Catherine the Great

Over the years, the status of serfs deteriorated. When workers were first tied to the land, they had possessed some rights, and the system had been based on service duties and payments. Over time, however, the powers of landowners increased and the rights of the serfs were whittled away. By the mid-eighteenth century, most Russian serfs had become possessions, chattel; in fact, slaves. Originally—and supposedly still—attached to the land, serfs were now regarded by their owners as personal property that could be sold apart from the land. Families could be ripped apart, with wives, husbands, sons, and daughters taken separately to market and sold. Sales of talented serfs often took place in cities where their skills were extolled by advertisements in the Moscow News or the St. Petersburg Gazette:

For sale, a barber and also four bedposts and other pieces of furniture. For sale, two banqueting cloths and likewise two young girls trained in service and one peasant woman. For sale: a girl of sixteen, of good behavior, and a ceremonial carriage, hardly used. For sale: a girl of sixteen trained in lace-making, able to sew linen, iron, and starch and dress her mistress, in addition to having a pretty face and being well formed.

Anyone wishing to buy an entire family or a young man and a girl separately, may inquire at the silver-washer’s opposite the church of Kazan. The young man, named Ivan, is twenty one years old, he is healthy, robust, and can curl a lady’s hair. The girl, well-made and healthy, named Marfa, aged fifteen, can do sewing and embroidery. They can be examined and had for a reasonable price.

For sale: domestics and skilled craftsmen of good behavior. Two tailors, a shoemaker, a watchmaker, a cook, a coach-maker, a wheelwright, an engraver, a gilder, and two coachmen, who may be inspected and their price ascertained … at the proprietors’s own house. Also for sale are three young racehorses, one colt and two geldings, and a pack of hounds, fifty in number. A maid of sixteen for sale, able to weave lace, sew linen, do ironing and starching and to dress her mistress; furthermore, has a pleasing face and figure.

The price of a serf, even one highly skilled, was often less than that of a prize hunting dog. In general, a male serf could be bought for between two hundred and five hundred rubles; a girl or woman would cost between fifty and two hundred rubles, depending on her age, talents, and comeliness. Serfs sometimes changed owners for no price at all. He or she could be bartered against a horse or a dog, and a whole family could be gambled away in a night of cards.

Most serfs worked the soil. But it was the condition and grievances of industrial serfs working in the mines, foundries, and factories of the Urals that posed Catherine’s first challenge. Originally, many Urals workers had been state peasants. To encourage the industrialization of Russia, Peter the Great in 1721 had offered these peasants to non-noble entrepreneurs to buy from the state, remove from the land, convert into industrial serfs, and attach permanently to an industrial enterprise. These serfs did not become the private property of the owners; they belonged instead to the enterprise and were sold along with it, like pieces of machinery. Their living conditions were horrendous, their working hours unrestricted, and the cost of their maintenance negligible. Managers were empowered to inflict corporal punishment. The rate of mortality was high; few industrial serfs reached middle age. Many had been simply worked to death. Not surprisingly, unrest among industrial serfs was acute. Under Empress Elizabeth there had been riots, suppressed by the army. Flight had always been the Russian peasants’ principal defense against oppression; industrial serfs attempted escape to the little-populated regions and deserts beyond the lower Volga. Not all of these runaways escaped alive, but the number of those attempting to flee was rising.

This situation confronted Catherine in her first summer as empress. Her reaction was to issue a decree, on August 8, 1762, declaring that, in future, owners of factories and mines were forbidden to purchase serfs for industrial labor apart from purchasing the land to which the serfs were bound. The decree also declared that new serf workers thus acquired were to be enlisted at agreed-upon wages.