Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia by Maxime Kovalevsky Lecture 6The Origin, Growth, and Abolition of Personal Servitude in Russia An account of the origin, growth, and abolition of serfdom in Russia might easily be made to fill volumes, so vast and so various are the materials on which the study of it is based. But for the purpose now in view, that of bringing before your notice the general conclusion to which Russian historians and legists have come as to the social development of their country, perhaps a single lecture will suffice. In it I cannot pretend to do more than present to you those aspects of the subject on which the minds of Russian scholars have been specially fixed of late years.
Among the first to be considered is the origin of that system of personal servitude and bondage to the land in which the Russian peasant lived for centuries. An opinion long prevailed that this system was due solely to the action of the State, which, at the end of the sixteenth century, abolished the freedom of migration previously enjoyed by the Russian peasant and bound him for ever to the soil. This opinion, which would have made Russian serfdom an institution quite apart from that of the serfdom of the Western States of Europe, has been happily abandoned, and consequently its development becomes the more interesting, in so far as it discloses the action of those economic and social forces which produced the personal and real servitude of the so-called villein all over Europe.
Whilst stating the most important facts in the history of Russian serfdom, I shall constantly keep in view their analogy with those presented by the history of English or French villenage. By so doing I hope to render the natural evolution of Russian serfdom the more easily understood.
The first point to which I desire to call your attention is the social freedom enjoyed by the Russian peasant in the earlier portion of medieval history. The peasant, then known by the name of smerd -- from the verb smerdet, to have a bad smell -- was as free to dispose of his person and property, as was the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, or the old German markgenosse. He had the right to appear as a witness in Courts of Justice, both in civil and in criminal actions; he enjoyed the right of inheriting -- a right, however, which was somewhat limited by the prevalence of family communism -- and no one could prevent him from engaging his services to any landlord for as many years as he liked, and on terms settled by contract. Lack of means to buy a plough and the cattle which he needed for tilling the ground very often led the free peasant to get them from his landlord on condition that every year he ploughed and harrowed the fields of his creditor.
It is in this way that an economic dependence was first established between two persons equally free, equally in possession of the soil, but disposing the one of a larger, the other of a smaller capital. The name under which the voluntary serf is known to the Pravda, the first legal code of Russia, is that of roleini zakoup; this term signifies a person who has borrowed money on condition of performing the work of ploughing (ralo means the plough) so long as his debt remains unpaid.
The frequent want of the simplest agricultural implements, which Magna Charta designates as con tenementum, was also probably the chief cause, which induced more than one Russian peasant to prefer the condition of a sort of French metayer or petty farmer, whose rent, paid in kind, amounts to a fixed proportion of the yearly produce, to that of a free shareholder in the open fields and village common. The almost universal existence of metayage, or farming on the system of half-profits, is now generally recognised. Thorold Rogers has proved its existence in medieval England, and in France and Italy this system is still found. In saying this, I have particularly in view the French champart and the mezzeria of Tuscany.
