Slavery was a very important social institution in Rus' between, say, A.D. 800 and 1725. Initially, slaves were one of the "forest products" harvested by Vikings making their way on the "route from the Varangians to the Greeks," the Eastern European river route (from the Baltic Sea into the Neva to Lake Ladoga, to the Volkov, to the Shelon', to the Dnepr, into the Black Sea) between Sweden and Constaninople. The Vikings picked up slaves and hauled them (along with wax, honey, and furs) to Constantinople in exchange for luxury goods. No one knows the numbers of slaves there were after the formation of the Kievan Russian state (882-1132), but it is assumed that most of these slaves had come from raids on other non-Slavic people.

After the Kievan Russian state began to disintegrate in 1132, slaves became much more numerous as inhabitants of neighboring East Slavic principalities (much of the territory between Poland-Lithuania and the Volga River) became fair game for enslavement and the political jurisdictions fell into civil war and raided one another almost continuously. Landownership developed after 1132, and some estates were farmed by slaves kept in barracks. Other slaves served in their owners' households. There were also debt slaves throughout medieval Russian history--people who could not repay obligations or who fell into servitude because they could not pay fines levied as penalties for crimes committed. There was a slave market in Kiev, and almost certainly others grew up in the capitals of every principality. Particularly important was the slave market in Novgorod, which provided East Slavic slaves for the Baltic, the European Atlantic coast, and North Africa. Jewish merchants took East Slavic slaves from Novgorod to these western destinations. Other East Slavic slaves were continuously "harvested" by the Turkic peoples inhabiting the southern and eastern frontiers of Rus' and subsequently sold to buyers in Byzantium, the Mediterranean world, and the Arab countries.

The Mongol invasions into Rus' from 1236-1240 accelerated the disintegration of Kievan Rus' that had commenced in 1132. Thirteen major principalities became fifty, then more than one hundred. Raiding to obtain East Slav slaves intensified and was compounded by the Mongal invasions, which may have resulted in the immediate enslavement of 10 percent of the populace and their deportation as slaves to Asian destinations as far away as Karakorum in Mongolia. Continuous Mongol slave raids replaced those of the pre-1240 Turkic peoples who had roamed the Ukranian steppe. In these centuries the Western European word "slave" was borrowed from the ethnonym "Slav."

During the ensuing period of the "Tatar yoke" (1237-1480), the export of slaves through Novgorod continued and the Novgorodian slave market at the intersection of Slave and High Streets was the most active business locale in the entire Republic of Novgorod, which encompassed much of Russia north of the Volga to the White Sea. Labor was an extraordinarily scarce commodity owing to the very low population densities on the east European plain. Meanwhile the demand for Slavic slaves remained high throughout much of Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Almost any person encountered by a raiding enemy band was liable to be seized and sold into slavery as a prize of war. Toward the end of this period, Moscow consolidated the northern East Slavic lands, and the institution of slavery continued to develop apace.

A new form of slavery evolved, a variety of antichresis (a kind of mortgage contract), in which a native Russian took a loan for a year and agreed to work for the creditor for the interest. He or she became a limited-service contract slave (kabal'nyi kholop/kabal'naia raba). A borrower who defaulted fell into permanent hereditary slavery. By the end of the 1850s, kabal'noe kholopstvo became a very common institution, which may have engulfed anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of the native Russian population. Almost no one ever repaid the loans, with the result that nearly all became perpetual slaves. This situation, in which a fair portion of the population consisted of natives who had sold themselves into slavery, was nearly unique in world history. This violated a "rule" of the social sciences--that the slave must be an outsider, that no society could withstand the tension of enslaving its own people. How or why the Russians managed to violate this rule on such a grand scale has been the subject of speculation but remains undetermined. The best explanation seems to be that almost anybody could be a "Russian" because of the large numbers of peoples involved in the ethnogenesis of the Russians (East Slavs, Balts, Finnic peoples, Iranian peoples, and Turkic peoples).

Because seemingly almost anybody could become a Russian, the boundary between "insiders" and "outsiders" was very permeable. In the institution of slavery, this could have meant that the Russians could have enslaved no one, or everyone. Because there was no concept of "human rights" and because of the shortage of labor, they elected to make everyone eligible for enslavement.

