Serfdom

Nikolai Nevrev painted Bargain. A scene from serf life. From the recent past in 1866: a household girl, a room of men, a price. It is later genre, not a minute of the 1785 charter. Use it anyway, as a reminder of what exclusive ownership of serf estates could look like when a painter of the next century still called the traffic recent. This page is Catherine’s intensification of bondage, not the 1649 Ulozhenie that first closed the legal door, and not Pugachev’s campaign. Those stories have other chapters. Here the dates are 1775 and 1785, and the geography includes the new south. A German-born empress who had disliked perpetual serfdom in an Instruction now wrote a landlord’s court into the countryside.

Pugachev’s war had shown that St Petersburg relied on too few appointed officials, much given to abuse and corruption, and on the informal control of landowners and village communes. The successors of Peter I had not solved the problem of local administration. The answer was a statute of provinces in 1775, a good piece of organic legislation in Britannica’s wording. For the first time in Russian history a local unit of administration, judiciary and self-government was created. The statute introduced a regular system of courts of justice and separate financial and administrative offices. The system lasted until the reforms of Alexander II and later served as a foundation for the zemstvo of 1864. Do not drag 1864 into 1775 as if they were the same council. Note only that Catherine’s local machine outlived her and taught a later reform where to sit.

A major need of the empire was an up-to-date code of laws. The last code, from 1649, had become largely inoperative. That need had produced the Instruction and the commission of 1767, which adjourned without a code. After Pugachev the legislative energy went into provinces and then into charters, not into a new Ulozhenie. The first article of this era closed a hall. This last article opens a landlord’s corporation. Between them the south received serfs and Poland disappeared. Do not treat 1775 as a delayed Nakaz. Treat it as the administrative answer to a fire. Courts, governors, assemblies: those are how an autocrat who would not limit herself still thickened local power in noble hands.

Aleksey Venetsianov painted a threshing barn in 1822–23. Light, timber, labour. It is not an estate ledger from 1785. Use it for the work the charter never mentions by name, then return to the edict that named who owned the work. A barn can be beautiful and still sit inside bondage.

Household serfs and field serfs both lived inside the exclusive ownership the charter would confirm. Nevrev’s later bargain shows the household traffic. Venetsianov’s barn shows the field. Neither painter sat in 1785. Both still help a reader see what “estates populated by serfs” meant when the phrase was not yet a museum label. The edict will add Siberia, recall, a marshal, a three-year assembly. The barn does not know those words. It knows grain. Keep the picture for labour, then let the charter speak in its own clauses. A golden age that cannot show the work is only a court.

Between her two Turkish wars Catherine returned to the legislative mania of her early years. Made wise by her experience with the commission of 1767, she turned from Montesquieu to William Blackstone and profited by the administrative knowledge of Jakob Sievers, a skilful adviser of German Baltic origin. The 1775 reform was completed in 1785 by two charters, to the nobility and to the burgesses. The Charter to the Gentry, also called the Charter to the Nobility, formally a charter for the rights, freedoms and privileges of the noble Russian gentry, recognised the corps of nobles in each province as a legal corporate body. It accorded the gentry of each province and county — excluding those of northern European Russia and Siberia — the right to meet every three years in a general assembly, to discuss local affairs, to elect a marshal of the nobility, and to petition the autocrat.

The charter confirmed the nobles’ exemption from compulsory service to the state and from payment of taxes. It granted them the rights of free speech and assembly, as well as the right to a trial by their peers. Members of the gentry exclusively were allowed to own estates populated by serfs. Estates owned by nobles were made hereditary property, and the power to revoke title to an estate, as well as to revoke a nobleman’s rank, was entrusted to the courts. The charter gave the gentry extensive power over its serfs. The nobles gained judicial authority over all crimes committed by serfs except robbery and murder and were empowered to sentence a serf to penal servitude in Siberia and also to recall him. The Instruction of 1767 had disapproved of perpetuating serfdom. The charter of 1785 wrote the landlord’s court into the village.

