The Iranian Peasant and the Russian Serf: A Comparative Study of Socioeconomic Obligations and Services

Document Type : Research Article

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of History, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract
This study employs a comparative–historical analysis to examine the fiscal and social obligations of peasants in Iran and serfs in Russia, in order to show how divergent institutional configurations shaped political mobilization capacity and the trajectory of social transformation. The central question is why legal and institutional differences in peasant obligations in two largely agrarian societies yielded distinct political outcomes. The evidence draws on primary sources alongside classic and recent scholarship, covering Russia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and Iran from the Ilkhanid through the Qajar periods. The findings indicate that in Russia, a codified serf regime legally bound peasants to land and lord, and consolidated a triad of obligations—compulsory labor (barshchina), cash/kind rent (obrok), and state taxation—underpinned by the village commune (mir) and the principle of collective responsibility. In Iran, despite the juridical freedom of peasants under Islamic law, a multilayered network of sharecropping rents, diwānī taxes, tiyūl and waqf dues, corvée labor, and chronic indebtedness—enforced through customary mechanisms such as the mirāb and communal qanat cleaning—produced effective dependency. Accordingly, legal–institutional concentration in Russia facilitated uniform extraction and nationwide uprisings, whereas customary dispersion in Iran raised coordination costs, limited national mobilization, and deferred structural change to late, top-down land reform.

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  • Receive Date 03 August 2025
  • Revise Date 24 October 2025
  • Accept Date 25 October 2025