, stuffed stocks on his feet and handed him over to the giver.

The future "defender of the fatherland", having put hand and foot shackles on him, was locked in a barn or in a bath before being sent to the military presence. This was done in order to prevent escape, and such precautions were not superfluous. People doomed to 25 years of military hard labor did everything possible to save themselves. They fled at every opportunity - from custody, or later, despite the shaved forehead. Often, peasants appointed as recruits mutilated themselves in order to be recognized as unfit for military service. In this case, the legislation provided for punitive measures: those who, after injuring themselves, retained the ability to handle weapons, were ordered to be punished with gauntlets, driving through a system of 500 people three times, and after being cured, they were taken into the army. Those who remained unfit for military service after self-mutilation were exiled to life hard labor.

The writer Elizaveta Vodovozova, who in her childhood witnessed the recruitment of one of the serfs belonging to her mother, left a description of this scene, which she remembered for the rest of her life: “That night, the watchmen could not doze off for a minute: despite the fact that the newly appointed the recruits were in shackles, they were afraid that he would somehow disappear with the help of his relatives. And was it possible for them to fall asleep when around the hut in which they guarded the unfortunate, howling, crying, sobbing, lamentations were heard all the time ... Anyone who had the misfortune to hear these soul-rending cries at least once in his life never forgot them ...

It got a little light. I went to where the voices came from, which led me to the bath, closely surrounded by people. From its only small window, from time to time, the fire of a torch flashed brightly and illuminated either one of those sitting in the bathhouse, or one or another group outside. In one of them stood several peasants, in the other young girls, sisters of a recruit, were sitting on the ground; they howled and lamented: "Our dear brother, for whom did you leave us, miserable orphans? .." Two old men sat on the sidelines: a man and a woman - the recruit's parents. The old man peered out the window of the bathhouse and shook his head ruefully, while water dripped down his wife's face and over her shoulders: she had just been poured over to bring her to her senses. She did not move, as if she were all frozen in a motionless pose, her eyes looked ahead somehow stupidly, as a person who is tired of suffering, who has cried out all his tears, who has lost all hope in life, can look at. And beside her, the young wife of the future soldier was desperately killing herself: with disheveled hair, with a face swollen with tears, she now rushed to the ground with a sob, now she wringed her hands, then jumped to her feet and rushed to the door of the bathhouse. After long requests to let her in, the door finally opened, and the headman Luka appeared in it: "Well, young lady, go ... on the last ... Let the old people go to their son! .."

This terrifying kickback scene recruits for many years it came to my mind, often embarrassed my peace, made me rack my brains and ask many, who is to blame for the fact that a son is taken away from a mother, a husband from a wife and taken to an "alien side"?

* * *

Back in 1764, the monasteries were banned from owning inhabited estates, having written over a million peasants to the treasury. They received the name "economic" and in fact did not differ in any way from the state, or state, peasants, whose life was still much easier than that of those who belonged to the landowners.

However, from the very moment of their removal from the jurisdiction of church estates, the nobles made attempts to get these people at their disposal. It seems that the elderly Catherine was already ready to fulfill the persistent requests of the soul owners and bestow hundreds of thousands of new slaves on them, but this was prevented by the death of the empress.

The accession to the throne of Alexander I was accompanied by rumors that the new autocrat, a supporter of liberal ideas and an opponent of slavery, vowed not to give more people into the property of other people. Indeed, during the reign of this emperor, new grants of "souls", for which his predecessors were so generous, were discontinued, and henceforth the serfdom of a person could arise only by birth from serf parents. Free peasants, economic and state, blessed the generous sovereign, who delivered them from eternal fear at any moment, at one stroke of the royal pen, losing all personal and property rights, and themselves becoming the private property of some landowner. It seemed that now they could confidently look into the future and not be afraid for the fate of their children.

But they soon became convinced that state slavery could not be any easier than that of the nobility, and that their “free state” was only an illusion that was very easy to break.

In many ways, it was the habit of seeing in the peasants, regardless of whether they belong to the treasury or the landowner, not living people, but only a faceless workforce, obliged to fulfill any whim of the master, made it possible to put into practice the idea of ​​creating so-called military settlements.

How to reduce the cost of the army without reducing it numerically? - the answer to this age-old question seemed obvious to the Russian autocrat: it was necessary to abandon the outdated principle of maintaining the army at the state expense and simply force the soldiers to provide for themselves. And their children should be enrolled as soldiers. And then we got an army that reproduces and feeds itself.

The idea seemed to Alexander so brilliant and effective that he did not want to listen to any warnings. To all objections, the worthy son of Paul I replied that in order to implement his plan, he was ready to cover the road “from St. Petersburg to Chudovo” for a hundred miles, to the border of the first military settlement, with corpses. Regarding such a ferocious intention, a contemporary of the emperor noted: "Alexander, in Europe the patron and almost coryphaeus of the liberals, in Russia was not only cruel, but even worse, a senseless despot."

No matter how great was the fear of recruitment, the reality of military settlements turned out to be even harder. At the request of the emperor, hundreds of thousands of peasants were instantly converted into soldiers, and their houses took on the form of barracks. Adult family men were forced to shave off their beards and change their traditional Russian clothes for a military uniform. The life of the settlers was also arranged according to the model of the barracks - strictly regulated wake-up and bedtimes, regular drills on the parade ground, training in rifle techniques, and so on. From the areas allocated for military settlements, all males from 18 to 45 years old were subject to enlistment, and their children from the age of 7 to 18 years old were trained in groups of cantonists, from where they also entered the ranks. Those dismissed "to the reserve" did not have the opportunity to organize their life, but had to perform auxiliary work in the settlement.

The military service not only did not free the military settlers from rural work, but it was charged to them as a duty - this was precisely the main idea of ​​the emperor. At least half of the harvest "combatant" peasant had to hand over to the regimental storage. But the rest of the production also went largely to government needs. Usually, two or three more soldiers transferred from the regular army were settled in each peasant household, whom the military peasant had to feed, and they, according to the plan of the government, helped him in housekeeping.

The dubious benefits of forcibly moving unmarried soldiers unaccustomed to rural work into a peasant family, in which there were many women, was obvious to everyone except the emperor and his closest assistant in this matter, Count A. Arakcheev. As a result, crops, and combat training, and the state of morality in military settlements were unsatisfactory. Among the officers, and far from the best were sent to such settlements, theft of peasant and state property, rudeness was commonplace. "Executions", all kinds of corporal punishment of the exhausted peasants were carried out almost daily.

Driven to complete despair, people turned to the emperor, asking him to look with his “philanthropic eye” at their need. There was no answer from the emperor, and then the settlers began to rebel. In these cases, the imperial government reacted immediately and harshly.

How the authorities acted with the peasants who were indignant against their fate can be imagined from the notes of the Decembrist Dmitry Yakushkin: “The state-owned peasants of those volosts that were assigned to the first military settlements were indignant. Count Arakcheev brought cavalry and artillery against them; they were shot at, they were cut down, many were driven through the ranks, and the poor people had to submit. After that, it was announced to the peasants that the houses and property no longer belong to them, that they all become soldiers, their children become cantonists, that they will perform certain duties in the service and at the same time work in the field, but not for themselves, but in favor of their regiment, to which they will be assigned. They immediately shaved their beards, put on military overcoats and painted them in companies ... "

Notes:

tithe- 1.0925 ha.

Board of Trustees- Founded in 1763 government agency, which was in charge of the affairs of some organizations, including the Loan Fund, from which funds were issued secured by real estate.

Such police officers- that is, peasants who lived according to the established order.

Zhukovo- the estate of D. Yakushkin in the Smolensk province.

Vodovozova E.N. (1844–1923) - writer, memoirist. Author of the book of memoirs "At the Dawn of Life".

Landlords belly up peasant women in order to trade their children, and travel abroad with the proceeds

155 years ago, Emperor ALEXANDER II, who received the nickname of the Liberator from the grateful people, issued a Manifesto on the abolition of serfdom. This ended the "country of slaves, the country of masters" and began "Russia, which we have lost." The long overdue, belated reform opened the way for the development of capitalism. Had it happened a little earlier, we would not have had a revolution in 1917. And so the former peasants still remembered what the landowners did to their mothers, and it was beyond their strength to forgive the bars for this.

The most striking example of serfdom is the famous Saltychikha. Complaints about the cruel landowner abounded both under Elizabeth Petrovna and under Petre III, but Daria Saltykova belonged to a wealthy noble family, so the peasant petitions were not given a move, and informers were returned to the landowner for exemplary punishment.
The order was violated by Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne. She took pity on two peasants - Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives Saltychikha killed in 1762. Investigator Volkov, sent to the estate, came to the conclusion that Darya Nikolaevna was “undoubtedly guilty” of the death of 38 people and “left in suspicion” regarding the guilt in the death of another 26.
The case received wide publicity, and Saltykova was forced to put in jail. Everything is just like with modern Tsapki. While the crimes did not acquire a completely transcendent character, the authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to influential murderers.

