1. Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 112 Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 54.

3. Pipes, Richard, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974), xxii, 64–65, 93, 110Google Scholar.

4. Sergeevich, V. I., Lektsii i izsledovaniia po drevnei istorii russkago prava (S. Peterburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1910), 527–29Google Scholar.

5. Man'kov, A. G., Ulozhenie 1649 goda-kodeks feodal'nogo prava Rossii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980 Google Scholar, 93. See, however, Veselovskii, S. B., Feodal'noe zemlevladenie v severo-vostochnoi Rusi (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1947), I: PtGoogle Scholar. 1. Veselovskii categorized hereditary estates as private property and provided an excellent discussion of the law of inheritance and clan rights to property in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Unfortunately, he considered only a fraction of the legislative materials available on the nature of ownership of hereditary estates.

6. Vladimirskii-Budanov, M. F., Obzor istorii russkago prava, 6th ed. (S. Peterburg and Kiev: Izd. N. la. Ogloblina, 1909), 547–65Google Scholar.

7. Blum, Jerome, Lord and Peasant in Russia (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 24–56 Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 93-105.

9. Ibid., 168-88.

10. Kobrin, V. B., Vlast’ i sobstvennost’ v srednevekovoi Rossii (Moscow: Izd. “Mysl',” 1985), 32-42, 68–89 Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 90-135.

12. Iushkov, S. V. and Cherepnin, L. V., ed., Pamiatniki russkogo prava (Moscow: Izd. iuridicheskoi literatury, 1952-63), 1: 77–80, 108-20Google Scholar; Chistiakov, O. I., ed., Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo X-XX vekov, (Moscow: Izd. “Iuridicheskaia literatura,” 1984), 1: 47–73 Google Scholar.

13. Tikhomirov, M. N., ed., Zakon Sudnyi liudem, kratkoi redaktsii (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1961), 104–9Google Scholar; Zakon Sudnyi liudem (Court Law for the People), trans. H. W. Dewey and A. M. Kleimola, Michigan Slavic Materials, No. 14 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1977), 1-51.

14. Vladimirskii-Budanov, M. F., Khristomatiia po istorii russkogo prava (S. Peterburg-Kiev: Izdanie knigoprodatsva N.Ia.Oglobina, 1909), 132–78Google Scholar; Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 1: 331-43.

15. Khristomatiia, 184-200; Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 1: 304-8.

16. Pamiatniki, 3: 341-418; Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 2: 54-61.

17. Pamiatniki, 4: 227-261; Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 2: 97-128.

18. Hellie, Richard, ed., The Muscovite Law Code: The Ulozhenie of 1649 (Irvine: Chs. Schlacks, 1988 Google Scholar).

19. Weickhardt, George G., “Due Process and Equal Justice in the Muscovite Codes,” Russian Review 51, no. 4 (1992): 463–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Hellie, Richard, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Hellie, Richard, Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 Google Scholar).

21. Weickhardt, “Due Process. ”

22. Roman and Byzantine law had thoroughly articulated the concept of private property and had regulated it in detail. For example, book I of the Digest of Justinian, one of the great compilations of Byzantine law which dates from the sixth century, contains a brief theoretical discussion of the distinction between public property (res publico), such as city walls and rivers, and private property (res privata), which included most other things. Otherwise the concept of private property is taken for granted in the Digest, a large part of which deals with the law relating to private property. The highest right which one could have in private property was ownership (dominium) which is not discussed extensively in the Digest, presumably because it was a commonly understood concept. The highest form of ownership in landed property was the estate (praedium) ( Watson, Alan, ed. and trans., The Digest of Justinian [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985], 4 volsGoogle Scholar.).

23. The Ecloga has been translated into modern Russian in Ekloga: Vizantiiskii zakonodatel'nyi svod VIII veka, trans. I. E. Lipshits (Moscow: Izd. “Nauka,” 1965). The Ecloga also appeared in the Kormchaia kniga and Merilo pravednoe, which were compendiums of canon law. See Kaiser, Daniel H., The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18–29 Google Scholar.

24. For the influence of the Ecloga on the Zakon Sudnyi liudem, see Tikhomirov, , Zakon Sudnyi liudem kratkoi redaktsii, 25 Google Scholar.

25. For discussion of these issues see Kaiser, , Growth, 46–50 Google ScholarPubMed; and Dewey and Klemola, Zakon, introduction.

26. Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo; 1: 328-29.

27. Kobrin, 105.

28. Pamiatniki, 5: 463-64.

29. Weickhardt, “Due Process. ”

30. Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor, 551 Google Scholar.

31. Sergeevich, 535-43.

32. Kobrin, 196-98.

33. Pamiatniki, 4: 529-31; for more on this decree and the decrees of 1551 and 1572, see Hellie, , Enserfment, 42 and 292Google Scholar.

