punishment and exile. When peasants did manage to complain, they were rarely
heeded by local authorities. In one case in the 1720s in Arzamas, nobleman Andrei
Lopatin was found guilty of killing more than ten of his peasants and was executed,
but in the notorious case of nobleman Afanasii Nikiforov, it took several petitions
by his peasants to catch the attention of local officials. Found guilty of murdering
several of his serfs in the Shatsk region in the 1710s, Nikiforov eluded justice with
judicial maneuvers for almost thirty years until he died of old age unpunished. The
most infamous case was that of noblewoman Daria Saltykova, found guilty in 1768
of murdering thirty-eight serfs (and implicated in 100 more serf deaths on her
estate); she died after thirty-three years in prison in 1801. Such cases were the
exception, both in prosecution and brutality. Most serf owners ruled coercively, but
not murderously. It was, after all, in their self-interest to keep their productive
forces alive.
Elise Wirtschafter argues that the dark underside of the social dynamism of the
eighteenth century was the slippage around serf ownership and the de facto
persistence of slavery in the form of indenture and bondage of various sorts. Serf
ownership spread beyond the legally exclusive rights of the nobility: entrepreneurial
serfs bought serfs in their landlords’names as hired labor,raznochintsyand mer-
chants purchased serfs using nobles as middlemen, noblemen could hire out their
servants to people in other estates. Alexander Kamenskii found several cases in
Bezhetsk in the early eighteenth century of townsmen seeking state help in tracking
down their runaway serfs, whom they had purchased from local noblemen. The
extent of the problem is suggested by the 1785 Charter of the Nobility’s explicit
statement denying rights of ownership to non-nobles who owned serfs. People
could fall into indenture through impoverishment, as in Muscovite times.
Orphans, illegitimate children, soldier’s wives, impoverished peasants—all could
find themselves dependent on someone with the wherewithal to support them—
nobles, state peasants,raznochintsy, merchants, townsmen. Such de facto servitude
fell below the radar screen.
VARIETY WITHIN SERFDOM
Serfdom was certainly a moral shame and source of suffering for almost half the
empire’s population. But historians caution against drawing too schematic a picture
of what it meant to be a serf. Certainly serfdom was not a benign experience—
people ran away from it, they resisted passively and violently. But“serfdom”was
not the same for all peasants, nor was peasant status the same for state, Economic,
and court peasants across the realm. Rather, serfdom adjusted its form to suit
regional circumstances. Historians accordingly accent its diversity andflexibility.
Steven Hoch calls serfdom“not a system, but a widely varying set of practices,”
while Tracey Dennison called it“a loose framework in which a wide continuum of
different forms of estate governance...could be implemented.”David Moon
concludes that serfdom“achieved a valence, albeit an unequal one, between
coercion and exploitation of the enserfed peasants by the ruling group” that
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 367