“There is no house in which there would be no iron collars, chains and various other instruments for torture ...” - Catherine II later wrote in her diary. She made a peculiar conclusion from this whole story - she issued a decree forbidding peasants to complain about their masters.
Any attempts by the peasants to seek justice were regarded, according to the laws of the Russian Empire, as a rebellion. This gave the nobles the opportunity to act and feel like conquerors in a conquered country, given to them "to flow and plunder."
In the XVIII - XIX centuries people in Russia were sold wholesale and retail, with the separation of families, children from parents and husbands from wives. They sold it “for delivery” without land, put it in a bank or lost it at cards. Slave markets operated legally in many large cities, and an eyewitness wrote that “people were brought to St. Petersburg in whole barges for sale.”
After some hundred years, this approach began to threaten national security countries. Russia lost the Crimean campaign of 1853-1856 to England, France and Turkey.
- Russia lost because it lagged behind both economically and technologically from Europe, where the industrial revolution was going on: steam locomotive, steamship, modern industry, - explains Academician Yuri Pivovarov. - This insulting, insulting defeat in the war prompted the Russian elite to reform.
It was necessary to urgently catch up and overtake Europe, and this could be done only by changing the country's socio-economic structure.

Orgy after the show

One of the most popular entertainment noble society was the theatre. It was considered special chic to have, in every sense of the word, your own. So, about the director of the Imperial Theaters and the Hermitage, Prince Nikolai Yusupov, they enthusiastically told that in a Moscow mansion he kept a theater and a group of dancers - twenty of the most beautiful girls selected from among the home theater actresses, whose lessons were given by the famous dance master Yogel for a lot of money. These slaves were prepared in the princely mansion for purposes far from pure art. The publisher Ilya Arseniev wrote about this in his “Living Word about the Inanimate”: “During Lent, when performances at the imperial theaters stopped, Yusupov invited bosom friends and buddies to his serf corps de ballet. The dancers, when Yusupov gave a certain sign, instantly lowered their costumes and appeared before the audience in their natural form, which delighted the old people, lovers of everything elegant.
Serf actresses are the owner's special pride. In the house where the home theater is arranged, the performance often ends with a feast, and the feast ends with an orgy. Prince Shalikov enthusiastically describes the Buda estate in Little Russia: “The owner of the estate, it seems, was really not used to being stingy and understood a lot about entertainment: musical concerts, theatrical performances, fireworks, gypsy dances, dancers in the light of sparklers - all this abundance of entertainment is completely disinterested offered to welcome guests.
In addition, an ingenious labyrinth was arranged in the estate, leading into the depths of the garden, where the “island of love” was hidden, inhabited by “nymphs” and “naiads”, the way to which was indicated by charming “cupids”. All these were actresses who, shortly before, had entertained the guests of the landowner with performances and dances. "Cupids" were their children from the master himself and his guests.
A huge number of bastards is one of the most characteristic signs of the era. Particularly impressive is the almost Gogol story about a certain brave guardsman, cited in the study “Fortified Russia. History of national slavery" by Boris Tarasov:
“Everyone decided that the glorious guardsman decided to turn into a provincial landowner and engage in agriculture. However, it soon became known that K. had sold out the entire male population of the estate. Only the women remained in the village, and it was completely incomprehensible to K.'s friends how he was going to manage the household with such strength. They did not let him pass with questions and finally forced him to tell them his plan. The guardsman said to his friends: “As you know, I sold the peasants from my village, only women and pretty girls remained there. I am only 25 years old, I am very strong, I am going there, as if to a harem, and I will take care of settling my land. In ten years or so I will be the real father of several hundred of my serfs, and in fifteen I will sell them. No horse breeding will give such an accurate and true profit.”

The right of the first night is sacred

Such stories were not out of the ordinary. The phenomenon was of an ordinary nature, not at all condemned in the nobility. The famous Slavophile, publicist Alexander Koshelev wrote about his neighbor: “The young landowner S. settled in the village of Smykovo, a passionate hunter for the female sex and especially for fresh girls. He otherwise did not allow the wedding, as by a personal actual test of the virtues of the bride. The parents of one girl did not agree to this condition. He ordered that both the girl and her parents be brought to him; chained the latter to the wall and raped their daughter in their presence. There was a lot of talk about this in the county, but the marshal of the nobility did not get out of his Olympian calmness, and the matter got away with it safely.
The historian Vasily Semevsky wrote in the journal Voice of the Past that some landowners who did not live on their estates, but spent their lives abroad, specially came to their possessions only for a short time for vile purposes. On the day of arrival, the manager had to provide the landlord full list all the peasant girls who had grown up during the absence of the master, and he took each of them for himself for several days: “when the list was exhausted, he went on a trip and, hungry there, returned again the next year.”
Official Andrei Zablotsky-Desyatovsky, who, on behalf of the Minister of State Property, collected detailed information about the situation of serfs, noted in his report: “In general, reprehensible ties between landlords and their peasant women are not at all uncommon. The essence of all these cases is the same: debauchery combined with more or less violence. The details are extremely varied. A certain landowner forces his bestial impulses to be satisfied simply by the power of power and, seeing no limit, goes berserk, raping young children...”
Coercion to debauchery was so common in the landowners' estates that researchers were inclined to single out a kind of "corvée for women" from other peasant duties.
After finishing work in the field, the master's servant, from the trusted ones, goes to the court of one or another peasant, depending on the established "queue", and takes the girl - daughter or daughter-in-law, to the master for the night. Moreover, on the way he enters a neighboring hut and announces to the owner there: “Tomorrow, go winnow wheat, and send Arina (wife) to the master.”
Should we then be surprised at the idea of ​​the Bolsheviks about common wives and other sexual liberties of the first years of Soviet power? This is just an attempt to make lordly privileges available to everyone.
Most often, the patriarchal life of the landowner was modeled on the way of life of Pyotr Alekseevich Koshkarov. The writer Yanuariy Neverov described in some detail the life of this rather wealthy gentleman, about seventy years old: “About 15 young girls made up Koshkarov’s home harem. They served him at the table, accompanied him to bed, and were on duty at night at the head of the bed. This duty was of a peculiar nature: after dinner, one of the girls loudly announced to the whole house that "the master wants to rest." This was a signal for his wife and children to go to their rooms, and the living room turned into Koshkarov's bedroom. A wooden bed for the master and mattresses for his "odalisques" were brought there, placing them around the master's bed. The master himself at that time was doing the evening prayer. The girl, whose turn then fell, undressed the old man and put him to bed.

Concubine - neighbor's wife

The departure of the landowner for hunting often ended with the robbery of passers-by on the roads or the pogrom of the estates of objectionable neighbors, accompanied by violence against their wives. The ethnographer Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky in his essay “Old Years” cites the story of a household prince: “Twenty versts from the Fence, there, behind the Undolsky forest, there is a village of Krutikhino. It was in those days retired corporal Solonitsyn. Because of the injury and wounds, that corporal was dismissed from the service and lived in his Krutikhin with his young wife, and he took her out of Lithuania ... Solonichikha liked Prince Alexei Yuryich, he said that he would not regret anything for such a fox ...
... I whooped yes in Krutikhino. And there the lady in the garden in the raspberry patty, amuses herself with berries. I grabbed the beauty across the stomach, threw it over the saddle and back. He galloped up to Prince Alexei Yuryich at the feet of a fox and laid it down. "Have fun, they say, your excellency." We look, a corporal jumps; I almost jumped on the prince himself ... I really can’t report to you how it was, but only the corporal was gone, and the Lithuanian woman began to live in Zaborye in an outbuilding.
The well-known memoirist Elizaveta Vodovozova explained the reason for the very possibility of such a state of affairs. According to her, in Russia, the main and almost the only value was money - "everything was possible for the rich."
Every Russian landowner dreamed of becoming a kind of Kirill Petrovich Troekurov. It is noteworthy that in the original version of "Dubrovsky", which was not allowed by the imperial censorship, Pushkin wrote about the habits of his hero: "A rare girl from the yard avoided the voluptuous attempts of a fifty-year old man. Moreover, sixteen maids lived in one of the outbuildings of his house... The windows to the outbuilding were barred, the doors were locked with locks, from which Kirill Petrovich kept the keys. Young hermits at the appointed hours went to the garden and walked under the supervision of two old women. From time to time, Kirill Petrovich gave some of them in marriage, and new ones took their place ... "
In the estates for a decade after the manifesto of Alexander II, there were a great many cases of rape, dog-baiting, death from cutting and miscarriages as a result of beating pregnant peasant women by landowners.
Bare refused to understand the changed legislation and continued to live in their usual patriarchal way of life. However, it was no longer possible to hide the crimes, although the punishments that were applied to the landlords were very conditional for a long time.

