15. Russia’s First Major Rebellion Against the Slavery of Serfdom
Given the kinds of abuses described above, it should come as no surprise that Russian serfs were unhappy with the conditions of de facto slavery in which they toiled. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia was rocked by massive rebellions that were brutally put down by the state. The first of them occurred in 1670 – 1671, when runaway serfs, peasants, and Cossacks, rose against the Russian aristocracy and Tsarist authority, in a major violent eruption along the lower Don River on Russia’s southwestern frontier.
The uprising was led by a Cossack leader named Stepan Timofeyovich Razin, better known to history as Stenka Razin (circa 1630 – 1671). It was the first of three major peasant rebellions that shook the Russian state to its core. The Cossacks – members of semi-military, democratic, self-governing communities along Russia’s southern and southwestern frontiers – were not agriculturists. Instead, they made their living from tolls on merchant shipping on the Don and Volga rivers as it traversed their lands.