Abstract
Various forms of family organization among Russian peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities later in the villages.
Over the last thirty years, most Russian ethnographers have argued that the simple family predominated among peasants from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries and among the city population from the tenth to the twelfth centuries onward. 1 The matter is complicated by the fact that until recently Russian ethnographers have not applied the family classification proposed by Peter Laslett and utilized in modern historical demography. This classification consists of five types of families: (1) single persons; (2) a kin or nonkin group that does not constitute a family but acts as a single economic unit; (3) the simple family consisting of a married pair living alone or with their unmarried children and also a widow or widower living with their unmarried children; (4) the extended family, which consists of a married couple, their children, and unmarried relatives; (5) the multiple family composed of two or more conjugal family units. 2 Since researchers have used different family classifications, the family types in the literature have been determined by different criteria and are not always compatible.
Most Western historians of the Russian family have suggested that the multiple family predominated among the Russian peasantry in the Muscovite and Imperial periods, at least until the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s. 3 More than thirty years of research on family structure has accumulated a significant amount of material that has not yet been summarized. The goal of this article is to summarize and interpret these findings.
A few words about the sources of information on the Russian family and household (dvor) are in order. In Russia, demographic sources were not as diverse and were significantly poorer than in Western European countries. In the period between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, information about the population that was collected by state institutions and by individuals differed from the point of view of recorded demographic, economic, cultural, and social features and also in the completeness of the range of territory and in the quality of the inventories.
In the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth centuries, in separate regions of the country and not simultaneously, but at different times, land tax censuses (pistsovye perepisi) were carried out, which took an inventory of the number of the adult male taxable population by household, although in the sixteenth century, only of the heads of households, and from the seventeenth century—of all the adult male members of the family. Owing to this, land tax lists (pistsovye knigi) do not contain full information about the family structure of the population.
From the middle of the seventeenth century, household censuses (podvornye perepisi) began in practice. They were carried out on the scale of the entire government four times—in 1646, 1687, 1710, and 1717. The collected information was noted down in household lists (perepisnye knigi). They contain information about the entire male taxpaying population; also the family relationships and age of each member of the family are shown.
In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, household censuses replaced poll tax censuses (revizii). The male taxable soul (revizskaia dusha) became the unit of accounting, but the majority of poll tax censuses also inventoried the female population and in part the nontaxpaying population. In fact, each recorded taxable soul was considered as existing until the next poll tax census even in the case of the person’s death. Facts about the souls were noted down in nominal rolls by household (revizskie skazki). Each household list contained information about those people who made up individual families or households. Data were recorded in poll tax lists (revizskie skazki). Poll tax lists were drawn up on estates by landowners or by their stewards in the settlements of state peasants—by officials of the village local self-government in the cities—by organs of city self-government, which bore administrative responsibility for the timely conducting of the poll tax census and its quality.
A poll tax census of the population was carried out on the territory of the Russian Empire ten times. Each of these censuses had its own peculiarities and continued for several years. But in any poll tax census, it is possible to pick out a primary year in which the principal part of the population was listed and to which the results of the census are also attached. The fundamental year of the first poll tax census is considered 1719, the second—1744, the third—1762, the fourth—1782, the fifth—1795, the sixth—1811, the seventh—1815, the eighth—1833, the ninth—1850, and the tenth revision—1857.
For the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, confessional statements (ispovednye vedomosti) are also the sources of information about family structure, which were compiled by priests at the end of each year. All parishioners of both sexes were listed in them by name and according to household, their age was noted, their estate membership, and the family relationships among themselves, which allows the identification of the structure and typology of the family in each parish.
A general census of the population was carried out once in the pre–Soviet period in 1897. Its program was very extensive. The census form contained the following questions: name, marital status, relationship to the head of the household, sex, age, estate, faith, place of birth, place of registration, place of permanent residence, native language, literacy, occupation, and dozens of other questions. The results of this census were published seven years later in eighty-nine volumes. Unfortunately, after the completion of the counts in the majority of gubernias, the original family lists were destroyed.
In 1916, an agricultural census was carried out, and in 1917, an agricultural and urban census. Primary information was collected by household. But because of the war, the census was narrowed and they covered the population of sixty-two gubernias out of the seventy-five gubernias.
Finally, other sources included family records of individual serf estates and local censuses carried out by zemstvos in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. All these household accounts also served as sources of information for some of the authors cited in this article.
The Peasant Family
From the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the words “family” (sem’ia), “household” (dvor), and “household economy” (dvorokhoziaistvo) were used interchangeably to express the idea of close relatives living and working together as a unit under the leadership of the household head. Persons living together and the presence of household property held in common and managed by the household head, who was generally in charge of all household matters, are the chief criteria for the unity of several married couples in one household.
The North and Northwest
The earliest data pertain to the period from the second half of the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the seventeenth century (Table 1).
Peasant Family Structure in the North in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
Source: A. I. Kopanev, Krest’iane Russkogo Severa v XVI v (Leningrad, Russia: Nauka, 1978), 120; A. I. Kopanev, Krest’iane Russkogo Severa v XVII v (Leningrad, Russia: Nauka, 1984), 71.
Used widely by researchers, these figures have been interpreted as proof of the predominance of the simple family in the north in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 4 But it is difficult to agree with this conclusion. The sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century cadastres (compiled for the assessment of peasant land taxes) that were used by A. I. Kopanev (the author of Table 1) omitted the female population and included only those males who headed households; as a result, the number of simple families was exaggerated. For example, households with one head in which married sons living with their father, as well as those households of married brothers living together, were counted as simple families in 1586. In the 1620s, the cadastres began to count, in addition to the head of the family, other adults (typically, married males), and the percentage of simple families immediately fell by 37.2 percent (from 90.2 percent to 53 percent), while the proportion of multiple families correspondingly grew by 37.2 percent.
