By imperial manifesto issued on February 26, 1764, all ecclesiastical lands and property became state property, and the church itself became a state institution. All church serfs were upgraded to the status of state peasants; as a result, one million male peasants—more than two million persons, counting wives and children—came under state control, paying taxes to the state. Power and administrative autonomy were stripped from the clergy, high and low, and all priests became salaried employees of the state. Along with loss of administrative autonomy, the church lost its economic base. Hundreds of churches were forced to close. Of 572 previously existing monasteries, only 161 survived. To this sweeping change in Russian religious, social, cultural, and economic life, there was no vocal opposition.
47
Serfdom
CATHERINE HAD ASSERTED and confirmed the administrative structure of the imperial government and dealt with the demands of the Orthodox Church. In the early months of her reign, she also had to confront a crisis in a basic and chronically unstable institution in the social and economic life of the empire: serfdom. It was an upheaval involving industrial serf workers in the mines and foundries in the Urals that first taught the student of Montesquieu and Voltaire that it was impossible to cure long-established injustice in a society simply by invoking philosophy, no matter how beautifully expressed and persuasive on the page.
In 1762, the Russian population of roughly twenty million consisted of hierarchal layers: the sovereign, the nobility, the church, merchants and townspeople, and, at the base, up to ten million peasants. Some of the peasants were partially free; a few completely; most not at all. Serfs were peasants in permanent bondage to land owned by the crown, the state, the church, private owners—almost all in the nobility—or to a variety of industrial and mining enterprises. According to a census taken between 1762 and 1764, the crown owned five hundred thousand serfs who worked on land owned by the ruler and his or her family. Two million eight hundred thousand serfs were classified as state peasants, owned by the state and living on land or in villages belonging to the state but allowed to meet their obligations by paying money or labor dues to the state. One million had been the property of the Orthodox Church; these were the serfs Catherine had taken from the church and transferred to the state. The largest number of Russian serfs—five and a half million, or 56 percent of the total—belonged to members of the nobility. All Russian noblemen were entitled by law to own serfs. A handful of these nobles were extraordinarily rich (a few owned thousands of serfs), but the vast majority were small squires owning land that required fewer than a hundred— sometimes fewer than twenty—workers to farm. Finally, there was a fourth category of unfree labor, the industrial serfs, working in the mines and foundries of the Urals. They did not belong to the owners or the managers of these enterprises; they were the property of the mines or foundries.
Serfdom had appeared in Russia at the end of the sixteenth century in order to keep laborers clearing and working the enormous expanse of the nation’s arable land. The fifty-one-year reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) had been followed by the Time of Troubles and rule by Ivan’s lieutenant Boris Godunov. When three years of famine descended on Russia, peasants left the barren land and flocked to towns in search of food. To bind them, Boris decreed a permanent bondage to the land, to be vested in the landowners. In the years that followed, the legal binding of workers to the land was needed to curb the nomadic instincts of Russian peasants; many simply walked away from work they did not like.
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
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.
News of this imperial decree reverberated through the mining and industrial regions. Hearing mention of agreed-upon wages, serfs in the Urals and along the Volga promptly laid down their tools and went on strike. Production at the nation’s mines and foundries came to a standstill. Catherine recognized that her decree had been premature. To force the industrial workers back to work, she was compelled to follow Eizabeth’s path and send troops. General A. A. Vyazemsky, the future procurator general, was dispatched to pacify the Urals; in places where former revolts had been suppressed by the lash and the knout, Vyazemsky resorted to cannon.
Before he left on his mission, however, Catherine gave Vyazemsky additional instructions. Having suppressed the strikes, he was to investigate the situation in the mines, study the reasons for the workers’ discontent, and ascertain the measures necessary to satisfy them. He was authorized to remove and, where necessary, punish serf managers:
