Imperial Russia had an overwhelmingly peasant population and its economy was largely agricultural. The peasants' ways of life evolved in the different regions and over the three time periods in processes of interaction with the nobles and state authorities that exploited them and the environments in which they lived. In order to support their growing numbers, cope with the environmental conditions and meet the demands of the state and landowners, Russia's peasants, sometimes in collaboration with landowners or the state authorities, developed practices and customs to ensure their subsistence and livelihoods in the present and the foreseeable future. This chapter considers, in turn, the peasantry's ways of life in: central Russia in the hundred years prior to the late seventeenth century, central Russia between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, the outlying regions over this second period, and Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.