SERFDOM AND SLAVERY
Around 1450 the grand princes of Moscow were consolidating regional power in a forested plain with a very simple society. Here were few towns, almost all, save Novgorod and Pskov, fortified military settlements rather than commercial centers, and few townsmen. There were no professional classes, minimal literacy, minimal wealth, little of the social diversity, commercialization, or prosperity of the Ottoman empire or Europe at this time. The elite was the cavalry officer corps; clergy were "black" (married parish priests) and "white" (monks and hierarchs); the bureaucracy was just emerging. Population was sparse, primarily taxpaying peasantry.
In the fifteenth century East Slavic peasants were mobile. Many lived in free villages managing their own fates, the so-called "black peasants"; others lived on lands owned by lay or clerical lords and, like peasants the world over, enjoyed a right to move masters when they had brought in their crops, settled their debts, and performed other traditional duties to their masters. Custom established a few times of the year when peasants could move—Lent, Shrovetide—but most common was a two-week period around the autumn celebration of St. George's Day in November. That norm was cited in Muscovy's 1497 Lawcode and repeated in its 1550 successor as an attempt to stabilize movement of the labor force; this became the first of successive steps to limit the peasantry's freedom of movement.
The term enserfment covers only part of the process at hand, inasmuch as it is usually taken to refer to the binding of peasants to landlords. That fate befell about half of Russia's East Slavic peasants over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the same processes that made peasants serfs also bound all taxpaying people to their registered residences. State building in Muscovy demanded control over peasant and urban populations as taxpayers, as providers of food to provision the army and cities and as serfs for the gentry officer corps. These processes started in earnest in the late fifteenth century, when the state started granting populated villages in service-based tenure (pomest'e) to cavalrymen in lieu of salaries, obtaining such lands by conquest and confiscation of free villages. So thorough was the state's patrimonial distribution of "black" peasant villages that by the end of the sixteenth century the only non-landlord peasants left were on lands claimed by the ruling family (crown peasants) or in the northern borderlands where it was difficult to support a landlord in addition to a peasant household (state peasants).
The social disruptions of state building, of which the pomest'e system was only one element, exerted constant pressure on the taxpaying population. Urban and rural alike, taxpayers owed fees and services to the state, services and goods to any landlords, and support for clergy and Church. It was a time of almost constant warfare and violence in various corners of the realm—Kazan and Volga campaigns of the 1550s, Livonian War (1558-82), Oprichnina (1564-72)—followed in the early seventeenth century by the foreign invasion, social rebellion ,and political crisis of the Time of Troubles (1605-13). Crippling taxation exacerbated the burden on populations. Cannon and weaponry had to be produced or purchased, experts hired, armies fed, roads improved, diplomacy paid for, local administration set up, bureaucracies and criminal court systems maintained. Even though Muscovy depended upon local labor services wherever possible, it still needed cash. As we saw in Chapter 8, taxes rose without regard for the population's ability to pay.
One result was a marked abandonment of settled lands by the end of the sixteenth century; while some of this might be normal abandonment in the slash/burn method, much was flight from social disruption. Peasants fled to the better conditions of wealthier landlords or to the frontier to be on their own. In the mid-1580s in the northwest 83 percent of settlements were deserted. Towns suffered disproportionately: while the populations of urban communes (posad) had risen in the first half of the sixteenth century, they fell by 61 percent in the 1550s-80s, and then another 45 percent from the 1580s to the 1610s. In Novgorod in 1582, for example, a census recorded only 122 occupied urban households, with over 1,300 abandoned for reasons of death in the family and impoverishment.
Many peasants fell into debt to their landlords, and some have argued that enserfment was essentially an economic process of inescapable indebtedness. Certainly debt was a contributing problem. Short-term indenture (zakladnichestvo) spiked in the last decades of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century; the state sought to curtail it by forbidding gentry from deserting their military roles and townsmen from deserting their tax obligations by this device. Other forms of indenture often resulted in de facto slavery (kholopstvo). Individuals indentured themselves in debt servitude (kabala) for varying lengths of service in return for loans or upkeep. In a move that worsened the indebted person's situation but helped to stabilize the gentry's labor force, decrees of 1586 and 1597 made such loans terminal only with the death of the master. There were other categories of slaves in Muscovy, such that historians estimate that in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Muscovy up to 10 percent of the population was enslaved. Although foreign prisoners of war were enslaved, as a rule slaves (kholopy) in Muscovy were fellow Russians, locals who had sold themselves into slavery to escape poverty. Richard Hellie called slavery in Muscovy a social safety net. Slaves worked as domestics or field hands, or accompanied their landlords to war (datochnye liudi). They often lived side by side with serfs in a landlord's village or household; legally the property of their owners and exempt from taxation, they nevertheless blended into the population. In 1723 with the introduction of the head tax, slavery was abolished and these people were folded into taxpaying serfdom.
The state's response to the devastation of the peasant economy was to limit peasant mobility, by declaring from 1580 "forbidden years" (intended to be a temporary abrogation of the right to move) and by compiling from the late sixteenth century cadasters to register urban and rural taxpayers. "Forbidden years" were announced regularly, becoming de facto permanent by 1603. Cadasters from 1592 became a benchmark when in 1597 a decree established that landlords could chase down any peasant registered to them within the past five years, creating a "statute of limitations" in which landlords could claim runaways. From the 1590s to the 1640s gentry repeatedly submitted collective petitions complaining of peasant flight and unfair competition from large landlords, and the state responded by extending the statute to nine years and in 1642 to as many as fifteen. The 1649 Lawcode abolished the limit entirely, ending legal peasant mobility.
The 1649 Lawcode not only tied landlords' peasants to their lands, but also tied townsmen and non-serf peasants to the communities in which they were registered. This result explains the seeming irony that the gentry were being awarded a fixed labor force just at a time when they were being militarily eclipsed by new model infantry and cavalry. Binding peasants and townsmen to lords and land was a political, not economic, choice: it ensured the loyalty of the traditional elite and it created a de facto local administrative system over the most densely populated areas of the realm.