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

1

THE FIRST AGE OF EXPANSION

In the first millennium after Christ the Eastern Slavic tribes who were the forebears of the Russian people settled in the valley of the Dnieper River. They chose well, for the region had fertile and easily worked soil. Open areas alternated with forests that served as shelter belts. A network of navigable streams laced the valley and connected it with the three great bordering seas, the Baltic, the Black, and the Caspian. As time went on the tribesmen spread along these streams until by the middle of the ninth century their settlements reached from Lake Ladoga south to the falls of the Dnieper, and from the Western Dvina to the banks of the Oka and Upper Volga.

Much of the history of this early period must remain conjecture for the sources are very few. Apparently the various tribes ultimately formed federations, each with a city as its center, and with a company of hired warriors as its defense force. Often these mercenaries were Vikings -- or Varangians, as they are known in Russian history -- who began to come down the Russian waterways from their native Scandinavia probably in the eighth century. Some of the chieftains of the Viking bands managed to establish themselves as the hereditary rulers of the towns they were hired to defend, and then extended their power over other cities. There was much conflict between these ambitious dynasts, but by the turn of the ninth century one of them had succeeded in getting all the Russian cities under his nominal sovereignty, with Kiev, chief city of the realm, as his capital. So began the Kievan era of Russian history.1

The union that was formed was an extremely loose federation of nearly autonomous city-states, each ruled presumably by a prince appointed by the prince of Kiev, who usually chose his kinsmen for these thrones. The boundaries of the federation were uncertain, and its internal politics were riven by ceaseless discord. At first, no principle of succession to the thrones of Kiev and the other cities seems to have been established, and rival claimants to the thrones were a chief cause of domestic unrest and civil strife. Under Vladimir I (978-1015) and his son Iaroslav I (1019-1054) the realm attained the maximum stability it was destined to achieve. After Iaroslav's death the political organization of the federation, and especially the method of succession that was worked out, became remarkably involved, producing further dissension, while the natural increase in the ruling families led to successive partitions of territory in order to furnish principalities for the royal siblings. These divisive forces were aggravated by the military aggressions of the rulers against one another, and by periodic outbursts of popular unrest in which reigning princes were sometimes driven from their thrones and new ones invited in. To these factors that made for internal instability was added the ever present threat of barbarian invasion, for throughout its history the Kievan federation was threatened by waves of nomads rolling out of the Eurasian steppe.

The economic history of these first centuries is even more obscure and uncertain than their political history. Nonetheless, the available data make it clear that the Kievan era was an age of economic expansion that bore much resemblance to the experience of Western Europe in these same centuries. As in the West, there was an active growth of interregional trade. The Viking conquerors, after establishing their hegemony over the Dnieper valley, pushed on to Byzantium to sate their greed for the precious wares of the East. Though their relations with the Greeks were marred by armed conflicts, amicable trading connections were finally established. The "road from the Varangians to the Greeks" -- as the chronicler called the great trade route that ran from the Black Sea up the Dnieper and Lovat Rivers, through Lake Ilmen past Novgorod, then down the Volkhov into Lake Ladoga and thence into the Baltic -- became the chief artery of Russian commerce. In addition to the Byzantine trade the Russians had overland connections with the East, their merchants going to the shores of the Caspian and beyond. An active commerce with the countries of Central and Western Europe also grew up. Russia became well known and respected in the rest of Europe, as was evidenced by the marriages between the Kievan princely houses and the ruling families of Byzantium, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, and England.

The extensive foreign trade gave a strong impetus to internal commerce. The merchants traveled through the land to buy goods for export and to sell the wares they had imported. The luxury items they offered for sale had only a limited market, but there was a mass demand for some of their merchandise, such as salt, metal articles, arid cheap jewelry. The cities, especially Kiev, Novgorod, and Smolensk, were the centers of this commerce. Kiev, at the heart of the great river network that linked the Dnieper, Bug, Oka, Vistula, and Don valleys, and with the main overland routes running through it, was by far the most important.

Along with the growth of commerce and of a market economy, the use of money increased. In the pre-Kievan era cattle and furs had served as mediums of exchange and foreign coins had also been used. In the Kievan centuries metallic money came into general use. Coins were minted from the first half of the eleventh century on into the first quarter of the next century. Small silver bars were also used, and foreign coins had wide circulation.

Urban life quickened, too, just as it did in contemporary Western Europe. The old towns grew and many new ones were founded. Kiev became one of Europe's greatest cities. Thietmar of Merseburg (d. 1019) told of its 400 churches, its eight markets, and its "infinite multitude" of people. Adam of Bremen (d. 1076) wrote that it rivaled Constantinople, and a Russian chronicler reported that a great fire that raged through the city in 1124 destroyed 600 churches. The chroniclers of the era unintentionally provided a partial index to the increase in urban settlements, for though they had no interest in reporting on such mundane matters as the growth of towns, they frequently mentioned them by name in the course of their tales of heroism, treachery, and piety. In their annals for the ninth and tenth centuries they referred to 24, for the eleventh century 62 more, and for the twelfth century still another 120, for a total of 206 individual towns. In contrast, only 32 are mentioned by name for the first time in the sources of the thirteenth century when (as will be seen later) the secular trend in economic life swung downward.2

Presumably most of these towns were primarily centers for trade, but many of them also seemed to have been active in industrial production. Usually the markets for the wares turned out by their artisans were limited to the surrounding countryside, but some of their products were sold hundreds of miles away and even in foreign lands. As their markets expanded, the techniques of these workmen grew more complicated, and specialization increased. Rybakov, in his monumental work on the history of early Russian handicrafts, was able to identify as many as sixty special crafts in some of the cities of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.3

The colonization of new territory was further evidence that this period was one of economic growth -- and bore further resemblance to what was happening in the West. In Western Europe settlers pushed out beyond the old frontiers, and a wave of German colonists swept eastward across the Elbe. In Russia, Slav colonists moved out of the old regions of settlement into the forested triangle formed by the Oka and Upper Volga. At first there was only a trickle of migrants, but in the eleventh century their numbers grew. Most of the newcomers in the first stage of settlement were from Novgorod, coming in search of furs and other forest products, or farmers looking for better soil than could be found in their infertile homeland. Then settlers began moving in from the Dnieper valley. In the latter twelfth and in the thirteenth centuries this stream grew rapidly, but these later migrants were seeking haven from new nomad invasions that were threatening the Dnieper region, and from internal political and economic troubles. Their movement, then, was not evidence of expansion, as the colonization up to this time had been; rather it was evidence of the opposite phenomenon -- the economic decline of the old zone of settlement.4

All of these developments, and particularly the growth of cities and the colonizing movement up to the latter decades of the twelfth century, point toward the conclusion that there was a large increase in population during the Kievan period. In lands of Western Europe, during the long upward swing of economic life in these centuries, the spotty and inexact data indicate a doubling and even a tripling of the population. Unfortunately, the demographic information about Kievan Russia is so slight that not even the most imprecise generalizations about population size or growth can be made safely.5

Because the data are so scanty the nature of the basic occupation of the mass of the people in the Kievan and pre-Kievan eras was long a matter of debate among historians. One school insisted that most of the population earned their living in such forest occupations as fishing, hunting, and collecting honey, and that settled tillage was of minor importance in the economy. Trade in these forest commodities is assumed to have provided the foundation of economic development down to the disintegration of the Kievan federation. But the transfer of the center of national life to the Northeast isolated the people from their old commercial connections and markets, and only then did settled agriculture become their dominant calling. In direct contrast, another group of historians asserted that farming was the chief source of livelihood for most of the people before and during the Kievan era, as well as after it.6

