How the state banned Sunday corvée labor—and why one Manifesto wasn't enough
In Paul I's calendar, Sunday belonged to God. The remaining six days were to be divided between the peasants and the landowner. Three days for oneself, three days for the master—thus the Manifesto of April 5, 1797, entered textbooks and was called the law on three-day corvée. On paper, the week seemed balanced. On the estate, counting the days was more difficult.
The first two articles in the series explained how the state enslaved the peasant (How accounting and investigation created serfdom without a single founding decree), and then turned the landowner into a tax, recruitment and passport intermediary (How state registration turned the landowner into a power over the people). There's no need to return to the capitulation census and the 1861 reform here. The third question is: when the state attempted to set limits on the proprietary power it had created, why did this limit often remain mere wishful thinking, and what happened to those who decided to invoke the law.
The restriction of serfdom did not begin with a single program of emancipation. The state prohibited certain methods of sale, clarified the procedure for exile, reminded people of Sunday rest, and permitted voluntary emancipation. Each act closed one door. Another usually remained nearby.
The reason for this resilience wasn't simply the monarch's reluctance: the state itself had integrated the landowner into the empire's fiscal and recruitment machinery. He collected the poll tax, supplied recruits, and issued passports. Limiting his power over the peasants meant undermining several pillars of the administrative order. This is precisely why each restrictive act acted only superficially, without reaching the foundation: it prohibited one instrument of coercion without challenging the right to coerce as such.
Punishment at the owner's discretion
The decree of December 13, 1760, permitted the acceptance of landowners' peasants sent by their owners for misdemeanors into Siberia, and the counting of some exiled ones as recruits. In the educational formula, the landowner "exiled the peasant." Legally, the process took place through the state apparatus: the owner presented the person, and the authorities accepted him for settlement. But the decision on whether the offense merited such an outcome began at the estate.
Historian A. N. Dolgikh points out an important detail: the act did not necessarily require open rebellion. It could refer to misdeeds from the owner's perspective, including drunkenness. There was no clear correlation between the severity of the offense and exile. The state provided its space and administrative machinery, while the landowner provided the accusation and the individual.
Five years later, the border was pushed even further. A Senate decree issued on January 17, 1765, was titled quite frankly: "On the Admiralty Board's Acceptance of Serfs Sent by Landowners for the Purpose of Subduing and Employing Them in Hard Labor." It authorized the acceptance of people deemed deserving of punishment "for hard labor" for as long as the owner desired. If the owner wanted the person back, the board was instructed to return them.
The landowner did not become the head of the Admiralty Board or run his own penal colony. But state punishment was an extension of domestic discipline. The owner determined who would be transferred and for how long; the treasury fed, clothed, and employed the person sent in hard labor. Private freedom received state protection.
This is precisely why subsequent restrictions cannot be read as a straightforward ladder of humanization. One monarch could suspend a landowner's authority, another could restore it in a modified form. The question was not only the severity of the law. The question was whether the state recognized the landowner's wishes as sufficient grounds for its own punishment.
A complaint that cannot be served
The Senate decree of August 22, 1767, is usually summarized in a single sentence: Catherine II forbade peasants from complaining about landowners. The document's title already indicates a more specific subject: "On the obedience and submission of petitions to landowners and peasants to their landowners, and on the non-submission of petitions to Her Majesty's own hands."
It was forbidden to present petitions directly to the empress, bypassing institutions and specially appointed persons. The rule itself applied not only to serfs: a decree of 1765 also prescribed punishments for those without noble title or rank who attempted to harass the monarch by submitting them directly. In 1767, the reason for this was complaints from servants and peasants of several landowners.
The document named these owners: General Leontyev, General's Wife Tolstaya, Lieutenant Colonel Avraam Lopukhin, and his brothers. Their men attempted to deliver petitions directly to Catherine. The state viewed this as a violation of order, not the quickest way to investigate the complaint. The decree's rationale echoed the previous general scale of punishment for direct petitions to the monarch: from a month of hard labor to perpetual exile for the third offense. But the 1767 act's own sanction for future unauthorized complaints against landowners was different and immediately extreme: those who filed and drafted the petitions were to be flogged and exiled to perpetual labor in Nerchinsk, counting the serf as the owner's serf instead of a recruit.
This combination of norms demonstrates that the distance between monarch and subject was primarily protected. A complaint could be true or exaggerated—its content had yet to be determined. The very method of filing constituted an offense, for which the peasant risked losing his home and family.
