Life of a peasant family (XVIII - early XX century). Life of peasants in Russia of the XVIII century
The fates of many peasant families were similar to each other. From year to year they lived in the same village, performed the same work and duties. The modest rural church did not impress either with its size or architecture, but it made the village the center of the entire district. Even as a baby, a few days old, each person fell under its vaults during christenings and visited here many times throughout their lives. Here, who had departed to another world, they brought him before being buried in the earth. The church was almost the only public building in District. The priest was, if not the only, then one of the few literate people. No matter how the parishioners treated him, he was an official spiritual father, to whom the Law of God obliged everyone to come to confession.
Three major events in human life: birth, marriage and death. So, into three parts, the records in the church registers were divided. In that period of time, in many families, children were born almost every year. The birth of a child was perceived as the will of the Lord, which rarely occurred to anyone to oppose. More children - more workers in the family, and hence more wealth. Based on this, the appearance of boys was preferable. You raise a girl - you raise, and she goes to a strange family. But this, in the end, does not matter: brides from other courts replaced the working hands of daughters who were extradited to the side. That is why the birth of a child has always been a holiday in the family, that is why it was illuminated by one of the main Christian sacraments - baptism. Parents carried the child to be baptized with godfather and mother. The father, together with the godfather, read a prayer, after that he immersed the baby in the font, put on a cross. Returning home, they arranged a christening - a dinner for which they gathered relatives. Children were usually baptized on their birthday or within the next three days. The priest gave the name most often, using the holy calendar in honor of the saint on whose day the baby was born. However, the rule to give names according to the holy calendar was not mandatory. Godparents were usually peasants from their parish.
Peasants married and got married mainly only in their community. If in the 18th century peasants were married at the age of 13-14, then from the middle of the 19th century the legal age for marriage for a man was 18 years old, and for women - 16 years old. Early peasant marriages were encouraged by the landowners, as this contributed to an increase in the number of peasant souls and, accordingly, the income of the landowners. In serf times, peasant girls were often given in marriage without their consent. After the abolition of serfdom, the custom of giving in marriage with the consent of the bride was gradually established. Severe measures were also applied to juvenile suitors. If someone didn’t want to marry, then the father forced them to be deaf. The overstayed grooms and brides were dishonored.
Among the Ukrainian peasantry, it was a wedding, and not a wedding, that was considered a legal guarantee of marriage: married couples could live apart for 2-3 weeks, waiting for the wedding. Everything was preceded by “loaf” – this is how the main ritual wedding bread was called in Ukraine, and the rite of its preparation itself, which most often took place on Friday. IN Saturday evening rural youth said goodbye to the young. At the girl's evening, a wedding tree was made - “giltse”, “wilce”, “rizka”, “troychatka”. It's thick Blooming tree- a symbol of youth and beauty of the young, which was used to decorate bread or kalach. It stood on the table throughout the wedding. Sunday came. In the morning, the bridesmaids dressed the bride for the wedding: the best shirt, an embroidered skirt, a namisto, a beautiful wreath with ribbons. A woman's wedding dress was kept as a relic until her death. The son took his mother's wedding shirt with him when he went to war. The groom also came in an embroidered shirt (it was supposed to be embroidered by the bride). Young people went to get married in the church. After that, they came to the yard of the bride, where they were met with bread and salt, sprinkled with corn, and the young woman invited the guests to the table. The wedding was preceded by matchmaking. There was a custom: for the success of the business, people who went to matchmaking were whipped with twigs or thrown with women's headdresses in order to quickly woo the girl. The morning of the wedding day was interesting, when the bride was bathing. She didn't go to the bathroom alone. When the bride has washed and steamed properly, the healer collects the bride's sweat with a handkerchief and squeezes it into a vial. This sweat was then poured into the beer of the groom in order to bind the young with indissoluble bonds.
Peasant weddings were usually played in autumn or winter, when the main agricultural work was over. Due to the difficult peasant life and early death, remarriages were not uncommon. The number of remarriages increased sharply after epidemics.
Death overtook a person at any time of the year, but in the cold winter months of work, she noticeably increased. The dead were buried until the beginning of the 19th century in the churchyard. However, due to the risk of infection infectious diseases, a special decree of the cemetery was prescribed to arrange outside settlements. People prepared for death in advance. Before death, they tried to call a priest for confession and communion. After the death of the deceased, women washed, dressed in mortal clothes. The men made a coffin and dug a grave. When the body was taken out, the lamentations of the mourners began. There was no talk of any autopsy or death certificate. All formalities were limited to an entry in the register of births, where the cause of death was indicated by the local priest from the words of the relatives of the deceased. The coffin with the deceased was taken to the church on a stretcher chair. The church watchman, already knowing about the deceased, rang the bell. 40 days after the funeral, the commemoration was celebrated with dinner, to which the priest was brought for service.
