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Millions of Living Dead: Fugitives, the Polish Border, and 18th-Century Russian Society
In 1761, Mikhail Lomonosov astutely noted that among other causes of population loss in Russia, such as diseases, murders, and accidents, was the issue of “the living dead” (zhivye pokoiniki). “From border provinces, people leave for other countries, especially for Poland, and, as a result, the Russian Crown loses its subjects.” He subsequently compared the Russo-Polish border with “a great hole (velikaia skvazhina) that was impossible to seal” to prevent ordinary people from slipping out of the country. Some fled because of seigniorial demands and conscription, while others, affected by “the schism,” moved to the Polish town of Vietka. Finally, he proposed that the Russian government should alleviate the tax burden and eliminate conscription to make borderland residents less susceptible to flight and also use troops to bring “the living dead” back to the empire. Lomonosov’s concern with population loss was widely shared by his contemporaries and further accentuated by several official reports that mentioned “over a million people” dwelling abroad. In his comments, thus, Lomonosov succinctly captures the essence of a problem that figured on the imperial agenda throughout the eighteenth century: the existence of the porous western border that created an opportunity for many thousands of Russian subjects to escape and begin a new life in the Commonwealth. From the 1720s onwards, Russian rulers became continuously preoccupied with both the scale of emigration to Poland-Lithuania and the state of the western border. They viewed these issues as intertwined because imperial subjects would not have been able to leave if the border had been sufficiently guarded. Considerable efforts hence were exerted to attain this goal. At the same time, the population flight abroad revealed the most oppressive features of Russia’s social order and prompted government administrators to consider the existent policies on noble-peasant relations and Old Believers. The most ambitious and problematic point on the agenda, nevertheless, was to discover ways to return fugitives to Russia. This article investigates these interrelated processes by focusing on interactions between the authorities and fugitive people (peasants, town residents, Old Believers, soldiers), which took a number of forms, such as petitions, deployment of military force, and issuance of amnesties. Considered together, they allow us to understand “the imperial repertoire” or ruling strategies used by Russian central and provincial officials to deal with specific situations that arose because of the problematic border with Poland-Lithuania.