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Catherine also created a further élite category that included trained professionals, businessmen with capital over 50,000 roubles, wholesalers, shipbuilders, and people deemed ‘eminent citizens’ (imianitye grazhdane, i.e. wealthy merchants who had been elected to serve in an official post). This élite, in recognition of their service, enjoyed a host of privileges that ranked them near the nobility in standing, except for the fact that their titles were not hereditary and they could not own serfs. As one might expect, many of these eminent citizens ultimately obtained those privileges by successfully petitioning for elevation into the ranks of nobility.

State Peasants and Interstitial Categories

The category of state peasants was a catch-all term to identify those living on state lands and owing dues to the state rather than to private landlords. Most state peasants lived in agricultural settlements as members of a repartitional commune, but some, like the odnodvortsy (homesteaders) in the south, functioned as family units. As for economic activity, most were primarily engaged in agriculture. In the north, working in heavily wooded territory and handicapped with poor soil and extensive frost, state peasants supplemented—and even replaced—agriculture with other activities, such as fishing, trapping, beekeeping, and logging. In the case of those who lived near waterways and canals, many worked on barges, hauling them downstream with teams of rope-pullers working each side of the river. And state ‘peasants’ living along the White Sea worked mainly as commercial fishermen and whalers. In areas where the state sought to foster industrial growth it assigned some state peasants to factories and plants, where, as ‘ascribed’ (pripisnye) peasants, they had to supply a stipulated amount of labour each year. In short, the umbrella category of ‘state peasant’ was primarily a definition of tax and other obligations, not a coherent economic or social classification.

One important subgroup of state peasants had formerly belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church—primarily monasteries, occasionally to parish churches. Despite recurrent attempts by Peter the Great and his successors to sequester or at least exploit this population, the Church succeeded in retaining ownership and limiting any exactions by the state. In 1762, however, Peter III secularized the Church’s landed estates and transferred its peasants to state jurisdiction. Although Catherine temporarily rescinded that edict, in 1764 she confiscated these lands and peasants once again. She then converted this population into a special category called ‘economic peasants’ (named after the ‘College of the Economy’ established to administer them), essentially just another of the myriad subgroups within the larger aggregate of state peasants.

The peasant population also included a congeries of other smaller social units. One category, bridging the status of state and seigneurial peasant, was the ‘crown’ (dvortsovye) peasants, who lived on crown land, held this hereditary status, and owed dues to the imperial family. A substantial population (over half a million males, or 5 per cent of the peasantry), these peasants were administered by a governmental agency and hence were more approximate to state than seigneurial peasants. Yet another special category was the ‘possessionary’ (possessionnye) peasant, who was ‘possessed’ by a factory or plant: declining to extend the noble privilege of owning serfs to other social groups, the government permitted industrial enterprises (not their owners) to purchase unfree labour.

Regardless of juridical status, most peasants did not occupy themselves exclusively, or sometimes even primarily, with field work. Even in agricultural communities, peasant households spent the long winter months indoors, repairing tools, tending animals, and threshing or milling grain. A substantial proportion of peasants hired themselves out for seasonable labour and participated actively in rural fairs. So many peasants engaged in the local and regional markets that the law designated them as ‘trading peasants’, who legally remained members of the peasantry, but whose long-term presence in commerce had become a recognized fact.

Serfs