10
Rural Taxpayers
Peasants and Beyond
The majority of the Russian empire’s population was taxpayers, mostly agrarian,
but also including townsmen and native peoples practicing a variety of economies
from nomadism to trapping and forest exploitation. Taxpayers were a steady source
of income and labor services for the state, and much of the story of empire is the tale
of their control, primarily control of their mobility. At the same time that the state
exerted impressive surveillance, maintaining taxation records, collecting taxation,
and enforcing enserfment, taxpayers lived lives often well removed from tsarist
authority, governing themselves in all but the most serious issues. Here, too, the
state made“deals”with subject peoples, balancing exploitation with autonomies.
SERFDOM AND SLAVERY
Around 1450 the grand princes of Moscow were consolidating regional power in a
forested plain with a very simple society. Here were few towns, almost all, save
Novgorod and Pskov, fortified military settlements rather than commercial
centers, and few townsmen. There were no professional classes, minimal literacy,
minimal wealth, little of the social diversity, commercialization, or prosperity of
the Ottoman empire or Europe at this time. The elite was the cavalry officer corps;
clergy were“black”(married parish priests) and“white”(monks and hierarchs);
the bureaucracy was just emerging. Population was sparse, primarily taxpaying
peasantry.
In thefifteenth century East Slavic peasants were mobile. Many lived in free
villages managing their own fates, the so-called“black peasants”; others lived on
lands owned by lay or clerical lords and, like peasants the world over, enjoyed a
right to move masters when they had brought in their crops, settled their debts, and
performed other traditional duties to their masters. Custom established a few times
of the year when peasants could move—Lent, Shrovetide—but most common was
a two-week period around the autumn celebration of St. George’s Day in November.
That norm was cited in Muscovy’s 1497 Lawcode and repeated in its 1550 successor
as an attempt to stabilize movement of the labor force; this became thefirst of
successive steps to limit the peasantry’s freedom of movement.
The term enserfment covers only part of the process at hand, inasmuch as it is
usually taken to refer to the binding of peasants to landlords. That fate befell about