Quote

Valery ZORKIN, Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation:
“With all the costs of serfdom, it was it that was the main bond holding the internal unity of the nation ...”

Like behind a stone wall

Upon learning of the abolition of serfdom, many peasants experienced a real shock. If from 1855 to 1860 in Russia 474 popular uprisings, then only in 1861 - 1176. According to contemporaries, for a long time after the liberation there were those who yearned for the "good old days." Why?

* The landowner was responsible for maintaining the serfs. So, if there were crop failures, it was the owner who was obliged to buy bread and feed the peasants. For example, Alexander Pushkin believed that the life of a serf was not so bad: “The duties are not burdensome at all. The poll is paid in peace; corvée is determined by law; quitrent is not ruinous... To have a cow everywhere in Europe is a sign of luxury; we do not have a cow is a sign of poverty.
* The master had the right to judge the serfs himself for most offenses, except for the most serious ones. Punishment usually consisted of flogging. But government officials sent the perpetrators to hard labor. As a result, in order not to lose workers, the landowners often hid murders, robberies and major thefts committed by serfs.
* Since 1848, serfs were allowed to acquire (albeit in the name of the landowner) real estate. Owners of shops, manufactories and even factories appeared among the peasants. But such serf "oligarchs" did not seek to redeem themselves at will. After all, their property was considered the property of the landowner, and they did not have to pay income tax. Just give the master a fixed amount of dues. Under these conditions, the business developed rapidly.
* After 1861, the liberated peasant still remained tied to the land, only now he was held not by the landowner, but by the community. All were shackled by one goal - to redeem the communal allotment from the master. The land intended for redemption was overvalued by half, and the interest for using loans was 6, while the "regular" rate for such loans was 4. The burden of freedom turned out to be unbearable for many. Especially for the servants, accustomed to eating crumbs from the master's table.

The Russians were the worst
In most of the territory of Russia there was no serfdom: in all Siberian, Asian and Far Eastern provinces and regions, in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, in the Russian North, in Finland and in Alaska, the peasants were free. There were no serfs in the Cossack regions either. In 1816-1819 serfdom was abolished in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire.
In 1840, the head of the gendarme corps, Count Alexander Benkendorf, reported in a secret report to Nicholas I: “In all of Russia, only the victorious people, the Russian peasants, are in a state of slavery; all the rest: Finns, Tatars, Estonians, Latvians, Mordovians, Chuvashs, etc. - free..."

Eye for an eye
A number of family chronicles are replete with reports of the violent death of noble landowners, who were killed for cruel treatment of serfs. noble families. This list includes the uncle of the poet Mikhail Lermontov and the father of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. The peasants said about the latter: “The beast was a man. His soul was dark."

The history of Russian autocracy is inextricably linked with serfdom. It is customary to think that the oppressed peasants worked from morning till night, and the cruel landlords did nothing but torment the unfortunate. There is a lion's share of truth in this, but there are many stereotypes about the slavish living conditions of peasants that do not quite correspond to reality. What misconceptions about serfs are taken at face value by modern inhabitants - further in the review.

1. Unlike progressive Europe, serfdom has always been in Russia

It is generally accepted that serfdom has existed in Russia almost from the moment the state was created, while the Europeans were building a radically different model of social relations in their countries. In fact, everything was somewhat different: in Europe, too, there was serfdom. But its heyday fell on the period of the 7th-15th centuries. In Russia, at that time, the vast majority of people were free.

The rapid enslavement of the peasants began in the 16th century, when the question of the noble army fighting for the father-tsar and mother-Rus' arose at the forefront. It was troublesome to maintain an active army in peacetime, so they began to assign peasants to plots of land so that they would work for the benefit of the nobles.

As you know, the liberation of the peasants from slavery took place in 1861. Thus, it becomes clear that serfdom existed in Russia for a little over 250 years, but not from the moment the state was formed.

2. All peasants were serfs until the reform of 1861

Contrary to popular belief, not all peasants were serfs. "trading peasants" were recognized as a separate official class. They, like the merchants, had their own ranks. But if the merchant of the 3rd guild had to pay 220 rubles to the state treasury for the right to trade, then the peasant of the 3rd guild - 4000 rubles.

In Siberia and Pomorye, serfdom did not even exist as a concept. The harsh climate and remoteness from the capital affected.

3. Russian serfs were considered the poorest in Europe

History textbooks say a lot about the fact that Russian serfs were the poorest in Europe. But if we turn to the testimonies of foreign contemporaries who lived in Russia at that time, it turns out that not everything is as simple as it might seem at first glance.

So, for example, in the 17th century, the Croatian Yuri Krizhanich, who spent about 15 years in our country, wrote in his observations that the standard of living in Muscovite Rus' is much higher than in Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden. In countries such as Italy, Spain and England, the upper classes were much wealthier than the Russian aristocracy, but the peasants "in Rus' lived much more comfortably and better than in the richest countries of Europe."

4. Serfs worked tirelessly all year round

The assertion that the peasants worked without straightening their backs is rather exaggerated. One year before the abolition of serfdom non-working days the peasants reached 230, that is, they worked only 135 days. Such an abundance of weekends was due to the huge number of holidays. The vast majority were Orthodox, so church holidays were strictly observed.
The scientist and publicist A. N. Engelgardt in his “Letters from the Village” described his observations regarding peasant life: “Weddings, nikolshchinas, zakoskis, threshing, sowing, dumping, tidal, tying artels, and so on.” It was then that the saying was in use: "Sleep came to seven villages, laziness came to seven villages."

5. Serfs were disenfranchised and could not complain about the landowner

In the Council Code of 1649, the murder of a serf was considered a grave crime and was punishable. For unintentional murder, the landowner was sent to prison, where he waited for the official consideration of his case. Some were sent to hard labor.

In 1767, Catherine II, by her decree, made it impossible to file complaints from the serfs personally to her. This was done by “governments established for that purpose”. Many peasants complained about the arbitrariness of their landowners, but in fact the case came to trial very rarely.

A clear example of the willfulness of the landlords is considered Justice, although not immediately, but still overtook the bloodthirsty landowner.

ABOUT THE LIFE OF THE serfs before the abolition of serfdom

In 1852, the Balakhna uyezd, which was widely spread along the Volga and the Oka, was divided into estates and ancestral lands by more than 200 landowners. Of these, 23 were princes.

The old owner of the Nikolo-Pogostinskaya patrimony, consisting of the village of Nikolo-Pogost with villages, cavalry general Prince Nikolai Repnin died in May 1845. His son, Prince Vasily Repnin, became his direct heir. He inherited a fiefdom with 1500 souls. In addition, he had 3,500 souls in the Kostroma, Poltava and Moscow provinces. As head of the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vasily Repnin took little interest in the affairs of his estates.

The beauty and freedom of the left bank of the Volga, the villages spread out along the high beret attracted many landowners. In Nikolo-Pogost there was the estate of the princes Baryatinsky - a large plank house, sheds with Berlins and 4 acres of land, as well as the estate of Countess Nadezhda Stenbock-Fermor with serfs of the Kiryushinsky volost in the amount of 150 souls.

“The village of Seltso, and in it there are 14 peasant yards, and 3 bobyl yards, and 4 empty yards. Arable lands - 32 quarters (30 quarters \u003d 15 tithes. - G.K.), but 40 quarters of arable land overgrown with fallow and forest in the field. Good land. Hay in the meadow - 40 kopecks.

The serf peasant Kondrashka Ivanov son Shilnev lived in this village. He has children Vaska, Potapko, Seryozhka, daughter Nastasya, wife Ustinya, the length of his yard and with a garden is 30 fathoms, across - 7 fathoms, he pays taxes from the mortka to the prince

V. Repnin. The village of Seltso, where Kondraty Shilnev lived, was small, surrounded by elms, between which young birch trees made their way here and there. In the village there was a low wooden church, there were two flour storages and one "king" tavern.

Kondraty had a difficult life - he starved and survived as best he could. He collects bread, sells a little to pay taxes, and he himself lives on the rest, which was barely enough until Maslenitsa. And then it was necessary to go on loans at the expense of future bread and work. It went on like this all year round.

The sun was at sunset when Kondrat returned home from the landowner's field, which stretched to the village of Faladovo. Ustinya's wife was breastfeeding her youngest. The elders, Potapko and Seryozhka, in linen shirts, without pants, were on their knees, quickly, greedily slurping something with spoons from a wooden cup that stood on a bench.

