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110-422: The mir was a community consisting of former serfs , or state peasants and their descendants, settled as a rule in a single village, although sometimes a village included more than one mir and, conversely, several villages were sometimes combined in a single mir. The title of the land was vested in the mir and not in the individual peasant. Members of the mir had the right to the allotment, on some uniform basis, of

220-516: A major agrarian reform , stimulated in part by his view that "it is better to liberate the peasants from above" than to wait until they won their freedom by rising "from below". Between 1864 and 1871 serfdom was abolished in Georgia . In Kalmykia , serfdom was not abolished until 1892. Serfdom was abolished, but not always on favorable terms to the peasants. Even after emancipation, feudal agriculture practices continued. Most former serfs had to pay

330-525: A manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church . Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor. It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly after

440-473: A slave , historically could be sold only together with the land to which they were "attached". However, this stopped being a requirement by the 19th century, and serfs were practically indistinguishable from slaves. Contemporary legal documents, such as Russkaya Pravda (12th century onwards), distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants. While another form of slavery in Russia, kholopstvo ,

550-531: A better fate). Jerzy Czajewski and Piotr Kimla wrote that until the partitions solved this problem, Russian armies raided territories of the Commonwealth, officially to recover the escapees, but in fact kidnapping many locals. In 1816, 1817, and 1819, serfdom was abolished in Estland , Courland , and Livonia respectively. However all the land stayed in noble hands and labor rent lasted until 1868. It

660-443: A cultural and political invention. He writes: This divide represented a radical departure from tradition: F. W. Mote and others have shown how especially during the later imperial era ( Ming and Qing dynasties), China was notable for the cultural, social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and countryside. But the term nongmin did enter China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of

770-400: A group effort, so the wage went to the family. The children who worked industrial jobs gave their earnings to their family as well, but some used it as a way to gain a say in their own marriages. In this case some families allowed their sons to marry whom they chose as long as the family was in similar economic standing as their own. No matter what, parental approval was required in order to make

880-560: A history of socialization of property and lacked bourgeois impulses toward ownership: Russia is the sole European country where the "agricultural commune" has kept going on a nationwide scale up to the present day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East Indies , and neither does it lead a life cut off from the modern world. On the one hand, the common ownership of land allows it to transform individualist farming in parcels directly and gradually into collective farming , and

990-532: A holding that each member cultivated separately. A holding could not be sold or bequeathed without the consent of the mir. As a consequence of its collective tenure, the mir had the power to repartition the land from time to time among its constituent households. The mir dealt primarily with the household and not with the individual. The peasant had a right to a holding but not to a particular holding, and he could not dispose of it freely. The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within

1100-632: A land redemption fee (redemption payments were not abolished until 1907), and could only purchase less fertile, less profitable plots of land that weren't necessarily contiguous. Peasants often had to pay more than the market price for land, with the percentage varying by location. 90% of the serfs who got larger plots were in Congress Poland , where the Tsar wanted to weaken the szlachta . Many peasants remained indebted and bound to landowners. Nobility didn't lose their privileges. A 2018 study in

1210-591: A landlord (the hacienda system), most Latin American countries saw one or more extensive land reforms in the 20th century. The land reforms of Latin America were more comprehensive initiatives that redistributed lands from large landholders to former peasants — farm workers and tenant farmers . Hence, many Campesinos in Latin America today are closer smallholders who own their land and do not pay rent to

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1320-487: A landlord, rather than peasants who do not own land. The Catholic Bishops of Paraguay have asserted that "Every campesino has a natural right to possess a reasonable allotment of land where he can establish his home, work for [the] subsistence of his family and a secure life". In medieval Europe society was theorized as being organized into three estates : those who work, those who pray, and those who fight. The Annales School of 20th-century French historians emphasized

1430-403: A marriage legal. According to a study completed in the late 1890s by the ethnographer Olga Petrovna Semyonova-Tian-Shanskaia, husband and wife had different duties in the household. In regards to ownership, the husband assumed the property plus any funds required to make additions to the property. Additions included fence, barns, and wagons. While primary purchasing power belonged to the husband,

1540-470: A mir community which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided in sections based on soil quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social (to each according to his needs) as it was practical (that each person pay his taxes). Strips were periodically re-allocated on

