But this bold and unscrupulous man had performed a service to the
state. The work of the Muscovite Princes was finished, and the
extinction of the line was the next necessary event in the path of
progress.

Boris had large and comprehensive views and proceeded upon new lines of
policy to reconstruct the state. He saw that Russia must be
Europeanized, and he also saw that at least one radical change in her
internal policy might be used to insure his popularity with the Princes
and nobles. The Russian peasantry was an enormous force which was not
utilized to its fullest extent. It included almost the entire rural
population of Russia. The peasant was legally a freeman. He lived
unchanged under the old Slavonic patriarchal system of _Mirs_, or
communes, and _Volosts_. These were the largest political
organizations of which he had personal cognizance. He knew nothing
about Muscovite consolidation, nor oligarchy, nor autocracy. No crumbs
from the modern banquet had fallen into his lap. With a thin veneer of
orthodoxy over their paganism and superstition the people listened in
childish wonder to the same old tales--they lived their old primitive
life of toil under the same system of simple fair-dealing and justice.
If their commune owned the land it tilled, they all shared the benefit
of the harvests, paid their tax to the state, and all was well. If
not, it swarmed like a community of bees to some wealthy neighbor's
estate and sold its labor to him, and then if he proved too hard a
taskmaster--even for a patient Russian peasant--they might swarm again
and work for another.

The tie binding them to special localities was only the very slightest.
There were no mountains to love, one part of the monotonous plateau was
about like another; and as for their homes, their wooden huts were
burned down so often there were no memories attached to them.

The result of this was that the peasantry--that immense force upon
which the state at last depended--was not stable and permanent, but
fluid. At the slightest invitation of better wages, or better soil or
conditions, whole communities might desert a locality--would gather up
their goods and walk off. Boris, while Regent, conceived the idea of
correcting this evil, in a way which would at the same time make him a
very popular ruler with the class whose support he most needed, the
Princes and the landowners. He would chain the peasant to the soil. A
decree was issued tha