Almost no log cabins or dugouts were built in the Poltava district, so the mud hut should be recognized as a model of the local hut. It was based on several oak plows buried in the ground. Poles were cut into plows, straw or vine or cherry branches were tied to them. The resulting hut was covered with clay, removing cracks and leveling the walls, and a year later it was covered with special, white clay.
The hostess and her daughters repaired the walls of the hut after each shower and whitewashed the outside three times during the year: for the trinity, the covers, and when the hut was furnished with straw for the winter from the cold. The houses were partially fenced with a moat with lushly overgrown wattle, ash or white locust, and partially with wattle (tyn) at the gate, usually single-leaf, consisting of several longitudinal poles. A cattle shed (coil) was built near the street. In the yard, usually near the hut, a chopped square comoria was built with 3-4 notches or bins for bread. Also, not a single yard could do without a kluny, which usually towered at a distance from the hut behind the threshing floor (current). The height of the entrance doors to the hut was usually 2 arshins 6 inches, and the inner doors were 2 inches higher. The width of the doors has always been standard - 5 quarters 2 inches. The door was locked with a wooden hook and painted some dark paint. Shutters painted red or green were sometimes attached to the windows of the hut.
The outer door led to a dark passage, where a piece of clothing, harness, utensils, and a wicker box for bread were usually placed. There was also a light staircase leading to the attic. A spacious outlet also came out here, conducting smoke from the stove up through the chimney to the roof. Opposite the vestibule, another, warm section was arranged, "khatyna" - a shelter for old people from dust, women and children. Large huts also included a special front room (svetlitsa). The extreme corner from the door was entirely occupied by a stove, sometimes making up a quarter of a small hut. The oven was made of raw material. It was decorated with wedges, mugs, crosses and flowers painted with blue or ordinary ocher. The stove was smeared simultaneously with the hut before the holidays. Between the stove and the so-called cold corner, several boards were laid along the wall for the family to sleep. From above they nailed a shelf for women's things: a shield, a sliver, spindles and hung a pole for clothes and yarn. A cradle was also hung here. Left in a cold corner outerwear, pillows, bed. Thus, this corner was considered family. The next corner (kut), located between two corner windows and a side window, was called pokuttyam. It corresponded to the red corner of the Great Russians. Here, on special boards, icons of the father and mother were placed, then the eldest son, the middle and the youngest. They were decorated with paper or natural dried flowers. Bottles of holy water were sometimes placed near the images, and money and documents were hidden behind them. There was also a table or skrynya (chest). At the table along the walls there were more benches (benches) and benches. In the opposite corner, there was a dead corner located at the dead end of the door. It was only of economic importance. There were dishes on the shelf, spoons and knives. The narrow space between the doors and the stove was called the "stump" because it was occupied by pokers and shovels.
The usual food for the peasants is bread, which they themselves baked, borscht, which is "the most healthy, useu's head" and porridge, most often millet. Food was prepared in the morning and for the whole day. They used it as follows: at 7-8 o'clock in the morning - breakfast, consisting of cabbage, cakes, kulish or lokshina with lard. On a fast day, lard was replaced by butter, which served as a seasoning for cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes, or hempseed milk, which was seasoned with egg kutya, boiled barley, crushed millet, or hempseed with buckwheat cakes.
They sat down for dinner from 11 o'clock and later, if threshing or other work delayed. Lunch consisted of borscht with bacon and porridge with butter, rarely with milk, and on a fast day, borscht with beans, beets, butter and porridge, sometimes boiled beans and peas, dumplings with potatoes, cakes with peas, anointed with honey.
For dinner, they were content with the leftovers from lunch, or fish soup (yushka) and dumplings. Chicken or chicken meat was on the menu only on major holidays. By the end of the summer, when most vegetables and fruits were ripe, the table improved a little. Instead of porridge, pumpkin, peas, beans, and corn were often boiled. For an afternoon snack, cucumbers, plums, melons, watermelons, forest pears were added to the bread. From September 1, when the days were getting shorter, afternoon tea was cancelled. From drinks they drank mainly kvass and uzvar. From alcohol - vodka (vodka).
The clothes of the Little Russians, protecting from the climate, at the same time emphasized, set off, increased beauty, especially women's. Concerns about the appearance of a local woman were expressed in the following customs: on the first day of the bright holiday, women washed themselves with water, in which they put a colored and ordinary egg, and rubbed their cheeks with these eggs to preserve the freshness of their faces. In order for the cheeks to be ruddy, they were rubbed with various red things: a belt, plakhta, rye flower dust, pepper and others. Eyebrows were sometimes summed up with soot. By folk beliefs I could only wash my face in the morning. Only on Saturday evenings and on the eve of major holidays, the girls washed their heads and necks and, willy-nilly, washed their faces.
