1723 - Slaves become serfs in Russia

Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. The government of Tsar Feodor III had formally converted Russian agricultural slaves into serfs earlier, in 1679.



In Kievan Rus and Muscovy, legal systems usually referred to slaves as kholopy. A kholop's master had unlimited power over his life: he could kill him, sell him, or use him as payment upon a debt. The master, however, had responsibility before the law for his kholop's actions. Individuals could become kholop as a result of capture, selling themselves, being sold for debts, committing crimes, or marriage to a kholop. Until the late 10th century, the kholopy represented a majority among the servants who worked lords' lands.

Russian slavery did not have racial restrictions. Russian girls were legally allowed to be sold in Russian controlled Novgorod to Tatars from Kazan in the 1600s by Russian law. Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians were allowed to be sold to Crimean Tatars in Moscow.




In 1665 Tatars were allowed to buy from the Russians, Polish and Lithuanian slaves. Before 1649 Russians could be sold to Muslims under Russian law in Moscow. This contrasted with other places in Europe outside Russia where Muslims were not allowed to own Christians.

An anonymous Lithuanian author wrote in De moribus tartarorum, lituanorum et moscorum:

    Among these unfortunates there are many strong ones; if they [the Tatars] have not castrated them yet, they cut off their ears and nostrils, burned cheeks and foreheads with the burning iron and forced them to work with their chains and shackles during the daylight, and sit in the prisons during the night; they are sustained by the meager food consisting of the dead animals' meat, rotten, full of worms, which even a dog would not eat. The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures....

By the sixteenth century, the slave population of the Grand Duchy of Moscow consisted mostly of those who had sold themselves into slavery owing to poverty. They worked predominantly as household servants, among the richest families, and indeed generally produced less than they consumed.

Laws forbade slaveowners to free slaves in times of famine in order to avoid feeding them, and slaves generally remained with their owning family for a long time; the Domostroy, an advice book, speaks of the need to choose slaves of good character and to provide for them properly.

With the conquest of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, Russians enslaved natives in military operations and in Cossack raids. Cases involving native women were frequent, hold as concubines, sometimes mortgaged to other men and traded for commercial profit. The Russian government generally opposed the conversion of natives to Christianity because it would free them from paying the yasak, the fur tribute. The government decreed that the non-Christian slaves were to be freed. This in turn led local Russian owners of slaves to petition the government for conversion and even involved forced conversions of their slaves. The rules stipulated that the native convert became a serf of the converter. As an indication of the extent of the slavery system, one voyevoda reported in 1712 that "there is hardly a Cossack in Yakutsk who does not have natives as slaves".