Russian serf

The term serf, in the sense of an unfree peasant of the Russian Empire, is the usual translation of krepostnoi krestyanin (крепостной крестьянин). The origins of serfdom in Russia are traced to Kievan Rus' in the 11th century. Legal documents of the epoch, such as Russkaya Pravda, distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants.

Serfdom became the dominant form of relation between peasants and nobility in the 17th century. Serfdom most commonly existed in the central and southern areas of the Russian Empire. Serfdom in the Urals and Siberia was widely unseen until, during the reign of Catherine the Great, businesses began to send serfs into those areas in an attempt to harvest their large amount of untapped natural resources

Tsar Alexander I wanted to reform the system but was stymied. New laws allowed all classes (except the serfs) to own land, a privilege that was previously confined to the nobility. Russian serfdom was finally abolished in the emancipation reform of 1861 by Tsar Alexander II. Scholars have proposed multiple overlapping reasons to account for the abolition, including fear of a large-scale revolt by the serfs, the government's financial needs, evolving cultural sensibilities and the military's need for soldiers.

The term muzhik, or moujik (Russian: мужи́к, IPA: [mʊˈʐɨk]) means "Russian peasant" when it is used in English. This word was borrowed from Russian into Western languages through translations of 19th-century Russian literature, describing Russian rural life of those times, and where the word muzhik was used to mean the most common rural dweller - a peasant - but this was only a narrow contextual meaning.

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