1. "Finding freedom" One of the most common passive forms of peasant struggle against serfdom was flight. Sometimes alone, sometimes in families or even in large groups, the peasants left their habitable hearths and rushed away from the borders of the master's possessions, hoping to arrange their lives in a new place without fail. Most often, especially in the XVII - XVIII centuries, the peasants fled to the place where new lines of border fortifications were being built. Here they hoped to find their freedom and settle down as free servants. Every" new line", wherever it appeared, seemed tempting to the serfs primarily because there was free land for settlements along it and that the landlords had not yet settled around it. According to the figurative expression of Leo Tolstoy, who described in the novel "War and Peace" one of the cases of mass peasant escapes, people, "like birds", flew "somewhere over the seas", "to the southeast, where none of them was"; "they rose, - says the writer, - by caravans ...they ran and rode, and went there to the warm rivers. " 1 Many were punished for this, exiled to Siberia, others died on the way. But, in spite of everything, the desire for a free life on free land never faded in the peasants. Something similar to what we know from the literature on peasant escapes in the seventeenth century.2 and what Leo Tolstoy wrote about happened in 1825. Then thousands of serfs rose from many regions of Russia, primarily from the Volga region, in connection with the rumors about the opening of another "new line" somewhere in the southeast, on the unknown "Darya River", surpassing in their spontaneous impulse all such things that had been passed earlier by one year. Escapes were preceded and accompanied by an ever-increasing number of peasant disobedience, in particular petitions for "seeking freedom" from landlords, which is generally characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth century and the last decade before the reform of 1861. S ... Читать далее