Authority in a Serf Village: Peasants, Managers, and the Role of Writing in Early Nineteenth Century Russia

Based on numerous letters sent between a number of peasants from a small Russian serf village and the Moscow-based office that managed them for their owner, this article examines one particular disruption of normal village life—in this case a demand for an army recruit from a village with fewer than twenty men—and its larger repercussions. In particular, it examines the ways that individual peasant men and women used the written word in order to try to disrupt normal estate authority structure (between managers and the village, and between village elders and the larger peasant community). It focuses on one woman who was initially able to use writing to the advantage of her family, but whose actions in the long run, once her fellow villagers adapted their own use of writing to fit the demands of their managers, came to isolate her from the larger estate authorities.