Kondrat looked gloomily at his smaller one, Vasyutka, the little boy was skinny, weak, with thin, pale hands and little legs.

Nastya, a marriageable daughter, had not yet returned from the Baryatinsky estate, where she was caring for an old woman, a former manager, and now a watchman of the princely estate.

Kondrat sighed heavily and silently sat down on the chest of Kazan work. The chest contained all the wealth of the family: a piece of rolled homespun linen, two sundresses, multi-colored beads, a small mirror, an embroidered towel, two skirts, a cloth caftan, a blouse with ruffles at the back and a piece of egg soap.

Ustinya took out a pot of empty cabbage soup from the stove - everything that made up the supper of this large family.

But today this did not particularly upset Kondrat. Finally, the manager of Prince Repnin allowed him to leave for two weeks to build a wooden beam bridge on the Parashka River along the Kostroma tract.

From the construction of this bridge, Kondraty returned home, having earned half a penny of money and worn bast shoes, which he gave to him, dying of consumption, the Bakunin peasant Ilyushka Seleznev.

Trouble follows the man. In heavy rain, when the water in Uzola rose and overflowed its banks, the river carried away the bridge. In addition, the spill demolished many dams at mills, drowned many haystacks from the peasants.

The position of the serfs, already difficult, worsened from year to year. And the landowners were in no hurry to give freedom. However, need and hunger pressed the peasant.

The only thing that still kept him in line was the rumor about the abolition of serfdom. Tsar Alexander II himself finally decided to take a trip around Russia to agitate the nobility for the liberation of the peasants. He also planned to visit the Nizhny Novgorod province, the governor of which was the former Decembrist A. N. Muravyov. Prince Repnin was also in the retinue of the traveling king. When asked by the emperor about the situation of the peasants of his estate, Repnin answered briefly: “The population of the county is never provided with a local harvest of bread, its main support is local earnings and seasonal crafts.”

Arriving for two days with the royal retinue in Nizhny Novgorod, Prince Repnin immediately left for his estate Nikolo-Pogost.

By 7 pm, the county marshal of the nobility Grinevich, the county doctor Nikolai Livanov, the military commander Lampa-Starzhenetsky, and Brigadier General Wittorf arrived at the estate to meet him.

The wife of Repnin, the lady-in-waiting of Her Imperial Majesty, Elizaveta Balabina, daughter of the notorious lieutenant general, received visitors with the cordiality of a hospitable hostess, treating them to first-class Bordeaux red wine.

The question of the liberation of the peasants from serfdom was discussed. However, despite the seriousness of the situation, despite the glaring need that prevailed everywhere, these influential and eminent people reacted extremely lightly to what was happening.

It began to get dark when the servant unexpectedly reported about the gathering at the office of 200 peasants.

Burmister Pyatkin, trembling with fear, told Prince Repnin what the peasants were demanding: not to collect the arrears from them, but to replace it with the economic amount available in the patrimonial office, to abolish corporal punishment and remove the manager, who was completely insolent and, casting aside all shame, takes from peasants solid jackpots for exemption from recruitment. Among the peasants, Kondrat Shilnev, who had been reduced to a beggarly state, put forward demands with particular zeal.

The authorities of the Peasants listened, but the spontaneous revolt was dispersed by a platoon of soldiers, and by order of General Wittorf, Kondrat Shilnev received 100 sticks as an example to others.

Unrest of the peasants swept throughout the province, and in the presence of the donator, the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, A. N. Muravyov, on behalf of the nobles of the province, was the first in Russia to speak in favor of the liberation of the peasants from serfdom.

NIKOLO-POGOST IN THE XIX-XX CENTURIES

As in the old gray days, so now We proudly pronounce, like a toast, Your unforgettable name. Old eminent our Pogost!

In the middle of the 19th century, the village of Nikolo-Pogost was divided into two parts: Nikola (or Pogost) and Kulakovo (or Kulakovskaya Sloboda). The village began with Kulakovskaya Sloboda.

According to the dictionary of S. I. Ozhegov, the word "sloboda" before the abolition of serfdom in Russia meant a large village with a non-serf population. Big soviet encyclopedia gives such an interpretation of this term: a settlement is a separate settlement, a quarter on state or privately owned land, the population of which enjoyed temporary exemption from taxes and other duties, that is, benefits.

According to the stories of the inhabitants, landless peasants lived in the Kulakovskaya Sloboda. These were, as a rule, Volgaris, sailors, watermen, helmsmen, barge haulers, captains, artisans, carpenters, contractors, shepherds.

The visiting peasants built their houses right on the mountain, and this once again indicates that the suburban peasants did not have land.

There were several legends about the origin of the name Kulakovskaya Sloboda. According to one of them, as if a strong, strong master of the Fists once lived here; on the other hand, disputes between landed (wealthy) peasants and landless peasants were often decided by kulaks, and landless peasants usually won in them.

Kulakovskaya Sloboda (now Naberezhnaya St.) was located on a large mountain, or eel, and consisted of only one street, which ended in a shikhan. The officer lived on this street. It was here that the most dramatic historical events took place.

In 1238, after the stubborn resistance of the inhabitants, the Mongols-Tatars took and burned Gorodets. According to legend, the Mongol-Tatars were also in Pogost, on the shikhan they built gallows for reprisals against their most active opponents. According to another legend, more than 400 years ago, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, on the shikhan, “on the frontal place”, the guardsmen brutally cracked down on the inhabitants of Zauzolye, who opposed the dominance of the guardsmen nobles. During the reign of Catherine II, at the end of the 18th century, the fugitive exiles "dressers" were hanged in this place for escaping from the Balakhna salt pans.

Until recently, it was possible to dig up a lot of bones and various objects under a small layer of earth on the shikhan, but in 1982 the entire top layer of earth from the shikhan was removed and used to build a road from the village of Gtsekino to the Volga.

The central part of the village was called Pogost (or Nikola in honor of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker).

Pogost is a term common in Russian historical sources, which had various interpretations during the 10th-18th centuries. Initially, the churchyard, apparently, was called rural communities in Old Russian state, as well as the centers of these communities.

In the 10th century, pogosts became administrative-territorial units, headed by special officials responsible for the regular flow of tribute. In the XII century, with the spread of Christianity in Russia, churches were built in the center of the churchyard, near which there were cemeteries. The size of the graveyard was different. In the XI-XIV centuries graveyards consisted of several tens or even hundreds of villages. In XV -XVI centuries in the Russian state, graveyards were preserved in counties where there were many black and palace lands. In the documents of the 15th-17th centuries, as a rule, small settlements with a church and a cemetery were already called churchyards.

For the longest time, churchyards as administrative-territorial divisions were preserved in the north of the Russian state, but in 1775 they were finally abolished there as well.

In the 19th - early 20th centuries, the word "graveyard" was used most often only in the meaning of a cemetery. A three-volume desktop dictionary for references in all branches of knowledge, prepared under the editorship of F. Toll (St. Petersburg, 1863. Vol. 1), gives the following interpretation of this term: “Pogost is a word found in our chronicles back in pagan times. The word "graveyard" is derived from the word "pogostina" - a moving place, a gathering point for rural residents of a well-known district, a volost where a guest has been, markets and bazaars. The Varangians stopped at the graveyards, who imposed tribute on Russian settlements in the 9th century. They demanded the surrounding population to their camp to pay tribute, which is why in the popular concept the word "graveyard" meant a well-known taxable plot of inhabited land, which was part of the county (collector's detour). With the introduction of Christianity, churches were built on the graveyards and cemeteries were appointed.

Nikola had a richer and more financially secure population: merchants, owners of barges and wharves, clergy, handicraftsmen, carpenters.

The street behind the market to the field was called Zaprudnaya.

Behind the southern church fence there was a manor's house with a large garden-park and outbuildings. The houses of the clergy were right behind the manor's garden. On the territory adjacent to the church, their graves are still preserved.

In 1865, the architectural ensemble was surrounded by a new brick fence with three gates (instead of a chopped fence). The main gate with the icon of Nicholas the Wonderworker fixed above them was called "saints". Through these gates, the dead were brought into the church for the funeral service. The other two gates were called side gates.

The village of Nikolo-Pogost is located on a high mountain. Below, under the mountain, there is a beautiful Nikolskoye Lake, 4 kilometers long, from 50 to 100 meters or more wide.

Its depth at Petrushin is 6 meters, in other places - 4 meters, but even at the beginning of the 20th century it was much deeper.