The two documents share a reign. They do not share a direction. On the new southern lands the same fact had already been practised. Service nobles received full control over peasants. Wealthy buyers from the centre received the right to resettle their own serfs. Serfdom and elements of a plantation system spread over whole new provinces. Expansion benefited the state and a thin wealthy nobility. It increased the misery and exploitation of the Ukrainian and Russian peasantries. Cossack officers who became service nobles received the right to own serfs; rank-and-file Cossacks sank toward state peasants with special military obligations. The Nakaz’s assembly had excluded serfs. The south now produced more of them. Yielding to the gentry in the 1760s, distributing crown estates to favourites, had already turned some peasant populations into serfs. 1785 did not invent that yield. It incorporated it.

The Instruction disliked bondage as a future. The charter made it a hereditary estate.

The charter, by accentuating distinctions among certain elements of the nobility, actually fostered enmity between the old aristocracy and the new gentry who had received status as reward for service to the state. Nonetheless, by its recognition of the nobility as an elite class, the charter ensured that the gentry would support and maintain the autocratic form of government. That is Britannica’s political moral, and it is enough. Catherine kept the autocracy she had refused to limit in the Nakaz. She bought its social floor by making nobles a corporation with serfs as exclusive property. The burgesses’ charter of the same year laid a basis for urban corporate life; it is a parallel gift to towns, not a peasant emancipation. Corporate self-administration is the polite name. Landlord government was the function in the countryside.

The reforms of local government carried contradictions. St Petersburg had relied on appointed officials and informal landlord control. After Pugachev it built offices, courts and assemblies that lasted until Alexander II. Essentially, the reforms divided the empire’s territory into provinces of roughly equal population, the division paying heed to military considerations. Each unit, a guberniya, was put under a governor or governor-general. Those details sit with the statute, not with the 1864 zemstvo dining room in the next picture. 1775 is a machine for not being surprised by the next Pugachev.

Close the chapter without stealing the next. Paul, Alexander I, Napoleon and 1812 wait in era XI. What era X has now completed is a reign that spoke Enlightenment, widened a sea frontier, took Crimea, partitioned Poland, crushed a false Peter, and wrote serfdom deeper into law and into new provinces. The two Russias of 1725–62 did not reunite under a German-born empress who read French. They were reorganised. The first Russia received assemblies, exemption, hereditary serf estates, a marshal, a petition. The second Russia received a thicker landlord court and, in the south, a longer road from old villages to new strips. Pugachev had offered abolition in a dead man’s name. The charter offered Siberia in a living empress’s name.

Grigory Myasoyedov painted The Zemstvo Dines in 1872: officials at table, peasants waiting. It is after the 1864 zemstvo, not Catherine’s statute. Use it for the long afterlife of local power eating lunch while petitioners stand. Then put it aside. 1775 is courts and governors, not this dining room.

Nevrev’s bargain, Venetsianov’s barn, Myasoyedov’s later lunch: three later pictures of a social fact Catherine’s charters did not hide. Household traffic, field labour, local power at table. The Instruction’s free individuals never arrived. The marshal of the nobility did. So did the right to Siberia. So did the southern estate stocked from the old centre. That is the golden age as a village would have counted it, without a golden frame. Between Pugachev and Paul sits this paper: a statute of provinces, a charter to the gentry, a charter to burgesses, and no matching charter for the people Nevrev still knew how to paint as a price.

Paul will not love his mother’s system. He will still inherit her serfs. Stop there. The next numbered chapter opens on a son, not on another Nakaz. A reader who has followed all six articles of this era already has the inventory: a commission without a code, a sea with new towns, a khanate taken, a commonwealth erased, a false Peter executed, a nobility incorporated. The last item on the list is the one that outlasted the letters to Voltaire. It is bondage, granted, hereditary, and spread onto land that had not been Russian fields when Rokotov painted a profile in 1763. That is enough for a chapter that other centuries would call golden, and that a barn in 1823 still shows as work.