Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1961).

INTRODUCTION

The year 1961 marks the hundredth anniversary of the emancipation of the Russian serfs. Of all the millions of Europeans who in centuries past had been held in bondage, they were almost last to be freed. Even then, the liberty they gained was not complete. They were not given full civil rights, they were still restricted in their ability to come and go as they pleased, and in most of the empire they did not become the individual owners of the land they tilled. Nor did the "peasant problem" vanish. On the contrary, in a different guise it became even more acute than it had been in the days of serfdom, and, indeed, still unsolved it remains to bedevil the rulers of the Russia of today. Nonetheless, the act of emancipation of 19 February 1861 is a crucial turning point in the history of the world's largest state, for in abolishing serfdom the tsar's decree not only ended the institution that had allowed one man to be the "baptized property" (to use Herzen's phrase) of another man: it also swept away the basis of the then existing social order, and thereby brought to a close an era of Russian history that had lasted for centuries.

The pages that follow trace the history of the lords and peasants, and of the relationships between them, from the time when large private landownership first established itself on Russian soil, to the abolition of serfdom a thousand years later. The reader will quickly discover, however, that this story, as it is related here, is not limited to agrarian matters alone. Much is said about political and economic affairs, too, for I have written the story of the lords and peasants against the background of Russian political and economic evolution.

The need for this method of presentation pressed itself upon me as my researches for this book proceeded. I came to this subject with no preconceived interpretations or hypotheses about Russian history. I soon learned that the problems in which I was interested could be comprehended only within the context of the political history of Russia, from Kievan times to the nineteenth century. The feuds of the Kievan rulers; the invasions and the princely rivalries of the Mongol era; the state-making ambitions of the Grand Dukes of Moscow; the savage resolution of the tsars of Muscovy to win absolute power for themselves; the conviction of the Romanov emperors that the private interests of their subjects must be subordinated to the imperial interests; each in its time was of critical importance in determining the roles of both lords and peasants, and the nature of the social and economic relationships between them. I have found it necessary, therefore, throughout the book to discuss these matters, sometimes at length, in order to provide the information needed for an understanding of what was happening out on the land.

It took me longer to realize that there was still another external factor that was also of great significance in the evolution of agrarian institutions. The economic aspects of these institutions and the interaction between agriculture and the other sectors of the economy made it essential to study the general economic development of Russia. As these investigations continued it became clear that Russian economic life (like that of other lands) had gone through long swings of growth and decline, and that these secular trends had been of major consequence in shaping the patterns of agrarian relationships. And so the long-term fluctuations in trade, manufacturing, market demand, prices, money values, and entrepreneurial activity, take their places alongside the history of political events as integral parts of the story.

The economic importance of agriculture throughout the centuries covered here, and the attention paid to general economic development, combine to make this book a study in the economic history of Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century. But it is also meant to be a study in the history of human freedom. It attempts tn exp]ain how a few men were able to destroy th<» frpp^om of millions of their fellows, why this social injustice.was allowed to endure for so long, and how men sought to lessen the injustice or to escape from it. Usually, books about freedom deal with politics, philosophies, and revolutions. They tell of the men of ideas who denned freedom in terms of concrete objectives, of the men of action who led in the struggle for these objectives, and of their triumphs and their defeats. These works are, of course, important and instructive. But freedom has an economic history, too, that is often overlooked, and that is in some ways the most significant part of its history. I say this not because I think that the modes of production always and everywhere determine the course of events. This book is not an exercise in the economic interpretation of history. But to understand the system of values of a society it is necessary to know its economic life. The following pages show that the history of personal freedom in a society is intimately linked with the arrangements that society makes in its efforts to satisfy its wants from the resources at its command. F. C. Lane put it well when he wrote:1 "[T]he qualities expressed in economic activities constitute the largest part of what life has been. Most men most of the time have been occupied in making a living. The values that existed for them, not merely as aspiration or as ideas to be talked about, but in action and as qualities of personal character, were those embodied in the daily activities by which they made their living. If bullying and fawning, arrogant command and servile obedience were the rule in economic life, that is the way men were—that is what society was like. Other themes—religious aspiration, artistic feeling, and creative intellectual vigor—reward endless historical investigation for their own sake, even when they have no discernible connection with social organization, but historians interested in justice, freedom, or any other qualities of social life have reason to give primary attention to the human relations entered into during the processes of production and distribution."

