Catherine II, excerpt from Decree on Serfs (1767)

Although Catherine was receptive to the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, her attempts to promote them in Russia did not extend beyond the service class.  This anti-peasant decree was enacted in the same year that her famous Instructions (Nakaz) on proposed law-code revisions were issued.  It reflected an upper-level consensus that greater autonomy for the service class and nobility demanded ever-stricter control over Russia’s peasants.

1.  Precisely what does the Decree demand of serfs and peasants?  Can they still go through channels to make complaints, or must they endure as best they can?

2.  What does the Decree demand of landlords?

3.  Why do you suppose the Decree targets both peasants who generate complaints and those who write them up? 

4.  Why is the Decree to be read (repeatedly) "in the churches"?   Does this suggest anything about rural literacy?

The Governing Senate...has deemed it necessary to make known that the landlords' serfs and peasants...owe their landlords proper submission and absolute obedience in all matters, according to the laws that have been enacted from time immemorial by the autocratic forefathers of Her Imperial Majesty and which have not been repealed, and which provide that all persons who dare to incite serfs and peasants to disobey their landlords shall be arrested and taken to the nearest government office, there to be punished forthwith as disturbers of the public tranquility, according to the laws and without leniency. And should it so happen that even after the publication of the present decree of Her Imperial Majesty any serfs and peasants should cease to give the proper obedience to their landlords...and should make bold to submit unlawful petitions complaining of their landlords, and especially to petition Her Imperial Majesty personally, then both those who make the complaints and those who write up the petitions shall be punished by the knout (1) and forthwith deported to Nerchinsk (2) to penal servitude for life and shall be counted as part of the quota of recruits which their landlords must furnish to the army. (3)  And in order that people everywhere may know of the present decree, it shall be read in all the churches on Sundays and holy days for one month after it is received and thereafter once every year during the great church festivals, lest anyone pretend ignorance.

Notes:

(1) knout = Russian leather scourge, used for flogging.  Depending on the skill and intent of the wielder, capable of killing.

(2) Nerchinsk = Gold mining settlement roughly 800 km east of Lake Baikal that relied on convict labor.

(3) In other words, the number of peasant recruits that a landlord was responsible for did not go down despite the loss to him/her of the labor of the exiled peasant(s).

From A Source Book for Russian History, G. Vernadsky, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 453-454.