The Old Russian state was formed in the ninth century, the process of its formation was dictated by the emerging economic relations, the further complication of the social structure, and smerd is one of the most important characteristics of that era.
Feudalization of Old Russian society
So, the economic development of the beginning of the 9th century in Russia proceeded at a rapid pace. Feudal relations were born, the main value for which was the land and the people working on it. At the same time, the tribal community is actively disintegrating, now one family is quite capable of cultivating a piece of land, it is being replaced by a neighboring community. Similar processes took place in relation to communal land use, and land rights, it now belongs to a separate family. On the rights of joint ownership, people used meadows, forests, pastures. However, there is a growing tendency to turn these possessions into personal ones. This is how landed private property begins to take shape. In this regard, those families climbed to the top of the social ladder, where there were a large number of men who could significantly expand the land holdings of their family. Families with a small number of men were forced to be content with little. Leaders were especially successful in capturing land.warriors.
Complication of the social structure
This distribution of land resources inevitably led to social stratification among the originally free population. The most prosperous families quickly adapted to the new economic and economic conditions and were able to remain free farmers, this is how smerds appear. The definition of this term can be expressed in the wording that these are people who retained personal and economic independence during the period of rapid development of feudal relations. In the early feudal period, such people made up the majority of the population of ancient Russian society. However, with the further evolution of the feudal system, many of them lose this status, turning into various kinds of dependent strata of the population. At the same time, the smerd is not a homogeneous category of society, among them are the prosperous, called men, as well as “voi”, who had the right and were obliged to participate in wars (an indispensable condition was the need to fully equip themselves for military operations).
Enslavement of free community members
With the strengthening of the state, its privileged strata also strengthened. Since the logic of feudalism requires a constant increase in the exploited population, the large landowners gradually began to be burdened by a large number of free community members. Therefore, smerd was a kind of threat to the future well-being of the feudal lord, and the latter tried in many ways to turn the former into people dependent on them. And it worked out quite often, which was facilitatedand natural and climatic conditions. Crop failures, floods, droughts - all these phenomena led to the fact that the once flourishing farms of smerds fell into decay. In order to feed their families, they were forced to turn to the feudal lords for help, and thus fell into bondage to rich tribesmen. For borrowed money, seeds, tools, they had to pay.
This could have been done in many ways. One part of the debtors entered into an agreement with the creditor (“row” in the old Russian transcription) and worked for him for a certain part of their time, thus working off the debt. These people were called "Ryadovichi". The other part also paid off the debt (“kupa” in the old Russian transcription), but could no longer leave the creditor until it fully reimbursed the property borrowed. Such people were called "purchases".
New meaning of the concept
Nevertheless, after the reckoning, the person became free again. Smerd in Ancient Russia is a certain state of a person that characterizes his position in a feudal society. This status could be lost forever: if a person was unable to fulfill his obligations, then he became a serf, already an inferior person, only one step higher than a slave. Subsequently, with historical development, the word lost its original meaning. In Russia of the 16th-19th centuries, smerd is a derogatory designation for people of humble origin, which was used in circles of the nobility of Russian society.
