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and partly in 1743, Peter the Great and the Empress
Elizabeth made large donations of lands, as they
were accustomed to do in other parts of their empire.
Men with well-known Russian names, Apraxin,
Tchernisheff, Schuvaloff, Repnin, Vorontzoff, Trubetskoi and
others, obtained hundreds of farms here, sometimes
even a number of villages with thousands of inhabitants.
These were granted at first for indefinite periods or for
life, but later on were given as property to be inherited
and freely disposed of. Most of the peasants were
krono-bönder, or tenants with the right of inheritance
and sale, some of them even being peasant proprietors.
It was decreed that the nobles to whom these lands
were granted should receive two-thirds of the revenue
due to the Crown, the Crown retaining one-third; and
in 1728 it was decided that the peasants should pay
only the same amounts which they had paid when the
country belonged to Sweden.
In time, however, the peasants began to suffer from
acts of tyranny on the part of these new landlords,
who, as was their custom in Russia, seized farms, and
turned them into home-farms with manor-houses for
their own use. Their Russian estate agents demanded
that the peasants, with their horses, should work for
the landlord instead of paying their dues in grain.
The local government officials, many of whom had
come from the Swedish part of Finland, were usually
willing to recognise the rights of the peasants, but the
Russian nobles were not used to tolerating such
interference with what they regarded as their private
business, and refused to recognise the jurisdiction of these
government officials and their courts. Worst of all
was the treatment meted out to the peasants at the
imperial small-arms factory in Systerbäck, which
demanded so much work, that the four parishes from which
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