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.