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1 results

  • 12 - The Peasantry

  • from Part II - The Expansion, Consolidation and Crisis of Muscovy (1462–1613)
  • Edited by Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 2006, pp 286-297

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the situation of the Russian peasant with that of the American farmer. Russian peasants lived in villages and not on isolated homesteads. The vast majority of the population in the years 1462-1613 were peasants who were becoming serfs, perhaps 85 percent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 percent were slaves. The period 1462-1613 witnessed intervention by the 'Agapetus state' in the lives of its subjects unparalleled in previous history. At the end of his reign Peter the Great abolished slavery by converting slaves into serfs. Peter's heirs by the end of the eighteenth century converted the serfs into near-slaves, the property of their lords (owners). The 'Agapetus state' was so powerful because it claimed and exercised control over two of the three basic factors of the economy, all the land and labour. This had little impact on peasant methods of farming or material culture, but it laid down the course for Russian history until 1991.