1650-661: A new social category of "free agriculturalist", for peasants voluntarily emancipated by their masters, in 1803. The great majority of serfs were not affected (under this decree by 1858 152,000 male souls, or 1.5 per cent of serfs, had been bought out to freedom ). Alexander I forbade to advertise the sale of serfs without land (1801), to sell peasants at fairs (1808), cancelled the right of landlords to exile peasants to katorga ('hard labour') ; 1807) and to settle them in Siberia (1809). In 1818 Alexander I gave secret instructions to 12 dignitaries to develop projects to abolish serfdom (among

1760-414: A newly-established family unit or a catastrophic loss, which places one unit at an unfair reproductive disadvantage in relation to its allies, are evened out". In addition, the alliance system had residual communal rights, sharing exchanges during shortages as well as certain distributive exchanges. Furthermore, the structure defined by these alliances and risk-sharing measures were regulated by scheduling and

1870-459: A peasant – but this was only a narrow contextual meaning. The origins of serfdom in Russia may be traced to the 12th century, when the exploitation of the so-called zakups on arable lands ( ролейные (пашенные) закупы , roleyniye (pashenniye) zakupy ) and corvée smerds (Russian term for corvée is барщина , barschina ) was the closest to what is now known as serfdom. According to

1980-411: A peasant" the papers would advertise "servant for hire" or similar. By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to

2090-519: A pejorative meaning, even when referring to farm laborers. As early as in 13th-century Germany, the concept of "peasant" could imply "rustic" as well as "robber", as the English term villain / villein . In 21st-century English, the word "peasant" can mean "an ignorant, rude, or unsophisticated person". The word rose to renewed popularity in the 1940s–1960s as a collective term, often referring to rural populations of developing countries in general, as

2200-674: A sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. The book was widely praised, but some argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870. Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. However, the traditional term for farmer, nongfu ( 农夫 ), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In

2310-593: A short-term persecution due to the fact that many runaways would usually flee to the southern parts of Russia. During the first half of the 17th century the dvoryane sent their collective petitions ( челобитные , chelobitniye ) to the authorities, asking for the extension of the "fixed years". In 1642, the Russian government established a 10-year limit for search of the runaways and 15-year limit for search for peasants taken away by their new owners. The Sobornoye Ulozhenie introduced an open-ended search for those on

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2420-416: A significant dent in the structure of peasant life in Russia. The organization of the peasant mode of production is the primary cause for the type of social structure found in the obshchina. The relationship between the individual peasant, the family and the community leads to a specific social structure categorized by the creation of familial alliances to apportion risks between members of the community. In

2530-507: A unique feature distinguishing Russia from other countries. Alexander Herzen , for example, hailed this pre- capitalist institution as a germ of the future socialist society. His Slavophile opponent Aleksey Khomyakov regarded obshchina as symbolic of the spiritual unity and internal co-operation of Russian society and worked out a sophisticated "Philosophy of Obshchina" which he called sobornost . The European socialist movement looked to this arrangement as evidence that Russian peasants had

2640-399: Is also increased assurance of chastity, which was more important for women than men. The average age of marriage for women was around 19 years old. During serfdom, when the head of the house was being disobeyed by their children they could have the master or landowner step in. After the emancipation of serfs in 1861, the household patriarch lost some of his power, and could no longer receive

2750-515: Is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in Low German (pronounced in English like boor ). In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman. Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside

2860-460: The mir consists of all the peasant householders of the village. These elect a Village Elder ( starosta ) and a collector of taxes who was responsible, at least until the ukaz of October 1906 which abolished communal responsibility for the payment of taxes, for the repartition among individuals of the taxes imposed on the commune. A number of mirs are united into a volost which has an assembly consisting of elected delegates from

2970-425: The mirs . The mir was protected from insolvency by the rule that the families cannot be deprived of their houses or implements necessary for agriculture; nor can the mir be deprived of its land. The mir or obshchina became a topic in political philosophy with the publication of August von Haxthausen 's book in 1847. It was in the mid-19th century that Slavophiles discovered the mir. Romantic nationalists and

3080-552: The American Economic Review found "substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants' nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861". In Russia, the terms barshchina ( барщина ) or boyarshchina ( боярщина ), refer to the obligatory work that the serfs performed for the landowner on his portion of the land (the other part of

3190-477: The Russkaya Pravda , a princely smerd had limited property and personal rights and his escheat was given to the prince. From the 13th century to the 15th century, feudal dependency applied to a significant number of peasants , but serfdom as we know it was still not a widespread phenomenon. In the mid-15th century the right of certain categories of peasants in some votchinas to leave their master

