State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia: The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1649

State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1649 Brian L. Davies State Power and Commun...

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State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1649

Brian L. Davies

State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia

State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia The Case of Kozlov, 1635–1649 Brian L. Davies

© Brian L. Davies 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3213–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Brian L., 1953– State power and community in early modern Russia : the case of Kozlov, 1635–1649 / Brian L. Davies. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3213–1 (cloth) 1. Michurinsk (Tambovskaëì oblast§′ Russia)—History. 2. Michurinsk (Tambovskaëì oblast§′ Russia)—Social conditions. 3. Social structure—Russia (Federation)—Tambovskaëì oblast§′—History. 4. Local government—Russia (Federation)—Tambovskaëì oblast§′ I. Title. DK651.M46D38 2004 947′.35—dc22 10 13

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Contents

List of Maps

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction The character of state power in Muscovy Compulsory service The chancelleries The town governors Compensations for the deficiencies of bureaucratic power

1 3 10 14 22 26

1

30

2

Kozlov and the Pacification of the Nogai Front Southern frontier colonization as a state-directed campaign The vulnerable Nogai Front The expedition to Urliapovo Gorodishche Surveying for settlement and defense The construction of Kozlov The wall across the steppe Combat with the Tatars Kozlov and the Belgorod Line Enlistment and the Construction of Social Identity The negotiation of colonist identity A colony of volunteers and smallholders Defining eligibility for enlistment Competition for manpower The enlistment process Enlistment targets The social and geographic origins of the Kozlov volunteers The pattern of peasant flight to Kozlov Enlistment and remand policies after 1638 Settlement subsidies Determining compensation entitlements v

30 36 43 49 55 59 66 70 75 75 75 80 83 86 89 91 93 99 105 106

vi

Contents

3

Property, Labor, and the Village Commune The Tsar’s bounty The siabr system of collective allotment The pattern of settlement at Kozlov, 1635–1638 The defense of property right Labor, production, and consumption Market relations

117 117 121 133 136 140 147

4

Governing Kozlov The personnel of the governor’s office The district service order The church Taxation Restrictions on movement Vagabonds and bandits Policing Justice The southern frontier as a distinct political culture?

152 152 159 163 169 177 182 185 197 203

5

Supplication, Subversion, and Resistance Bribery, feeding, and the politics of gift exchange The theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance Grievance The repudiation of Governor Roman Boborykin The limits of resistance Epilogue: the degradation of the odnodvorets condition

207 208 213 216 225 242 244

Appendix I

249

Appendix II

251

Appendix III

253

Abbreviations

255

Notes

257

Archival Sources

298

Index

299

List of Maps 1 2

The Southern Frontier in 1635 Kozlov District, 1635–1638

ix x

vii

Acknowledgments This project has consumed several years of my life and I could not have seen it through to completion without the assistance, encouragement, and patience of others. My debt of gratitude begins with the University of Chicago, which gave me the opportunity to study history under William H. McNeill, Richard Wortman, Jeffrey Brooks, the late Arcadius Kahan, and particularly Richard Hellie, who introduced me to the study of Muscovite history and who has continued to guide and inspire me over the past 20 years. Two generous grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board made it possible for me to conduct research in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the Lenin State Library in Moscow in 1978–1979 and 1987–1988. My thanks to the staff of RGADA and the Lenin State Library, and the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, who were generous with their assistance and helped to make my time in Moscow unforgettably pleasant as well as productive. I am also grateful for the support I have received from The University of Illinois Summer Research Laboratory on Russia and Eastern Europe, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio. I have had the great fortune to have had the friendship as well as counsel of Kira Stevens, Philip Uninsky, Jeremy Black, Robert Frost, Daniel Kaiser, Ann Kleimola, Janet Martin, Steven Hoch, Gail Lenhoff, Marshall Poe, Wing Chung Ng, Anne Hardgrove, Harvey Graff, Antonio Calabria, Gaye Okoh, James Schneider, Max Tibbits, Greg Smith, Sandy Morrison, and Beverly Davis. It meant a great deal to me to know I could always count on the encouragement of my parents Robert and Kay Gerelick and my brother Joel and his wife Jeanne. And no person could hope for friends more steadfast and loving than Kolleen Guy and Bill, Eric, and Emma Bishel. Above all I thank my wife Paula. Her love, good humor, and wisdom helped me to finally vanquish the Monster in the Box. I dedicate this book to her.

viii

Map 1

kop Pere

The Southern Frontier in 1635

c k l a B e a S

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ix

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Map 2

Kozlov District, 1635–1638

Introduction

This book uses materials from the Moscow archives of the seventeenthcentury Military Chancellery (Razriadnyi prikaz) to reconstruct the colonization and governance of Kozlov, a garrison town founded in 1635 at the confluence of the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh rivers about 250 kilometers southeast of Moscow. This site was of particular strategic importance as it lay athwart the Nogai Road, one of the principal invasion routes used by the Crimean Tatars and Nogais. Tatar raiding up the Nogai Road had long discouraged Russian colonization south of the Oka River between the Don and the Volga, and on several occasions larger Crimean Tatar armies had managed to cross the Oka and ravage central Muscovy. It was therefore to protect the capital and heartland as well as support resumed colonization of the southern steppe frontier that the Military Chancellery decided in 1635 to block attacks up the Nogai Road by commissioning governors I. V. Birkin and M. I. Speshnev to establish a garrison town at Kozlov and erect a chain of fortifications extending eastward from Kozlov across the steppe as far as Chelnovaia Creek. This project was remarkably successful. Within three years of Kozlov’s founding its garrison had become one of the largest reservoirs of military manpower on Muscovy’s southern steppe frontier. Kozlov’s troops and steppe fortifications had effectively closed down the Nogai Road, greatly reducing the threat of Tatar raids upon the districts to its north. More importantly, the success of the Kozlov Wall in cutting the Nogai Road had inspired the Military Chancellery to accelerate its program of defense line construction and military colonization across the rest of the southern frontier. In 1637 work began on the great Belgorod Line, a chain of fortifications running over 800 kilometers southwest across the edge of the forest-steppe zone, from the eastern terminus of the Kozlov Wall 1

2


to Akhtyrka in northern Ukraine. By the time of its completion the Belgorod Line linked up over 20 garrison towns situated to block the remaining Tatar invasion roads. Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy now shifted to the offensive. The Belgorod Line became a place d’armes for Muscovite campaigns down the Don against the Crimean Khanate and campaigns in Ukraine against the Poles, renegade Ukrainian hetmans, and the Ottomans. Kozlov troops subsequently comprised the core of most of the expeditionary armies involved in these operations, which succeeded by 1681 in bringing eastern Ukraine under the tsar’s hegemony and advancing Muscovite military colonization to within 150 kilometers of the Black Sea coast. Because of Kozlov’s continuing importance for Muscovy’s evolving southern frontier strategy, most aspects of its settlement and subsequent governance were under the supervision of the Military Chancellery, the central government organ most responsible for the colonization and defense of the southern frontier. The records of the Military Chancellery allow us to reconstruct daily life at Kozlov in remarkable detail. They reveal how the Military Chancellery and the governor’s office recruited colonists and determined their land and cash subsidy entitlements; how they trained, disciplined, and remunerated the Kozlov garrison community; how they regulated property relations and collected revenue; how they policed and administered justice; and how they responded to grievances and social unrest. At the same time the Kozlov materials in the Military Chancellery archive – particularly the petitions, impounded private letters, trial and inquest transcripts, and muster testimonies – let us hear something of the voices of the Kozlov colonists themselves. They speak of their origins, their motives for settling, the military and administrative duties they performed, their social ties and rivalries, and their requests and complaints of the governor’s office and the central government at Moscow. These sources have a great deal to say about the nature of subaltern practice at Kozlov – how the colonists responded to the Kozlov garrison regime, how they collaborated in building and maintaining it, what associations they formed and what strategies they pursued to bend the garrison regime to their own interests, or reform or resist it. The focus of our study is therefore on the power relations between the governor’s office and the garrison community at Kozlov from 1635 to 1649, from the district’s founding to the beginning of the juridical decline of the garrison population through their subjection to draft grain taxes. Close attention will be paid to the great mutiny of 1648, the district population’s most organized and articulate protest against the course of development of the garrison regime. Our primary interest

Introduction

3

is in the local, in Kozlov as a locus for observing such power relations within a particular framework of challenges, opportunities, and restraints.1 Such a focus upon the local and particular is especially appropriate given the significant role played by improvisation and accommodation in the chancelleries’ strategies for further centralizing control over Kozlov’s governance as well as in the community’s strategies for adapting to or resisting state control. But we will also argue for Kozlov’s importance for a larger comparative study by considering what the pattern of state–society relations at Kozlov can tell us about the regional differentiation of political culture in seventeenth-century Muscovy. The military colonization format pursued at Kozlov served as a model for the subsequent colonization of the districts across the Belgorod Line. It involved a radical reordering of the “middle service class” – the provincial petty service nobility – adapting it to the special circumstances of southern frontier service. In contrast to the traditional middle service class of central Muscovy, the reconfigured middle service class of Kozlov and the southern frontier comprised mostly yeoman smallholders (odnodvortsy) with considerably lower entitlements, lacking peasant tenants, holding their land allotments within village communal bloc grants rather than as discrete personal farmsteads, and bearing a military service burden heavier in proportion to their material resources. These southern frontier odnodvortsy were more clearly subaltern than their counterparts in central Muscovy. They lived under a more pervasive military discipline out of the governor’s office as well as the more collectivized social discipline of their village communes. The smaller scale of their household economies imposed greater limits on their ability to mobilize agricultural surplus for the local market. Their juridical status was also far more precarious, to the extent that most of them were eventually subjected to taxation and deprived of their legal freedom in order to support field army operations away from the frontier their decades of service had secured. Household and community life at Kozlov and in the other southern frontier districts settled after 1635 therefore tended to be considerably more (although never totally) “state-determined” than in provincial central Muscovy – a condition at odds with the traditional stereotype of the frontier as undergoverned “unbounded” space.

The character of state power in Muscovy As our subject is the relation between state power and community in early Kozlov, it is essential that I clarify at the outset how I understand

4


the character of the Muscovite state in the first half of the seventeenth century. Some preliminary attention needs to be given to explaining the sources of the Muscovite state’s power and legitimacy, the organization of central and local government, the degree of centralization and devolution of decisionmaking, the priority of objectives in governance, and the factors affecting the efficiency with which these objectives were pursued. Some of the language that has been used in the past to characterize the Muscovite political system – terms like “autocracy,” “absolutism,” and “state-determined society” – also needs to be carefully qualified, as it continues to elicit some misunderstanding even among specialists. 2 In a few instances historians have surrendered to the lure of simple stark dichotomies and have conflated ideology with political practice or used faulty comparisons from early modern Western Europe in order to more conveniently slip the Muscovite state into taxonomies that are completely inappropriate. There is a general agreement that the Muscovite political system was officially autocratic – that in theory the imperium was entirely concentrated in the hands of the tsar who ruled unconstrained by any manmade laws or institutions. Muscovite political thought also asserted that the tsar’s autocratic power was patrimonially derived, that in theory all property in the realm belonged to the tsar and that his subjects could therefore be properly considered his bondsmen. And the official conception of the social order was of one organized by the state service principle: all elements of society were consigned to sosloviia (“liturgical orders,” although usually mistranslated as “estates”) according to the forms of direct or indirect service they rendered to the tsar and the apparatus of his state. Some historians (Richard Hellie, Marshall Poe, Richard Pipes) are inclined to see these three ideological claims as largely fulfilled in political practice by the end of the Muscovite period. Autocracy, patrimonialism, and universal compulsory state service were such totalizing claims that they discouraged any effective elite or popular resistance to the aggrandizement of state power, which in turn was devoted primarily to the reinforcement of these claims. As a result, the state–society relations over the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries “evolved from a weak, distant, and perhaps consensual one based on taxes paid for defense to an efficient, coerced, nonreciprocal, and often nonconsensual relationship enforced by efficient organs of social control.” By comparison with contemporary Western European regimes Muscovite state power hypertrophied and the power claims asserted in Muscovite official ideology became genuinely enforceable to a much greater extent than any of the

Introduction

5

claims asserted by Western European royal absolutism. The autocrat tsar was subject to “none of the institutional restraints on the government that existed in the West. . . . The government could and did mobilize whatever land it wanted almost at will. . . . The ruling oligarchy desired that government service be the basic principle of society, and because of its control over so much of everyday life it generally succeeded.”3 Those who have argued for the Muscovite political system as a “hypertrophic service state” have generally done so in a carefully qualified way. They do not claim that the tsar actually possessed and wielded absolute universal power. That power was unlimited only in theory; in practice it remained subject to significant technical and natural limitations (jurisdictional conflicts in the central chancelleries, the shortage of literate experienced personnel, technological backwardness, the special difficulty of communications and control over such a vast territory, an undermonetarized economy, etc.).4 Certain important functions therefore remained beyond the autocracy’s power; although it was remarkably efficient in mobilizing resources for war, there was little it could do to stop bribetaking and abuse of authority by its own provincial governors. Furthermore, these historians generally avoid overpersonalizing the notion of autocracy. They do not imagine the autocrat tsar was alone the state. The conduct of Ivan IV, who appears to have wielded power arbitrarily and capriciously in order to demonstrate that he was fully independent of his court and councilors and free to ravage his own subjects, did not represent the norm and ultimately led to the systemic political crisis of the Troubles. The norm, rather, was monarchical sovereignty rendered autocratic by the consent of elites. The service nobility, chancellery secretariat, and church hierarchy actively collaborated to “build” autocracy – to assert and enforce the claim that the tsar ruled as autocrat and possessed the power to compel universal service – in order to mediate and contain their own factional conflicts, maintain control over the lower orders, and distribute ranks and entitlements. However, there has been some criticism that the hypertrophic service state model has been overly preoccupied with the nonreciprocal and nonconsensual aspects of Muscovite state power. Its proponents have not given enough attention to the dependence of autocracy upon the ongoing collaboration of elites and the opportunities this provided for oligarchic rule behind the facade of autocracy; they have overstated the extent to which the autocrat had true patrimonial control over all of the land of the realm preventing the emergence of any concept of private property and therefore of any notions of personal or corporate rights; and because their emphasis has been primarily on the power of the state

6


they tend to portray Muscovite society as entirely supine and incapable of resistance.5 Nancy Shields Kollmann, Valerie Kivelson, and others have therefore called for greater attention to the role of hegemonic politics, as opposed to direct domination, in the operations of the autocratic service state. They identify the notion of the tsar’s paternal responsibility towards his subjects as the central idea of the political discourse establishing elites’ active support of and the masses’ passive acceptance of autocracy. They therefore see “a monarch ruling in council with his boyars and elites, constrained to rule according to custom, tradition, and even law, and enjoying a high degree of legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects. . . . Collective consultation was the norm in Muscovy, in both representation and practice.” 6 They also treat bureaucratic centralization in Muscovy as considerable but incomplete. This left governance still partly reliant on the devolution of some administrative functions to popular representative organs, which meant in turn the continued toleration of particular local autonomies. Effective governance also continued to require that bureaucratic instruments occasionally be put aside so that matters could be resolved by personal and clique influence. Thus state power and the private power of elites continued to be intertwined and under normal circumstances mutually reinforcing.7 This revisionist approach has two virtues. It offers a more nuanced understanding of autocracy and compulsory state service, explaining why their maintenance did not require unlimited and fully efficient bureaucratic power perpetually attacking the moral economy of communities. It also recognizes the existence of space for some autonomous subaltern practice within the Muscovite system and places the mapping of this space at the top of the agendum. But it could do more to clarify what it means by collective consultation, which has been and is likely to continue to be misconstrued. There have been, for example, some attempts by other historians to label early seventeenth-century Muscovy as an “estate-representative monarchy” like those of late medieval and early modern Western Europe or “a popularpatriarchal monarchy . . . with elements of rudimentary democracy.”8 But this can only be done by misrepresenting the nature of collective consultation in the Muscovite case. These historians have therefore had to mischaracterize the functions and authority of the Boiar Duma and Assembly of the Realm, and also mischaracterize the service and draft sosloviia, which were liturgical orders created by the state and not selfconsciously independent estates (stande, etats) predating the establishment of national royal sovereignty.

Introduction

7

Another source of misunderstanding has arisen from the tendency of some other writers to contrast Muscovite administrative practice with an idealized model of rational bureaucracy, to too quickly assume the latter already characterized administration in Western absolutist regimes, and to dismiss Muscovite practice as comparatively backward for falling short of this model.9 Thus Muscovite autocracy is judged as much less functionally effective than contemporary Western European royal absolutism, which “evolved as a result of military and institutional innovations and social change,” establishing and maintaining its authority with the “aid of powerful standing armies and large efficient bureaucracies, of which pre-Petrine Muscovy could not boast.” The Muscovite military and state apparatus remained comparatively unimpressive, the Muscovite statebuilding strategy having “tended to concentrate on destroying real or potential centres of power rather than building up strong institutions of its own.” Although the grand princes and tsars had succeeded in undermining one after another of their internal and external enemies by making shrewd use of the talent for political intrigue centuries of Mongol domination had inculcated in them, they had not yet learned to build a bureaucracy capable of significantly reordering their subjects’ daily lives. 10 Thus the Muscovite state was brutally oppressive yet simultaneously “politically weak,” its autocrat a “less effectual ruler than western observers supposed” because the administrative apparatus through which he ruled “was of a most rudimentary kind.” Both the local and the central governments were “chaotic, disorganized, and shot through with bribery and corruption.”11 This contrast between Muscovite political backwardness and the bureaucratic rationality of Western European absolutism is overstated. It exaggerates the size and complexity of the military and administrative apparatus of Western European states, particularly before the last third of the seventeenth century. It wrongly singles out the Muscovite statebuilding process for continuing to rely in part upon nonbureaucratic means of power aggrandizement, as if European monarchs had already succeeded in developing such reliable instruments for bureaucratic command that they no longer needed to resort to intrigue, occasional selective terror, and patronage co-optation to tame their nobilities. Above all its test of the effectiveness of state power is ahistorical; it cannot help but find seventeenth-century Muscovite bureaucratic development backward because its stereotype of bureaucratic rationality is actually derived from a later period of European history, from the eighteenth century, when the enlightened “well-ordered police state” issuing comprehensive ordinances to promote and direct “a dynamic,

8


production-oriented society” had become the prevailing model of government in Russia as well as the Germanies. 12 Russian government made no real effort to pursue such a program until the reign of Peter the Great. The seventeenth-century Muscovite state pursued what were by comparison more “limited” ends: upholding the Orthodox faith; mobilizing manpower for war; maintaining the viability of the pomest’e system and attendant entitlements rewarding service to the state; and policing against treason and brigandage. These tasks were crucial to the state’s survival, and coercive sanctions and maximum centralization of political decisionmaking were appropriate means of achieving them. 13 But other objectives requiring greater responsiveness to local needs were as yet given little attention. The judicial system, for example, frequently failed to protect subjects’ rights and resolve their conflicts in an impartial manner because the state was only beginning to see its courts as something more than a source of fee revenue. It is hard to discern the glimmering of any kind of mercantile policy already in the late 1650s. And as yet very limited resources were devoted to combatting the principal forms of official corruption, proizvol’ (abuse of authority, insubordination) and the levying of posuly (bribes) or nalogi (unauthorized and extortionate imposts) except when these were especially egregious and damaging to state interests. Compared with the program of the eighteenth-century polizeistaat, the agendum of the seventeenth-century Muscovite state appears to Marc Raeff as largely “passive or negative in nature” in that it defined state interests in a narrow, selfish way and gave little thought to using state power to promote national prosperity and cultural progress.14 But if these ends were by comparison more “limited,” “passive,” or “negative,” that does not mean they were also fundamentally more primitive ends presenting the state with no great technical challenge and requiring no more than the most rudimentary bureaucracy. Our account of the resource mobilization and policing tasks involved in the military colonization of Kozlov should go some way in dispelling this notion. Those who see the Muscovite state as failing to have developed strong institutions in comparison with the absolutisms of Western Europe appear to be looking for efficient state power only in certain familiar institutional configurations. We will argue that by the early seventeenth century the Muscovite state had already developed three powerful instruments for resource mobilization and social control. The oldest and most fundamental of these instruments took the form of a complex hierarchy of state service obligations and their attendant incentives and penalties, binding upon all ranks of society; this liturgical regime of

Introduction

9

compulsory state service actually predated the emergence of bureaucratically organized state power,15 having originated in a fifteenth-century political compact between the crown and the nobility aiming at preventing further civil warfare over precedence and political spoils, that is, as what Weber would call a regime of primary patriarchalism. But by the mid-sixteenth century territorial expansion, economic recovery, and the increased size and complexity of the army and royal household had made it possible and necessary to depersonalize, formalize, and specialize the authority managing the state service system. This process of bureaucratization was first apparent at Moscow, in the multiplication of central chancelleries (prikazy), organized upon a functional as well as territorial basis and staffed by secretaries and clerks who had some specialized training. By the end of the Time of Troubles local government had been considerably bureaucratized as well, nearly all civil and military administrative authority having been transferred into the hands of town governors ( gorodovye voevody) who were appointed, instructed, and monitored by the central chancelleries. By the 1630s Muscovite government was certainly still far from being rationally bureaucratic in the Weberian sense, but closer examination of it in action reveals its organization to be more ramified and systematized and its operations more normatized than is generally recognized. It remained troubled by insufficiency of material resources, disputes over jurisdiction, red tape, and especially by corruption, but this could be said of most regimes in early modern Europe. The policing and resource mobilization power provided by the compulsory state service system, the central chancelleries, and the town governors’ offices was impressive enough when considered against Muscovy’s sparse population, undercommercialized economy, and limited literacy. What it was able to accomplish at Kozlov and on the southern frontier was especially striking. Furthermore, that Muscovite state power was still largely protobureaucratic in character may have been of greater advantage than disadvantage for political stability at this juncture in Russian political history, when successful administrative solutions were found only through continuous experimentation with rules and jurisdictions, and the traditional political legitimation of the autocrat as personal intercessor for the people’s justice remained at odds with the principles of depersonalized bureaucratic government. In this regard Muscovite political culture was more flexible than the culture of the Petrine “regulated state,” which could not as easily justify suspending bureaucratic norms to resort to what we shall call “techniques of primitive centralization.”

