Most of the women in Muscovy’s cities were poor, a condition they shared with the great majority of urban women across Europe. Muscovite townsfolk lived in wooden cottages clustered along unpaved roads; the rich sheltered in large, walled compounds. Poorer women supported themselves by making consumer goods, keeping taverns, or selling food, clothing, and housewares in boisterous markets near the city center. Some worked as servants. Theirs were precarious existences, given the ups and downs of Muscovy’s economy. Unfortunately we know very little about such women because the documents that have survived deal overwhelmingly with the elite. They contain extensive information on only one group of urban poor people, the slaves.
There were a lot of slaves in Muscovy; they constituted perhaps as much as 10 percent of the population, making them more numerous than nobles, merchants, or priests.5 There were also far more slaves in Muscovy than elsewhere in Europe at the time, because slavery served a very different purpose in Muscovy than it did in Western Europe. In the West, by the sixteenth century, slavery consisted overwhelmingly of the horrific bondage inflicted on Africans sent to colonies in the western hemisphere. In Muscovy, by contrast, slavery was a state into which people entered voluntarily in order to save themselves from destitution. It was akin to the English practice of indentured servitude, except that it lasted longer. In England, the indentured earned their freedom after a period of labor for their masters; in Muscovy, until the 1590s, slaves were required to remain in bondage their entire lives. Thereafter, the government changed the law so that slaves were emancipated on the death of their owners.
Muscovite slave owners shared with the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese a preference for male slaves. Richard Hellie has calculated that two-thirds of Muscovy’s slaves were men. This was largely a matter of economics: slaves cost more in room and board than they returned in labor value. So the majority of nobles, who could afford only one slave, usually selected a man, because men did more varied work than women. Men could perform menial chores, become household and estate managers, and even serve with their masters in the army. Most of the slave owners—80–90 percent—were also men, because women’s rights to buy slaves were limited.6
A third of Muscovy’s slaves were female, the great majority of them married women who became slaves when their husbands arranged for the entire family, including children, to enter into service. Widows and women whose husbands had deserted them also turned to slavery to save themselves from want, but they were less likely to find buyers than were single men. “The consequence…,” Hellie observes, “must have been the death from starvation and related causes of the females for whom a market did not exist.” This devaluation of female labor meant that Muscovite slavery, considered as a social-welfare institution, benefited men and married women much more than single females.7
Most Muscovite slaves, male and female, performed domestic labor in wealthy households. They gardened, prepared food, made clothing, and tended children. Some also served as maids to the family’s women. Although the work was hard, it was not as exhausting or as uncertain in its returns as farming. Slaves were also better clothed, housed, and fed than the rural poor and they had more economic security.
In exchange, they were subject to the power of their masters. Slaves in Muscovy were allowed to marry, which was often not the case in the western hemisphere. As in the West, owners in Muscovy could separate children from their parents by selling them or giving them to a son or daughter who was moving away from home. Hellie argues that Muscovite slave-owners abided by the general belief that slave families should not be so violated. He also finds that female slaves suffered less than women in other slave societies from sexual exploitation by their owners, probably because the Orthodox Church condemned such behavior and levied penalties on it.8 The fact that there were no economic incentives to produce large numbers of slave children, as there were in the Americas, where slaves did agricultural, mining, and manufacturing work, may also have dampened the ardor of Muscovite masters.
In sum, Muscovite slavery was a good deal less oppressive than many other slave systems, and “freedom” in the larger society was for many a less attractive alternative. This mournful reality is attested to by the fact that oftentimes freed slaves, even those who had run away from masters they did not like, sold themselves back into slavery in fairly short order. Slavery offered a recourse that was less awful than begging or watching one’s children starve. The desperation that drove people to slavery has been well documented by Hellie. One of his most chilling findings is the fact that families entering slavery contained very few female children. He speculates that parents who had decided to become slaves killed their daughters, because they believed that doing so would improve their chances of finding owners. It is also possible that they did away with their female babies as poverty bore in on them. After people became slaves, they no longer had to make such dreadful choices, so the families born to married slaves contained natural numbers of girls and boys.9
The Lives of Elite Women
The homes in which the slaves labored belonged to a Muscovite elite made up of wealthy noble families and a growing cohort of non-noble court servitors and merchants. In the cities, these people lived in substantial walled compounds containing residential buildings; outbuildings such as kitchens, stables, storage sheds, and smokehouses for curing meat and fish; gardens devoted to vegetables and fruit trees; and wells. Geese, chickens, goats, and pigs wandered around the barnyards and through the trees; the family’s cattle and horses grazed on nearby pastures in summer and joined the other livestock in the compound in the winter. The human inhabitants of these mini-farms included the head of household and his wife, their minor children and unmarried adult ones, perhaps a few relatives too poor to live independently, and a household staff of slaves and servants. Working together, they produced most of their food and clothing, tended to their medical needs, and reared their children.
The major contemporary source on these households is The Domostroi, a book written by a highly placed priest or government bureaucrat in the 1550s to instruct male family heads in managing their domestic affairs. This was no trivial matter, for the anonymous author believed, as did most Europeans of his era (and of ours, for that matter), that the family was the cornerstone of the social order. The welfare of the family, in turn, depended on its being run by a loving, mutually respectful husband and wife, a pair united in work and life. The “master” was the boss, and the author of The Domostroi devoted a lot of attention to his tasks. He also believed that the “mistress” made a crucial contribution to family success, and so he painstakingly laid out an idealized pattern of character and behavior for her as well. The resulting book became a classic of Muscovite literature that was still being consulted by Russian readers in the twenty-first century.10
The author of The Domostroi believed that the mistress should be chaste, obedient, and loving to her husband, stern and commanding to other members of the household, and modest in her dealings with acquaintances. Obedience to her husband was her most important obligation. “Whatever her husband orders, she must accept with love; she must fulfill his every command,” the author declared (124). She should also strive to live with him in amity. “A wife should not get angry at her husband about anything, nor a husband at his wife” (143). But the lady of the house was to take on quite other qualities when supervising her female servants. In that role she was required to be a no-nonsense manager. “The wife should… teach her servants and children in goodly and valiant fashion,” the author wrote. “If someone fails to heed her scoldings, she must strike him” (143). This was not an unusual admonition; physical punishment of disobedient subordinates, be they children, employees, soldiers, or slaves, was widely accepted across Europe. As widespread was the ideal of the elite woman who submitted humbly to her husband’s authority and that of others who outranked her, while unflinchingly exerting her own authority over inferiors.