of abuses, Paul I at his coronation spoke in favor of the three-day labor limit and no
peasant labor on Sundays (but since in some areas two days were still the norm,
some panicked peasants took this as an increase).
Everywhere peasants lived with one foot in the farming economy, another in
production or trade. Even while only 1.4 percent of the population was engaged
solely in commercial activities, in the 1780s there were more than 6,400 shops in
Moscow and across the realm hundreds of weekly fairs, manned by serfs and state
peasants. They hired themselves out for labor, hauling barges up the Volga,
building boats for grain shipping through canals to St. Petersburg, working in
factories. They were small shopkeepers, rural peddlers moving among urban and
rural fairs. When agrarian crisis hit in the 1780s (caused by drought, declining
yields due to over-farming in the center, inflation, and monetary crises), the
agricultural sector weathered it with familiar adaptations. Landlords devoted
more resources to export grain production, peasants turned more to crafts and
manufacturing, particularly textiles and ironwork in the center, and the expanded
husbandry of the Pontic and Caspian steppe lands made tallow and meat products a
major export crop. Peasants suffered some decline in diet and income, but by the
first decade of the nineteenth century the economy had rebounded.
The serf economy was profitable for landlords. Prices of serfs, populated estates,
and adult serfs suitable as recruit substitutes rose steadily in the eighteenth century,
faster than the rate of growth of other staples such as grain and manufactured
goods. Boris Mironov found while the quitrent and direct taxes on state peasants
rose by 2.8 times from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century,
those on serfs rose fourfold. No wonder that Emelian Pugachev in 1774 promised
serfs that his rebellion would liberate them from landlords.
Cash and labor in thefields were only the most prominent form of peasants’
obligations in this century. All taxpayers—townsmen, serfs, and state peasants—
owed other services to commune, town, landlord, and state, whether transport of
army supplies in time of troop movement, billeting of troops for six to eight months
a year, road and bridge building and maintenance, and more.
UNENSERFED PEASANTS
Serfdom did not define the Russian empire; serfs constituted about half the peasant
population and were regionally concentrated in the mixed-forest center and central
black earth lands. Elsewhere peasants lived without the burden of a landlord. Such
peasants could be directly subordinate to the crown, Church, College of Economy
(for confiscated church peasants after 1764), or to the state, but we will call them
generically state peasants. They clustered in empire’s borderlands. In the coniferous
forest—the north, northern Urals, Siberia—where a gentry population could not
be supported, serfdom was untenable economically. Here villages of free (“black”)
peasants, including Tatar and Finno-Ugric natives in the northern Urals (Tatar,
Votiak/Udmurt, Mordva, Chuvash, and Cheremis/Mari) were liable only for state
taxes and services. State peasants also clustered in the southern steppe as various
362 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801