They washed their heads with lye, beet kvass or hot water, in which they put a branch of consecrated willow and something from fragrant herbs. The washed head was usually combed with a large horn comb or comb. Combing, the girls braided their hair both in one braid, in 3-6 strands, and in two smaller braids. Occasionally they made hairpieces, but with any hairstyle, the forehead of the girl was open. Both field flowers and flowers plucked from their flower garden served as a natural decoration for hairstyles. Multi-colored thin ribbons were also woven into the braid.
The main headdress of a woman is an eyeglass. It was considered a sin for young women under 30 not to wear earrings, so girls' ears from the second year of life were pierced with thin, sharp wire earrings, which were left in the ear until the wound healed. Later, girls wore copper earrings, at a price of 3-5 kopecks, girls already wore earrings made of Polish and ordinary silver, occasionally gold, at a price of 45 kopecks to 3 rubles 50 kopecks. The girls had few earrings: 1 - 2 pairs. A multi-colored namisto up to 25 threads was worn around the girl’s neck, more or less lowered to the chest. Also, a cross was worn around the neck. The crosses were wooden, costing 5 kopecks; glass, white and colored, from 1 kopeck; copper in 3-5 kopecks and silver (sometimes enamelled). The jewelry also included rings.
Shirt - main part underwear was called a shirt. At all times of the year, she was dressed in a "kersetka", short, a little more than a arshin, black, less often colored, woolen or paper clothes, opening the entire neck and upper chest and tightly wrapping around the waist. In summer, women wore high-heeled shoes (cherevyki), made of black leather, shod with nails or horseshoes, and in winter, black boots. The boys were given smooth haircuts. Middle-aged men cut their hair "pid forelock, circle", that is, round, evenly over the entire head, cutting more on the forehead, above the eyebrows and behind. Almost no one shaved their beards, but only cut them. The peasant's head was protected from the cold by a lamb's hat, round, cylindrical or somewhat narrowed upwards. The hat was lined with black, blue or red calico, sometimes with sheepskin fur. The generally accepted color of the cap was black, occasionally gray. Caps were also often worn in summer. The men's shirt differed from the women's shortness.
Together with the shirt, trousers were always worn. Wearing pants was considered a sign of maturity. On top of the shirt they wore a gray woolen or paper vest, single-breasted, with a narrow standing collar, without a cutout and with two pockets. Over the vest they wore a black cloth or gray woolen chumarka, knee-length, single-breasted, fastened with hooks, with a waist. Chumarka was lined with cotton wool and served as outerwear. She, like other outerwear, was tied with belts. For the most part, men's shoes consisted of only boots (chobots). Chobots were made from a yukhta, sometimes from a thin belt and "shkapyna" (horse skin), on wooden studs. The sole of the boots was made of a thick belt, the heels were lined with nails or horseshoes. The price of boots is from 2 to 12 rubles. In addition to boots, they also wore boots, like women's, "postols" - leather bast shoes or ordinary bast shoes made of lime or elm bark.
Not passed the peasant share and military service. These were the sayings about recruits and their wives. “To the recruitment - to the grave”, “There are three pains in our volost: uncoolness, taxes and zemshchina”, “Merry grief is a soldier’s life”, “You fought young, and in old age they let you go home”, “The soldier is a miserable, worse than a bastard bast "," A soldier is neither a widow, nor a husband's wife, "" The whole village is a father to the soldiers' guys." The term of service as a recruit was 25 years. Without documentary evidence of the death of her husband-soldier, a woman could not marry a second time. At the same time, the soldiers continued to live in the families of their husbands, completely dependent on the head of the family. The order in which recruits were allocated was determined by the volost gathering of householders, at which a list of recruits was drawn up. On November 8, 1868, a manifesto was issued, according to which it was prescribed to put up 4 recruits with 1000 souls. After the military reform of 1874, the term of service was limited to four years. Now all young people who had reached the age of 21, fit for service for health reasons, were supposed to serve. However, the law provided for benefits based on marital status.