Calculations from the Novgorod cadastres show that the percentage of simple family households (the sources do not always uniformly identify the family type) was less than 59.6 percent in the 1620s, while the percentage of extended and multiple family households was more than 38.7 percent; the respective figures in 1646 were 69 percent and 22.5 percent. The average household size was approximately 6.4 persons of both sexes (the sample included 4,242 households in the 1620s and 7,401 households in 1646). These figures also suggest a predominance of simple families. However, thirty-two years later, in 1678, the percentage of one-family households declined to 49.4 percent, while the percentage of multifamily households grew to 43 percent (based on data from 10,436 households). 5 These data, like those of Kopanev, overestimate the percentage of simple families and underestimate the percentage of multiple families due to the absence of information about females, the incomplete identification of family members, and the utilization of a specific family typology.
In the eighteenth century, judging by the Dvina district, the percentage of multifamily households consisting of extended and multiple families increased by 2.5 times to 65.7 percent from 1646 to 1710 and by 1782 decreased to 49.9 percent; the percentage of households consisting of one family as well as single-person or kin-group households grew significantly (Table 2).
Peasant Family Structure in Dvinskii District, 1642–1782.
Source: O. B. Kokh, “Krest’ianskii dvor i krest’ianskaia sem’ia na Russkom Severe v kontse XVII—XVIIIB” (PhD diss., Institut istoriii SSSR AN SSSR, Leningrad, Russia, 1987), 79; O. B. Kokh, “Krest’ianskaia sem’ia,” in Agrarnaia istoriia Severo-Zapada Rossii XVII veka (naselenie, zemlevladenie, zemlepol’zovanie), ed. A. L. Shapiro (Leningrad, Russia: Nauka, 1989), 56–58.
In 1685, simple and multifamily households among monastery peasants of Vologda province numbered 58.5 percent and 33.9 percent, respectively, but by 1717, the figures were almost reversed to 39.3 percent and 53.7 percent (the data cover 1,000 households in 1678 and 428 households in 1717). 6
In my view, we cannot rely with confidence on these data on the family structure in the north in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All over Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially in the north, families in which several kin or occasionally nonkin households united in one family became widespread. 7 Every time it became necessary to work together to decide a farming problem, beyond the capacity of a single family given the absence of a labor market, when one or several families combined into a union there arose the combined family, the family association with collective labor and consumption. For a certain period, property, labor, and consumption were in common. The combined family consisted primarily of kin, but neighbors could create the family association. The members of such a union possessed a certain share (equal or unequal) of the common property (land and movable property). They could live in one or several households and in one or several villages. Later, when common property in land was divided, the family association became a community of neighbors while relations in the combined family became relations of individual landholders. Some scholars have suggested that the common possession of land by a village was the prevailing form of landholding in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; accordingly, as a general rule persons from the same village were called “combined family” and very rarely “neighbors.” 8 Censuses likewise did not record such a union as a single family, hence the exaggerated number of simple families. M. V. Vitov even suggested that in the fifteenth century in the north, the village constituted a multiple family and several such villages were constituted by paternal kin groups. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the paternal kin group as the chief form of family organization broke up; various forms of family organization, including multiple, extended, and simple, took its place. 9 Usually, there is a lengthy transition from the paternal kin family to the simple family. It is difficult to suggest that in the north such a complicated transformation could take a mere fifty years, at a time when there were no fundamental changes in peasants’ lives.
E. Waris’s research confirms that family unions in the north were widespread even in later years. Having discovered that in Eastern Finland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the official census did not show real ties among people, she decided not to use the standard method of identifying family organization by residence in the same household. By combining persons of one economic unit, she expressed a preference for actual relationships, that is, for the actual organization of work and the household based on confirmation and confessional registers and on testamentary and court documents. It turned out that a large number of peasants lived in family associations, as was the case in the north in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were officially simple families but were actually multiple families. There was a high percentage of such families—approximately 55 percent in 1750, 61 percent in 1775, and 35 percent in 1820–1849—and a majority of the population lived in them. 10 The widespread family unions explain how the population managed to survive in a large number of single-family settlements; how orphans, the aged, and widows survived; how the family economy survived natural disasters; and how single-family households could undertake the hard and urgent work of slash-and-burn agriculture.
The data regarding the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show the predominance of multiple and extended families. From 1678 to 1782, the average number of persons living in one household grew from 5.6 to 6.5 and by 1858 reached 6.8. 11 The increase in the average household size gives us grounds to suggest that the percentage of multiple families from the eighteenth through the first half of the nineteenth centuries, right up to the abolition of serfdom, tended to increase.
The data on the Karelian population of Olonets province, carefully processed by M. Pöllä according to the standard family typology of Peter Laslett, confirm the tendency to family enlargement in the north: from the end of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, the percentage of multiple families grew and in the 1850s exceeded 50 percent (Table 3). 12
Family/Household Type in Oulanka, 1710–1910.
Source: M. Pöllä, “Peasant and Hunter Households in Oulanka, Northern Russia, 1710–1910,” History of the Family 8 (2003): 163–81.
The small amount of data on peasant family organization in the Ural Mountain region suggest that at the turn of the eighteenth century there was a slight predominance of simple families, while throughout the eighteenth century multiple families predominated; during the first half of the nineteenth century, simple families again predominated. In the majority of cases, however, no less than half of the peasants lived in multiple families. 13 According to the ninth revision census of 1850 in Perm province (with a population of 1.5 million peasants of both sexes), simple families lived in 38.2 percent of the households, extended families lived in 10.9 percent of the households, multiple families lived in 45.9 percent of the households, and single persons and kin groups lived in 4.7 percent of the households. The average farm consisted of 7.06 persons, including 3.33 males and 4.73 females. 14 Multifamily farms predominated.