I have chosen to make a study of these relations in Russia not only because of the importance of that country in the speculations that go on in our time about the nature of freedom. Inquiries into Russia's rural past reveal the inheritance of modern Russia, and so cast light on the course that it is presently following. I hope, in addition, that this book will contribute ultimately to an understanding of the history of freedom in the European world. The particulars of the Russian experience differed, of course, from that of other European lands. But studies similar to this one of these other societies should make it possible to formulate generalizations about the history of freedom, in terms of aspirations, social patterns, and economic and political motives, that transcend national frontiers, and that are free from the methodological shortcomings that distort the Marxian synthesis.

II

As I have just indicated, Russian history is viewed here as part of European, rather than of Oriental, history. There were many differences between Russian institutions and those of other lands of Europe, but as Marc Bloch once asked, "In what science has the presence of variations or varieties ever interfered with the recognition of a genus?" The structure of Russian rural society had the same fundamental features that characterized the agrarian societies of other European countries. Comparative study demonstrates the congruities between Russian and these other lands in such things as the nature of the legal and fiscal powers that lords had over their peasants, the forms of rural settlement, the agricultural techniques that were employed, and so on. The presence of these uniformities convinces me that Russia's agrarian institutions should be studied in a European frame of reference, and described with European terms, such as "serf" and "seignior" as synonyms for the dependent peasant and his lord. This, of course, is not to deny that non-European influences were felt in Russia, but their effect was only to modify what were fundamentally European institutions.

Most of these institutions need no detailed explanation. Such terms as the three.field system, communal tillage, servile tenure, hamlet and village, seignioral jurisdiction, and the like, either are self-explanatory or can be quickly defined. But serfdom, the institution that occupies the central position in this book, defies easy explanation. The word "serf" or its equivalents were applied—on occasion in the same time and place—to a wide range of European peasants, from people whose condition could scarcely be distinguished from that of chattel slaves to men who were nearly free. The presence or absence of certain dues or fines that had to be paid the seignior has sometimes been proposed as a kind of litmus test of whether or not peasants were serfs, but these servile obligations were not infrequently demanded of men who are known to have been legally free. Often the serf is thought to have been a person who was bound to the soil, but this, too, is an inadequate and, for many times and places, even a mistaken concept. The deepest and most complete form of serfdom was precisely when the lord was able (as he often was) to move his peasants about as he wished, transferring them from one holding to another, converting them into landless field hands or into household servants, and even selling, giving, or gambling them away without land. On the other hand, there were periods in serfdom's history when the bondman had the right to leave his holding, after giving notice to his lord, whereupon he became a free man.

Nor is it any more accurate to define the serf as a person bound to the body of his lord, for this condition, too, was true only for certain times and places. In France, for example, the serf had once been attached to his lord by what has been described as an indissoluble, almost corporeal bond that had nothing to do with any land the serf might hold. Thus, if a free man took over a holding formerly occupied by a serf, he remained free. In short, there was a clear distinction between personal status and tenure. Then, beginning in the thirteenth century, the "blemish of serfdom" began to adhere to the land rather than to the man, so that a free peasant who took over a tenement recognized as servile was regarded as a serf so long as he remained on the holding. Now tenure determined status. In Russia the development took just the opposite course, at least so far as the serfs of the pomeshchiks (the seigniors holding on service tenure from the tsar) were concerned. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these serfs were bound to their holdings (except under certain special circumstances), and not to the person of the pomeshchik. But this came to be disregarded by the pomeshchiks, who began to move their peasants about and even to sell them without land. In the eighteenth century the crown gave legal sanction to these practices so that these serfs of the pomeshchiks became bound to the person of their seigniors.