10


Compulsory service The principle of compulsory state service introduced and systematized over the course of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries reclassified virtually the entire population as state servitors or unfree taxable subjects – “men of service” (sluzhilye liudi) and “yoked men” or “men of draft” (tiaglye liudi) – both subject to direct and indirect forms of compulsory life duty to the state. The men of service were organized into three classes with different military and administrative roles and corresponding privileges. Though all three classes received land allotments and cash and grain remuneration from the state in exchange for service, only the upper service class – the elite metropolitan nobility from which the generals, Duma counsellors, and town governors were drawn – also owned allodial lands (votchiny) on any significant scale. The middle service class – the provincial petty nobility – comprised the core of the army, serving from service-conditional land allotments called pomest’ia. The lower service class – the registered cossacks and musketeers – served from smaller allotments called nadely, but were more dependent upon their cash and grain allowances and were not legally permitted to acquire serf labor. The men of draft were the private and state peasants and commoner townsmen who comprised the bulk of the population. As taxpayers they provided the cash and grain with which the state remunerated the men of service. They performed occasional militia duty and corvee labor on state construction projects as well. The private peasants were also tenants on the allodial and service-conditional lands of the upper and middle service classes, paying rents supporting them in service, and in legal status rapidly facing enserfment. On the surface, this compulsory state service system has struck some observers as possessing an “amoeba-like simplicity.”16 In fact managing the multitude of obligations and entitlements that structured it took most of the attention of Muscovite central and local government and was the primary reason for the accelerated growth and ramification of Muscovite bureaucracy. The state service principle extended either directly or indirectly to all categories of the population and harnessed them to all the various military, fiscal, and economic functions of importance to the state. The claims and manner of administration of the state service principle were so totalizing as to render most property right and personal and corporate entitlements and privileges service-conditional. This was due in large part to the fact that its power derived from hegemonic practice as well as direct domination; it could not have taken hold

Introduction

11

if the ruling class itself had not consented to be bound by its rules. Thus even the metropolitan nobility was subject to military, court ceremonial, and administrative service to the tsar; if in practice the most eminent of them wielded the real power in the realm and laid hereditary claim to boyar rank and to allodial estates, they still accepted their status as servitors to the extent that they even identified themselves as bondsmen (kholopy) of the tsar, who could take their ranks, estates, and even their lives if they failed to render him loyal service. The nobility had originally acceded to this service role in the fifteenth century, as part of their political bargain with the throne, to maintain the charade of the tsar’s personal autocracy, out of fear that their own unrestrained feuding would otherwise lead to continued political disintegration and civil war. In so doing they were also striking a political bargain among themselves, agreeing to uphold the fiction that their status and privileges were entitlements legitimated by the service the state compelled them to perform, entitlements defined partly by clan precedence but also by evaluations of their service made by an “autocratic” tsar standing above all clan and regional interests. This bargain necessarily had to be binding upon the nobility as a whole, without exception, if it was to successfully establish the principle that the most important status differentiations in Muscovite society derived not just from pedigree and private economic power but also from service role. Those who balked at accepting the bargain were repressed; the rest reconciled themselves to it with the knowledge that the project of constructing autocracy ultimately required that the principle of compulsory state service be extended in turn to the lower orders of society, placing them in various other supporting forms of service – including forms of service to the nobility as well as to the tsar. Thus the political compact between the monarchy and the nobility made it possible to gradually enserf the men of draft to guarantee their rents and taxes supported the men of service, while the latter spent their lives under military discipline, earning their promotions, lands, salaries, and peasant labor by fulfilling the state’s assignments. The monarchy in turn was obliged to allow particular privileges (princely title and votchina estates) to be transmitted by inheritance; to use its police power to assist in the immobilization of peasant tenants; and above all to keep to the rules of precedence in distributing offices. On the whole it was able to accommodate the honorific pretensions of the traditionally preeminent leading aristocratic clans in distributing military and administrative commands without seriously prejudicing the general quality of service performance.17 The exceptions to this – the

12


anarchy of the Oprichnina years and the Time of Troubles – derived rather from extraordinary circumstances, from the temporary confusion of precedence caused by Ivan IV’s and Boris Godunov’s failures to make stable marriage alliances with the leading aristocratic clans; and they unleashed such devastation as to convince the nobility and the new Romanov dynasty that the survival of the state required that they reestablish their political compact upon the traditional three pillars of compulsory state service, precedence-regulated privilege, and quasi-autocracy. This gave the monarchy more absolutizing power than the monarchies of Western Europe, for unlike them it no longer confronted independent social estates and institutions that required great effort to curb, co-opt, or play off against each other. 18 The state service principle was also of considerable advantage for resource mobilization in that it did much to compensate for the deficiencies of Muscovite tax collection. By the 1620s the fiscal machinery damaged during the Troubles had been rebuilt and cadastral updates undertaken, but it was still the case that the Muscovite state, like other regimes of the period, had to set heavy tax rates because it could not yet collect its taxes efficiently. The largest share of revenue continued to come from indirect taxation (customs and excise duties); even lease charges (obrok) for the use of state lands and other state property yielded more than direct taxation; and although the heaviest of the regular direct cash taxes, the musketeers’ grain tax, nearly tripled over the years 1635–1638, the amount of it actually collected still did not suffice to cover military expenditures, compelling the government to continue supplementing it with extraordinary levies like “fifths money,” which tended to meet with resistance and provoke taxpayer flight or the curtailment of cultivation. For example, although an initial outlay of 110,000 rubles was needed in 1637 to build new defense line segments in the Belgorod, Kursk, and Oskol’ regions and station troops along them, the four chancelleries charged with levying fifths money for this undertaking were unable to collect more than 72,309 rubles. 19 But if cash revenue was sometimes in short supply, manpower could be mobilized on a vast scale and at comparatively small expense to the treasury thanks to the tradition of universal compulsory service. Muscovite troops were remunerated less by treasury cash and grain outlays than by the allotment of service-conditional land – often by the mere promise of land, given the modest ratio of actual grants to entitlement rates (25–60 percent of entitlement rate in the sixteenth century, and 5–40 percent of entitlement rate in the seventeenth century).20 Cash and grain disbursements could be limited, dribbled out over a long period to

Introduction

13

keep their promised recipients on active duty. Of the 24,714 middle service class cavalrymen on the 1632 service list, only about 7 percent received their cash allowances in full each year, and all of these were on the western and southern fronts; the rest were paid only irregularly, usually once in every five years or when they were called up from the provinces for campaign. 21 Those who failed to serve forfeited their service allowances. This made the Muscovite military format cheaper than that followed by most European states, which chose to hire large numbers of mercenaries to augment their small national force cores (aristocratic and general arriere-bans, commoner militias). Compulsory service was especially suited to the task of colonizing the southern frontier, allowing it to be conducted as a state-directed military campaign which served strategic interests better than colonization on private initiative by magnate latifundists, runaway peasants, and independent Don Cossacks. The material hardships and regimentation experienced by the colonists suggest that the architects and foremen of the southern colonization program – the Military Chancellery and the town governors – succeeded in accelerating military settlement without having to devote much attention to the needs of the colonists themselves. Promises of land and freedom were made, then ignored; the satisfaction of petitioners’ requests for material assistance or justice came slowly or not at all. But under most circumstances this caused no anxiety on the state’s part. It was not a sign of inefficency, but rather a proof of the state’s power to command: the promise of certain material and legal boons may have been a necessary incentive for military colonization, but the actual fulfillment of such promises was unnecessary unless the community had been frustrated to the point of mutiny. The state continued to prefer coercive measures to achieve more rapid colonization, and it invoked the principle of compulsory state service to legitimate them. The advantages of coercion were clear. Garrison colonies did more to fortify and defend their districts and shield the Russian interior than civilian colonies formed on private initiative; and if not enough volunteers for garrison settlement were forthcoming the needed manpower could be forcibly transferred from other districts. Military colonists were obliged to serve for life in the new garrison towns, whereas private colonists not subject to state command might abandon settlements in those areas which were of greater strategic value to Moscow than of economic value to themselves. And because the state’s ability to compel service or tiaglo was theoretically universal, formally rooted in the tsar’s claim of patrimonial ownership of the realm, it was also possible to invoke this and confiscate private settlements for state ends. Thus villages and forts

14


built by free cossacks seeking their own land and freedom could be reclaimed by the state and reorganized as registered service cossack communities; likewise, the peasants of boyar or monastery votchina villages were already liable for tiaglo, through which they could be impressed into corvee and militia duty on behalf of the new garrisons nearby, and if they should fall into property disputes with military colonists their master’s votchina could be confiscated by the tsar and reorganized as a state service garrison. 22 The same patrimonial right was exercised in the Forbidden Towns decrees, to shut out future magnate colonization and restrict access to the frontier land fund exclusively to the service smallholders of the garrisons. The great boyar families and monasteries had to accept the state’s right to exercise occasional monopoly claims to frontier land and labor – not only because of the historical bargain they had made to construct autocracy, but more practically because of the military situation in the south, where magnate land tenure would have remained insecure without the strong military presence provided by the state service system.23 The state’s ability to limit magnate colonization along the frontier had the additional political advantage of reducing the risk of the kind of feudalization of frontier military authority that was eroding the Polish monarchy’s control over Ukraine.

The chancelleries The efficiency with which Muscovite central government regulated and remunerated compulsory service has been underestimated largely out of the false conflation of efficiency with the ideal of the fully rationalized and enlightened polizeistaat to which the Petrine era state pretended. For example, it has often been repeated that the central chancellery apparatus must have been plagued by jurisdictional confusion. After all, there were 65 different chancelleries operating in the 1630s, 12 of which were temporary and ad hoc commissions, while others seem to have overlapped in jurisdiction. Historians’ taxonomies of the chancellery apparatus have failed to discern any single clear organizing principle structuring central government: some chancelleries were organized by function, others territorially, and still others as dumping grounds for whatever unrelated matters fell out of the purview of other bodies. 24 But if we look past the formal structure of the apparatus into actual administrative practice as documented in chancellery archives, the chaos was not really so great. Most of the time “neither the government nor its subjects had any doubt which prikaz was in charge of what.”25 Jurisdictional conflicts seem to have been minimized especially in the

Introduction

15

military colonization of the southern frontier because virtually all aspects of the colonization campaign were entrusted to a single organ, the Military Chancellery. At Kozlov we do find a few instances of gridlock and action at cross purposes when the cooperation of other chancelleries was required – for example, in Kozlov’s relations with neighboring Tambov, which came under the jurisdiction of the Chancellery of the Great Court. But the interests of the Military Chancellery invariably prevailed at the end, and there were few circumstances in which the settlement and administration of Kozlov required dealings with other chancelleries. There were three advantages to letting the Military Chancellery monopolize authority over the tasks associated with southern frontier colonization. First of all, state-directed military colonization served strategic ends and had to be closely integrated with other military operations. This could best be done in the Military Chancellery, which traditionally had directed field army operations as well as the founding and governance of garrison colonies on the southern and western fronts. In peacetime the Military Chancellery oversaw work in 12 other more specialized military prikazy (the Musketeers’ Chancellery, the Gunners’ Chancellery, the Chancellery of Peasant Militia Levies, etc.) in order to maintain army and garrison readiness, and in wartime the Military Chancellery served as a supreme war council, exercising authority over the chancellery apparatus in its entirety in order to coordinate manpower and materiel mobilization for major campaigns.26 Second, the decision to pursue the smallholder model of military colonization differentiated the service population of the south from that of the Muscovite heartland. This justified recentring authority over southern pomest’e allotments from the Service Lands Chancellery to the Military Chancellery, which had the advantage of streamlining decisionmaking for the colonization process. Thus servicemen in the central and northern districts continued to receive their entitlement rates from the Military Chancellery and their land grant authorizations from the Service Lands Chancellery – whereas those settling south of the Oka after 1600 also got their land grants from a Service Lands Bureau (Pomestnyi stol) within the Military Chancellery, which then filed the results with the Service Lands Chancellery. Finally, the Military Chancellery was the organ best positioned to select leaders for important administrative as well as military missions. Because it was recognized that administrative assignments should be balanced against military manpower needs, the Military Chancellery

16


acquired ultimate authority not only over the appointment of regimental commanders but also over the appointment of town governors and of secretaries and clerks to other chancelleries. This, added to the fact that it shared responsibility with the Service Lands Chancellery for the distribution and regulation of pomest’ia, placed the Military and Service Land chancelleries “at the heart of a vast patronage system extended over the entire country.” 27 The boyar cliques which actually ran the government could not afford to be perceived as having completely commandeered this patronage machine for themselves, for this would have delegitimated the compulsory service system. While lesser chancelleries were increasingly headed up by boyars and okol’nichie who were not administrative specialists and who were often most interested in using their chancellery directorships to enrich themselves and their clients, the Military and Service Lands chancelleries generally remained under the direction of secretaries who were career bureaucratic specialists and had worked their way up from the chancellery clerical corps. Thus the Military Chancellery’s operations benefitted from the continuity and expertise provided by secretary I. A. Gavrenev, who headed it for 32 years. Even when the powerful boyar Ivan Borisovich Cherkasskii took over the directorship of the Service Lands Chancellery, it resisted domination by the interests of a narrow clique of magnates and their clients: the serviceman Ivan Buturlin observed, “There were many chancellery personnel under Prince Ivan Borisovich, and at that time everything was done well in the chancelleries and no one encountered red tape.”28 The Military Chancellery also seems to have been run in a costefficient manner. Like other chancelleries, it determined the size of its own clerical staff and set the salary scale for its clerks, who were to be paid out of its own revenue sources; that removed any incentive for it to overexpand its staff or let other internal management costs mount so as to demand further revenue from the tsar. Most of the revenue it collected could therefore be returned to the provinces for expenditure on local needs.29 Yet it could still afford to have one of the largest clerical staffs of any chancellery. While we have no figures for the 1630s, it was known to have had 45 clerks in the 1620s (at that time the clerical corps for the entire central chancellery apparatus numbered 575) and 105 by 1672.30 Although clerks’ cash entitlement rates ranged from only one to fifty rubles, even the newest junior grade clerks were adequately remunerated when holiday pay, salt and grain allowances, relief subsidies, and special payments for service in the field are factored in, and salaries were more likely to be paid in full and on a more regular basis

Introduction

17

(usually in two or three installments each year) than was the case with the provincial middle service class. Military Chancellery clerks had pay rates three to five times higher than their counterparts in the various judicial and territorial chancelleries, giving them less reason to seek income from fees, bribes, and “feeding” prestations; this meant that Military Chancellery operations were less likely to be disrupted by prestation politics and bribery. 31 This clerical staff was organized into a hierarchy of three grades – junior, middling, and senior – with additional hierarchization by seniority within each grade, and with functional subordination to special senior “document clerks” and “signatory clerks” who oversaw accounts and document production and acted as section heads. Nepotism and patronage undoubtedly played some role in personnel selection and promotion, but experience counted for more: a candidate typically began his apprenticeship to a senior clerk when he was just 10–15 years old, and it took him another five to eight years to receive initiation as a salaried junior clerk or to ascend another grade. There was therefore opportunity for trainees to learn the general rules of document production and office discipline and also acquire the more specialized skills needed for accounting, the recording of court testimonies, cartography, or the interpretation of military intelligence.32 The Military Chancellery was subdivided into bureaus (stoly, “desks”) specializing in certain functions or supervising certain territories. Before mid-century there were four of these bureaus, and twelve by the end of the century. Each was headed by a senior clerk. 33 This division of labor affected the administration of Kozlov affairs in the following manner. The Moscow Bureau was the nerve center of the Military Chancellery, coordinating and supervising the activities of the other bureaus. It was responsible for administrative and military command appointments, regimental mobilizations and deployments, the collection of cash and grain for service allowances, provisioning, and the keeping of service rolls and inventories of stores in the garrison towns. It was also the Military Chancellery’s liaison with the rest of the chancellery apparatus. The Cash Bureau was responsible for the Military Chancellery’s treasury, bookkeeping, and distribution of funds across the southern and western frontiers. It maintained the income–expenditure books for fixed-rate and occasional levies, arrears, and balances. Such books were kept for individual towns as well as for general chancellery income and expenditure. The Chancellery Bureau served as the judicial affairs section; it conducted investigations, logged petitions and warrants, supervised policing

18


and the jails in the south, and served as the archive for unresolved court cases referred up from the provinces for adjudication by the directors of the Military Chancellery. It was also responsible for collecting and processing military intelligence, and it had charge of certain categories of southern servicemen (cossacks, patrol riders, Ukrainian immigrants in Russian service). In 1635 the Chancellery Bureau took on a new role: from this point on most matters pertaining to the colonization and administration of Kozlov, Chelnavsk, Bel’sk, Dobryi, and Sokol’sk were entrusted to it – probably a testimony to the special strategic importance of Kozlov and its satellite garrisons. Later in the century Tambov, Voronezh, and Usman’ were also intermittently under its jurisdiction. Initially, then, Kozlov affairs were highly concentrated in a single subdivision of the Military Chancellery, so they probably received unusually close attention by clerks with special familiarity with Kozlov conditions. Later some aspects of Kozlov administration were shifted to other new bureaus. A Grain Bureau was created in 1663 to supervise the grain stores of Kozlov and other frontier districts. The allotment of service lands, the issue of cadastral book extracts to certify rights of possession, and the adjudication of disputes about pomest’e boundaries, tenure rights, and alienations were transferred to the Service Lands Bureau. When Kozlov servicemen began undergoing mobilization into the Belgorod Army Group these mobilizations became the purview of a Belgorod Bureau. The work which began in 1637 on the construction and garrisoning of the new Belgorod Line likewise required that some early Kozlov records pertaining to fortifications corvee, land surveying, provisioning, and military operations be transferred from the Chancellery Bureau to the Belgorod and Vladimir bureaus. This shift towards the broader circulation of Kozlov affairs among other bureaus reflected the routinization of administration made possible by the fact that Kozlov was now a settled district. It was also connected with Kozlov’s redefined role in southern frontier strategy, reflecting the district’s new importance as a source of manpower and materiel for campaigns far beyond the Belgorod Line. Borivoj Plavsic believes that each chancellery had its own “fully developed written rules of procedure” in the form of its Ordinance Book, which served as a kind of manual stipulating “in the minutest detail who was to do what and how,” with “administrative directives covering every conceivable situation.” 34 Actually very little in these ordinance books touched upon matters of internal deloproizvodstvo, that is, upon office management, the division of labor, document production, record storage, and communications. But there was increasing uniformity of

Introduction

19

practice as to these things in the first decades of the century, both within the Military Chancellery and across the chancellery apparatus; this was apparent in the general similarity of governors’ working orders, in the repertory of report and accounting forms, in procedures for processing reports and petitions, and in auditing and inspection measures. If there was as yet no General Regulation, a published universal and systematized code of office management and information handling procedures, there were already unwritten rules passed down to clerks in the process of their training, with some variations adapted to chancellery jurisdiction and local circumstances but generally reflecting common principles. Administration was evolving from practical towards formal rationality. Furthermore, the absence of a General Regulation was especially unlikely to hinder the governance of Kozlov because jurisdiction over Kozlov was for some time centered almost entirely within the Chancellery Bureau. In the district’s early years most of the important information about local developments had been reported up in narrative form by the governors, who often dealt with several unrelated matters within the same report; but as specialists in Kozlov affairs the clerks of the Chancellery Bureau would have had no great difficulty in skimming for it. One might think the retrieval of information from older reports would be even harder because incoming reports were glued together in long scrolls which lacked indices or tables of contents; but here the clerks of the Chancellery Bureau had not only their memories to guide them but also logbooks which summarized incoming and outgoing communications in chronological order.35 After the 1630s the Chancellery Bureau’s administration of Kozlov affairs became more routinized. The kinds of information that increasingly became necessary to distribute among other bureaus were mostly service rolls, income–expenditure accounts, and cadastral data: these could be submitted in more schematized and quantifiable form as lists or entries in books, and it became easier for the governors’ clerks to prepare these as the clerical staff grew in size and accumulated experience. Incoming reports, accounts, and petitions were first directed to the pertinent bureau, where they were divided into two categories: “disputed matters” subject to adversarial claim or litigation, requiring investigation and searches of the chancellery archive, and “undisputed matters” which could be decided at once or simply filed away for future reference. This streamlined the decisionmaking process. The senior clerk of a bureau could quickly issue his own directive on an undisputed matter and have his staff draft a reply; in the Service Lands Chancellery a senior clerk

20


could issue as many as 30 such directives a day. Disputed matters required the bureau clerks to search their archive for pertinent past reports and decrees, cadastral registrations, service rolls, or other supporting materials; or they might have to interrogate personnel about relevant precedents, send memoranda through the Moscow Bureau to other chancelleries to order up needed information, or direct governors to conduct local investigations. When all this was done the bureau clerks prepared an extract or summary of the case, which might include recommendations by the bureau’s senior clerk; this was referred up to the chancellery director for his deliberation.36 When the chancellery had more than one director – usually a boyar or okol’nichii nonspecialist with secretaries as his associates – the executive panel was supposed to deliberate “as one,” “by all the directors together.” But this collective deliberation probably did not require strict collegial unanimity or majority vote; it simply encouraged the boyar director to consult the expertise of his associates, the secretaries who had risen up from the clerical ranks.37 Given the boyar director’s exalted rank, one might expect this consultation to be pro forma, unable to prevent him from enforcing strict monocratic subordination; but in practice the secretaries – and even the senior clerks who prepared the report extracts – had the opportunity to shape or even dictate the verdict because it was they who best knew the procedural rules and the choice of options for action.38 If the chancellery executive panel could still not reach a verdict, the matter was passed up to the tsar and the Boyar Duma. But even when this was not done the chancellery’s verdict was promulgated as if it were a decree from the tsar himself. Decrees seldom articulated universal norms; they prescribed specific actions for particular districts or defined the powers and obligations of particular organs. Those decrees promulgated after the Sudebnik law codes of the sixteenth century and issued in response to specific questions referred up to the chancellery were usually not included in the chancellery’s ordinance book, but neither had many other issues yet found written expression in the law. This should not be so surprising: the creation of a truly universal systematized code of administrative law was necessarily an empirical and cumulative process requiring decades and even centuries of administrative experience. It did happen that other chancelleries might not even be notified of a new decree unless they made specific inquiries about it, and this resulted in some action to cross purposes. 39 This is often cited as one of the dangers arising from the chancellery apparatus’ lack of full bureaucratic rationality.

Introduction

21

If the development of universal norms did not receive greater attention it was because autocracy had limited enthusiasm for this, so much of what it aimed at accomplishing at this time requiring its freedom from normative constraint; political expediency often dictated compromise with the law or exemption from it. Yet some movement towards normatization was already apparent, with certain chancelleries engaged in expanding and collating administrative law in response to collective petitions against unjust or unresponsive officials, and these collation efforts culminating in the production of the Ulozhenie (1649) as a general code for judicial procedures in central and local government.40 A code of behavior defining and punishing official malfeasance was also taking shape. The patrimonial origins of the state were still apparent in some of the language used in allegiance oaths given on state service and the more specific pledges given upon accession to particular offices, for these sureties committed officeholders to seek the “Sovereign’s gain” ( gosudareva pribyl’) in the conduct of all state business. But the code did not define the Sovereign’s gain so narrowly as to criminalize only sedition, embezzlement, and forgery; it also identified the Sovereign’s interest with the interest of his subjects and provided for the punishment of officials who took bribes, inflicted red tape on petitioners and litigants, or issued biased and dishonest rulings. Malfeasant officials might be fined, deprived of office or rank, subjected to corporal punishment or the confiscation of their estates, or even exiled. 41 This code of conduct, taken together with the training process within the chancellery and the chancellery’s responsibility for setting the salary rates of its clerks, gradually inculcated a more rational bureaucratic mentality among chancellery personnel, promoting the idea that they were in service not only to the person of the Tsar but to the larger abstraction of the State. The routine supervision and control of chancellery activity fell to the Tsar and Boyar Duma, to whom the chancellery secretaries reported their unresolved court cases, fiscal transactions, and matters requiring the promulgation of new norms. But their ability to police against inefficiency and corruption depended upon the Tsar’s political attentiveness and upon power relationships within the Duma. Organs for outside review and control did exist – the Petitions Chancellery, the special investigative commissions, and later, the Tsar’s Privy Chancellery – but they operated only in response to whatever complaints succeeded in reaching them, and they were sometimes headed by boyars who shielded from punishment malfeasors who happened to be their own clients.42

22


This points up the fact that the greatest potential weakness of the chancellery system was sociological, not organizational. The clerical and secretarial corps was small because administrative expertise and even basic literacy were still in deficit; and the highest administrative authority usually fell to Duma-rank magnates who valued military and court ceremonial duty over administrative duty. Regardless of how ramified the structure of government or how farsighted and comprehensive was the production of procedural norms and rules of conduct, government remained in the hands of men who often lacked the skills and attitudes to perform efficient service in compliance with the law. The shortage of qualified manpower also meant the government might not be able to afford to rid itself altogether of officials caught in malfeasance and would have to settle for reprimanding and fining them and transferring them to where they could do less damage.43

The town governors This was especially true in local government. By the 1620s nearly all aspects of defense, taxation, policing, civil and criminal justice, the remuneration of servicemen, and the regulation of pomest’e landholding at the local level had come under the authority of the town governor and his staff; it was upon their performance that resource mobilization and the maintenance of order ultimately hinged. Ideally, Moscow wanted the governor’s office (“assembly house,” s’ezzhaia izba) to operate like a miniaturized provincial chancellery, with a staff of experienced clerks who received their appointments and entitlement rates from Moscow, divided their labors by bureau, took their general guidance from working orders and ordinance books and chancellery rescripts, and followed chancellery rules of deloproizvodstvo. But most districts had few qualified clerks, especially in less populous regions early in the century. This left local government all the more dependent upon the town governors themselves, and the governors were there only avocationally, not as administrative specialists. Usually they were appointed to governorships as occasional respites from their “normal” duties in the army or at court, and they received no salary remuneration specifically for being governors. Serving as governors seldom advanced their careers; it was campaign duty in the regiments that won them their rank promotions and hikes to their service allowances.44 In their eyes the principal attraction of a term as governor was the opportunity it offered to “feed” off the local population for a year or two. Moscow had to tolerate such feeding practices because it knew the service allowances it

Introduction

23

intermittently paid them were inadequate remuneration. When a governor took more feeding revenue than the populace was willing to give, the central government usually did its best to investigate, remove him, and offer the victimized community some relief – but without cutting short the career of the malfeasor, who was simply transferred to some other post. 45 Corruption and the abuse of authority were more disruptive for local than for central government because responsibility for a broader range of administrative functions was concentrated in fewer and less experienced hands at the local level. For this same reason there were fewer checks against voevoda malfeasance in the smaller towns of no great strategic or economic importance, as these towns were more likely to be underclerked and to receive as governors lower-ranking courtiers less likely to have the attention of the tsar, Duma, and chancelleries. Voevoda authority in the smaller towns in far-off Siberia was even more difficult to supervise and therefore more vulnerable to abuse. One could therefore say that the capillary flow of power out to smaller and distant towns was less efficient and reliable than the arterial flow of power to major regional centers like Tobol’sk or Belgorod, where the governor tended to be a courtier of high rank with closer connections to the chancelleries and usually shared administrative responsibilities with an associate governor, a secretary, and a number of captains and clerks able to conduct more frequent and detailed reporting and accounting to Moscow. The principle cause of malfeasance in local government was neither the allegedly ramshackle structure of the chancellery apparatus nor the state’s alleged inability to spell out procedural norms and codes of conduct, for malfeasance persisted despite marked progress on both of these fronts. Various measures, both proactive and reactive, were already being taken to rationalize government operations and to combat malfeasance: the reduction of jurisdictional confusion through the subordination of other chancelleries to the Military Chancellery; the gradual codification of civil and criminal law; the issue of working orders defining officials’ powers and obligations more explicitly and thoroughly; the requirement that provincial offices report to Moscow on a more frequent, routine basis; greater standardization of procedures for handling information; the assignment of associates for consultative and supervisory purposes; end-of-term audits to uncover fiscal irregularities and to give plaintiffs hearings against outgoing governors; and the despatch of special investigators. Malfeasance continued in the face of all these measures because they did not address the problem at its roots: personnel recruitment

24


and remuneration policy. Moscow remained reluctant to spend more money on salaries for officials. This retarded the expansion of clerical staffs and left the governors reason to continue taking feedings and bribes. The state service principle continued to valorize military over administrative service, thereby perpetuating amateurism in the latter. Only in the early eighteenth century were these matters addressed by Peter the Great, and then only halfheartedly and unsuccessfully.46 But while Moscow’s own practices regarding cadre selection and remuneration continued to promote corruption and maladministration, by the end of the political reconstruction after the Time of Troubles the center did have available to it three techniques to minimize the damage they inflicted. The first of these involved a sharper division of labor between central and local government. Policymaking was separated from policy implementation; the former was centralized within the chancellery apparatus at Moscow, and the latter was left to the town governors. For example, working orders and decrees now forbade the governors to make any expenditures, set entitlement rates, or pass verdict in certain kinds of cases on their own initiative without express authorization from Moscow. This ban was extended to practically any administrative action which, if left entirely up to the governor’s discretion, might become a tiagost’, that is, a ruinous burden on the community. The exceptions were matters requiring the governor’s immediate response such as military emergencies. It should be stressed that this practice in no way reduced the range of tasks the governor was responsible for implementing; one could say it left the governor omnicompetent even while ending his omnipotence. The centralization of decisionmaking in the chancelleries of course had the negative effect of promoting prevarication among governors, who repeatedly sought chancellery decrees telling them what they were supposed to do, and this could slow government response time. But the sacrifice of speed to central control was exactly the kind of cost an autocracy was willing to pay – in contrast to increased proizvol, the higher price that would have attached to entrusting full discretion to the governors. Second, since the agenda for administrative action was increasingly decided in far-off Moscow, more emphasis had to be placed on the reportorial function of local government. The governors and their clerks had to make more frequent reports to Moscow, apprising the capital of what needed to be done. In judicial matters, the governor’s court was responsible for conducting hearings and investigations, referring its findings up to Moscow for final resolution. To facilitate quick reference and quantification information concerning finances and provisioning,

Introduction

25

pomest’e affairs, enrollments and manpower losses had to be reported up as entries in income–expenditure books, cadastral and allotment books, and service rolls. The governor was expected to check out the claims of the petitioners whose requests he passed up to the capital. All of this of course required some expansion of local clerical staffs and their familiarization with chancellery rules of deloproizvodstvo, which was not achievable in some districts; so the best that could be hoped for was to concentrate on the reporting of information of higher priority related to resource mobilization. But the fact that the tsar stopped convening the Assembly of the Realm after 1653 suggests that Moscow was by then more confident about relying on local authorities to keep it informed of politically significant developments in the provinces. Furthermore, the great advantage of increasing the documentation of local administrative action was that it provided greater opportunity to identify crimes of proizvol in the contradictions or omissions discovered in audits and record checks. As notables temporarily detailed to provincial government duty on an avocational basis, the town governors lacked a professional bureaucratic esprit de corps; they were undisciplined by any conviction that their career mission was to serve society in an efficient and socially impartial manner. But the compulsory state service principle could provide some partial compensation for this by reinforcing the association of rank and land and cash entitlements with service to the Sovereign, and by bending governors to a military form of discipline, resistance to which carried the penalties of disgrace, estate forfeiture, or corporal punishment (this was not entirely effective against certain forms of corruption, however, as we shall see below). While the discipline of civilian bureaucratic service was alien to the upper service class, that of military service was not, and service as a town governor remained fundamentally military in character. The gorodovyi voevoda system of local government had originated in the mid-sixteenth century as garrison command authority on frontiers undergoing military pacification,47 and a century later enforcement of the military service obligations of the middle and lower service classes and the mobilization of resources for defense remained the town governor’s most important tasks. These were the kinds of tasks that could be profitably entrusted to someone who was more professional soldier than bureaucrat – like Ivan Birkin, Kozlov’s founder. If a governor was much less qualified as a judge or ombudsman, this was of less concern to Moscow. The primarily military character of town governor authority was especially suitable for projects like the colonization of the southern frontier, which was first and foremost a military campaign.