The 1580s and the 1590s were a period when Russian serfdom became entrenched. In the second half of the fifteenth century, peasants had been gradually limited to moving from estate to estate around the time of Saint George's Day (November 26), and then in the 1580s and in 1592 all peasants were temporarily forbidden to move on Saint George's Day. "Temporarily" lasted until 1906. The issue in the beginnings of the institution of serfdom, at least until 1650, was always a perceived shortage of labor by those who petitioned the government to solve their personnel problems by forbidding peasants to move, either from one lord to another or from the center of the Muscovite state to one of the frontiers. The serf was bound to the land, while the slave was bound to the person of a lord, a distinction which may have made little difference to most Russian peasants. The major objective difference was that the peasant always had to pay taxes, whereas many slaves did not. Taxes in Muscovy were onerous, so tax avoidance was a matter of consequence, and the ranks of the limited-service contract slaves began to swell. As a result, in the 1590s the government changed the nature of the "limitation" in limited-service contract slavery from a limit of a year and upon default to lifetime slavery to a limit of the lifetime of the owner with no possibility of repayment of the loan, something which, as was noted, was hardly ever done anyway. This resulted in two expropriations: the slave was expropriated of his right to repay his loan (buy himself out of slavery) at the end of the first year, and the slaveowner was expropriated of his hereditary property, which he could no longer bequeath to his heirs. The government was gambling that at least once every generation the limited-service contract slave would become a freedman and go back on the tax rolls. What was not anticipated was that being enslaved created a mentality of dependency, in response to which the freedperson had little option but to sell himself back into slavery, often to the heir of the deceased owner.

Limited-service contract slavery, which was primarily a private welfare system in a society that provided few public alms, experienced several legal changes in the seventeenth century. Sometime in the 1620s the government established a fixed price of 2 rubles for a kabal'nyi kholop; in the 1630s this price was raised to 3 rubles. In 1678-1679 slaves engaged in farming were put on the tax rolls and converted into serfs by a state very apprehensive about its tax receipts. In the early 1720s the remaining household kholopy were converted into house serfs for the same reason, primarily because new censuses revealed a decline in the "peasant/serf" taxpaying population and a rise in the number of tax-exempt house serfs. Slavery in Muscovy was primarily a male institution: two-thirds of both adult and child slaves were males.

Although limited-service contract slavery assumed the central place in late Muscovite slavery, there were other types as well. Hereditary slaves were those who had been enslaved for a generation or more, perhaps Russians who had sold themselves, perhaps outsiders impressed in various ways. Military captives--especially Poles and Swedes but also Tatars--could be enslaved. (Poland and Sweden abolished slavery in these years, but the Crimean Tatars made a living by raiding Muscovy and Poland and annually kidnapping thousands of slaves whom they typically sold to other Muslims.)

Ordinary debt slavery persisted, and a formula specified that such slavery was to be worked off at a rate of 5 rubles per year by adult males, 2.50 rubles by adult females, and 2 rubles by minors over the age of ten. There was also indentured slavery, in which a person sold himself or herself to another for a period of years and upon expiration of the term was to be freed. Finally, there was an elite form of slavery in which an estate manager had to become a slave in order to hold the job. All of these people were "slaves" in the sense that they were so-called kholopy of various types, they were subject to the Moscow Slavery Chancellery (Russia was one of the few countries in the world ever to have a central governmental office whose sole responsibility was slaves), and they were all discussed at length in chapter 20 ("The Judicial Process for Slaves") of the great Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) of 1649.

Muscovite slavery was primarily a household slave system and was very mild by comparison with productive slave systems. Muscovite slave owners were primarily estate owners and holders who served in the cavalry. The higher one rose in the cavalry, the more likely he was to own more slaves. Other slave owners were merchants and craftsmen. Until the second quarter of the seventeenth century, it was even possible for elite slaves to own other slaves. Most slave owners kept their chattel as household menials and as status symbols of wealth, but military personnel often took some along as body servants to guard the baggage train and even to fight on horseback. Others used slaves to manage their estates or to aid merchants in their trade, including long-distance trade. At various times, some slaves performed governmental tasks as extensions of their owners in government service. As Muscovite society became rigidly stratified in the seventeenth century, it became nearly impossible for anyone to hire free workers, for the law specified that an employer who employed someone for more than three months could convert that person into a slave upon application by the employer.

Slavery was abolished by Peter the Great in the early 1720s, but its legacy lingered long. It had a direct impact on Russian serfdom, which was mentioned together with slavery increasingly frequently already in the seventeenth century and borrowed a number of its norms from slavery. Russian serfdom by the end of the eighteenth century had many of the features of slavery. This in turn led to the slavelike features of the Soviet Gulag and the general absence of human rights in the Soviet Union.


-- Hellie, Richard


FURTHER READINGS


Bibliography


Hellie, Richard. Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. 1971.

------. Muscovite Society. 1970. See especially chapter 8, "Bondage in Muscovy."

------. Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725. 1982.

------, ed. and trans. The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. 1988. See especially chapter 20, "The Judicial Process for Slaves."

Iakovlev, A. I. Kholopstvo i kholopy v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVII v. 1943.

Kolychëva, E. I. Kholopstvo i krepostnichestvo (konets XV-XVI v.). 1971.

Paneiakh, V. M. Kabal'noe kholopstvo na Rusi v XVI veke. 1967.

------. Kholopstvo v pervoi polovine XVII v. 1984.

------. Kholopstvo v XVII-nachale XVII veka. 1975.

Zimin, A. A. Kholopy na Rusi (s drevneishikh vremën do kontsa XV v.). 1973.