The distinction between "one cannot complain" and "one cannot deliver a complaint to the empress" is legally significant. Judicial and administrative channels did not disappear entirely. But for a peasant, this distinction could be almost mocking. The judicial reform of 1775 placed a zemstvo police officer at the head of the district administration—a position elected at district noble assemblies. He also presided over the lower zemstvo court, which handled rural affairs. A peasant who decided to complain against a landowner found himself before an official elected by the district nobility, who viewed the conflict through the eyes of the same class. A complaint could reach him—and get stuck there.
It's worth noting that the 1767 decree was issued in a year when discussions within the Legislative Commission were still ongoing throughout the empire. In that atmosphere, any relaxation of the peasant question risked being interpreted as a signal for greater action. Six years later, Pugachev's rebellion of 1773–1775 would fully confirm this fear: his manifestos promised liberation from serfdom—and it was this promise, not military organization, that gave the uprising its mass appeal. After 1775, the legislator's caution on the peasant question became not just a political stance, but a learned lesson: peasants were turning the sovereign's words into an expected right, and the state feared this transformation more than open rebellion.
Therefore, the decree of 1767 should neither be watered down to a mere clerical norm nor expanded to the point of abolishing any court. It protected the order of courts in a society where the courts themselves did not ensure equality of arms. Complaints remained possible. They did not become safe.
People should not be sold at auction
The same narrowness is visible in stories The sale of serfs. As A. N. Dolgikh reconstructs, in 1771, when selling confiscated estates, it was forbidden to auction landless people off to the public with the use of an auction hammer. According to his analysis, in 1792, the sale of landless serfs for debt was again permitted, provided the hammer was not used. The difference seems mockingly formal: the person remained the object of sale, the auction ritual changed. But it is precisely this distinction that reveals the logic of the legislation. The state was attempting to eliminate the most provocative form of public auction, hesitating to challenge the owner's disposition as such.
Paul I continued this line. A decree of February 16, 1797, ordered that landless household servants and peasants not be sold "by auction or similar auction," instructing the Senate to devise other methods of debt collection. Clarifications followed. For state debts, a person could be assessed based on the income they brought to the owner and taken into the treasury; for private debts, the standard auction remained. Acts of 1799–1801 excluded landless people from the hammer auction procedure, but did not abolish the sale of landless people altogether.
Even family unity was protected by fragmentation. In 1800, the Senate decreed that when dividing inheritances, families of servants and peasants should not be split if they could be assigned to the heir receiving the paterfamilias. At the same time, other regulations permitted the transfer and sale of people in other circumstances.
The famous auction scene in the "Copper" chapter of Radishchev's "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" became a literary image of precisely such a loophole. Elderly people, a woman, a young mother, and a child are brought out to be sold to pay the owner's debts. This is not the protocol of a single, verified auction or a practical statistic, but a contemporary journalistic testimony of how public sales were perceived by a critic of serfdom. The gavel in Radishchev's text is important not as a mere household trifle: it transforms the transfer of ownership into a verdict on the family, audible to the entire audience.
The legislator could prohibit this sound without annulling the transaction. In 1798, it was proposed that a person's public debts be assessed based on the income their labor generated for the owner and taken into the treasury to pay off the debt; for private debts, the sale remained. The "humanization" of the procedure simultaneously confirmed the economic dimension of the individual as a source of capitalized income.
There was also an economic logic behind this legal caution. By the end of the 18th century, a significant portion of noble estates were mortgaged to the state: the Noble Loan Bank issued loans at 6% per annum, with estates and their serfs serving as collateral. Peasant labor became not just an agricultural resource but also collateral for the nobles' debt obligations. Restricting the sale or forced transfer of serfs would have undermined the solvency of that portion of the nobility that relied on credit. The state found itself in a dual position: a creditor interested in preserving the collateral value of the estates, and a reformer seeking to soften the regime of this same mortgage.
The resulting legal landscape was strange. You couldn't strike with a hammer—you could only announce the sale differently. You couldn't separate a family in one transaction—another form of alienation could leave a loophole. The state outlawed a humiliating gesture faster than the power to alienate a person.
What exactly did Paul I say?
The Manifesto of April 5, 1797, was announced on the day of the coronation. Its first and most explicit section had a religious basis. Paul demanded "strict and unfailing" observance of the seventh-day commandment and commanded that no one "under any circumstances dare compel peasants to work on Sundays."
The explanation followed: the six remaining days, divided equally between the peasant's work for himself and for the landowner, "would be sufficient" for economic needs if managed well. This is where the controversy begins. The prohibition of Sunday work is expressed by a decree. An equal division of the week is presented as a sufficient and reasonable arrangement, but without a separate sanction, a complaint procedure, or a clear indication of who is responsible for enforcing the owner's three days.