The ideas of our ancestors about comfort and hygiene are somewhat unusual for us. There were no bathhouses until the 1920s. They were replaced by ovens, much more capacious than modern ones. Ash was raked out of the melted furnace. The floor was covered with straw, they climbed in and steamed with a broom. The head was washed outside the oven. Instead of soap, they used lye - a decoction of ash. From our point of view, the peasants lived in a terrible filth. General cleaning they arranged houses before Easter: they washed and cleaned not only the floors and walls, but also all the utensils - smoked pots, tongs, pokers. Hay mattresses stuffed with hay or straw were knocked out, on which they slept, and from which there was also a lot of dust. They washed bedding and sackcloth with pryalniks, with which they covered themselves instead of blankets. In normal times, such thoroughness was not shown. It’s good if the hut had a wooden floor that could be washed, and the adobe floor could only be swept. There were no needs. The smoke from the ovens, which were sweating black, covered the walls with soot. In winter, there was dust from the fire and other spinning waste in the huts. In winter, everyone suffered from the cold. Firewood for the future, as now, was not harvested. Usually they bring a wagon of deadwood from the forest, burn it, then go for the next wagon. They warmed themselves on the stoves and on the benches. No one had double windows, so the windows were covered with a thick layer of ice. All these inconveniences were habitual everyday life for the peasants, and there was no thought of changing them.
Saints - list of saints Orthodox Church, compiled in the order of the months and days of the year in which the saint is honored. Saints are included in liturgical books. Separately published calendars are called the calendar.
When writing this article, the following materials were used:
Miloradovich V. Life of the Lubensky peasant // magazine "Kyiv Starina", 1902, No. 4, pp. 110-135, No. 6, pp. 392-434, No. 10, pp. 62-91.
Alekseev V.P. Faceted oak // Bryansk, 1994, pp. 92-123.
34.Legal status peasants in the 18th century.
The consolidation of the peasantry into a class-estate did not lead, as already noted, to the elimination of its division into intra-estate groups, sometimes significantly differing in legal regime. Only now it was not the division that we saw in the former Russia.
The largest and most disenfranchised group were privately owned peasants. Their situation deteriorated sharply in the second half of the 17th - 18th centuries. Serfdom in Russia reached its climax, turning into something similar to slavery.
differed markedly from privately owned peasants. state, possessing a certain personal freedom: no one sold them or mortgaged them, as was done with the possessing peasants, they could rent and buy land, maintain trades.
It was allowed to change the place of residence and even the transition of state peasants to other classes. It is no coincidence that one of the slogans peasant war 1773 - 1775 was the transformation of landlord peasants into state.
At the same time, state peasants could be forcibly resettled, assigned to factories, and in other ways to control their fate. The state peasants were large group, and in the XVIII century. their number grew, amounting to more than 40% of the entire peasantry of Russia.
The secularization of church lands, i.e. taking them away from the church, led to the emergence of the category “ economic peasantry". The peasants of the spiritual feudal lords were previously subjected to somewhat less exploitation than the owners. Now, the economic peasants, who numbered about a million, have approached in their status to the state.
Former servicemen "according to the instrument" and even some of the servicemen "in the fatherland", who guarded the security lines, after passing the need to defend the southern borders, turned into "odnodvortsy" - the top of the state peasants. The privileges of the odnodvortsev reached the point that they were allowed to have serfs.
The yasak peoples of the Volga, Urals and Siberia were also equated with state peasants. They can also include ladles, Kazakhs, coachmen, etc. Several categories included palace peasants.
35. Civil law in the 18th century: the right to property.
The development of the institution of property rights leads in the second half of the XVIII century. to the emergence of the term "property". Legislation deals primarily with the regulation of ownership of real estate, primarily land. In 1714, the long process of equating the legal regime of the estate with that of the patrimony ended. Nominal decree of Peter I "On the order of inheritance in movable and real estate"established that the right to dispose of estates and estates becomes exactly the same, the same principles are established for the inheritance of estates and estates. The very concepts of patrimony and estate merge into one - real estate.
The Decree on single inheritance, listing the objects included in the concept of real estate, includes here, in addition to estates and estates, also courtyards and shops. This is one of the indicators of the growing importance of the merchants, whose property rights are of great interest to the state. However, the equating of estates and estates did not mean the lifting of restrictions on feudal landed property. Feudal ownership of land continues to be property with a limited right to dispose of it. The same Decree on single inheritance prohibits the alienation of immovable property. There were also restrictions on the inheritance of real estate. There were also a number of restrictions on the right to dispose and use real estate. Some of them were canceled by Catherine II in 1785.
The bulk of the population of Russia were peasants. To a large extent, it was their work, their efforts that ensured the success of the country during this period.
