Mertvye Dushi (Russia, 1700s-)

Dead Souls 🇷🇺
Location: Russia
Definition: Fraudulent schemes with land and peasants in the 18th and 19th centuries
Keywords: Russia – Nobility – Serfdom – Scheme – Credit – Domestic labour – Domination – Functional ambivalence – Gaming the system – Investment – Normative ambivalence
Clusters: Gaming the system
Author: Andrey V. Gornostaev
Affiliation: Center for Imperial History, NRU Higher School of Economics, Russia
Website: https://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/401776642

By Andrey V. Gornostaev, Center for Imperial History, NRU Higher School of Economics, Russia

References to mertvye dushi (dead souls) commonly occur to explain fraudulent and immoral practices of the nobility in imperial Russia. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century, aristocrats managed to sell serfs and land multiple times, exploiting purchasers’ inability to travel to St. Petersburg or Moscow and register legal titles (LeDonne 1984: 151). Likewise, after the issuance of the 1762 decree on the resettlement to Siberia, some landlords began banishing inefficient and infirm serfs, who committed no actual crime. For each resettled peasant, his landlord obtained a recruit waiver allowing him to save “good” workers during the next conscription cycle (Blum 1961: 430). The term itself originates from the famous novel Dead Souls (Mertvye Dushi) by Nikolai Gogol that vividly describes the lives and practices of the Russian provincial nobility in the mid-nineteenth century (Gogol’ 1842). Specifically, the story centers around Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a former state official, who visits serf-owners to purchase their dead souls, serfs deceased but, importantly, still listed on the census rolls and thus carrying a tax obligation. The protagonist intended to acquire a large roster of such “souls” that would entitle him to receive a generous state loan, whose purpose was to facilitate the settlement of new lands in Kherson gubernia. In his case, however, these serfs would exist only on paper, and Chichikov planned to use the money for his own benefit. The scheme is discovered in the end, and he is forced to flee.

The idea for the story was likely brought to Gogol’s attention by another prominent writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, who learned about a real case of purchasing dead souls from his Moscow acquaintance. “No one, he [Pushkin] used to say, can observe the poshlost’ (vulgarity and philistinism) of a Russian man better than Gogol” (Iz vospominanii 1865: 745-46). In that case, the purchaser pawned dead souls and gained a considerable profit. Another version attributes the emergence of the plot to Gogol’s time in Mirgorod uezd. There, the writer visited the house of the nobleman Kharlampii Pivinskii, who bought several dead souls to qualify for a license to produce alcohol that required the ownership of at least 50 people (Giliarovskii 1902: 47-48).

Among the variety of Chichikov activities, the most well-researched is the scheme of buying runaway serfs by nobles in the eighteenth century. Unlike those in Gogol’s novel, these serfs were not deceased but missing at the time of the transaction because they had fled from their official localities (Gornostaev 2021).

This scheme originated from the particularities of Russia’s legal and socioeconomic development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the 1590s and 1649, Russian peasants gradually lost their right to move and change their place of residence that had traditionally taken place over two weeks around St. George’s Day (November 26). This process culminated with the promulgation of the Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) in 1649 that permanently attached all peasants to land (Hellie 1971). While some were fixed to the lands owned by the crown and church, the majority found themselves on the lands owned by individual noblemen. According to the Code, another nobleman could acquire seigniorial peasants (aka serfs) only together with the land, when it was transferred, sold, or inherited. At the same time, however, the Code failed to define both the legal status of serfs and the extent of landlords’ proprietary rights over them. As a result, during the ensuing century and a half, nobles’ authority over their peasants steadily increased, and they gained new rights, such as the trade in peasants without land.

A deed of purchase (1743). With permission of Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Smolenskoi oblasti, f. 106, op. 3, d. 6, l. 1. Source: Andrey V. Gornostaev. © Andrey V. Gornostaev.

The first known examples of such trade date from the 1660s, but they occurred without official approval. The practice was legalized in 1682 in response to landowners’ appeal that the right of trade would assist them in finalizing their transactions over present and runaway peasants. The 1682 decree sanctioned the sale of runaway serfs with the condition that their new owners “had to search for them according to their deeds of purchase.” All transactions had to be recorded at an appropriate governmental body (Man’kov 1962: 200-202).

