The concept of a harem, traditional for the Eastern mentality, is somehow not associated with Slavic culture. Although in favor of the fact that similarities of eastern harems were created in the manors of the landowners, there are many facts. The right of the first night, widespread in feudal Europe, in Russia had no legal basis - the law prohibited the sexual exploitation of serfs. But cases of its violation were nevertheless very frequent - landowners were not brought to justice for this. This is discussed in the study by B. Tarasov “Russia is a serf. The history of national slavery”. Further - the most interesting fragments.
A. Korzukhin. Collecting arrears (Take away the last cow)
Peasant girls and women were completely defenseless against the tyranny of the landlords. A. P. Zablotsky-Desyatovsky, who collected detailed information about the situation of serfs, noted in his report: “In general, reprehensible connections between landowners and their peasant women are not at all uncommon. The essence of all these matters is the same: debauchery combined with more or less violence. Some landowner makes him satisfy his bestial motives simply by the power of power and, not seeing the limit, goes to the point of rampage, raping young children … another comes to the village for a while to have fun with his friends and first gives water to the peasant women and then makes them satisfy both his own bestial passions and his friends."
N. Nevrev. Bargain. Scene from serf life
The principle that justified the master's violence against serf women sounded like this: "You must go, if you are a slave!" Coercion to debauchery was so widespread in landowners' estates that some researchers were inclined to single out a separate duty from other peasant duties - a kind of "corvee for women."
Serfs
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One memoirist told about his acquaintance landowner that in his estate he was “a real rooster, and the entire female half - from young to old - was his chickens. It used to go around the village late in the evening, stop in front of some hut, look out the window and lightly tap on the glass with a finger - and this very minute the most beautiful of the family comes out to him.
Serfs were subjected to cruel corporal punishment
VI Semevsky wrote that quite often the entire female population of some estate was forcibly corrupted to satisfy the lord's lust. Some landowners, who did not live on their estates, but spent their lives abroad or in the capital, specially came to their possessions only for a short time for nefarious purposes. On the day of his arrival, the manager had to provide the landlord with a complete list of all the peasant girls who had grown up during the absence of the master, and he took each of them for several days: "… when the list was exhausted, he left for other villages and came back the next year."
G. Myasoedov. Congratulations to the young in the house of the landowner
The state power and the landowners acted and felt themselves as conquerors in the conquered country. Any attempts by the peasants to complain about the unbearable harassment from the owners, according to the laws of the Russian Empire, were punished as a riot, and the “rioters” were treated in accordance with legal instructions.
K. Lemokh. Convalescent
A harem of serf "girls" in a noble estate of the 18th-19th centuries is the same inalienable sign of a "noble" life, like a hunting dog or a club. The moral savagery of the Russian landowners reached an extreme degree. In the manor house among the courtyard people, no different from the servants, lived the illegitimate children of the owner or his guests and relatives. The nobles did not find anything strange in the fact that their own, although illegitimate, nephews and nieces, cousins and cousins were in the position of slaves, doing the most dirty work, subjected to cruel punishments, and on occasion they were sold to the side.
K. Lemokh. Parental joy
Serfs