26


Few notables had reason to specialize in provincial government as a career path. But because governorships offered respite from the rigors of campaign duty, the chance to get paid one’s annual service allowance (at least for the first year of one’s posting), and the opportunity to feed off community prestations, there were usually enough candidates petitioning for governorships to give the Military Chancellery some choice in filling positions. 48 Furthermore the Military Chancellery’s choice was less restrained by precedence considerations (mestnichestvo) than in its selection of army commanders, since governors were less likely to be in common deployment (razriad) with status rivals.49 While it sometimes appointed governors who turned out to be harsh martinets (Roman Boborykin) or sluggards (Fedor Pogozhev), the Military Chancellery was also able to find some district governors of energy and imagination like Ivan Birkin. The militarization of provincial administrative authority thus provided a useful form of discipline, even if of a prebureaucratic type, and it did not preclude rational personnel selection. Above all it facilitated the militarization of the agendum of local government, prioritizing the tasks of resource mobilization for the army. With the creation of the Belgorod Army Group at mid-century and the shift to a more aggressive strategy on the southern and western fronts, the army needed more and was able to get it, nearly to the point of stripping the provinces of cash, grain, wagons and teams, and manpower. 50 Unfortunately the communities under militarized voevoda administration had few means or opportunities to demand that potentially ruinous requisitions be reduced; and Moscow tended to ignore their protests for as long as it could, an indication that the emerging ethos of official duty to the common welfare (obschaia pol’za) was still far from supplanting the more traditional and narrowly patrimonial conception of the Sovereign’s gain. Local society therefore paid a heavy price for the center’s expanded capacity for resource mobilization. As we shall see, this was especially pronounced on the southern frontier, where conscription left too few households with sufficient agricultural labor and grain taxation spared the community too little surplus to encourage market formation.

Compensations for the deficiencies of bureaucratic power The lack of full system and uniformity in administrative law could sometimes be turned to advantage in that it permitted certain improvisations to strengthen the administration of a district judged to be of

Introduction

27

particular strategic or fiscal value. These improvisations were crucial to the success of Kozlov’s construction and settlement, for example. For the founding of Kozlov, the first of the Belgorod Line garrison towns, Moscow appointed I. V. Birkin, who had more than usual experience in southern frontier affairs and who had enjoyed the special trust of the late Patriarch Filaret. Birkin was assigned an associate goveror, M. I. Speshnev, who also had considerable frontier experience (both men would be rewarded for their Kozlov labors with unusually generous entitlement raises). To fund the Kozlov project, large sums raised from several different chancelleries were transferred to the Military Chancellery. As Birkin and Speshnev’s assembly house had for some time just one permanent clerk, the chancelleries sent some of their own clerks to Kozlov on temporary field assignment to conduct musters, inquisitions, and special accountings and to supervise fortifications labor. Central supervision of Kozlov’s governance was even concentrated in a specially created Chancellery Bureau within the Military Chancellery. These improvisations testify to the special importance the Kozlov project had for Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy. Furthermore the bureaucratization of state power was too recent and incomplete to fully supplant more traditional techniques of primitive centralization. The latter could still achieve some things bureaucratic authority could not. When bureaucratic authority failed or refused to give remedy it was still sometimes possible to circumvent it by discretely appealing for the intercession of the personalized authority of powerful individuals or cliques – district “strong men,” town governors obligated in return for bribes or gifts, chancellery secretaries, and Duma boyars; they in turn could resort to kinship relationship, regular patronage ties, or more particular obligations owed for favors and bribes to turn the Duma, chancelleries, and governors to the task requested. The exercise of personal or clique influence outside official channels could sometimes improve the effectiveness of government, by drawing government’s attention to local needs or grievances otherwise beneath its notice, cutting through red tape to expedite action, or softening unrealistically harsh rulings. This was not likely to cause complaint and draw condemnation as corruption as long as it confined itself to remedies that did not alter major state policies, inflict injury upon other elements of the community, or openly contradict the official ideology of autocracy, which maintained that all bounty and mercy ultimately issued from the tsar himself and that the only intercessions to be appreciated as personal were those made by the tsar himself. To repudiate autocracy risked political chaos, so the kinship-based and patronage-based cliques dominating the

28


Duma and chancellery apparatus generally tried to keep their influence politicking within these limits, with the result that cliques seldom presented themselves as factions fighting to radically alter state policy.51 When ruling cliques transgressed these limits (the Morozov clique in 1645–1649, the Miloslavskii clique in 1676–1682) they eventually provoked popular rebellion and were repressed by the tsar. Particularly in the first half of the century Muscovite political culture encouraged the traditional personalization of the tsar’s authority as a counterweight and check to malfeasance by his officials. In Chapter 5 we will give some attention to the ideology of gosudarevo delo – the idea that society could expect from the tsar some defense against official malfeasance insofar as the elimination of malfeasance and corruption reinforced and relegitimated autocracy. Petitioners invoking the principal of gosudarevo delo could sometimes win meaningful remedy. At the same time gosudarevo delo enabled bureaucracy to secure compliance with its laws insofar as bureaucracy pretended that the ultimate author and safeguard of its laws was the merciful paternal tsar reverenced by the people. An especially important technique of primitive centralization was employed at the local level. To compensate for the deficiencies of town governor administration – understaffing, lack of local knowledge, and particularly the limited effectiveness of central chancellery supervision – certain aspects of policing, revenue collection, and entitlement designation were ceded to the community itself, more precisely to the community’s various “elected” representatives at the district and village levels (assessors chosen by the district service corporation of the middle service class; zemskii and guba elders and deputies; tavern and customshouse agents, and the parish clergy). Putting the local population in harness for limited self-administration had the added advantages of reducing treasury expenditures and the workload of the governor’s clerks and constables while allowing state officials to shift some of the blame for administrative failure (desertions, missing revenue, jailbreaks, harboring of bandits) upon these elected representatives and their electors and suretors. The state could thereby economize its coercive power by exercising central control “not against but rather with a component of local control.” 52 However, this did not preclude the possibility that these same organs of community self-administration could sometimes refuse to carry out certain directives and even organize community protest and resistance. In the following chapters I have used the modified Library of Congress system of transliterating Russian and have tried whenever possible to find concise English translations for Russian terms. No doubt some

Introduction

29

will be unhappy with my choices, for in some instances there was no generally established usage to follow, and in other cases the established usage seemed to me inaccurate or even misleading. Chetvert’ could be literally translated as “quarter,” but there were three different commonly used units of measurement under this name. Therefore I have reserved “quarter” for the chetvert’ as a surveying unit of land, equal in area to one-half desiatina, that is, to about 1.3 acres. There was also a zhivushchaia chetvert’, a larger area of land used as a unit of tax assessment; I have translated it as “inhabited quarter.” The chetvert’ as a dry measure of grain is here given simply as “measure,” and unless otherwise indicated always denotes the Moscow Customs Measure or priemnaia chetvert’ pod greblo, which held about 7.5 pudy (one pud = 16.38 kilos). Other terms (most often ranks within the Muscovite state service hierarchy) have stubbornly resisted translation; they have been left in Russian but are defined within the text. I chose not to follow the example of some colleagues and translate syn boiarskii (pl., deti boiarskie) literally as “boyar’s son” or “junior boyar” because these no longer accurately reflected the social origins of most deti boiarskie by the seventeenth century. Some writers have synonymized the deti boiarskie as a “gentry,” but I consider this misleading, particularly in reference to the deti boiarskie of the southern frontier; I prefer the more descriptive if clumsier sounding “middle service class.” In seventeenth-century Muscovy history was reckoned from a Creation set in 5508 BC, the new year began on 1 September, and the Julian calendar – then 10 days behind the Gregorian calendar – was observed. I have kept to the Julian calendar but converted all year dates into modern reckoning (e.g. 1 August 1635 instead of 1 August 7143; 2 October 1635 instead of 2 October 7144).

1 Kozlov and the Pacification of the Nogai Front

Southern frontier colonization as a state-directed campaign Imagine a great arc running across the map of Ukraine and Russia, moving northeast from the Romanian border through Zhitomir, Kiev, Orel, Tula, Riazan’, and Simbirsk and ending at Ufa near the Urals. Below this line, stretching as far south as the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian and the foothills of the Caucasus, spread 270 million acres of humus-rich black soil called chernozem. Although this region is vulnerable to occasional drought, its black soil is so much more fertile than the leached gray soil ( podzol’) of northern Russia that by the middle of the eighteenth century its agriculture was already half again as productive with the same labor inputs as agriculture in the northern grey soil zone.1 By the end of the sixteenth century the black soil Ukraine – at this time still under the dominion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – had undergone faster and more thorough colonization than the black soil steppe frontier of southern Muscovy. Polish-Lithuanian recolonization of western Ukraine (Podolia, Volhynia, and Galicia) had taken off in the 1520s, and by the 1570s many more castles and new settlements were arising in the east as well, in Bratslav and that part of Kiev palatinate west of the Dnieper. The formation of cossack freebooting companies at Kanev and Cherkassy accelerated the colonization of the southern Dnieper rapids and by the 1580s resulted in the formation of an independent Zaporozhian Cossack Host. The Zaporozhian Host was larger than its Don Cossack counterpart and offered colonists in the middle and upper Dnieper basin more protection from Tatar raiders. Immigrants and fugitives resettling in the Dnieper basin from western Ukraine were followed by Polish or Lithuanian magnates who established huge 30

Kozlov and the Pacification of the Nogai Front 31

latifundia (folwarki) by obtaining royal charters to wilderness land or by forcing peasant and gentry smallholders to sell out to them. Magnate revenue in Bratslav and Kiev palatinates initially derived less from exploitation of agricultural corvee to produce for the Baltic grain and cattle markets (this was still confined largely to western Ukraine) than from tolls, tavern and mill fees, and taxes on hunting and fishing; but these dues too reflected effective magnate monopoly over most production sources, which they held either as inheritable private property or as life thaneships over royal domains. 2 Certain magnates further enhanced their power by winning appointments as palatines and starostas and holding these offices for life. They came to wield significant military power not just as royal officials but as private warlords. Because of the Diet’s terror of royal absolutism, it voted the funds only for a small royal Quarter Army of a few thousand men, which usually confined its operations to western Ukraine. The defense of eastern Ukraine therefore fell largely to the private armies formed from companies of cossacks and gentry clients by the palatines and starostas of Kiev and Bratslav, augmented in times of crisis by the Zaporozhian Host campaigning on hire for the Crown. Magnate power in Ukraine reached its peak in the 1640s with the spread of serfdom and agricultural corvee. By 1645 the Wisniowiecki clan owned over 230,000 souls and Jarema Wisniowiecki maintained a private army of 1500–3000 men, expandable to 12,000 men during emergencies. Soon after this, however, magnate economic exploitation, religious oppression, and the inability of the magnates and the Crown to offer service registration to protect cossack liberties provoked a massive cossack-led backlash. 3 Thus both the colonization and defense of the Commonwealth’s Ukrainian frontier proceeded largely from private initiative. Colonization followed the trajectory of initial smallholder settlement, manorial folwark settlement, and then resettlement farther afield by the smallholder refugees the magnate latifundia had displaced. Frontier military power first took the form of companies of freebooter cossacks, then of the private armies of the magnates, and finally of the mass popular armies of organized independent cossackdom. By contrast Muscovite colonization of the black soil steppe had advanced no farther south by the late 1620s than the rivers Seim, Bystraia Sosna, and Voronezh. Most settlement was still limited to the northern edge of the black soil zone, to the broadleaf forests running along the southern banks of the Oka River. South of the towns of Kazan’, Riazan’, Kaluga, and Briansk where the forest gave way to a belt of forest-steppe in which oak and linden groves mixed with open parkland, settlement was

32


considerably sparser and confined mostly to the wooded banks of certain rivers or to the immediate environs of a few garrison towns because of the danger of Tatar attack. Farther south still – starting around the latitudes of Samara, Kozlov, Voronezh, and Belgorod – lay the steppe (Dikoe pole, or “Untamed Field”), a vast unforested plain of feathergrass growing to shoulder height. The only islands of Russian settlement in this steppeland sea were the garrison towns of Voronezh, Livny, Valuiki, Belgorod, and Tsarev-Borisov. 4 A few thousand cossacks also lived in fortified encampments on the steppe near the Don’s mouth, but they would not become subjects of the tsar until 1671 and in the meanwhile they engaged in raiding and piracy that did as much to frustrate Muscovite territorial expansion as to advance it. Part of the reason for the slower pace of colonization on Muscovy’s southern frontier was that it was less likely to be driven by private initiative.5 Private agency lacked the capital, market opportunities, and technology to establish local economies supporting as many large communities as were being formed in Ukraine; and private agency was much less free to pursue goals conflicting with interests of state. Colonization of Commonwealth Ukraine was to a great extent driven by market forces, with the expansion of commercialized agriculture in Poland and western Ukraine (promoted by the rise of the Baltic grain trade, Dutch capital investment, and the development of shipping along the Vistula) having a spillover effect upon colonization and economic growth in eastern Ukraine. But Muscovite export opportunities from inland Novgorod and far northern Arkhangel’sk were considerably more limited as well as much farther removed from the black soil south; they could not provide any equivalent market stimulus. Muscovite agricultural technology was also less productive. The heavy mouldboard plow ( plug) was in use in the Commonwealth but not in Muscovy, where it would appear only towards the end of the 1630s, introduced by cossack and peasant fugitives from the civil war raging in Ukraine. Until then Muscovite cultivators of the open steppe had to rely upon the light sokha plow, which was much less effective in cutting the deep roots of the thick steppe grass. Sokha cultivation could support sizeable communities only from the intensely hoed glades along certain riverbanks where steppe grass did not grow (in Voronezh district for example); settlements on the open steppe therefore tended to be small and impermanent and devoted to seasonal hunting, fishing, and beekeeping.6 Furthermore private colonization in southern Muscovy operated under much tighter political constraint than in Commonwealth Ukraine. There was no Muscovite equivalent of the Henrician Articles, stripping


the crown of most of its authority and redistributing power to local diets and aristocratic patronage networks. The Muscovite autocracy therefore had the power to hold back manorial colonization of the south until it had fully established centralized state control over the frontier. The Muscovite tsars had no intention of allowing their boyars to set themselves up as independent marchlords on the southern frontier. As soon as Bogdan Bel’skii, sent to found a new town at Tsarev-Borisov in 1599, started feeding and salarying its garrison colonists at his own expense Tsar Boris Godunov had him immediately arrested. 7 This is not to say that private agency played no role in Muscovite colonization of the southern frontier. Especially after the Troubles we find some colonization by lay and ecclesiastic magnates; the boyars I. N. Romanov and D. M. Pozharskii and the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries founded votchina estates in the wilderness beyond Elets and Lebedian’, for example. But large-scale, capital-intensive magnate colonization did not begin in earnest until the end of the seventeenth century. In fact it was in most instances blocked by the state until then, a series of acts called the Forbidden Towns Decrees (from 1637) banning all magnate colonization in many borderland districts in the interests of military security, so that boyars and monasteries might not undermine the new borderland garrison towns by usurping the plowlands, meadows, and woodlands smallholder garrison colonists needed for their survival. This allowed the state to dictate the socioeconomic composition of the borderland population, limiting it to smallholder garrison colonists performing local defense duty. In some instances the government went so far as to confiscate several estates founded by powerful boyars and monasteries before 1637 and convert their peasant tenants into dragoons. 8 Before the relaxation of the Forbidden Towns’ bans in the 1670s and 1680s southern frontier colonization on truly private initiative was therefore much more likely to take the form of small-scale settlement by fugitive plebeian elements: fugitive peasants and deserter servicemen seeking to outrun the consolidation of serfdom in central Muscovy, the tremendous increase in taxation accompanying the Livonian War, or the famine and warfare ravaging their home districts during the Time of Troubles. Fugitive immigrants generally preferred to become cossacks living along the Don and Voronezh rivers a 100 kilometers or more beyond the southernmost garrison towns and well outside the territorial limits of state authority. But because peasant flight and service desertion undermined pomest’e economy and garrison strengths in both the interior and on the frontier, the state went to great lengths to try to regulate

34


movement to and from the center and the borderland towns and block movement altogether beyond the borderland towns to the free cossack settlements. Thus Commonwealth royal power invested very little in the garrison colonization of Ukraine, especially east of Podolia and Volhynia, leaving the colonization of eastern Ukraine to private agents, magnate and plebeian, motivated by economic interests; by contrast Muscovite royal power took steps to contain private colonization and ensure that garrison colonization remained the primary means of settling Muscovy’s black soil steppe frontier, for strategic purposes. In the chapters that follow we shall see that Muscovy’s state-directed campaign of garrison colonization was by some tests less efficient – it consumed far more in state revenue and in overall economic surplus as well, for the local garrison regimes it established left much less opportunity for the development of commercialized agriculture and called for heavier expenditure on policing. Because the garrison colonization campaign was dependent upon the state’s powers of resource mobilization, its progress was subject to a number of political, military/diplomatic, and fiscal vicissitudes and therefore lagged behind the colonization of Commonwealth Ukraine until the 1630s. But there were three reasons why the Muscovite state kept to the course of garrison colonization and reconciled to its high costs and more plodding pace. The single most important factor challenging southern frontier colonization in both Commonwealth Ukraine and southern Muscovy was of course the continued threat posed by the Crimean Tatars and their confederate Bucak, Edisan, and Lesser Nogai hordes. Nearly every year southern Muscovy, Ukraine, and Malopolska were repeatedly attacked by Tatar raiding parties (chambuly) carrying off captives and livestock. The human toll from these raids appears to have been enormous: it has been estimated that in the period 1600–1650 some 150,000 to 200,000 Muscovites were captured and taken off to Kaffa and other Crimean slave markets (this was out of a total Muscovite population of about seven million, of whom no more than 500,000 resided in the southern forest-steppe and steppe).9 The Military Chancellery saw the best check to chambul slaveraiding in the establishment of an increasingly dense network of garrison towns strung out across the major Tatar invasion roads, serving as bases for ranger patrols and cavalry searchand-destroy detachments, and providing siege refuges for the district population. The Military Chancellery could then use its authority over colonization to limit or forbid settlement in the steppe beyond these hard points, where the garrison forces could not offer adequate protection.


Furthermore, the Crimean khanate still posed a serious threat to the Muscovite heartland as well. When the Crimean khan or the nureddin was able to mobilize most of the Crimean Tatar host at Perekop he could assemble an army of 20,000 or 30,000 warriors – and as many as 80,000 if he was joined by the confederate Bucak, Edisan, and Lesser Nogai hordes.10 An invading army of this size could push deep into the interior and cross the Oka to ravage the districts around Moscow or perhaps even fall upon the capital itself. Central Muscovy was attacked by Crimean Tatar armies in 1521, 1541, 1570–1572, 1591, and 1633. The most destructive of these attacks occurred in May 1571 when Khan Devlet Girei burned Moscow and sacked 35 other towns. The Tatar ambassador to Wilno boasted that this incursion had resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Muscovites and the abduction into slavery of an equal number. 11 The costs of a long-term campaign of garrison colonization across the Tatar invasion roads were therefore calculated in terms of heartland as well as borderland security. Garrison colonization was undertaken with an eye to establishing not only an archipelago of borderland defensive hard points but also a gradually expanding perimeter defense for the heartland. This was done by improving garrison administration, reconnaissance, and coordinated or joint operations (skhody) out of multiple garrisons; by linking up the garrisons in closer proximity along a fortified defense line in order to improve observation and signalling and slow or redirect the enemy’s advance; and then by moving the corps ( polki) of the field army down towards the defense line to engage the enemy earlier. The regional security provided by the defense line and corps arrays in turn encouraged further military colonization to the immediate south; and when enough new garrisons were established south of the original defense line a second defense line was erected to link them up, and the corps relocated to this second line, thereby establishing a new perimeter much farther south. Thus the longterm trajectory of Muscovy’s southern frontier defense strategy can be seen in the successive southward shift of force concentration from the Bereg Line along the Oka (c. 1500s–1550s) down to the Abatis Line (1500s–1630s) and then to the Belgorod Line and Iziuma Line (1640s–1680s). 12 The third justification for state-directed garrison colonization was its political sustainability. It kept magnate property and power subordinate to autocratic patromonialism, and it provided far greater opportunity for registering cossacks in state service, thereby avoiding what had been a leading cause of cossack unrest in Commonwealth Ukraine. By contrast,

36


the Commonwealth’s policy of eschewing royal garrison colonization and defense line construction and entrusting the defense of eastern Ukraine almost exclusively to the cossacks and the private militias of their enemies, the magnates, was already unravelling by the 1630s, plunging Ukraine into a series of revolts that would eventually drive Left Bank Ukraine (Ukraine east of the Dnieper) into alliance with Muscovy, bring Ottoman armies into Right Bank Ukraine, and liquidate about a quarter of the Commonwealth’s population.13

The vulnerable Nogai Front In 1612 the number of troops stationed in the corps arrays along the Abatis Line numbered 11,826. The town garrisons along and below the Abatis Line held a few thousand more. But during the Smolensk War (1632–1634) the southern corps and garrisons were stripped of much of their manpower, which was sent off to the western front, to the PolishLithuanian border, to recapture the towns of the Smolensk and Seversk regions from the Commonwealth. This reduced the total strength of the Abatis Line corps to under 5000 men, 14 and left many southern garrisons so undermanned that they could no longer mount enough flying detachments to intercept Tatar raiding parties; some garrisons even had to curtail their steppe patrols.15 As a result more than 20,000 Crimean and Bucak Tatars and Nogais invaded southern Muscovy in the spring and summer of 1632, raiding largely with impunity and inflicting especially heavy losses in Novosil’, Mtsensk, and Livny districts. In 1633 the Tatars invaded again, this time with nearly 30,000 warriors, predominantly Crimean Tatars under the leadership of the khan’s son, Mubarek Girei. This time they circumvented the great fortress at Tula and crossed the Oka into central Muscovy, taking thousands of captives in the districts of Serpukhov, Kolomna, Kashira and Riazan’. This was a sobering demonstration that the security of the heartland’s security continued to depend upon the strength of the southern frontier defense system; neglect of the latter could endanger the districts around the capital itself. The Assembly of the Realm held these Tatar incursions partly responsible for General Shein’s failure at Smolensk in January 1634 as well, on the grounds they provoked mass desertion by those of Shein’s troops whose home districts had come under attack. 16 With the Smolensk War’s ignominious end the government found it necessary to turn its attention back to the rebuilding and expansion of the southern frontier defense system. The founding of Kozlov in the autumn of 1635 was an important first step towards this.