3300-499: The Black Death had reduced the population of medieval Europe in the mid-14th century, resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, it became more productive for many laborers to demand wages and other alternative forms of compensation, which ultimately led to the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of

3410-467: The Black Earth Region was flax . Husbands owned most of the livestock, such as pigs and horses. Cows were the property of the husband, but were usually in the wife's possession. Chickens were considered to be the wife's property, while sheep was common property for the family. The exception was when the wife owned sheep through a dowry ( sobinki ). Typical Russian serf clothing included

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3520-566: The Central Black Earth Region 70–77% of the serfs performed labour services ( barshchina ), the rest paid rent ( obrok ). Owing to the high fertility, 70% of Russian cereal production in the 1850s was here. In the seven central provinces, 1860, 67.7% of the serfs were on obrok . In literature, Russian serfdom provided both a backdrop and a source of dramatic tension for the works of prominent authors like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky . Characters drawn from

3630-620: The Cossack uprisings benefited from disturbances among the peasants, and they in turn received an impetus from Cossack rebellion, none of the Cossack movements were directed against the institution of serfdom itself. Instead, peasants in Cossack-dominated areas became Cossacks during uprisings, thus escaping from the peasantry rather than directly organizing peasants against the institution. Rich Cossacks owned serfs themselves. Between

3740-657: The Enlightenment . The evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution , which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for factory workers in cities, who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat . The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure , displaced many peasants from

3850-529: The Napoleonic Wars and Russo-Persian Wars ; this did not change the disparity between Russia and Western Europe, who were experiencing agricultural and industrial revolutions. Compared to Western Europe it was clear that Russia was at an economic disadvantage. European philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment criticized serfdom and compared it to medieval labor practices which were almost non-existent in

3960-425: The military 's need for soldiers. The term muzhik , or moujik (Russian: мужи́к , IPA: [mʊˈʐɨk] ) means "Russian peasant" when it is used in English. This word was borrowed from Russian into Western languages through translations of 19th-century Russian literature , describing Russian rural life of those times, and where the word muzhik was used to mean the most common rural dweller –

4070-414: The zipun  [ ru ] ( Russian : зипун , a collarless kaftan ) and the smock . A 19th-century report noted: "Every Russian peasant, male and female, wears cotton clothes. The men wear printed shirts and trousers, and the women are dressed from head to foot in printed cotton also." By the mid-19th century, peasants composed a plurality of the population, and according to the census of 1857,

4180-507: The "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of Robert Redfield . In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism. The anthropologist Eric Wolf , for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition such as Daniel Thorner , who saw

4290-588: The "imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition". In Latin America, the term "peasant" is translated to "Campesino" (from campo —country person), but the meaning has changed over time. While most Campesinos before the 20th century were in equivalent status to peasants—they usually did not own land and had to make payments to or were in an employment position towards

4400-455: The "peasant," thereby putting the full weight of the Western heritage to use in a new and sometimes harshly negative representation of China's rural population. Likewise, with this development Westerners found it all the more "natural" to apply their own historically derived images of the peasant to what they observed or were told in China. The idea of the peasant remains powerfully entrenched in

4510-519: The "semantic successor to 'native', incorporating all its condescending and racial overtones". The word peasantry is commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and developing countries of the world. Via Campesina , an organization claiming to represent the rights of about 200 million farm-workers around the world, self-defines as an "International Peasant's Movement" as of 2019 . The United Nations and its Human Rights Council prominently uses

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4620-737: The 17th century. Serfdom most commonly existed in the central and southern areas of the Tsardom of Russia and, from 1721, of the subsequent Russian Empire. Serfdom was rare in Little Russia (parts of today's central Ukraine ), other Cossack lands, the Urals and Siberia until the reign of Catherine the Great ( r.  1762–1796 ), when it spread to Ukraine ; noblemen began to send their serfs into Cossack lands in an attempt to harvest their extensive untapped natural resources. The emperor and

4730-407: The 18th and 19th centuries. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, and while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities. Even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within

4840-604: The 18th century Russian peasants were escaping from Russia to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (where once harsh serfdom conditions were improving) in significant enough numbers to become a major concern for the Russian Government and sufficient to play a role in its decision to partition the Commonwealth (one of the reasons Catherine II gave for the partition of Poland was the fact that thousands of peasants escaped from Russia to Poland to seek

