Early Ukrainian Peasants

In the very early times the Ukrainian peasants life was fairly peaceful and enjoyable. They lived in very small villages made up of a collection of peasants who had set up farming in a small localized area. These villages were many miles apart from each other making it very unprofitable for marauding tribes to go looking for them.

The peasant represented approximately 80% of the Ukraine's population during the 10th to 12th century. The life of a peasant family in the Ukraine in the early 14th century was basically fairly good for the times. For the right to use land, a peasant owed the landowning nobleman duties, which usually took the form of providing free labor or paying rents in kind. As long as a peasant fulfilled these obligations, and in the 14th century they were relatively light, rarely totaling no more than fourteen days of free labor a year, he could not be removed from his plot of land. In fact, a peasant could sell or bequeath the use of his plot to others. It was not uncommon for a well off peasant, of which there were many,  to work a twenty or thirty acre plot, own one or two horses or oxen, two or three cows, some pigs, and dozens of chickens and geese. An average Ukrainian's diet consisted of about 0.6 kilograms of bread and 2.5 liters of beer. Other common foods were kasha (?), cheese, eggs, and when in season fruits. Meat was eaten only rarely, usually during major holidays. Even in the best of times, many of the poorer peasants and urban laborers went hungry. Because of poor hygienic conditions, the infant mortality rate was high and the median age was still only about 25-30 years.

A century later this concept changed dramatically in 1490 when the peasants were restricted to the lands they were born on unless they were given specific permission to move from their land owning nobleman. In 1557 the Voloky Ustav law was passed. This ruling made it illegal for peasants to own land and obligated all adult peasants to work for free on the nobles land for three to four days a week. This made it impossible for the peasant to work his own little piece of land successfully to provide sustenance for his family. Unable to move, denied his personal rights, exploited at will, the peasant became a serf, little better than a slave of his nobleman landlord. The peasants occasionally revolted as was the case from 1490-92 when a series of revolts failed all for the same reason. The peasants were handicapped by the classical weakness of all peasant uprisings; inexperienced leadership, lack of organization, poor military skills and strictly local concerns. As a result, they were quickly defeated, demonstrating thereby that without the help of a militarily and politically more experienced class, the peasantry alone was incapable of challenging the nobles monopoly on power and privilege.