An especially weak sector of the southern frontier defense system was the territory to the east of Kal’miuss Trail. The network of garrison towns grew even thinner here. The oldest and northernmost tier of Russian settlement in this region, partially shielded by the Riazan’ Array, began at Zaraisk on the Osetr river, below Kolomna, and ran along the Oka through Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’ and the Meshchera forests to end at Kasimov. Because these districts were densely populated and guarded the Oka and Moskva river approaches to Kolomna and Moscow, they had long been an especially important objective for Tatar invaders who raided them so frequently they became known as “the trampled lands.” Not far below them stretched a second tier of garrison towns, most of which had been built in the mid-sixteenth century: Mikhailov, Pecherniki, Epifan’, Dankov, Pronsk, Riazhsk, Shatsk, and Sapozhok. The third and southernmost tier was the most vulnerable of all, as it comprised only a few small estates belonging to boyars and monasteries and the garrison towns of Elets, Voronezh, and Lebedian’. Lebedian’ typified the low priority given to military colonization in this region before 1635. Located on the Don River about 90 kilometers west of the future site of Kozlov, it was the only new southern frontier town built since the Troubles, and had been established in 1613 largely to protect the vast estate the tsar’s uncle I. N. Romanov was settling at nearby Romanovo Gorodishche. Its garrison (384 servicemen by 1626) was too small to accomplish more than this, and east of it there was no military presence until one reached the banks of the Volga.17 Tsar Boris Godunov had intended to begin filling this enormous gap in Muscovite defenses by founding a new garrison town about 70 kilometers to its east at Urliapovo Gorodishche, at the confluence of the Lesnoi and Pol’noi Voronezh rivers, but his government had fallen before it could be built.18 Few of the garrisons east of the Kal’miuss Trail were much larger than Lebedian’s. A Military Chancellery inventory from 1635 listed 7651 active duty servicemen and civilians available for defense duty in 10 of these towns. Just over half (4211 men) were cossacks or middle service class cavalrymen, most of whom were concentrated at Riazhsk, Voronezh, and Elets; six of the other towns had fewer than 250 cavalrymen each. 19 Even in regard to siege troops most of these garrisons were undermanned, and certain of them – Dankov, Riazhsk, Shatsk, and Lebedian’ – desperately needed more artillery, larger grain stores, and repairs to their fortifications. The fortifications of Riazhsk were so inadequate that the district’s villagers sometimes refused to take refuge behind its walls, preferring instead to scatter into the woods.20

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Let us call these three belts of garrison towns the Nogai Front, since they faced out upon the easternmost of the main Tatar invasion trails, the Nogai Road. These towns were occasionally raided by Crimean Tatars turning northeast off the Kal’miuss Trail at the Bystraia Sosna River and the town of Livny, but they were more often hit by Greater and Lesser Nogais and Azov Tatars coming up the Nogai Road.21 The Nogai Road began in the steppe just east of the mouth of the Don, at a point halfway between the Ottoman fortress of Azov and the Muscovite town of Tsaritsyn’ on the lower Volga. It ran north across the steppe between the Khoper and Bitiug tributaries of the Don and then along the watershed of the Matyra and Chelnovaia rivers into the heart of the Voronezh– Tsna plain. Here, at the confluence of the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh rivers, the Nogai Road forked: one branch veered north along the Chelnovaia and Pol’noi Voronezh watershed towards Riazhsk and Shatsk, ultimately coming out on Riazan’; the other branch crossed the Lesnoi Voronezh just outside the village of Dobroe Gorodishche and entered Lebedian’ and Dankov districts. 22 There were few natural obstacles to enemy movement up either fork of the Nogai Road. The terrain between the Voronezh and Tsna was a gently undulating plain devoid of mountains or gorges. The prevailing profile of the river network formed by the Voronezh and Tsna and their main tributaries the Pol’noi Voronezh, Lesnoi Voronezh, and Chelnovaia was longitudinal; there were several smaller tributary creeks flowing into the main river trunks at near right angles (the Stanovye Riasy, Ilovai, Bol’shaia Lipovitsa, etc.), but these were narrow and shallow, and mostly under 10 kilometers in length. The only extensive swamp and marshland was along the west bank of the Tsna. This meant that Tatar raiders could proceed due north along the river banks at a rapid pace without having to detour or ford in more than a few places, none of which were difficult to cross. 23 The northern and southern boundaries of the Voronezh–Tsna corridor corresponded closely with the northern and southern edges of the forest-steppe zone. To the north, where the Para and Tsna rivers joined near Shatsk, forest-steppe gave way to the dense Riazano-Mordva Forest; south of the Lipovitsa feathergrass steppe predominated. The more heavily wooded part of the plain was in its eastern half, assigned after 1636 to Tambov district. A narrow but dense wildwood of pine, fir, and oak called the Tsna Forest ran down along the Tsna’s right bank from the Shamorgskie gates in Shatsk district as far south as Kuz’mina Gat’, thereby partly shielding from Tatar attack the court peasants in Verkhotsensk canton on the opposite bank of the Tsna. There was also


a thick oak forest along the Chelnovaia river, which marked the boundary between Kozlov and Tambov. But the territory of Kozlov district – the lands east of the Chelnovaia as far as the Voronezh – probably had only half as much forest cover as Tambov: some narrow belts of pine and oak along the Lesnoi and Pol’noi Voronezh; the woods at Iur’ev on the district’s northern edge; and the Great Voronezh or Black Forest that ran along the left bank of the Voronezh River from its bend at Tarbeevo all the way down to the town of Voronezh. This last forest was the most imposing, ranging from 10 to 20 kilometers across and widening as it proceeded southwest; its southernmost reaches concealed extensive swamps and marshes. Near the future site of the town of Kozlov the Great Voronezh Forest curved northward between the Lesnoi Voronezh and Ilovai Creek in the shape of a tail; this Khobot Forest was about two to four kilometers wide. A Khobotets Forest (“Lesser Tail”) in turn extruded from it to the upper reaches of Oleshnia Creek. The Great Voronezh, Tsna, and Chelnovaia forests were the only woodlands of the region too dense for the Tatars to penetrate, but their north–south axis meant they were at best longitudinal baffles channelling movement between them rather than bulwarks blocking movement northward. Most of the watershed of the Tsna and Pol’noi Voronezh was unforested steppeland that would have to be fortified if the eastern branch of the Nogai Road was to be shut down.24 The Voronezh–Tsna corridor might already have been settled and secured if Boris Godunov’s government had carried out its plan to found a garrison at Urliapovo Gorodishche to block the intersection of both branches of the Nogai road. A sizable population could be supported here. The forests along the western and eastern edges of the corridor offered several productive sites for apiaries, fisheries, and hunting grounds; they could also provide plentiful firewood for colonists’ hearths, potash production, metallurgy, and distilling; pine lumber for houses and fortifications; and eventually good quality oak for the construction of Peter I’s Azov fleet. Except for some sandy stretches along the Voronezh and Tsna the soil was classic dark chocolate chernozem, particularly fertile in the low-lying parts of the plain; the thick steppe grass cover and nearby woods protected the soil from erosion and helped retain ground water.25 Military Chancellery records indicate the farming season here in the 1630s typically began around 25 March and lasted through most of October, whereas it ran only from mid-April to late September at the latitude of Moscow.26 But the Urliapovo Gorodishche project had been abandoned. Before 1635 there was no military colonization south of Riazhsk and Shatsk

40


and east of Lebedian’. There had been a little settlement by private intiative, by boyars, monasteries, and peasant collectives. These elements were interested primarily in exploiting its forest appurtenances and were unable to meet the prohibitive protection costs involved in settling the open steppe. 27 The settlements they founded therefore tended to be small and confined to the Great Voronezh and Tsna forests along the region’s western and eastern edges. The left bank of the Tsna from Algasovo to Temnikov drew the larger number of private settlers because its dense forest provided greater protection and a livelihood for fishermen and beekeepers. Tsar Mikhail’s mother, Marfa Ivanovna, held 21 settlements of court peasants here for her maintenance. Most of the settlements in this Verkhotsensk court canton were mere hamlets of a few households, inhabited by a mix of Finnic Mordva peasants fairly recently converted to Christianity and Russian peasants transferred from other court lands to the north. The former tended to support themselves from forest appurtenances they rented from the government, while the latter were more likely to make their living by farming small land allotments averaging about four hectares per field in three-field tenure. Canton peasants were liable for a variety of dues, including grain in lieu of corvee on court lands, but at comparatively low rates, so as to encourage colonization; hence the typical Verkhotsensk peasant’s per capita total tax burden probably did not exceed 16 percent of his income.28 The powerful Kirillov Monastery also held an estate near Kita Creek, populated with peasants transferred from its holdings in northern Russia; and the Court had granted small allotments to the peasant tenants of two locally based monasteries, the Nikolai Cherneev Monastery (established 1573) and Mamontov Hermitage Monastery (established 1629).29 Less progress had been made in colonizing the western end of the plain along the Voronezh and its tributaries. These lands originally belonged to Lebedian’ or Riazhsk districts but would be reassigned to the new district of Kozlov after 1635. At Ranina Poliana, on the east bank of the Ilovai, there were 19 households belonging to Riazhsk servicemen, odnodvortsy with small pomest’ia of under 50 quarters and no peasant tenants. Grant charters and the 1627–1631 cadastral books for Lebedian’ and Riazhsk show another 18 small villages and hamlets belonging to the boyars Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich Pozharskii and Prince Aleksei Nikitich Trubetskoi, to three members of the Vel’iaminov clan, and to the politically powerful Moscow-based Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries. These 18 settlements had all arisen after the Troubles and altogether held only about 500 households of peasants


and landless cottars (bobyli). Four-fifths of these households were concentrated in the seven of these settlements jointly owned by the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries, which were the only settlements that could be said to be organized for large-scale agricultural production, holding a combined arable fund of 3345.8 quarters per field. The 11 settlements owned by Pozharskii, Trubetskoi, and the Veliaminovs had arable funds of only 40–250 quarters per field; their value to their masters was rather as sources of fish, honey, furs and game from the nearby forest. Pozharskii’s Goretovo village peasants lay claim to the most lucrative forest apputenances along the Ilovai and Sestrenka creeks and at the confluence of the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh.30 Little had been done to fortify these villages against Tatar raids. There were ditches and abatis on the northern Tsna, but only to protect the northernmost tier of towns from attacks out of the east, from the Volga, and these defenses were dilapidated by the 1630s. South of Riazhsk and Shatsk there were just a few fortlets and watchtowers built at private expense. 31 Around 1620 someone had put up two watchtowers on high tumuli on the Chelnovaia and Belyi Kolodez, for surveillance against Tatar attempts to ford the Chelnovaia or Pol’noi Voronezh; but these soon fell into disrepair. 32 The Novospasskii and Chudov monasteries had built their own small forts so that their tenants would not have to take refuge behind the walls of distant Riazhsk or Lebedian’. Yet they still expected Lebedian’ to send them two units of cavalry to protect them during alerts – which Lebedian’ as one of the smaller Nogai Front garrisons could hardly afford.33 Subsequent events suggest the votchinniki and pomeshchiki of the region were reluctant to alter this state of affairs. On the one hand, they could not always be sure that distant garrison towns would be willing or able to reach out across 70 or 90 kilometers to defend them; on the other hand, this was preferable to having new garrison towns in closer proximity, because then they would be expected to contribute to their construction and provisioning. 34 This was especially true of the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries, whose lands counted for 43.5 of the 48.8 taxbearing inhabited quarters the Lebedian’ and Riazhsk cadasters enumerated for the territory that would subsequently be incorporated into Kozlov district. 35 At this time the only force the government regularly projected south of Riazhsk and Shatsk took the form of reconnaissance detachments, and they were under instruction to collect intelligence rather than engage the enemy. A long-range reconnaissance detachment (stanitsa)

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of 120 rangers drawn from the garrisons of Shatsk, Riazhsk, Dankov, Temnikov, Kadom, and Alatyr’ roamed the steppe along the Medveditsa and Khoper rivers far to the south, rendezvousing at Vezhki. There was also a stationary watch on the Bol’shie Riasy River, above Kamennyi Ford, manned by four Riazhsk servicemen; and four short-range patrols (storozhi) out of Shatsk and Riazhsk, riding beats of 20–70 kilometers.36 The short-range patrols were in general intelligently deployed, at closer intervals than the patrols of districts to the west and with their beats intersecting at Mokeev Lipiag or at Two Forests Point; they covered enough of the open steppe and the riverbanks to stand a good chance of detecting the enemy. But carrying back reports in time to give the towns of the Nogai Front the chance to prepare for siege or sorty was another matter. The patrols mounted here from Riazhsk had to cover great distances – as far as the Matyra, for example, 130 kilometers due south; and the same was true of Shatsk, so that it took three days for a courier from its patrol along the Lipovitsa River to return to Shatsk. This was time enough to ready Shatsk for siege, but in the interval the Tatars could change their course and strike elsewhere on the Nogai Front before Shatsk cavalry could intercept them. Each town kept couriers to transmit intelligence at top speed to its neighbors, but the towns were simply too far apart to respond quickly enough; the Tatars therefore had a good chance of slipping through without encountering any garrison detachments in the field. Thus the unfortified Voronezh–Tsna corridor represented a large gap in the defenses of the Nogai Front. During the Smolensk War very little of the southern frontier had escaped Tatar devastation, but Moscow was especially concerned about the heavy losses experienced on the northern tier of the Nogai Front, in the trampled lands of Riazan’, which lay just down the Oka from the capital and which fed much of the population of the Oka basin. The inability of the garrisons of the Front’s lower tiers to provide timely warnings of enemy movement or spare troops to reinforce the Riazan’ Array had therefore become a major security concern. To heighten this concern, more raiding activity up the Nogai Road could be expected now that the Great Nogais had been pushed across the Volga by the Kalmyks and were roaming the steppes along the Don, Khoper, and Medveditsa. Most sightings of hostile activity in the spring and summer of 1635 were being made on the Nogai Road, and the region was put on full alert after fresh trails across the Pol’noi Voronezh were found and reports came in of large raiding parties seizing livestock and Russian peasants at Dobroe Gorodishche, Verkhotsensk, Dankov, Riazhsk, and as far north as Mikhailov. By late autumn the Military


Chancellery became convinced that a major Nogai invasion was still in the offing; it forbade commanders to issue leaves because “now, by the grace of God, the autumn remains fine and warm, great frosts and foul weather are not expected, and Tatar invasions used to occur in such autumns.” 37

The expedition to Urliapovo Gorodishche The end of the Smolensk War had allowed the government to disband the expensive new foreign formation regiments and begin shifting revenue and manpower to the neglected southern frontier. This shift in priorities had the approval of boyar Prince, I. B. Cherkasskii, now the dominant figure in state policymaking whose political primacy derived in large part from his directorship of the Service Lands Chancellery, Great Treasury, Musketeers’ Chancellery, and Foreign Mercenary Chancellery; the specifics of this new frontier strategy were worked out by the directors of the Military Chancellery, state secretary Ivan Gavrenev and secretary Grigorii Larionov; and the Cherkasskii clique facilitated its implementation by giving Gavrenev and Larionov greater power to coordinate the work of the other chancelleries involved in military resource mobilization. 38 Three projects undertaken in 1635 testify to the heightened priority secretaries Gavrenev and Larionov now gave the south. Two of them involved heavy investment in the reinforcement of the inner perimeter – the fortified lines and corps arrays protecting the interior against invading Tatar armies. The third project – the founding of a new garrison town near the fork of the Nogai Road – was initially a more modest undertaking but its success in reducing the threat to the Nogai Front would expand it into a far more ambitious program of resumed military colonization all across the frontier. One of the lessons of the 1633 Crimean invasion had been that a strategy of fallback concentration along the Abatis Line could do little to protect the interior if there were no more than 5000 troops in the Borderland and Riazan’ corps arrays, their backs to a dilapidated Abatis Line, facing an invading enemy of twenty to thirty thousand Crimean Tatars. For this reason the deployments announced for the spring of 1635 called for tripling corps forces to 14,368 men, of whom 4571 were to be stationed on the Riazan’ Array at Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, Mikhailov, and Pronsk. Each array was to be ready to reinforce the other, and the Great Regiment at Tula was now even permitted to march to the relief of towns south of the Abatis Line provided that Moscow was satisfied

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this would not leave the Abatis Line undermanned.39 That autumn the Military Chancellery also took the first step towards what would soon become an enormous project to repair and expand the Abatis Line. Princes V. P. Shcherbatyi, N. N. Gagarin, and S. F. Volkonskii and some European engineers were sent to inspect different segments of the line and draw up plans and budgets for their refortification. 40 Meanwhile Gavrenev and Larionov, concerned about the inability of Lebedian’, Riazhsk, and Shatsk to stop Tatar raids up the Nogai Front, had revived the project of founding a new garrison town at Urliapovo Gorodishche or some other site between the Voronezh and Tsna. They convened a special hearing in the Military Chancellery on 18 August 1635 and took testimonies from Moscow dvoriane Grigorii Fedorovich Kireevskii and Mikhailo Ivanovich Speshnev, who were familiar with the region – Kireevskii as cadastral surveyor of Lebedian’, Riazhsk, and other districts, Speshnev as former town governor of Dankov.41 Also questioned were four servicemen from Voronezh, Shatsk, and Lebedian’.42 These testimonies confirmed that Urliapovo Gorodishche was a suitable site, protected by forest, “secure enough for there to be an entire district.” It was located on the southern bank of the Lesnoi Voronezh, just three kilometers west from where it joined with the Pol’noi Voronezh. The terrain at Urliapovo was so marshy the Tatars had to lay down a short corduroy road of logs there in order to ford the river; there were no other suitable fords nearby, and “if there are settlers at that Urliapovo Gorodishche, even only a few, the Tatars would cease to go by that trial.” The government of Tsar Boris Godunov had already identified Urliapovo as crucial to the shielding of the entire Nogai Front because of its proximity to the fork of the Nogai Road: “When large numbers of Tatars pass the townsite, they divide. Those who go to the right [between the Pol’noi Voronezh and Chelnovaia] raid the Shatsk, Sapozhok, and Pecherniki areas, and having reached and raided Riazan’ they return by the same trail. Those who go to the left [crossing the Pol’noi Voronezh and Lesnoi Voronezh just above Urliapovo] raid the Voronezh, Riazhsk, and Dankov areas . . . and return past Urliapovo Gorodishche and cross the Don . . . at Staryi Dankov to raid the Elets, Novosil’, and Livny areas.” Even raiders turning east off the Iziuma and Kal’miuss trails to hit Livny, Novosil’, Dankov, and Riazhsk had to pass Urliapovo on their return. Kireevskii and Speshnev thought the founding of small garrison at Urliapovo was not enough to block the Nogai Road, however; a line of steppe fortifications across the Nogai Road was also needed, running for 30 kilometers from the mouth of the Pol’noi Voronezh across the


steppe up to the bluffs along the Tsna. Without such fortifications the Tatars still might be able to cross the Lesnoi Voronezh 10 kilometers upstream from Urliapovo and ride on to raid Lebedian’ and Dankov. 43 A report summarizing these testimonies, with maps, extracts from the Lebedian’ and Riazhsk cadasters, and estimates of the manpower and materiel needed for the project was submitted to the Tsar and his Duma councillors. On 22 August 1635 the Tsar and Duma authorized an expedition under iasel’nichii Ivan Vasil’evich Birkin and Moscow dvorianin Mikhailo Ivanovich Speshnev to Urliapovo Gorodishche with the mission of founding a garrison town “to prevent enemy invasion of the Riazan’ region.”44 It cannot be determined whether Ivan Vasil’evich Birkin (d. 1642) had petitioned for this assignment, but his family’s reputation, his experience, and his connections at court made him a logical choice to head the project. The Birkin clan had long been associated with the Nogai Front. They hailed from Riazan’ and claimed to have served its princes before entering the service of the Moscow Grand Prince in the early sixteenth century. Ivan Vasil’evich’s father Vasilii Grigor’evich Birkin had served as a captain at Riazhsk, negotiated the entry into Muscovite service of some important Don Cossack atamans, and selected the site for the new garrison town of Voronezh in 1585. While hardly one of the leading families at court, the Birkins had some kinship and clientage connections with the Vel’iaminovs and Liapunovs and they had ultimately chosen the victors’ side in the Troubles, I. I. Birkin having abandoned the Tushino Brigand and gone over to P. P. Liapunov and later to Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii.45 Court registers and Military Chancellery deployment books first mention Ivan Vasil’evich Birkin in 1614, when he was sent to Beloozero to collect taxes for the army. He subsequently served as a town governor at Mangazeiia in western Siberia and then at Riazhsk on the Nogai Front. Of enormous benefit to his political career was the role he played in ransoming Patriarch Filaret from the Poles at Viaz’ma in June 1619. In gratitude Filaret made him majordomo of the Patriarch’s Court Chancellery. Thus Birkin became the leading client of the Patriarch, who was not only the head of the Orthodox Church but Tsar Mikhail’s father and the de facto ruler of the realm from 1619 to 1633. In 1629 Ivan Birkin was promoted in rank from Moscow dvorianin to iasel’nichii, and he briefly headed the Equerries’ Chancellery in 1632 before serving in the Smolensk War. His official entitlement rate by 1635 was probably 900 quarters per field and 70 rubles; his actual holdings

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totalled 1436 quarters per field of service and allodial land spread through Riazan’, Galich, and Moscow districts, although he owned only 12 peasants and cottars. Birkin also had the advantage of extensive military and administrative experience on the Nogai Front. He had been governor or associate governor of three of its southernmost districts – Riazhsk (1617), Dankov (1629–1630, replacing Mikhailo Speshnev), and Voronezh. 46 M. I. Speshnev, appointed second in command, also knew the region well, having served as governor of Dankov and obtained a pomest’e in that district and having testified to the Military Chancellery as to the course of the Nogai Road and the best sites for a new garrison town and steppe wall. He knew Birkin well, too, having married Birkin’s daughter some time after turning Dankov over to him in 1629. Their relation by marriage probably helps to explain why there were no disputes undermining collegiality in Kozlov’s first governorship. On only a few occasions did their subsequent correspondence with Moscow mention specific duties for Speshnev as associate governor, so there was probably little formal division of labor between them. Speshnev’s entitlement was to 800 quarters and 34 rubles.47 Further guaranteeing that the early administration of Kozlov would be very much a family affair was the Military Chancellery’s decision to permit Birkin to take his son Samoilo and grandson Vasilii with him to Urliapovo.48 It was common for town governors to be accompanied to their provincial posts by family members who would share their feeding revenues, but in this instance Birkin seems to have wanted his heirs with him in order to give them an early apprenticeship in district governance, and Moscow acceded to this, allowing Samoilo and Vasilii to be entrusted with particular tasks at Kozlov (although not officially, as his associates, for unlike Speshnev they were never addressed by name in the Military Chancellery’s rescripts). Samoilo even succeeded his father as town governor of Kozlov in 1637. Putilo Bykov of Bolkhov and Petr Iudin Krasnikov, a former interpreter in the Ambassadors’ Chancellery, were appointed captains of the defense and corvee contingents temporarily transferred to the Urliapovo expedition from the nearest Nogai Front towns. They would stay on at Kozlov as captains of the cossacks and musketeers who permanently settled at Kozlov. Krasnikov’s entitlement rates were forty quarters and six rubles; Bykov’s cash entitlement was eight rubles (his service land entitlement is not known). Unlike Birkin and Speshnev, neither received his full allowance before departure. 49 Clerk Osip Prutskii was transferred from Dankov to handle the project’s correspondence and recordkeeping;


his entitlement rates were 15 rubles, 10 measures of rye, and 10 measures of oats. 50 Later Prutskii would be assisted by clerks whom the Military Chancellery sent down to Kozlov to distribute treasury funds. On 5 September 1635 the Military Chancellery issued Birkin and Speshnev their working order.51 It resembled the working orders given to other town governors in combining general precepts (e.g. maintaining vigilance against Tatar raiders, administering justice fairly and without red tape, refraining from unauthorized expenditures) with the more specific directives necessitated by the character of the district; it differed from them in that its particulars were those associated with the founding of an entirely new district in the wilderness. The working order therefore passed over several of the principal duties comprising the administrative routine of an already settled district (regulating commerce, collecting customs and liquor monopoly revenues, giving court hearings to taxpaying townsmen, etc.) in order to focus instead on such matters as surveying, supervising fortifications corvee, maintaining discipline among the troops on loan from other districts, enrolling volunteers in the permanent garrison, and paying out rations money and settlement allowances. It would be necessary to borrow contingents of servicemen from other nearby districts to secure the site and erect the town fortifications until a sizable permanent garrison could be recruited (largely from these same districts). An inventory compiled on 22 August to determine how much manpower the 10 nearest districts of the Nogai front could safely loan or resettle to Urliapovo showed a total population of 7561 males capable of bearing arms, of whom 5586 were active duty servicemen eligible for selection into temporary defense and corvee contingents for the Urliapovo project; these men had 1690 relatives and dependents not yet enrolled in service or on the tax rolls and therefore eligible for permanent resettlement at Urliapovo.52 On 5 September Moscow decided that 699 servicemen would be loaned to Birkin and Speshnev from this pool, on six-week shifts: 100 deti boiarskie, 486 cossacks, 91 musketeers, 12 gunners, 3 blacksmiths, and 7 carpenters. The largest contingents would come from Riazhsk (155 men) and Voronezh (170 men), with Pereiaslavl’-Riazan, Mikhailov, Pronsk, Lebedian, Elets, and Shatsk contributing about 50 men each. Every man was to be equipped with a musket, powder and shot, boarspear, axe, horse and cart, and six weeks’ provender; the treasury smiths and carpenters were entitled to an additional rations subsidy of 0.02 or 0.03 rubles a day per man, depending upon their skills, payable out of Urliapovo funds. Birkin and