The Central Nonblack Earth Region
According to the data from fourteen districts covering the period 1613–1645, in thirty-six private estates, the majority of families were either three-generation paternal families or two-generation fraternal families; the average peasant household (N = 1,940) had more than two working adult males. 15 This demonstrates the predominance of the multiple family but still allows for the possibility that in certain settlements and in certain years, there were more simple families. 16 The available data suggest that in the eighteenth century as well as among the region’s privately owned serfs multiple and extended families predominated on the majority of estates. 17 Table 4 shows the typical family structure of a typical landlord’s estate in the first half of the nineteenth century—the village of Vykhino of Moscow province (129 households in 1811 and 212 households in 1857), where multiple families predominated throughout the period. The same was observed in the landed estates of the Moscow, Tver, and Yaroslavl provinces. 18
Family Structure in the Village of Vykhino of Moscow Province, 1811–1857.
Source: A. Blum, I. Troitskaya, and A. Avdeev, “Family, Marriage and Social Control in Russia—Three Villages in Moscow Region,” in Family Structures, Demography and Population: A Comparison of Societies in Asia and Europe, eds., M. Neven and C. Carpon (Liége, Belgium: Laboratoire de démographie de l’Université de Liége, 2000), 88–92.
According to the ninth revision census in 1850 in Iaroslavl’ province (with approximately 780,000 peasants of both sexes), simple families lived in 34.2 percent of the households, extended families lived in 10.6 percent of the households, multiple families lived in 43.4 percent of the households, and single persons and kin groups lived in 11.8 percent of the households. On one farm there was an average of 1.95 families, 6.49 persons (3.01 males and 3.48 females), including 3.45 adults and 3.04 children. 19
Among the Russian population of the Middle Volga for the 350-year period from the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries, multiple families predominated. 20 According to the ninth revision census of 1850 in Nizhnii Novgorod province (with 1,020,000 peasants of both sexes), simple families, single persons, and kin groups lived in 38.9 percent of the households; extended families lived in 13.2 percent of the households; and multiple families lived in 47.9 percent of the households. The average farm consisted of 6.89 persons, including 3.30 males and 3.59 females. 21 Multifamily households predominated.
We have an idea of peasant family organization of the Central Black Earth region at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. According to the data from household inventories on landlord estates, on the Mishino estate (169 households in 1849) of Riazan’ province from 1782 to 1858, the percentage of multiple families was never less than 65 percent (1849) and was as high as 82 percent (1782); the percentage of simple families fluctuated from 17 percent in 1849 to 7 percent in 1782. The average size of a farm in 1814–1858 varied from 8.0 to 9.7 persons of both sexes. 22 According to the data from nine household inventories on the Petrovskoe estate of Tambov province (125 households in 1856) from 1813 to 1856, multiple families also predominated: their percentage ranged from 60 percent to 78 percent and only once, in 1856, went as low as 45 percent; at the same time, the percentage of simple families never exceeded 22 percent (1856). The average size of a farm increased from 7.7 to 9.0 persons. 23 According to the data from birth certificates and revision census affidavits concerning four villages of state peasants in Tambov province in 1816–1858 (with more than 1,000 households), the percentage of multiple families ranged from 53.3 percent to 73.6 percent while the percentage of simple families ranged from 13.2 percent to 28.8 percent. The average size of a farm in the period 1814–1858 varied from 8.3 to 15 persons. 24
Data on family structure in Siberia from the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries do not reveal any definite trend. 25 Nevertheless, in different parts of this vast region, there were significant differences in family structure: in some localities, simple and extended families predominated while in others extended and multiple families predominated. 26
In the Baltic provinces, according to the data from several estates in Estonia, Courland, and Latvia in the period 1765 to 1858, the percentage of simple families fluctuated from 46 percent to 53 percent, while that of multiple families fluctuated from 23 percent to 59 percent; however, in the majority of cases, single-family households predominated. 27 In the southern Estonian parish of Otepe in 1765, the average peasant household consisted of 6.8 persons; 59.3 percent of farms consisted of single persons, reduced and simple families, 6.2 percent of farms consisted of extended families, and 33.5 percent of farms consisted of multiple families. In the northern Estonian parish of Karuze in 1782, 54 percent were single-family households (including single person households), 14 percent were extended family households, and 32 percent were multiple-family households, 28 while on the estate of Pinkenhof, the corresponding percentages were 58.0, 18.5, and 23.3 in 1816 and 49.9, 23.3, and 26.6 in 1850 (124 households in both years). 29 According to the compendium published by R. Wol, in three Estonian samples in 1850 (451, 388, and 165 households), the proportions were, respectively, 52 percent, 17 percent, and 31 percent; 44 percent, 23 percent, and 33 percent; and 34 percent, 19 percent, and 37 percent. In the sample from the Linden estate in Courland (present-day Latvia) with ninety-two households in 1858, the proportions were 52 percent, 24 percent, and 24 percent. 30
We can use data from Kiev province to evaluate the family structure in Ukraine. An analysis of census data from twenty-eight Uniate parishes in 1791, provided by the Ukrainian historian M. Krikun, shows that of the 2,903 households, 56.5 percent consisted of simple families or single persons, 8.1 percent consisted of extended families, and 35.3 percent consisted of multiple families. The average farm consisted of 6.6 persons, including 0.32 hired laborers. 31 The peasant family structure of the province’s peasants in 1850 (1,334,000 persons of both sexes) according to the ninth revision census shows an increase in the percentage of multifamily households in the first half of the nineteenth century: simple families, single persons, and kin groups lived in 39.4 percent of the households; extended families lived in 13.1 percent of the households; and multiple families lived in 47.5 percent of the households. The average farm consisted of 7.32 persons, including 3.64 males and 3.68 females. 32 The increase in the size of the average household from 6.3 to 7.3 persons demonstrates that from 1791 to 1850, the percentage of multifamily households increased.
