50 For his psychological security the serviceman needed to have the peasant beneath him, and, if possible, under his control. When peasants fled, the serviceman lost not only financial support but also the presence of degraded people under his authority who reminded him daily that he was superior. . . A closed society, then, was of crucial importance if the middle service class was to preserve its prestige, its limited authority and power, and its perquisites, particularly its claim to the bulk of the peasant labor force. In 1648, serious disturbances in Moscow and other cities finally forced the government to give in to the demands of the service nobility. The Zemskii sobor, which was meeting in Moscow, approved in 1649 a legal code, the so-called Sobornoe Ulozhenie, which eliminated the statute of limitation {ptmena urochnykh let) and thus permanently confirmed the institution of serfdom.^® The most important paragraph concerning serfdom (XI: 2) stated that “fugitive peasants and landless peasants {bobyli) are to be returned to persons of all ranks according to the register {pistsovye knigi) without regard to any time limit. Regardless of category, the peasants were now bound forever to the estates where they had been registered in 1646—47 and were thus transformed into human accessories to those parcels of real estate. After 1649, then, the Russian peasantry was transformed into “a rigidly stratified caste. At the same time that the institution of serfdom was confirmed, the differences between hereditary and service estates were reduced, which in turn reflected the process of integration taking place within the Russian nobility in juridical terms.^® Among other things, it was stated that the service estates could be used as sources of pension payments for servicemen who had completed their service, and that they could even be signed over to widows (vdovino pomest'e) or daughters {devkino, dochernee pomest'e) of these servicemen. It was further stated that the service nobility had the right to exchange, mortgage, and even to sell parts of their service estates. The legal code also discussed “family pomest’e" {rodstvennoe pomest’e)^ which, as, B. I. Syromiatnikov has pointed out, was a term that constituted a legal contradictio in adiecto.^^ During the course of the seventeenth century, service estates increasingly came to be considered. ” 57 » 58 Concerning the connection between the widespread disturbances in Russia in 1648 and the drawing up of the law code, see M. N. Tikhomirov, Klassovia bor’ba v Rossii XVII V. (Moscow, 1969), 170—188. Sobornoe Ulozhenie 1649 g., 161. Hellie, 142. •*» Volkov (1970), 92. B. I. Syromiatnikov, “Regnliarnoe” gosudarstvo Petra Pervogo i ego ideologiia (Moscow, 1943), 125.
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