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Speshnev were expected to hold inspections to determine whether the other governors had sent them hired substitutes or other undesirables, and they had to update the rolls regularly to keep Moscow apprised of delayed arrivals, desertions, and the numbers of men assigned to corvee, patrol and sortie duty, or siege defense. No shift could be released homeward until its replacement had arrived.53 The initial enrollment targets for the new town’s permanent garrison were 300 cossacks and 200 musketeers (60 patrol cossacks, 20 gunners and sharpshooters, and 10 carpenters, smiths, and gatekeepers were also authorized a few months later; the number of middle service class cavalryman to be enlisted could not be set until Birkin and Speshnev had conducted a survey determining how much arable would be available for pomest’e allotments).54 In a decision of considerable consequence for the social character of Kozlov the Military Chancellery decreed that these enlistees were to be skhodtsy rather than svedentsy – that is, free volunteers invited from other districts rather than forced transfers. Town criers would publicize across the Nogai Front the opportunity to enroll at Urliapovo and receive cash subsidies, house lots, plowlands, pasturage, and temporary exemption from the usual dues for which servicemen were liable. Given the shortage of manpower in the region, Moscow was prepared to use sanctions against governors who refused to help publicize this opportunity or who illegally detained volunteers bound for Urliapovo. Eligibility for enrollment was limited to any free men who were not already registered in service or on the tax rolls, such as the sons or other male kinsmen of servicemen, or hired laborers or itinerants. But the working order neglected to address an issue that would soon prove troublesome: whether to consider eligible for enrollment those who had once been registered in service but had subsequently lost their juridical freedom, having indentured themselves or settled as peasants under other landowners. 55 Because the Urliapovo region was largely unpopulated wilderness all initial financing would have to come from the central chancelleries. The Military Chancellery had general supervision over the project, but most of its revenue consisted of funds transferred from other chancelleries. Hence the first outlay of which we have record – 400 rubles, promised for construction expenses in the 5 September 1635 working order – was provided by the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery, which often served as a revenue source for the Military Chancellery but otherwise had almost no jurisdiction over towns south of the Oka. The financial record for the Birkin administration is fragmentary, but there are references


to his office receiving at least 12,834 rubles for rations money, settlement subsidies, and service allowances between September 1635 and May 1638, the money being provided by the Uglich and Galich Territorial chancelleries, the Chancellery of Foreign Mercenaries’ Provender, the Slavery Chancellery, and the Chancellery of Militia Levies. 56 Most governors were forbidden to make any expenditures without Moscow’s preliminary authorization, except under circumstances specified in their working orders (such as for fortifications repairs) or for emergencies endangering the district’s survival. 57 Birkin’s and Speshnev’s working order was silent upon this point, probably because it made sense to grant them greater discretion of expenditure than was allowed the governors of already settled districts where most expenditure needs could be more easily anticipated. The Military Chancellery still exercised control over their expenditures on a post facto basis by requiring Birkin and Speshnev to record the circumstances of all disbursements in their expenditure books. But because of the highly routinized nature of construction and settlement methods, few occasions actually arose on which Birkin and Speshnev had to make their own expenditure decisions. The expedition to Urliapovo followed two different routes. Captain Petr Krasnikov travelled east through Dankov, Lebedian’, Elets, and Voronezh, assembling troop contingents on the way; his column reached Urliapovo on 15 October. The 350-kilometer route 58 followed by Birkin, Speshnev, and Bykov took them from Moscow down the Oka River to Kolomna and then to Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, probably by barge or boat so that they could more cheaply transport their families’ stores and the ordnance issued to them by the Armory (5 brass cannons, 50 arquebuses, powder and shot, as well as a great alarm bell). At Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’ they unloaded all this onto wagons provided by the local post station, inspected the first of the contingents of troops and craftsmen detailed to their expedition, and on 23 September began the overland march through Pronsk and Riazhsk to Urliapovo, “proceeding cautiously . . . and pitching camp in secure places under tight guard.” They did not reach Urliapovo Gorodishche until 7 October, in part because of delays in obtaining permission from the Military Chancellery to issue ammunition and transport to their troop contingents. 59

Surveying for settlement and defense Within four days of their arrival Birkin and Speshnev had surveyed enough of the region to have found a townsite superior to Urliapovo Gorodishche about two kilometers to its northeast. 60 The new site was

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on the right bank of the Lesnoi Voronezh, atop a high bluff or manmade tumulus called Kozlov Point because Semeika Kozlov and comrades, peasants belonging to Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, had made it their seasonal camp while they were engaged in fishing and beekeeping nearby. Birkin noted that the bluff had its own springs and that its contours allowed the excavation of a secret escape tunnel down to the river, which might be useful during a siege. There were dense woods as well as bogs and small lakes along both sides of the river. The Great Voronezh Forest would hinder any Tatar approach from the west and southwest. To prevent the enemy from attacking from the south, however, three fords across the Pol’noi Voronezh would have to be blocked: seven kilometers away at Kasimov Crossing, where a small earth fort could be thrown up; at Urliapovo, where some anticavalry fences and watchmen would be sufficient for the time being; 61 and at Tarbeevo, where a village of servicemen and a line of anticavalry fences were needed. Fortifications east of Tarbeevo and between Urliapovo and Kasimov were unnecessary, as there were no likely fords here, only impassable forest and marsh. The greatest danger rather lay to the east, on the open steppe stretching across 24 kilometers between the Pol’noi Voronezh and Chelnovaia rivers, which would have to be secured by some kind of long fortified line. 62 The September 1635 working order had anticipated that Birkin’s and Speshnev’s initial survey might reveal a townsite strategically preferable to Urliapovo Gorodishche, so the Military Chancellery was quick to accept their recommendation and authorize construction of the new garrison town at Kozlov Point. It was now time for Birkin and Speshnev to provide Moscow with a series of more thorough surveys. The Military Chancellery needed to how many laborers would be needed and for how many weeks, so that it could budget for rations money and the governors could coordinate corvee duty with defense duty; Birkin and Speshnev would have to estimate how much lumber would be used and decide where it would be felled, so that forests which might otherwise provide protection to the colonists might be spared the axe; they were to conduct a closer survey of all the terrain between the Voronezh and Tsna, searching for any river fords and enemy trails and plotting where their proposed steppe wall could be situated to maximum strategic effect; they would have to inventory the arable and meadows available for mass pomest’e grants to new colonists, so Moscow would know in advance how many settlers the new district could accommodate and where their villages would be placed; and they were to inspect all area state leasehold fisheries, apiaries, and hunting grounds so that the


government could decide which of these should be taken off lease and reassigned to the Urliapovo military colonists as forest appurtenances to their service lands.63 Birkin and Speshnev completed most of this additional surveying by 18 December. They delimited the boundaries of Kozlov district (uezd) largely on the basis of river courses and existing settlement patterns. 64 The 19 villages along the Voronezh and its tributary creeks, currently assigned to Lebedian’ and Riazhsk, would be reassigned to the new district of Kozlov by 22 January. They lay much nearer to the new townsite and Kozlov had need of their peasant manpower for corvee and militia duty. 65 The best locations for new settlements were on the expanse of steppe 20 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide on the northern side of the Voronezh River; Birkin considered that part of it ringed by the Khobot and Khobotets forests sufficiently spacious and secure to provide pomest’e plowlands to about a 1000 deti boiarskie. By 18 December he was able to make specific recommendations for plowland allotments to the new district’s first colonists. The garrison’s 590 lower service class troops – the cossacks, musketeers, gunners, sharpshooters, gatekeepers, and treasury craftsmen – were to be settled just outside the town walls in special colonies (slobody) organized by service and would hold their plowlands in collective allotment along the Lesnoi Voronezh, along Kamenka Creek, or in various places between the great Voronezh and Khobot forests. He had already surveyed these tracts, and they offered a total of 11,304 quarters per field, enough plowland to endow 565 cossacks or 1413 musketeers at the prevailing entitlement rate. At least 46,000 quarters per field were already available for pomest’ia for Kozlov’s middle service class cavalry in four areas. The smallest (1000 quarters) was along Turmasovka Creek and Oleshenka Creek and adjoining the plowlands of the lower service class along the Voronezh River. Another 10,000 quarters were located between the mouth of the Lesnoi Voronezh and the Pol’noi Voronezh as far as Bulatovo Clearing (the haymeadows for these farmsteads would have to be located farther up the rivers). The third plowland fund (20,000 quarters) lay north of the Khobot Forest, along Oleshenka Creek and both banks of Ilovai Creek, in a great clearing called Velikaia Luka. There would be an additional 15,000 quarters once the Tatar trails east of Kozlov were closed down by fortifications erected between the Lesnoi Voronezh and the course of Iaroslavka Creek, and Birkin expected that this steppe wall would subsequently make it safe to place the western bank of the Chelnovaia under cultivation. 66

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To gather their firewood, cut lumber to build their homes, hunt, and tend their beehives the colonists would have to be given guaranteed access to the Great Voronezh Forest and Chelnavsk Forest, the same woods from which most of the lumber for the town and steppe fortifications would be drawn. The colonists would also need untrammelled access to nearby rivers and creeks to fish and water their livestock. But to implement this some of the area’s most productive hunting grounds, fishing sites, and stands of bee trees would have to be confiscated from the peasants who held them on leasehold (obrok) from the Chancellery of the Great Court. 67 Such leaseholds were widespread along the southern frontier, particularly along the Nogai Front in the first decades of the seventeenth century; they represented a form of exploitation of the land antecedent to large-scale permanent settlement, as those who worked on such leaseholds usually lived farther north and only visited them on a seasonal basis. For example, only about 15 percent of Voronezh district was actually settled because the rest, stretching some 200 kilometers south and southeast to the Don, was under obrok leases held by a few men. Legally these appurtenances were part of the tsar’s patrimony, located on unsettled and undeveloped frontier lands administered by the Chancellery of the Great Court, and some of them were potentially very lucrative. But they could bring in no revenue unless some capital and labor were invested to clear them for tillage or to undertake fishing, trapping, or beekeeping. The Chancellery of the Great Court therefore divided its lands, forests, and waters into lots and leased them for limited terms to the highest bidders in exchange for obrok rent. Those competing for leases included prosperous townsmen, servicemen, and court or private peasants, either as individuals or in collectives. Some of the leaseholds were quite large, comprising hundreds of hollowed trees containing hives or many kilometers of hunting grounds.68 Much of the woodland along the Chelnovaia and Tsna was already leased by the court peasants of Verkhotsensk canton, and the Chancellery of the Great Court was not about to surrender these profitable appurtenances. But Birkin and Speshnev found other appurtenances on the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh, up along both sides of the Voronezh River from the mouth of the Ilovai, and in the Radostnyi and Khobot forests – mostly apiaries and fishing sites, the majority of which were being leased by peasants from Prince Pozharskii’s village of Goretovo.69 Now that Goretovo was incorporated into Kozlov district it was easier to argue that these appurtenances should be reassigned to Kozlov colonists, particularly as the apiaries held by Semeika Kozlov


and his comrades limited the colonists’ access to the lumber of Great Voronezh Forest. Birkin even cited precedents from Voronezh, Dankov, and Lebedian’ in urging the nullification of these leases. Soon after the Chancellery of the Great Court agreed to turn over some of its apiary leases to Kozlov’s settlers.70 However, it would take another several years to settle the matter of fishing leases, and in the interval there were sharp conflicts between Kozlov servicemen and other parties over water rights. Disputes over forest and river appurtenances turned violent, starting with vandalism obliterating boundary blazes and escalating through the arson of bee trees to forced seizure, assault, and murder; and the quarrels tended to continue even after the courts had upheld the property right of this or the other party, because the cadasters seldom described boundaries in terms precise enough to resolve the controversy. Another of Birkin’s first tasks had been to strengthen the region’s patrols and ranger beats lest the town site come under attack while it was still under construction. An expanded patrol network was in place by February 1636. Kozlov’s own permanent detachment of 60 patrol cossacks (storozhevye kazaki) now rode on joint patrol with the detachments out of Shatsk and Riazhsk as well as on two entirely new patrol beats. The first new patrol began on the Matyra River at Mordovskii Lipiag, 15 kilometers south of Kozlov, and rode up the Matyra for 12 kilometers to rendezvous with the old Lipovitsa patrol at Two Forests, thereby extending the southernmost of the old patrol beats so that it now covered a broader front of almost 50 kilometers – from southeast of Kozlov all the way to the longitude of Tambov. Birkin also placed a stationary observation party north of this beat’s approximate midpoint, on the wooded bluff of Saldych Lipiag, “from which one can see the Tatar trails for ten or more versts.” The third new patrol detachment was posted 20 kilometers north of town at the Khobotets Forest, from whence it travelled 15 kilometers to the mouth of Veshnevaia Creek on the Lesnoi Voronezh River, where it rendezvoused with a newly rerouted Riazhsk patrol. 71 These changes rendered the district’s early warning network less permeable. Its first tripwire was the old ranger beat deep in the steppes along the Khoper and Medveditsa; the steppes to its north were crossed by a second warning line, the new Matyra–Lipovitsa patrol, above which was a centrally positioned stationary watch; farther north still, on the territory settled by the new garrisons of Kozlov and Tambov, a series of parallel patrol routes ran from north to south along the river courses the Tatar war bands traditionally followed. By permanently stationing its own couriers at Lebedian’

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and Voronezh, Kozlov could also obtain early intelligence of Tatars moving up the Voronezh River or fording the Don at Kazar Crossing to come out onto the Bitug and Khoper steppes. This would give time for Birkin to send out sortie detachments under captains Krasnikov and Bykov and call upon other districts for assistance.72 Of paramount interest to the Military Chancellery was the projected placement of the chain of fortifications across the steppe trails. Birkin had initially (22 October) searched for likely sites for them along the Matyra and southern reaches of the Chelnovaia, but by mid-December his attention had shifted northward to a line running from Belyi Kolodez on the Polnoi Voronezh along Iaroslavka Creek over to the Chelnovaia below Kamennyi Ford, where he proposed the following defense works. 73 The main element would comprise a long wooden palisade, set at a slight incline, with loopholes for sharpshooters. This wooden wall would start 16 kilometers from Kozlov, at the edge of the woods at Iaroslavka Creek on the Pol’noi Voronezh, and would run for twentyfour kilometers across the steppe until it reached the Chelnovaia river. 74 Along its outer face Birkin envisioned a wide ditch, the earth from which would be packed up in a low earth wall reinforcing the inner face of the wooden wall. Double rows of anticavalry barriers (nadoloby) along both sides of the wooden wall would slow Tatar cavalry attacks and prevent the enemy from driving off the mounts of the Kozlov servicemen. 75 Four small blockhouses stationed at regular intervals along the wall could hold artillery and serve as observation posts and refuges. The first of these was to be built on the Pol’noi Voronezh at the westernmost terminus of the wall; the second and third would stand farther up the Iaroslavka Creek, at 8-kilometer intervals; and the last was to be built on the Chelnovaia, 38 kilometers east of Kozlov. In each of the first three steppe forts Birkin intended to station 100 foot and 100 mounted men, but an additional hundred mounted men were needed for the Chelnovaia fort because it lay too far from Kozlov to be easily reinforced. Each fort would have two pieces of ordnance, preferably falconets. 76 A fifth fort manned by 100 men would stand detached from the wooden wall at Kasimov Ford several kilometers up the Pol’noi Voronezh from Kozlov. To further discourage the Tatars from fording here, pickets would be posted and sharpened stakes placed in a checkerboard pattern in the shallows of the river and along the banks. Between Kasimov Ford and Kozlov most of the bank of the Pol’noi Voronezh was marshy and densely wooded, requiring only short stretches of palisade


in a few spots; “and in that forest, Sovereign, in spring, while the weather is still cold, the young wood will be pruned halfway up the trunks so that it will not wither and bend to the ground, and so that the undergrowth will grow out thick.” This could also be done in the Chelnavsk Forest running north from the eastern end of the steppe wall.77 Birkin suggested that it might take as little as two weeks to build all this provided at least 2000 workers were levied, the lumber was prepared beforehand over the course of the winter, and the weather proved favorable. The contigents assigned from other towns to help defend the completed fortifications ought to appear at Kozlov no later than 25 March, “because in the steppe areas spring arrives and the rivers flood early.” 78

The construction of Kozlov The Military Chancellery had initially expected that the town itself could be completed by the onset of winter. To attempt to meet this deadline Birkin and Speshnev began clearing the site and marking out the perimeter of Kozlov’s walls on 11 October, just a few days after their arrival. 79 Their working order prescribed the town be built “in the form, as fit, that the Sovereign . . . assigned to them, Ivan and Mikhailo” – the form (obrazets) most likely being a fairly detailed drawing, possibly even a maquette. 80 For over a century town construction in Muscovy had followed a standardized esthetic derived in large part from Byzantine norms – especially from the tenth-century Procheiros Nomos – and this esthetic had produced a repertory of standardized town plans for different terrains and settlement sizes. Thus the symbolic heart of the town, its cathedral church, had to be placed inside the town’s keep (kreml’) or in the middle of its market square, and streets and squares had to be laid out with a certain pleasing regularity; a decree of 1626 even regulated the dimensions and layout of trade stalls in the market square. These norms were guided by practical considerations (placing the kreml’ to facilitate defense of the outer walls; preventing the spread of fire, etc.) but most of all by liturgical values; this is why construction at Kozlov was allowed to begin only after having “begged God’s mercy and the aid of the Most Immaculate Mother of God, and having sung the service of all the Saints and blessed the site with holy water,” and why the first foundation to be laid (18 October) was for Kozlov’s cathedral church, consecrated to the Shroud of the Most Holy Mother of God, and its smaller attendant chapel dedicated to the martyr Georgii. 81

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These standardized plans were often broadly schematic, however, and the Military Chancellery gave Birkin and Speshnev the discretion to alter its plan to suit local conditions provided they periodically submit detailed reports and at project’s end send Captain Krasnikov to Moscow to present a summary report and hand over the map and account books.82 Chief engineer at the townsite would be Fedor Sukhotin, who would later play an important role in the planning of the Belgorod Line. Birkin and Speshnev were to personally supervise the labor, while clerk Prutskii had charge of paying the treasury smiths and carpenters their daily rations money out of the funds sent down from Moscow. 83 The plan for Kozlov was for a midsize wooden fortress of simple and traditional construction. There were two basic methods of wooden wall construction in use on the southern frontier. In what was called “the town method” ( po gorodovomu), thick oak timbers were laid horizontally to form a series of quadrilateral cradles or boxes measuring two or three meters on a side and four meters high, the interiors of which might be filled with earth or stones. These boxes were then linked together to form the outer wall; similar boxes were placed atop its corners or above other points along the wall’s length to serve as loopholed bastions projecting over the wall. The bastions and wall were then given lean-to roofing. At Kozlov this was the method followed in erecting the towers and bastions, but the walls themselves were built in the simpler “palisade method” (po ostrozhnomu), which, although less solid, required only half as much lumber. A wall built in the palisade method consisted of squared-off oak logs, each a little over six meters in length, their ends sharpened to a point, set vertically in a closepacked row with a third of each log’s length sunk into the earth. They were joined together on the wall’s inside face with horizontal braces and iron staples or wooden pins. Bastions fashioned in the town method were then set atop this wall, supported by vertical wooden columns and crossbraces so that the deck of each bastion jutted out over the exterior face of the wall by about two meters; along the inside of the wall between the bastions were ground-level embrasures and an elevated firing deck. When completed, the fortress of Kozlov took quadrilateral form. Its eastern face overhung the Lesnoi Voronezh; the other three sides were surrounded by a ditch four meters deep and a low earth wall. The perimeter of the outer palisade wall measured 1244 meters; the inner kreml’ keep, set offcenter against the southern wall, was unusually large in proportion to the area enclosed by the outer wall. The bastions were not especially high, so that the total height of the outer wall (including the roofed bastions) was just 6.5 meters. But


the towers were three-deckers, averaging 15–20 meters in height, and there were 11 of them: two entrance towers with inner and outer gates, eight “blank” towers without gates, and a tower on the eastern wall to guard the secret tunnel that ran downhill for 40 meters to the river. 84 The governors’ office and residence were eventually located inside the kreml’ along with the powder vault, granaries, and other government buildings. Interestingly, the construction of the governor’s office seems to have been put off until late January or early February 1636; in the interval Birkin and Speshnev must have had to conduct their business out of a tent or temporary shack, or perhaps from the refectory of the town cathedral.85 To save on lumber and labor Birkin purchased a barn and five pinewood sheds from the monastery peasants at Goretovo and Krivets, took them down, and had them reassembled inside the kreml’ for use as granaries; their combined capacity was 1500 measures. Another three granaries would be built by 1639. 86 For defense and policing reasons the central government exercised such tight control over where settlers could put up their dwellings that its permission had to be obtained before homeowners could pull down and relocate their houses.87 In most towns private residences were usually restricted to the posad, the zone of settlement around the outer walls, which might have its own simple protective stockade. Fear of Tatar raids had initially inclined the Military Chancellery to order all of Kozlov’s lower service class colonists to be housed within the town walls (the middle service class was to settle in outlying villages but maintain a few special siege houses inside Kozlov). But once construction began and volunteers arrived to enroll in Kozlov’s cossacks and musketeers, Birkin discovered there was too little space within Kozlov’s walls to accommodate them all; he recommended they be settled instead in the posad so that they could be given house lots of the size then standard on the southern frontier (42.6 by 21.3 meters). The Military Chancellery concurred; henceforth only the gunners, sharpshooters, and gatekeepers were to have houses within the town walls, on the grounds that they were exclusively siege personnel; the musketeers, cossacks, and service land atamans were to reside in the posad, in their own slobody, that is, in special colonies according to their branch of service. This would eliminate overcrowding, and settlement by sloboda would facilitate mobilization and self-policing. By the second half of the century Kozlov had nine such service colonies, most located beyond the northern and western walls, protected by a line of anticavalry fences and small towers. 88

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As of 29 October over 200 meters of the outer wall had been completed and some of the towers were already going up. But the workpace would have to be acclerated in order to finish the town by the onset of winter, and meanwhile it had already become necessary to reassign many of the laborers and their mounts to sortie duty chasing Tatar scouting parties. Birkin therefore requested more troops, carpenters, blacksmiths, and muskets on 7 November. Two weeks later the Military Chancellery approved the despatch to Kozlov of 105 additional men (four carpenters, two smiths, and the rest cossacks and musketeers) from Mikhailov, Pronsk, Shatsk, Riazhsk, Dankov, Lebedian’, and Voronezh. This brought the loaned contingents of laborers and guards to a total strength of 804 men.89 But the arrival of the winter frost made it difficult to use these laborers to optimal effect. They had to compete with the garrison volunteers for shelter and firewood; many were reduced to living in the unroofed fortifications. Some of them also ran through their personal stores before the end of their shift. Although the carpenters and smiths received rations money and the volunteers enrolling in the garrison got settlement subsidies, they were no better off in regards to food and fodder; the largely unsettled nature of the district meant there was very little local grain surplus available for them to purchase. Even Captain Krasnikov was unable to find fodder for his mounts. 90 The town of Voronezh, the nearest major grain market and state granary, had been ordered to provide Kozlov with 244,500 kilos of rye and oats, but there was not yet any way of getting this grain to Kozlov, nor enough granary capacity at Kozlov to hold it. 91 So Kozlov servicemen had to travel the 180 kilometers to Voronezh to buy their own grain, and to make such a trip they had to get Moscow’s permission by petitioning Birkin and Speshnev, who had no intention of allowing large numbers of men to leave Kozlov half-built and underdefended.92 Despite these setbacks the town’s walls, bastions, and towers were largely completed and water piped into the fortress through the secret tunnel by the end of February 1636. The finishing touches – the roofing and the excavation of the last of the surrounding ditch – could not be put to the town until 16 October 1636 in part because of a shortage of skilled carpenters, but especially because so many laborers had to be diverted to the steppe wall labor or to sortie duty.93 Although construction had continued long past the original deadline, Birkin and Speshnev had driven their workforce hard under difficult circumstances. The following year A. V. Buturlin showed it was possible to build a steppe fortress town – Iablonov, on the Iziuma Trail – in just two weeks,


but most of Iablonov’s fortifications were of simpler earthen type, Buturlin had twice as many laborers at his disposal, and construction did not begin before spring. 94 Kozlov’s projected steppe fortifications ran only as far east as the Chelnovaia and left unfortified the Kuz’mina Gat’ ford on the Tsna. This still left Verkhotsensk canton vulnerable to attack. In February 1636 Moscow therefore authorized an expedition under stol’nik Roman Fedorovich Boborykin to found a second new garrison town, this one to be located on the Tsna at the mouth of Lipovitsa Creek. 95 When Boborykin began construction on 17 April 1636, however, it was at a different site, farther up the Tsna at the mouth of Studenets Creek and 90 kilometers southeast of Kozlov. Birkin questioned whether Boborykin was subordinating defense considerations to customs revenue in selecting this location: the new townsite did not block any Tatar trails but did overlook the intersecting trade routes the Don Cossacks travelled to reach the markets of central Muscovy and the Volga. On Boborykin’s behalf it could be said that the new site – to be named Tambov – was at least less vulnerable to attack than the Lipovitsa site, defended as it was by the Studenets to the north, the Tsna and its dense forest to the east, deep gullies to the south, and forest and swamp to the west.96 In erecting Tambov Boborykin had the advantage of a much larger workforce. Verkhotsensk canton contributed laborers at the rate of one man from every five households; servicemen from the Shatsk garrison were used, along with the peasants of Shatsk pomeshchiki; the Cherneev Monastery contributed; and from Romanov district alone came 1500 workers. But some of these contingents were delayed, and Boborykin had such a problem with desertions that a special inquisitor had to be sent down from Moscow; Tambov was therefore not completed until 1 October 1636. Tambov had 12 towers, the circumference of its outer palisade wall was about 500 meters greater than Kozlov’s 1778 meters, and its kreml’, unlike Kozlov’s, was built in the town method. The Musketeers’ Colony was situated inside the town; sloboda colonies for the gunners, cossacks, and some Zaporozhian emigres were located farther off on the Studenets.97