I. L. Abramova emphasizes that the bureaucracy contemporary with the document also distinguished between these parts. Senate reports conveyed the meaning as a ban on Sunday work and an equal number of days for both the individual and the landowner. Alexander Radishchev wrote that working on weekends was prohibited, and the three-day limit was set by "the council"; without defining the status of the farmer and the nobleman, the act would yield no significant result.
The later title influenced its reading. When compiling the Complete Collection of Laws in the 1820s and 1830s, the formula "On the three-day work of landowners' peasants" was placed first. The title of the codifiers proved more definitive than the text itself and helped transform the moral and economic discourse into the familiar "decree on three-day corvee."
Contemporaries also perceived different strengths in the two parts of the Manifesto. Radishchev saw a direct ban on Sunday work and advice that three days were sufficient. The court poet, on the contrary, celebrated the emperor as a sovereign who "cut into pieces" the week. From its inception, the document offered two readings: a cautious legal one and a broad political one. It was natural for the peasant to choose the latter, because it transformed the tsar's phrase into the measure of his own time.
The scope of its practical application was also unclear. The Manifesto addressed the entire empire, but corvée, quitrent, and mixed duties were distributed unevenly across regions. In the Black Earth provinces, where landowners' arable land provided the main income, the lords' corvée often consumed most of the workweek, and the question of three days was a matter of the peasant farm's survival. In the non-Black Earth region, where estates lived primarily on cash quitrent, the debate over the number of corvée days might have no practical meaning at all. A uniform proportion would apply to a country with fundamentally different labor regimes.
But it's also wrong to dismiss the Manifesto as a mere document. For the first time, the supreme authority publicly declared Sunday corvée unacceptable and proposed a measure for a fair division of the week. For the peasant, these weren't just abstract words. They were a monarch's text, readable as a promised right.
There were also cases where this interpretation was upheld by the courts. According to a case published by M.V. Klochkov, Captain Terenberg demanded four days of corvée labor, long-distance cartage, and additional fees from peasants. The St. Petersburg Chamber found him in default, ordered him stripped of his ranks, banned future leases, and annulled the contract. Exceeding the three-day limit was only part of a broader oppression, so this isolated decision cannot be used as a general statistic. But it does prove that the three-day limit was sometimes applied as a legal limit, not just as moral advice.
When the peasants read the law literally
That's exactly how the peasants read it. According to archival materials put into circulation by Abramova, judicial institutions received complaints against landowners who failed to comply with the tsar's decree. The complaints that reached the court followed a uniform pattern: the peasants cited the sovereign's will as the direct basis for their demands. The logic was impeccable in form—if the monarch had determined the limit, the fourth day of the landowner's life was a violation of the sovereign's decree, not simply the arbitrary exercise of private power. It was precisely this reference to a higher authority that made the complaint politically dangerous: a peasant appealing to the monarch over the heads of local authorities violated the very hierarchy that the state had protected since the decree of 1767.
The answer often turned out to be different. Abramova reports on cases in the Senate's Fifth Criminal Department, where complaints were dismissed as "weekly," meaning they involved demands for seven days of work or excessive work, and the complainants themselves were exiled to Siberia, counted among the landowner's conscripts. The state published a limit, and the peasant attempted to make it his right—and could be punished for the manner in which he demanded compliance.
This detail is more important than the debate about Paul's good intentions. A law becomes effective not when a monarch has written a beautiful proportion, but when there is a procedure in place that allows a weaker party to safely point out a violation. The Manifesto lacked reliable oversight, a clear sanction for the owner, and an independent intermediary within the estate.
Historiography is therefore divided. I. L. Abramova's review conveys S. B. Okun's assessment as a view of the Manifesto as a conservative intervention and a means of preserving serfdom; Abramova herself develops a similar interpretation. A. A. Artobolevsky and several other researchers more strongly emphasize the social content of the Manifesto and its place in the development of state intervention. A. N. Dolgikh cautions against textbook expansions: holidays are not mentioned in the text, the three-day limit is not formulated as clearly as the Sunday ban, and enforcement was inconsistent.
The disagreement extends beyond Paul's intentions. Historians differ in their assessments of what constitutes the law's effect. For one position, the very fact of the supreme authority's public intervention in the administration of private property is crucial: mandatory compliance was still a long way off, but the former sanctity of private property had already been violated. For the other, the lack of sanction, the punishment of complainants, and the rapid waning of government interest are decisive. In the first view, the Manifesto marks the beginning of a long-term restriction of serfdom. In the second, it is a means of pacification that was not intended to alter the foundations of order.
