Internal trade, although less spectacular than foreign commerce, likewise dated from time immemorial and satisfied important needs. Kiev, Novgorod, and other leading towns served as its main centers, but it also spread widely throughout the land. Some of this domestic trade stemmed from the division of the country into the steppe and the forest, the grain-producing south and the grain-consuming north - a fact of profound significance throughout Russian history - and the resulting prerequisites for exchange.
Commerce led to a wide circulation of money. Originally furs were used as currency in the north and cattle in the south. But, beginning with the reign of St. Vladimir, Kievan minting began with, in particular, silver bars and coins. Foreign money too accumulated in considerable quantities in Kievan Russia.
Agriculture developed both in the steppe and in the forest. In the steppe it acquired an extensive, rather than intensive, character, the peasant cultivating new, good, and easily available land as his old field became less productive. In the forest a more complex process evolved. The trees had to
be cut down - a process called podseka - and the ground prepared for sowing. Moreover, when the soil became exhausted, a new field could be obtained only after further hard work. Therefore, the perelog practice emerged: the cultivator utilized one part of his land and left the other fallow, alternating the two after a number of years. Eventually a regular two-field system grew out of the perelog, with the land divided into annually rotated halves. Toward the end of the Kievan period the three-field system appeared, marking a further important improvement in agriculture and a major increase in the intensity of cultivation: the holding came to be divided into three parts, one of which was sown under a spring grain crop, harvested in the autumn, another under a so-called winter grain crop, sown in the autumn and harvested in the summer, while the third was left fallow; the three parts were rotated in sequence each year. Agricultural implements improved with time; the East Slavs used a wooden plough as early as the eighth and even the seventh century a.D. Wheat formed the bulk of the produce in the south; rye, also barley and oats, in the north. With the evolution of the Kievan state, princes, boyars, and monasteries developed large-scale agriculture. It may be noted in this connection that, in the opinion of some scholars, private ownership of land in Kievan Russia should be dated from the eleventh century at the earliest, while, on indirect evidence, other specialists ascribe the origins of this institution to the tenth or the ninth centuries, and even to a still more distant past.
The East Slavs and later the Kievan Russians engaged in many other occupations as well. Cattle raising has existed since very ancient times in the steppe of southern Russia, and a Byzantine author of the sixth century a.D. wrote about the great number and variety of cattle possessed by the Antes. Forest environment on the other hand led to the acquisition of such skills as carpentry and woodworking in general, as well as apiculture, and the forests also served as enormous game preserves. Hunting for furs, hides, and meat, together with fishing in the many rivers and lakes, developed long before the formation of the state on the Dnieper and continued to be important in Kievan Russia. The Kievan people mined metal, primarily iron, and extracted salt. Their other industries included pottery, metalwork, furriery, tanning, preparation of textiles, and building in stone, not to mention many less widespread arts and crafts practiced at times with a consummate artistry. Rybakov and some other investigators have recently shed much light on this interesting aspect of Kievan life.
Kievan Society
Vernadsky's well-known and perhaps high estimate has placed the population of Kievan Russia in the twelfth century at seven or eight million.
At the top stood the prince and the ever-increasing princely family with its numerous branches, followed by the retainers of the prince, the druzhina. The latter, divided according to their importance and function into the senior and the junior druzhina, together with the local aristocracy formed the upper class of the country, known in the Russian Justice and other documents of the time as the muzhi. With the evolution of the Kievan state the retainers of the prince and the regional nobility fused into a single group which was to play for centuries an important role in Russian history under the name of the boyars. After the muzhi came the liudi, who can be generally described as the Kievan middle class. Because of the great number and significance of towns in Kievan Russia, this class had considerable relative weight, more than its counterparts in other European countries at the time or in Russia in later periods, even though apparently it diminished with the decline of the state.
The bulk of the population, the so-called smerdy, remained agricultural and rural. Kievan peasants, or at least the great majority of them, seem to have been free men at the dawn of Kievan history, and free peasantry remained an important element throughout the evolution of the Kievan state, although bondage gradually increased. Indeed several kinds of bondsmen emerged, their dependence often resulting from their inability to repay the landlord's loan which they had needed to establish or re-establish their economy in troubled times. The slaves occupied the bottom of the social pyramid. It may be added that the principal taxes in Kiev were levied on the "plough" or the "smoke," meaning a household, and were gathered only in the countryside and apparently exclusively from the peasants.
A special group consisted of people connected with the Church, both the clergy who married and had families and the monks and nuns, together with others serving the huge ecclesiastical establishment in many different capacities. The Church operated hospitals and hostels, dispensed charity, and engaged in education, to mention only some of its activities, in addition to performing the fundamental religious functions. Still another classification, that of the izgoi, encompassed various displaced social elements, such as freed slaves.
Soviet historians - and, for different reasons, Pavlov-Silvansky and a few other early scholars - considered the evolution of Kievan society in terms of the establishment of a full-fledged feudalism. But the prevalence of money economy in Kievan Russia, the importance of towns and trade, the unrestricted rather than feudal attitude to landed property, the limited and delegated authority of the local magnates, as well as certain other factors, indicate serious weaknesses of any such view and suggest that the issue of feudalism in Russia can be more profitably discussed when dealing with a later period of Russian history.
Kievan Institutions
The chief Kievan political institutions were the office of prince, the duma or council of the boyars, and the veche or town assembly, which have been linked, respectively, to the autocratic or monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic aspects of the Kievan state. While princes in Kievan Russia proliferated, the one in Kiev retained a special position. From the twelfth century he carried the title of the great, or grand, prince. Princely tasks included military leadership, the rendering of justice, and administration. In war the prince could rely first of all on his own druzhina, and after that on the regiments of important towns, and even, in case of need, on a mass levy. Kievan military history, as has already been mentioned, proved to be unusually rich, and the organization and experience of Kievan armies left a legacy for later ages.