Moskovitki, Moskovki, Moskalikhi: Gender history of Russian Emigration in the 16th – 17th centuries

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Exile or free movement of Early-Modern Russian women abroad (first of all to Polish Crown and Grand Duchy of Lithuania) comes under scrutiny in the article, which is based on the manifold evidence from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Push-factors were decisions to leave the country with their husbands, children or other relatives, captivity, abduction and desertion in the frontier regions of the Russian state. The pull-factors were quite weak, and can be rarely proven by the evidence of sources evidence. Usually, the wives of the gentry (syny boiarskie) successfully integrated into the new society either with their husbands and sons or alone in the case of their death. These women of Muscovite origin often had a good grasp of the legal traditions of their home lands. They found familiar traits in the judicial practices of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Emigrees from the low classes emerged in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the normative “grey zone”, from which they could either rise to freedom, or remain in slavery owned by local gentry, magnates or town-dwellers. Special attention is paid to the sexual and family violence which could force the Muscovite women flee abroad, made them and their representatives bring lawsuits in the Commonwealth. Objectivation of women in Russia fed ethnical visions, but it did not stimulate stereotypes and phantasms typical for the Time of Enlightenment.