The Ulozhenie of 1649
The Odoevskii legislative commission was one of the most efficient in all Russian history. Its members sent requests to the major chancelleries requesting that they send them their statute books, scrolls on which laws were entered as they were made. About ten of the forty chancelleries participated in that process. The commission extracted the most relevant provisions from the statute books and grouped them into what became the twenty-five chapters of the Law Code of 1649 (Sobornoe Ulozhenie), the most important written monument in all of Russian history before the nineteenth century - with perhaps the exception of the chronicles. On 1 October 1648, the delegates to the Assembly of the Land assembled with the petitions and demands of their constituents. About 7 per cent of the 968 articles of the Ulozhenie resulted from the petitions brought to the Assembly of the Land, including one for the repeal of the statute of limitations for filing suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs. The Odoevskii Commission read its draft to the delegates of each chamber, who voted each article either up or down. The provisions demanded by the delegates were integrated in with the Odoevskii Commission's draft extracted from the chancellery records. The whole project was completed in January 1649, and on 29 January the delegates who were willing signed the scroll copy of the Ulozhenie. This point must be stressed, for it is known that a number of the upper chamber clerics refused to sign the document to protest against the beating the Church had taken in the document on issues ranging from a semi-secularisation of the Church (a lay governmental chancellery, the Monastery Chancellery, was appointed to manage much of the Church; this was an ancestor of Peter the Great's Holy Synod) to issues on Church property discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The scroll copy, which is still extant, was taken to the state typography, and then 1,200 copies were published. This was the second civil (non-religious) book published in Muscovy. The 1,200 copies sold out rapidly, and a second printing of another 1,200 copies was ordered immediately, which sold out in a couple of years.39 The entire Ulozhenie is a printed manifestation of the dictum of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan that governments will acquire more power whenever the opportunity arises. The Ulozhenie gave the government power over nearly all of society, thus consolidating its almost total control over two of the major economic factors (land and labour).40 The third factor, capital, was
39 Richard Hellie, 'Muscovite Law and Society: the Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reflection of the Political and Social Development of Russia since the Sudebnik of 1589', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1965; Richard Hellie, 'The Ulozhenie of 1649', MERSH, vol. xl (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1985), pp. 192-8; Richard Hellie, 'Early Modern Russian Law: The Ulozhenie of 1649', and 'Ulozhenie Commentary: Preamble and Chapters 1-2', RH 15 (1988): 155-224; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapters 3 through 6', RH 17 (1990): 65-78; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapters 7-9', RH 17 (1990): 179-226; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapter 11 (The Judicial Process for Peasants)', RH 17 (1990): 305-39; Richard Hellie, 'The Church and the Law in Late Muscovy: Chapters 12 and 13 of the Ulozhenie of 1649', CASS 25 (1991): 179-99.
40 Perhaps a chapter such as this should discuss in detail the evolution of the exploitation of the peasants/serfs in this period, but space limitations and other considerations prevent such a presentation. Soviet scholars did much work on this issue, but never systematised their findings. The problems are immense. One is the passage of time, and the facts that rents were always changing. Another is the fact that there were numerous forms of rent, ranging from labour rent (barshchina) in which a serf farmed his lord's land to money or in kind rent (obrok) to any possible combination of these forms of rent. Geographical variations were important. Perhaps most important was the variety of landowners and landholders ranging from the state itself to the tsar, from the Church (consisting of the patriarch, monasteries, individual institutions) to magnate landowners down to provincial cavalry landholders. With the passage oftime, pure 'rent' gets mixed up with taxes. The general assumption is that rent and taxes took about a third of a peasant's harvest and his time (ifproperly priced), the peasant could consume about a third ofwhat he produced, andhehad to save about a third ofhis harvest for seed for the following year. See e.g. A. N. Sakharov Russkaia derevnia XVII v. Po materialam Patriarshego khoziaistva (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), pp. 66-7; N. A. Gorskaia, Monastyrskie krest'iane Tsentral'noi Rossii v XVII veke. O sushchnosti i formakh feodal'no-krepostnicheskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 239-339; Iu. A. Tikhonov, Pomeshchich'i krest'iane v Rossii. Feodal'naia renta v XVII - nachale XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), pp. 117-305. Tikhonov's table 59 shows the vast variations in rents on service landholdings in this period (p. 297). See also L. V Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar' i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow:
still largely in private hands, although the discussion above about technology transfers indicates that the government, which also was the largest merchant, had considerable control over this factor as well.
The Ulozhenie became known everywhere almost immediately and was referred to by those with legal interests for decades thereafter. The major changes in the law were announced by public criers. For the purposes of this chapter, the major items of interest were contained in the Ulozhenies chapter 11 (serfdom, 34 articles), chapter 19 (townsmen, 40 articles), and chapter 20 (slaves, 119 articles). The Assembly of the Land added little to chapter 20, which was a codification of the practices of the Slavery Chancellery. On the other hand, much of chapters 11 and 19 came from petitions by the delegates to the Assembly of the Land. The principles of these three chapters interacted with one another in the production of the system which was to last in Russia - even beyond the abolition of personal serfdom in 1861 - until the reforms of 1906 onwards.
The first principle of serfdom was that the peasant could not move without his lord's permission. The same was true for the townsmen (for whom the town was the 'lord'). According to articles 1 and 2 of chapter 11, this was true for all peasants, regardless of whether they lived on lay or Church seigniorial land, or on land that had no lord, 'taxable land', that still belonged to the peasants or to the state. Later on, in the eighteenth century, the provisions for seigniorial and state peasants diverged, but this was not the case in 1649. Second, there was the issue of the return of fugitives. Here the measures for serfs resembled more those for slaves than for townsmen. For the return of slaves, there had never been a statute of limitations for the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitives. Now, the same applied to serfs. As mentioned earlier, however, the evidentiary bases for the status of slavery and serfdom differed dramatically. Slaves were registered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery; otherwise they were not slaves. There was no formal registration for serfs, so the issue arose ofwhat evidence would apply in the case of disputes involving serfs. The Ulozhenie preferred written evidence, and mentioned the land cadastres compiled in 1626, the recently compiled 1646-7 census, or records transmitting possession oflands to servicemen. In practice, such written evidence overrode the clause in the Ulozhenie which declared that a peasant was supposed to live where his/her grandfather had lived. On the other hand, there were no provisions for the return of townsmen who had fled prior to the Ulozhenie; for them,