The trade in serfs without land and runaways became commonplace in the first half of the eighteenth century when a considerable number of peasants were on the run as a result of the tax reform and frequent military campaigns (see also krugovaia poruka). Active in the early 1740s, the senatorial commission calculated that over 500,000 peasants fled from their homes between 1719 and 1742, while the total male population comprised 5,331,673 according to the first population census. Examined by Nina Golikova, 50 out of 467 deeds of purchase from the early 1720s pertained to runaway peasants. The analysis of runaway cases suggests that three reasons could explain such seemingly strange purchases: (1) to acquire in ownership “not only runaways themselves but their wives or husbands, children and even grandchildren born on the run;” (2) “to obtain runaways’ possessions including tools, flock, grain, and anything else;” and (3) to collect compensation from a runaway’s harborer” (Golikova 1972: 316).

Among these reasons, the right to collect compensation for the years of harboring was the most significant and could yield very substantial profit. From 1683 to 1754, the amount of compensation fee per year of harboring owed to runaways’ legal owners increased from 20 to 200 rubles for a male and 100 rubles for a female serf. In the government’s view, such large fines functioned both as a deterrent for potential harborers and an incentive for owners to commit to searching for their missing peasants.

The very acquisition of runaway peasants points out that their new owners were quite certain about their ability to locate their new property. In some instances, deeds of purchase contained information about the whereabouts of runaways, thereby facilitating their recovery. Thus, a 1743 deed of purchase of 25 runaways by Pelageia Konstantinova, included their current localities. Konstantinova was so confident about their recovery that she agreed to pay the poll tax for them (see the image), which typically was the seller’s responsibility until the next population census.

In other cases, it was not the sellers but the buyers who knew or had suspicions about fugitives’ hideouts. The major feature helping to identify these buyers as “Chichikovs” is how astonishingly quickly – usually within a year of acquisition – they discovered the runaways and filed lawsuits against their harborers. So far, eleven such schemes have been discovered in archival cases and secondary literature.

The most profitable scheme dates back to 1763 when a court counselor, Ivan Ignat’ev bought two runaways with their families and possessions for 150 rubles. Immediately after the purchase, Ignat’ev filed a lawsuit against their harborer, the collegiate assessor Melnitskii, in whose village they resided since 1724. At the time of the proceeding, both peasants were deceased: one in 1758 and another in 1763. Therefore, Ignat’ev demanded the payment of compensation for the periods until their deaths. Although some complications and appeals delayed the resolution of the case until 1776, Ignat’ev succeeded in acquiring not only the runaways’ descendants but also in making a staggering profit, over 7,000 rubles (Semevskii 1903: 398). Although deceased, these peasants were not dead souls in the Gogolian sense but officially considered as typical runaway peasants. Their acquisition, however, was made to exploit similar legal gaps and achieve similar financial goals.

The available sources indicate that nobles who engaged in such schemes were usually at the higher echelons of imperial social hierarchy and had the influence and resources to conduct a search and participate in lengthy and costly court proceedings. The considerable monetary gains, nevertheless, allowed them to further their careers, support their financial enterprises, or acquire luxury goods associated with the noble lifestyle in the eighteenth century.

References

Gogol’, N.V. 1842. Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova ili mertvye dushi. Moscow

‘Iz vospominanii grafa V.A. Sologuba’. 1865. Russkii arkhiv, no. 5-6

Giliarovskii, V.A. 1902. Na rodine Gogolia (Iz poezdki po Ukraine). Moscow

LeDonne, J. 1984. Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism 1762-1796. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Blum, J. 1961. Lord and Peasant in Russia: from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Gornostaev, A.V. 2021. ‘Trade in Runaway Peasants and ‘The Chichikov Phenomenon’ in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Journal of Social History 54 (3): 715-740

Hellie, R. 1971. Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Golikova, N.B. 1972. ‘Torgovlia krepostnymi bez zemli v 20-kh godakh XVIII v. (Po materialam krepostnykh knig gorodov Povolzh’ia)’, Istoricheskie zapiski 90: 303-31

Semevskii V.I. 1903. Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, vol. 1. St. Petersburg

Man’kov, A.G. 1962. Razvitie krepostnogo prava v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka. Moscow