A similar situation prevailed in Belorussia. Simple families predominated from the end of the sixteenth to the first half of the eighteenth centuries. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the family structure began to change and extended and multiple families began to predominate; this continued to the abolition of serfdom in 1861. 33
The peasant family after the abolition of serfdom has not been studied sufficiently from the point of view of family structure. According to the calculations of Christine Worobec, in black-earth, agricultural Voronezh province in the period 1887–1896, the percentage of multiple families was 57.8 percent, that of extended was 14.3 percent, and that of simple was 25.6 percent (the data covered 230 households). In the nonblack-earth Kostroma province around the year 1890, the percentage of multiple families was considerably lower at 38.7 percent, that of extended families was 14.3 percent, and that of simple families was 47.0 percent; for sixty-two households, the average size was four persons. 34 H. Kolle’s analysis of household lists of another nonblack-earth province (Moscow) in 1869–1871 and 1886 shows that among former state peasants the percentage of multiple families stabilized over a fifteen-year period at 42.0 percent, while that of simple families declined from 32.5 percent to 29.9 percent. At the same time, among former landlord peasants, the percentage of multiple families increased from 53.2 percent to 62.5 percent and that of simple families declined from 35.1 percent to 15.6 percent. 35 Worobec and Kolle concluded that multiple families continued to predominate in agricultural black-earth provinces as well as in more manufacturing-oriented nonblack-earth provinces.
By contrast, M. Pöllä’s calculations for the Karelian population of Olonets province show a tendency toward the nuclearization of family structure: from 1858 to 1910, the percentage of multiple families decreased from 54.0 percent to 38.5 percent, while that of simple families increased from 21.1 percent to 41.8 percent (Table 3). Pöllä’s observation coincides with the general trend prevailing in the postreform period. According to the all-empire census of 1897, the simple family dominated everywhere; among the entire rural population of European Russia, the percentage of single-family households or of households containing no families was approximately 53.4 percent, while the percentage of extended and multiple-family households was 46.6 percent. 36 The average size of a peasant household in European Russia declined by one-third from 8.4 persons in the 1850s to 6.2 persons in 1917. 37 This also demonstrates the decline in the share of multiple families and the increase in the share of simple families insofar as the natural growth and the corresponding average number of children per family grew in the postreform period. Of course, the trend toward nuclearization does not rule out the existence of villages where the multiple family structure predominated, as Worobec and Kolle show.
We can see the same trend toward nuclearization in the postreform period also in Siberia. According to the census of 1897 among the peasants of Tobolsk province (the selection included 6,255 households), the predominant family structure was simple (53.2 percent), while the percentage of extended and multiple families was approximately 42.0 percent. The same trend prevailed in other Siberian provinces. Indeed, the more socioeconomically developed the province, the greater the portion of simple families and vice versa. The average household size declined. 38
The Urban Family
The family structure of the urban population has been even less well studied than that of the rural population. In 1710–1720, according to census figures from nine cities (Belev, Boroovsk, Viatka, Zaraisk, Maloiaroslavets, Riazan’, Toropets, Tula, Uglich, and Ustiuzhna), which covered 6,719 households consisting of 38,180 persons, 51.7 percent of the families were simple, 33.8 percent were multiple, 12.0 percent were extended, and 2.5 percent consisted of one person or of kin groups. The percentage of multiple families varied greatly by city—from 29.9 percent in Toropets to 57.6 percent in Riazan’; the percentage of simple families was 67.3 percent and 33.2 percent, respectively. 39 The average household size was 5.7 persons and ranged from 4.6 to 7.2 persons. Interestingly, better-off city dwellers were more likely to live in multiple or extended families and the poor in simple families. Insofar as by population density (by the average number of family members) the multiple family exceeded the average household by approximately one-third, 40 that apparent majority of the commercial and manufacturing population nevertheless lived in extended and multiple families. Simple families predominated among the workers of Petersburg in the eighteenth century. 41
According to the data from ten revision censuses over the course of the eighteenth through the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the Moscow merchants preferred simple families; however, the portion of multiple families in various years ranged from 16 percent to 23 percent and the portion of three-generation families in various years ranged from 11 percent to 18 percent. 42 There were more multifamily households in small-sized and medium-sized towns than in the capital. In the town of Morshansk (population 15,800 in 1863) in Tambov province in the first half of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among the merchants, while simple families predominated among the burghers (meshchane). 43 As in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the better-off burghers preferred multiple or extended families, while the poorer burghers preferred simple ones. Judging by the towns of Iaroslavl’ and Kiev provinces, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the simple family apparently became predominant: in the mid-nineteenth century in agricultural Kiev province, multiple and extended families constituted 44 percent of all families, while in the towns of Iaroslavl’ province with more manufacturing they were only 19 percent. 44
In the city of Tambov (population 48,000 in 1897), the simple family predominated among all categories of the urban population. 45 In Moscow (population 1,038,000 in 1897), extended and multiple families constituted only 19 percent of all families. 46
An analysis of the family structure of the burghers of the city of Kazan’ (population 130,000) according to family lists of 1898 shows that the share of simple families was approximately 30 percent of all families, that of extended was 13 percent, that of multiple was 11 percent, that of single persons was 25 percent, and that of kin groups was 21 percent. 47 Insofar as the size of the average multiple family in Kazan’ was approximately three times larger than that of the average simple family, many burghers (about one-third) lived within multiple families. This shows that by the beginning of the twentieth century, the multiple family had not become extinct, at least among the burghers who constituted 43 percent of the urban population of European Russia and 34 percent of the urban population of Kazan’ province. 48
For all of European Russia, according to the all-empire census of 1897, extended and multiple families constituted about 26 percent of all families; almost 46 percent of town dwellers lived in them. 49
Scholars who study the family structure of the urban population of Siberia think that from the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries, town dwellers preferred simple families; nevertheless, the multiple family was rather widespread. Over time, the family structure simplified and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the simple family had notably crowded out the multiple family. 50 In Tomsk (population approximately 21,000), Barnaul (11,300), and Biysk (5,100) among the merchants in 1866 the number of multiple families was 39.6 percent, while that of simple families was 53 percent; in 1904, the numbers were 14.8 percent and 75.2 percent, respectively. 51 Owing to their larger size, multiple families had a larger portion of the population than did simple ones.
