PROJECTS FOR REFORMING THE PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION 299ever our moral attitude and whatever its present economic and social
disadvantages, Speransky argued, serfdom was a legitimate (in the sense
made popular by Talleyrand) form of human relations. 1 Indeed, the
fundamental fact about serfdom is that the labor of the serfs benefits
not only individual owners, but the entire state and society. Serf labor
enables other Russian subjects to serve the military and political needs
of the state. At one point, Speransky even went so far as to say that the
basic serf relationship, i.e., the potestas dominationis in the form of
praestationis (right to labor) was something immutable, that it could
be altered or surrendered by neither of the two parties, and thSlt the
obligation of labor could not even be changed into monetary payments. 2
Admittedly, this was quite a strong statement, and Speransky did not
attempt to follow it up with practical suggestions. Nevertheless, it was
indicative of his conviction that serfdom had been established for the
good of the state and of society at large. It was not a private contract,
but an act of public law. And on strictly legal grounds his position
was una.ssailable.
Although serf relations were not based on a contract, i.e., an agree-
ment made between two independent individuals for their private
benefit; they were still relations of mutual obligations. But the
obligations involved in serfdom were to society, as personified by the
state. Therefore they derived from and were determined by laws which
only sovereign power could change, and which involved a basic change
in the ways of satisfying society's needs. Since 1797, in theory at least,
this legal relationship specified that the peasant give Y2 of his labor
to the landlord, and in return the landlord must give the serf enough
land to insure not only the peasanfs survival, but also the education
and livelihood of his children. The justification for the peasant's giving
his labor was twofold: first, to free the nobleman for service to the
state; secondly - and which is of greater concern to a modern govern-
ment - to put into cultivation the arable land belonging to the
nobleman.
Although in theory and in law the obligations of the serf were
determined by the needs of the state, in practice the distinction
between these needs and the wishes of the landlord could not be easily
maintained. As the landowner was nearer to the serf than the state,
the peasant depended more on his lord's will than on the policies of
the state. And so the serf had become an object, chattel, which the
1 "Istoricheskoe obozrenie izmenenii ... ," loco cit., p. 464; "Opredelenie i ustroistvo
krepostnogo sostoianiia," loco cit., p. 846.
2 "Krepostnaia vlast'," Pamiati, p. 851.