4950-421: The 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian ( 封建 ) for "feudalism" and nongmin ( 农民 ), or "farming people", terms used in the description of feudal Japanese society. These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed. Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented

5060-541: The Latin pagus , or outlying administrative district. Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society . The majority of the people—according to one estimate 85% of the population—in the Middle Ages were peasants. Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy had taken root, the term peasant proprietors was frequently used to describe

5170-588: The Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976), historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and economic trends . Weber argued that until 1900 or so

5280-404: The Russian peasants are already practising it in the undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the land invites mechanical cultivation on a large scale; the peasant’s familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, Russian society, which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the necessary advances for such a transition. On

5390-470: The Slavophiles hailed the mir as a purely Russian collective, both ancient and venerable; free from what they considered the stain of the bourgeois mindset found in western Europe. Not surprisingly, it was but a short step from this to the mir being used as a basis for Slavophilic idealist theories concerning communism, communalism, communal lands, history, progress and the nature of mankind itself. By

5500-475: The Western perception of China to this very day. Writers in English mostly used the term "farmers" until the 1920s, when the term peasant came to predominate, implying that China was feudal, ready for revolution, like Europe before the French Revolution. This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population. Cohen writes that

5610-439: The abolition of serfdom. He ended mandatory military service for nobles with the abolition of compulsory noble state service. This provided a rationale to end serfdom. Second, was the secularization of the church estates, which transferred its peasants and land to state jurisdiction. In 1775 measures were taken by Catherine II to prosecute estate owners for the cruel treatment of serfs. These measures were strengthened in 1817 and

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5720-414: The amount of pozhiloye and introduced an additional tax called za povoz ( за повоз , or transportation fee), in case a peasant refused to bring the harvest from the fields to his master. A temporary ( Заповедные лета , or forbidden years ) and later an open-ended prohibition for peasants to leave their masters was introduced by the ukase of 1597 under the reign of Boris Godunov , which took away

5830-426: The authorities about the cruelty of their masters, to bring lawsuits for emancipation, and also restored the right of landlords to exile peasants to Siberia at their discretion. The Russian state also continued to support serfdom due to military conscription . The conscripted serfs dramatically increased the size of the Russian military during the war with Napoleon . With a larger military Russia achieved victory in

5940-399: The authors of the projects were A. A. Arakcheev , P. A. Vyazemsky , V. N. Karazin , P. D. Kiselyov , N. S. Mordvinov , N. G. Repnin ). All these projects were united by the principle of gradual emancipation of peasants without infringement of economic interests of landlords. However, in 1822–23, due to changes in the domestic political course, Alexander I again forbade serfs to complain to

6050-518: The basis of a census to ensure equitable share of the land. This was enforced by the state which had an interest in the ability of households to pay their taxes. The concept of Obshchina was an important part in Old Russia and had its roots in Slavic communities. A detailed statistical description of the Russian village commune was provided by Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov . Communal land ownership of

6160-583: The complexities of the French Revolution, especially the fast-changing scene in Paris, reached isolated areas through both official announcements and long-established oral networks. Peasants responded differently to different sources of information. The limits on political knowledge in these areas depended more on how much peasants chose to know than on bad roads or illiteracy. Historian Jill Maciak concludes that peasants "were neither subservient, reactionary, nor ignorant." In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen:

6270-566: The empire as a whole; it was the Cossacks and nomads who rebelled initially and recruited serfs into rebel armies. But many landowners died during serf uprisings against them. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 happened after serfdom's abolition. There were numerous rebellions against this bondage, most often in conjunction with Cossack uprisings, such as the uprisings of Ivan Bolotnikov (1606–1607), Stenka Razin (1667–1671), Kondraty Bulavin (1707–1709) and Yemelyan Pugachev (1773–1775). While

6380-468: The empire had gradually decreased "from 45–50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858." In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant

6490-423: The end of Pugachev's Rebellion and the beginning of the 19th century, there were hundreds of outbreaks across Russia, and there was never a time when the peasantry was completely quiescent. As a whole, serfdom both came and remained in Russia much later than in other European countries. Slavery remained a legally recognized institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great abolished slavery and converted

