Regarding the condition of these State Peasants, or Peasants of the Domains, as they are sometimes called, I may say briefly that they were, in a certain sense, serfs, being attached to the soil like the others; but their condition was, as a rule, somewhat better than the serfs in the narrower acceptation of the term.  They had to suffer much from the tyranny and extortion of the special administration under which they lived, but they had more land and more liberty than was commonly enjoyed on the estates of resident proprietors, and their position was much less precarious.  It is often asserted that the officials of the Domains were worse than the serf-owners, because they had not the same interest in the prosperity of the peasantry; but this a priori reasoning does not stand the test of experience.

It is not a little interesting to observe the numerical proportion and geographical distribution of these two rural classes.  In European Russia, as a whole, about three-eighths of the population were composed of serfs belonging to the nobles;* but if we take the provinces separately we find great variations from this average.  In five provinces the serfs were less than three per cent., while in others they formed more than seventy per cent. of the population!  This is not an accidental phenomenon.  In the geographical distribution of serfage we can see reflected the origin and history of the institution.

* The exact numbers, according to official data, were—­Entire
Population                                 60,909,309
Peasantry of all Classes                          49,486,665

     Of these latter there were—­State Peasants
          23,138,191
     Peasants on the Lands of Proprietors 23,022,390
     Peasants of the Appanages and other Departments 3,326,084
     ----------
          49,486,665

If we were to construct a map showing the geographical distribution of the serf population, we should at once perceive that serfage radiated from Moscow.  Starting from that city as a centre and travelling in any direction towards the confines of the Empire, we find that, after making allowance for a few disturbing local influences, the proportion of serfs regularly declines in the successive provinces traversed.  In the region representing the old Muscovite Tsardom they form considerably more than a half of the rural population.  Immediately to the south and east of this, in the territory that was gradually annexed during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, the proportion varies from twenty-five to fifty per cent., and in the more recently annexed provinces it steadily decreases till it almost reaches zero.

We may perceive, too, that the percentage of serfs decreases towards the north much more rapidly than towards the east and south.  This points to the essentially agricultural nature of serfage in its infancy.  In the south and east there was abundance of rich “black earth” celebrated for its fertility, and the nobles in quest of estates naturally preferred this region to the inhospitable north, with its poor soil and severe climate.