law, explaining to the Tunguz tribe,“if he had planned this with intent, then he
would be killed without mercy. But in an unintentional crime we sentence our
Russian people to corporal punishment, we do not execute them. And even
among the Tunguz, they don’t give people who commit homicide without intent
to the other side for execution.”Here, the court asserted the state’s monopoly
over violence and applied the standards established in the Moscow criminal
law chancery.
Courts of law provided a unifying network for subjects of the tsar to experience
something from the state other than oppression and taxation. The tsar’s courts
could protect communities from bands of robbers, punish murderers, try to settle
snarly land disputes, and defend the honor of even a slave. Furthermore, as noted in
Chapters 3–5, on the local level for lesser crimes, communities maintained their
traditional justice systems. East Slavic villages were self-governing by communes;
Muslim communities used sharia law and Muslim judges; Siberian natives used
their traditions; Don and Left Bank Cossacks had their own legal traditions and
courts. Peasants and common people across the realm through the seventeenth
century were touched by the tsar’s taxation and East Slavic peasants were pinned
down to their place of registration. But in true“empire of difference”style, through
the seventeenth century the state did not endeavor to standardize its treatment of
subject peoples.
*****
On the peasant economy: David Moon,The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the
Peasants Made(London: Longman, 1999); Steven L. Hoch,Serfdom and Social Control in
Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
Tracey K. Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); B. N. Mironov and Ben Eklof,The Social History
of Imperial Russia, 1700– 1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000); B. N. Mironov,
The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700– 1917 , ed. Gregory L. Freeze
(London: Routledge, 2012); Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw,Landscape and Settlement
in Romanov Russia, 1613– 1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). A classic still has value:
Jerome Blum,Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
On the rationality of peasant farming practices, see Janet Martin,“‘Backwardness’in
Russian Peasant Culture: A Theoretical Consideration of Agricultural Practices in the
Seventeenth Century,”in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds.,Religion
and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine(DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 19–33. On enserfment: Blum,Lord and Peasant; Richard Hellie in
Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy(Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1971); Evsey Domar,“The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,”Journal
of Economic History30 (1970): 18–32.
Richard Hellie’s work on slavery is based on a small and chronologically restricted collection
of cases (early seventeenth-century Novgorod region), but it provides fascinating insights:
Slavery in Russia, 1450– 1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Allessandro
Stanziani puts Russian serfdom and slavery in a Eurasian context:Bondage: Labor and
Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries(New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014).Rural Taxpayers 233