20. Oppressed and Brutalized Russian Serfs Mounted Revolt After Revolt
Until they were finally freed in the nineteenth century, Russia’s downtrodden serfs rose up in revolt after revolt, only to get brutally beaten back into sullen submission each time. There were hundreds of relatively minor in size but nonetheless quite violent uprisings, whose participants numbered in the hundreds or few thousands. However, within a span of roughly a hundred years in the seventeenth and eighteenth, three uprisings caught fire, grew, and became major rebellions that rocked Russia to its core.
The first of them occurred in 1670 – 1671, when runaway serfs, free peasants – a decidedly relative term in Tsarist Russia – and Cossacks, rose in revolt against Russia’s aristocracy and government. Rebellion erupted along the lower Don River on Tsardom’s southwestern frontier, and spread out from there to engulf southern Russia. The revolt was led by a Cossack leader named Stepan Timofeyovich Razin, better known to history as Stenka Razin. Relatively little is known about Razin, other than that he was born into a lower-class Cossack family sometime around 1630. What he did within the span of a year, as the leader of a major revolt, secured his place in his history.