Once upon a time, the lake was connected to Uzola through its source (deep lowland). Through it, water from the lake entered the Uzola, and during the spring flood, the Uzol and Volga water entered the lake through the same source, refreshing it. Through the lowland (channel) Prost near the village of Suzdalevo, water entered the lake at its other end, and from it flowed into another lake and further into the Volga. The water level in the lake did not drop thanks to the springs that beat at the bottom of it and in the mountain. The water in it was drinkable, clean, pleasant to the taste. There were also fish in it: perches, ruffs, paths, pikes - and crayfish. In an hour it was possible to catch up to a hundred fish.

The village of Nikolo-Pogost was especially beautiful in the spring, during the flood of the Volga and Uzola, when the water reached the mountain itself. The Volgars prepared their boats for the navigation period in advance, pierced the grooves with tow, tarred the bottom with tar heated on fires. From morning till evening there was a noise, a rumble under the mountain, the sound of axes was heard, the air smelled of resin.

With the decrease in water in the meadows, high places were first exposed - green islands. And when the water left completely, they turned into a solid green carpet.

The lake has a bay of Criulina (as if crying), about which they say that once clay and sand were taken from this place, which is why it was formed, and on the other side of it there is a cliff up to 8 meters deep.

At the beginning of the lake, between its two branches, there is Bezdonka (bottomless pit). Behind the lake there is a reservoir Krestovka. They say that in the old days, annually on January 19, on Epiphany, religious processions were made here.

Until the 17th century, behind Lake Nikolsky, a mansion forest grew;

At Petrushin, between two ravines, there has long been a cart - a descent to Lake Nikolskoye. In winter, it was possible to ride horses across the frozen lake and the Volga to Balakhna itself and back. On a cart, in a lowland, the villagers arranged a key in the form of a wooden well 60 - 70 centimeters high, from where it was possible to bring clean drinking water not just one barrel. Water in the key-well was constantly accumulating.

And now the springs are still beating from these ravines near Petrushin. More than a dozen streams from different places in the lowland merge into one large stream that flows into the lake. All winter, even in the most severe frosts, the water in this stream does not freeze.

There are many keys throughout Pogostinskaya Gora. But one of them, at the very top of the mountain, directly opposite the bell tower, which also feeds the lake with its life-giving water, is called a saint.

Shikhan is a Tatar word and means "wedge". Shihan was the name given to the place where the mountain came to naught.

Most modern Russians are still convinced that the serfdom of the peasants in Russia was nothing more than legally fixed slavery, private ownership of people. However, the Russian serfs not only were not slaves of the landlords, but did not feel like such.

"Respecting history as nature,
I am by no means defending serf reality.
I am only deeply disgusted with political speculation on the bones of ancestors,
the desire to inflate someone, annoy someone,
to boast of imaginary virtues in front of someone "

M.O. Menshikov

1. THE LIBERAL BLACK MYTH OF serfdom

The 150th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom, or, more correctly, the serfdom of peasants in Russia, is a good occasion to talk about this socio-economic institution of pre-revolutionary Russia calmly, without biased accusations and ideological labels. After all, it is difficult to find another such phenomenon of Russian civilization, the perception of which was so strongly ideologized and mythologized. At the mention of serfdom, a picture immediately appears before your eyes: a landowner selling his peasants or losing them at cards, forcing a serf - a young mother to feed puppies with her milk, slaughtering peasants and peasant women to death. Russian liberals - both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary, Marxist - managed to introduce into the public consciousness the identification of the serfdom of the peasants and the slavery of the peasants, that is, their existence on the rights of private property of the landowners. A significant role in this was played by classical Russian literature, created by nobles - representatives of the highest Europeanized class of Russia, who repeatedly called serfs slaves in their poems, stories, pamphlets.

Of course, this was just a metaphor. As landowners managing serfs, they knew perfectly well what was the legal difference between Russian serfs and, say, American Negroes. But poets and writers generally tend to use words not in the exact sense, but in the figurative sense ... When the word used in this way migrates to a journalistic article of a certain political trend, and then, after the victory of this trend, to a history textbook, then we get dominance in the public consciousness of a wretched stereotype.

As a result, the majority of modern educated Russians, Western intellectuals, are still convinced that the serfdom of the peasants in Russia was nothing more than legally fixed slavery, private ownership of people, that the landowners in law(my italics - R.V.) could do anything with the peasants - torture them, exploit them mercilessly and even kill them, and that this was another evidence of the "backwardness" of our civilization compared to the "enlightened West", where in the same he was already building democracy in the very epoch... This was also manifested in the publications that flooded in on the anniversary of the abolition of serfdom; no matter what newspaper you take, even the officially liberal Rossiyskaya, even the moderately conservative Literaturnaya, everywhere is the same - discussions about Russian "slavery" ...

In fact, not everything is so simple with serfdom, and in historical reality it did not at all coincide with the black myth about it that the liberal intelligentsia created. Let's try to figure this out.

2. Serfdom in Moscow Rus'

Serfdom was introduced in the 16th-17th centuries, when a specific Russian state, which was fundamentally different from the monarchies of the West and which is usually characterized as service state. This means that all his estates had their duties, obligations to the sovereign, understood as a sacred figure - the anointed of God. Only depending on the fulfillment of these duties, they received certain rights, which were not hereditary inalienable privileges, but a means of fulfilling duties. Relations between the tsar and subjects were built in the Muscovite kingdom not on the basis of an agreement - like relations between feudal lords and the king in the West, but on the basis of "selfless", that is, non-contractual service [i], - like the relationship between sons and father in a family where children serve their parent and continue to serve even if he does not fulfill his duties to them. In the West, the non-fulfillment by the lord (even if the king) of the terms of the contract immediately freed the vassals from the need to fulfill their duties. In Russia, only serfs were deprived of duties to the sovereign, that is, people who are servants of service people and the sovereign, but they also served the sovereign, serving their masters. Actually, the serfs were the closest to the slaves, since they were deprived of personal freedom, completely belonged to their master, who was responsible for all their misdeeds.

State duties in the Moscow kingdom were divided into two types - service And tax, respectively, the estates were divided into service and draft. servants, as the name implies, served the sovereign, that is, they were at his disposal as soldiers and officers of an army built in the manner of a militia or as government officials collecting taxes, keeping order, etc. Such were the boyars and nobles. draft estates were exempted from the state service (primarily from military service), but they paid tax- tax in cash or in kind in favor of the state. These were merchants, artisans and peasants. Representatives of the draft estates were personally free people and in no way were they similar to serfs. On slaves, as already mentioned, the obligation to pay tax did not spread.

originally peasant tax did not imply the assignment of peasants to rural communities and landowners. Peasants in the Moscow kingdom were personally free. Until the 17th century, they rented land either from its owner (individual or rural society), while they took a loan from the owner - grain, implements, draft animals, outbuildings, etc. In order to pay the loan, they paid the owner a special additional tax in kind (corvee), but having worked out or returned the loan in money, they again received complete freedom and could go anywhere (and even during the period of working off the peasants remained personally free, nothing but money or the owner could not demand a tax in kind from them). The transitions of peasants to other classes were not prohibited either, for example, a peasant without debts could move to the city and engage in crafts or trade there.

However, already in mid-seventeenth century, the state issues a number of decrees that attach the peasants to a certain piece of land (estate) and its owner (not as a person, but as a replaceable representative of the state), as well as to the current estate (that is, they prohibit the transition of peasants to other estates). In fact, this was enslavement peasants. At the same time, for many peasants, enslavement was not a turning into slaves, but, on the contrary, a salvation from the prospect of turning into a slave. As V.O. Klyuchevsky noted, before the introduction of serfdom, peasants who were unable to repay the loan turned into bonded serfs, that is, debt slaves of landowners, but now they were forbidden to be transferred to the class of serfs. Of course, the state was guided not by humanistic principles, but by economic benefits, serfs, according to the law, did not pay taxes to the state, and an increase in their number was undesirable.

The serfdom of the peasants was finally approved by the conciliar code of 1649 under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. The situation of the peasants began to be characterized as a peasant eternal hopelessness, that is, the impossibility of leaving one's estate. The peasants were obliged to stay on the land of a certain landowner for life and give him part of the results of their labor. The same applied to the members of their families - wives and children.

However, it would be wrong to say that with the establishment of serfdom of the peasants, they turned into serfs of their landowner, that is, into slaves belonging to him. As already mentioned, the peasants were not and could not even be considered landlord serfs, if only because they had to pay tax(from which the serfs were released). The serfs did not belong to the landowner as a certain person, but to the state, and were attached not to him personally, but to the land that he disposed of. The landowner could use only a part of the results of their labor, and then not because he was their owner, but because he was a representative of the state.

