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uthless forced-labour levies for his new capital, hisnew fleet, his new canals, he imposed upon the peasantsas a regular duty the very heavy burden of recruitinglevies for his new standing army. As a consequence,the eighteenth century in one respect is similar to theseventeenth: it began, and continued to be, a centuryof peasant flight and peasant revolt.5. Peasant RevoltsThe reaction of the peasants, Russian and non-Russian alike, to increasing subjection to serfdom and tothe rapacity of officials took two extreme forms—eitherflight from oppression or fight against oppression. Theimportance of flight as one great element in the historyof Russian expansion and the frontier has already beensufficiently emphasized. The fight against serfdom inthe central Russian lands was perhaps less determinedthan it might have been just because so many of theboldest and toughest spirits trekked away to the southor east. The bitterest fight against the expanding waveof serfdom was waged in the main from the frontierfringes, not from behind the wave itself. It was the fightof the frontier against the comparatively settled andexpanding centre, which was at the same time the seatof governmental power.Four times, apart from revolts of non-Russians, thesouth-east and middle Volga frontier rose in greatrevolts, or better civil wars, which gravely shook thestate; but, except to some extent for the first, they didnot succeed in setting alight mass revolt in the centralcore of Muscovy. They are famous in Russian historyfrom the names of their principal leaders, Bolotnikov(1606-7), Stenka Razin (1670-71), Bulavin (1707-8), andPugachov (1773-75). 1In these civil wars certain characteristics appear, ananalysis of which will help towards an understanding of1One of the best known of Pushkin's tales, The Captain's Daughter(1836; translated in the Everyman edition), gives a vivid picture of thesetting of the revolt of Pugachov, who is himself portrayed in somerespects in a curiously favourable light. Pushkin also wrote a valuablehistory of the revolt, which has not been translated.