RICHARD HELLIE (Chicago, U.S.A.)

RICHARD HELLIE (Chicago, U.S.A.) WOMEN A ND SLA YERY IN MUSCOVY* Women played an important, but subordinate role in the Muscovite slave (kholopstvo) system. Positions of both owner and owned were reserved pri- marily for men, but about one-twentieth of the slaveowners were women, and about one-third of the chattel were female. This essay will summarize some of 1 the available information and also present new and more detailed data. The Muscovite slave system differed from most of the other slave systems of the world in that most of its chattel were natives, "insiders," who thereby violated the "rule" that slaves are supposed to be "outsiders." I hope that readers will be convinced by my evidence that Muscovy was unusual not only because the vast majority of the slaves were natives, but especially because no fictions were used to disguise that fact and because the government on its own initiative, with rare exceptions, did comparatively little to restrain Mus- covites from "voluntarily" selling themselves into slavery. The Muscovite slave system served, inter alia, as the country's "welfare system." Relief was minimal, and most of those who "voluntarily" sold themselves into slavery the first time and who had been free previously probably did so to escape starvation. The extant documents, most of which survive from the Novgorod region from the 1580s through 1603, rarely state why or the circumstances under which people sold themselves into slavery; but most of the evidence indicates that the act was a response to physical and/or psychological stress. There were exceptions, such as those who became stewards supervising large landed estates and those who became military slaves of their owners (who after 1556 were required to furnish a specific number of combat- ready retainers depending on the size of their estates), but they were in the minority.2 Muscovite slavery was a household system, and most slaves explicit- ly sold themselves to serve in the household. Some also farmed, others accom- panied their owners to the battle front as body servants in the baggage train. *The author wishes to express his thanks for the very helpful comments made on earlier drafts of this essay by Igor Kopytoff at the University of PennsylvaniaEthnohis- tory Workshop as well as by the editor, Charles Halperin, and his anonymous reviewers. 1. Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, in the sources used in this article are referred to the its 1982). Readers interested ' book, discussionof sources, and its bibliography. 2. One might ask whether those who sold themselves as military slaveswere starving. My assumption is that they ordinarily were not, and particularly those for whom top prices were paid and those who came from elite families. 214 Many of those who sold themselves out of destitution recovered at their owners' expense and then fled. Slavery seems to have created a high levei of psychological dependency, and often those who fled (even with large sums of money) or were otherwise freed by or from one owner sold themselves soon thereafter to another. Perhaps as much as 10 percent of the Muscovite popu- lation was enslaved, making slaves the second largest social group after the peasantry/serfs.3 3 Slavery was advantageous to the owner as well as to the slaves. The owners used them to keep their houses (free hired people seemingly could not, or would not, do such work), to raise some of the produce required to keep their establishments running (peasants, later serfs, produced most of the grain, meat, eggs, and the like that landholders ate or marketed), as estate supervi- sory personnel (free people seemingly could not give orders to other free people, or take them from them), and as agents and personal extensions of every kind. Slaves served as their owners' advocates in court, took oaths for them, and were distrained by the government in their owners' absence. Slaveowners could dominate their slaves completely, probably an important fact in a society where they in turn were dominated almost completely by the government. Slaves were also a status symbol, something that nearly all landowners strove to own. Because the ownership of slaves conferred prestige, owners tried to own as many of them as they could, often more than they could "af- ford." Slaveownership was an expense, and therefore was highly life-cycle de- termined, with those from the social groups that potentially owned slaves who were just beginning their careers owning few and those dying usually owning at least a few. Finally, slaves served as social cement, one of the few objects that could be transferred from one generation or family to another in a society where there were few luxury goods (besides slaves) and even most land, in the service land fund, was restricted by government demands. In the world that has just been described there was, relatively less use for females than there was for males in any segment of the slave system. First I shall discuss women as slaves, then as slaveowners. The lower value placed on women as slaves is demonstrated in table 1, where it is evident that the amount buyers were willing to pay for females was nearly always less than it was for males. Moreover, buyers were willing to purchase (or keep) fewer females than males. When coding the 2;500 cases that served as my primary statistical data base, I used as one of my 80 variables the sex and marital status of the major person in the document being coded. These are the variables across the top of table 1. When a self-sale document was involved (88.8 percent of all the documents), a sum was paid for all the people in the document, who in over 90 percent of the cases were members of a nuclear family or solitaries. (The ex- tended family did not exist during most of Muscovite history, and was created in response to changes in the tax system and as part of the system of serf- .

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