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| 1617 |
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| Treaty of Stolbovo, with Sweden. The Swedes restored Novgorod, which they had occupied, but Russia was obliged to abandon the few towns that had still been held on the Gulf of Finland. | 1 |
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| 1634 |
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| Treaty of Polianov, with Poland, bringing to a temporary end a long period of conflict. In return for recognition of his title, Michael was obliged to give up many of the frontier towns (including Smolensk) that had been taken by the Poles. | 2 |
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| 1637 |
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| Russian pioneers reached the coast of the Pacific, after a phenomenally rapid advance over the whole of Siberia. | 3 |
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| 1637 |
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| The Cossacks managed to take the important fortress Azov from the Crimean Tatars. They offered it to Michael, who refused it (1642) in order to avoid conflict with the Ottoman Turks. The fortress was thereupon returned. (See Russia) | 4 |
| THE CONSOLIDATION OF RUSSIAN SERFDOM | 5 |
| As the Grand Duchy of Moscow expanded in the 15th and 16th centuries, so serfdom, a method of binding peasants to the land they cultivated, took root in Russia. Large-scale deportations and colonizations accompanying the conquest of Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Ryazan placed the peasantry under increasingly strict control of the state and the nobility, who replaced the old landed magnates of conquered territories and who owed services to the prince of Moscow. | 6 |
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| 1497 |
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| A law made universal the requirement that peasants could renounce the tenancy of the lands they cultivated only at the end of an agricultural cycle, that is, the week of St. Yuri's Day (Nov. 26). | 7 |
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| 1533–84 |
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| The reign of Ivan the Terrible (See 1533–84), and especially the Livonia wars, led to the ruin of many great estates: large independent holdings were destroyed together with their village communes and replaced with smaller estates whose holders needed serf labor in order to fulfill their service obligations. Many peasants fled to the central regions of Russia, which responded with ever harsher measures to keep the peasants on the land. | 8 |
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| 1590 |
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| A new law confirmed restrictions on peasants' movements imposed by the 1497 law. | 9 |
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| 1649 |
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| The great Ulozhenie (law code) summarized all previous provisions about serfdom, imposed new restrictions, and abolished the time limit for the return of runaway serfs to their masters. Thus serfs were deprived of their last legal escape route. Moreover, serfs could now be sold apart from the land they cultivated, and increasing numbers of them were exploited in the mining and processing industries. No basic distinction existed between Russian serfdom and chattel slavery as the latter was practiced in the Western Hemisphere. | 10 |
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