Against these means of extortion and oppression the serfs had no legal protection.  The law provided them with no means of resisting any injustice to which they might be subjected, or of bringing to punishment the master who oppressed and ruined them.  The Government, notwithstanding its sincere desire to protect them from inordinate burdens and cruel treatment, rarely interfered between the master and his serfs, being afraid of thereby undermining the authority of the proprietors, and awakening among the peasantry a spirit of insubordination.  The serfs were left, therefore, to their own resources, and had to defend themselves as best they could.  The simplest way was open mutiny; but this was rarely employed, for they knew by experience that any attempt of the kind would be at once put down by the military and mercilessly punished.  Much more favourite and efficient methods were passive resistance, flight, and fire-raising or murder.

We might naturally suppose that an unscrupulous proprietor, armed with the enormous legal and actual power which I have just described, could very easily extort from his peasants anything he desired.  In reality, however, the process of extortion, when it exceeded a certain measure, was a very difficult operation.  The Russian peasant has a capacity of patient endurance that would do honour to a martyr, and a power of continued, dogged, passive resistance such as is possessed, I believe, by no other class of men in Europe; and these qualities formed a very powerful barrier against the rapacity of unconscientious proprietors.  As soon as the serfs remarked in their master a tendency to rapacity and extortion, they at once took measures to defend themselves.  Their first step was to sell secretly the live stock they did not actually require, and all their movable property except the few articles necessary for everyday use; then the little capital realised was carefully hidden.

When this had been effected, the proprietor might threaten and punish as he liked, but he rarely succeeded in unearthing the treasure.  Many a peasant, under such circumstances, bore patiently the most cruel punishment, and saw his sons taken away as recruits, and yet he persisted in declaring that he had no money to ransom himself and his children.  A spectator in such a case would probably have advised him to give up his little store of money, and thereby liberate himself from persecution; but the peasants reasoned otherwise.  They were convinced, and not without reason, that the sacrifice of their little capital would merely put off the evil day, and that the persecution would very soon recommence.  In this way they would have to suffer as before, and have the additional mortification of feeling that they had spent to no purpose the little that they possessed.  Their fatalistic belief in the “perhaps” (avos’) came here to their aid.  Perhaps the proprietor might become weary of his efforts when he saw that they led to no result, or perhaps something might occur which would remove the persecutor.