Here we must clarify local system, which dominated the Moscow kingdom. During the Soviet period in Russian history the vulgar-Marxist approach dominated, which declared the Muscovy a feudal state and, thus, denied the essential difference between the Western feudal lord and the landowner in pre-Petrine Rus'. However, the western feudal lord was a private owner of the land and, as such, disposed of it independently, not even depending on the king. He also disposed of his serfs, who in the medieval West, indeed, were almost slaves. Whereas the landowner in Muscovite Rus' was only the manager of state property on the terms of service to the sovereign. Moreover, as V.O. Klyuchevsky, the estate, that is, state land with peasants attached to it, is not even so much a gift for service (otherwise it would be the property of the landowner, as in the West) but means of carrying out this service. The landowner could receive part of the results of the work of the peasants of the estate allocated to him, but it was a kind of payment for military service to the sovereign and for fulfilling the duties of a representative of the state to the peasants. It was the responsibility of the landowner to monitor the payment of taxes by his peasants, their, as we would now say, labor discipline, order in rural society, and also protect them from raids by robbers, etc. Moreover, the ownership of land and peasants was temporary, usually for life. After the death of the landowner, the estate returned to the treasury and was again distributed among the service people and it did not necessarily go to the relatives of the landowner (although the farther, the more often it was, and in the end, landownership became little different from private ownership of land, but this happened only in the 18th century).

The real owners of the land with the peasants were only the estates - the boyars, who received the estates by inheritance - and it was they who were similar to the western feudal lords. But, starting from the 16th century, their rights to land also begin to be curtailed by the king. So, a number of decrees made it difficult for them to sell their lands, created legal grounds for giving the patrimony to the treasury after the death of a childless patrimony and already distributing it according to the local principle. The serving Muscovite state did everything to suppress the beginnings of feudalism as a system based on private ownership of land. Yes, and the ownership of land by the estates did not extend to their serfs.

So, the serfs in pre-Petrine Rus' did not belong at all to a nobleman-landowner or patrimony, but to the state. Klyuchevsky calls the serfs just that - "eternally obligated state taxpayers." The main task of the peasants was not to work for the landowner, but to work for the state, to fulfill the state tax. The landowner could dispose of the peasants only to the extent that it helped them to fulfill the state tax. If, on the contrary, it interfered, he had no rights to them. Thus, the power of the landowner over the peasants was limited by law, and according to the law, he was charged with obligations to his serfs. For example, the landowners were obliged to supply the peasants of their estate with implements, grain for sowing, and feed them in case of crop shortages and famine. The concern for feeding the poorest peasants fell on the landowner even in good years, so that economically the landowner was not interested in the poverty of the peasants entrusted to him. The law clearly opposed the willfulness of the landowner in relation to the peasants: the landowner did not have the right to turn the peasants into serfs, that is, into personal servants, slaves, to kill and maim the peasants (although he had the right to punish them for laziness and mismanagement). Moreover, for the murder of peasants, the landowner was also punished by death. The point, of course, was not at all in the "humanism" of the state. The landowner, who turned the peasants into serfs, stole income from the state, because the serf was not taxed; the landowner who killed the peasants destroyed state property. The landowner did not have the right to punish the peasants for criminal offenses, he was obliged in this case to provide them to the court, an attempt at lynching was punished by deprivation of the estate. The peasants could complain about their landowner - about the cruel treatment of them, about their willfulness, and the landowner could be deprived of the estate by the court and transferred to another.

Even more prosperous was the situation of the state peasants, who belonged directly to the state and were not attached to a particular landowner (they were called black-sleepers). They were also considered serfs, because they did not have the right to move from their place of permanent residence, they were attached to the land (although they could temporarily leave their permanent place of residence, going to work) and to the rural community living on this land and could not move to other estates. But at the same time, they were personally free, possessed property, themselves acted as witnesses in courts (their landowner acted for the possessing serfs in court) and even elected representatives to estate government bodies (for example, to the Zemsky Sobor). All their duties were reduced to the payment of taxes in favor of the state.

But what about the serf trade, about which there is so much talk? Indeed, back in the 17th century, it became customary for landowners to first exchange peasants, then transfer these contracts to a monetary basis, and finally, sell serfs without land (although this was contrary to the laws of that time and the authorities fought such abuses, however, not very diligently) . But to a large extent, this did not concern serfs, but serfs, who were the personal property of landowners. By the way, even later, in the 19th century, when actual slavery took the place of serfdom, and serfdom turned into a lack of rights for serfs, they still traded mainly people from the household - maids, maids, cooks, coachmen, etc. The serfs, as well as the land, were not the property of the landowners and could not be the subject of bargaining (after all, trading is an equivalent exchange of objects that are privately owned, if someone sells something that does not belong to him, but to the state, and is only at his disposal , then this is an illegal transaction). The situation was somewhat different with the estate owners: they had the right of hereditary possession of land and could sell and buy it. In the event of the sale of land, the serfs living on it went with it to another owner (and sometimes, bypassing the law, this happened even without selling the land). But this was still not a sale of serfs, because neither the old nor the new owner had the right to own them, he only had the right to use part of the results of their labor (and the obligation to perform the functions of charity, police and tax supervision in relation to them). And the serfs of the new owner had the same rights as the previous one, since they were guaranteed to him by state law (the owner could not kill and maim the serf, forbid him to acquire property, file complaints with the court, etc.). After all, it was not a person that was being sold, but only obligations. The Russian conservative publicist of the early 20th century M. Menshikov spoke expressively about this, arguing with the liberal A.A. Stolypin: A. A. Stolypin, as a sign of slavery, emphasizes the fact that serfs were sold. But it was a sale of a very special kind. They did not sell a person, but his duty to serve the owner. And now, when you sell a bill of exchange, you are not selling the debtor, but only his obligation to pay the bill. “Selling serfs” is just a sloppy word…”.

And in fact, they were selling not a peasant, but a “soul”. The “soul” in the revision documents was considered, according to the historian Klyuchevsky, “the totality of duties that fell under the law on a serf, both in relation to the master, and in relation to the state under the responsibility of the master ...”. The word "soul" itself was also used here in a different sense, which gave rise to ambiguities and misunderstandings.

In addition, it was possible to sell “souls” only into the hands of Russian nobles, the law forbade selling the “souls” of peasants abroad (whereas in the West, in the era of serfdom, the feudal lord could sell his serfs anywhere, even to Turkey, and not only labor duties of the peasants, but also the personalities of the peasants themselves).

Such was the real, and not the mythical, serfdom of the Russian peasants. As you can see, it had nothing to do with slavery. As Ivan Solonevich wrote about this: “Our historians, consciously or unconsciously, allow a very significant terminological overexposure, because the“ serf ”,“ serfdom ”and“ nobleman ”in Muscovite Rus' were not at all what they became in Petrovsky. The Moscow peasant was not anyone's personal property. He was not a slave... The Council Code of 1649, which enslaved the peasants, attached the peasants to the land and the landowner who disposed of it, or, if it was a question of state peasants, to a rural society, as well as to the peasant estate, but nothing more. In all other respects the peasant was free. According to the historian Shmurlo: "The law recognized his right to property, the right to engage in trade, conclude contracts, dispose of his property according to wills."

It is noteworthy that the Russian serfs not only were not slaves of the landlords, but did not feel like such. Their sense of self is well conveyed by the Russian peasant saying: "The soul is God's, the body is royal, and the back is master's." From the fact that the back is also a part of the body, it is clear that the peasant was ready to obey the master only because he also serves the king in his own way and represents the king on the land given to him. The peasant felt himself and was the same royal servant as the nobleman, only he served in a different way - with his own labor. No wonder Pushkin ridiculed Radishchev's words about the slavery of Russian peasants and wrote that the Russian serf is much more intelligent, talented and free than the English peasants. In support of his opinion, he cited the words of an Englishman he knew: “In general, duties in Russia are not very burdensome for the people: head taxes are paid in peace, quitrent is not ruinous (except in the vicinity of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the variety of revolutions of the industrialist multiplies the greed of the owners). Throughout Russia, the landowner, having imposed quitrent, leaves it to the will of his peasant to get it, how and where he wants. The peasant does what he pleases and sometimes travels 2,000 miles away to earn money for himself. And you call this slavery? I do not know of a people in all of Europe who would have been given more room to act. ... Your peasant goes to the bathhouse every Saturday; he washes his face every morning, moreover, he washes his hands several times a day. There is nothing to say about his intelligence: travelers travel from region to region across Russia, not knowing a single word of your language, and everywhere they are understood, fulfill their requirements, conclude conditions; I never met between them what the neighbors call "bado"; I never noticed in them either rude surprise or ignorant contempt for someone else's. Everyone knows their receptivity; agility and dexterity are amazing... Look at him: what could be freer than his treatment of you? Is there even a shadow of slavish humiliation in his steps and speech? Have you been to England? … That's it! You have not seen the shades of meanness that distinguishes one class from another among us ... ". These words of Pushkin's companion, sympathetically cited by the great Russian poet, should be read and memorized by anyone who rants about the Russians as a nation of slaves, which serfdom allegedly made them into.

