Land Redemption in Muscovy during the Reign of Ivan IV

Land Redemption in Muscovy during the Reign of Ivan IV Charles J. Halperin (bio) The Englishman Giles Fletcher declared in his Of the Russe Commonwealth that no written law existed in Muscovy.1 Daniel Printz, envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor to Muscovy in 1576, made the same assertion.2 Historians know better, but they do not agree on the significance of Muscovite statutory law, which has left fundamental historical questions unresolved. In particular, the question of what kind of property law existed in Muscovy has long occupied historians. Richard Pipes strongly criticized George Weickhardt for claiming that there was private property in Muscovy based solely on statutory law. According to Pipes, Weickhardt omitted "the law as applied in numerous reported case transcripts." Because Russia had weak legal institutions, "the gap between law and life [was] uncommonly wide."3 Weickhardt replied that Pipes was inconsistent in accepting some statutory laws at face value and rejecting others as legal fictions, but even so he conceded: "I will be the first to admit that law as proclaimed nearly always differs from the law as applied." Weickhardt concluded that both statutory and case law had to be taken into account. "While one can certainly find inconsistencies between the statutes and the cases, this is true of every legal system." More [End Page 721] research on the "actual practice" of private property in pre-Petrine Russia was necessary.4 This article examines the relationship between statutory and case law, as both Pipes and Weickhardt recommended, concerning the redemption of property in land. The earliest statutory reference to redemption appeared in the Law Code (Sudebnik) of 1550, followed by additional provisions in 1551 and 1557. I examine case law before the statutory law was issued, compare that statutory law to prior case law, and then compare subsequent case law to statutory law. I try to show that before statutory law was promulgated, case law reflected a widespread practice of redemption in land that accorded unlimited discretion to the seller or donor of land in choosing who could exercise redemption rights; that the statutory law established in 1550–57 strongly deviated from the pre-statutory model, setting restrictions and requirements on redemption that circumscribed the seller's or donor's choices of potential redemptors or even the very existence of the right of redemption for donated land; and that sellers and donors reacted to these newly issued requirements in a very inconsistent manner, obeying some, disobeying others, and to an inexplicably large extent ignoring some fundamental aspects of this legislation. Such a differentiated response by society to government regulation of redemption suggests considerable societal autonomy in this activity. Types of Redemption Nowadays, "redemption" commonly denotes redeeming a coupon or an offer; that type of redemption was unknown in Muscovy. Nor does this redemption have any connection to redemption of land after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Redemption (vykup) in Muscovy applied to several types of transactions. The redemption under examination here was a potential second step in a real estate transaction, either the sale of land or its donation to a monastery. Under certain circumstances a seller or donor, or someone else related or unrelated to the seller or donor, could "undo" or supersede the sale or donation, in the former case by returning or paying the purchase price, in the latter by paying a stipulated sum. Insufficient data exist to determine how often the original seller or donor, rather than someone else, exercised redemption or the time gap between the original transaction and its redemption, which could extend to as much as 40 years. Indeed, even the frequency with which any redemption occurred on sales and donations remains unknown. In 16th-century Muscovy the term also [End Page 722] applied to the redemption of mortgages in which land was collateral, as well as the redemption of enslaved prisoners of war or captives kidnapped for ransom. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between redemption of a sale or donation and mortgages, because a mortgaged estate could be sold or donated; the buyer or recipient assumed the obligation of the mortgage. There are a few transactions that did not use the word but strike me...