6600-563: The exact meaning of this expression has changed over time and now in Russian it has a negative meaning of mutual cover-up. In 1905, repartitional tenure did not exist in the Baltic provinces, but it was used by a quarter of western and southwestern (i.e. Ukrainian) peasants, two thirds of steppe peasants and 96.9% elsewhere. The institution was undermined by the Stolypin agrarian reforms (1906–1914). The ambitious reforms however failed to make

6710-449: The family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered on church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions. Information about

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6820-444: The female and male ages were raised to 16 and 18 respectively. To marry over the age of 60, the serf had to receive permission, but marriage over the age of 80 was forbidden. The Church also did not approve marriages with large age differences. Landowners were interested in keeping all of their serfs and not losing workers to marriages on other estates . Prior to 1812 serfs were not allowed to marry serfs from other estates. After 1812

6930-705: The fullest extent. The official estimate is that 23 million Russians were privately owned, 23 million were considered personally free and another 3500,000 peasants were under the Tsar's patronage ( udelnye krestiane ) before the Great Emancipation of 1861 . Unlike serfs, state peasants and peasants under tsar's patronage were considered personally free, nobody had the right to sell them, to interfere in their family life, by law they were considered as 'free agricultural inhabitants' (Russ 'свободные сельские обыватели') One particular source of indignation in Europe

7040-516: The highest state officials feared that the peasants' emancipation would be accompanied by popular unrest, given the reluctance of the landlords to lose their serf property, but took some actions to alleviate the situation of the peasantry. Emperor Alexander I ( r.  1801–1825 ) wanted to reform the system but moved cautiously, liberating serfs in Estonia (1816), Livonia (1816), and Courland (1817) only. New laws allowed all classes (except

7150-407: The importance of peasants. Its leader Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume—called The Structures of Everyday Life —of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong , and in the post-1945 studies of

7260-463: The land and compelled them, often unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum formerly the preserve of the medieval peasants. This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until

7370-408: The land, usually of a poorer quality, the peasants could use for themselves). Sometimes the terms are loosely translated by the term corvée . While no official government regulation to the extent of barshchina existed, a 1797 ukase by Paul I of Russia described a barshchina of three days a week as normal and sufficient for the landowner's needs. In the black earth region, 70% to 77% of

7480-427: The landowner had no right to kill the serf. About four-fifths of Russian peasants were serfs according to the censuses of 1678 and 1719; free peasants remained only in the north and north-east of the country. Most of the dvoryane (nobles) were content with the long time frame for search of the runaway peasants. The major landowners of the country, however, together with the dvoryane of the south, were interested in

7590-411: The landowner's help. The younger generations now had the freedom to work off their estates; some even went to work in factories. These younger peasants had access to newspapers and books, which introduced them to more radical ways of thinking. The ability to work outside of the household gave the younger peasants independence as well as a wage to do with what they wanted. Agricultural and domestic jobs were

7700-453: The late 1820s. There were even laws that required estate owners to help serfs in time of famine, which included grain to be kept in reserve. These policies failed to aid famines in the early nineteenth century due to estate owner negligence. As the ideas of Enlightenment and humanism spread among the Russian nobility at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, a conviction developed that

7810-504: The mir predated serfdom , surviving emancipation and the Russian Revolution . Until the abolition of serfdom in 1861 , the mir could either contain serfs or free peasants. In the first case, lands reserved for serf use were assigned to the mir for allocation by the proprietor. Even after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs , a peasant in his everyday work normally had little independence from obshchina, governed at

7920-477: The number of private serfs was 23.1 million out of 62.5 million citizens of the Russian empire, 37.7% of the population. The exact numbers, according to official data, were: entire population 60 909 309 ; peasantry of all classes 49 486 665 ; state peasants 23 138 191 ; peasants on the lands of proprietors 23 022 390 ; peasants of the appanages and other departments 3 326 084 . State peasants were considered personally free, but their freedom of movement

8030-549: The obshchina, alliances were formed primarily through marriage and common descent of kin. Usually, the eldest members of the household made up the mir to govern the redistribution of land. The families came together to form a community that depended on making taxes more equitable and the concept of mutual help. Jovan E. Howe writes: "The economic relations so established are essentially distributive: through various categories of exchanges of both products and labor, temporary imbalances such as those occasioned by insufficient labor power of

8140-575: The other hand, the contemporaneity of western production, which dominates the world market, allows Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks [i.e. undergo humiliation in defeat]. Serfdom in Russia In tsarist Russia , the term serf ( Russian : крепостной крестьянин , romanized :  krepostnoy krest'yanin , lit.   'bonded peasant') meant an unfree peasant who, unlike

