The political and cultural efforts of the state and the court rested on the shoulders of the Russian peasantry, seventy percent of whom were serfs. About half of all peasants were the property of the gentry, another fifteen percent were serfs of the Orthodox monasteries, and the rest relatively free. Monastery serfs had been the object of government policy since the time of Tsar Aleksei, who had already taken control of church lands to shore up state revenues. Peter had imitated him, but after his death, control of the land went back to the church. In the 1750s the Shuvalovs decided on a more radical measure: the state would confiscate the monastery lands and make the peasants into tenants of the state. In practice this would mean the end of serfdom for monastery peasants, but the war with Prussia intervened and the reform was delayed.
The fifty percent of peasants that were the property of the gentry varied in their economic position considerably. In the old Russian heartland of central Russia and the northwest, by 1750 most peasants rarely performed labor services, though the gentry could demand them at any time. Mostly the peasants paid some sort of rent and managed the affairs of the village themselves under the supervision of an often distant estate steward and an even more distant owner. The peasant economy of these regions was a complex mix of food crops, small-scale stock raising, and more specialized pursuits like market gardening for the Moscow and St. Petersburg population, both of which were growing rapidly. Some peasants also grew flax to make linen and canvas or hemp for ropes. To the northeast of Moscow and on the upper Volga in particular, there were whole villages and even districts emerging where the peasants were scarcely farmers at all. Here they made frying pans and other iron implements, wove coarse cloth, made wooden spoons and dishes, and even produced more sophisticated items, such as painted chests, toys, and even icons on wood and metal. Herein lay the origins of the Palekh icon painting of the nineteenth century, and the later production of painted lacquer boxes. In these villages the richest artisans were merchants as well, who attended all the local fairs like the great fair near Nizhnii Novgorod or who went to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Some such peasant traders even came to Archangel as early as Peter’s time. Many of these were monastery villages, but some were the property of great magnates like the Sheremetevs. In later times the Sheremetev villages would grow into great industrial cities.
South of the Oka River, where the steppe began with its black earth, a different sort of serf economy emerged. These areas were still open to Crimean slave raids, but since the 1630s the Russian state had steadily strengthened its defenses in the south, so that the area was relatively secure by 1750. The seventeenth century defensive lines had relied on armed peasants, Cossacks, and local noblemen, but Peter’s regular army replaced them in large part, leaving land open for normal peasant settlement. Noblemen began to move farther and farther south, buying or receiving larger and larger estates as grants from the crown. Many of them were devoted at first to sheep and cattle raising, as this was easier to manage in remote and thinly settled areas, but soon the area began to shift to grain production and the nobles began to set up estates largely worked by labor services. This system demanded the presence of a nearby steward to give orders to the peasants or even the residence of the landowner. Labor services were much more oppressive to the peasantry, and were balanced only by the greater fertility of the southern soil.
The peasantry, however, under either system was not ground down into abject and universal poverty. Eighteenth century Russian peasants probably ate as well as their counterparts in France or Germany, at least in years of normal harvest, and they owned their own animals, ploughs, and other agricultural tools as well as modest material goods. The oppressive nature of the serf system lay not in the diet or the lack of material possessions of the peasants, but rather in the nature of the social relations that defined serfdom. Serfdom was never defined in written law, though by custom the master had nearly complete power over the serf. He could demand any sort of labor services or payments, forbid marriages, reorder the land allotments of the village community, or move whole villages to different parts of the country. Short of torturing or killing the serf, he could do anything. In practice radical mistreatment was not in the master’s interest, but not all masters understood that, and in any case the threat of arbitrary exactions or commands hung over the serf for the whole of his life. The only real limit to the landowner’s power was the threat of revolt or personal revenge, and this was a very real possibility given the lack of effective state power in rural areas. Yet that option meant that the peasant burned his bridges and had to flee, which was not desirable for most peasants. It was better to put up with the master and hope for the best.
Fortunately not all Russian peasants were serfs. About thirty percent of the peasantry had no master and paid only taxes and an additional “rent” to the state. These were the peasants of the north, the Urals, and Siberia, as well as many on the southern frontier. All Cossacks, who increasingly farmed the land, were also free. These areas were not unimportant, and indeed from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century the north was a land of great prosperity, founded on the fur trade with Siberia and the salt springs that supplied most of Russia’s needs. The Stroganov family had made its fortune as early as the sixteenth century on salt, so much so that the tsar granted them a separate legal status of their own – not noble but higher than all other merchants. Their houses in the north had been a major center of not only trade, but also of book production and icon painting. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the collection of salt from surface deposits around the mouth of the Volga took the profits out of the salt trade, but the Stroganovs turned to iron manufacturing in the Urals, along with the Demidovs, a peasant-merchant family from central Russia and a few other families. From Peter’s time onward the state granted them the right to use corvée labor by the peasantry to supply the iron foundries with wood for fuel, and the iron mines prospered. The Urals mines and foundries were very remote, and the iron had to be floated down the rivers on barges during the spring floods to reach the Volga where it went on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Much of it was even exported to England and elsewhere in Western Europe. Though a technically rather primitive industry, it made enormous fortunes for the owners, and both the Stroganovs and Demidovs entered the nobility. The profitability of the iron works rested on the unpaid labor of the state peasants “assigned” to them, and their peasants fell into a sort of semi-serfdom, which in time proved highly explosive.