There is such a topic, about which, it would seem, break, as a breakwater, teachings of alternative historians and praises of the great past of the Rus. This topic is so shameful and obvious that few undertake to discuss it, let alone dispute.
But such a skeleton cannot be kept in the closet, we must try to understand. Where can we go without it?
Free tribes of the Slavs
“Here they are, free tribes of the ancient Slavs. Here is their daring prince with his retinue. Here are freedom-loving Russian people throwing off the Tatar yoke (and if not freedom-loving, then why are they, one wonders, throwing it off?). And then - bam: 90% of the population are slaves who are traded like cattle. How, at what point could this happen? Why did people allow this to be done over themselves? Why did they not rebel, as they rebelled against the Tatars? Why did they not put the presumptuous princelings and boyar children in their place, as they did more than once before, expelling the negligent prince and his retinue away? Even the pride of the Russian Land of the Holy and Blessed Prince Alexander Nevsky was driven out by the Novgorodians when he was too boring. And then … What happened to these people? How in two hundred years, by the middle of the 16th century, he lost all that freedom and dignity,which he was rightfully proud of and which even foreigners celebrated? " (Alfred Koch "How Our Ancestors Became Slaves")
Yes, the question is very common. But can anyone figure it out?
Serfdom by books
Promotional video:
The picture of the development of serfdom in Russia from ancient times to the middle of the 17th century is presented in textbooks as follows: princely and boyar land tenure, combined with a strengthening bureaucratic apparatus, attacked personal and communal land property. Oh, how does it feel? Memorize - I will ask at the exam!
Previously, free farmers, communal peasants, or even private landowners - the "own land" of ancient Russian legal acts - gradually became tenants of plots belonging to the clan aristocracy or the service nobility.
This is clear and understandable to everyone from school. I'll start by asking where and when did the first Russian tsar come from, and why he was a "tsar" and not a "prince." I apologize for such a primitive educational program, but it is necessary to indicate it, because it turns out that there is confusion here too.
It is generally accepted that Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) is the first Russian tsar. Here he is:
But there is another opinion: the first of the great princes who ruled in the already united Russia, his grandfather, Ivan III Vasilievich, began to call himself "tsar".
Why is that? It's simple: Ivan's wife is the niece of the last Emperor of Constantinople - Sophia Paleologus (actually Zoya).
This image does not really fit with the promoted series, right?
However, I'm not talking about that.
Ivan III, having married, becomes tsar by right. A king with a capital C. (Caesar / Caesar or Caesar is an obligatory part of the title of Roman emperors during the Roman state). And Moscow, therefore, followed Tsargrad (Constantinople) - the new Rome, the Third.
An interesting addition from the site otvetina.narod.ru:
“But it’s one thing to call yourself a king, and it’s another to be a king. Until the middle of the 15th century in Ancient Russia, in addition to the Byzantine emperors, the khans of the Golden Horde were also called tsars. The great dukes were subordinate to the Tatar khans for several centuries and were forced to pay tribute to them, so the grand duke could become a king only after he ceased to be a tributary of the khan. But in this respect, too, the situation has changed. The Tatar yoke was overthrown, and the Grand Duke finally stopped attempts to demand tribute from the Russian princes."
When we put everything back on its feet, we will see that already under Ivan III it is possible to snatch a large piece of Great Tartary: the former part of it, called "Muscovy", becomes independent with the center in the city of Moscow, where Ivan proclaims himself new king.
It was then, apparently, that the age of slavish lawlessness began its mournful course, which later grew into serfdom. History is gradually being rewritten, Tartary is gradually turning into a fairy tale about the Tatar-Mongol yoke, betrayal and a just cause - War, the sovereign is a fine fellow and all in white.
I want (I want it !!), friends, to believe in the version that serfdom is a myth. That under this shameful case there is only a system of relationships between the inhabitants of the fortresses. When everyone, as if in reserve, is in military service and if something happens, takes his place in the fortress, exercising and receiving protection from the enemy in it. The collection of taxes, the tax on the fortress, and realizes this very serfdom. There is such a version, very beautiful, slender. And perhaps something like that took place … somewhere.