That both local and interregional commerce was extensive in these early centuries, and that the chief articles in it of Russian origin were forest products, has been well established by written, archaeological, and linguistic evidence.7 The much scantier evidence on the trading class indicates that many persons, both Slav and foreign, were active merchants, but the chief foreign traders of the realm seem to have been the princes and their retainers. True Vikings, they had first come to the Russian land in search of wealth, to be gained by peaceful trade or by force as circumstances dictated -- piracy has often been the first stage of commerce. After their elevation to the ruling class of the Dnieper basin they continued in their mercantile activities, using their new preeminence in government to insure profitable trade for themselves. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who ruled in Byzantium from 945 to 959, in a manual that he compiled for the instruction of his son on governing the Empire, related how the Russian princes (he called them archons) and their retinues came each summer to Constantinople from Novgorod, Kiev, and the other river ports. Their vessels -- made by hollowing out single great tree trunks -- were loaded to the gunwales with merchandise. (Five hundred years after Constantine wrote his manual Josafa Barbaro, Venetian ambassador to the Crimean Tatars, told of Russian merchants sailing down the Volga in the same kind of craft. In the Russian forests, Barbaro recorded, "are great trees growing, which, being made hollow, serve for boats of one piece, so big that they will carry eight or ten horses at a time and as many men.") Constantine explained that each winter the princes and their men went through the Russian land levying tribute on the Slavs over whom they ruled.8 Doubtless this tribute made up a large part of the goods they brought to Constantinople. The articles in their cargoes mentioned most frequently in the sources were furs, honey, wax, and slaves. They exchanged these wares for luxury items such as silks, wines, fruits, and finely-made weapons.9

Despite the unquestioned prominence of commerce and the active trading role of the princes and their retinues, the available data, and particularly the archaeological evidence that has been unearthed in increasing quantities in recent decades, point clearly to farming as the predominant occupation for the mass of the people from the pre-Kievan centuries on. Even in frontier regions where forest industries could have been expected to have been of prime importance, the settlers practiced regular tillage from very early times. Trade may well have been the chief economic activity of the princes and nobles, but most people apparently made their livings by following the plow.10 Forest products were major export articles because they were the Russian goods for which there was the largest foreign demand, and not because they were the chief products of the Russian economy. In internal trade farm goods were of much greater importance. The people of the cities, though they probably raised some truck in gardens, were dependent for much of their food upon the surrounding rural districts. There was also an active interregional trade in farm products. Novgorod, for example, drew grain supplies from the more southerly parts of Russia, and there is evidence that grain was perhaps sometimes shipped to Constantinople.11

Two major tillage systems had been used originally. In forested regions the slash-burn mpthoH was employed (podseka). Trees felled in spring were allowed to lie until fall when their branches were chopped off and the trunks hauled away on sledges. The following spring the brush and debris that covered the clearing was set on fire, and the ashes allowed to remain. The area was then sown, often without plowing, the seed being broadcast and then covered by rakes or by dragging tree branches across the field. The clearing was used continuously for from two to eight years depending upon its fertility. When it was exhausted it was allowed to go back to forest, and other burned-out patches that had been prepared beforehand were sown. An estimated twenty-five to forty years were necessary for the field to recover its fertility and be ready to be used again to grow crops. Obviously, this was a wasteful system that was possible only where land was cheap and plentiful. It was equally wasteful in terms of labor. It has been estimated that seventy working days had to be expended annually to clear, prepare, and till one desiatin (2.7 acres) of arable land using this technique. A single family could not have been able to provide enough labor to work the land it needed to support itself, so that the use of the podseka system presupposed the existence of some form of communal organization.

In the forest-steppe and steppe zones field grass husbandry was employed. Here a field was cropped continuously for several years until its productivity fell. It was then allowed to go back to grass, while other fields were used. After an indeterminate number of years the field was once more tilled until it became exhausted again. There was no regular rotation of fields in this system. Like the slash-burn technique, this method was possible only where land was cheap and plentiful.12

As population increased and the man-land ratio rose, these wasteful tillage systems had to be abandoned. The practice of distributing fields on a permanent basis and working them continuously was gradually adopted. By the second half of the ninth century this stage had apparently been reached even in the North and Northeast, while in the Dnieper valley the old systems had long since been given up. Presumably the two- and three-field systems of husbandry became the dominant techniques, although it has been claimed they did not begin to displace the older methods until the first half of the fourteenth century.13 Actually, indisputable evidence of the widespread use of the three-field system is found only beginning with the last part of the fifteenth century. Both field grass husbandry and podseka continued to be used in frontier regions and in the far north for many more centuries and were still being practiced in some places into the twentieth century.