The wall across the steppe Over the first winter Birkin began having some reservations about the wooden wall he and Speshnev had proposed erecting across the steppe between the Pol’noi Voronezh and Chelnovaia. Its position was not the

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problem: it intersected the Tatar trails and ought to be easy to defend, and provisioning the troops manning it would not be difficult, as they would have their plowlands not far to the rear, thereby allowing each of them “to carry his supplies on one horse, and in summer sufficient fodder would be right under his feet.”98 Birkin’s doubts rather concerned the wooden palisade wall’s vulnerability to fires spreading across the dry grass of the steppe. As soon as the spring thaw came he could always send out a hundred men to burn a firebreak along the construction site, “but concerning fire we must expect whatever God permits us. There will be no guarantee. . . . At some point there will be fires on the steppe at the fortifications, which must not be without men for protection at that time.” 99 An additional consideration was the enormous quantity of lumber needed to build a palisade wall 12 surveying versts long: 248,000 logs for the palisade itself, and another 60,000 logs for the anticavalry fences along the wall. By 18 February the Boyar Duma had been swayed by Birkin’s report and by the recommendations of those of his troops who were veterans of the Smolensk War and familiar with earth fortification methods. It decreed that earthen steppe fortifications would be safer and more practical. 100 Military Chancellery secretaries Gavrenev and Larionov consulted with the Dutch engineer Jan Cornelius von Rodenburg in drawing up the necessary blueprints and budget estimates. Familiar with the latest Dutch innovations in the science of earth fortification, Rodenburg had entered Russian service in 1631; after refortifying Rostov he had helped direct sapping, trenchworks, and artillery emplacements at the siege of Smolensk, and in 1635 he had carried out surveying and planning for the reconstruction of the Tula, Veneva, and Kashira segments of the Abatis Line.101 Rodenburg’s plan called for replacing the palisade line with an earth wall 12 surveying versts (25.5 kilometers) in length. The wall was to be built to a height of 2.3 meters; its thickness at the base was 3.5 meters, tapering to one meter at the parapet; along its inner face was a banquette of six steps allowing sharpshooters to fire over the crest. At the end of its narrow outer berm there would be a ditch 3.5 meters deep and 3.5 meters wide. Beyond the ditch, about 100 meters out from the wall, a line of anticavalry fences would slow the attacking Tatar cavalry as they came within range of the guns along the wall; there would be an additional line of anticavalry fences along the inner face of the wall in the event the enemy broke through and tried to stampede the mounts of the Russian defenders. The great expense of casting cannons and the narrowness of the parapet made it impractical to place guns all along


the wall, so heavy firepower would have to be concentrated at certain points, sufficiently close together to provide an effective crossfire – at 60 low earth watchtowers or bartizans and 12–15 larger earthen redoubts, equidistantly spaced along the wall, built into it rather than detached. Rodenburg did not specify the height of these bartizans, but each would measure about 100 square meters in area and have no entry gates lest the enemy overrun it (presumably the soldiers stationed inside entered the bartizan through its gunports). The redoubts were intended to replace the four blockhouse forts Birkin had originally proposed; the walls of each redoubt were to stand four meters high and enclose an area of about 450 square meters – enough room to hold a hundred servicemen and two cannons.102 Ivan Andreev, a veteran of the Smolensk siege, was to serve as chief engineer for the project, but Birkin would have general supervision over the labor and could offer suggestions for alterations to the plan.103 Birkin did subsequently propose certain changes, altering the dimensions of the ditch and moving it farther out from the wall because “the soil is soft and from great downpours it might crumble into the ditch.” He did not want the 12–15 earthen redoubts, as he was convinced there were too few creeks and springs to provide enough water for so many men; he preferred just four earth forts, of the same size but with sortie gates, situated where he had originally planned the four blockhouse forts. 104 Rodenburg estimated that construction of the steppe fortifications ought to take no more than seven weeks if the redoubts were omitted and the project was assigned 1200 foot laborers and 100–150 mounted laborers for grading and hauling. The labor contingents on loan from other districts for the construction of the fortress of Kozlov were therefore kept on for the wall labor, and an additional 725 men (115 deti boiarskie and 610 cossacks and musketeers) were now to be brought in from Mikhailov, Pronsk, Riazhsk, Dankov, Sapozhok, Voronezh, Lebedian’, and Elets for six-week shifts beginning 25 March. Because of the innovative nature of the project it would be necessary to remunerate these new laborers with rations money at the generous rate of 1.5 rubles per man per month; Rodenburg estimated that the total cost would therefore run to 3543.75 rubles, or 4050 rubles if rations money was paid for a full two months’ labor. If Birkin followed his recommendation and added a redoubt every verst, another 200 laborers and 600 rubles would be needed. As of late March, Birkin had on hand 2673.12 rubles remaining from 5000 rubles Captain Krasnikov and clerk Ivan Protasov had brought from Moscow, but this money was earmarked for

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settlement subsidies for new colonists; to pay for the earth-wall labor the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery therefore turned over another 4000 rubles, which clerk Gavriil Ivanov delivered on 20 May. Voronezh and Moscow also promised 400 shovels and spades, four more brass cannons, 2051 muskets, and 3000 measures of grain. 105 As the villages belonging to the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries, Dmitrii Pozharskii, and the Trubetskois and Vel’iaminovs had been reassigned from Riazhsk and Lebedian’ to Kozlov, they were now obliged to provide Birkin with peasant corvee workers ( pososhnye liudi) to erect the anticavalry fences along the steppe wall. In the future they would also be called upon to provide peasant militiamen (datochnye liudi) to help man the wall during the raiding season. Each estate’s manpower quota was determined by the number of taxbearing “inhabited quarters” listed for it in the cadasters. 106 Initially the government had intended to follow customary practice and extend liability for the corvee levy to all settlements located within 100 kilometers of Kozlov, regardless of whether they were incorporated into the new district. This affected villages in Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, Riazhsk, Shatsk, Dankov, and Lebedian’. Birkin’s efforts in November– December 1635 to lay the foundations for this conscription had encountered considerable resistance, however. In some instances the village elders and stewards refused to show his constables cadastral extracts tallying their settlements’ inhabited quarters and setting their conscription quotas; at Sviatoe a mob led by the village priest even attempted to lynch Captain Putilo Bykov, the commander of Birkin’s cadastral inspection party. The governors of Shatsk and Riazhsk refused to cooperate on the grounds the territory in question lay within their own borders and they had not received instruction from the Great Court or other chancelleries. 107 Even if the Military Chancellery had done more to notify the other governors and chancelleries, Birkin’s corvee levy would still have provoked resistance. Such levies were unpopular for fairly obvious reasons: they removed able-bodied workers from the village for sometimes protracted periods, often at the height of the agricultural season; they held the villages responsible for the expense of outfitting the conscripts with mounts, carts, tools and weapons, and part of their rations and fodder; the governor and the commune’s elected assessors could not always reach a consensus as to how to apportion tasks among the households subject to the levy; and the central government was unlikely to accept cash substitutions unless there was insufficient reliable cadastral information to calculate the assessment rate.108


On this occasion the Military Chancellery decided to compromise by assessing peasant laborers only from the nearer settlements within the venue of the corvee levy, those officially reassigned to Kozlov district from Riazhsk and Lebedian’ in December 1635. The farther settlements would be allowed to substitute cash payments, with the cash to be paid out as rations money to servicemen substituting for their part of the original quota of peasant labor conscripts on the anticavalry fences. 109 The settlements remaining subject to the labor levy – the holdings of the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries, Pozharskii, Trubetskoi, and the Vel’iaminovs – held 1100 households according to Birkin’s latest survey. They were now required to provide 100 laborers, at the rate of two men from every three households on the Chudov and Novospasskii estates, and one man from every three households from the other estates. These laborers were to report to Kozlov by 25 March. Their duty was not expected to be onerous: because Kozlov servicemen would put up most of the anticavalry fences, each labor conscript was responsible for erecting just 12 meters of anticavalry barrier, work that would probably take no more than six days unless it became necessary to fight off Tatar attacks. 110 Apparently only Pozharskii’s village of Goretovo sent its full contingent of peasant laborers by the deadline. Nearly all of the work on the anticavalry fences therefore ended up being performed by servicemen remunerated with rations money. The fences began going up on 8 April, after the ground had thawed. 111 Some of the six-week labor details requisitioned from the other towns of the Nogai Front to build the earth wall across the steppe were slow to arrive or appeared at less than full strength. This forced Birkin to delay the start of work on the wall until 13 May. It also left him with too few men to defend the worksites. Only 210 men from the Riazhsk, Lebedian’, and Voronezh contingents were available for policing and defense duty, and “from this number we withdraw and send out men as patrol riders, while others keep watch at town and protect against fires. . . . We also send them out on grain distributions and on ranger missions or to pickets on the river fords. There is no one left to defend the fortifications on the steppes, Sovereign, because these troops are erecting and defending the anticavalry fences.” To reinforce Birkin the Military Chancellery therefore transferred a command of 200 elite Moscow musketeers for the May–October 1636 work season. But Birkin would have to pay these additional troops rations money at the daily rate of 0.04 rubles per man.112

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By 20 June 1028.50 rubles remained of the 4000 rubles brought by clerk Gavriil Ivanov. Work on the anticavalry fences had used up 245.36 rubles, while 2726.14 rubles had been paid out to build the first eight kilometers of earth wall and forts. Birkin estimated that each surveying verst of the steppe wall was costing 778.04 rubles; at this rate it would require another 6613.34 rubles to finish the rest of the steppe fortifications, bringing the likely total cost of the project to 9584.84–4934.84 rubles over Rodenburg’s original budget. 113 Fortunately the Military Chancellery was able to provide another 1000 rubles from the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery on 22 July; this, together with improvements in the weather and the arrival of the rest of the assigned laborers, made it possible to accelerate the workpace after 11 August and lower labor costs to 500 rubles per verst. When the steppe fortifications were finally finished on 16 October 1636, a total of only 6515.14 rubles had been spent: over half again as much as Rodenburg had intially estimated, but 3069.69 rubles less than had been anticipated in the revised budget of late June. 114 An inventory compiled in January 1639 provides the most detailed early description of what engineer Andreev and his 950 laborers had been able to accomplish. 115 The earth steppe wall began at Belyi Kolodez’ on the right bank of the Pol’noi Voronezh River, 16 kilometers west of Kozlov, and ran eastward for 25 kilometers until it reached the left bank of the Chelnovaia river. Its dimensions were close to those originally proposed by Rodenburg, except that a breastwork erected along its parapet now brought the rampart’s total height to 3.75 meters (repair work in 1647 and 1652 would raise it to over four meters). The outer ditch was shallower than the one planned by Rodenburg – only 2.5 meters deep – but Birkin had added a second ditch and anticavalry fence along the inner face of the wall. A total of 70 small blank bartizans had been built into the wall at intervals of 290–380 meters, along with three larger earth redoubts with sortie gates. The first redoubt was placed at Belyi Kolodez’, at the western end of the wall; the second stood 4.8 kilometers to the east; and the last stood another 15 kilometers beyond. In place of the wooden forts Birkin had originally proposed, there were now four earth forts with sloping walls, sortie gates, gun platforms, and surrounding ditch. The largest of these forts (about 106 square meters) stood near Belyi Kolodez’, about 320 meters east of the redoubt marking the western terminus of the wall; the other three forts measured about 85 square meters and were placed on Iaroslavka Creek (about 10 kilometers farther east), on the Mokhovaia (another


five kilometers on), and on the bank of the Chelnovaia at the end of the steppe wall.116 The wall running from Belyi Kolodez’ to the Chelnovaia was not the only fortified line built in Kozlov district in 1636. An earth wall and ditch of similar dimensions ran for about 1200 meters along the river bank at Urliapovo Ford, and seven kilometers farther up the Pol’noi Voronezh at Kasimov Crossing, Birkin put up another small earth fort and a 426-meter segment of earth wall, ditch, and anticavalry fences. Pickets of 20–50 men were stationed near both river fords, and Urliapovo Ford was further reinforced by a nearby settlement of 90 service land atamans who held plowlands between the Pol’noi Voronezh and Lesnoi Voronezh. Birkin and Speshnev also erected small wooden forts protected by ditches and anticavalry fences at various key points along the creeks and rivers in the southern half of the district; by the 1650s there would be 17 such palisade fortlets.117 Longer fortified lines were less necessary here because of the natural defenses offered by the Great Voronezh Forest. Although Kozlov’s steppe wall ran only as far east as the Chelnovaia, the fortifications of Tambov district began directly across the Chelnovaia from the last of Kozlov’s earth forts. Tambov’s fortifications did not include an earth wall – they took the more traditional form of abatis, anticavalry fences, and wooden fortlets and towers – but they did run from Lysye Gory as far southeast as Kuz’mina Gat’, thereby closing off the rest of the steppe west of the Tsna. 118 The bartizans and earth forts along Kozlov’s steppe wall were manned by military colonists allotted plowlands not far behind the wall and by armed peasant militiamen levied every raiding season. Three hundred and twenty-eight muskets were shipped to Kozlov for distribution to those troops lacking firearms; by September 1636 three heavy bronze guns, ten lighter bronze cannons, and six “rapid-fire” iron guns had also been placed in town and along the steppe wall.119 But what ultimately mattered more than distributing firepower along the steppe wall was making available sizable reservoirs of mobile manpower to conduct effective sorties and pursue Tatar chambuly considerable distances into the steppe, and towards this end Birkin and Speshnev built two large wooden forts a few hundred meters behind the western and eastern termini of the steppe wall, each large enough to serve as a permanent base for 300 men. Thus the satellite garrison of Chelnavsk, established at Chebotovka about a half-kilometer north of the smaller Chelnovaia earth fort, took the form of a sloboda colony and a quadrilateral oak fort with palisade walls 4.2 meters high and 512 meters in

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circumference, with four blank corner towers, two larger gated towers, and a surrounding ditch. The garrison at Bel’sk, just behind the earth fort at Belyi Kolodez’, was similar in form but almost twice the circumference. 120 To have built all this in seven months with less than 1000 laborers and at a cost of just 6500 rubles was an impressive achievement, especially considering that it involved European earth fortification techniques in which Muscovite engineers and laborers had little prior experience. In later years the Military Chancellery and Kozlov’s governors would cite Birkin’s and Speshnev’s supervision of the steppe wall project as a model of zealous and diligent service on the Sovereign’s behalf. As with most activities affecting interests of state, the fortifications labor was closely supervised by the central chancellery apparatus, which held its agents in the field, the town governors, accountable by requiring from them frequent and detailed report. On occasion this centralization of control proved unwieldy, as when the chancelleries’ failure to provide adequate instruction to the governors of neighboring delayed the arrival of some labor contingents and permitted landowners’ stewards and village elders to resist peasant corvee levies. Yet centralized supervision did not preclude flexible adaptation to local circumstances; the fortifications were successfully adapted to Kozlov’s terrain and resources because the Military Chancellery twice accepted Birkin’s major revisions to the original construction plan. Birkin’s and Speshnev’s success at Kozlov may not be representative of all experience with major fortifications projects in this period – the repair of some sections of the Abatis Line to the north met with more delay, waste, desertion, and community resistance – but it does suggest what state power could accomplish in terms of resource mobilization and redefinition of property right when the project in question was of highest priority.

Combat with the Tatars During the autumn and winter of 1635 small Tatar scouting and raiding parties had managed to cross through Kozlov district with impunity because Birkin and Speshnev and their troops were still largely unfamiliar with the local terrain and the trails the enemy used. But this did not last long; by the spring of 1636 Kozlov detachments had become adept at intercepting and defeating the Tatars. Later that year the new garrison of Tambov began playing a more active role in blocking Tatar movements east of the Chelnovaia. Although Tambov Governor Roman


Boborykin was by temperament disinclined to coordinate his operations with those of Birkin and Speshnev, his cavalry was especially ruthless in hunting down and destroying the enemy. For these reasons the danger to central Muscovy from the Nogai Road was substantially reduced by spring 1637. The Kozlov garrison’s first recorded sighting of the enemy had occurred just before dawn on 25 October 1635, when a party of surveyors spotted 50 Tatars emerging from the Matyra Wildwood and making a run for the steppe, apparently on their return from raiding the village of Turov in Riazhsk district. Three days later it was discovered that one of the Kozlov patrols had been ambushed and abducted by a band of at least 100 Tatars. Birkin therefore sent Captain Krasnikov with two hundred men north towards Turov village with orders to intercept the enemy and take prisoners for interrogation. Krasnikov’s scouts caught sight of three or four Tatars on the plain east of the Pol’noi Voronezh and followed their tracks northeast to the Chelnovaia, where they found the enemy’s camp. Only a few Tatars were present in camp, but Krasnikov decided not to attack: there were too many horses picketed there, indicating that most of the enemy was nearby gathering firewood. He waited for them to return and break camp and then followed them from a safe distance. But then bad weather set upon them – rain, turning to snow – obliterating the enemy’s tracks and forcing Krasnikov to give up the pursuit altogether. He returned to Kozlov on 2 November.121 On 21 November the Kozlov patrol at Bulatov on the Pol’noi Voronezh reported seeing 100 or more Tatars riding north to ford the river at Kasimov Crossing. Earlier that morning a different patrol had spotted a hundred Tatars crossing the Lesnoi Voronezh at Perepol’skii Ford. Captains Krasnikov and Bykov were sent in pursuit with a detachment of a 100 men. That evening Pronsk cossack Vaska Titov reached Kozlov with news of a Tatar attack. He and fifty other Pronsk cossacks assigned to temporary duty at Kozlov had been en route to Kozlov from Riazhsk when they were ambushed at the edge of Malyi Khobotets Forest by about 100 Tatars. The cossacks drew their carts into a protective wagenburg while Titov rode off to try to summon a relief column. Titov claimed to have seen the enemy bring down at least 17 of his comrades but thought there was still time to rescue the others; Birkin therefore sent a courier to order Bykov and Krasnikov to ride to their relief. Fortunately for the Pronsk cossacks the Tatars had withdrawn at nightfall, having actually wounded only one cossack. Bykov and Krasnikov tried to give pursuit but lost their trail. This event seems to

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have had an intimidating effect upon the labor contingents bound for Kozlov, for some Pronsk musketeers assigned to corvee duty refused to march to Kozlov on 3 December.122 The spring of 1636 brought a heightened alert to all the districts along the southern frontier. Nobles of the Kazyev Nogai Horde were pressing for a campaign against the Muscovite towns; the Lesser Nogais had gathered along the Kuban River, and the Great Nogais were roaming the Terek steppes east of the Don and refusing to return across the Volga. The Crimean khan boasted threateningly to a Russian emissary from Astrakhan’, “You see that the Nogai murzas and the men of their domains have all petitioned me as bondsmen, and the Muslim faith is united in one place. Having seen this, go to Astrakhan’ and tell your governors.” In March, Russian travelers reported seeing Nogais and Azovians fording the Northern Donets River and massing in the steppelands along the Derkula, Boguchara, and Glubokaia rivers for a major strike in the spring. Large forces of two to ten thousand Tatars made sudden raids in Livny, Valuiki, Novosil’, and Mtsensk districts and fought pitched battles with Muscovite servicemen.123 The main blow was expected to fall upon the towns of the Nogai Front. Don Cossacks reported to Moscow that Tatars were preparing to come up the Nogai Road en masse against Shatsk, Alatyr’, and Temnikov. Large forces of the enemy were seen near Samara and Saratov, and Tatars crossing the Medveditsa River had split into two armies, the first advancing along the Sura, the second creeping along the Moksha. Some 10,000 warriors were observed crossing the Khoper River, presumably advancing against Kozlov, Riazhsk, and Riazan’. 124 On 29 April a comparatively large band of 500 Tatars forded the Pol’noi Voronezh at Kasimov Crossing to offer the Kozlov garrison its first serious military test. The Tatars drove off a picket and began to pull down some of the recently erected anticavalry barriers. Birkin sortied with a detachment of cossacks and deti boiarskie and battled the Tatars from noon to early evening. Two Russians were killed and one wounded, but the enemy was eventually pushed back across the river and put to flight. “By thy Sovereign’s . . . good fortune, the Tatars did not pass on into Rus’. And many Tatars were wounded in the battle, and others were killed.” Birkin’s men had also managed to take a few prisoners, who were sent off to Moscow for interrogation. 125 News of this battle was received with great interest by Governor Boborykin at Tambov. Birkin and Speshnev had questioned the strategic value of the site Boborykin had chosen for Tambov; now Boborykin responded by charging that attacks like that of 29 April were likely to


recur, that Birkin’s planned steppe wall might prove useless to Kozlov because Birkin had failed to identify all the Tatar trails cutting through his district. This accusation moved Birkin to complete his survey of the region. On 23 January he reported to the Military Chancellery that all his interrogations and mapping satisfied him that all trails had now been identified for fortification. He had found no evidence of any Tatar trails across the Lesnoi Voronezh south of Kozlov and north of the Matyra, and Boborykin’s identifications of fords on the Lesnoi Voronezh and Goretovo Creek were erroneous: there were too many bogs, too many villages, and too dense forest to permit Tatar crossings at these spots. The fortifications Birkin had already proposed would be enough to cut the Nogai Road.126 Furthermore, testimony given by the brethren of Cherneev Monastery in Shatsk confirmed that it was Boborykin who had blundered in situating Tambov too far from any known Tatar trails. Tambov was unnecessary, for the Cherneev monks insisted that they had never heard of any instance of the enemy using trails between the Chelnovaia and the Tsna.127 The conflict between Birkin and Boborykin would subsequently escalate to include the trading of accusations about illegal impressment and a boundary dispute over access rights to the Chelnavsk Forest would lead to armed conflict between Kozlov and Tambov colonists. The only good that came of their rivalry was that Boborykin, unable to match Birkin’s accomplishments in the fortification of the steppe, became especially aggressive in his cavalry operations against Tatar warbands. The battle of 29 April seems to have temporarily discouraged the Tatars from another direct attack on Kozlov; their next few incursions were aimed at circumventing the Kozlov fortifications. A raiding party hit Verkhotsensk canton to the northeast but was trapped and deprived of all its captives while trying to withdraw across the Don. A band of 200 warriors rode past Ratchina Poliana on 14 May in order to turn towards Riazhsk and Sapozhok. Most of the raiding activity in May and June was directed against Voronezh district from across the Bitiug, and it never acquired devastating force. The major invasion anticipated since March simply failed to materialize in 1636 because of the new towns and their garrisons.128 This could not yet be foreseen, however, and Kozlov and other towns were put on alert after the Muscovite emissary Fedor Aliabev reported from the Don on 13 July that the Nogais and Kazyev Horde were mobilizing to invade. Birkin and Speshnev were told not only to increase the vigilance of their patrols but to prepare the district inhabitants for a siege. Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, Pronsk, and Riazhsk had been ordered to

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send Kozlov another 250 men because Birkin had to send 150 Voronezh servicemen home to defend their own district.129 Some 300 Tatars were spotted on the eastern bank of the Chelnovaia early in the evening of 3 August. They tried to pass through the anticavalry fences erected between the end of the wall and the river, but were fired upon by the 211 Russians posted at the Chelnavsk fort. Captain Bykov came to the fort’s assistance with another 200 men and after a fierce battle the Tatars retreated into the steppe with Bykov’s detachment in pursuit. At nightfall Bykov turned back, fearing ambush by a larger force lurking farther out in the darkness.130 This had probably been an attempt to test the strength of the steppe wall and perhaps delay its completion. 131 In the autumn there were still reports that 10,000 Tatars were crossing the Khoper and that Russian leaseholders fishing and raising bees on the Bitiug, Medveditsa, and Khoper rivers had been captured by marauders. In September the Kozlov governors relayed to Moscow rumors that the Nogais were assembling for an invasion by the spring harvest and that they might be guided against the frontier towns by Serezhka Bizgin, a Valuiki patrol rider turned renegade. But only small bands of one hundred or so raiders appeared anywhere near Kozlov and Tambov, and they were successfully neutralized. Two hundred Tatars turned back from another raid on Verkhotsensk canton when blocked by a forest barrier and the approach of troops from Tambov. Later that month a detachment of 400 Tambov cavalrymen ambushed a steppe encampment of 100 Tatars, killing their chief and five other men and then tracking down and capturing 65 of those who tried to flee on foot. Two hundred Tatars were seen on the Khoper on 26 October, and Tambov relayed this information to Kozlov on the thirty-first. Krasnikov rode out with 300 men to intercept them. On 7 November, Tambov troops captured 39 Azovians and Great Nogais whom they recognized as participants in previous raids on the area and, judging from their caparison, as “rich men, although black of skin.” Governor Boborykin sent Moscow the ears of those Tatar prisoners who died of their wounds en route to Tambov.132 By winter the threat of invasion had largely passed, allowing the tsar to demobilize the troops of the Borderland and Riazan’ arrays on 1 December.