There was, however, one feature common to European serfdom wherever and whenever it existed: a peasant was recognized as unfree if he was bound to the will of his lord by ties that were degrading and socially incapacitating, and that were institutional rather than contractual. In practice, this meant that the lord had legal jurisdiction over his peasants to the complete, or nearly complete, exclusion of the state, so that to all intents and purposes the only rights the peasants had were those that the lord was willing to allow them. Concomitant circumstances of this condition were that the peasants were unable to come and go as they pleased without their lord's permission, and that the lord could demand whatever obligations he wanted. In actuality, it was a general, although far from universal, rule for these obligations to be fixed and even minutely defined by custom, but it was possible for the seignior to increase or decrease them, change their nature, or to command that they be performed in any order he wished. Yet the power of the lord over his serfs was not so great as to deprive them of their legal personality. Herein lay the difference between serf and slave. The serf, even when his status fell so low that he could be bought and sold without land, still had certain individual rights, albeit severely curtailed. The slave, no matter how well off he might be—and there were periods when at least some slaves seem to have enjoyed greater social and economic advantages than did serfs— was in the eyes of the law not a person but a chattel of his owner.

A sign of the waning of serfdom appeared when the central power began to intrude itself between lord and serf, chipping away at the lord's legal and administrative powers and establishing norms for the obligations he could demand of his peasants. Conversely, the withdrawal of the sovereign from interference in the lord-peasant relation doomed a free peasantry to serfdom.2

In our own day the word serfdom has become part of the vocabulary of polemicists who use it in describing societies of which they disapprove. In employing it in this fashion they subvert the historical meaning of the word. For though compulsion and subjugation have not disappeared from the world, the forms they take are very different from the forms of the institution that once bound millions of Europeans.

III

One further matter remains to be discussed before this history can begin: the physical setting in which it took place. As later pages will show, the topography, soil characteristics, and climate of the vast Russian land had much to do with the course of historical evolution there.

Nearly all of European Russia lies north of the 46th parallel.* In North America this line runs close to the border between the United States and Canada. Russia, then, is in both the cold and the moderate climatic zones. There are no neighboring great seas to temper the extremes of its weather, so that it has a continental climate—that is, sharp seasonal contrasts in temperatures. Winters are long and hard, and summers short, and in much of the country, hot. The growing season—the period free from killing frosts—is relatively short, even in the southern parts. In the Archangel district, in the far north, it averages 120 days a year, in the Moscow district 130 days, to the east in Kazan 146 days, in Kharkov in the Ukraine 151 days, and in Saratov, on the lower Volga, 161 days. In the United States the average growing season along our southern borders is more than 260 days, on the northern margin of the cotton belt, about 200 days, in the northern part of the corn belt, from 140 to 150 days, and in northern Maine and northern Minnesota, about 100 days.* The relative brevity of the frost-free season in Russia limits the choice and variety of crops that can be grown, and compels much work to be concentrated into a brief period.

The deficiency in moisture provides even greater handicaps to agriculture. The average annual precipitation ranges from 6 inches in the semi-arid dry steppe of the southeast, to 20-25 inches on the borders of Poland and the Baltic states. Again to use the United States for purposes of comparison, the line of 20 inch rainfall here goes through the center of North and South Dakota and the western parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. In days gone by those parts of America were known as the Great American Desert, and, more recently, as the Dust Bowl. In the northern part of Russia, because of the low temperatures and consequent small amount of evaporation, the rainfall is usually enough for the crops that are raised there. In fact, that region, with its abundancy of marshes and lakes, suffers more often from an excess than from a deficiency of moisture. But in the southern and southeastern regions the light rainfall, high summer temperatures, and scorching dry winds hold down the moisture. To make matters worse, the amount of annual rainfall is irregular, and its seasonal distribution is often unfavorable. Dry spells not infrequently occur in May and June when the growing plants need water badly, and rains in July and August come too late to help many crops and sometimes interfere with the harvest. If a dry spring is preceded by a winter with little or no snow, and if the dry winds blow during the summer, crop failures, and often in the past, famine, overwhelm the countryside.