Therefore, the data available on Russian family structure suggest that among Russian peasants beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of households were multifamily. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the multiple family often was patrilineal, uniting many married couples and including up to 100 persons. Even in the 1850s, in every province, there were many families consisting of twenty to thirty and more persons; their share of the population was not great (0.3–1.6 percent), but they numbered in the thousands. 52 This demonstrates that patrilineality had not become extinct in the middle of the nineteenth century. After the abolition of serfdom, the simple family became more widespread and by the end of the nineteenth century it predominated. However, if we calculate not the number of households and families but the number of people in families of various types, then even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of the Russian empire’s peasants lived in multiple families.
Throughout the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the burghers lived in various forms of family organization but simple and extended families predominated more often than not. Several scholars suggest that this was the case even in Kievan Russia in the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. 53
In evaluating these results, we must not forget that they depended to a significant degree on the criteria for uniting people in one household. During the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, living in one household was, as a general rule, the criterion for census takers: a family was a household and a household was a family. The actual relations among people were not taken into account. However, several households could also constitute one family: family groups (termed combined family or family association) uniting several kin, and even nonkin households, with communal labor and consumption, were widespread in Russia. In the colonized regions of Siberia and the Middle Volga, family associations continued to exist even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 54 Since they were not counted as a single family in the censuses, the number of single families was exaggerated. Even though sometimes the data are conflicting, scattered and incomplete, they do form a reasonable foundation for longitudinal generalizations about changes in household size.
Family Structure and Family Life Cycle
All classifications of peasant families give an impression of peasant family structure at the moment of classification, that is, a static classification. But every household was a living organism and experienced a family cycle of growth, decline, and other processes. Under normal conditions, the simple, extended, and multiple families were in fact separate stages in the life cycle of the peasant household, for the simple family became extended, multiple and even patrilineal and, after division, the multiple family and the patrilineal family turned into two and more families and in many cases these were simple families. 55 Longitudinal censuses of peasant households at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, which over a period of four to twenty years followed the life of each peasant household, clearly showed all these changes. 56 At any moment, approximately 70 percent of the households were growing, 20 percent were dividing, and the remaining 10 percent were leaving the village and terminating their existence, arriving from other locations, uniting, or breaking up. Consequently, the portion of simple, extended, and multiple families in a population’s family structure shows how many peasant households were at the simple, extended, and multiple stages. If multiple families predominated that means that a majority of households were at the multiple family stage and likewise if simple families predominated. A decline in the percentage of multiple families along with a corresponding increase in the percentage of simple families shows that entry into the multiple stage was slowing down for a majority of families while entry into the simple stage was accelerating.
After the abolition of serfdom, the average household size decreased, the share of simple families increased, and the share of multiple families decreased, in spite of the fact that during the last third of the nineteenth century the natural increase rates by year demonstrated significant ups and downs, while the average annual natural population growth by quinquennials demonstrated a positive trend: 12.3 per 1,000 in 1866–1870, 14.1 per 1,000 in 1881–1885, and 17.4 per 1,000 in 1896–1900. 57
Several things explain this paradox. First, there occurred a decrease in the percentage of patrilineal families because multiple families were no longer expanding into patrilineal families even in agricultural regions. The patrilineal family was maintained only by the power and authority of the “elders”; young people preferred the simple family but did not separate from the multiple family for fear of being deprived of their property rights. Second, after reaching a certain stage in their development or upon the death of the head of the family, almost every multiple family divided, whereas before 1861 under serfdom at least 10 percent of households never divided. This is apparent from the fact that, according to Steven Hoch’s calculations of the Petrovskoe estate in Tambov province for the period 1813–1856, 10.1 percent of the males aged fifty to fifty-nine years were never heads of families or of households. 58 Third, the family came to be composed more and more of immediate kin, which contributed to a reduction in household size. Fourth, the postreform village was overpopulated, pushing millions of peasants to the cities, to industry, and even into emigration and obliging them to engage in nonfarming occupations. From 1870 to 1896, 8.6 million of 101,300,000 peasants, almost one of every ten, emigrated to the cities; as a result, by 1897, 51.9 percent of urban residents were born somewhere else. 59 From 1897 to 1916, more than five million resettled to the far reaches of the Russian empire, and several million peasants spent most of the year in the cities, returning to the village only for sowing and harvesting. 60 Peasant migration held back the formation of multiple families in the village. Finally, the old custom against household division during the patriarch’s lifetime was breaking down. The increase in household divisions in the postreform era not only dismantled the patrilineal, multigenerational, patriarchal family, but it also meant that the average peasant household spent less of its life cycle in the multiple stage. 61
Thus, neither the multiple family nor the simple family was the principal form of peasant family organization from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries, both were but one of the stages in the internal development of the peasant household for the preponderant number of peasants in a specific period of life. As a rule, the multiple family stage coincided with childhood and youth (from birth to age twenty to twenty-five years) and old age (age sixty years and older), while the simple and extended family stage coincided with maturity (from the division of the multiple family and the formation of an independent household until it changed into a multiple family). Until the 1860s, the multiple family stage was practically mandatory for all households, moreover, it was the longest stage and approximately 10 percent of peasants spent their entire life in a multiple family. When it is stated that in the postreform era the simple family replaced the multiple family, what it really meant is that several simple families did not grow into multiple ones and the patrilineal family became an exceptional stage in the evolution of the peasant family. In addition, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, the multiple family was certainly an important, if not the longest, stage in the development of the peasant household in the childhood, youth, and old age of a significant part of the peasantry.
From the sixteenth through the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the demographics of the population were subordinate to traditional patterns—early and almost universal marriage (approximately 20 per 1,000 of population), a miniscule number of celibates, a miniscule number of divorcees (0.03 per 1,000), frequent remarriage of widows and particularly widowers, a high birth rate (approximately 50 per 1,000), a high death rate (35–40 per 1,000), and a low life expectancy (not more than twenty-five to twenty-seven years, as it was in the 1850s). 62 From the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century, the death rate decreased slightly, natural population growth increased, and the average life expectancy increased (up to thirty-three years in the years 1900–1910). 63 Inheritance practices did not change: as a rule, family division took place upon the death of the patriarch; the principle of entail was not applied. As a consequence, the relationship between simple and multiple families among the Russian peasantry from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries depended directly on how often kin split up upon the death of the family’s patriarch. Had the frequency of family divisions been constant, the peasant family structure would have been unchanged. Family divisions were the fundamental feature of family structure. It is no accident that every time there were changes in family structure, the law and public opinion focused on family divisions.
