Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/56

30 under which it was convened. Thus, though the sobor of 1648 was organised bicamerally, the resemblance to the constitutionalist bicameral system was purely superficial.

. Concurrently with the increase in power of the grand princes of Moscow and with the centralisation of the great state, there occurred a change in the position, not of the aristocracy alone, but also of the rest of the population, and in especial of the peasants.

At first, in Moscow as in Kiev, the peasant was for the most part free; but in comparison with the aristocrat he was the disregarded "little man," or "manling," this being the literal signification of the word mužik. "Black people" is the other characteristic term used already in early days at Moscow to denote the peasantry or special classes of that order. The official designation for the peasant is krest'janin, meaning literally the anointed or christened person.

In Moscow, too, as in Kiev, in addition to free peasants, there existed serfs and semi-free peasants; but with the centralisation of the princedoms the social status of the serfs underwent a change. Capture in war no longer provided so many bondsmen as in the days when the principalities were perpetually at feud. Economic need now became the most potent and decisive cause of serfdom, the indebted peasant, voluntarily in many cases, accepting a state of bondage vis-à-vis the wealthy lord. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards there came into existence in Muscovy what was known as kabal-serfdom (kabalnoje holopstvo), kabala being the Tatar word for indebtedness. The debtor worked in order to pay the interest, but, the capital charge remaining unreduced, the debtor was bond for life, and so were his children. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, when repeated scarcity of food had much degraded the peasants of Muscovy, it frequently happened that impoverished and hungry peasants voluntarily renounced the status of freedom.

Centralised administration completed what economic conditions had begun, the influences of national economics being superadded to those of domestic economics. The new state needed money, the thinly peopled land required labour, the army demanded soldiers, and thus it was that the peasant who had hitherto been privileged to change his lord, became "bound" to the soil. Prikrěplenie, the state of being bound,