Serfdom in any meaningful sense was confined to peasants who performed exclusively or mostly labour services, and especially to those who belonged to landlords with small or medium-sized estates inhabited by fewer than a thousand 'souls'. It may be roughly estimated that between seven and nine million of corvee-obligated peasants of both sexes were in the latter category. This group, representing in 1858-9, 12-15 per cent of the empire's population, were serfs in the classical sense of the word; bound to the land, subject to the direct authority of their landlords, forced to perform for him any services demanded.
It is, of course, quite impossible to attempt any generalizations about the condition of so large a group, the more so that we are dealing with some fifty thousand landlords (the approximate number of those who had peasants on corvde). Until more scholarly studies on the subject become available, all we can go by are impressions. These do not bear out the picture, derived largely from literary sources, of widespread misery and oppression. The obvious injustice of serfdom must not be allowed to colour one's perception of its realities. Several Englishmen who wrote accounts of their experiences in Russia found that the Russian peasant's condition compared favourably with what they knew at home, especially in Ireland, thereby confirming independently Pushkin's estimate. The following two excerpts come from such accounts. The first is by an English sea captain who in 1820 undertook a four-year journey on foot across Russia and Siberia which gave him unique opportunities to observe rural life at first-hand:
I have no hesitation... in saying, that the condition of the peasantry here is far superior to that class in Ireland. In Russia, provisions are plentiful, good, and cheap; while in Ireland they are scanty, poor, and dear, the best part being exported from the latter country, whilst the local impediments in the other render them not worth that expense. Good comfortable log-houses are here found in every village, immense droves of cattle are scattered over an unlimited pasture, and whole forests of fuel may be obtained for a trifle. With ordinary industry and economy, the Russian peasant may become rich, especially those of the villages situated between the capitals.8
The second is by a British traveller who had gone to Russia for the express purpose of finding material which would cast on it a less favourable light than that found in the literature of the time:
On the whole... so far at least as mere [!] food and lodging are concerned, the Russian peasant is not so badly off as the poor man amongst ourselves. He may be rude and uneducated - liable to be ill-treated by his superiors - in-
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temperate in his habits, and filthy in his person; but he never knows the misery to which the Irish peasant is exposed. His food may be coarse; but he has abundance of it. His hut may be homely; but it is dry and warm. We are apt to fancy that if our peasantry be badly off, we can at least flatter ourselves with the assurance that they are much more comfortable than those of foreign countries. But this is a gross delusion. Not in Ireland only, but in parts of Great Britain usually considered to be exempt from the miseries of Ireland, we have witnessed wretchedness compared with which the condition of the Russian boor is luxury, whether he live amid the crowded population of large towns, or in the meanest hamlets of the interior. There are parts of Scotland, for instance, where the people are lodged in houses which the Russian peasant would not think fit for his cattle.9 The evaluation of these witnesses carries the more weight that they had no sympathy whatever with serfdom or any other of the disabilities under which the vast majority of Russian peasants were then living.
It is particularly important to be disabused concerning alleged landlord brutality toward serfs. Foreign travellers to Russia - unlike visitors to the slave plantations of the Americas - hardly ever mention corporal punishment.* The violence endemic to the twentieth century and the attendant 'liberation' of sexual fantasy encourage modern man to indulge his sadistic impulses by projecting them on to the past: but the fact that he longs to maltreat others has no bearing on what actually happened when that had been possible. Serfdom was an economic institution not a closed world created for the gratification of sexual appetites. Isolated instances of cruelty are no evidence to the contrary. It is simply not good enough to cite the notorious case of one Saltykova, a sadistic landlady immortalized by historians, who whiled away her idle hours by torturing to death dozens of her domestic servants. She tells us about as much about imperial Russia as does Jack the Ripper about Victorian London. Where statistics happen to be available they indicate moderation in the use of disciplinary prerogatives. Every landlord, for example, had the power to turn unruly peasants over to the authorities for exile to Siberia. Between 1822 and 1833, 1,283 serfs were punished in this fashion; an annual average of 107 out of over twenty million proprietary serfs is hardly a staggering figure.10
For the serfs, the most onerous feature of landlord authority seems to have been interference with their family life and working habits. Landlords were eager to have serfs marry young, both because they wanted them to breed, and wished to put to work young women, who were customarily exempt from corvee until after marriage. Many landlords
Nor must it be forgotten that the Russian peasant did not share modern man's horror of this kind of punishment. When in the 1860s rural (volosC) courts were empowered to impose on peasants either monetary fines or physical punishment, it was found that most peasants, given the choice, preferred to suffer a beating.
THE PEASANTRY
compelled their serfs to marry as soon as they were of age, if not earlier, and sometimes even chose partners for them. Sexual licence was not uncommon; there are enough authenticated stories of landlords who staffed regular harems with serf girls. All of this the peasants deeply resented, and on occasion repaid with arson or murder. Landlord interference with the peasant's working routine was an even greater cause of discontent. The intention did not matter: a well-meaning landlord, eager, at his own expense, to improve the lot of his peasants was as disliked as a ruthless exploiter. 'It is enough for a landlord to order that the soil be ploughed one inch more deeply', Haxthausen reports, 'to hear the peasant mutter: "He is not a good master; he torments us." And then woe to him if he lives in the village!'11 Indeed, a solicitous landlord, because he tended to meddle more with the working routine of his serfs, was often more despised than his callous neighbour whose only care was for higher rents.
The impression one gains is that the serf accepted his status with the same fatalism with which he bore the other burdens of peasant existence. He was grudgingly prepared to set aside a part of his working time and of his income as tribute to the landlord because that was what his ancestors had always done. He also bore patiently his landlord's eccentricities, provided they did not touch what mattered to him the most: his family and his work. His principal grievance had to do with land. He was deeply convinced that all the land - arable, meadow, forest - was rightfully his. From the earliest times of colonization, the peasant carried away the belief that virgin land belonged to no one and that cultivated land was the property of him who cleared and tilled it. This conviction was strengthened after 1762, when dvoriane were freed from compulsory state service. The serfs understood in some instinctive way the connection between the dvorianstvo's service obligations and their own servitude. Word spread in the villages that at the same time that he had issued the Manifesto of dvorianstvo's liberties in 1762, Peter in had issued another edict turning the land over to the peasants, but the dvoriane had suppressed it and thrown him into jail. From that year onwards the peasants lived in the expectation of a grand 'black repartition' of the country's entire private landholdings, and nothing would persuade them they were wrong. To make matters worse, the Russian serf had got into his head the totally mistaken notion that while he belonged to the landlord, the land - all of it - was his, whereas in fact neither happened to be true. This belief intensified tension in the countryside. Incidentally, it suggests that the peasant had no strong feelings against serfdom as such. This de-emphasis of brutality and insistence on distinguishing serfdom