Peasants in the reign of Peter I

The situation in which the mass of possessive peasants found themselves towards the end of the 17th century is characterized by the complete dependence of the peasants on landowners. It is necessary to look very, very keenly, in order to find features in the then law that really distinguish the peasant owners from the slaves. Especially after the owner's peasants, having lost the right to leave the lands where they were caught by the scribe books of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, still owed the landowners unpaid, borrowing money, bread, and agricultural implements from them. According to the law of that time, an unpaid debtor was to become a serf of his creditor. It is therefore not surprising that relations were established between landowners and peasants in life, as between gentlemen and serfs. And since, on the other hand, in the life of serfs there was a lot of worldly common with the structure of peasant life, the general dependence of their landowners would inevitably lead to the merger of these two groups of the population.

The government protected the peasants from a direct transition to slavery, having established “peasant eternity,” that is, a ban on the transfer of peasants to other class categories, not excluding slaves. Serfs did not pay taxes. Protecting the peasants from going into slavery, the government kept itself payers of state taxes. But in reality, the possessive peasantry was not much different from serfdom. Equally with the slaves of the peasants, they are increasingly beginning to call serfs.

However, already in 1695, by decree of Tsar Peter, they began to take taxes from the lands cultivated by the slaves. Laying on the arable slaves the same burden that the peasants bore, the government, one might say, equated one to the other. If life forced the serfs to become in a slave position, the law put the serfs in the position of serfs. The practice of selling peasants without land, established since the 17th century, also erases the line between peasants and slaves. Even Peter felt powerless to eradicate the sale of people. Condemning in one decree of 1721 the sale of peasants, Peter doubts the possibility of ending it.

By decree of 1705, recruits are subject to serfs. In life, servility to such an extent has completely penetrated the peasantry, and, conversely, the peasantry has become so close to servility that it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between them. Subsequent life quickly erased and the last differences that could still be captured in these two essentially different states. The merger of serfdom and possessive peasantry into one category and by law occurred in the era of censuses and revisions that accompanied the introduction of the poll tax.

By decree of January 22 ( February 2 ), 1719 , only peasants and arable serfs were included in the tax rolls ^[1] . In subsequent years, the census further expands its scope and captures slaves of all kinds in their lists, or fairy tales. In 1723, all the households were included in the census, even if they did not plow the land and were only in the personal service of the gentlemen. By decree of 1723, minors, “not remembering whose they were before”, were given “into eternal possession” to those landowners on whose land their census found. In 1722 , after clergy staff were established in rural and urban churches, all churchmen and clerks were recorded in cushion tales for the owners on whose lands they lived. Retired soldiers, sailors, and “former servicemen” —pushkari, gatherers , and archers — also entered the airbags. As payers of the poll tax, they became in one rank with the peasants, and therefore, in case of granting the lands on which they lived, to the nobleman, they became serfs.

The most important consequence of the census, which began in 1718 , was that serfs and serfs were mixed in one category. From then on, servility disappeared in Russia, merging with the possessive peasantry into one category of serfs, forced by their masters.

In 1722, the existence of free and walking people found their limits. For an active, always absorbed in the work of the Tsar, this category of Moscow people had long seemed necessary to attach to the sovereign’s business. Even at the beginning of his reign, he spoke of them as “those who stagger without service; it is not possible to hope for state benefits from them, they only increase theft. " Freedom or walking people were really a fair amount of rabble, very variable in composition, idle and restless. He considered himself a free, walking person, a freedman and a serf , a bonded serf who went free after the death of the master, and any other rank was a man whom fate or unhappiness threw out from the category of people born to him. Now all these walking people were ordered to either enlist in military service, or to look for gentlemen who would agree to take them to their house. Those free people who turned out to be unfit for service and did not find gentlemen referred to the galleys.