8250-407: The peasants' right to free movement around Yuri's Day, binding the vast majority of the Russian peasantry in full serfdom. These also defined the so-called fixed years ( Урочные лета , urochniye leta ), or the 5-year time frame for search of the runaway peasants. In 1607, a new ukase defined sanctions for hiding and keeping runaways: the fine had to be paid to the state and pozhiloye – to

8360-505: The per capita tax by their peasants (the tax was collected from the peasants and paid to the treasury by the landlord himself or his clerk). It was forbidden to put peasants on torture for their master's debts. In order to suppress fraudulent practices of landlords, who during audits recorded persons who did not belong to serfs, allegedly with their consent, decrees of 1775, 1781 and 1783 prohibited voluntary registration of serfs. The legislation stipulated conditions that allowed peasants to leave

8470-428: The population of Russia) formed a class apart, largely excepted from the incidence of the ordinary law and governed in accordance with their local customs. The mir itself, with its customs, is of immemorial antiquity, but it was not until the 1861 emancipation of the serfs that the village community was withdrawn from the patrimonial jurisdiction of the landowning nobility and endowed with self-government. The assembly of

8580-401: The previous owner of the peasant. The Sobornoye Ulozhenie ( Соборное уложение , "Code of Law") of 1649 gave serfs to estates, and in 1658, flight was made a criminal offense. Russian landowners eventually gained almost unlimited ownership over Russian serfs. The landowner could transfer the serf without land to another landowner while keeping the serf's personal property and family; however,

8690-553: The rest of the continent. Most Russian nobles were not interested in change toward western labor practices that Catherine the Great proposed. Instead they preferred to mortgage serfs for profit. Napoleon did not touch serfdom in Russia. In 1820, 20% of all serfs were mortgaged to state credit institutions by their owners. This was increased to 66% in 1859. To discuss the peasant question, Nicholas I successively created 9 secret committees, issued about 100 decrees aimed at mitigating serfdom, but did not affect its foundations. From 1833 it

8800-519: The ritualization of time. Howe writes that "the traditional calendar of the Russian peasants was a guide for day-to-day living. The names attached to calendar dates, the calendrical periods into which they were grouped, the day on the week on which each fell, and the sayings connected with them encoded information about when to undertake tasks, but also about when not to work, when it was necessary to perform symbolic actions, take part in rituals and compulsory celebrations". Peasants (i.e. three-quarters of

8910-469: The rules relaxed slightly, but in order for a family to give their daughter to a husband in another estate they had to apply and present information to their landowner ahead of time. If a serf wanted to marry a widow , then emancipation and death certificates were to be handed over and investigated for authenticity by their owner before a marriage could take place. Before and after the abolition of serfdom, Russian peasant families were patriarchal . Marriage

9020-539: The run, meaning that all of the peasants who had fled from their masters after the census of 1626 or 1646–1647 had to be returned. The government would still introduce new time frames and grounds for search of the runaways after 1649, which applied to the peasants who had fled to the outlying districts of the country, such as regions along the border abatises called zasechniye linii ( засечные линии ) (ukases of 1653 and 1656), Siberia (ukases of 1671, 1683 and 1700), Don (1698) etc. The dvoryane constantly demanded that

9130-531: The rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism . Wolf and a group of scholars criticized both Marx and the field of Modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action . James C. Scott 's field observations in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back to

9240-763: The same time, works of art often depicted serfs and their lives, either romanticizing their existence or highlighting the cruelty of the serf system. Peasants A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves , semi-free serfs , and free tenants . Peasants might hold title to land outright ( fee simple ), or by any of several forms of land tenure , among them socage , quit-rent , leasehold , and copyhold . In some contexts, "peasant" has

9350-519: The scattering of their estates, lack of primogeniture , and the high turnover and mobility from estate to estate. The Tsar's aunt Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna played a powerful role backstage in the years 1855 to 1861. Using her close relationship with her nephew Alexander II, she supported and guided his desire for emancipation, and helped mobilize the support of key advisors. In 1861, Alexander II freed all serfs (except in Georgia and Kalmykia ) in

9460-533: The search for the runaways be sponsored by the government. The legislation of the second half of the 17th century paid much attention to the means of punishment of the runaways. Serfdom was hardly efficient; serfs and nobles had little incentive to improve the land. However, it was politically effective. Nobles rarely challenged the tsar for fear of provoking a peasant uprising. Serfs were often given lifelong tenancy on their plots, so they tended to be conservative as well. The serfs took little part in uprisings against

