Millions of Living Dead: Fugitives, the Polish Border, and 18th-Century Russian Society

Abstract

Millions of Living DeadFugitives, the Polish Border, and 18th-Century Russian Society Evgenii V. Akelev (bio) and Andrey V. Gornostaev (bio) 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 to 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 likely to flee and use troops to bring the "living dead" back to the empire.1 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" [End Page 269] dwelling abroad.2 Thus in his comments, Lomonosov succinctly captures the essence of a problem that figured on the imperial agenda throughout the 18th century: the existence of a 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 onward, 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 restrict departures. At the same time, the population flight abroad revealed the most oppressive features of Russia's social order and prompted government administrators to consider existing 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 fugitives (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," the ruling strategies used by Russian central and provincial officials to deal with specific situations that arose because of the problematic border with Poland-Lithuania. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper note, "an imperial repertoire" was not "a preset formula for rule" but improvisations and decisions often "shaped by past practices and constrained by context."3 Specifically, we argue that attention to the porousness of the Russo-Polish border and processes associated with it enables us to view the imperial state not as rigid and limited in its capacity to control the population but as experimenting with various approaches and constantly adapting to changing circumstances along the border and within the country.4 [End Page 270] Likewise, the examination of the western border complicates our understanding of cross-border migrations. Commonly, social historians tend to simplify this issue by presenting it as resistance to oppressive features of the imperial regime and ignoring fugitives' expectations for potential benefits in the receiving country.5 By contrast, historians of borderlands argue that we need to view borders "as historical constructs that empower some at the expense of others," and therefore our task is to understand the effect that borders exert on different people.6 This article demonstrates that ordinary people had motivations and considerations that went beyond resistance and were based on their knowledge of border conditions, advantages, and freedoms available in different places. For those living on the Polish-Lithuanian side, the border represented a bargaining chip that helped them interact with the Russian government at a different level, as independent parties that could make demands and concur with or disregard official orders when they so pleased. The exploration of the early modern Russo-Polish border also contributes to the growing field of borderlands studies, whose scholars actively research the significance of mapping, treaties, demarcations, negotiations, and violence...