ABSTRACT
The broad participation in local administration that opened up to the gentry in Catherine's II reign was a consequence of its landowning significance, and its landowning significance rested on serfdom. The gentry directed the local administration because, apart from its role in government, almost half the local population, the serfs, in its hands, living on its land. The free rural population under Catherine II formed a minority of the rural population as a whole; a decided majority of the rural population in Great Russia consisted of serfs. Peter Panin, one of the best statesmen of Catherine's II time, in a memorandum of 1763 wrote of the necessity of limiting the unbounded power of the landlord over his peasants and establishing norms for labor and dues the peasants paid him. Under Catherine II, serfdom proliferated by yet another means: the legislative abolition of free peasant movement. In the eighteenth century, free movement was still allowed by law in the Ukrainian provinces.