9570-399: The second half of the 19th century, the Slavophiles were challenged by the opposing Western faction. Boris Chicherin , a leading spokesman for the Western school, argued that the mir was neither ancient nor particular to Russia. The mir, the Western school argued, had arisen in the late 17th to early 18th century and was not based on some sort of social contract or communal instinct. Rather, it

9680-448: The serf population were portrayed with profound emotional depth, their stories shedding light on the harsh realities of serfdom. These narratives served to amplify calls for social reform and underscored the deep inequalities of the Russian societal structure. The influence of serfdom was also notable in Russian music and art. Folk songs and dances, often performed by serfs, contributed significantly to Russia's unique cultural tradition. At

9790-452: The serf state. Edicts of 1737, 1743, 1744, 1745, 1770, and 1773 declared free those who returned from captivity, as well as foreigners who accepted Eastern Orthodoxy . The children of foster homes and those who had graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts could not be enserfed. Freedom was granted to retired soldiers who were serfs. Peter III created two measures in 1762 that influenced

9900-415: The serfs performed barshchina ; the rest paid levies ( obrok ). The Russian Orthodox Church had many rules regarding marriage that were strictly observed by the population. For example, marriage was not allowed to take place during times of fasting, the eve or day of a holiday, during the entire week of Easter , or for two weeks after Christmas . Before the abolition of serfdom in 1861 , marriage

10010-412: The serfs) to own land, a privilege previously confined to the nobility. Emperor Alexander II abolished serfdom in the emancipation reform of 1861, a few years later than Austria and other German states. Scholars have proposed multiple overlapping reasons to account for the abolition, including fear of a large-scale revolt by the serfs, the government's financial needs, changing cultural sensibilities, and

10120-463: The size of the dowry as well as the bride's decency, modesty, obedience, ability to do work, and family background. Upon marriage, the bride came to live with her new husband and his family, so she needed to be ready to assimilate and work hard. Serfs looked highly upon early marriage because of increased parental control. At a younger age there is less chance of the individual falling in love with someone other than whom his or her parents chose. There

10230-414: The slaves into serfs. This was relevant more to household slaves because Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere formality. Instead of "sale of

10340-514: The successor states of the Golden Horde , chiefly the Khanate of Crimea . Annually the Russian population of the borderland suffered from Tatar invasions and slave raids and tens of thousands of noblemen protected the southern borderland (a heavy burden for the state), which slowed its social and economic development and expanded the taxation of peasantry. The Sudebnik of 1550 increased

10450-569: The system of serfdom was flawed and hindered economic development and urban growth. Tsar Alexander I and his advisors quietly discussed the options at length. Obstacles included the failure of abolition in Austria and the political reaction against the French Revolution . Cautiously, he freed peasants from Estonia and Latvia and extended the right to own land to most classes of subjects, including state-owned peasants, in 1801 and created

10560-585: The term "peasant" in a non-pejorative sense, as in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas adopted in 2018. In general English-language literature, the use of the word "peasant" has steadily declined since about 1970. The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th-century French word païsant , meaning one from the pays , or countryside; ultimately from

10670-448: The traditional rural population in countries where smallholders farmed much of the land. More generally, the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class", perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on

10780-549: The use of peasants, for which they had to perform duties in favour of the landlord. The landlords were given the right to let the peasants go free by mutual agreement with them (1844). The peasants of the landlord's estates sold at auction for the owner's debts were allowed to buy out at will (1847; in 1848–52 964 male peasants used the right). Emperor Nicholas I also banned the trade of African slaves in 1842, though there were almost no Russians who participated in it. Bourgeois were allowed to own serfs 1721–62 and 1798–1816; this

10890-431: The village level ( mir ) by the full assembly of the community ( skhod ). Among its duties were control and redistribution of the common land and forest (if such existed), levying recruits for military service and imposing punishments for minor crimes. Obshchina was also held responsible for taxes underpaid by members. This type of shared responsibility was known as krugovaya poruka (mutual responsibility), although

11000-455: The wife was expected to buy certain items. She was also expected to buy household items such as bowls, plates, pots, barrels and various utensils. Wives were also required to purchase cloth and make clothes for the family by spinning and using a dontse . Footwear was the husband's responsibility - he made bast shoes and felt boots for the family. As for crops, it was expected for men to sow and women to harvest. A common crop harvested by serfs in

