Founded in 1636, Tambov was a fortress that protected the Muscovite state from the nomadic tribes that had populated this land before the Russians invaded it. Tambov was thus a contemporary of Williamsburg (1632), an early center of plantations in Virginia, and of Cape Town in South Africa (1652). Near Tambov, however, the security situation made stable agriculture impossible for 100 years after its foundation, and a plantation-type economy unfeasible for another 100 after this. Centrally located, the estate that Hoch studied was still far from the markets; it took a week to deliver grain to the river hub, and to transport it to Moscow took months. Forced resettlements of serfs populated this land, and immigration continued into the nineteenth century. Even then, the demographic growth on this estate did not compensate for the draft of recruits and the flights of the serfs (Hoch 1989: 5). Though the estate was relatively rich, it could not sustain the imperial demands. It is counterintuitive to consider Tambov as a colony, but anywhere else in the world a land that was populated by forced settlers at a time of high imperialism and, in addition, cultivated under the permanent threat of the lash would be so designated. It so happens that scholars of the Russian peasantry have rarely addressed its particularity from a colonial perspective, though some remarkable exceptions exist (Rogger 1993; Frank 1999).
Serfs and Colons
Serfdom became law in Russia after the turmoil of the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). A little earlier than the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618 - 48), this Russian crisis also included a confessional conflict, a civil war with foreign intervention, celebrated cases of fake identities, and the general breakdown of the state (Dunning 2001). As part of the European crisis of the seventeenth century, the situation in Russia was provoked by the collapse of the resource-bound economy (see Chapter 5). With no fur or silver for mercenaries, land remained the only currency available to Moscow. But making any profit on land was problematic. The three-field agricultural system, which was the condition for productivity in central Russia, demanded long cycles (Confino 1963). But bonding people to the land involved a high level of violence. With the arrival of firearms, the servitors obtained a decisive advantage over the peasants; armed with muskets or rifles, a small number of soldiers could control a crowd of peasants carrying axes and knifes (Hellie 1971; Pettengill 1979). Eventually, the new regime was codified as a serfdom and became a major feature of the Russian state. The import of firearms made a larger contribution to the establishment of serfdom than any economic consideration. But violence was difficult to translate into power; complex institutions were needed for this task.
While in Western Europe, serfs became farmers and free toilers, in Poland and Russia, free men became serfs. Some historians explain this "second serfdom" as a result of the growing export demand, with Eastern Europe becoming the supplier of cereals and livestock to the west (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007: 162). But in contrast to Baltic lands, in Russia there were few opportunities for a landowner to export his crops. Until the Black Sea ports became available in the mid-eighteenth century, Russia's largest agricultural export was the hemp and flax that the Brits were buying in Archangel. However, serfdom developed not in Archangel but in those land-locked provinces of Russia that had the worst export opportunities. Racially white, religiously Orthodox, ethnically Russian, centrally located peasants suffered from serfdom more than anybody else. Kliuchevsky showed that the closer a province was to Moscow, the higher was the percentage of serfs there. He interpreted this distribution in security terms: "the fortress of serfdom" (Kliuchevsky 1913). There were few privately owned serfs in northern Russia and Siberia; no serfdom among Kalmycks, Kazakhs, Jews, or peoples of the north; few serfs among Tartars; only some serfs among the Russian Old-Believers and sectarians; and millions of serfs among the Orthodox Slavs (Kappeler 2001: 30). However one defines the core of this Empire, the closer one got to it, the more serfs there were. Despite the intellectual challenge that this situation presented, there was no racial or religious theory that explained or justified such selectivity. Neither the church, nor the state, nor the intelligentsia formulated anything equivalent to the American planters' belief that African Americans were fit for slavery and Native Americans were not (Nash 2000). But the practice of enserfment was consistent with the idea that Orthodox Russians were fit for enserfment and other peoples were not. Much later, the emancipation of serfs also fitted in with this idea. The great reforms of the mid-nineteenth century were first tested on the periphery of the Empire, in those Baltic and Polish lands where Russian and non- Russian peasants were serfs, and then applied to its core. In the long history of serfdom, the peasants of the internal provinces were enslaved earlier and emancipated later than the peasants of the imperial periphery, and in much higher proportions.
In his comparative study, Orlando Patterson characterizes Russian serfdom as "highly extrusive," with the serf imagined as "an internal exile," who had been deprived of the protection of law and all claims of community. The Orthodox Church encouraged the enserfment of the Orthodox by the Orthodox but did not provide a justification for their inequality: "Russia was the only Christian state whose church did not help to define the slave as a converted infidel." Instead of defining serfs as the foreign enemy within their land, the Russian serf-owner "chose exactly the opposite way in defining himself as the foreigner of noble ancestry" (Patterson 1982: 43-4). Whether Rurikide or Petrovian, the typical serf-owner kept hundreds or thousands of his serfs in a state of social death. From 1649 to 1861, masters could legally sell, buy, and mortgage serfs, though in most cases they could not do this to individual serfs, only to whole families.
Masters could force their peasants to work, but they could not legally kill them. Serfs could not sign contracts, could not testify in courts, and could not denounce their masters.
"Ruling the countryside like local satraps or colonial administrators" (Frank 1999: 8), landed nobles had to feed themselves with the help of their serfs. If they failed to do so, the state subsidized them, as it would do with the administrators. The nobles benefited in two ways, socially and economically. While the social benefits - conspicuous consumption, lifestyle preservation, and various privileges of power - were primary, the economic benefits were unreliable and increasingly unsustainable. The non-economic nature of serfdom made it different from slavery in America (Kolchin 1987). There, plantation owners would not keep their slaves from generation to generation if they did not bring a profit. But the standard property of a Russian noble, with many square miles of land and hundreds of peasants, was a not-for-profit institution. Keeping serfs despite losses was the rule rather than the exception. Starting with the early nineteenth century, the empire offered nobles ways of mortgaging their lands, together with the peasants, in state banks. Unpaid mortgages converted into foreign debts and inflation. Serfs subsidized the Empire but the Empire subsidized serfdom. Introduced by Egor (George) Kankrin, the Imperial Minister of Finances (1823 - 44), this policy was much ridiculed by Marxist historians. In the twenty-first century, when an average European farm receives about a third of its income from the state, Kankrin's policy seems forward-looking. Serfdom did not have an economic rationale; the social interests of the nobility and the disciplinary interests of the Empire dictated its preservation. In 1856, about two-thirds of male serfs (6.6 million "souls") were mortgaged, but foreclosures on the landed gentry could be counted in the dozens (Pintner 1967: 37- 42). The government gave loans to the rural gentry on the security of their serfs and refused to credit manufacturers and merchants. During most of its reign, the Empire restricted industrial development in favor of unproductive agriculture. In its core areas, serfdom was a mechanism of social policy and preservation of lifestyle (Moon 1999).