certainly also engaged in trade and crafts. Some married their way, or talked their
way, into urban taxpaying or higher social statuses with their wits and entrepre-
neurial energies. Some built businesses and owned serfs under the legal radar screen.
The eighteenth century was the century of the peasant trader, and many of these
were state peasants.
LORD AND PEASANT
Serfs had a more precarious relationship to all this mobility and change. Between
1719 and 1744, according to V. M. Kabuzan, the percentage of the empire’s
population that was enserfed rose from 48.4 percent to 50.4 percent, concentrated
in the forested central and northwest gubernii. By 1762 the percentage of serfs in
the overall population rose slightly above half and their location shifted to include
the southern Urals and Novorossiia. By the end of the century, serfs constituted
more than 70 percent of the population in the central forested and forested-steppe
regions. In the Baltic lands (Livland, Estland) that Russia acquired in the eighteenth
century, German landlords’peasants had been enserfed since the sixteenth century
and this endured in the Russian empire (although peasants in Finnish provinces
north of the Baltics were not enserfed). Since peasants had also been enserfed in the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Right Bank Ruthenian lands from the sixteenth
century, their peasants came into Russia in the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793,
1795) enserfed, but in the Hetmanate peasants enjoyed at least a de jure right to
move until 1783. In the second half of the century, despite the tightening of
peasant mobility in Left Bank Ukraine in 1783, the proportion of serfs in the
empire’s population actually declined to just less than half with demographic
growth and the settling of the steppe primarily with non-serfs.
Landlords’power over their people waxed in the eighteenth century in part
because neither the 1649 Lawcode nor subsequent law directly defined the rela-
tionship between lord and serf, as Elise Wirtschafter has noted. Landlords exploited
the law’s ambiguity. The 1649 Lawcode, in principle, bound peasants and towns-
men to their physical residence, particularly peasants onpomest’ewho were intend-
ed to be afixed workforce for a military servitor. But even the 1649 code allowed
landlords in many cases to treat their peasants as moveable property. They could
shift serfs betweenpomest’eor hereditary properties, they were obligated in some
criminal cases to offer peasants as compensation to victims of crime, they could
claim the wife and children of a fugitive peasant who was recovered after he had
married in a new location, even if he hadfled unmarried. A serf’s property was
considered his master’s and could be confiscated to pay off a landlord’s debts. Serfs
maintained some legal competence: serfs could bear witness in court, they could
win awards for dishonor in court, and they were subject to the criminal laws. But in
many affairs outside of the lord’s estate, they were to be represented by their
landlord; any contractual agreement that an entrepreneurial serf wanted to engage
in (trade, artisan work, hiring labor, purchasing land or even serfs) had to be
364 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801