* Ukaz of June 2d, 1742.

     ** See ukaz of January 17th, 1765, and of January 28th,
     1766.

If these stringent measures had any effect it was not of long duration, for there soon appeared among the serfs a still stronger spirit of discontent and insubordination, which threatened to produce a general agrarian rising, and actually did create a movement resembling in many respects the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant War in Germany.  A glance at the causes of this movement will help us to understand the real nature of serfage in Russia.

Up to this point serfage had, in spite of its flagrant abuses, a certain theoretical justification.  It was, as we have seen, merely a part of a general political system in which obligatory service was imposed on all classes of the population.  The serfs served the nobles in order that the nobles might serve the Tsar.  In 1762 this theory was entirely overturned by a manifesto of Peter III. abolishing the obligatory service of the Noblesse.  According to strict justice this act ought to have been followed by the liberation of the serfs, for if the nobles were no longer obliged to serve the State they had no just claim to the service of the peasants.  The Government had so completely forgotten the original meaning of serfage that it never thought of carrying out the measure to its logical consequences, but the peasantry held tenaciously to the ancient conceptions, and looked impatiently for a second manifesto liberating them from the power of the proprietors.  Reports were spread that such a manifesto really existed, and was being concealed by the nobles.  A spirit of insubordination accordingly appeared among the rural population, and local insurrections broke out in several parts of the Empire.

At this critical moment Peter III. was dethroned and assassinated by a Court conspiracy.  The peasants, who, of course, knew nothing of the real motives of the conspirators, supposed that the Tsar had been assassinated by those who wished to preserve serfage, and believed him to be a martyr in the cause of Emancipation.  At the news of the catastrophe their hopes of Emancipation fell, but soon they were revived by new rumours.  The Tsar, it was said, had escaped from the conspirators and was in hiding.  Soon he would appear among his faithful peasants, and with their aid would regain his throne and punish the wicked oppressors.  Anxiously he was awaited, and at last the glad tidings came that he had appeared in the Don country, that thousands of Cossacks had joined his standard, that he was everywhere putting the proprietors to death without mercy, and that he would soon arrive in the ancient capital!