IN XVIII V. several categories of the peasantry took shape:
1) privately owned (landlord) peasants absorbed all the former categories of dependent people (serfs, serfs) who belonged to factories and factories since the time of Peter I (session). Before Catherine II this category of peasants was also replenished by clergy who remained behind the state, retired priests and deacons, deacons and sextons. Catherine II stopped the transformation into serfdom of persons of spiritual origin and blocked all other ways of replenishing it (marriage, loan agreement, hiring and serving, captivity), except for two: the birth of a handout state lands with peasants in private hands. Awards were especially widely practiced by Catherine herself and her son Paul I and were terminated in 1801 by one of the first decrees of Alexander I. From that time on, birth remained the only source of replenishment of the serf class;
2) monastic peasants. Initially, they made up about 25% of all peasants. The secularization of church lands in 1764 deprived the church of land holdings and the serfs who inhabited them. Since that time, the former church peasants, who were controlled by a specially created College of Economy, began to be called economic. But from 1786 they also passed into the category of state peasants;
3) palace peasants were the property of the imperial family. Since 1797, when a department of appanages was created to manage these peasants, the palace peasants began to be called appanage;
4) state peasants. This category included black-eared peasants who paid yasak Tatars, Udmurts, Chuvashs, Komi, Mordovians. Later, odnodvortsy joined its composition. Throughout the XVIII century. the number of state peasants was continuously decreasing. The Russian emperors widely practiced the distribution of state lands, along with the peasants who inhabited them, to their favorites;
5) sessional peasants. Bought by factory owners from the state, they constituted a special category. The labor of these peasants could be used only in factories and factories, and their owners did not have the right to sell them separately from the enterprises where they worked.
In the XVIII century. the position of the peasants, who first of all belonged to the landlords, deteriorated markedly, especially after the introduction by the government of Peter I in 1719 of a general census of taxable people in connection with the establishment of a poll tax. Under Peter I, they turned into a thing that could be sold, donated, exchanged (without land and separately from the family). The landowner at his own discretion used the labor of serfs, the dues of corvée were not limited by any law. The peasants were deprived not only of personal, but also of property rights. All their property was treated as belonging to their owner.
The landowner had the right to judge his peasants. He was not allowed only to use death penalty and extradition of peasants instead of themselves to the right. True, in 1719, Peter I, in his instructions to governors, ordered to identify landowners who ruined peasants and transfer the management of such estates to relatives. In 1721, it was recommended to stop the sale of children separately from their parents. But the separation of families continued until 1843.
Restrictions on the rights of serfs, starting in the 1730s, were enshrined in laws. They were forbidden to acquire real estate, open factories, work on a contract basis, undertake promissory notes, incur obligations without the permission of the owner, and enroll in a guild. The landowners were allowed to use corporal punishment and send the peasants to the chastity houses. The procedure for filing complaints against landowners became more complicated.
In 1760, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna allowed the landlords to exile their serfs to Siberia for certain misdeeds they had committed, or simply for bad character (as the decree said, “presumptuous, who harm, ruin, loss and anxiety come to others. .. they set an example for the same harmful deeds”). In 1765, Catherine II supplemented this right by establishing that peasants could also be sent to hard labor for a period that "the landlords want." Two years later, she strictly forbade the peasants to complain about their landowners. Such a complaint began to be qualified as a false denunciation and was punished by whipping and eternal reference to hard labor in the Nerchinsk mines.
Impunity contributed to the growth of crimes among the landlords. An illustrative example is the story of the landowner Saltykova, who killed more than 30 of her serfs, who was exposed and sentenced to death (replaced with life imprisonment) only after a complaint against her fell into the hands of Empress Catherine II.
Only after the peasant war of 1773-1775. under the leadership of E.I. Pugachev, the government began to strengthen state control over the situation of the peasants and take steps to mitigate the serfdom. The release of peasants into the wild was legalized, including after serving the recruiting service, after being exiled to Siberia, for a ransom at the request of the landowner (since 1775 without land).
The state peasants were in a better position compared to the serfs. Their personal rights were never subjected to such restrictions as the personal rights of serfs. They could buy land (with the preservation of duties), engage in entrepreneurial activities. Attempts to curtail their property rights (to take farms and contracts, to acquire real estate in cities and counties, to be bound by promissory notes) did not have such a detrimental effect on the state of the economy of state peasants, especially those who lived on the outskirts (in Siberia). Here, the communal arrangements preserved by the state (land redistribution, mutual responsibility for the payment of taxes), which hindered the development of the private economy, were destroyed much more vigorously.
Self-government was of great importance among the state peasants. From ancient times, the elders elected at the gatherings played a prominent role in them. According to the provincial reform of 1775, the state peasants received their own court. Under Paul I, volost self-government was created. Each volost (with a certain number of villages and with a number of no more than 3 thousand souls) could elect parish administration, consisting of volost head, headman And clerk. elected in the villages petty officers And tenth. All these bodies performed financial, police and judicial functions.
