Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Yet serfdom constrained their freedom of movement, imposed taxes and/or heavy labour obligations on them, and at times military service. It usually provided subsistence, but on meagre soils in a harsh climate where cultivation was marginal and might be threatened by bad weather or by extra demands from superiors. Their relationship with their landlord, if they had one, was ambivalent: he could be a source of patronage and protection, but on the other hand, his demands were unpredictable, not effectively restrained by anyone, and sometimes ruinously onerous. At all times, there were peasants who found these conditions intolerable and left the village illegally to seek a better life in the more fertile south, or in the Urals and Siberia where there was plentiful land and no landlords. Refugees from the system, those mobile peasants paradoxically often became its agents in extending assimilated territory far to the south and east.

The 17th and 18th centuries were a time of especially pronounced popular discontent among peasants, townsfolk, Cossacks, and steppe tribes. As we have seen above, the state was not only imposing increasing burdens, it was becoming more bureaucratic. What caused the discontent was not so much the burdens themselves as the violation of traditional moral norms, of legitimate hierarchy and authority, held by communities to be both time-honoured and in accordance with pravda. Most rebellions came from the less settled south and east, and originated in local communities whose obligations had abruptly changed. They usually began not with peasants, but with Cossacks or recently annexed non-Russian peoples, as in the Razin rebellion of 1667–71 and the Pugachev rebellion of 1773–5. Many Cossacks objected vehemently to the Tsar’s attempts to register them, make them subjects, and incorporate them fully into his army. Bashkir, Kalmyk, and Nogai tribesmen resented the erosion of their traditional freedoms. Russians had similar grievances, though: restless peasants would join the non-Russians and avenge their own grievances by attacking pomeshchik estates, plundering, burning, and murdering as they went.

The Pugachev rebellion (1773–5) fed on just such grievances. The Yaik Cossacks of the southern Urals had traditionally been able to elect their own leaders (atamans), and had considerable freedom of action provided they patrolled and defended the frontier lines around Orenburg, where the integration of the Kazakh steppe was beginning. During the 1750s, the Tsar abolished those freedoms and integrated them into the regular Russian army. The Cossacks rose under Emelian Pugachev, who had converted to the Old Belief and assumed the title of the recently deposed Tsar Peter III (see below, p. 42). His manifesto was an exemplary statement of popular grievances and projected a vision of a fair and righteous hierarchy of authority. It accused the pomeshchiki of having violated ‘the ancient tradition of the Christian law’ and supplanted it with ‘an alien law taken from German traditions’. He promised that

By God’s grace, We, Peter III, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. . . . with royal and fatherly charity grant by this our personal ukaz to all who were previously peasants and subjects of the pomeshchiki to be true and loyal servants of our throne, and we reward them with the ancient cross and prayer [Old Belief], with bearded heads, with liberty and freedom and to be for ever Cossacks, demanding neither recruit enlistment, poll tax nor other money dues. . . . And we free peasants and all the people from the taxes and burdens which were previously imposed by wicked nobles and mercenary urban judges.

Pugachev was soon joined by downgraded Tatar nobles, Bashkirs whose grazing lands had been expropriated, and serfs assigned to Urals factories. Enserfed peasants, encouraged by their marauding, and indignant that nobles had recently been emancipated from state service while the peasants had not, attacked pomeshchik estates, and in some cases murdered their owners. Once again, a great fear stalked Russia, until Empress Catherine II could send an army, which eventually restored order.

In the 19th century, there were no mass risings on this scale, but low-level discontent continued to simmer, finding an outlet in sporadic acts of peasant resistance, as multiple volumes of documents published by Soviet scholars demonstrate. The durable symbiosis of government, pomeshchiki, and peasant communities continued to offer some benefits to both sides, but also generated resentment and conflict, which impeded the assimilation of the majority of the people into the political community and left a permanent latent threat of disorder.

Chapter 3

The Russian Empire and Europe

State and society