State serf

State serfs were a special class in 18th–19th century Russia, the number of which in some periods reached half of the agricultural population. In contrast to private Russian serfs, state serfs were considered personally free, although attached to the land.

The state peasants were created by decrees of Peter I and applied to the agricultural population: various peasant classes, single homesteaders (servant people on the border area adjoining the wild steppe), the non-Russian peoples of the Volga, and the Ural regions.

The number of state peasants increased due to several factors: the confiscation of church lands (huge estates of the Russian Orthodox Church) by Catherine II, additional conquered territories (the Baltic States, the Right-Bank Ukraine, Belarus, Crimea, the Caucasus), and the former serfs of the confiscated estates of the gentry of the Commonwealth, among others. Many of these state peasants replenished runaway private serfs and allowed peasants to re-settle on the developed but un-tended lands (Bashkiria, New Russia, North Caucasus, etc.). This process (transition of land previously tended runaway serfs to the category of state-serf tended land) implicitly encouraged the imperial power. In the second half of the 18th century, the government handed out to the nobility hundreds of thousands of state peasants, practiced mass sale of state-owned estates, transferring them into specific state departments, and converted many state peasants to the position of military settlers in the western provinces (a deposit for rent landlords). Additionally from the nobility came suggestions to eliminate the estate of state peasants, requesting the passage of the state-owned land to private hands. Nevertheless, the relative number of state peasants grew. At the time of the first census in 1724 the state peasants accounted for 19% of the population, and by the last census in 1858 they accounted for 45% of the population in the same territory [2].

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