The evolution of serfdom in the 18th century. Peter's era
The reforms of Peter I had a serious impact on the socio-economic development of the country. In the XVIII century. observed in Russia (although in initial stage) the process of decomposition of serfdom and the formation of capitalist relations. The socio-economic development of Russia was extremely difficult and contradictory. Serf relations, which entered the stage of their decomposition, not only remained dominant, but also spread to new territories.
In the era of Peter the Great, serfdom began to be understood as an institution of public law. The entire estate system of this era was built on the principle of state interest, and in practice - on general enslavement: the king is strong for the state, the nobility - for the king, the peasants - for the nobles. Serfdom is based on the dictates of the benefit of the whole people. The idea of state benefit, as the basis of serfdom, was reflected in the decree of January 18, 1721 on the purchase of villages for factories. The decree stated that, despite the previous prohibition for merchants to acquire villages (and the prohibition was because the merchants were engaged exclusively in merchants and thus did not bring benefits to the state), “... it is allowed by our decree ... to buy villages without restriction” , due to the fact that “... many merchants ... have taken the liberty of starting various factories to increase the state benefit ...”. Thus, it turned out that the owners of the peasants were only their temporary holders under the authority of the state power.
Klyuchevsky writes: “The decrees on the first revision legally mixed two serf states, previously distinguished by law, serf servility and serf peasantry. The serf peasant was strong in the face of the landowner, but at the same time he was also attached to his state, from which even the landowner could not get him out: he was an eternally obliged state tax. The serf, like the serf, was personally strong to his master, but did not bear the state tax that lay on the serf. The legislation of Peter the Great extended the state tax of serfs to serfs as well. Thus, the source of the fortress has changed: as you know, before this source was a personal agreement between a serf or a peasant with a master; now such a source has become a state act - revision. The serf was considered not the one who entered into a serf obligation under the contract, but the one who was recorded as a well-known person in the revision tale. This new source, which replaced the old contract, gave the serfdom an extraordinary extensibility. Since there were no serfs or serfs, and both of these states were replaced by one state - serfs, or souls, it became possible at will to reduce or expand both the number of serfs and the boundaries of serfdom. Previously, the peasant state was created by an agreement between a person and a person; now it was delivered on the basis of a government act.
Since the death of Peter, the serfdom expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively, that is, at the same time everything large quantity persons became serfdom and the boundaries of the owner's power over serf souls expanded more and more.
In other words, a characteristic feature of serfdom in the 18th-19th centuries was that, unlike the previous, Moscow period, the peasants were owned by the state. Another feature (or rather, a trend) of the period under review is the consolidation of various categories of the peasantry into a single estate. The decree of 1718 on the introduction of a poll tax and the replacement of household taxation led to the abolition of such categories as scumbags, backbones, and bobs. It is known that with household taxation, the union of households was practiced. In the yard of a more or less prosperous peasant, poor peasant families (subsidiaries, landowners) or single peasants-beans were settled in order not to pay tax from their yards. With the introduction of the poll tax, the incentive for such unification disappeared. Meanwhile, from the second half of the 18th century, the situation of privately owned peasants noticeably deteriorated.
Serfdom multiplied in two ways - postscript and award. The postscript consisted in the fact that people who did not have time to join the main classes of society, having chosen a permanent way of life for themselves, by decree of Peter I were obliged to find themselves a master and position, sign up for a capitation salary for any person or society. Otherwise, when they did not find such a person or society, they were recorded by a simple police order. Thus, according to the II and III revisions (1742 and 1762), various small categories of persons who were previously free gradually fell into serfdom - illegitimate, freedmen, who do not remember kinship and other vagabonds, children of soldiers, provincial clergymen, adopted children, captured foreigners and so on.
The policy of Catherine II towards the serfs.
Under Catherine II, the process of turning serfs into slaves begins (as she herself called them “If a serf cannot be recognized as a person, therefore, he is not a person; so if you please recognize him as cattle, that we will be attributed to considerable glory and philanthropy from the whole world.” ). The darkest side of serfdom was the unlimited arbitrariness of the landowners in disposing of the personality and labor of the serfs, whole line statesmen of the XVIII century spoke of the need to regulate the relationship of peasants to landowners. It is known that even under Anna, the Chief Procurator of the Senate Maslov (in 1734) proposed to carry out the legislative normalization of serfdom (in 1734), and Catherine herself spoke out against slavery, recommending “to prescribe to the landowners by law that they dispose of their requisitions with great consideration”, but all these projects remained only good wishes. Catherine, who ascended the throne at the request of the noble guard and ruled through the noble administration, could not break her ties with the ruling class. In 1765, official permission followed for the sale of such peasants without land (which proves the predominance of this stage attachment not to the land, but to the landowner) and even with the separation of families. Their property belonged to the landowner, they could make civil law transactions only with his permission.
