AGENCY AND RESISTANCE
It was not in the self-interest of communes to resist the state or their landlords;
peasants were tied to the annual cycle of crops for their very subsistence. But
peasants exerted a lot of agency, resisting in everyday ways, as James Scott has
chronicled. In Russia, for example, they insisted that their landlords observe
prohibitions on work on Sundays and all state holidays and religious holydays.
David Moon notes that by the mid-nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox peasants
observed 95 Sundays and holydays off work, a greater number than other faiths in
the empire (38–48 for Catholics and 13–23 for Protestants in the Baltics, 13– 15
for Muslims). Such regular days off provided peasants with an acceptable workload,
and they complained to their landlords or to officials about overwork.
Religion provided a locus for dissent. Many Russian peasants joined the Old
Belief when schism broke out in the Orthodox Church from the 1660s. Some
found Old Belief religious practice more compatible with their beliefs and chose to
live outside the mainstream; others saw it as an expedient way to rebel against the
dominant society. Cossack communities, for example, ostentatiously adopted the
Old Belief as a claim to separate status and age-old traditions. Such religious
distancing was usually accompanied by physical movement: Old Believer commu-
nitiesfled to the borderlands, even outside of Russia, to create lives anew.
Peasants resisted on the job. They poached game and cut timber in landlords’
forests; they underpaid their taxes and built up arrears; they bribed officials to avoid
recruitment; they surreptitiously brewed illegal vodka. They also resisted change,
even in the late eighteenth century when enlightened landlords with all the best
intentions tried to introduce crop rotations and new foods that would have
improved peasant well-being. It was simply too risky to innovate. Peasants also
resisted more overtly. Theyfled their landlords, becoming Cossacks and garrison
troops on the borders. Some blended into urban occupations, while others escaped
even state control byfleeing so far into Siberia or the steppe that tsarist taxation,
let alone landlords, did not follow, at least for a few generations. And some escaped
tsarist control, albeit often briefly, by becoming highwaymen. Bands of robbers
preyed on major roads and rivers where the distance between settlements made
travel perilous. A scourge on communities, such robbers generated relatively little
idealization in Russian folk tradition.
Rarely did peasants erupt in mass revolts, usually when grievances became too
sharp and when outside leadership provided organization. In Eurasia catalyst
and organizational ability for rebellion was usually provided by Cossacks—Ivan
Bolotnikov (1606), Stepan Razin (1670–1), Emelian Pugachev (1773–5) were all
Cossacks, each with travel experience that gave them greater political savvy. These
rebellions generally followed a pattern: they erupted from the borderlands and
gathered disparate social groups rebelling against increasing government control
(enserfment, taxation) or loss of traditional Cossack or native autonomies. In the
Time of Troubles, Bolotnikov’s followers included peasants resenting encroaching
serfdom; Stepan Razin mobilized not only lesser Don Cossacks, resentful of
oppression by their own elite, but also natives in the middle and lower Volga,
230 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801