The Social Order 359A family of serfs paying
homage to their lord. Notethe wife kissing the noble’s
hand.
state. Villages were collectively responsible for the payment of taxes.
Moreover, all male peasants could be conscripted into army service for
terms of twenty-five years, a life sentence for most soldiers.
Possibilities for peasant resistance were limited; yet the “weapons of the
weak” were not insignificant. These ranged from sullen resentment and
foot-dragging to arson, or even insurrection. All nobles in an idle moment—
and there were many—pondered the possibility of a massive uprising of
“the dark masses.” As the legal and material conditions of the serfs deterio
rated, rebellions were endemic in eighteenth-century Russia. During the
reign of Catherine the Great, the Cossack Emelian Pugachev appeared on
the Siberian frontier claiming to be “Tsar Peter III” (the real Peter III had
spoken of reforms but had been dethroned and then murdered). He led
several million peasants against their lords in 1773 and 1774. Pugachev’s
followers included Cossacks, Old Believers (dissidents persecuted by the
Orthodox Church and doubly taxed), miners from the Ural Mountains,
and desperate serfs. About 3,000 landowners perished in the Pugachev
rebellion before it was crushed.
In Bohemia and Moravia, 40,000 royal soldiers were required to put down
peasant uprisings in 1775. And in the middle of the next decade, about