estates, when the law demanded that state courts control criminal justice. Landlords
could cynically emancipate serfs when they were old and infirm; they and village
communes could play favorites in choosing recruits for the army. By the end of the
eighteenth century laws affirmed serfs’inability to contract loans, hire out one’s
labor, or enter into any contractual relations without their owner’s permission.
A particular bane was landlords’increasing disregard of the prohibition against
buying and selling serfs separately from land or family. Peter I condemned the
practice and subsequent laws reinforced the prohibition (1721, 1771). But it
expanded in part because other statutes and practices implicitly promoted it. In
1714 Peter I abolished the distinction betweenpomest’eand hereditary lands
(putting military and state service on a salary basis instead), ending any remaining
hesitancy of landlords to treat serfs as hereditary property and move them among
scattered properties. Laws that legalized the sale and purchase of young men as
army recruits (1717, 1720, 1747) and set purchase rates for such substitutions
implicitly allowed landlords to break up peasant families. Trade in serfs peaked in
Catherine II’s time. Landlords sold, mortgaged, and gave serfs as dowry without
land and even as individuals; they bought peasants without land forfield labor,
domestic service, artisan work, theatrical troops, and sexual exploitation. Douglas
Smith has, for example, poignantly chronicled the love affair of the fabulously
wealthy Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev with a serf opera diva in his family’s
serf theater; eventually he married Praskovia Koval’eva, stage-named“The Pearl”
(Count Peter Sheremetev had named all his singers and actors as precious, but
inanimate, gems). Despite their marriage, one should not forget that Nikolai and
Praskovia’s relationship began in coercion, as she was owned by him.
The century was full of state decrees warning nobles not to abuse their serfs. The
1649 Lawcode and subsequent legislation (1734) mandated that serf and slave
owners support dependents during famine and other disruptions, but enforcement
was not consistent. No government regulation over how serfs were treated in
resettlement was ever issued. Peter I condemned abusive landlords; Catherine II
spoke eloquently about abuse of serfs in chapter 12 of her 1767Instruction, but in
her thirty-year-long reign, she prosecuted and punished only a handful of nobles for
abusing serfs. Enlightenment values penetrated some 1770s decrees: in 1773
landlords were forbidden to knout serfs for petty theft and the 1775 provincial
reforms prescribed state receivership of lands of nobles who abused their peasants.
Paul I expressed remarkable solicitude for the rural population: he insisted that
landlords ensure that each village establish grain reserves for times of famine; he
issued several injunctions against landlord abuse of serfs, in 1797 forbidding the
sale of house servants and landless serfs at auction and in 1798 the sale of Ukrainian
peasants without land. He forgave poll tax arrears in December 1797, established
three days of labor services (barshchina) as maximum, and, when he came to the
throne, he restored the practice of serfs taking the oath of allegiance to new rulers.
Nevertheless, landlords’serfs had few avenues of recourse. In multiple decrees
from 1649 through the eighteenth century all subjects were forbidden to submit
petitions directly to the ruler (using proper judicial venues was expected); a 1767
law forbade peasants tofile complaints against their masters, on pain of corporal
366 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801