Somewhere, but not here. We had not a play on words and a substitution of concepts, but real trash.
The history textbooks, which some of my readers strongly advise me to take and, finally, read and not disgrace themselves, are passed off as a great blessing to unite the "scattered" principalities into a single state. In fact, I see that the result of this "good" soon became that terrible, serfdom.
The peasants lived in village communities, in which a special peasant world was formed. Some of these communities found themselves under the rule of landowners, who levied taxes on every household and peasant farm. The most freedom-loving went to "inconveniences", where free villages were formed. As they strengthened, the "powerful of that world" again imposed taxes on them. Some of the peasants, for whom "will" was not an empty word, again went to uninhabited places.
In 1646, Tsar Mikhail Romanov introduced serfdom in Muscovy.
Mikhail Romanov. Beard, still Tartar clothes and headdress.
The first Russian tsar from the Romanov family, Mikhail Romanov, was the son of the boyar Fyodor Nikitich Romanov and the boyar Ksenia Ivanovna Romanova.
Romanov needed a way to simplify and increase the collection of taxes. For this, the peasants were "assigned" to the owners of the land. The tsar began to endow people who were in military service with "estates" - lands with peasants living on them.
This is how the "landowners" appeared. They had to feed themselves from the peasants and were obliged to ensure the collection of taxes to the royal treasury.
The peasants who lived on the lands of churches and monasteries were assigned to the clergy. Some of the peasants living on the estates of the royal court were assigned to the clerks of the court.
The collection of taxes "to the treasury" has become more efficient. But on the other hand, such a law deprived many Russian peasants of their age-old value - "free will".
Free will
At first glance, "free will" is a meaningless expression, like "butter oil."
However, it has a very ancient, and extremely important for the study of this chapter, meaning.
In ancient Russia, concluding a "row" (agreement) with each other, the princes wrote: "And the boyars and the children of the boyars, and the servants, and the peasants have free will."
When this saying took shape, every peasant was free to plow wild land, create fertile areas, grow bread and other products. The peasants, with their labor, turned empty, worthless land into valuable land.
At first, for the protection of such land, the princes demanded the payment of taxes, and the peasants agreed to pay.
Then princes and boyars turned such land into their possessions by force, and the peasants were forced to hire or move away from such possessions. The Russian plain is vast, so there was where to go.
Hiring to work for the landowner, the peasant paid him with his labor or harvest ispolu (half of the harvest). Paid in honor and conscience with the landowner - free. That is, "free will" meant freedom to live on the land of the owner, as long as he lives, and to leave wherever he pleases. Even in the Middle Ages, a peasant, if he so desired, could leave the landowner's territory, fulfilling his obligations on lease and loan. A source
Church and slavery
Yes, and about the role of the Church in enslaving the peasants. If without any special emotions, then the Russian Orthodox Church not only did not condemn serfdom spiritually, but also enjoyed great material benefits. Almost immediately, a huge mass of peasants were assigned to monasteries and churches.
The revision of 1678 shows that a quarter of all serfs are with the clergy.
A particularly large share was in the Moscow Region. In 1719 - 1.1 million of the 1.6 million of all serfs of the clergy.
Rampant serfdom and Peter the Great
Of course, even before 1646, the official date for the introduction of serfdom, the peasants had a hard life, but fundamental changes in the position of the peasants came EXACTLY with the accession of the Romanov dynasty.
For example, by this time the timeframes for detecting fugitive peasants had increased to 15 years. And in the Cathedral Code published in 1649, two fundamentally new circumstances appeared:
First, an unlimited period was announced for the search for fugitive peasants. The lord now had the right to return the fugitive himself or even his descendants with all the good he had gained on the run, if he could prove that the peasant had fled from his estate.
Secondly, even a peasant free from debts lost the right to change his place of residence - he became "strong", that is, he was permanently attached to the estate where the census of the 1620s found him. In the event of his departure, the Code ordered to forcefully return a previously free person back together with the entire household and family. Hit hard, in short, and did not become a resident of the fortress.
In fact, the Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich made a social revolution, depriving the majority of the country's population of the right to freely move and dispose of themselves, their labor and property.