Reasons for the Perpetuation of the Multiple Family
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the state and the landlords owned land in Russia, excluding the Baltic provinces. The peasants merely possessed the land and, then, not individually but collectively. The peasant commune was granted land by the state or the landowner, which it transferred to member households. The possessor of land was the commune and the family not the individual. Customary law forbade family division during the lifetime of the family’s patriarch, regardless of his wishes. When family division did take place, all adult male children inherited land; all other family members inherited movable property. Primogeniture was infrequent. In 1714, Peter I introduced it among the nobility despite their objection. However, in 1730, soon after his death, the nobility successfully petitioned for the repeal of primogeniture. The family possession of land and the family (collective) nature of ownership of other immovable property, coupled with the absence of primogeniture, objectively supported the multifamily household.
The landowners, the crown, and the peasant commune strongly supported multiple families for economic reasons, especially during serfdom. Simple families had an extremely hard time fulfilling labor duties (corvée); they were easier for extended and multiple families to fulfill, because landowners and peasant households did farm labor at the same time. On estates requiring quitrent, male peasants left to earn money elsewhere. In this case as well, a simple family, left without a laborer for a lengthy period of time, could not maintain a peasant farm whereas an extended or multiple family could. If one or one of the two able-bodied members was conscripted into the army for life, a simple family was devastated, while a multiple family bore the burden of conscription more easily. By forbidding conscription from a family of one or two able-bodied members, the law took this into account. Therefore, it is not surprising that the landlords, who owned 60 percent of all peasants in 1795 and 47.2 percent in 1857 and the crown, which owned 36.5 percent of all peasants in 1795 and 48.9 percent in 1857, needing the smooth flow of taxes and recruits, supported multiple families and forbade family division that would weaken a family’s capacity to provide both. The peasant commune, whose members were mutually responsible to provide all obligations to the landowner and to pay taxes to the state, also had an interest in the capacity of peasant households to meet their obligations and accordingly supported multiple families and limited family division.
All other things being equal, the multiple family was more economically effective for peasants engaged in farming than was the simple family, owing to the family’s cooperation on the basis of an age and gender division of labor. The multiple family gave stability to peasant households and was an important factor in their well-being. In a simple family, the illness or death of one, and often the only, able-bodied member ruined the household; therefore, in Russia, an agricultural labor market appeared only after the abolition of serfdom and even at the beginning of the twentieth century was weakly developed. Prior to the 1860s, it was very difficult to find a farm laborer when needed, which explains their high wages. The loss of a breadwinner was a great blow to the well-being of a multiple family, but it did not have a catastrophic effect on the household.
Given the high death rate and low average life expectancy, multiple families insured children against the high death rate of parents (orphans, who comprised up to 13 percent of children under age of fifteen, 64 were raised by kin); such families also insured parents against the high death rate of children and childless couples against the absence of children as well as care for the aged and the sick. In the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, social assistance in old age and in times of hardship, in the rural and urban population alike, came primarily from children, parents, and kin; only a small amount came from neighbors, the commune, the parish, the landlord, and private charity and practically nothing came from the state.
Given the early age of marriage and the corresponding early age of motherhood and fatherhood, the multiple family made possible that socialization and cultural continuity of generations are so important in an oral culture based on the direct transmission of experience from one generation to another. This was even more important when the family was the chief agent of socialization. Moreover, patriarchal relations were reproduced and the authority and power of the seniors was affirmed precisely in multiple families, because children were under the authority of the male patriarch as head of the family and his wife as head of the female side of the family, that is, of grandfather and grandmother, more than of their parents. On the Petrovskoe estate in the years 1813–1856, only 8.9 percent of males aged twenty-five to twenty-nine years were heads of families; the proportion increased to 23.1 percent of males aged thirty to thirty-four years, 35.1 percent of males aged thirty-five to thirty-nine years, 65.8 percent of males aged forty to forty-nine years, and 89.9 percent of males aged fifty to fifty-nine years. Up to the age of forty, approximately 78 percent of males 65 played a secondary role in the family and in the commune. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, city communes were no different than rural. In the 1710s, in ten towns, containing 6,719 families and 38,200 persons, males aged twenty to twenty-nine years were heads of only 6.9 percent of households, men aged thirty to thirty-nine years were heads of 16.8 percent of households, and males over age forty years were heads of the remaining 71.9 percent of households. 66
During the period under review, Russia was a colonizing country with open or shifting borders and no shortage of land; the population of those localities that did face a shortage of land could always relocate. This is evident in Table 5.
Number of Migrants by Region of Settlement, 1678–1915 (in Thousands).
Source: L. G. Beskrovnyi et al., “Migratsiia naseleniia Rossii v XVII–nachale XX vv.,” in Problemy istoricheskoi demografii SSSR (Tomsk: TGU, 1982), 26–32; S. I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan, “Migratsiia naseleniia v Rossii v XVIII–nachale XX veka,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 4 (1984): 41–59.
The Russian proverbs “God is in every newborn” and “when a child is born a piece of bread is ready” indicate plentiful land and, especially among peasants, the provision of land for every Russian peasant up to Stolypin’s land reform through regular land reallocation. Plentiful land, as well as the weak development of industry, transport, services, and the low level of urbanization, strengthened extended and multiple families, as we have seen, insofar as farming made peasants devoted to the multiple family.
A weakly developed individualism was an important reason for the peasants’ preference for multiple families. To live in a multiple family required that all family members sacrifice their personal interests (including that of the wife and children) for the good of the entire household and forced everyone to obey the patriarch and all females to obey the household’s senior woman. To a person with a sense of self-worth and individualism, this was not easy and over a long period of time was impossible. Contemporaries noticed individualism on the eve of and especially following the abolition of serfdom.