11110-460: Was Kolokol published in London, England (1857–65) and Geneva (1865–67). It collected many cases of horrendous physical, emotional and sexual abuse of the serfs by the landowners. Edicts of 1718, 1734, 1750, 1761, and 1767 obliged landlords to feed their peasants in times of crop failure and famine and to prevent their impoverishment. Since 1722 landlords were responsible for the correct payment of

11220-446: Was ended by Peter I in 1723, serfdom (Russian: крепостное право , romanized:  krepostnoye pravo ) was abolished only by Alexander II 's emancipation reform of 1861 ; nevertheless, in times past, the state allowed peasants to sue for release from serfdom under certain conditions, and also took measures against abuses of landlord power. Serfdom became the dominant form of relation between Russian peasants and nobility in

11330-505: Was a monarchical creation, created and enforced for the purpose of tax collection. Whatever the merits of either case, both schools agreed that the landlord and the state both played a vital role in the development (if not the origin of) the mir: Where (arable) land is scarce, the communal form of tenure tends to prevail, but where ever it (arable land) is abundant it is replaced by household or even family tenure. The 19th-century Russian philosophers attached signal importance to obshchina as

11440-473: Was important for families economically and socially. Parents were in charge of finding suitable spouses for their children in order to help the family. The bride's parents were concerned with the social and material benefits they would gain in the alliance between the two families. Some also took into consideration their daughter's future quality of life and how much work would be required of her. The groom's parents would be concerned about economical factors such as

11550-447: Was limited to a period of one week before and after Yuri's Day (November 26). The Sudebnik of 1497 officially confirmed this time limit as universal for everybody and also established the amount of the "break-away" fee called pozhiloye ( пожилое ). The legal code of Ivan III of Russia , Sudebnik (1497), strengthened the dependency of peasants, statewide, and restricted their mobility . The Russians persistently battled against

11660-535: Was not allowed to sell serfs at public auction "with the splitting of families", "to satisfy public and private debts", paying for them with serfs with their detachment from the land, as well as to transfer peasants into household serfs, taking away their plots. The right of landlords to exile peasants to Siberia at their discretion was restricted (1828). A decree on obliged peasants was issued (1842), according to which landlords could let their peasants go free, but peasants' plots were transferred not into ownership, but into

11770-403: Was replaced with landless laborers and sharecropping ( halbkörner ). Landless workers had to ask permission to leave an estate. The nobility was too weak to oppose the emancipation of the serfs. In 1820, a fifth of the serfs were mortgaged, half by 1842. By 1859, a third of noble's estates and two thirds of their serfs were mortgaged to noble banks or the state. The nobility was also weakened by

11880-864: Was restricted. Russian serfdom depended entirely on the traditional and extensive technology of the peasantry. Yields remained low and stationary throughout most of the 19th century. Any increase in income drawn from agriculture was largely through increasing land area and extensive grain raising by means of exploitation of the peasant labor, that is, by burdening the peasant household still further. % peasants enserfed in each province, 1860 >55%: Kaluga Kyiv Kostroma Kutais Minsk Mogilev Nizhny Novgorod Podolia Ryazan Smolensk Tula Vitebsk Vladimir Volhynia Yaroslavl 36–55%: Chernigov Grodno Kovno Kursk Moscow Novgorod Oryol Penza Poltava Pskov Saratov Simbirsk Tambov Tver Vilna 16–35%: Don Ekaterinoslav Kharkov Kherson Kuban Perm Tiflis Vologda Voronezh In

11990-422: Was strictly prohibited on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Because of these firm rules most marriages occurred in the months of January, February, October, and November. After the emancipation the most popular marrying months were July, October, and November. Imperial laws were very particular with the age in which serfs could marry. The minimum age to marry was 13 years old for women, and 15 for men. After 1830

12100-532: Was to encourage industrialisation. In 1804, 48% of Russian factory workers were serfs, 52% in 1825. Landless serfs rose from 4.14% in 1835 to 6.79% in 1858. They received no land in the emancipation. Landlords deliberately increased the number of domestic serfs when they anticipated serfdom's demise. In 1798, Ukrainian landlords were banned from selling serfs apart from land. In 1841, landless nobles were banned also. According to certain Polish sources, increasingly in

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