During the reign of Peter the Great, the serf trade acquired the most cynical and frank character. People are being sold in bulk and singly, in market squares, separating families, separating children from parents, and wives from husbands.
And note that we are not talking about some brought slaves or prisoners, but about our own, relatives! Yes, only, relatives?
The Emperor Peter himself distributed over two hundred thousand male souls to private property (state statistics took into account only men) and, therefore, in reality, about half a million people of both sexes. These distributions were, as a rule, gifts from Peter to his entourage.
From the end of the 17th century and, especially, from the beginning of the 18th century, serfdom in Russia acquired a fundamentally different character than that which it had at its inception. It began as a form of state "tax" for the peasants, a kind of social obligation, and in its development came to the fact that the serfs, deprived of all civil and human rights, were enslaved by their landowners.
The apogee of serfdom was the period of the reign of Catherine the Great.
These over 30 years (1762-1796) became the time of the greatest enslavement of the peasants. The landowner could send the peasants to Siberia for some misdeeds, sell them as recruits, the peasants were forbidden to complain about the landowner to the emperor, although they could go to court. During her reign, Catherine gave away about 800 thousand peasants, which became a record.
There was no serfdom in Siberia
And here's an incident: Wikipedia mentions that there was no serfdom in most of the territory of Russia: in all Siberian, Asian and Far Eastern provinces and regions, in the Cossack regions, in the North Caucasus, in the Caucasus itself, in the Transcaucasus, in Finland and in Alaska …
It is believed that serfdom in Siberia was absent for one reason - the settlement of this region began during the Stolypin reform. With a population density of 1 person per 2 km2, it was not easy.
Tyumen today:
“The exhibition features 50 copies of original documents stored in the Tobolsk archive. Each is of historical value. And together they debunk the opinion prevailing among the inhabitants that there was no serfdom in Siberia. It was, of course, like throughout Russia, only on a much smaller scale. So, by 1698, the monasteries of the Tobolsk province numbered 6,500 male serfs. The figure, considering the vast expanses of Western and Eastern Siberia, is modest."
Well?
Considering ancient maps or, at least, Remizov's atlas, where the whole of Siberia is populated so that an apple has nowhere to fall, it all sounds pretty funny …
You wiggle your brains, compare the facts, think, it's not for me to chew everything.
Lawlessness was in Muscovy, but beyond the Urals, everything is relatively calm. The first tsars, "the unification of the Russian lands" and as a result - a yoke that no Tatar-Mongols dreamed of … The Romanovs … and so on and so forth. Fold, fold the puzzle, pieces, fragments, I have already sketched a lot.
And who are we? And what kind of Tartary was that? AND? What do you think? It wasn't, was it? Intrigues of the Vatican? The fifth column and the State Department?
Officially: all Slavs are slaves
On the wiki, you can still find the article Slavery among the Slavs, in which we read:
“Among the dependent population of ancient Russia in the 9th-12th centuries, slaves occupied a very significant place. Their labor even prevailed in the old Russian patrimony. In modern historical science, the idea of the patriarchal nature of slavery in Russia is especially popular."
So, the Slavs are slaves in their souls from the very beginning of time, no more, no less.
Russian truth pointed to the following appearance of slaves in Russia, in addition to the capture of prisoners:
- self-sale into slavery,
- marriage with a slave,
- admission to the service (in tiuns, key keepers),
- "Without a row" (that is, without any reservations),
- bankruptcy
Also, a runaway purchase or a person who committed a serious crime could become a slave.
The researcher E. I. Kolycheva writes about slavery in ancient Russia as follows:
“… servitude in Russia as a legal institution was not something exceptional, unique. It is characterized by the same most important features as slavery in other countries, including ancient slavery."
In Russia, there were several forms of slavery: servants and servants (In the 6th-9th centuries, servants were captive slaves. In the 9th-10th centuries, they became an object of sale and purchase. In the middle of the 11th century, it was replaced by the term “slaves.” In the 18th-19th centuries, the word “servants” meant the courtyard people of the landowner).
