Blackwell Reference Online

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Slavery and serfdom plus autocracy were the features of Russia that most distinguished it from other polities in the modern era. Autocracy commenced at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the writings of Joseph of Volokolamsk, and the result was what I term “the Agapetos state” from then until 1991, in which the autocrat was assumed to represent God, and then its Soviet replacement, the Marxist historical dialectic. Autocracy combined with slavery and serfdom to create an environment in which almost no one was free in any sense that a person from the West would recognize. Autocracy and Soviet totalitarianism are dealt with in other chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to explain the unfreedom of the vast majority of the population, certainly over 85 percent of the population between the 1590s and 1907, then more than a majority between 1929 and 1956.Unfreedom in Imperial Russia had many forms, but the two major ones were slavery and serfdom. The rest of the populace were unfree to varying degrees as well, from the townsmen bound to their towns to the servicemen who could not leave their posts in the army and elsewhere, but they are not the subject of this chapter. Slaves and serfs were primarily rural denizens, but not always. Slaves could live in towns, as we shall see, and so occasionally did serfs – but rarely.The first point that must be made clear is the distinction ... log in or subscribe to read full text