They were subject to patrimonial justice of the landowner and corporal punishment, which depended on the will of the landowner and was not limited to anything. On August 22, 1767, the Empress issued a decree “On being landowners and peasants in obedience and obedience to their landowners, and on not submitting petitions to Her Majesty’s own hands”, in which peasants and other people of the non-noble class were forbidden to submit petitions to Her Majesty, “a. ..if ... the peasants will not remain in due obedience to the landowners, and on the contrary ... petitions against their landlords ... They dare to submit to Her Imperial Majesty, ”then it is prescribed to flog them with a whip and send them to hard labor, counting them as recruits, so as not to cause damage to the landowner. Catherine's legislation on the space of landlord power over serfs is distinguished by the same uncertainty and incompleteness as the legislation of her predecessors. In general, it was directed in favor of the landowners. We have seen that in the interests of settling Siberia, by the law of 1760, Elizabeth granted the landowners the right "for presumptuous deeds" to exile healthy serfs to Siberia for settlement without the right to return; By the law of 1765, Catherine turned this limited right of exile to a settlement into the right to exile serfs to penal servitude without any restrictions for any time, with the return of the exiled at will to the former owner.
With this law, the state actually refused to protect the peasants from the arbitrariness of the landowners, which naturally led to its strengthening. True, in Russia the nobles were never given the right to take the life of serfs, and if the case of the murder of serfs came to trial, the perpetrators would be severely punished, but not all cases went to court and we can only guess how hard the life of the peasants was, for the landlords had the official right to corporal punishment and imprisonment at their discretion, as well as the right to sell the peasants. The peasants paid a poll tax, carried state duties and feudal land rent to the landowners in the form of corvée or dues, in kind or in cash. Since the economy was extensive, the landlords saw the possibility of income growth only in an increase in corvée or dues, by the end of the 18th century corvee began to reach 5-6 days a week. Sometimes the landowners generally established a seven-day corvee with the issuance of a monthly food ration (“months”). This, in turn, led to the liquidation of the peasant economy and the degradation of feudalism to a slave-owning system. From the second half of the 18th century, a new category of peasants appeared - "possession". The lack of a labor market forced the government to provide industry labor force by attaching entire villages (peasant communities) to factories. They worked out corvée for several months a year at factories, i.e. served a session, hence their name came from - sessional.
Thus, in the first half of the 18th century, and especially after the death of Peter I, the Russian economy was characterized by the widespread use of forced labor by serfs or bonded state peasants. Entrepreneurs (including non-nobles) did not have to hope for a free labor market, which, with the intensification of the state's struggle against the fugitive, free and "walking" - the main contingent of free working people - narrowed significantly. A more reliable and cheaper way to provide factories with labor was to buy or register entire villages with enterprises. The policy of protectionism pursued by Peter I and his successors provided for the registration and sale of peasants and entire villages to the owners of manufactories, and above all those who supplied the treasury with products necessary for the army and navy (iron, cloth, saltpeter, hemp, etc.) . By a decree of 1736, all working people (including civilians) were recognized as serfs of the owners of factories.
Decree of 1744. Elizabeth confirmed the decree of January 18, 1721, which allowed the owners of private manufactories to buy village factories. Therefore, in the time of Elizabeth, entire industries were based on forced labor. So, in the second quarter of the XVIII century. at most of the factories of the Stroganovs and Demidovs, only the labor of serfs and ascribed peasants was used, and the enterprises of the cloth industry did not know hired labor at all - the state, interested in the supply of cloth for the army, generously distributed state peasants to breeders. The same picture was state enterprises. Census of working people of the Ural state factories in 1744-1745. showed that only 1.7% of them were civilian employees, and the remaining 98.3% worked forcibly.
Starting from the era of Catherine II, theoretical studies were carried out ("solution of the problem" in the Free Economic Society about "what is more useful for society for a peasant to own land, or only a movable estate, and how far his rights to this or that estate should extend" ), projects for the liberation of peasants by A. A. Arakcheev, M. M. Speransky, D. A. Guryev, E. F. Kankrin and other public figures) and practical experiments (for example, the decree of Alexander I in 1801 on permission to buy and sell uninhabited lands to merchants, petty bourgeois, state peasants, landlords, released to freedom, a decree on free cultivators, which allowed the landowners themselves, in addition to the state, to change their relations with the peasants, a decree on obligated peasants, the reform of the state peasants of Count P. D. Kiselev), directed to find specific ways to ensure minimal costs for the introduction of new institutions and reforms in Russian Empire generally).