Topographically, European Russia is part of the Great Central Plain that reaches from northern France across Germany, Poland, and Russia, and on into Asia. The Russian part of this vast tableland is a low plain that is only occasionally hilly. Its average elevation is just 580 feet, and in its highest parts, the water divides between its rivers, it does not reach over 1,640 feet. Its northern limit is set by the Arctic Ocean. On the east it is bounded for 1,250 miles by the Ural Mountains. This long ridge, most of it too low and gradual to form a real barrier, is the conventional division between Europe and Asia. Between the southern end of the Urals and the Caspian Sea there stretches the broad lowland, called the Caspian Depression, that links the Russian plain with the steppes of Asia. On the south the plain is bordered by the mountains of the Caucasus and by the Black Sea, and on the southwest by the Carpathians.

Travelers journeying across this tableland are overwhelmed by its immensity and its sameness. Without visible boundaries, it seems to stretch on into infinity. But though there are few geographical features to lend variety to the landscape, the plain is actually divided into five great horizontal belts, each differing sharply from the others in its natural characteristics.

The first of these belts is the tundra zone. It lies above the Arctic Circle between the White Sea and the northern Urals. The frigid climate, poor soil, and insufficient precipitation severely restrict agriculture. In spring the lower courses of the rivers remain blocked with ice long after their headwaters have melted, so that there are many flooded areas and broad stretches of marshland. It is cloudier there than in any other part of Europe, and there are frequent fogs. Snow may fall in any month of the year, but the cover is negligible because of the small amount of precipitation, and because strong winds blow it away. As a result, there is not enough cover to protect the soil during the cold winters and much of the subsoil is permanently fro^ep. Along the region's northern borders there are no trees or even shrubs, but moving southward the vegetation gradually increases until, on its southernmost outskirts, the tundra merges into the next great belt, the forest zone.

This second region, by far the largest of the five major belts, stretches southward from the Arctic Circle to a line running from Kiev northeast to Kaluga, then east through Riazan, Nizhnii Novgorod (now called Gor'kii), Kazan, and on into Siberia. This boundary, roughly approximating the 55th parallel of latitude, is usually considered the dividing line between northern and southern Russia. The zone was once covered by coniferous and mixed deciduous forests. Many navigable rivers move slowly through it. It has many bosfo especially in its northern part where there also are numerous lakes. Its predominant soils are light gray earths known as podzols. Sandy, clayish, or stony in composition, they have a low humus content, and are deeply leached. They can be and are farmed, but without fertilizer they give relatively low crop yields.

South of the forest zone there is a comparatively narrow strip that combines the qualities of forest and steppe, and so is called the forest-steppe zone. Here woods alternate with prairies, or small stands of trees are scattered against a steppe background. The soils, like the topography, stand midway between the earths of the forest and the steppe. Dark gray in color, they are the result of the encroachment of the northern forests into the steppe, and are sometimes known as degraded podzols and degraded black soil, the process of degradation consisting of a gradual transition from the black soil to the podzolic type. Though these soils are not as fertile as the true black earth they are well suited for farming.

Proceeding southward the woods thin out until the traveler emerges into the treeless expanse of the steppe. This is the land of the chernozem, as the Russians call the black earth that makes this zone the most fertile region of European Russia. More than twice as large as France or Germany, the black earth belt covers about one fourth of European Russia. It goes from the Rumanian border across to the Urals, and reaches southward to the mountains of the Crimea and the Caucasus. Its broadest north-south width, in the valley of the Don River, is over 600 miles. The average depth of its soil is between 2i/£ and 3 feet, and in some places it is as much as 5 feet. The weather, though marked by the extremes typical of continental climates, is milder than it is in the forest zone, but precipitation is light.

On its southern border the chernozem belt gradually fades into the semi-arid region that is called the dry steppe. This zone, north of the Caspian Sea and in the basin of the lower Volga, forms the southeastern corner of European Russia. The chestnut and light brown soils that cover much of this region are usually included in the chernozem, though they are not as fertile. Because rainfall is so light, agriculture is unimportant in this region, but when artificial irrigation is employed the soils give high returns.


Notes

1 In the Journal of Economic History, XVIII (1958), 417.

2 This discussion of the meaning of serfdom is from my article in the American Historical Review, LXII (1957), 807-809.

3 This sketch is drawn from Berg, Natural Regions, passim; Timoshenko, Agricultural Russia, pp. 4-17; Volin, A Survey, pp. 1-9.

4 US. Department of Agriculture, Climate and Man, p. 694.