When three years of famine descended on Russia, peasants left the barren land and flocked to towns in search of food. To bind them, Boris decreed a permanent bondage to the land, to be vested in the landowners. In the years that followed, the legal binding of workers to the land was needed to curb the nomadic instincts of Russian peasants; many simply walked away from work they did not like.
Walking away is one of the basic freedoms
