How desperate serfs took revenge on their oppressors

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The history of serfdom is a thriller. Desperate serfs hacked, slaughtered and killed their oppressors.

In 1809, one of the most notorious cases in the history of serfdom took place. The serf of Field Marshal Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky killed his master with an ax in the forest. The reason turned out to be the most prosaic at that time: the old landowner forcibly seduced the murderer's young sister.

In the course of the investigation, it turned out that Kamensky had terrorized the people of his Oryol estate Saburovo-Kamenskoye for many years and was known there as an "unheard of tyrant", nevertheless, the peasants who were dissatisfied with him were severely punished, about three hundred people were exiled to Siberia. Everyone knew about the bad temper of the field marshal, even the emperor himself dismissed him from the post of military governor of St. Petersburg in 1802 "for impudent manifestations of his daring, cruel and unbridled character." But in his estate the landowner is a tsar and a god, and there only an ax could stop his arbitrariness.

This case, although it became famous in its time due to the status of the murdered, was only one of many similar to it. For example, in the same 1809, the peasants killed the landowner of the Vologda province Mezhakov. The investigation established: 14 peasants participated in the conspiracy against the master, who took revenge on him for exhausting work and systematic bullying. May 24 Mezhakov went

The court sentenced the perpetrators to 150-200 blows of a whip, pulling out their nostrils and exile to Siberia for hard labor.

Even the knowledge of such murders did not deter thousands of landowners from atrocities against the serfs. And even more or less educated and well-mannered nobles often saw in the peasants not people, but nothing more than wild barbarians, who can only be treated with the help of threats and corporal punishment.

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, and a prominent serf owner himself, said that "he was born and raised in an atmosphere where cuffs, tweaks, beaters, slaps reigned." How many wrote about it then and later … do not count. To whip a serf for a minor offense or even for no reason is a common thing in many estates of the 18th - 19th centuries. The law only ordered not to allow injuries and murders, but this was not carried out either.

In addition, the bullying perpetrated by the cruel landowners went far beyond mere physical violence. Surrender to soldiers or dangerous work in factories, confiscation of children for sale, transformation of a person into a jester, starvation, medieval torture, forced marriage, exchange of peasants for dogs, disposal of personal property and more (remember "Mu-mu"), rape peasant wives and daughters, the establishment of serf harems - all this was in abundance in the vastness of the Russian Empire.

What could a serf do? It was extremely rare to restore justice in a legal way. For example, in the case of the serial killer of serfs Saltychikha, the peasants were far from the first time able to get through with complaints to the empress, and they were lucky that Catherine II set the stage for the case (having recently taken the throne, she wanted to show herself as a kind and enlightened queen).

It is characteristic that after this the empress forbade the serfs to file complaints against the landowners - the complainants were flogged and sent back to the estates. Local officials (often the same serf-owners) usually ignored and hushed up even the murders, it happened that the courts even outright sadists from among the landowners were sentenced only to "church repentance." If the peasants rebuffed the nobles, the officials, on the contrary, immediately appeared to punish the disobedient.

So the rods and whips whistled, the backs were bent, the landowners asserted their "master's power" by any means and showed considerable ingenuity in this. For example, according to the testimony of Prince. P. Dolgorukova, General Count Otton-Gustav Douglas (a Swedish officer in the Russian service) "brutally beat people with a whip (…) and ordered to sprinkle gunpowder on the beaten back" - after that the gunpowder was ignited, and "Douglas laughed at the groans of the tortured" and "called it a device fireworks on the back."

Another nobleman, MI Leontiev, when he did not like the prepared dish, ordered to beat the cook with a whip in his presence, and then forced him to eat bread with salt and pepper, a piece of herring and drink it with two glasses of vodka. Then the cooks were put in a punishment cell for a day without water. Leontyev was taught this torture by his father.

The peasants practically could not appeal to the law, so they resorted to other ways to get rid of their tormentors. Often, unable to withstand the bullying, they went to suicide (even children) or ran away. Others resisted passively - they became apathetic, worked sluggishly, drank, stole and were ready to repay the torturers at any moment (for this reason, Pugachev almost invariably found wide support from the serfs).

During the reign of Catherine II, attacks by peasants on nobles also became regular. The Empress herself understood that this was a sign of "impending disaster." Once she even accidentally expressed a completely seditious thought - the peasantry is "an unfortunate class that cannot break its chains without a crime." But Catherine could not do something about it - she was afraid.

The surviving documents are very incomplete and only partly reflect the scale of serf lynching against the nobles, but even this information allows us to draw some conclusions. The historian B. Yu. Tarasov writes: “Attempts by peasants to murder their masters, robberies and arson of estates were so frequent that they created the feeling of an unceasing partisan war. This was a real war. In 1764 - 1769 only in the Moscow province, the gentlemen were attacked in 27 estates, 30 nobles were killed (21 men and 9 women). The same thing happened in other provinces.

In 1800 - 1825, according to incomplete data, about one and a half thousand armed peasant uprisings against their landowners took place in Russia. Over time, they became more and more. In 1835 - 1843. 416 serfs were exiled to Siberia for the murder of masters. Geographer P. P. Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky wrote about the middle of the 19th century: "Not a year passed without the fact that one of the landowners in the nearest or distant district was not killed by his serfs."

All these cases are similar to each other. So, in 1806 Prince Yablonovsky was killed by his coachman in St. Petersburg. The "yard" hit the master with a wheel wrench, and then strangled him with the reins. The coachman was executed. The artist R. Porter, who saw the execution, said that the unfortunate man could not stand it and "killed his master for the most severe oppression not only of himself, but of all the other serfs." In 1834, the courtyards hacked to death A. N. Struisky, who was nicknamed "the terrible master."

In 1839, peasants in the field killed Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, the writer's father (in a good family, he behaved differently with serfs; “the beast was a man,” they said, “he had a dark soul”). In 1854, two peasants killed the state councilor Olenin - he kept his peasants in poverty and did not give them food. The government punished the murderers, but was forced to admit that Olenin's serfs were driven to extremes, and gave them food.

In 1856, the future composer A. P. Borodin (then an intern) treated six peasants who were led through the ranks. It turned out that in response to the cruelty of the master, Colonel V., they beat him with a whip in the stable. Often, women also became murderers - the raped concubines of their masters.

The peasants hounded, beaten to death, chopped, strangled and shot at their despots until their liberation in 1861. The cruelty of punishment for an attempt on the life of a nobleman could not change anything, the system of serfdom itself was to blame, which put millions of people in a defenseless position against the arbitrariness of specific people with their base ideas and desires.

Even the chief of the gendarmes A. H. Benckendorff back in 1839admitted: "Serfdom is a powder magazine under the state." On attacks by peasants on landowners in 1850, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported to the minister: “Research on crimes of this kind showed that the landowners themselves were the cause: the landowner's indecent household life, a rude or riotous lifestyle, a violent drunken character, dissolute behavior, cruel the treatment of the peasants and especially their wives in the form of an adulterous passion, and finally the most adultery was the reason that the peasants, who were previously distinguished by impeccable morality, finally encroached on the life of their master."

It took another decade before the infamous slavery was abolished. Two centuries of bullying, harems and torture have finally come to an end.