subsequently landlords raised quitrent faster than did the state. In the 1760s,
landlords were asking one to two rubles inobrok, while the state rate was 1.5. By
the 1770s landlords were charging two to three rubles, while stateobrokstayed the
same. In the 1780s, in a time of inflation, landlords were asking about four rubles
and the state raised its rate to three. In the inflationary 1790s, landlords were asking
five rubles, and the state was asking 3.5 to 5 (rates were graduated according to the
prosperity of the province), in addition to having raised the poll tax (between 1769
and 1775, for townsmen it ranged from 2 rubles to 1.2; in 1794, it was raised for all
to 2 rubles).
All this pushed peasants intofinding supplemental income in manufacturing or
seasonal labor, particularly in the less fertile center and northwest. In the center,
including Vladimir, Moscow, Kaluga, Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, Nizhegorod, and Tver’
gubernii, the eighteenth century saw only modest increases in farmed land even
though the population was expanding. A good two-thirds of the population was
engaged in the production offlax and hemp, producing linen, cordage, sailcloth,
and other products. Moscow and Vladimir provinces led the empire in textile
production, while the relative importance offlax and hemp production declined
over the century to the west (in Belarus’an-speaking, Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver’
gubernii), because population pressure there pushed cereal cultivation to the
detriment of herds,flocks, and gardens. By the end of the century some 20– 33
percent of the adult male population were engaged in non-farming activity, without
leaving peasant status. As Blanchard notes, economic change occurred“from within
peasant society not without.”In the north the population of state peasants had
long favored non-agrarian sources of income—fishing, hunting, manufacturing of
goods for export through Arkhangelsk—and production increased there as well as
in the center.
The story was different in the newly acquired lands where farming was profit-
able. Over the century, farmed arable expanded from about 20 percent of the area
of the entire realm in 1696 to about 31 percent by 1796, a 55 percent increase in
one century even as the empire was expanding territorially. Russian nobles from the
time of Peter I were investing in (or being awarded) lands in the wooded steppe;
with Catherine II’s conquests and the progress of fortified lines, by the 1760s a
“land fever”(in Arcadius Kahan’s phrase) erupted among the gentry, clamoring to
have estates awarded to them; the general land survey of the 1760s enhanced this
process in the center by identifying available lands, whose settlement then contrib-
uted to overpopulation. In the black earth provinces of Tambov and Voronezh,
arable land expanded by 60 percent in the last decades of the century, primarily in
wheat production, while in Riazan’and Kursk provinces the arable doubled. To
farm it most profitably in a time of rising grain prices, lucrative export trade and
overall inflation, landlords reversed the trend towards cash quitrent and turned to
labor services (barshchina). By the last third of the eighteenth century in black earth
areas, 26 percent of the peasantry paid quitrent and 74 percent did labor services,
generally exceeding three days a week. By contrast, in non-black earth lands,
55 percent of serfs paid cash, while 45 percent did somebarshchina(two days a
week was the norm, while the 1649 Lawcode had set a maximum of three). Aware
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 361