done in the landlord’s name. We see the fruits of the law’s ambiguities in the
eighteenth century.
Because most landlords did not live on their estates in the eighteenth century,
experience as a serf varied widely. Until 1762 nobles were required to serve all or
most (twenty-five years after 1736) of their adult lives in military, naval, or civil
posts far from their home estates, which could, in any case, be distributed around
the realm. After emancipation, some noblemen chose the life of a country gentle-
man and by the end of the century an“enlightened”landowner stratum, particu-
larly in the black earth areas, was emerging. They expanded their estates, imposed
labor dues, and tried to implement agrarian reform and estate improvements, such
as more complex crop rotation regimes, planting of grasses and legumes, and use of
new fertilizers to replenish soil, introduction of new, more nutritious, or profitable
crops (potatoes and tobacco in the black earth lands), use of better plows and tools.
Such agrarian reforms tended to be successful on a broad scale only in the Baltic
provinces, where estates were smaller and landlords generally took more direct
control. In Russia, most peasants proved unwilling to change crops or farming
techniques, particularly infields that they farmed not under the landlord’s direct
control. While their caution reinforced landlords’attitudes towards peasants as
crude, backward, and in need of patrimonial protection, their reluctance to change
was well grounded. Many farmed on the edge of subsistence and crop failure meant
famine; they trusted the tried and true. Serfs also had little incentive to produce
more if only their landlords benefited. Their aversion to innovation was not only a
form of resistance but of self-preservation.
Landlords’physical and cultural distance from their serfs might have lessened a
landlord’s direct burden on his serfs, but as a social estate, the nobility needed the
income derived from peasant labor. The pressure on noblemen to pay for a
Europeanized lifestyle—dress, education, homes and furnishings, travel, entertain-
ment, including largesse to clients and community—could be crippling for middle
and lower gentry. Arcadius Kahan has directly linked the“costs of Westernization”
on eighteenth-century nobility to their expansion of lands and increased use of
labor services, as well as more intensive engagement of their peasants in manufac-
turing over the century.
Nobles in this century took full advantage of their political dominance to
legislate control in the economy, including over serfs. Initially village communes
collected the poll tax on landlords’estates, but in 1731 the law made landlords
explicitly responsible. Paul Bushkovitch remarks that with such an indirect mode of
collection, the state undoubtedly lost potential income but gained noble allies.
Landlords and communes also oversaw recruitment; in 1727 the state forbade serfs
to voluntarily join the army without a landlord’s permission (thus closing off an
avenue of escape). Landlords won more control over peasants’personal lives: in
1754 landlords gained the right to demand compensation for a serf woman’s
marriage off the estate; laws allowed landlords to punish serfs for petty crime
(1736), to deport delinquent serfs to Siberia (1760), and to punish them by
sending them to hard labor at the Admiralty shipyards (1765). Some landlords
exceeded their legal rights by prosecuting and punishing criminal offenses on their
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 365