SERFS.
Boris Godunof, general, kinsman, successor of Ivan the Fourth, reduced
the principle of serfage into legal form (1601). An able and patriotic
man, Godunof, designed to colonize his bare river-banks and his empty
steppe. He meant no harm to the rustic--on the contrary, he hoped to
do him good; his project of "fixing" the rustic on his land was
treated as a great reform; and after taking counsel with his boyars,
he selected the festival of St. George, the patron of free cities and
of the ancient Russians, for his announcement that every peasant in
the empire should in future till and own forever the lands which he
then tilled and held.
Down to that time, the theory of land was that of an Asiatic horde.
From the Gulf of Venice to the Bay of Bengal the tenure of land might
vary with race and clime; yet in every country where the Tartars
reigned, the original property in the soil was everywhere said to be
lodged in sultan, shah, mogul, and khan. The Russians, having lost the
usage of their better time, transferred the rights which they acquired
from Tartar begs and khans to their victorious prince.
This prince divided the soil according to his will; in one place
founding villages for peasants, in a second place settling lands on a
deserving voyaved, in a third place buying off an enemy with gifts of
forests, fisheries, and lands; exactly in the fashion of Batu Khan and
Timur Beg. This system of giving away crown lands was carried so far
that when Godunof came to the throne (in 1598), he found his duchies
and khanates consisting of a great many estates without laborers, and
a great many laborers without estates. The peasants were roving
hordes; and Godunof meant to fix these restless classes, by assigning
to every family a personal and hereditary interest in the soil. The
evil to be cured was an Oriental evil; and he sought to cure it in the
Oriental way. The khans had done the same; and Godunof only extended
and defined their method, so as to bring a larger area of country
under spade and plough.
There is reason to believe that this festival of St. George (in 1601)
was hailed by peasant and boyar as a glorious day; that the decree
which established serfage in Russia was accepted as a great and
popular reform. To understand it, we must lay aside all notion of
serfage in Moscow and Tamboff being the same thing as villeinage in
Surrey and the Isle of France.
Serfage was a great act of colonization. Much of what was done by
Godunof was politic, and even noble; for he gave up to his people
millions of acres of the crown estates. The soil was given to the
peasant on easy terms. He was to live on his land, to plough his
field, to build his house, to pay his rates, and to serve his country
in time of war. The chief concession made by the peasant, in exchange
for his plot of ground, was his vagabond life.
To see that the serf--the man "fixed" on the soil--observed the terms
of settlement, the prince appointed boyars and voyevods in every
province as overseers; a necessary, and yet a fatal step. The
overseer, a strong man dealing with a weak one, had been trained under
Tartar rule; and just as the Tsar succeeded to the khan, the boyar
looked upon himself as a successor to the beg. Abuses of the system
soon crept in; most of all that Oriental use of the stick, which the
boyar borrowed from the beg; but a serf had to endure this evil--not
in his quality of serf, but in his quality of Russian. Every man
struck the one below him. A Tsar boxed a boyar, a boyar beat a prince.
A colonel kicked his captain, and a captain clubbed his men. This use
of the stick is in every region of the East a sign of lordship; and a
boyar who could flog a peasant for neglecting to till his field, to
repair his cabin, and to pay his rates, would have been more than man
if he had not learned to consider himself as that peasant's lord.
Yet the theory of their holding was, that the peasant held his land of
the crown; even as the boyar held his land of the crown. A bargain was
made between two consenting parties--peasant and noble--under the
authority of law, for their mutual dealing with a certain
estate--consisting (say) of land, lake, and forest, with the various
rites attached to ownership--hunting, shooting, fishing, fowling,
trespass, right of way, right of stoppage, right of dealing, and the
like. It was a bargain binding the one above as much as it bound the
one below. If a serf could not quit his homestead, neither could the
lord eject him from it. If the serf was bound to serve his master, he
was free to save and hold a property of his own. If local custom and
lawless temper led a master to fine and flog the serf, that serf could
find some comfort in the thought that the fields which he tilled
belonged to himself and to his commune by a title never to be
gainsaid. A peasant's rhyme, addressed to his lord, defines the series
of his rights and liabilities:
"My soul is God's,
My land is mine,
My head's the Tsar's,
My back is thine!"
A likeness to the serf may be found in the East, not in the West. The
closest copy of a serf is the ryot of Bengal.
Down to the reign of Peter the Great the system went on darkening in
abuse. The overseer of serfs became the owner. In lonely districts who
was to protect a serf? I have myself heard a rustic ordered to be
flogged by his elder, on the bare request of two gentlemen, who said
he was drunk and could not drive. The two gentlemen were tipsy; but
the elder knew them, and he never thought of asking for their proofs.
A clown accused by a gentleman must be in the wrong. "God is too high,
the Tsar too distant," says the peasant's saw. In those hard times the
inner spirit overcame the legal form; and serfs were beaten, starved,
transported, sold; but always in defiance of the law.
