tion was abolished by Tsar
Boris Godunof--who, by the way, was half a Tartar and more than half a
usurper--and herein lies the essence of serfage in the Russian sense.
The peasants have never been the property of the landed proprietors,
but have always been personally free; and the only legal restriction on
their liberty was that they were not allowed to change their domicile
without the permission of the proprietor. If so-called serfs were
sometimes sold, the practice was simply an abuse not justified by
legislation."

This simple explanation, in which may be detected a note of patriotic
pride, is almost universally accepted in Russia; but it contains, like
most popular conceptions of the distant past, a curious mixture of fact
and fiction. Serious historical investigation tends to show that the
power of the proprietors over the peasants came into existence, not
suddenly, as the result of an ukaz, but gradually, as a consequence of
permanent economic and political causes, and that Boris Godunof was not
more to blame than many of his predecessors and successors.*

* See especially Pobedonostsef, in the Russki Vestnik, 1858,
No. 11, and "Istoritcheskiya izsledovaniya i statyi" (St.
Petersburg, 1876), by the same author; also Pogodin, in the
Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4.

Although the peasants in ancient Russia were free to wander about as
they chose, there appeared at a very early period--long before the reign
of Boris Godunof--a decided tendency in the Princes, in the proprietors,
and in the Communes, to prevent migration. This tendency will be easily
understood if we remember that land without labourers is useless, and
that in Russia at that time the population was small in comparison with
the amount of reclaimed and easily reclaimable land. The Prince desired
to have as many inhabitants as possible in his principality, because the
amount of his regular revenues depended on the number of the population.
The landed proprietor desired to have as many peasants as possible on
his estate, to till for him the land which he reserved for his own use,
and to pay him for the remainder a yearly rent in money, produce, or
labour. The free Communes desired to have a number of members sufficient
to keep the whole of the Communal land under cultivation, because
each Commune had to pay yearly to the Prince a fixed sum in money or
agricultural produce, and the greater the number of able-bodied members,
the less e