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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Many of the names that were used for the peasant during the centuries of Russian history tell much about the people to whom they were applied. To give just a few examples, three of the terms that were employed during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, starožilcy, “old dwellers,” novoporjadčiki, “new renters,” and polovniki, “sharers,” were descriptive of tenurial status. Earlier, during the Kievan era (ninth to thirteenth centuries), the mass of the free rural population was known as smerdy (the singular is smerd). This name, though less obvious, is actually more revealing of social position than the examples just given. Philologists have pointed out that in all probability it was derived from an ancient root meaning “man.” Once, they suggest, it may have been used to describe everyone. By the Kievan period, however, the word was used only for the lowest class of free men and had become associated with the verb smerdeti, “to stink.”
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6 Expanded Version, Article 1.
7 Ibid., Article 3.
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Professor Vernadsky excludes the smerdy from the ranks of the ljudi. He writes that the ljudi were those men who held enough land to guarantee them both a comfortable living and a social position superior to that of the mass of the rural population (i.e., the smerdy). He calls the ljudi the middle class of Kievan free society, the upper class being the prince's men, and the lower class the smerdy. Vernadsky, G., Kievan Russia (New Haven, 1948), pp. 136, 141.Google Scholar
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20 Not all the students of this era are agreed that there was this division in the smerdy. Many, especially among the older authorities, maintained that the status of all smerdy was the same. For representative views see Institut Istorii Ak. Nauk SSSR, Pravda Russkaja, II, 171–76. Others, notably S. V. Juskov and G. Vernadsky among modern writers, insist that the term smerdy was not a nomen generale for all the peasantry but referred only to the “dependent” peasants, i.e. those who had come under the control of a private landlord (Juskov) or whose legal status was limited by the prince's authority (Vernadsky). S. V. Juskov, Ocerki po istorii feodalizma v Kievskoj Rusi (Moscow, Leningrad, 1939), pp. 89 ff; Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, pp. 143-46. The interpretation presented here is that suggested by a number of historians, among them M. Vladimirskij-Budanov, N. P. Pavlov-Silvanskij, and, especially, B. D. Grekov.
21 Expanded Version, Article 45.
22 Ibid., Article 46.
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24 Short Version, Articles 19–28, 32–33.
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