The formulas describe unfree men and women with terms that are fluid and overlapping, and that encompass everything from what we would call chattel slavery to loose patronage. The unfree most often appear as the passive objects of the power and interests of their betters. They are not a closed group, however. Free people submitted themselves to servitude either voluntarily or by force of circumstance, in exchange for money or to make amends for some wrong. Unfree were freed or bought their own freedom. The unfree also display a significant amount of agency. They ran away. They sought help against their own lords from other powerful people. Sometimes they stole things, including marriage partners. They contested their status, often with success. Some even owned other unfree. In short, the formulas tell us that status at the interface between free and unfree was fluid, and that while they spent much of their lives as the passive objects of power, the unfree in this world had the capacity to act in their own interests, were fully aware of how power flowed, and could work the social and political system to their own advantage.

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

This chapter explains the Great Reforms of Alexander II, and Tolstoy’s complex response to them in his work. It explores the basic structure of serfdom, and the ways in which it was fundamental to Russian social and economic structures in first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter explains the process of emancipation, and how it gave serfs a degree of freedom while still keeping economic and social power in the hands of the landowners. Tolstoy recognized serfdom as unjust, but also owned serfs and made only an ineffectual attempt to partially free them before the official end of serfdom in 1861. In his works, serfdom is described as oppressive but also connected with love and family. His works also reflect his concern that emancipation would destroy the nobility without solving the fundamental problems of poverty and exploitation. The creation of the zemstvo as a system of local government was a similar source of ambivalence for Tolstoy. He served in his local zemstvo for some years, but in his fiction the zemstvo is shown as an inadequate solution. His later works suggest that a more radically empathetic solution is needed to break down the barriers between peasants and landowners.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It begins by justifying the study of ancient slavery then turns to the difficulties of studying slavery from the available evidence. Methods for recovering the experiences of slaves are explored, including the use of comparative evidence. Next, ancient and modern definitions of slavery are surveyed and the distinctions between slavery and other forms of unfree labor, including serfdom, are discussed.