In spite of the Ulozhenie, peasants continued to flee, both to other landlords and to the frontiers. About the latter little could be done, and it is not clear that the government was opposed to the settling of the frontier areas in any case.44 But the government learned that there was something it could do to inhibit lords from receiving fugitives. The first step was a fine, which had no impact. Then the government decided to confiscate an additional peasant besides the fugitive being returned. This had no impact. So the government raised the number to two. This also had no impact. But when the number was raised to four, would-be recipients of others' fugitive serfs drove them out en masse.45 Historians have been able to learn of only a handful of enforcements of this sanction. For the savage Peter the Great, this was still insufficient, so he decreed the death penalty for the receiver of another's serf. Whether this sanction was ever effected is unknown.
The post-Ulozhenie era was replete with legislation on serfs, as we have seen. The last measure which must be mentioned came about as a result of the census of 1678, which uncovered the fact that vast numbers of serfs, now differing little from slaves, had left the tax rolls by selling themselves into slavery. The following year the government solved this problem on 2 September 1679 by unilaterally converting all slaves engaged in agriculture into serfs, that is, putting them on the tax rolls.46 This left household slavery as the sole exit for the exploited peasantry, a fact uncovered in the census of 1719. Peter liquidated that problem on 5 February i722, and again on i9 January i723, by making all household slaves subject to the soul tax (a head tax on all males), thus extinguishing the institution of slavery in favour of serfdom.47
Ibid., pp. 146-7; PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1952-63), vyp. vii: Pamiatniki prava periodasozdaniiaabsoliutnoi monarkhii. VtoraiapolovinaXVIIv., ed. L. V Cherepnin (1963), pp. 298-30i. See also the decree of 5 March i677, permitting peasants of the Saviour monastery who had settled in the town of Iaroslavl' after the Ulozhenie to remain there (PRP, vyp. vii, p. 297). In 1699 a similar decree was issued for Kazan' (ibid., p. 302).
Hellie, Enserfment, p. 250.
Ibid., pp. 252-3. Additionally, fines of 20 roubles per year per fugitive were to be collected, and offending estate stewards were to be beaten with the knout: Vorms, Pamiatniki, pp. 84-6.
Hellie, Slavery, pp. 686, 697.
Ibid., p. 698.
The census of I678 changed the method of assessment of taxation. Previously, peasants had been taxed on the basis of the quantity and quality of the land they tilled. As one might expect, this led to a diminution of agricultural tillage. So the government decided to tax on the basis of households. The mean household size had been four. The new provision changed the nature ofthe peasant/serf household. Like all economic creatures, the Russians soon figured out a way to 'beat' the tax collector: to crowd as many people into a house as possible. The smoky hut had limited capacity, but fundamentally solitaries disappeared and the three-generational family was created. The same thing had happened earlier in the Balkans, when the Ottomans had introduced household taxation a few centuries earlier. Mean household size increased to ten, as surviving grandparents, their male children and spouses and their children all crowded into one hut. Nineteenth-century Slavophiles believed that the extended family was a primordial Slavic peasant institution, but in fact it had been created, really unknowingly, by the powerful Muscovite state. Peter figured out what had happened, and shifted to the system of soul taxation. Crowding so many people into one hut was undoubtedly deleterious for both health and social relations, but it saved money (first, on heat, like the stove ventilating into the room), so that the extended family persisted to 1861, and in many cases to the end of the tsarist regime. This was done under pressure from landlords desiring to maximise rents and peasant communes desiring each household to have maximum disposable income to pay its share of the collectively assessed taxes. Recall that the soul tax was imposed on all males. Only working males actually could pay the tax burden, whereas a widow with five small boys paid nothing, even though five 'souls' were entered in the tax records. Thus the tax burden of a community was collectively assessed and paid by the able-bodied males, who were interested in every household's taxpaying ability to support the demands of the hypertrophic state.
24
Law and society
NANCY SHIELDS KQLLMANN
Addressing the interconnections of 'law and society' in seventeenth-century Muscovy is challenging, because of the complexity of the judicial system. Russia was far from the uniformity in law, adjudication and procedure that the contemporary European Polizeistaat was striving for (and even there the goal was achieved more in the breach than the norm).[136] In its multiplicity of venues and legal norms and in the flexibility of the enforcement of those norms, Russian justice was decidedly medieval.
This is not to say that the state was passive in the legal arena. Codification and centralisation of judicial power were, indeed, key goals of seventeenth-century rulers. But their ambition exceeded reality. Moscow's rulers were hindered by the challenge of administering an empire that was immense, ethnically diverse and riddled with pockets of immunity. This chapter will explore that complexity by surveying the multiple venues of legal proceedings in Muscovy, then by examining judicial practice and finally by surveying changes in the positive law.
Judicial venues
In principle a centralised bureaucratic structure of chancelleries in Moscow and regional governors in the provinces provided the judicial system in the seventeenth century. Chancelleries sent governors, called voevody, to appointed regions. They exercised administrative, fiscal and judicial authority; they often oversaw subordinate officials and courts in smaller towns. On paper the system was hierarchical and empire wide. In practice, however, many groups and regions fell out of range of the governor's authority because of explicit or implicit charters of judicial immunity, religious, ethnic or colonial status, or personal dependency
136
Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, 'The State, the Community and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe', in V A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds.),