In short, up to a certain moment, the multiple family best provided for the development of agriculture, the reproduction of the population, the protection of children and the aged, the transfer of cultural capital, and the socialization of the young. For these reasons, the multiple family during serfdom consistently received the strong support of the landlord in privately owned villages, of the crown on state lands, and of the patriarchs in the peasant commune. 67
An analysis of family divisions in the postreform village helps us understand what factors held together and broke apart the multiple family. Contemporaries were almost universally agreed that there were two types of division—economic and psychological. The growth of nonagricultural occupations, which embraced approximately 23 percent of the adult population, lessened the economic advantages of family cooperation and the growing land shortage in the central provinces made cooperation unnecessary. The more flexible simple family was better adapted to economic fluctuations and to the commodity economy geared toward the market; when a labor market appeared, the temporary shortage of hands could be remedied by hiring agricultural laborers. 68 The growth of personal property and individualism also undermined the multiple family.
Psychological factors loomed even larger in the minds of contemporaries. The loss of authority of the elderly, the weakening of parental power, the violation of strictures preventing division before the death of parents, and the growth of individualism among the young, who wanted to be free from the tutelage of the elderly and live on their own, caused dissension in the family which in the end led to family divisions. A poll of peasants of Iaroslavl’ province in the period 1873–1883 showed the following reasons for family division: 41.1 percent from quarrels among family members, 21.5 percent from reprehensible conduct, 15.2 percent from the appearance of a stepmother (i.e., a new senior female), 11.6 percent from a shortage of living space in the house and an excessively large family, 4.5 percent from a desire to leave the village, and 6.1 percent from other causes. More than 83.9 percent of these reasons appear to be psychological. The desire for economic independence overcame the advantages of the remaining multiple families. Even though 35 percent of the families that separated received little or no property, the loss of property did not stop family divisions. 69 Peasants now valued independence so highly that they were willing to pay for it with their well-being. “Ask any of the peasants here whether it is better to work in a big or simple family and they will tell you the same thing: ‘you can’t beat working in a big family.’ … But if you ask whether it is better to live in big or simple family, they’ll say right away, ‘God forbid that anyone live in a big family!’” 70 The steady shortening of the multiple family phase in the life cycle of the peasant household (due to the outdated psychology of patriarchal traditions and to the growth of individualism) was of cardinal significance. If the mass of people became more individualistic, then their rejection of the simple family and return to the bosom of the multiple family would be highly problematic. As a rule, normal people do not regress psychologically; accordingly, the restoration of the patriarchal family was unlikely. It is not accidental that the growth of the simple family in the postreform period coincided with the disappearance of communal relations and the destruction of the commune, which in essence had been an extension of the multiple family.
The Influence of Serfdom on Family Organization
Let us turn to the question of serfdom’s influence on the family structure of the Russian peasantry. I emphasize that this discussion will be about the Russian, not the Russian empire’s peasantry, because the empire’s Belorussian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Tatar, Georgian, and other peasants lived under very different circumstances. Inheritance, land ownership, legal customs, and property relations were significantly different in Russian and non-Russian regions.
Serfdom developed in the village spontaneously and gradually during the sixteenth century because of economic indebtedness. At the end of the century, a series of government edicts completed the legal formulation of serfdom throughout the Russian state, thereby attaching peasants to the land on which they were residing at the moment of the edict and to the owner of that land—landlords, the state, monasteries, and so on—the subjectivities of serfdom. During the Time of Troubles, the enserfment edicts lost their force, but the Law Code of 1649 restored them. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the mid-1770s, ownership rights over the peasants increased, but the state began to limit them after the powerful peasant uprising of 1773–1775. 71 The legal status of private, appanage (belonging to the ruling dynasty), monastery, state, and other categories of peasants was virtually identical. All peasants bore quitrent or corvée obligations, were attached to their residence, were ascribed at birth to their legal estate, and could not change their social status by their own volition; they were tied by mutual responsibility, they were under the control of their owners, and their rights were limited (they were forbidden to work by franchise or contract, to work at ports, to open factories, to draft promissory notes, etc.). They differed only in the degree of dependence: serfdom was stronger and harsher for landlord peasants, especially those on corvée, and less harsh for other categories, especially for appanage and state peasants.
The available data show that family structure was similar for various categories of peasants. The only exception was the household peasants (serfs in domestic service to their lords and deprived of land), among whom the simple family always predominated. On the eve of emancipation in 1861, household serfs constituted 6.8 percent of all serfs; the large landowners (whose estates have been studied more) had more of them. As a rule, the household serfs were not counted in estate inventories, thus, the share of simple and single-person families was understated on private estates.
The family structure of various categories of peasants changed at the same time. Differences in peasant family preferences did not depend on their membership in a particular estate category. No doubt, occupation influenced family structure to a certain degree. Peasants engaged exclusively in agriculture had a higher proportion of extended and multiple families than did peasants engaged in trade, handicrafts, manufacturing, or transport either exclusively or as a side occupation. The general increase in the proportion of simple peasant families in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, when everywhere they began to work more in manufacturing, trade, handicrafts, transport, and services, also demonstrates the relationship between occupation and family structure. From this, we can assume that to a certain degree agricultural occupations facilitated the development of multiple peasant families while nonagricultural occupations facilitated the development of simpler families. The family structure among the lower strata of the burghers (meshchanstvo), who had a larger proportion of simple families than did peasants, may also demonstrate this. Nevertheless, a strong and direct relationship between occupation and family structure is unlikely since the upper strata of the burghers (the merchants) had more multiple families than did the lower burghers. Merchants refrained from family divisions because they did not want to divide their capital, a serious threat owing to the absence of primogeniture in Russia. It turns out that inheritance was more important than economic activity among the merchants. The legal limitations placed on family divisions in 1886 (those wishing to divide had to receive the consent of the commune) did not result in a larger share of multiple households; the nuclearization of the family continued in the 1880s–1900s.
