categories of military servitors were folded into the peasantry. These included
odnodvortsy, gentry, musketeers, provincial Cossacks, and other military men who
were too poor to support themselves. Peasants owned personally by the imperial
family declined from 9 percent to 5 percent of the peasant population in the
eighteenth century as emperors lavished land grants on noble allies; they were
scattered around the realm, as were the thousands of peasants taken into state
ownership from the Church in the 1760s (Treasury or Economic peasants). Peasant
mobility in Left Bank Hetmanate endured to 1783; as a rule on the southern
steppes (Novorossiia, the Crimea, northern Caucasus) in the late eighteenth
century, serfdom was difficult to impose. In a situation of very scarce labor, even
Russian landlords importing serfs offered lenient terms, while other settlers (foreign
colonists, resettled communities of Russian peasants,odnodvortsy, Tatar natives,
Cossacks) maintained free status. At the end of the eighteenth century state
peasants represented 20 percent of the peasants in the central mixed forest zone,
but were almost half of all peasants in the north and in southern borderlands.
Like all taxpayers since the seventeenth century, state peasants were registered in
cadasters and after 1649 were required to remain in their place of registration;
nevertheless as a rule they were more mobile than serfs. As the economy boomed,
state peasants moved to towns or manufacturing areas for seasonal work; others
traveled to markets with goods produced in the village. Even though state peasants
bore the same burdens as serfs (poll tax, recruitment, quitrent, and labor services to
the state), they were free from landlords’whims and paid a lower quitrent. Their
status was symbolized by the fact that after 1741 serfs were considered so subsumed
under their landlords that they were not required to pledge allegiance to new tsars,
but state peasants continued to do so. Catherine II included representatives of state
peasants in the Legislative Commission in 1767 and considered awarding state
peasants a charter of freedom. Their representatives served in lower land courts
established in the administrative reforms of 1775, while serfs continued to be
subject to landlord and communal courts.
State peasants in the north are particularly known for strong communal organ-
izations that worked with local officials for effective self-government. They enjoyed
more personal integrity: they had no landlord to sell them with or without lands,
nor were their marriages obstructed by a landlord. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century restrictions on state peasants’engagement in contracts, leases,
commerce, and industry were eased, as were restrictions on their freedom of
movement: exit fees for women marrying out of their communities were abolished
in 1782, for example. But not all was rosy. They could be“ascripted”into brutal
industrial work or mining in the Urals, Altais, and Nerchinsk. State peasants were
forcibly moved for hard labor projects; between 1721 and 1762, whole villages
could be purchased by merchants for factory work, making them de facto serfs;
thereafter, only noblemen enjoyed that right until 1798, when Paul I allowed
factory owners in the merchant class to purchase peasants with or without land for
factory labor.
Living disproportionately in less fertile northern lands, state peasants were more
engaged in manufacturing and in peddling those wares, although seigneurial serfs
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 363