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peoples remained with their own customs and socialorganization.Rather under half of the peasantry were not bondedserfs but various categories of state peasants (cf. pp. 29,46, 48, 54), who were subject to the poll tax, recruiting,and rent payments, whether in money or in the formof very various labour services, such as transport, construction,and forestry work; but on the whole theircondition was considerably better than that of the bondedserfs of the landowners, especially in the nineteenthcentury.Still, with all allowances made, it remained true thatserfdom was, as Nicholas I expressed it, "the indubitableevil of Russian life." "God, how sad our Russia is,"Pushkin is said to have kept on repeating as he read themanuscript of Dead Souls (1842), Gogol's great noveldepicting the life of the serfs, their masters and provincialofficials. 14. Origins of Serfdom and the CommuneIn its modern form serfdom took shape in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries as a mixture of custom, privatecontract, and governmental edicts on particular points,backed by force. Although it became the main basis ofRussian society, there was never any clear formulation ofits legal basis or any code or amalgamating legislationsetting out the rights and obligations of masters andserfs. There was, for instance, no attempt at systematizingthe position of serfs in the so-called code of 1649,a very important landmark, but despite its name a confusedassortment of rules, mainly of procedure, someold, some new. Its general tendency, however, was toconfirm the practice of attachment of peasant householdsto the land, notably by the new provision abolishingany time-limit for the recovery of future runawaypeasants. The jurisdiction of masters over their serfsbecame more and more widely extended, and legallyrecognized, registered, hereditary bondage becameestablished.The opening chapter on the frontier has emphasized1 Translated in the Everyman series.148