Moreover, the Englishman knew what he was talking about when he pointed out the slavish state of the common people of the West. Indeed, in the West in the same era, slavery officially existed and flourished (in Great Britain slavery was abolished only in 1807, and in North America in 1863). During the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia, in Great Britain, peasants who were driven from their lands during the fences easily turned into slaves in workhouses and even in galleys. Their situation was much more difficult than that of their contemporaries - Russian peasants, who, according to the law, could count on help during a famine and were protected by law from the willfulness of the landowner (not to mention the position of state or church serfs). In the era of the formation of capitalism in England, the poor and their children were locked up in workhouses for poverty, and the workers in the factories were in such a state that even the slaves would not envy them.

By the way, the position of serfs in Muscovite Rus' from their subjective point of view was even easier because the nobles were also in a kind of not even serf, but personal dependence. Being feudal lords in relation to the peasants, the nobles were in the "fortress" of the king. At the same time, their service to the state was much more difficult and dangerous than the peasant one: the nobles had to participate in wars, risk their lives and health, they often died in public service or became disabled. Conscription did not extend to the peasants, they were charged only with physical labor for the maintenance of the service class. The life of a peasant was protected by law (the landowner could neither kill him nor even let him die of hunger, as he was obliged to feed him and his family in famine years, supply grain, wood for building a house, etc.). Moreover, the serf even had the opportunity to get rich - and some became rich and became the owners of their own serfs and even serfs (such serfs of serfs were called "reckless serfs" in Rus'). As for the fact that under a bad landowner who violated the laws, the peasants suffered humiliation and suffering from him, then the nobleman was not protected by anything from the willfulness of the tsar and tsar dignitaries.

3. THE TRANSFORMATION OF SERVICES INTO SLAVES IN THE PETERSBURG EMPIRE

With the reforms of Peter the Great, military service fell on the peasants, they became obliged to supply the state with recruits from a certain number of households (which had never happened before, in Moscow Rus' military service was only the duty of the nobles). Kholopov were obliged to pay state poll taxes, like serfs, thereby destroying the distinction between serfs and serfs. Moreover, it would be wrong to say that Peter made serfs serfs, rather, on the contrary, he made serfs serfs, extending to them both the duties of serfs (tax payment) and rights (for example, the right to life or to go to court). Thus, having enslaved the serfs, Peter freed them from slavery.

Further, most of the state and church peasants under Peter were transferred to the landlords and thereby deprived of personal freedom. The so-called “walking people” were assigned to the estate of serfs - wandering merchants, people who trade in some kind of craft, just vagabonds who used to be personally free (passportization and the Petrine analogue of the propiska system played a big role in the enslavement of all estates). Serf workers were created, the so-called possessive peasants, assigned to manufactories and factories.

But neither the serf landlords nor the serf factory owners under Peter turned into full-fledged owners of peasants and workers. On the contrary, their power over the peasants and workers was further limited. According to the laws of Peter the Great, the landlords who ruined and oppressed the peasants (now including the courtyards, former serfs) were punished by returning their estates with the peasants to the treasury, and transferring them to another owner, as a rule, a reasonable, well-behaved relative of the embezzler. By decree of 1724, the intervention of the landowner in marriages between peasants was prohibited (before that, the landowner was considered as a kind of second father of the peasants, without whose blessing marriage between them was impossible). Serf factory owners did not have the right to sell their workers, except perhaps together with the factory. This, by the way, gave rise to an interesting phenomenon: if in England a breeder in need of skilled workers fired the existing ones and hired others who were more highly qualified, then in Russia the breeder had to send workers to study at his own expense, for example, the serf Cherepanovs studied in England at the expense of the Demidovs . Peter consistently fought against the trade in serfs. The abolition of the institution of votchinniki played a major role in this, all representatives of the service class under Peter became landlords who were in the service of the sovereign, as well as the destruction of the differences between serfs and serfs (housekeepers). Now the landowner, who wished to sell even a serf (for example, a cook or a maid), was forced to sell a piece of land along with them (which made such a trade unprofitable for him). Peter's decree of April 15, 1727 also prohibited the sale of serfs apart, that is, with the separation of the family.

Again, subjectively, the strengthening of the serfdom of the peasants in the Petrine era was facilitated by the fact that the peasants saw that the nobles began to depend not less, but to an even greater extent on the sovereign. If in the pre-Petrine era, Russian nobles performed military service from time to time, at the call of the tsar, then under Peter they began to serve regularly. The nobility was subject to heavy lifelong military or civil service. From the age of fifteen, every nobleman was obliged either to go to serve in the army and navy, and, starting with the lower ranks, from privates and sailors, or go to the civil service, where he also had to start from the lowest rank, non-commissioned schreiber (with the exception of those noblemen sons who were appointed by the fathers as administrators of estates after the death of a parent). He served almost non-stop, for years and even decades without seeing his home and his family, who remained on the estate. And even the resulting disability often did not exempt him from lifelong service. In addition, noble children were obliged to receive an education at their own expense before joining the service, without which they were forbidden to marry (hence the statement of Fonvizin Mitrofanushka: “I don’t want to study, I want to get married”).

A peasant, seeing that a nobleman serves the sovereign for life, risking his life and health, being separated from his wife and children for years, could consider it fair that he, on his part, should “serve” - with work. Moreover, the serf peasant in the Petrine era still had a little more personal freedom than the nobleman, and his position was easier than that of the nobility: the peasant could start a family whenever he wanted and without the permission of the landowner, live with his family, complain about the landowner in case of offense ...

As you can see, Peter was still not quite a European. He used the primordial Russian institutions of the service state to modernize the country and even toughened them up. At the same time, Peter also laid the foundation for their destruction in the near future. Under him, the local system began to be replaced by a system of awards, when, for services to the sovereign, the nobles and their descendants were granted lands and serfs with the right to inherit, buy, sell, donate, which the landowners had previously been deprived of by law [v] . Under the successors of Peter, this led to the fact that gradually the serfs turned from state taxpayers into real slaves. There were two reasons for this evolution: the arrival of the Western system of estates in place of the rules of the Russian service state, where the rights of the upper class - the aristocracy do not depend on service, and the arrival of private ownership of land in the place of local land ownership in Russia. Both reasons fit into the trend of spreading Western influence in Russia, initiated by Peter's reforms.

Already under the first successors of Peter - Catherine the First, Elizaveta Petrovna, Anna Ioannovna, there was a desire of the upper stratum of Russian society to lay down state duties, but at the same time preserve the rights and privileges that were previously inextricably linked with these duties. Under Anna Ioannovna, in 1736, a decree was issued limiting the compulsory military and public service of the nobles, which under Peter the Great was for life, 25 years. At the same time, the state began to turn a blind eye to the massive failure to comply with the Peter's law, which required that the nobles serve, starting with lower posts. Noble children from birth were recorded in the regiment and by the age of 15 they had already “served up” to the rank of officer. In the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, the nobles received the right to have serfs, even if the nobleman did not have a land plot, while the landlords received the right to exile serfs to Siberia instead of sending them out as recruits. But the apogee of course was the manifesto of February 18, 1762, issued by Peter the Third, but implemented by Catherine the Second, according to which the nobles received complete freedom and no longer had to serve the state in a military or civil field (the service became voluntary, although, of course, those nobles who did not have enough serfs and little land were forced to go to serve, since their estates could not feed them). This manifesto actually turned the nobles from service people into Western-style aristocrats who had both land and serfs in private ownership, that is, without any conditions, simply by right of belonging to the estate of nobles. Thus, an irreparable blow was dealt to the system of the service state: the nobleman was free from service, and the peasant remained attached to him, not only as a representative of the state, but also as a private person. This state of affairs was quite expectedly perceived by the peasants as unfair and the release of the nobles became one of the important factors for peasant uprising, which was headed by the Yaik Cossacks and their leader Emelyan Pugachev, who posed as the late Emperor Peter III. The historian Platonov describes the mentality of the serfs on the eve of the Pugachev uprising as follows: “The peasants were also worried: they clearly lived in the consciousness that they were obliged by the state to work for the landlords precisely because the landowners were obliged to serve the state; they lived in the consciousness that historically one duty was conditioned by another. Now the duty of nobility has been removed, and the peasant duty should also be removed.