Slavery in Russia is known from many medieval sources, in particular, from the laws of the "Russian Truth" of the Kiev prince Yaroslav the Wise. In addition, some peoples (in particular, the Varangians) had the abduction and sale of slaves as their main source of income, and therefore references were included in some sources, sometimes mistakenly understood as references to the Slavs as living off the slave trade.
In particular, this is how the Arab traveler of the first half of the 10th century Ibn Fadlan describes the Varangian slave trade in the Volga city of Bulgar.
“As for ar-Rusiyya, it is located on an island surrounded by a lake. The island on which they (Rus) live is three days' journey, covered with forests and swamps, unhealthy and cheese to the point that as soon as a person steps on the ground, the latter shakes due to the abundance of moisture in it. They have a king called the Khakan of the Rus. They attack the Slavs, approach them on ships, disembark, take them prisoner, take them to Khazaran and Bulkar and sell them there. They do not have arable land, and eat only what they bring from the land of the Slavs"
(The text clearly shows the opposition of the "Rus" -varyags described by the author to the Slavs).
So, the position of slaves in Russia was similar to the position of serfs. The difference was that Slavery is a system of social organization, and Serfdom is a set of legal norms of a feudal state. The serf could pass to another owner on St. George's Day (until it was canceled already in 1581) and could have property. The slave was deprived of such an opportunity. Later, slaves merged with slaves, courtyard people and other categories of serfs.
Oh, and I piled up facts and investigations! It is necessary to taxi somehow. What do we see? Tin and hopelessness since the beginning of time. And today, if you look around, it's not much better. Was serfdom or was it the invention of enemies? Let's stop fussing already. It was!!
But the reasons, sources of this phenomenon are completely different from what the official history presents to us, for there was another Russia.
Otherwise, as the seizure, change of power, the coming to power of the Romanovs, the split of the once united country, the one that is designated as Tartaria on the old maps, I cannot explain this horror.
I am suspicious of statements that allegedly from ancient times in Russia (surrounded by a lake, according to the memoirs of Ibn Fadlan), slavery flourished even before Ivan III.
There are other sources saying that the Russians did not have slavery and even the enemies taken in full were free to choose to live freely together or leave, and other facts about which quite a lot has already been written. For me personally, the indisputable evidence of this glorious past is the Russian language and the so-called "folk costume" which I wrote about in my article: "On the search for truth and key images".
Whose will you be?
Here's another thought that has tormented me for a long time:
Russian female surnames are inclined to answer the question "whose". That is, the wife of the husband of such and such. Petrova, Smirnova, etc.
Male surnames often end in "in". They bow down, answering the question "whose". Are not there traces of a slave past?
I myself have such a surname ending in "in", and it is not sweet for me to talk about it, but in the search for the truth it is stupid to close our eyes to unsightly facts - you will not get far.
Wild version
So when did the seizure of Russian lands take place? Or tartar? Or Scythian? Skitskikh? Beastly? Heperborean? And by whom? And why?
Maybe everything was so, or maybe not at all? Could it be that there is not a single word of truth in history, well, just absolutely?
Maybe everything is so wrong that this picture, below, in which behind the wild version that Alexander is showing Napoleon the Russian army, is hidden an even wilder truth - the last negotiations of the Tartar khans - the tsars of Tartaria - and the allies of Napoleon and Alexander in the war of 1812 year after which that same slavery began?
For more details on the strangeness of the war of 1812, see the films of Sergei Ignatenko, but I am only voicing the version concerning serfdom.
As Sergei noted, these are not Alexander's subjects. They are wearing hats! These are equals with equals, and the picture clearly shows the opposition of one to the other. Those who know how to see everything clearly and without my explanations.
conclusions
So, here is slavery that has not reached Siberia. Here are the reasons, and effects, and explanations. Here is the rampant serfdom during the accession of the Romanov dynasty connected with the history of Peter the Great, even earlier, the third conquest of the Tartar lands, which began with Ivan.
This is such a network of events of the darkness of the ages that led to terrible consequences. So that we do not know our history, and we still cannot squeeze the slave psychology out of ourselves, and even more, many continue to justify serfdom even now.
Of course, the wild version, at first glance, is not all, of course, so simple, but what if the truth is still somewhere close by?
And you, reader, whose will you be?
Author: Sil2