The first revision, as you know, brought with it a pillow tax, which came not from the ground and not from the yard, but from the “soul”, that is, from a person. Supervision over their payment serviceability remained as before for the land owners. By decree of February 5 ( 16 ), 1722 , it was ordered that “the landowners pay money themselves, and where the landowners themselves are not, their clerks and elders” ^[2] . In cases of non-receipt of per capita payments on time, it was ordered to such villages to "send executions and order to immediately rule on the landowners". Since 1724, the peasant owners could leave their villages to earn money and for other necessities only if they had with them the written permission of the master, attested by the Zemsky commissar and colonel of the regiment that was in the area. Thus, the landowner power over the identity of the peasants received even more opportunities to strengthen, taking into their unaccountable disposition both the personality and property of the private property peasant. From this time on, this new condition of the rural worker is called the “serf” or “revision” soul.

Peasants from this time began to be divided into serfs , monastic and state peasants. All three categories were recorded in audit tales and taxed one.

Peter's legislation tried to do some mitigation of the serfdom, creating even the possibility of getting out of it. So, it was allowed yard people to enter the soldiers and without the consent of the master. The peasants, who conducted large-scale trade, were allowed to ascribe to the cities even against the will of the landowner, and the landowner could not take more levy from them than from the others (decree of September 7, 1723). In order to develop shipbuilding in St. Petersburg, all the carpenters who “had been doing shipwork ... whoever they were not” were given the opportunity to join the ranks of “free carpenters” (these carpenters were supposed to settle in St. Petersburg on Okhta, where huts were built for them ) At the same time, carpenters and their families were automatically released from serfdom ^[3] . . A decree was issued that if the landowner was one of the “dissolute motes and destroyers,” then his estates should be taken away and given to close relatives. It was destroyed the right of the landowners, in collecting debts from them, to put for themselves the right of their serfs. Peter I also instructed the Senate, in the preparation of the new Code (which was supposed to replace the “Council Code”), to take measures against the ugly forms of trade in peasants - “It is customary in Russia that petty gentry sells peasants and business and yard people separately, like cattle - who wants to buy something that is not found in the whole world ... And His Majesty indicated that this sale of people should be stopped, and if it would be impossible to stop it at all, then they would at least sell it by whole surnames, or by families, and not separately. ” But this instruction remained an empty phrase, since the new Code was not drawn up (the slowly drafting of laws ceased after Peter's death).

The category of state or state peasants appeared as a result of the tax reform of 1723 as a result of the unification of various groups of personally free peasants (black-mowed, yasak, etc.). Presumably, the crown peasants in Sweden served as a model for the legal definition of this group. At the time of the census of 1724, state peasants accounted for 19% of the population (subsequently their share in the population increased - in 1858 state krais made up 45% of the population in the territory covered by the first revision). Legally, state peasants were considered as “free rural inhabitants”. In addition to the poll tax, state peasants paid a rent in cash to the state. State peasants, unlike property peasants, were considered as legal entities — they could appear in court, enter into transactions, and own property. The land on which such peasants worked was considered state ownership, but the peasants recognized the right to use - in practice, peasants made transactions as land owners ^[4] . But at the same time, state peasants were attached to the community, and could be granted to private individuals as serfs. The practice of distributing state peasants to private hands was canceled by Alexander I in 1800, however, earlier awards of Russian state peasants to private individuals were rare (and never in the North and Siberia). As a rule, the palace peasants (that is, the personal serfs of the king) and peasants from the conquered lands were handed out to the nobles. The class policy of Peter I (the ban on the possession of serfs for the nobility) prevented the introduction of serfdom in the Russian North ^[5] .