Both positions are based on the document's realities. If we look only at the Sunday prohibition, the political significance of the equal division of days is lost. If we read only the three days, the distinction between a command and a business judgment disappears. If we judge only by the monarch's intentions, we can forget about the peasants who attempted to use the published text and received a response from the Senate.
It's difficult to reduce this debate to a choice between "law or council." The ban on Sunday work was a law. The equal division of the six days was a normative formula whose binding force remained weaker and whose protection lacked a working apparatus. The document had social significance, but it was not a labor code for a serf village.
When the landowner's wish ceased to be a sentence
In the early 19th century, the state attempted several times to return punishment from the dictates of private property to a legal process. The right to send people to penal servitude was abolished in 1809, although subsequent practice and legislation remained inconsistent. The case of the Tver landowner Vorobyova is particularly telling.
She requested the exile of several peasants for unproven escape. The Tver Criminal Chamber was prepared to grant the request, but Governor-General Georg Holstein-Oldenburg requested clarification. The decree of July 5, 1811, responded with a formula that sounds like a rejection of the previous order: "In resolving criminal cases, the law shall govern; no desire or unwillingness of the landowner shall be involved here."
The phrase was clearer than practice. Dolgikh demonstrates that subsequent acts again permitted decisions implicitly recognizing the exile of proprietors, and in 1822 this right was restored in a broad form. The state took a step from private will to the courts and then retreated. But the 1811 formula itself enshrined a new legal idea: a landowner could bring charges, but punishment must be carried out according to the law and the verdict.
The 1822 reversal is particularly revealing. Landowners were once again allowed to send peasants to Siberia for settlement without the usual trial and investigation, although those exiled could no longer be counted as recruits. The restriction was not one-sided. The state could deem the owner's desire insufficient and then again make it the basis for administrative transfer.
Yet even the rollback did not erase the distinction that had arisen. The law of 1811 retained the formula that crime belonged to the court, not to the master's will. It didn't guarantee the peasant defense in every case, but it did provide subsequent reformers with a language to describe the problem: what needed to be curbed was not the cruel person in general, but the private power that had appropriated the state's function of punishment.
Subsequently, restrictions multiplied: voluntary emancipation, prohibitions on certain methods of sale, inventory rules, and written definitions of duties. Their details have already been discussed in the second article of this series. The important thing here is the general limit. As long as the reform depended on the landowner's wishes or lacked independent enforcement, it corrected the individual case but preserved the entire structure.
In 1797, the monarch divided the week. In 1811, a state act separated the owner's wishes from the court's verdict. In 1861, a law abolished the landowner's personal power, leaving the difficult land dispute to another document.
The three mechanisms described—exile by the owner's will, prohibition of direct complaint, and sale without land—demonstrate the same architecture of a half-measure: the state prohibited the most obvious extremes without providing the weaker party with the means to defend the prohibition. The peasant received the text of the law and was deprived of a safe means of invoking it. The reform of 1861 severed this knot differently—it abolished the landowner's personal power itself, leaving no room for partial restrictions. But the bitter disputes over land allotments and redemption payments demonstrated that the abolition of one institution does not resolve the issue automatically: an enforcement apparatus is necessary, which the half-measures of the previous century lacked.
Sunday remained on the calendar. The question changed: not how many days the sovereign named, but who could force the owner to count them and turn the royal document into valid law.
Literature
- Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire. First Collection. St. Petersburg, 1830.
- Monuments of the history of peasants of the 14th–19th centuries / compiled by N. N. Klochkov. Moscow, 1910.
- Semevsky V. I. Peasants during the reign of Empress Catherine II. St. Petersburg, 1881.
- Klochkov M. V. Essays on government activities during the time of Paul I. Petrograd, 1916.
- Abramova I. L. Manifesto of April 5, 1797 in historical literature: was there a decree on three-day corvee? // Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 8. History. 2019. No. 1. pp. 21–38.
- Dolgikh A. N. On the issue of interpretation in modern historiography of legislation on the peasant question at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries // Humanitarian studies of Central Russia. 2018. No. 1 (6). P. 38–51.
- Artobolevsky, A. A. "The Manifesto on the Three-Day Corvée of Paul I: Prerequisites for its Appearance and Conditions of Implementation": Dissertation by a Candidate of Historical Sciences. Penza, 2006.
- Radishchev A. N. Selected works. Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1949.
- Radishchev A. N. Description of my estate // Complete Works. Vol. 2. Petrograd, 1907.
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