It must be remembered that tax policy also influenced peasant family structure. For example, in 1678, the tax on land was replaced by the household tax. In their effort to reduce their tax burdens, peasants and landowners tried to merge households into one farmstead and not to divide. As a result, the number of persons in one household began to increase and in individual cases at the beginning of the eighteenth century reached improbable numbers. In 1717, A. V. Kikin’s estate in Novgorod province had 135 households, 360 cottages, and 2,269 persons, that is, 16.8 persons per household, 6.3 persons per cottage, and 2.7 cottages per household. 72 However, the replacement of the household tax by the capitation tax in 1717–1718, which removed the stimulus for maintaining multiple families, did not result in a decrease in the proportion of multiple families, which continued to increase. The transition from the capitation tax to a tax on land in the 1880s also did not change family structure. Therefore, although it had some influence, tax policy was not a decisive factor in peasant family organization.
Under serfdom, the proportion of extended and multiple families was significantly higher in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth century and higher still in the first half of the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth century. Therefore, serfdom was not the main reason for the changes in family structure. If serfdom had been the main reason for the prevalence of multiple families from the seventeenth through the first half of the nineteenth centuries, then there should have been an immediate and rapid increase in the share of simple families after the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s. However, as was shown above, the nuclearization of the family in the postreform period was both slow and gradual, indicating a multifactor process.
What the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries had in common was the commercialization of agriculture: the marketable surplus was an estimated 9–12 percent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 17–18 percent in the 1850s, and by 1909–1913 netted approximately 31 percent of the basic agricultural products. 73 However, the commercialization of the economy in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries was accompanied by an increase in the proportion of multiple families but a decrease in this share during the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Thus, no single factor—inheritance, commercialization, tax policy, serfdom, and so forth—adequately explains the changes in family structure. Social, economic, legal, and even psychological factors always acted together; at any given moment, their singular combination shaped family structure. Prominent among these factors from the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries was serfdom, itself the outcome of the confluence of political, social, and economic circumstances.
Conclusions
Generalization of the data on the history of Russian family, despite their incompleteness and scantiness during the separate periods, nevertheless allows us to draw the following conclusions about the main tendencies in the change of family structure and organization with a high probability of accuracy.
Various forms of family organizations among peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities, later in the villages.
Material from the Russian empire shows that people did not always prefer the simple family and the simple household economy and embraced multiple forms of family organization not only out of necessity. For a long time, multiple families were regarded as the norm, the ideal model of human existence, while simple families were regarded as an unfortunate necessity. The situation changed after the Great Reforms of the 1860s–1870s that opened the way for the development of capitalism with its concomitant market economy, private property, and individualism. A second critical factor in the change in family structure after the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s was the industrial revolution, which came to Russia in the 1860s and 1870s and was completed in the 1920s and 1930s. The industrial revolution transformed the economy, the society, and the individual and objectively and subjectively facilitated a new model of family organization: the simple family. The history of the family in the Soviet era speaks to this. After the revolution of 1917, a new antibourgeois regime was established in Russia that opposed the market economy, private property, and individualism. However, no revival of the multiple family occurred. The nuclearization of the family continued. In 1994, only 3.6 percent of all families in the Russian Federation were multiple. 74 In addition, the absence of suitable housing usually prevented these remaining multiple families from separating.
Material from the Russian empire shows a trend toward a change in family structure favoring simple forms and supports the argument of John Hajnal and Peter Laslett that such a trend also applied to Russia. As is known, the conclusions of Hajnal and Laslett were criticized from the beginning and even today are not accepted by everyone. R. Grassby, who compiled a unique database that included 28,000 families in English-speaking countries between 1580 and 1740, concluded that his empirical data supported no single theoretical model of the family’s historical trajectory. 75 Richard Wall also agrees. Between 1750 and 1950, he reminds us, there were cases of movement from simple families to multiple and vice versa. In eighteenth-century and nineteenth -century Hungary, the simple family evolved to a more multiple structure due to the shortage of land and labor. The same thing was observed in Corsica in the second half of the nineteenth century due to worsening economic conditions. By contrast, in southern Finland, from the end of the eighteenth century up to the 1850s, removal of limitations to family separations allowed multiple families to develop into simpler forms; in the second half of the nineteenth century, the tendency toward simple families grew stronger, thanks to innovations that permitted a smaller amount of capital and labor in the fishing industry. In some cases (in Ireland and Spain), an increase in celibacy was accompanied by an increase in the number of multiple families. The appearance of more multiple family forms has been observed even in the twentieth century. 76
We may conclude from these data that some essential elements of the Russian family system bore a greater resemblance to Western Europe than we had previously thought. Russian family patterns as well as European family patterns have always been heterogeneous. Nuclearization as a general trend in the development of the family was typical both for Europe and for Russia. Russia also experienced the slow, contradictory, gradual erosion of the patriarchal tradition in family organization, albeit later. The most significant factors in the persistence of the multiple family were socioeconomic, in particular the repartitional peasant commune, serfdom, legal impediments to the development of private property in land, the absence of primogeniture, the abundance of land, climate features, the nature of economic activity, and the weakly developed labor market. 77 Indeed, in other European countries, the nuclearization of the family proceeded with contradictions and with reversals and the very model of the West European family was conditioned by varying circumstances. 78
Monocausal explanations for the changes in family structure—inheritance practice, commercialization, taxation, serfdom, and so forth—are inadequate. There were always several social, economic, legal, and even psychological factors; their unique combination shaped peasant family structure at any given moment. Serfdom, itself the result of a combination of political, social, and economic circumstances, was a particularly notable factor from the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries. But to extract serfdom from a multiple context and to single out its role is hardly worthwhile: the origins of family structure are multicausal.
To be sure, these conclusions are not definitive—they reflect the current state of the study of family history in Russia. It would be desirable to continue this research using as large amount of material as possible.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Professor Joseph Bradley, Department of History, University of Tulsa, for the translation of this article. I am grateful to David Ransel and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on an earlier draft.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.