THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PEASANTRY
Peasants in Russia’s forests and cultivated steppe lands organized their lives in a
complex interaction of cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. As
noted, peasants were responsible for significant burdens to outside parties. Serfs
paid quitrent—in kind, in cash, or in labor—to their landlords; they performed
services for their landlords (cartage, construction, military service); some were
delegated to household work or to skilled labor such as blacksmithing, tending to
horses, and carpentry. In addition, all peasants paid dues to their community for
common expenses; they paid to support their parish church and clergy; to the state
they paid land tax, theiasak, or another form of direct tax for non-Russian
taxpayers, and many (few non-Russians) were recruited into the army when this
began in mid-seventeenth century. Peasants of all sorts were obliged to do public
services such as road building and cartage for officials, for the coach service and for
military provisions.
Despite the diversity of the empire’s populations, East Slavs (Russian, Ukrainian,
and Belarus’an speakers) were always a majority. Thefirst direct population data
emerged in the eighteenth century, and it showed that non-Slavs constituted less
than 15 percent of Russia’s population; so diverse was the empire that each of the
almost twenty other ethnicities constituted no more than 2 percent of the total
population. Thus, the lives of the Russian peasantry represent a great piece of the
social experience of the empire, and will be our focus here. The lands into which
Moscow expanded in the early modern centuries offered at least three zones of
agricultural engagement. The coniferous forest north of Moscow and across all of
Siberia made arable farming only a minor part of household economy, if at all,
while the richer soil of the mixed-forest (a wide triangle from around Novgorod
south to Kyiv on the west narrowing eastward to the Volga-Oka“Mesopotamia”)
supported production of hearty grains such as rye and barley, with oats for horses.
Arable farming in the mixed forest produced historically a 3:1 or subsistence yield.
Root vegetables and legumes supplemented the diet—cabbage, cucumber, carrots,
turnips, beets, onions, peas, and beans (potatoes were not introduced until the
nineteenth century). Since livestock had to be housed and fed over a long winter,
peasants kept relatively few animals and their meat did not supplement the diet
regularly. But meat from hunting (elk, reindeer, bear, boar),fish, eggs, and cheese
provided protein; mushrooms, wild plants, honey, and berries were foraged; food
was preserved by pickling for the long winter. It was a nutritious diet by contem-
porary European standards, as noted in Chapter 17.
How East Slavic villagers worked the land varied with geography and political
pressures. Absent constraints imposed by the state or landlords, villagers made
rational decisions in light of a dearth of labor and abundance of land. Thus, they
adopted what David Moon calls“extensification”of agricultural production: com-
munities regularly moved, breaking new land with slash/burn agriculture. They
cleared afield, burned the tree stumps, and farmed for several years until the
fertility of the earth had been exhausted (Figure 10.1). Then, they moved on.
Bespeaking the limited fertility of the soil, villages were small. As long as peasants
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