Kozlov and the Belgorod Line “By the grace of God and our good fortune,” the Military Chancellery noted in February 1637, “from spring through the autumn of 1636 there


was no Tatar warfare in all the Riazhsk, Riazan’, and Shatsk settlements and in many places along the Sosna River. The Orthodox peasants in those areas are living in peace, free of fear.” The Military Chancellery attributed this to the defeats the Tatars had suffered at the hands of Kozlov and Tambov servicemen. “Riazhsk, Riazan’, and all the Shatsk areas have been secured against Tatar attack by the new towns and fortifications.”133 This assessment was echoed by the service population of Lebedian’: “Because of those new towns it will henceforth be impossible, Sovereign, for Tatars to come to Lebedian’ by surprise and raid from across the Voronezh.” Even the Tatars themselves acknowledged this, some Tatar princes of the ulus of Magmet-Aga admitting to Russian interpreters in October 1637 that the new defenses at Kozlov and Tambov had “shut down” the Nogai Road.134 On 24 November governors Birkin and Speshnev were recalled to Moscow and rewarded with raises to their entitlement rates, bringing Ivan Birkin’s entitlement to 1000 quarters and 120 rubles and Mikhailo Speshnev’s to 950 quarters and 64 rubles. Ivan Birkin’s son Samoilo was appointed Kozlov’s new governor. 135 From the events of the previous year secretaries Gavrenev and Larionov concluded that the opportunity to revise Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy was now at hand. Up to this point a perimeter defense had been mounted only along the Abatis Line, leaving the towns to its south functioning largely as scattered hard points and bases for patrol and ranger intelligence gathering. But the larger manpower reservoirs being established at Kozlov and Tambov – especially when this manpower was posted along the steppe fortifications running between the Voronezh and the Tsna – had already proven effective in substantially reducing Tatar penetration even on open steppe terrain. It was therefore time to follow the example of the Kozlov steppe wall and found new garrison towns and defense lines all across the frontier, transecting the Kal’miuss, Iziuma, and Murava invasion trails in the same manner that Birkin’s wall had cut the Nogai Road. The forts of Chernavsk and Taletsk were already going up on the Bystraia Sosna River to shield Livny, Elets, Novosil’, Chern’, Mtsensk, and Bolkhov; a town had been started at Orel Gorodishche on the southern Don, to replace the old Orel that had been abandoned during the Troubles; and to the northwest of Shatsk the new towns of Verkhnii Lomov and Nizhnii Lomov were under construction. But further construction was needed, particularly in the southwest. Therefore the Military Chancellery in February 1637 commissioned Fedor Sukhotin (who had been engineer at the Kozlov townsite) and clerk Evsei Iur’ev to conduct a survey across the entire

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frontier and recommend sites for new towns and lines of fortification to “secure Oskol’, Livny, Elets, Belgorod, Kursk, and all the Borderland towns from warfare by the Crimeans, Nogais, and Azovians.”136 From the Sukhotin-Iur’ev survey the Belgorod Line would be born. By the time it was completed in 1658 the Belgorod Line would run all along the southern edge of the forest-steppe zone, from Akhtyrka on the Vorskla River to Chelnavsk 800 kilometers away; at Chelnavsk the fortifications of Tambov district attached it to the Simbirsk Line running another 500 kilometers east to the Volga. The Line consisted of wooden and earth fortifications and forest abatis linking 25 garrisons. Only six of these garrison towns and forts (Kozlov, Bel’sk, Chelnavsk, Romanov, Voronezh, and Belgorod) predated the Sukhotin-Iur’ev survey. The rest were newly built (Vol’nyi, Khotmyzhsk, Karpov, Bolkhovets, Nezhegol’sk, Korocha, Iablonov, Novyi Oskol’, Verkhososensk, Userdsk, Ol’shansk, Ostrogozhsk, Korotoiak, Uryv’, Kostensk, Orlov, Usman’, Sokol’sk, and Dobryi). 137 The first completed section of the Belgorod Line was of course its easternmost segment – Kozlov’s 25-kilometer steppe wall. The Kozlov wall also served as an engineering model for much of the rest of the Belgorod Line, 140 kilometers of which would eventually take the form of earthen wall. In another respect, however, the Belgorod Line represented a technical advance beyond the Kozlov project. Whereas the town Sukhotin had built atop the bluff at Kozlov Point was of traditional wooden palisade form, many of the garrison towns erected after 1637 followed the newer plan of the fortress of Iablonov: they were built on the plain, into the defense line itself, and had large outer enceintes of sloped earth wall in the Dutch manner.138 An early indication of how much Moscow expected Kozlov and Tambov to reduce the threat emanating along the Nogai Road could be found in the 1636 roster of command appointments, which now referred to the corps of the Riazan’ Array as backup deployments. The construction work along the rest of the Belgorod Line similarly redefined the strategic function of the Borderland Array. The Abatis Line itself came under reconstruction by 1638, but in order to turn it into a more imposing inner perimeter, along which local garrison forces were to play a larger defense role; this allowed the Military Chancellery to gradually shift the corps down to the new outer perimeter staked out by the Belgorod Line. For many years the Great Corps had stood at Tula, the Vanguard at Dedilov, and the Rear Guard at Krapivna; beginning in 1646 they took the field in early spring at Livny, Kursk, and Elets, shifting in June to Belgorod, Karpov, and Iablonov. Formerly garrisons and small field


forces stationed south of the arrays had to march northwards to rendezvous with the corps; now the corps could be reinforced by sending these units south. 139 This bolder forward defense in turn accelerated the colonization of the forest-steppe and steppe below the old Abatis Line, thereby making more manpower available to the Belgorod Line garrisons and the corps. By 1678 the total number of adult male odnodvortsy on the southern frontier, in Sloboda Ukraine, and on the lower Volga had reached about 200,000.140 As the service population grew and the danger of Tatar penetration of the Line declined, more troops could be assigned to distant campaign service off the Line. This in turn permitted Muscovite military operations against the Khanate to go on a sustained offensive. A force under Zhdan Kondyrev (1646) was the first in a series of Muscovite military expeditions sent down the Don against Azov and the Crimean Tatars; for logistical reasons it failed, and up until the 1670s the expeditions down the Don involved comparatively small forces, their mission not to provoke war with the Turks but to threaten immediate retaliation for Tatar raids while simultaneously making a show of force sufficient to remind the Don Cossacks Moscow did not intend to permit them full operational independence.141 But it also became logistically possible to commit considerably larger forces from the Belgorod Line to protracted campaigns in Ukraine – against the Commonwealth and Khanate in the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and against the Porte and Khanate in the first Russo–Turkish War (1676–1681). The campaigns in Ukraine were considerably more decisive in outcome, resulting in the establishment of Muscovite hegemony over Left Bank Ukraine, the successful defense of that sphere of hegemony against Ottoman imperialism, and the Muscovite military colonization of Sloboda Ukraine behind a new 300-kilometer Iziuma Line running southeastward from the Belgorod Line. The tremendous scale of resource mobilization involved in these campaigns led to the construction of powerful regional administrative authorities to facilitate chancellery coordination of the town governors and corps commanders. By 1658 it had become practice to make the commander of the Great Corps at Belgorod marshal over the other frontier corps, and by 1663 his headquarters was serving as the office of the Belgorod Regional Command (Belgorodskii razriad), a far more integrated regional defense and resource mobilization network protoypical in some respects of the guberniia administration later introduced under Peter the Great.142 There also occurred a momentous change in the social composition, organization, remuneration, and tactics of the army

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on the southern frontier: the revival and expansion in the late 1640s of the “foreign formation” infantry and cavalry regiments. Kozlov would provide a disproportionate share of the manpower for these foreign formation regiments, and the conditions of service in them would profoundly transform the lives of Kozlov’s colonists, as we shall see below. A 1681 report from the Military Chancellery to the Boyar Duma assessed the impact of the Belgorod Line in the most enthusiastic terms, claiming not only that “enemy warriors can no longer attack the Borderland towns by surprise because of that defense line,” but that military colonization along the Line had even transformed the national economy by making the southern frontier safe for private colonization. “In Riazhsk, Riazan’, Tula, Orlov, and in many other adjoining districts many new villages and hamlets have been built on the steppes and vast tracts of plowland put under cultivation by many of the Sovereign’s courtiers and nobles of Moscow rank, pomeshchiki and votchinniki; and this has enlarged the supply of grain and other foodstuffs in the Muscovite state over that of previous years, lowered its price of purchase, expanded the scale of enterprise and the inventories of merchants, and led to greater yields in customs duties.”143 In reality this prosperity was limited to certain districts in the northern half of the forest-steppe zone, where magnate votchina economy was now spreading. Kozlov did not share in it. The Kozlov service population’s early success in settling and pacifying the region of the Nogai Road had now become its misfortune, committing it to continue playing a leading role in frontier defense and offensives on the southern Don and in Ukraine – a military service burden so onerous as to retard the district’s commercial development and even undermine its social stability.

2 Enlistment and the Construction of Social Identity

The negotiation of colonist identity Although the construction of Kozlov and its steppe fortifications had been a project of considerable technical complexity, the process of recruiting and settling Kozlov’s permanent garrison population required even closer attention by the Military Chancellery, for it amounted to the social engineering of a new community and the construction of new identities for over 2000 men and their families and descendants. This involved thousands of decisions concerning individuals’ legal eligibility for enlistment, their new ranks and duties, and their entitlements to remuneration. Furthermore, these were decisions which could not be left solely to government fiat. Having decided to form Kozlov’s garrison by taking volunteers rather than relying upon transfers, the Military Chancellery had to be prepared to go farther than usual in opening certain terms of enlistment and remuneration to negotiation with the volunteers themselves. The records of the Military Chancellery show that its readiness to accommodate the special needs of certain categories of volunteers at Kozlov and make special concessions concerning eligibility and entitlements enabled it to settle in quick order an unusually large garrison (2000 men by 1639). Although the nature of the enlistment process at Kozlov led to peasant flight and other disruptions in the older districts of the Nogai Front, the odnodvorets service colony it formed at Kozlov was better adapted to local frontier defense duty at minimum expense to the treasury.

A colony of volunteers and smallholders In the past military colonization of the southern frontier had mobilized primarily svedentsy, that is, men involuntarily transferred from other 75

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districts where they had already been enrolled in service. Such practice was very much in the command spirit of the state’s strategic plan for securing the frontier, and it was an effective means of quickly establishing a small garrison nucleus which could be subsequently expanded to maximum strength through further controlled transfers or even by enlisting volunteers. Hence the Military Chancellery made much use of the transfer method in establishing new garrison districts along the Belgorod Line in the 1640s–1650s. 1 But colonization by transfer was less feasible in the mid-1630s. At this time the closest districts of the Nogai Front had very little surplus manpower to spare Kozlov, at least in the form of men already registered in service or tiaglo. This was apparent not only from these districts’ rolls but from the actions of their governors. The governors balked at parting with their troops or peasant taxpayers even temporarily, as loaned corvee details, and they were even more reluctant to surrender manpower for transfer, given that those of their inhabitants they were supposed to select for transfer were those of the greatest service capacity, that is, the district’s most prosperous inhabitants with the largest families. The elected assessors upon whose recommendations the governors identified candidates for transfer were often the “strong men” of their communities and were likewise disinclined to deport their own kinsmen and clients. 2 The men marked for transfer were understandably reluctant to be forced from their homes. They could try to win exemption by showing they were impoverished or blind or crippled, by coming up with substitutes, or by bribing the governor and assessors; otherwise they would have to try to conceal themselves from the muster, which risked provoking the governor into jailing their wives and children or confiscating their family pomest’ia.3 For such reasons the Military Chancellery’s working order to Birkin and Speshnev stipulated that Kozlov’s permanent garrison be recruited from free volunteers (vol’nye skhodtsy).4 Transfer was used to form only one service category at Kozlov, and the attempt failed: Moscow found homes for 144 former Don and Iaik Cossacks who had registered in the Muscovite army to participate in the Smolensk campaign by transferring them to Kozlov in December 1635, but they failed to establish viable households and only 26 of them remained on Kozlov’s rolls by June 1638.5 Although the Nogai front districts were unable to spare for transfer to Kozlov men already on their service rolls and tax rolls, they did have some surplus manpower in the form of servicemen’s and taxpayers’ “sons, brothers, nephews, or dependents . . . not already in service, paying taxes, or living as serfs.”6 Such men were of more use to the Military Chancellery

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enlisted at Kozlov than when left in their home districts as civilians occasionally assisting in siege defense. Furthermore, because the size of district cossack and musketeer commands was usually fixed, many of these kinsmen and dependents stood little chance of obtaining cossack or musketeer enlistment with plowland. There was therefore every reason to think such men would respond to the opportunity to receive plowlands and cash maintenance at Kozlov. In fact by 1636 the Kozlov musketeers were already drawing volunteers from over 50 towns, some of them behind the Nogai Front. 7 Because the process of harnessing the entire population to military service or to taxbearing had not yet reached completion in the 1630s there also remained a significant number of unattached “free itinerants” (vol’nye guliashchie liudi). Not all of these itinerants were true vagrants. Some were hired workers residing in the households of other men, as their zakhrebetnik boarders; others rented their own houses and crofts; and still others lived under landlords as peasant tenants who remained legally free because they were not yet registered in deeds or cadasters. Their origins were equally varied: they might be manumitted serfs or slaves; sons of clergymen, who could not get their own parishes; and former deti boiarskie, cossacks, or musketeers who had dropped out of service due to poverty or some other misfortune or had recently returned from Tatar captivity. There were especially many in this last category because of the devastation wrought by the Time of Troubles, the PolishLithuanian and Tatar invasions, and the Smolensk War. Together with the kinsmen of servicemen, declasse men of this sort constituted an unascribed manpower surplus large enough to permit volunteer colonization at Kozlov and other new garrison towns. Thus volunteers comprised about 60 percent of the families enrolled in service in the new frontier districts founded in the 1630s. 8 Whereas colonization by transfers provoked considerable resistance because it attempted to remove from the community its most successful established families, colonization by volunteers mobilized those most able and ready to cut their existing ties and relocate wherever they were needed; true, the volunteers thereby tended to be more plebeian by origin and more marginal in current condition, but they were also more likely to view resettlement farther south as an economic bounty and social promotion. By providing the opportunity to reclaim former servicemen for state service and absorb declasse elements volunteer colonization also supported the state’s possibility of simplifying and servilizing social structure through the universalization of obligations for service or taxbearing.

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Furthermore, the generally lower social and economic condition of these volunteers need not limit the effectiveness of the service they were to perform, for the Military Chancellery’s strategy for the military colonization of the southern frontier had now redefined service norms so as to avoid having to continue to rely upon the settlement of serfholding pomeshchiki of the central Muscovite type. By the late sixteenth century most of the middle service class settled south of the Bank Array had come to consist of lower-ranking gorodovye deti boiarskie with small pomest’ia, the southern frontier’s heavier service burden, higher risk of devastation by Tatar raiders, and greater opportunities for peasant flight having tended to discourage higher-ranking servitors from establishing larger economies.9 In fact the pomest’e system could be said to be in crisis in both central and southern Muscovy by 1600. The 1556 Decree on Service had established that a pomest’e of 100 quarters per field sufficed to maintain one fully equipped mounted servitor for corps service. But in central Muscovy fewer men were now holding allotments this large, in part because natural increase in the number of servitors had fragmented holdings over the generations and because novitiates often had to serve several years before they could obtain land entitlements, much less actual allotments. Southern deti boiarskie were finding it even harder than their counterparts in central Muscovy to meet the traditional service norms. In 1577 of the 168 Putivl’ and Ryl’sk deti boiarskie, 99 had not yet received allotments and many of the rest had grants at only a third or quarter of their entitlement rates; at Riazhsk in 1597 only 44 men (11 percent of those mustered) had entitlement rates adequate (150–300 quarters) to outfit them for corps service, and seven years later only 28 men met this standard. 9 This had especially dangerous consequences for the southern frontier districts. Their security depended heavily upon the corps in the Borderland and Riazan’ arrays, yet a large and growing proportion of the southern middle service class now lacked the land and peasant labor to support themselves and their retainers in the arrays for any protracted period. The governments of Filaret and Cherkasskii therefore felt compelled to invest heavily in measures reinforcing the campaign duty capabilities of the middle service class – issuing special subsidies, distributing more service land, giving novitiates their entitlement assignments earlier, and gradually extending the time limit for the recovery of fugitive peasant tenants. But they simultaneously pursued a second solution, radical in form but lower in cost (at least over the short term). This involved


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a rethinking of the southern middle service class’s role in frontier defense strategy, the revision of recruitment and remuneration standards, and ultimately the socioeconomic transformation of much of the southern middle service class. We shall call this second solution “the odnodvorets adaptation.” Some of the southern deti boiarskie unable to meet the campaign service norms established in the 1556 Decree on Service had already been reorganized into detachments of light mounted arquebusiers. These units were now expanded by recruiting outside the middle service class – by enrolling free cossacks, for example, or even fugitive peasants. Those enrolled in the mounted arquebusiers were assigned tracts of virgin steppeland or the surplus lands of better endowed higher-ranking servitors, but in allotments considerably smaller (just 30–50 quarters per field) than the traditional standard for deti boiarskie. They also differed from the traditional middle service class in that they were odnodvortsy, “single-homestead men” with no peasant or cottar tenants. But their lack of peasant labor no longer mattered to the Military Chancellery because their primary duty was local defense, and when called into the campaign army they were not expected to bring along peasant or slave retainers. 10 Reliance on the service of odnodvortsy had advantages. It expanded social eligibility for promotion into the middle service class, offering enrollment opportunities to declasse and plebeian elements previously eligible for recruitment only into the cossacks or musketeers; it bound these recruits and their heirs to hereditary service, unlike enrollment in the lower service class; and it cost the state less in land and cash entitlements than did service by a comparable number of traditional deti boiarskie. Its greatest shortcoming was that the odnodvortsy were unsuited for service in the array corps. But the arrays became less crucial to the defense of the southern frontier once large-scale military colonization resumed in 1635. The new defense strategy pursued from 1635 aimed at achieving denser military colonization beyond the arrays so that the Military Chancellery could place much greater reliance on local, district-level defense operations – for which the odnodvortsy were well suited. Thus the odnodvorets adaptation and the new frontier defense strategy were mutually supporting. The decision to pursue the odnodvorets format of voluntary colonization at Kozlov quickly bore fruit. By early 1639 Kozlov’s garrison had become one of the largest on Muscovy’s southern frontier and comparable in size to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s entire Quarter Army; and the proportion of middle service class deti boiarskie to lower service

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class cossacks in Kozlov’s garrison was much higher than in most of the southern districts settled before 1635. It also meant that Kozlov’s deti boiarskie would bear little resemblance to the traditional middle service class found in the older districts to the north. They were, rather, deti boiarskie mutated, adapted to the special circumstances of southern frontier service. They tended to be of humbler social origin. Nearly all of them were odnodvortsy; only a handful of them held peasants. Their pomest’e grants were pretty much of one standard size, in contrast to the pattern encountered in the central and northern districts, and it was a size not much larger than that of cossacks’ or musketeers’ plowlands. Kozlov’s deti boiarskie further resembled lower service class troops in holding their land allotments as shares within collective bloc grants. For such reasons they were slower to experience significant internal socioeconomic differentiation than the middle service class population of the center and north, and for several decades government policies towards property right on the frontier protected them from magnate competition for land and labor and helped maintain a socioeconomic homogeneity of odnodvorets character.

Defining eligibility for enlistment The Military Chancellery went to great lengths to attract volunteers to Kozlov. It used town criers to announce in town and village marketplaces across the Nogai Front the new enlistment opportunity at Kozlov. It offered volunteers special settlement subsidies of five to eight rubles per man and temporary exemptions from state dues. It even relaxed some of its usual restrictions upon governor’s abilities to make expenditures on allowances without prior authorization. 11 The Military Chancellery did not intend to accept every volunteer, of course. The 1635 working order to Birkin and Speshnev limited eligibility to men who were not already registered elsewhere in service (unless they petitioned Moscow citing sufficient grounds for permission to transfer) and who were juridically free, that is, those who were not already inscribed on the tax rolls or registered in cadasters or deeds as the peasant or cottar tenants of landlords. To ensure this all volunteers had to be carefully vetted. Before they could acquire passes to relocate to Kozlov they had to undergo questioning by the governors of their home districts, who were instructed to detain them if they proved to be men already deeded or registered. Those released to Kozlov underwent a second round of interrogations there at the hands of Birkin and Speshnev, who were authorized to turn away all those “who have served in the


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towns or paid taxes or tilled the land for someone or served someone under a deed.” 12 These instructions left unclear what Kozlov’s governors were to do with volunteers who were revealed to be former servicemen who “had lost their service status in the towns because of impoverishment . . . [or] had lost their pomest’ia, and are now living under sundry men [as peasants or bondsmen] on allodial lands and service lands.” It quickly became apparent that a good number of volunteers fit this description and that it would be wasteful not to reclaim them for the Sovereign’s service by offering them enrollment at Kozlov. Therefore on 6 January 1636 the Military Chancellery revised standards of eligibility and authorized Birkin and Speshnev to “question such men thoroughly and investigate them [to determine] whether they really went from those towns out of poverty and abandoned their service status and lived under various pomeshchiki and votchinniki. And if they really are servicemen and there are no disputes about them, accept them in our service, under surety bond, placing them into the service to which each is suited.” 13 The governors of other districts were correspondingly instructed to release to Kozlov volunteers of this sort. This decision significantly broadened legal eligibility for enlistment at Kozlov, for the devastation during the Troubles and the frontier warfare of 1618–1635 had cast many servicemen into poverty and driven them to seek protection as tenants of noblemen and monasteries. The law considered these men free and retaining the right to depart and seek enrollment at Kozlov, provided they had settled under landlords on terms laid down in special bonds of conditional habitation and had not been registered under a landlord in any cadaster or deed. Even a tenant on whom a landlord held cadastral or deed registration might reestablish his freedom by fleeing, provided he was able to escape arrest and remand for five years from the date of his flight; this was because current law set landlords a time limit of just five years in which to find and sue for the remand of their fugitive peasants.14 But the 6 January 1636 ruling left two major issues unresolved. News of the opportunity to reclaim free status by enlisting in Kozlov’s garrison was already provoking tenants who had been registered in cadasters for decades to abandon their landlords; Ivan Bobrishchev-Pushkin, for example, complained that many of his long-term Dobroe Gorodishche tenants were running off to Kozlov. Could such peasants be reclaimed for military service if they had fallen out of the service estate decades before? And were Birkin and Speshnev to be allowed to enroll volunteers who were sons of servicemen but had never been on the service rolls

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themselves, and who after their fathers’ deaths “left the towns due to poverty and are now living under various pomeshchiki and votchinniki and on monastery estates”?15 On 21 March 1636 the Military Chancellery responded to these issues by forbidding Birkin and Speshnev to enlist “those musketeers and cossacks and sundry servicemen who had lost their service status and those deti boiarskie who abandoned their service lands due to poverty and left the towns prior to the year 7121 [1612–1613], and who are living as peasants under various pomeshchiki and votchinniki.” Also henceforth ineligible for enlistment were those servicemen’s sons “who were born under the pomeshchiki and votchinniki and who have not appeared in any service.”16 What this decree permitted was more significant than what it limited. It established that a former serviceman could now be enlisted and restored to his original free status even if he was recorded in the cadaster as someone’s peasant and was a new fugitive – provided his loss of freedom had occurred after the Time of Troubles. The son of such a man was also reclaimable for service if he had been born while his father was still a free man and the son was not already enrolled in service elsewhere. The decrees of 6 January and 21 March demonstrated that the government had decided not to permit the proprietary interests of the serfowning nobility to take priority over its plan for accelerating the military colonization of the south. In principle this was not a sharp departure from post-Troubles policy: the five-year statute of limitations in force from 1619 to 1637 did not make it easy for landlords to win remand of their fugitive peasants, and in this period the government generally refused to authorize mass extraditions from the musketeer commands of the southern frontier garrisons even though many of these musketeers were fugitives from the urban taxpaying communes. 17 But never before had there been such an openly announced dispensation of juridical freedom upon an entire category of men. For awhile it was also extended to enlistees at Tambov and other new colonies.18 Word quickly spread of the unusual opportunity presented by the “1613 clause” within the decree of 21 March. Ruined former servicemen and their sons were quick to understand that it offered them the chance to regain their freedom, and they successfully invoked it against their lords’ attempts to have them remanded. Kozlov syn boiarskii F. I. Korovaev, jailed upon revisiting Elets in 1640, won his release on bond by arguing that according to the new law “free men from thy Sovereign’s Borderland towns – brother from brother, son from father – who had served


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thee, Sovereign, on the Borderland from 1612–1613 . . . and departed, abandoning their service status due to poverty, are ordered to be taken back into thy Sovereign’s various services.” Korovaev claimed membership in this category, having served in the Mikhailov musketeers up to 1615, when, “abandoning service due to devastation and poverty, I went off to Elets. . . . And I, thy slave, heard thy royal mercy and in accordance with thy decree I was given entitlement rates in the deti boiarskie at Kozlov.”19 But some who had lost their service status before 1613 misunderstood the law as applying to themselves as well; and there were still others, registered and deeded peasants who had never been in state service, who seized upon it as the chance to flee their masters and assume false identities as free men. Peasant flight to Kozlov from Lebedian’, Riazhsk, Riazan’, and Voronezh reached alarming proportions as early as June 1636, when the archimandrite of the Novospasskii Monastery complained that the new Kozlov enlistment policy was depopulating his villages: his remaining peasants “are disobeying the elders and monastery servitors in everything and are saying, ‘We are going to Kozlov town to be servicemen.’ ” 20 By 1638 the Novospasskii and Chudov monasteries had reportedly lost over 300 of their peasants to Kozlov in this manner.21 Voronezh was especially affected, for it had a larger peasant population and a higher level of exploitation of serf labor than the other districts of the Nogai Front. On the road to Voronezh to assume his duties as its new governor, M. A. Vel’iaminov passed over 3000 peasants “with their wives and children and livestock and ten priests,” all of them bound for Kozlov and Tambov. Upon his arrival at Voronezh Vel’iaminov discovered there had also been a mass exodus out of Voronezh northward to Kozlov. “Voronezh district is empty, Sovereign. Many churches are without singing, [lacking parishioners] . . . and the people who are left are continually leaving without registering for permission.” Among those emigrating were “many deti boiarskie and cossacks who are on the service rolls, and peasants . . . who are in the cadastral books and resided for ten fifteen, or twenty years.”22

