Meanwhile Peter III. had been succeeded by his consort, Catherine II. As she had no legal right to the throne, and was by birth a foreigner, she could not gain the affections of the people, and was obliged to court the favour of the Noblesse. In such a difficult position she could not venture to apply her humane principles to the question of serfage. Even during the first years of her reign, when she had no reason to fear agrarian disturbances, she increased rather than diminished the power of the proprietors over their serfs, and the Pugatchef affair confirmed her in this line of policy. During her reign serfage may be said to have reached its climax. The serfs were regarded by the law as part of the master's immovable property*—as part of the working capital of the estate—and as such they were bought, sold, and given as presents** in hundreds and thousands, sometimes with the land, and sometimes without it, sometimes in families, and sometimes individually. The only legal restriction was that they should not be offered for sale at the time of the conscription, and that they should at no time be sold publicly by auction, because such a custom was considered as "unbecoming in a European State." In all other respects the serfs might be treated as private property; and this view is to be found not only in the legislation, but also in the popular conceptions. It became customary—a custom that continued down to the year 1861—to compute a noble's fortune, not by his yearly revenue or the extent of his estate, but by the number of his serfs. Instead of saying that a man had so many hundreds or thousands a year, or so many acres, it was commonly said that he had so many hundreds or thousands of "souls." And over these "souls" he exercised the most unlimited authority. The serfs had no legal means of self-defence. The Government feared that the granting to them of judicial or administrative protection would inevitably awaken in them a spirit of insubordination, and hence it was ordered that those who presented complaints should be punished with the knout and sent to the mines.*** It was only in extreme cases, when some instance of atrocious cruelty happened to reach the ears of the Sovereign, that the authorities interfered with the proprietor's jurisdiction, and these cases had not the slightest influence on the proprietors in general.****
* See ukaz of October 7th, 1792.
** As an example of making presents of serfs, the following
may be cited. Count Panin presented some of his
subordinates for an Imperial recompense, and on receiving a
refusal, made them a present of 4000 serfs from his own
estates.—Belaef, p. 320.
*** See the ukazes of August 22d, 1767, and March 30th,
1781.
**** Perhaps the most horrible case on record is that of a
certain lady called Saltykof, who was brought to justice in
1768. According to the ukaz regarding her crimes, she had
killed by inhuman tortures in the course of ten or eleven
years about a hundred of her serfs, chiefly of the female
sex, and among them several young girls of eleven and twelve
years of age. According to popular belief her cruelty
proceeded from cannibal propensities, but this was not
confirmed by the judicial investigation. Details in the
Russki Arkhiv, 1865, pp. 644-652. The atrocities practised
on the estate of Count Araktcheyef, the favourite of
Alexander I. at the commencement of last century, have been
frequently described, and are scarcely less revolting.
