produced“a viable way of life”for peasants; Dennison concurs that serfdom
produced“a more open, dynamic society than that usually portrayed.”Alessandro
Stanziani argues that Russia never really had serfdom at all, at least officially
decreed. He argues that the state was more concerned with defining property rights
as a basis of taxation and with creating cadasters to do so; although in the process
peasants werefixed to the land, the form of their service was never legally defined or
regulated. Stanziani’s view is provocative, and his point echoes what others have
been saying: the“world the peasants made”in early modern Russia was diverse, full
of unpredictable possibilities for peasants.
Certainly the constraints for all peasants of being obligatedfiscally to one’s
registered community were real, as was the power that landlords possessed to
buy, sell, and move their peasants. But within those constraints peasants worked
to carve out control. As discussed in Chapter 10, Steven Hoch and others have
shown that peasant communes worked assiduously to keep landlords’bailiffs at
arms’length by managing their own affairs. The power of the commune was not
benign, in many ways a tyranny of the old men over the young, and of men over
women. But at the same time the commune took care of its own in hard times,
communal assemblies gave some individuals and families forums in which to shape
their own fates, and peasants and communal boards could even carve out spheres of
entrepreneurial energy and self-determination. Tracey Dennison shows how peas-
ants learned to work around and within the limits placed by their landlords, using
the example of serfs on properties owned by the wealthy Sheremetev family.
Administering estates around the realm, the Sheremetevy created an administrative
system that provided“transparent”and reliable mechanisms by which peasants
could purchase land, found businesses, hire labor, and even enrich themselves. The
overarching legal framework of serfdom and recruitment, and the demands of
landlord power, frustrated and complicated these ambitions—time was wasted on
work-arounds, ample money was dispersed on bribery, anxiety over landlord or
state confiscation always accompanied success. But still many peasants carved out a
sphere of their own.
Living standards rose for Russian peasants overall across the century. Ian Blan-
chard argues that from about the 1720s to 1788, in the Russian empire per capita
income of the entire population rose to levels unimagined in Peter I’s time,
increasing by 70 percent between about 1720 and 1762 and by 70 percent again
by 1802, despite agrarian crises of the last decades of the century. The rise reflects
what he calls the“agricultural revolution”of the eighteenth century, a transform-
ation not in methods of farming so much as its physical conditions and comple-
mentary infrastructure. As Russia moved into more fertile wooded steppe and black
earth, the empire’s productivity of grain, cattle, and garden products soared. Citing
statistics of 1788, he notes that the mixed-forest center constituted 40 percent of all
plowland, but yielded only a third of the total grain harvest while the black earth
lands constituted the same percentage of the empire’s plowland and yielded half the
harvest; relatively small Left Bank Ukraine produced another 20 percent.
On the average, only a third of the grain harvest was needed to provide peasants
with bread; the rest was turned into livestock feed and vodka, while some 40
368 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801