On this day in 1722, Emperor Peter the Great prohibited freelancing. The enslavement of the population of Muscovy was a gradual process. Peter the Great, who needed fresh blood for his military and state reforms, intensified this process. Already in 1690, the 18-year-old Peter permitted transactions with estate peasants, who were “a valuable commodity.” Therefore, they could be bought to fill in at the developing manufacturers and to serve in the Army. Peter the Great became the first Russian absolutist monarch. On one hand, he stopped assembling Zemsky Sobor (an assembly of the land), and on the other, he depended on Russian nobility. To appease the later, Peter ruled in 1719 that peasants belonged to their owners forever (in the 16th century, they could leave them), and the boundary between serfs and peasants was removed. In Muscovy, the freelancers (guliashchie liudi) were people on the fringes of social classes: freed slaves, peasants set free, children and relatives of taxed people who have not yet entered the official register, those who have not been taxed and separated from the family at their own risk, and migrants from abroad. They freely moved around the country, offering their services and sometimes breaking the law. Now, the state reached out to them, turning them into canon fodder, serfs, and set up those who refused to obey on the path of crime. When Emperor Alexander I, 150 years later, in 1861, undid the Petrine enslavement of most of the Russian Tsar's subjects, there was arguably not enough time left to prevent the social explosion that resulted in the Russian Revolution of 1917 . Sources: Gulaishchii chelovek, Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. Iurii Kuznetsov, “Reformy Petra Pervogo,” Trilogiia: neizvestnaia istoriia. |
