About “Ivans of Oblivious Origin”: One of the Strategies of Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

In the Russian legal system, the phenomenon of persons of oblivious origin emerged in the early eighteenth century. During population censuses, enumerators discovered a number of people, unaware of their parents and places of domicile, who subsequently did not belong to any social stratum. Despite its realization that many persons of oblivious origin were in fact runaway peasants and deserters, the government decided to use them to increase its population in different parts of the country instead of returning them to their official localities. At the same time, some runaways independently managed to be added to the census rolls in towns and villages, thereby changing their social status. As a result, the examination of the issue of people of oblivious origin as one of the strategies of deception improves our understanding of adaptation tools and everyday practices, employed by the inhabitants of the Russian Empire.