y member of the rural population not
legally attached to the land or to a proprietor should be regarded as a
vagrant, and treated accordingly. Thus the principle that every subject
should in some way serve the State had found its complete realisation.
There was no longer any room in Russia for free men.

The change in the position of the peasantry, together with the hardships
and oppression by which it was accompanied, naturally increased
fugitivism and vagrancy. Thousands of serfs ran away from their masters
and fled to the steppe or sought enrolment in the army. To prevent this
the Government considered it necessary to take severe and energetic
measures. The serfs were forbidden to enlist without the permission
of their masters, and those who persisted in presenting themselves for
enrolment were to be beaten "cruelly" (zhestoko) with the knout, and
sent to the mines.* The proprietors, on the other hand, received the
right to transport without trial their unruly serfs to Siberia, and even
to send them to the mines for life.**

* Ukaz of June 2d, 1742.

** See ukaz of January 17th, 1765, and of January 28th,
1766.

If these stringent measures had any effect it was not of long duration,
for there soon appeared among the serfs a still stronger spirit of
discontent and insubordination, which threatened to produce a general
agrarian rising, and actually did create a movement resembling in many
respects the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant War in Germany. A
glance at the causes of this movement will help us to understand the
real nature of serfage in Russia.

Up to this point serfage had, in spite of its flagrant abuses, a certain
theoretical justification. It was, as we have seen, merely a part of a
general political system in which obligatory service was imposed on all
classes of the population. The serfs served the nobles in order that the
nobles might serve the Tsar. In 1762 this theory was entirely overturned
by a manifesto of Peter III. abolishing the obligatory service of
the Noblesse. According to strict justice this act ought to have been
followed by the liberation of the serfs, for if the nobles were no
longer obliged to serve the State they had no just claim to the service
of the peasants. The Government had so completely forgotten the original
meaning of serfage that it never thought of carrying out the measure
to its logical consequences, but the peasantry held tenaciously to
the ancient