The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (review)

In this well-documented study, Dennison explores the peasant community and its household economies on a Russian serf estate, using the interpretive framework of institutional economics, which, in her words, “takes its inspiration and starting point from the recent work of development economists and economic historians persuaded that institutions are the fundamental determinants of social and economic outcomes” (17). This approach places the author in the distinguished company of economists like Ogilvie, whose recent work on Bohemian serfdom makes impressive use of institutional economics.¹

The author has focused on Voshchazhnikovo, a large serf estate located east of Moscow, which exemplified the monetary rent (obrok) estates that were widespread in the seven non–black-soil provinces around Moscow. She has skillfully mined its rich estate records to show how serfdom shaped the household structures and family economies of the peasants who were subjected to it.

In her discussion of the peasant community, Dennison helps to debunk the myth of the Russian peasant commune as a self-governing, egalitarian institution that protected its members through the periodic re-allocation of both communal resources (land) and communal obligations (taxes and rents). Dennison’s detailed findings provide a more nuanced picture: Elected communal officials charged with re-allocating resources and obligations carried out their tasks in a partisan spirit that excluded poor peasants from access to resources. Indeed, so calloused were the communal leaders toward their poorest members that the estate owner himself once wrote to the Voshchazhnikovo commune, reproving it for its neglect of the “old, blind or otherwise infirm [peasants] living in abject poverty, often without homes or communal land” (114). Dennison’s analysis of the peasant economy shows that market relations permeated most areas of peasant life. Serfs could not, de jure, own land, but the estate owner (Count Sheremetev), allowed his peasants to buy land in his name. His estate administration registered all of the land transactions between peasants, providing them with deeds to the lands that they purchased. By 1858, on the eve of Emancipation, the peasants of Voshchazhnikovo owned more than 15,000 acres, in addition to nearly 25,000 acres of communal land.

The labor market was also highly developed; three-quarters of the households participated in the labor market as either employers or wage laborers. Peasants working as wage laborers did not constitute a village proletariat. Most of these peasants belonged to middling or even prosperous households; some of them even bought luxury goods, as well as necessities. The dowry of Praskovi’ia Pugina, who worked as a servant, contained luxury items like French silk head scarves, a pearl necklace, and a silver tea service.

The strength of this book lies in Dennison’s detailed analysis of household structures and economies and her skill in bringing this analysis to life with finely observed scenes of daily life on the estate. Less impressive are her conclusions, which do little justice to her pioneering research. For example, although she is correct in concluding that the estate owner encouraged the peasants’ integration into the market economy, this finding is not new; Fedorov published abundant evidence of it nearly forty years ago.² The author is also correct in concluding that Russian serfdom did not provide “the incentive to engage in the sort of entrepreneurial initiatives that played such an important role in the agricultural and industrial revolutions in early modern northwest Europe” (231). But this observation is not new either. Russia was not England. Moreover, despite the deficiencies of Russia’s institutional framework, at least five serf households in Voshchazhnikovo had assets of more than 10,000 rubles. There were fifty-two such households on a nearby estate!³ The point is that such capital accumulation in serfs’ hands suggests informal networks of exchange that substituted for the lack of an institutional framework. We know little about these informal mechanisms, but hopefully the author will explore them in future publications.