In the first stages of agriculture the chief farm tools were the axe to clear the forests and a primitive hoe-plow to scratch the surface of the soil. As tillage advanced more efficient tools were adopted. Archaeological evidence shows that a true plow, with iron share, pulled by horses or oxen, was being used in the Dnieper valley at least as early as the seventh-eighth century. In the North the sokha, a forked wooden hoe, was devised. This light and mobile instrument, pulled by draught animals or by humans, proved well-suited for the shallow soil of the North, and continued in use there down into recent times. Besides these tools, a wide variety of other basic farm implements, such as sickles, scythes, mattocks, and so on, dating back to the Kievan and pre-Kievan eras, have been unearthed.14

The improvements in the techniques of farming, like the growth in the number of cities, the active internal and foreign trade, the increase in industrial production, the greater use of money, and the colonial movement, provide evidence that the Kievan era was a period of economic expansion. At the same time these improvements in tillage must themselves have been the results of economic growth, since it seems reasonable to assume they were adopted in response to a mounting demand for farm products. Nor were they the only innovations in agriculture. New forms of land tenure and new methods of farm management also appeared within the framework of the expanding economy and in response to the opportunities it offered. These changes in the rural economy are the subjects of the next two chapters.


Notes

1 Rybakov, "Obrazovanie," pp. 107-138; Rostovtzeff, "Les origines," pp. 5-18.

2 Grekov, Feodal'nye otnosheniia, p. 7; Tikhomirov, Drevnerusskie goroda, pp. 10, 21-24.

3 Rybakov, Remeslo, pp. 501-588.

4 Liubavskii, Obrazovanie, pp. 4-8.

5 Abel, Agrarkrisen, pp. 20-21; Russell, British Medieval Population, p. 280, fig. 10.4.

Vernadsky, on what seem to me to be inadequate grounds, estimated the population of Kievan Russia in the twelfth century at between 7-8 millions, and without any presentation of evidence stated that it was much less than this in the tenth century, and still less in the eighth century. (Vernadsky, Zven'ia, I, 30.) Elsewhere Vernadsky estimated, again without providing the bases for his calculations, that urban population in the late twelfth-early thirteenth centuries was around one million, or about 13 per cent of the total estimated population. Not until the late nineteenth century did Russia again have so high a proportion of city dwellers. (Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, pp. 104-105.) Iakovlev arrived at the same estimate of total Kievan population by a somewhat startling procedure. He reasoned that since England and France's population are estimated to have increased seven times over between the eleventh and the beginning of the twentieth centuries the same should be true for Russian population growth. So he divided the early twentieth-century population of those areas of Russia that had been parts of the Kievan federation by seven. He "checked" this calculation by assuming that the population density per sq. km. in Kievan Russia was the same as that of North America at the end of the eighteenth century, or of Central Africa in the twentieth century, and then multiplied this density figure by the total area of the Kievan realm, and found that the product (ca. 7.5 millions) was very close to the figure he arrived at by his first calculation (7.9 millions). (Iakovlev, Kholopstvo, 1, 298.)

6 For an historiographical discussion of this controversy see Grekov, Krest'iane, pp. 8I-42.

7 Hrushevsky, Geschichte, 1, 878-308.

8 De administrando imperio, pp. 47-62; Barbara, "Travels," p. 31.

9 Vasiliev, "Economic Relations," pp. 324-325, 329.

10 Cf. Dovzhenok, "K istorii," pp. 116-131, 136-145; Hrushevsky, Geschichte, 1, 245-256.

11 "Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, pp. 116-117; Kliuchevskii, History, 1, 80; Voronin, "K itogam i zadacham," p. 28.

12 Savich, "Die Agrarwirtschaft," pp. 493-495; Dovzhenok, "K istorii," pp. 132, 156-157.

13 Grekov, Krest'iane, p. 48; Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, p. 109; Dovzhenok, "K istorii," pp. 157-158; P. Smirnov, "Obrazovanie," pp. 77-79; Smith, The Origins, pp. 66-70.

14 Dovzhenok, "K istorii," pp. 125-134.