As discussed in Chapter 16, slavery was one of the oldest social institutions in Russia and one of the major concerns of law. As a proportion of all law, the quantity dedicated solely to slavery can only be described as staggering. Slavery in fact was so important in Russia that a special central governmental office was created around 1550 to deal solely with slavery matters. Russia was the sole country in history to have one governmental department in the capital devoted solely to the issue of slavery. Major changes in the institution occurred during the period covered by this chapter. As has been discussed, society was in chaos after the reign of Ivan IV and Boris Godunov, acting in the name of the mentally challenged Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, tried to stabilise the situation by history-making measures enacted in the 1590s involving both slaves and peasants. The one involving slaves radically changed the nature of the institution. By this time the major slavery institution was limited service contract slavery (kabal'noe kholopstvo). A Russian - typically a low-energy, low- initiative down-and-outer - approached another Russian and asked him to buy him. The transaction was phrased in terms of a loan: the 'borrower' took a sum (perhaps 1, 2 or 3 roubles) from the 'lender' and agreed to work for him for a year in lieu of paying interest on the loan.[66] In ancient Parthia, this was known as antichresis. If the borrower failed to repay the loan in a year, he became the full slave of the lender. Almost no such 'loans' were ever repaid, and both parties realised from the start that the transaction was in reality a self-sale into perpetual slavery. Over the course of the sixteenth century limited service contract slavery replaced full slavery as the major relief institution for those desiring to sell themselves into slavery. The difference was that kabal'noe kholopstvo offered hope for a year of manumission, whereas full slavery from the outset was for life and hereditary. The trouble for the government was that slavery usually took an individual off the tax rolls, which the government did not like. Therefore on 25 April 1597, the typically activist government, by fiat, changed the nature of kabal'noe kholopstvo. The sale/loan was no longer for a year, but for the life of the creditor. Upon the death of the creditor, the slave was freed - presumably to go back onto the tax rolls. What the government did not understand was that the dependency created by slavery made it impossible for the freedman to exist on his own, with the result that he soon sold himself back into slavery, often to the heirs of the deceased. The government was unable to 'solve' this problem until Peter the Great by fiat in 1724 converted all household slaves into household serfs (all males, from newborns to decrepit geriatrics, were called 'souls') who all had to pay taxes.
The farming peasantry were also in chaos as a result of Ivan's psychotic reign. Serfdom dates back to the 1450s, with the introduction of St George's Day (26 November) for indebted monastery peasants, who could only move on that date.[67] The Sudebnik of 1497 extended St George's Day to all peasants.
Then in the i580s the government began to repeal the right of peasants to move on St George's Day who lived on the lands of selected landholders. In 1592 this prohibition was extended 'until further notice' to all peasants. The purpose was to stabilise the labour force of the provincial middle service- class cavalry, who could not render military service in the absence of peasant rent-payers. Thus with a flourish of the pen Boris Godunov's hypertrophic government changed the legal status of more than nine-tenths of the Russian population. Enserfment, especially as it descended into a slave-like condition, unquestionably would have been impossible without the fact that the Russians were accustomed to enslaving their own people.
Boris did not end his 1590s social legislative spree with the above. He added another provision to the enserfment decree, a statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive serfs. There was no statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive slaves, but Boris decided that hunters of fugitive serfs should be given five years to locate their chattels and file a suit for their recovery. Five years seems like a long time, but Russia is a big country, and was getting bigger all the time as mentioned above. Once a Russian serf had fled into any of the areas outside the Volga-Oka mesopotamia, finding him became almost impossible. Various elements of the Russian government wanted all of those areas inhabited by scarce Russians, and in fact encouraged migration into those areas. The struggle for scarce labour resources had yet another element: serfs could and did flee not only to the new territories, but also to lands of larger lay and monastic landlords. Such magnates (in the 1630s called 'contumacious people' - sil'nye liudi, literally, 'strong people') had estates in many places, and could move fugitives from one estate to another so that a pursuer could never find them. The five-year statute of limitations was a licence to the magnates and regional recruiters to recruit the peasant labour force of the Moscow heartland middle service-class cavalry. The sequel to this is discussed in Chapter 23.
In i607 Tsar Vasilii IV Shuiskii promulgated an important edict on fugitive serfs and slaves.36 The first important thing was that he linked the two categories of population. Secondly, he extended the statute of limitations to fifteen years for the hunting down and filing suits for fugitive serfs. The linking of serfs with slaves by Shuiskii was an important landmark in the abasement of the Russian peasantry. The St George's Day measures 'only' bound the peasants to the land so that they would be there as rent-paying fixtures for the next
et al. (eds.), Pamiatniki istorii krest'ian XIV-XIX vv. (Moscow: N. N. Klochkov, 1910),
pp. 14-50. The literature on enserfment is vast. See the bibliography for additional titles.
36 Hellie, Muscovite Society, pp. 137-41.
tenants of the land, rather like immovable structures left by one holder of the land for the next one. This was 'legalised' by the state in two forms of state charters. One, issued to the landholder, called a vvoznaia gramota, informed him that the peasants of such-and-such a parcel were to pay him traditional rent. In the first half of the sixteenth century, it is likely that the landholder did not even collect the rent himself, but a third party did. The second charter, called an 'obedience charter' (poslushnaia gramota), was issued to the peasants, and informed them that so-and-so was now the holder of the land and that they should pay him the traditional rent. But Ivan IV during his mad oprichnina introduced a dramatic change into the 'obedience charter': instead of ordering the peasants to pay traditional rent, they were ordered to 'obey their landholder in everything'. This gave the landholders complete control over their peasants. This was responsible for much of the peasant chaos that led to the repeal of the right to move on St George's Day. But for the long run, the personal abasement of the peasant was equally important. The 1607 Shuiskii decree enhanced this abasement, which was adumbrated by the simultaneity of the 1592 and 1597 decrees changing the status of the slaves and the peasants.
The period 1462-1613 witnessed intervention by the 'Agapetus state' (see Chapter 16) in the lives of its subjects unparalleled in previous history. Much of the institution of slavery was radically changed, while the freedom of the peasantry was radically abased. At the end of his reign Peter the Great abolished slavery by converting slaves into serfs. Peter's heirs by the end of the eighteenth century converted the serfs into near-slaves, the property of their lords (owners). The 'Agapetus state' was so powerful because it claimed and exercised control over - almost without opposition - two of the three basic factors of the economy, all the land and labour.[68] This had little impact on peasant methods of farming or material culture, but it laid down the course for Russian history until 1991.
67
Ibid., ch. 7; Hellie,
68
Richard Hellie, 'Thoughts on the Absence of Elite Resistance in Muscovy',