Great Muscovite Law Code

Context

Several factors contributed to the creation and promulgation of the Ulozhenie. Ostensibly, it was an effort to bring order to a corpus of law that, owing to the issuance of numerous edicts over the previous two centuries, had become confusing, contradictory, and ineffective. A more specific trigger was a major riot that shook Moscow in 1648. The riot was in response to an unpopular salt tax and perceived corruption and abuses among state officials. More generally, the Ulozhenie was intended as a means of enforcing authority, order, and social hierarchy in a state that had suffered numerous major upheavals in the preceding decades, including foreign invasions, civil war, peasant uprisings, “false” czars, and mass migrations, many of them connected with the difficult interregnum of 1598 to 1613 known as the Time of Troubles. This traumatic period followed the death in 1598 of Fyodor I Ivanovich, son of Ivan IV (known as Ivan the Terrible). Fyodor was the last member of the seven-century-old Rurik Dynasty of Russian rulers. The Time of Troubles almost led to the complete collapse of Russia and the establishment of Polish Catholic rule in Moscow. Ultimately, however, it instead spawned a broad-based national movement for the regeneration of Muscovite and Orthodox Christian Russia as well as a deeply ingrained sense of the need for strong, central rule and clear lines of authority. The Ulozhenie addressed all these concerns.

As noted, some of the Ulozhenie's most important articles involve serfdom, specifically its transformation into virtual slavery. From the founding in 878 of Kievan Rus (the first ancestor state to both modern Russia and Ukraine, with its capital at Kiev), most peasants had enjoyed considerable freedom and independence. Typically organized in groups, they often entered voluntarily into agricultural communes, including on privately owned land, in order to produce and share food and other necessities. They left when they wished. Affairs changed little in this regard, even as Kiev's influence waned and Rus fragmented during the eleventh and twelfth centuries into an increasingly decentralized collection of principalities. The peasants' freedoms began seriously to erode, however, with the arrival of the Mongols, whose armies—primarily made up of Turkic Tatars under Mongol leadership—conquered most of the Rus from 1237 to 1241. The Mongol-Tatar hordes did not occupy their conquered areas but instead became absentee tax-collectors. They delegated to subordinate Rus princes the task of collecting payments from Russian peasant communes and other entities. Thus, the Rus princes came to wield considerable power over the communes and peasant constituents. Over the next two hundred years, one Russian principality, Moscow, increased its tax-collecting authority and political power prodigiously. By the end of the reign of Ivan III (“the Great”), in the first decade of sixteenth century the principality of Moscow had achieved two critical goals: the unification of most of the Russian lands under its own control and the end of Mongol-Tatar domination.

The resulting state was known as Muscovite Russia, or simply Muscovy, and its success and continued development was based in large part on the ever-increasing enserfment of the Russian peasantry. The reason for this lay in the importance of land grants. Church officials and nobles from many Russian lands had cooperated with power-hungry Muscovite princes primarily in return for permanent grants of land. Thereafter, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ever-more grants were made; increasingly, they went to the lower-ranking “service gentry” as revocable payment for ongoing state service, usually in civil administration or as military officers. Thus, there evolved two main types of land grant: permanent hereditary ones known as votchiny (held mainly by the nobility) and temporary service-related ones known as pomestie (held by the service gentry).

Regardless of type, the value of a land grant was determined almost entirely by the presence of peasants, who provided income in the form of labor and crops—the primary and often the only sources of revenue for the landlord. Until the late fifteenth century, it had remained common for landlords to negotiate terms of labor with peasants residing upon their lands. The two groups often had opposite interests, however. The landlords wanted permanent and reliable workers and ever-higher incomes. The peasants valued their freedom and independence, and they resented encroaching authority and rising taxation. Often, they simply moved on, leaving their landlords to face untended fields and economic hardship. The absence of natural boundaries and the lure of seemingly endless horizons to the east and south compounded the problem. Flight was especially common during the dislocations of the Time of Troubles.

Among landlords, however, the service gentry were especially vulnerable, since they faced the additional threat of having their peasants seized and transferred wholesale to the estates of higher-ranking and more powerful nobles. Thus, it was the service gentry who most actively pressured the state for help. Since Muscovy relied heavily on them for services and loyalty, as well as on military recruits from their lands, their pleas were taken to heart.

The state responded in stages. Ivan III's 1497 Sudebnik barred peasants from moving at any time of the year except during a two-week period at the end of the harvest, around Saint George's Day. Peasants also had to fulfill all contracted obligations to their landlords and pay a large contract-release fee. Continued peasant flight spurred ever-more repressive countermeasures. In 1570 in parts of the province of Novgorod, Ivan IV declared a one-off “prohibited year,” during which peasants would not be able to move for any reason, even around Saint George's Day, regardless of their ability to pay all debts and release fees. Thereafter, the concept was applied more widely. By the 1580s prohibited years had become the norm throughout Muscovite Russia. Instead, the state designated occasional “free years.” The last one was in 1602. Around the same time, the statute of limitations on recovery of a runaway peasant was increased, reaching fifteen years in the first part of the sixteenth century. The Ulozhenie abolished the limitation altogether, and subsequent legislation criminalized peasant flight.

The service gentry also lobbied the state for permanent possession of their service lands and for the right to pass them on as heritable property. The Ulozhenie reinforced the legal distinction between the two. In practice, however, service lands were treated increasingly as hereditary possessions as the sixteenth century progressed.