Sazhen

1995: And it will not yield more than ten sazhens of wood to the desyatina…and he is paying me at the rate of two hundred roubles. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Louise & Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998, p. 166)

For how if he were to end by getting drowned? True, the river’s normal level lay four sazheni down—the remembrance of that (for he had often descended thither to draw water) comforted him for a moment; […]

Although in his diary he listed its intended dimensions as 200 by 100 sazheni (1400 x 700 ft.), the resulting structure probably measured only 818.75 x 425.75 feet (230 x 130m).

In 1883, peasant representatives from two villages in Voronezh Province petitioned the governor, detailing their hardships. In 1863 they had chosen to receive gratuitous allotments that amounted to a minuscule 2,080 sazheni (86.7 percent of one desiatina) per soul; since then, however, population growth had reduced their allotment size by more than one-half, to eight hundred sazheni per soul.