Usually, single-palaces are included in the composition of state peasants, but their position was special. One palace was called the direct descendants of small service people settled by the government each on a separate plot along the entire military border of the Moscow state. In the middle of the XVII century, these settlers were replaced on the Little Russian regiments, which advanced further into the steppe border, and from 1713, the landmilitia established by Peter, who was also recruited from the same class. The military service of the people settled between the Tula and Belgorod defensive lines ceased to be needed on the spot, as the danger moved far to the south. Then, by decree, Pyotr recorded these old servants in the salary and turned them, thus, into a special category of peasants. The classmates paid a capitation tax and a cash rent to the state, but otherwise had almost the same rights as the nobles (in particular, they could have serfs). The odnodvorsi lacked a community, and they were not bound by mutual responsibility (the partial introduction of the community of odnodvodniki occurred only in the 19th century). ^[6] In the event of a military threat, the odnodviks should form a landmilitia.

The tightening of fiscal policy under Peter I led to the strengthening of the position of the community as an administrative unit. Since the 16th century, peasants in the community were bound by mutual responsibility (they had to pay the amount of taxes for those villagers who for some reason did not pay taxes). The tightening of control over tax revenues by the state contributed to an increase in local authority in the community. During the reign of Peter continued the spread of the redistribution community that arose in the 17th century. This process was associated with an increase in the density of the peasant population ^[7] , ^[8] . The widespread view of the impact on the formation of the redistribution community of the introduction of a poll tax, apparently, is not entirely justified ^[9] .

The consequence of Peter's reforms, affecting both directly and indirectly the landowning population of Russia, was primarily the unification of the landowner class. Now it splits into only two large groups - peasants, serfs to their owners, and peasants, serfs to the state. Both of them are recorded in general revision tales and everyone pays a poll tax. Before Peter, when the lodge was land and its size was determined by the size of the arable land, the peasants tried to reduce the stock to pay less. When in the XVII century they began to take the tax from the yard, the peasants expanded the courtyards, getting bored on one, in order to achieve a reduction in the state tax in this way. The transfer of taxes from the yard to the worker himself gave the peasants the opportunity to plow more land and freed them from the need to reduce their own enterprise, hiding from taxes in the yard. Before Peter and before the introduction of the poll tax under him, the peasants considered it an unattainable good to be able to develop an allotment of six acres. By the end of the 18th century, plots of ten acres were commonplace in the Russian peasantry. In this circumstance one can see the positive significance of Peter's agricultural and tax reforms.

On the other hand, Peter's reforms worsened the position of the peasant owners in the sense of their greater dependence on the landlords. First of all, serfdom was expanded. According to the decree on the revision, all those who lived and worked on his land, all those whom he entered in the revision tales became strong to him, depending on the landowner: once he got on these lists, he no longer had a way out of the serfdom, especially when subsequently, most complaints against such, even incorrect, entries are prohibited. Since the time of Peter there are no more serfs, no backyard people, no people walking - all of them, along with the owner's peasants, are serfs of that gentleman, on whose land their revision found, which brought them a state of serfdom with their notes.

Under Peter, a new variety of dependent farmers was created - peasants assigned to manufactories . These peasants in the XVIII century received the name of the sessional . By a decree of 1721, nobles and merchants-manufacturers were allowed to buy villages for manufactories ^[10] . The peasants bought for the factory with the village were not considered the property of the factory owners, but as living equipment, the living labor of the factories themselves, attached to these factories and plants, so that the factory owner could neither sell nor lay the peasants separately from the factory.

An important measure for Peter was the decree of May 11, 1721, introducing the Lithuanian scythe into the practice of harvesting bread, instead of the sickle traditionally used in Russia ^[11] . To spread this innovation, samples of “Lithuanians” were sent to the provinces, together with instructors from German and Latvian peasants. Since the braid provided ten-fold labor savings during harvesting, this innovation became widespread in a short time, and became part of the usual peasant farming. ^[12] Peter's other agricultural development measures included the distribution of new cattle breeds to the landowners - Dutch cows, merino sheep from Spain, and the establishment of horse factories. On the southern outskirts of the country, measures were taken to plant vineyards and plantations of mulberry trees, and nurseries with fruit trees discharged from France and Italy were broken up. ^[12] .

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