Peter introduced some changes, which, in spite of his good intentions,
made the evil worse. He stopped the sale of serfs, apart from the
estate on which they lived--a long step forward; but he clogged the
beneficial action of his edict by converting the old house-tax into a
poll-tax, and levying the whole amount of tax upon the lord, to whom
he gave the right of collecting his quota from the serfs. A master
armed with such a power is likely to be either worse than a devil or
better than a man. Peter took from the religious bodies the right,
which they held in common with boyars and princes, of possessing
serfs. The monks had proved themselves unfit for such a trust; and as
they held their lands by a title higher than the law can give, it was
hard for a convent serf to believe that any part of the fields he
tilled was actually his own.
Catharine followed Peter in his war on Tartar dress, beards, manners,
and traditions; but she also set her face, as Peter had done, on much
that was native to the soil. She meant well by her people, and the
charter of rights, which she granted to her nobles, laid the
foundation in her country of a permanent, educated, middle class. She
studied the question of converting the serf's occupancy into freehold.
She confiscated the serfs attached to convents, placing them under a
separate jurisdiction; and she published edicts tending to improve the
position of the peasant towards his lord. But these imperial acts,
intended to do him good, brought still worse evils on his head; for
serfage, heretofore a local custom--found in one province, not in the
adjoining province--found in Moscow and Voronej, not in Harkof and
Kief--was now recognized, guarded and defined by general law.
Catharine's yearning for an ideal order in her states induced her to
"fix" the peasant of Lithuania and Little Russia on the soil, just as
Godunof had "fixed" the peasant of Great Russia, giving him a
homestead and a property forever on the soil. Paul, her son, took one
stride forward in limiting the right of the lord to three days' labor
in the seven--an edict which, though never put in force, endeared
Paul's memory to the commons, many of whom regard him as a martyr in
their cause. Yet Paul is one of those princes who extended the
serf-empire. Paul created a new order of serfs in the appanage
peasants, serfs belonging to members of the imperial house, just as
the crown peasants belonged to the crown domain.
Alexander the First set an example of dealing with the question by
establishing his class of free peasants; but the wars of his reign
left him neither time nor means for conducting a social revolution
more imposing and more perilous than a political revolution, and after
a few years had passed his free peasants fell back into their former
state. Nicolas was not inclined by nature to reform; the old,
unchanging Tartar spirit was strong within him; and he rounded the
serfage system by placing the free peasants, colonists, foresters, and
miners, under a special administration of the state. Every rustic in
the land who had no master of his own became a peasant of the crown.
But, from the reign of Ivan (ending in 1598) to the reign of Nicolas
(ending in 1855), every patriot who dared to speak his mind inveighed
against the abuse of serfage--as a thing unknown to his country in her
happier times. Every false pretender, every reckless rebel, who took
up arms against his sovereign, wrote on his banner, "freedom to the
serf." Stenka Razin (c. 1670) proclaimed, from his camp near Astrakhan,
four articles, of which the first and second ran--deposition of the
reigning house and liberation of the serfs! Pugacheff, in a revolt
more recent and more formidable than that of Razin (c. 1770), publicly
abolished serfage in the empire, taking the peasants from their lords,
and leaving them in full possession of their lands. Pestel and the
conspirators of 1825 put the abolition of serfage in the front of
their demands.
Catharine's wish to deal with the question was inspired by Pugacheff's
letters of emancipation; and on the very eve of his triumph in St.
Isaac's Square, the Emperor Nicolas named a secret committee, to
report on the social condition of his empire, chiefly with the serf in
view. At the end of three years, Nicolas, warned by their reports,
drew up a series of acts (1828-'9), by which he founded an order of
honorary citizens (not members of a guild), and set the peasants free
from their lords. These acts were never printed, for as time wore on,
and things kept quiet, the Emperor saw less need for change. The July
days in Paris frightened him; and having already sent out orders for
the masters to treat their serfs like Christian men, and to be content
in exacting three days' work in seven, according to the wish of Paul,
the sovereign thought he had done enough. His act of emancipation was
not to see the light.
In his later years the question troubled the Emperor Nicolas day and
night. In spite of his glittering array of troops, he felt that
serfage left him weak, even as the great division of his people into
Orthodox and Old Believers left him weak. How weak these maladies of
his country made him he only learned in the closing hours of his
eventful life; and then (it is said) he told his son what he had done
and left undone, enjoining him to study and complete his work.
It was well for the serf that Nicolas made him wait. The project of
emancipation, drawn up under the eyes of Nicolas, was not a Russian
document in either form or spirit; but a German state paper, based on
the misleading western notion that serfage was but villeinage under a
better name. The principle laid down by Nicolas was, that the serf
should obtain his personal freedom, and the lord should take
possession of his land!