34. Pamiatniki, 5: 461-63.

35. Ibid., 5: 430-525.

36. Stashevskii, E. D., Zemlevladenie Moskovskogo dvorianstva v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow: S. P. IakovJev, 1911), 18–19 Google Scholar.

37. Anna M. Kleimola “ ‘In Accordance with the canons of the Holy Apostles': Muscovite Dowries and Women's Property Rights,” Russian Review 51, no. 2 [1992], 204-29), traces the evolution of dowry and the inheritance rights of women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She concludes that the rights of widows to inherit property reached a zenith in the mid-sixteenth century but were restricted by the 1649 Law Code and its seventeenth century precedents. The rights of widows to inherit property were the obverse of clan rights. Because a wife was from a different clan, an increase in her property rights would diminish those of her husband's clan, and vice versa. Thus Kleimola's analysis signifies that the 1649 Code benefited the paternal clan. This conclusion also tends to support Kobrin's thesis. However correct Kleimola may be that seventeenth century legislation restricted dowry rights which women had acquired in the sixteenth century, the 1649 Code clearly restored inheritance rights of women which had been eliminated in the 1562 decree.

38. The Laws Respecting Women (Dobbs Ferry: Ocean Publishers, 1974 [reprinted from London: J. Johnson, 1777]), 221-30.

39. Much urban land had been acquired by church officials, monasteries, boyars and other tax-exempt owners, eroding the tax base of the town (posad). Chapter 19 of the Law Code provided that all such property was to be confiscated (with compensation), was to be subjected to the same taxes as land held by the tax-paying townsmen and was to be sellable in the future only to tax-paying townsmen. The provision restricting alienation to townsmen proved impossible to enforce and was eventually repealed in 1681 (Hellie, Enserfment, 245). For a good discussion of urban property see Michael Hittle, J., The Service City, State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 33–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This development incidentally buttresses the argument made here that Muscovite legislation was tending to create a free market in land.

40. Whatever may have been the intent of the draftsmen as to the creation of a free market in land, there is little evidence to indicate that an active market for rural hereditary estates developed in the seventeenth century. While I have not inspected the Central State Archives of Early Documents, the guidebook to that archive contains no category of holdings for documents of purchase and sale other than sale by the government of “escheated, treasury, confiscated and vacant lands” (although private sale may be located under the category of “exchanges ” ) (Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnykh aktov SSSR. Putovoditel’ [Moscow: GAU-TsGADA, 1991], 1: 94). Of the 80, 000 records in Hellie's University of Chicago data bank on seventeenth century prices, less than 100 are for land and villages (personal communication from Professor Hellie, July 1992). However, the Law Code's provisions on urban property would indicate that there was a lively market in this commodity. See footnote 39 above. The many sixteenth century decrees restricting alienation of hereditary estates would likewise suggest that sale was a common phenomenon. Explanations for the apparent dearth of archival material relating to commercial transactions in property are topics for future research. Here only several hypotheses can be advanced. The most obvious reason was that the Law Code did not require rural transactions to be recorded (10: 250). There were also perhaps incentives under the tax system for concealing purchase transactions. For example, seal fees on purchase and sale transactions may have amounted to as much as 3% of the purchase price plus an additional fee per chetvert (1.3 acres) (18: 15; 18: 17). Service class landholders may have also wanted to conceal transactions because sale of their lands would involve a loss of their political and social prestige. Or perhaps many documents were destroyed in one of the fires which destroyed portions of the chancellery records (Law Code 17: 55 refers to the 1626 fire).

41. Blum, , Lord and Peasant, 182–85Google Scholar.

42. Ibid., 185.

43. Man'kov has argued that, because service obligations also attached to hereditary estates (by virtue of Ivan IV's 1556 decree), such estates were not truly private property in the western sense. The burden imposed by Ivan IV's decree was, however, to provide armed men, who did not necessarily have to include the owner or his kinsmen. Under the 1649 Law Code, the owner's service obligation was stated separately (see, e.g. 7: 2 and 7: 17) from the rights and duties of ownership, and even the owner could substitute non-related recruits or cash in his stead if he was superannuated, ill or wounded. Man'kov erroneously implies a universal duty of service from 17: 37. This provision in fact refers to an extremely narrow group of servitors, namely servitors of church officials. Moreover, the 1649 Law Code, as noted above, allowed hereditary estates to be owned by women, merchants and other non-service men. Ownership by such non-servicemen conclusively severed the legal link between land ownership and personal service of the owner. Likewise, in practice, there were high rates of absenteeism among the middle class in reporting for service in the late seventeenth century—a problem so widespread that there was little that anyone could do about it ( Hellie, , Enserfment, 213–20Google Scholar).

44. Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 428-31, 264-65, 176-82, 107–8Google Scholar.