If there’s one thing Russia has no shortage of, it’s land. Thus, it should be easy to see why land ownership was seen as essential to freedom and prosperity. “Until Catherine’s reign, the moral right to own serfs had never been questioned in Russia. The distribution of peasants attached to land had initially been considered not as a reward for service [of nobles], but as a means of making service possible (Madariaga, 54). This indicates that no tsar thought of paying nobles decently for their service to the state, forcing them to be independently wealthy (a problem we still see in America today). Was it something about Catherine’s policies that made nobles feel they had to start fighting serfdom, and made other nobles feel they had to start defending it?
Also, it seems that land was starting to lose its essentiality during Catherine’s reign. “The theme proposed by Catherine was: What is most useful for society – that the peasant should own the land or only movable property, and how far should his rights over the one or the other extend?” (55) Does this indicate that Catherine was starting to see the value of pushing peasants into non-agricultural occupations, or is she simply being practical in appeasing the landowners and still expecting the peasants to work another’s land?