The enslavement of the peasants hindered the development of industry, deprived it of free hands, the impoverished peasantry did not have the means to purchase industrial products. In other words, the preservation and deepening of feudal-serf relations did not create a market for industry, which, together with the absence of a free labor market, was a serious brake on the development of the economy and caused a crisis in the serf system. In historiography, the end of the 18th century is characterized as the culmination of serfdom, as the heyday of serfdom relations, but the climax is inevitably followed by a denouement, the period of prosperity is followed by a period of decay, as happened with serfdom.
State and noble landownership had one common feature, associated with the emergence of a new form of land use: all the land, convenient for field farming, which was owned by the state, was given to the use of the peasants. At the same time, the landowners usually gave a certain part of the estate for use to their peasants for rent or corvée: from 45% to 80% of all land, the peasants used for themselves. Thus, feudal rent took place in Russia, while the norms of classical rent spread throughout Europe with the involvement of commodity-money relations, with the participation of subjects of rent relations in trade and market relations.
The last years of the outgoing XVIII century did not pass, meanwhile, unnoticed by the Russian peasants.
Peasant policy of Paul I
A definite, albeit very contradictory, policy towards the peasant issue was pursued by Paul I. During the four years of his reign, he gave away about 600 thousand serfs, sincerely believing that they would live better with the landowner. In 1796, peasants were enslaved in the region of the Donskoy Army and in Novorossiya; in 1798, the ban imposed by Peter III on the purchase of peasants by owners not from the nobility was lifted. At the same time, in 1797 the sale of yard peasants by auction was prohibited, and in 1798 - Ukrainian peasants without land. In 1797, Pavel published the Manifesto on the three-day corvee, which introduced restrictions on the exploitation of peasant labor by landowners and limited their property rights.
More decisive (albeit far from sufficient) steps in this direction - improving the situation of the peasants - were already made in the 19th century.
The 18th century is a period of real contrasts. Life, like the way of life of the Russian people, completely depended on what niche a person occupies in society.
In post-Petrine Russia, the chic secular receptions and the haughty luxury of the life of the nobility stood next to the hungry and difficult existence of the serfs. Unfortunately, this did not cause any discomfort on the part of the first. And the profound differences between the lives of the upper and lower classes were taken for granted.
Life of nobles in the XVIII century
Prestige, a high position in society, often supported by material well-being, allowed the Russian aristocracy to lead an idle lifestyle. Public idleness - this is how the main occupation of the noble nobility can be characterized.
Life of genealogical families, it seemed, was tied only to secular receptions. The houses in which the aristocracy lived were spacious and richly decorated. Their design is already beginning to be influenced by the Western trend of enlightenment absolutism.
Every house had libraries filled with books by Western authors. The living room was a wide hall, often with a fireplace. But all the efforts of the nobility to arrange for themselves beautiful dwelling, was not a desire to achieve comfort, but first of all - not to fall face down in front of the high society, since social receptions and balls were very often held in houses.
However, the idleness of high society also brought its positive results - the concepts of honor, morals and education, which were the cult of the nobility, were able to significantly raise the culture of Russia. Primary education for small children was given by specially hired foreign teachers.
Later, upon reaching the age of 15-17, they were sent to educational institutions closed type where boys were taught military strategy, and girls - mostly rules good manners and the foundations of family life.
The distribution of family responsibilities was rather vague. Men did not have the need to earn money, as often enough for an idle life stable income From property, the main function of a woman was rather not the upbringing of children, but the search for a profitable match for them, which actually began from the infancy of the child.
Provincial nobility
Representatives of the provincial nobility felt their backwardness from their metropolitan relatives, so they built their way of life in such a way as to correspond to them in everything. Often this was a kind of caricature of the aristocracy.
The noble estate was often a copy of the houses of the St. Petersburg nobility. However, here, next to the beautiful and luxurious houses, there were many outbuildings where living creatures lived. The main income of the families of the provincial nobles received from the taxation of serfs.
Their life was hopeless and devoid of any cultural development. Even the education of his children, he did not attach much importance. Very often, the children of the nobility ended their educational process at the stage of studying the basics of arithmetic and grammar.
Lack of education gave rise to complete ignorance, and as a result - the neglect of their metropolitan aristocracy. The main leisure of men was hunting, women got together and talked about fashion and the imperial court, having no reliable idea of either one or the other.
Life of peasants in the XVIII century
The serfs were forced to work for the landlord six days a week. Lack of time and money determined their simple life. On Sundays and holidays they were forced to work on their own land plots in order to somehow provide food for his family, which often had up to 10 children.