The flip side of the liberation of the nobles was the transformation of peasants from serfs, that is, state-bound taxpayers who had broad rights (from the right to life to the right to defend themselves in court and independently engage in commercial activities) into real slaves, practically deprived of rights. This began under Peter's successors, but it reached its logical conclusion under Catherine II. If the decree of Elizabeth Petrovna allowed the landowners to exile peasants to Siberia for "presumptuous behavior", but at the same time limited them to the fact that each such peasant was equated with a recruit (which means that only a certain number could be exiled), then Catherine II allowed the landowners to exile peasants no limits. Moreover, under Catherine, by decree of 1767, serfs were deprived of the right to complain and go to court against a landlord who abused his power (it is interesting that such a ban followed immediately after the Saltychikha case, which Catherine was forced to put on trial based on complaints relatives of the killed Saltykova peasant women). The right to judge the peasants has now become the privilege of the landowner himself, which has freed the hands of the tyrant landowners. According to the charter of 1785, the peasants even ceased to be considered subjects of the crown and, according to Klyuchevsky, were equated with the agricultural implements of the landowner. In 1792, Catherine's decree allowed the sale of serfs for landlord debts at a public auction. Under Catherine, the size of the corvee was increased, it ranged from 4 to 6 days a week, in some areas (for example, in the Orenburg region) peasants could work for themselves only at night, on weekends and on holidays (in violation of church rules). Many monasteries were deprived of peasants, the latter were transferred to the landowners, which significantly worsened the position of the serfs.

So, Catherine II has the dubious merit of the complete enslavement of the landlord serfs. The only thing that the landowner could not do with the peasant under Catherine was to sell him abroad, in all other respects his power over the peasants was absolute. Interestingly, Catherine II herself did not even understand the differences between serfs and slaves; Klyuchevsky is perplexed why in her “Instruction” she calls serfs slaves and why she believes that serfs have no property, if it has long been established in Russia that a slave, that is, a serf, unlike a serf, does not pay tax, and that serfs are not just they own property, but even until the second half of the 18th century, without the knowledge of the landowner, they could engage in commerce, take contracts, trade, etc. We think this is explained simply - Catherine was German, she did not know the ancient Russian customs, and proceeded from the position of serfs in her native West, where they really were the property of feudal lords, deprived of their own property. So it is in vain that our Western liberals assure us that serfdom is a consequence of the lack of principles of Western civilization among the Russians. In fact, everything is the opposite, while the Russians had an original service state that had no analogues in the West, there was no serf slavery, because the serfs were not slaves, but state taxpayers with their rights protected by law. But when the elite of the Russian state began to imitate the West, the serfs turned into slaves. Slavery in Russia was simply adopted from the West, especially since it was widespread there in the time of Catherine. Let us recall at least the well-known story about how British diplomats asked Catherine II to sell the serfs they wanted to use as soldiers in the fight against the rebellious colonies of North America. The British were surprised by Catherine's answer - that according to the laws of the Russian Empire, serf souls cannot be sold abroad. Let us note that the British were surprised not by the fact that in the Russian Empire people can be bought and sold, on the contrary, in England at that time it was an ordinary and common thing, but by the fact that nothing could be done with them. The British were surprised not by the existence of slavery in Russia, but by its limitations...

4. FREEDOM OF NOBLE AND FREEDOM OF PEASANTS

By the way, there was a certain regularity between the degree of Westernization of this or that Russian emperor and the position of the serfs. Under emperors and empresses who were reputed to be admirers of the West and its ways (like Catherine, who even corresponded with Diderot), the serfs became real slaves - powerless and downtrodden. Under the emperors, who were focused on preserving Russian identity in state affairs, on the contrary, the fate of the serfs improved, but certain duties fell on the nobles. So, Nicholas the First, whom we never tired of stigmatizing as a reactionary and a serf-owner, issued a number of decrees that significantly softened the position of serfs: in 1833 it was forbidden to sell people separately from their families, in 1841 - to buy serfs without land to all who do not have populated estates, in 1843 - it is forbidden to buy peasants by landless nobles. Nicholas I forbade the landlords to exile the peasants to hard labor, allowed the peasants to redeem themselves from the estates being sold. He stopped the practice of distributing serf souls to the nobles for their services to the sovereign; for the first time in the history of Russia, serf landowners began to form a minority. Nikolai Pavlovich implemented the reform developed by Count Kiselev regarding state serfs: all state peasants were allocated their own plots of land and forest plots, and auxiliary cash desks and bread shops were established everywhere, which provided assistance to the peasants with cash loans and grain in case of crop failure. On the contrary, the landowners under Nicholas I again began to be prosecuted if they mistreated the serfs: by the end of the reign of Nicholas, about 200 estates were arrested and taken from the landowners on the complaints of the peasants. Klyuchevsky wrote that under Nicholas I the peasants ceased to be the property of the landowner and again became subjects of the state. In other words, Nicholas again enslaved the peasants, which means, to a certain extent, freed them from the willfulness of the nobles.

Speaking metaphorically, the freedom of the nobles and the freedom of the peasants were like water levels in two arms of communicating vessels: an increase in the freedom of the nobles led to the enslavement of the peasants, the subordination of the nobles to the law softened the fate of the peasants. The complete freedom of both was simply a utopia. The liberation of the peasants in the period from 1861 to 1906 (and after all, under the reform of Alexander II, the peasants freed themselves only from dependence on the landowner, but not from dependence on the peasant community, only the Stolypin reform freed them from the latter) led to the marginalization of both the nobility and the peasantry. The nobles, going bankrupt, began to dissolve in the philistine class, the peasants, having received the opportunity to free themselves from the power of the landowner and the community, became proletarianized. How it all ended is not necessary to remind.

The modern historian Boris Mironov makes, in our opinion, a fair assessment of serfdom. He writes: “The ability of serfdom to provide for the minimum needs of the population was an important condition for its long existence. This is not an apology for serfdom, but only confirmation of the fact that all social institutions are based not so much on arbitrariness and violence, but on functional expediency ... serfdom was a reaction to economic backwardness, Russia's response to the challenge of the environment and the difficult circumstances in which the the life of the people. All interested parties - the state, the peasantry and the nobility - received certain benefits from this institution. The state used it as a tool for solving pressing problems (meaning defense, finance, keeping the population in places of permanent residence, maintaining public order), thanks to it it received funds for the maintenance of the army, the bureaucracy, as well as several tens of thousands of free policemen represented by landlords . The peasants received a modest but stable means of subsistence, protection and the opportunity to arrange their lives on the basis of folk and communal traditions. For the nobles, both those who had serfs, and those who did not possess them, but lived public service, serfdom was a source of material wealth for life according to European standards. Here is a calm, balanced, objective view of a true scientist, so pleasantly different from the hysterical hysterics of liberals. Serfdom in Russia is associated with a number of historical, economic, geopolitical circumstances. It still arises as soon as the state tries to rise up, start the necessary large-scale transformations, and organize the mobilization of the population. During Stalin's modernization, peasants-collective farmers and factory workers were also imposed a fortress in the form of a postscript to a certain locality, a certain collective farm and factory, and a number of clearly defined duties, the fulfillment of which granted certain rights (for example, workers had the right to receive additional rations in special distributors on coupons, collective farmers - to own their own garden and cattle and to sell surpluses).

And even now, after the liberal chaos of the 1990s, there are trends towards a certain, albeit very moderate, enslavement and the imposition of taxes on the population. In 1861, it was not serfdom that was abolished - as we see, such a thing occurs with regularity in the history of Russia - the slavery of the peasants, established by the liberal and Westernizing rulers of Russia, was abolished.

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[i] the word "covenant" means a contract

the position of a serf in Muscovite Rus' differed significantly from the position of a slave in the same period in the West. Among the serfs were, for example, report serfs, who were in charge of the economy of a nobleman, stood not only above other serfs, but also above the peasants. Some serfs had property, money, and even their own serfs (although, of course, most serfs were laborers and servants and were engaged in hard work). The fact that serfs were exempted from state duties, primarily the payment of taxes, made their position even attractive, at least the law of the 17th century forbids peasants and nobles to become serfs in order to avoid state duties (which means that there were still those who wanted to! ). A significant part of the serfs were temporary, who became serfs voluntarily, on certain conditions (for example, they sold themselves for a loan with interest) and for a strictly specified period (before they worked off the debt or returned the money).

and this despite the fact that even in the early works of V.I. Lenin, the system of the Moscow kingdom was defined as an Asian mode of production, which is much closer to the truth, this system was more reminiscent of the structure of ancient Egypt or medieval Turkey than Western feudalism

by the way, that is why, and not at all because of male chauvinism, only men were recorded in the “souls”, a woman - the wife and daughter of a serf peasant herself was not clothed with a tax, because she was not engaged in agricultural labor (the tax was paid by this labor and its results)