Competition for manpower The decisions to rely upon volunteers and to extend enlistment eligibility to individuals who had fallen out of the middle and lower service classes into the ranks of the dependent peasantry accelerated the colonization of Kozlov. But they also presented the Military Chancellery and the

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town governors of the southern frontier with a whole new range of administrative problems. The judicial system had to devise a way to accomodate landlords’ suits for the remand of their runaway peasants while protecting from deportation those enlistees whose origins met the test of the 1613 clause. Volunteers arrived in such numbers that some strain was placed upon government cash and grain reserves: those enrolling at Kozlov understandably expected material assistance from the state until they had their own household economies up and running, but this support was not always immediately available, Moscow being reluctant to relinquish centralized control over expenditures out of the governor’s office. Disputes of course arose over the allotment of plowlands and appurtenances. One of the most immediate problems was related to the intense competition for manpower across the entire Nogai Front. By February 1636 it had become clear that the governors of Voronezh, Lebedian’, and Sapozhok were ignoring the Military Chancellery’s repeated warnings that free volunteers must be released “with their wives, children, and all their moveable property and grain, without any detention.” Birkin complained that the governors of other districts were jailing volunteers and extorting large bribes of as much as three rubles a head for the issue of travel passes, thereby undermining the enlistment drive at Kozlov. 23 Especially vulnerable to such detention were Kozlov enlistees who had come back to their former residences to bring in their last harvests, sell off unneeded property, and move their families to Kozlov. In some cases Kozlov-bound volunteers or returning enlistees were arrested simply because a mendacious governor saw an opportunity for extortion; in other instances it appears that governors ordered arrests because they were unfamiliar with the special dispensation granted by the law of 21 March 1636 and thought they were acting in their district’s best interest by preventing the desertion of registered servicemen and taxpayers. 24 They could also argue that such arrests had to be made to protect local law and order, for fugitive peasants enrolled in new garrison towns were sometimes known to return to their original districts “to steal and plunder and commit arson and destroy their emblements.” 25 The governors were not the only parties using force to block emigration to Kozlov. Birkin reported that ex-servicemen who sought to reclaim their freedom by enlisting at Kozlov were being harassed by their former landlords, who “have put them in irons and have plundered their property and are not releasing them to Kozlov.” Other lords were taking advantage of the confusion to detain and file claim upon free men who had never resided under them. Unscrupulous neighbors and even


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relatives had scented the opportunity for expropriation and the settlement of old scores. In May 1636 a number of Kozlov enlistees submitted a collective petition complaining that when they returned to collect their families and moveable property they were detained, assaulted, and robbed by “the votchinniki and pomeshchiki and their stewards, Sovereign, and our brothers and uncles and the service shareholders [ polovinshchiki] with whom we lived in the same services. . . . And they are bribing the governors in the towns . . . to have us thrown in jail, and they are inflicting all sorts of extortion on us . . . threatening us with murder and all sorts of evil deeds so that they can take possession of our moveable property and our grain in the fields and on the threshing floors.” 26 Even elected village elders engaged in such extortion as compensation for the loss of residents whose departures increased the burden of collectively assessed tax and corvee obligations upon their remaining neighbors. At Bogoroditskoe the village elders and village priest “assembled with the peasants, locked up that village, and set barricades at the gates” to deny entry to 13 newly enlisted Kozlov cossacks who were trying to return to harvest their rye; a party of gunners sent by the governor of Lebedian’ to force them to admit the Kozlov cossacks was nearly lynched.27 The Military Chancellery ordered the releases of unjustly imprisoned families and impounded property, and repeatedly warned governors across the frontier that they were duty-bound to protect travelers from highway robbery. 28 Eventually Birkin and Speshnev themselves fell under suspicion of illegally detaining volunteers. This was because they were now in competition for manpower with the newer garrison town of Tambov, where the law of 21 March 1636 was also in force. “Many free volunteers have appeared, hearing about the construction of a town and various fortifications and the good land and various nearby appurtenances of the new town of Tambov.”29 In August 1636 the Military Chancellery ordered the Kozlov governors to set up a roadblock where all passing travelers would be interrogated and issued passes. The roadblock’s presiding officer, Captain Putilo Bykov, was instructed to detain only deserters, fugitive peasants, and suspected bandits, and was not to hold or harass legitimate volunteers bound for Tambov.30 But a few weeks later Governor Boborykin of Tambov began receiving reports that the checkpoint guards were “taking volunteers off the roads to Kozlov, for themselves, and forcibly confining them in Kozlov. . . . And they are beating and jailing those men who do not want to live in Kozlov . . . or are sending them back from whence they came and are not allowing

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them through to the new town of Tambov.” Boborykin even alleged that Bykov’s men were robbing Tambov-bound travelers and raping their wives and that Governor Birkin had repeatedly ignored his requests to investigate these matters. 31 The Military Chancellery had enough faith in Birkin to entrust him with an investigation, but Boborykin would not cooperate with it. He produced no plaintiffs for confrontment with the accused, nor did he present a written bill of particulars. Under interrogation Captain Bykov admitted only to having “had a word” with travelers “committing felonies and breaking down the anticavalry fences . . . but had beaten no one.” Birkin was therefore able to dismiss Boborykin’s charges as groundless slander. “We, thy slaves, did not reproach those who went to Tambov, Sovereign. All sorts of men have ridden past Kozlov to and from Tambov without cease all summer, but without declaring themselves to us. . . . But we have turned back none of those who declared themselves, but have let all pass.”32 Boborykin, however, was further angered by what he considered a cover-up of the affair.

The enlistment process The state did not fully control who was able to enroll at Kozlov; it was too anxious to recruit a full garrison complement in quick order, and its procedures for the vetting of volunteers were not entirely foolproof. The terms of the production of new social identity for Kozlov’s colonists were therefore subject to some contention between state power and the flood of arriving volunteers. Birkin and Speshnev had to conduct their own vetting of arriving volunteers in order to winnow out ineligible men who may have deceived or bribed the governors of their home districts and obtained travel releases to Kozlov, or tried to enter Kozlov without such passes; otherwise the treasury would be issuing settlement subsidies and service allowances to colonists who would eventually have to be deported after complicated judicial proceedings. The governors therefore required all volunteers to testify under oath as to their origins in order to be certified as eligible to enlist and draw their remuneration. Those who had already been enrolled in service elsewhere also had to indicate who had been assigned to replace them. Men “to whom there are deeds pertaining” were of course to be rejected and returned to their former lords. But Birkin and Speshnev were unlikely to have had the time and available documentation to check for cadastral or deed registration on


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every volunteer, except for those volunteers upon whom a landlord’s petition for remand had already been received – and proving that the volunteer was the fugitive in question then required a court hearing. In practice the government therefore had to content itself with enrolling volunteers largely on trust in their veracity and on the additional reassurances provided by the testimony of elected assessors, the willingness of a volunteer’s comrades to come forward and sign surety bond on him, and the volunteer’s own knowledge that he could be bastinadoed and fined twice the value of his settlement subsidy if he gave false testimony about his identity. 33 The state had somewhat greater control over enlistments in Kozlov’s middle service class than in its lower service class cossacks and musketeers, as there was greater opportunity to conduct the vetting of the former at Moscow, where documentary certification of eligibility for enrollment was an easier matter. Men of the middle service class were more likely to be able to afford the expenses of traveling to Moscow to petition the Military Chancellery concerning their various needs, and their unenlisted novitiate sons and brothers often accompanied them; these unenlisted novitiates could apply for service at Kozlov and be vetted for it by the chancellery clerks. Thus 148 of the 662 deti boiarskie and service land atamans on Kozlov’s muster roll as of 1637 had received their certification for Kozlov enlistment at the capital, from the clerks of the Military Chancellery.34 The names of volunteers accepted in Kozlov’s middle service class deti boiarskie and service land atamans were entered into a muster roll hierarchically organized by cash and land entitlement rate. The muster roll also recorded each enlistee’s origins and the names of his suretors. 35 But his new pomest’e grant at Kozlov was recorded elsewhere, in the Kozlov endowment book (stroel’naia kniga) or Kozlov cadaster, since it usually took some time for an enlistee to receive authorization for a land allotment. Volunteers enrolled in Kozlov’s lower service class formations had their names entered into a less detailed expenditure book, which also recorded rations money disbursements and other transactions. Regardless of where volunteers had been vetted, both the governor and the Military Chancellery had to maintain updated copies of the muster roll and expenditure book, as these records not only kept track of garrison strength but served as instruments of central control over remuneration expenditures. 36 Before an enlistee could claim his settlement subsidy, he had to demonstrate his commitment to remaining in residence and service by submitting a surety bond, building his house, and planting his first

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crop. Settlement subsidies and service allowances were paid out at a special mass disbursement; if the enlistee missed this muster because he was off on a mission or revisiting his old homestead he would have to go unpaid until the next disbursement. This was also the case if his entitlement rates had not yet been set. For such reasons over a quarter of the deti boiarskie and service land atamans listed on the 1637 Kozlov muster roll had not yet drawn their cash remuneration. 37 Surety bonds upon enlistees served a dual purpose. They provided the government with a means of recovering the settlement subsidy disbursed to an enlistee who had failed to complete his relocation to Kozlov or had subsequently deserted, by holding his guarantors liable for restitution of the amount of the squandered subsidy.38 They also performed an important ideological function, forcing not only enlistees but their already-settled comrades to subscribe to and repeatedly reaffirm explicit standards for discipline and the quality of service they owed the state. Surety bonds stipulated that enlistees obey their officers and serve zealously, without shirking; that they abstain from drunkenness, brawling, and gambling; that they take proper care of the firearms the treasury had issued them and practice marksmanship regularly; and that they use their settlement subsidies and annual allowances for their intended purposes, that is, for establishing farmsteads and outfitting themselves for military duty.39 Enlistees were also required to take an oath of allegiance to the Tsar, pledging them to serve him with enthusiasm, honesty, and selflessness. “Where the Sovereign orders me to be . . . there I shall be. . . . I shall not engage in any felony or heed enticements to felony . . . nor rob or assault anyone or commit any evil deeds. On all missions and labors I shall tell the truth . . . and shall not shield anyone because of blood relationship or friendship, nor repeat any false accusation out of animosity.” Failure to inform upon traitors, rebels, and deserters was considered a state crime as grave as treason, mutiny, and desertion themselves. 40 The power of the state was reflected in its ability to impose surety bonding holding the community responsible for policing the conduct of its individual members. But the limits of its power were simultaneously revealed by its need to rely upon surety bonding: the state recognized that its ability to enforce its service obligations upon new colonists continued to require the active assistance of the colonists as a community. Likewise, its oath of allegiance illustrated its intent to govern even the spirit in which service was rendered while betraying its doubts – heightened by its recent experience in the Troubles – as to the sufficiency and authenticity of that spirit.


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Enlistment targets The September 1635 working order had not set a quota for the number of middle service class deti boiarskie to be enrolled in Kozlov’s permanent garrison. The number taken into service would depend upon the size of the district land fund available for their pomest’e allotments and for future allotments to their heirs following them into service. The size of Kozlov’s middle service class contingent was expected to grow over time, through natural increase. By contrast the size of Kozlov’s lower service class contingent could be fixed in advance. There was no need to make provision for its gradual expansion through natural reproduction, since the sons of cossacks and musketeers did not have the hereditary right to follow their fathers into cossack or musketeer service; the lower service class was instead recruited on contract, the government enrolling a new musketeer or cossack only when a vacancy had to be filled. Furthermore, it was desirable to cap the size of the cossack and musketeer commands in order to leave more plowland available for the expanding middle service class. Birkin’s and Speshnev’s working order therefore stipulated that no more than 300 men were to be enrolled in the cossacks, “to serve in the cavalry, go out on missions, ride as patrols to the district boundaries, and stand watch in shifts at sites near and far.” Two hundred foot musketeers were to be recruited and placed under the command of Captain Bykov, “to serve as infantry and be guards in town, in shifts continuously changed.”41 Another 300 cossacks and 200 musketeers were subsequently authorized for the two small satellite garrisons at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk, the eastern and western termini of Birkin’s wooden wall across the steppe. In January 1637 the decision to erect an earthen rather than wooden steppe wall convinced the Military Chancellery to raise the enlistment targets at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk to a new total of 600 men, all musketeers. 42 Kozlov also needed some gunners to man the heavy ordnance along the town walls and steppe wall; a few sharpshooters to fire lighter swivel guns; some gatekeepers; and some treasury blacksmiths and carpenters for construction and repairs. Initially 25 men were thought to suffice for this, only half as many as in some other Nogai Front towns; but by April 1636 the need to detach some gunners to constabulary and courier duty convinced Moscow to permit more men to enroll in these services. 43 The first petitions for enrollment were received in mid-October 1635. The pattern of enrollments by January 1639 suggests that volunteers were

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more drawn to certain service formations. Ninety-two percent of Bykov’s musketeer command was filled by March 1636, and it was certainly at full strength by August 1637. 44 The Kozlov cossacks were at 70 percent of full strength by February 1636 and near capacity by August 1637. Birkin had found it tactically advantageous to divide the Kozlov cossacks into two formations, with different land and cash allowance rates: a formation of corps cossacks (polkovye kazaki) for distant search-anddestroy missions under Captain Petr Krasnikov, and a smaller formation of patrol cossacks (storozhevye kazaki) for patrol and nearby picket duty.45 Service at the steppe forts of Bel’sk and Chelnavsk seems to have had much less attraction, perhaps because colonists at these sites were more isolated and vulnerable to Tatar raids; only 60 musketeers had been settled at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk as of October 1638.46 In most southern frontier garrisons the proportion of middle service class deti boiarskie to lower service class cossacks and musketeers was not very high. Here Kozlov was strikingly atypical. By early January 1636 Birkin and Speshnev had signed up 378 deti boiarskie. There were 565 of them on the muster rolls in the spring of 1638, and by January of the following year their numbers had more than doubled, to 1133 men. 47 It was not surprising that those who were socially eligible for it should seek to enroll in the middle service class, given that it offered higher status, larger service land allotments, and other privileges. But at Kozlov there existed two additional special circumstances drawing volunteers into it: a large fund of virgin steppe land of comparatively high productivity, and a generous special legal dispensation – the law of 21 March 1636 – broadening eligibility for enlistment. There also existed a formation of service land atamans (pomestnye atamany). This formation had been added to many southern frontier garrisons after 1618 in order to increase the size and number of ranger detachments – and also to co-opt Don Cossacks into state service. Hence the service land atamans occupied a status niche between the deti boiarskie and the regular cossacks of the lower service class: like the former, they had more generous service land entitlements, as well as the right to own peasants; but they resembled regular cossacks in that the size of their contingent was fixed and their members had one standard entitlement rate rather than multiple rates differentiated on the basis of personal initiation. Kozlov’s service land ataman formation filled rapidly: by January 1636 they were already at 72 percent (108 men) of full strength.48 Kozlov district’s permanent garrison force numbered 2141 men by January 1639: 1133 deti boiarskie; 150 service land atamans; 26 transferred


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Don and Iaik cossacks, 33 cossacks recently enrolled as their replacements; 232 corps cossacks; 60 patrol cossacks; 200 Kozlov musketeers; 54 Bel’sk musketeers; 202 Chelnavsk musketeers; 20 gunners; 25 sharpshooters; 4 gatekeepers; and 2 blacksmiths. 49 To defend the town at time of siege Birkin and Speshnev could also call into duty the 378 able-bodied adult male kinsmen of these colonists. Only 25 of these kinsmen had their own firearms, however.

The social and geographic origins of the Kozlov volunteers The 1637 muster roll offers some insight into the social and geographic origins of some two-thirds of the 662 volunteers who had enlisted by that date in the Kozlov deti boiarskie and service land atamans. It reports the last district of residence for 476 of these men, and indicates the most recent rank or estate of 464 of them.50 Only four of these volunteers hailed from Moscow. The rest had come from 22 southern frontier districts; in fact 93 percent of the volunteers had come to Kozlov from the Nogai Front districts that had been loaning contingents to help build Kozlov’s fortifications – especially from Voronezh (134 men), Riazhsk (123 men), and Elets (95 men). This probably reflected the sufficiency of size as well as proximity of these three districts’ garrisons (2323 men at Voronezh, 1576 men at Riazhsk, and 1589 at Elets). Two-thirds of the volunteers taken into the service land atamans had come from Voronezh.51 Of the 464 men providing testimony concerning their social estate or rank, 73.7 percent (342 men) claimed to be free, kinsmen of servicemen but not themselves already registered in service anywhere (31 of these individuals admitted to having resided on monastery or urban commune lands but still claimed to be free; another two men were escapees from Tatar captivity). The rest were already in service somewhere: roughly equal proportions were middle service class (11.8 percent – 32 deti boiarskie, 8 atamans, and 15 men from the foreign formation regiments which had fought at Smolensk) and lower service class (13.1 percent – 43 cossacks, 16 musketeers, and 2 gunners). There was also one clerk and five former abatis guards. These figures suggest the decree of 21 March 1636 was already effective in encouraging enlistments from the unattached free frontier population. Itinerants and kinsmen of servicemen accounted for three quarters of the enlistees for whom such background information was available; and those the decree’s “1613 clause” reclaimed for service accounted for at least 7.2 percent. The decree’s success at maintaining or reestablishing

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the inheritability of military service obligations is indicated by the fact that 97.4 percent of the volunteers providing information as to their fathers’ estate or rank (352 men) testified that their fathers had been enrolled in service (209 fathers in the middle service class, 120 fathers in the lower service class, and 14 in unspecified formations). Enlistees in the deti boiarskie generally were following their fathers into this formation, whereas those volunteers enrolling as service land atamans were more likely to be the sons of fathers who had been in the lower service class. Not surprisingly, their fathers were of more diverse geographic origin, hailing from 40 districts and one foreign country. But they too came primarily (two-thirds) from the districts of the Nogai Front. Only a handful had lived north of the Abatis Line. A strikingly large number of the fathers (117, or 34.2 percent) had been based at nearby Riazhsk. It is harder to follow the geographic and status mobility of those volunteers enrolling in Kozlov’s lower service class because their enlistments were recorded in a separate record, the settlement subsidy expenditure book, which did not detail their origins. The government was less likely to have reliable information to test their claims concerning their backgrounds, as they – unlike the majority of enlistees in the middle service class – underwent their vetting at Kozlov. The volunteers taken into the lower service class were therefore more likely to be not only of humbler background, but of more questionable origin – more declasse, more itinerant, and more likely to have spent some time living as dependent peasants or cottars.52 Because their free status was subject to greater dispute over a hundred of them were subsequently charged with being fugitive serfs. Court hearings at Kozlov or Moscow then had to be held to determine whether such men were to be remanded to their former lords or left in service at Kozlov on the grounds that they or their fathers had been in military service before 1613. This was no simple question for the court; many of the defendants had been on the move from one frontier district to another over the course of several years, boarding under other servicemen or living as peasants or cottars under a series of landlords who may or may not have taken out deeds or cadastral registrations on them. 53 For example, Kirill Olkolelov, an enlistee in the Kozlov cossacks, had left his father’s home in Riazhsk for Voronezh when that district had been invaded by the Lithuanians (1618). After his brother was captured by Tatars, Kirill left Voronezh and spent the next nine years on the lower Don, then returned to Riazhsk to live on the service land of another brother. He subsequently moved to Lebedian’, residing “freely” under pomeshchik Bogdan Pleshcheev, and then moved to


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Kozlov in 1636. Because Kirill was ultimately able to satisfy the court that his father had been a cossack at Riazhsk after the Troubles the Military Chancellery ruled against a Riazhsk landowner’s suit to have him remanded as a fugitive. 54

The pattern of peasant flight to Kozlov By the spring of 1638 the Military Chancellery had received complaints from a number of governors and landlords that too many of the volunteers enlisting at Kozlov were actually unfree deeded peasant tenants, encouraged to flee their masters by the 21 March 1636 decree broadening eligibility for enlistment at Kozlov. Between September 1635 and August 1640 the Military Chancellery processed lawsuits for remand filed by 131 landlords, enumerating 568 Kozlov enlistees as fugitive peasants. It is not possible to determine how many of the defendants were actually condemned and remanded to the plaintiffs, as the record of the processing of these suits – two scrolls from the archive of the Military Chancellery, Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 121 and 123 – consists largely of Military Chancellery authorizations for court hearings at Kozlov or at Moscow and rarely reports any final verdict. But because the hearing authorizations at least summarize the charges leveled against the defendants they remain useful for reconstructing the origins and pattern of mobility of those Kozlov servicemen accused of being fugitives. Of the 568 indicted fugitives 434 were males of apparent service age (15 years or older) and the remaining 134 were wives and minors. The total number of defendants threatened with remand may have been considerably larger, however – perhaps as many as 1700 men, women, and children – for the plaintiffs’ petitions charge 213 of the 434 adult males with having fled with families of unspecified size. 55 The plaintiffs’ petitions indicated the juridical status at Kozlov of 312 of the 434 adult males: 51 were being harbored by Captain Krasnikov and other Kozlov servicemen, who had turned them into dependent laborers. 56 Two had settled in Kozlov’s posad as taxpaying townsmen. The remaining 259 had been enrolled in Kozlov’s garrison – half of them in the cossacks, musketeers, gunners, or other lower service class troops, and 11 percent in the more socially exclusive middle service class (the type of service performed by the remaining 39 percent was not indicated). If all 259 of these defendants had actually been convicted and remanded the Kozlov garrison enrollment total of January 1639 would have been reduced by 12.2 percent.

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From the plaintiff’s petitions we also know the years in which 533 of the 568 defendants are alleged to have fled their masters, and while this data is not enough to establish that tenants fled in direct response to the decree of 21 March 1636, it does suggest that once the 1613 clause became general knowledge those who had recently fled quickly made their way to Kozlov to enlist. Eighty-six persons (16.1 percent) had fled their landlords in the five years preceding Kozlov’s founding and had apparently found some other temporary refuge before arriving at Kozlov. But 257 persons (48.2 percent) were reported as having fled their lords in the period between Kozlov’s founding and the suspension of the 1613 clause (autumn 1635–autumn 1637).57 Although the number fleeing after autumn 1637 did not decline that precipitously (92 fled in autumn 1637–autumn 1638, and another 92 in autumn 1638–autumn 1639), fewer of them found their way into military service at Kozlov 58 while the number harbored at Kozlov as dependent laborers rose. This probably reflected not only the more rigorous vetting given to volunteers after 1637 but also the greater demand for additional labor now that the first wave of middle service class colonists had their homesteads fully established. Whereas about three quarters of the deti boiarskie and service land atamans listed in the 1637 Kozlov muster roll hailed from the more populous nearby districts of Voronezh, Riazhsk, and Elets, the geography of peasant flight to Kozlov followed a different pattern.59 Over a quarter of the men on the muster roll came from Riazhsk, but only 7.9 percent of the alleged fugitives were from that district. While more distant Riazan’ was the home district of just 3.4 percent of those on the muster roll, Riazan’ was the district named as the location of the estates from which the largest number (26.7 percent) of indicted fugitives had allegedly fled. In second place was Voronezh (14.2 percent), followed by Elets (14 percent), Lebedian’ (10.2 percent), Riazhsk (7.9 percent), Shatsk (4 percent), and Tula (2.8 percent). Smaller numbers of fugitives were also claimed by landlords in Mtsensk, Borisoglebsk, western Kozlov, Kashira, Solovsk, Dedilov, Aleksin, Belev, Meshchera, Chern’, Pronsk, Dankov, Likhvin, and Kolomna. Riazan’ remained in first place among the districts losing peasants to Kozlov for six out of the ten years of reported flight. Voronezh’s losses tended to greater fluctuation, however, and the number of districts losing inhabitants who eventually landed at Kozlov doubled after Kozlov’s founding in autumn 1635. Whereas recruitment into Kozlov’s middle service class tended to be affected by geographic proximity and garrison size, what most seems to have determined the pattern of peasant flight to Kozlov was the


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distribution of manorial economy across the southern frontier and central Muscovy. Although Riazan’ lay far off across the Oka, larger-scale pomest’e and votchina land tenure exploiting serf labor was more widespread and longer entrenched in Riazan’ than in the newer districts to its south.60 Of the nearest districts of the Nogai Front Voronezh had the most developed manorial regime. Presumably those who had fled from distant Riazan’ or Tula some years before enlistments at Kozlov began had greater reason to change residence, vocation, and juridical status more than once before entering service at Kozlov, keeping on the move and taking on new identities in order to avoid detection and remand.61 This cannot be confirmed from the plaintiffs’ and defendants’ petitions in Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 121 and 123, however, only 17 of which mention the havens fugitives found en route to Kozlov. In 12 of these cases the defendants did reside in more than one district between their alleged flight from the plaintiff and their arrival at Kozlov, but most of their wanderings were confined to the districts of the Nogai Front. Solitary fugitives may have been more mobile and capable of concealment than those who fled in families or groups of families, but family and group flight was more common because fugitives needed to take with them the additional labor, livestock, grain stores, and tools to reestablish their families elsewhere. A juridically free man enrolled in or transferred to another town could afford to go ahead alone, returning for his family only after his new economy had been established. Fugitives could not afford this risk; entire families fled together because there might be no other opportunity for them to get away safely.62 In the 1636–1640 Kozlov hearing authorizations 61 families or groups of fugitives were charged with stealing a total of 2101 rubles in cash and property. This came to an average of 34.44 rubles per family or group, comparable to the 20–30 rubles calculated by A. I. Iakovlev as the average value of property stolen by fugitive slaves of provincial servicemen in the 1620s–1640s.63 At least 573 rubles of the total value allegedly stolen by the Kozlov defendants was in cash, and in fairly large sums – 20 or 50 rubles or more. One group of 15 fugitives took 96 rubles in rent money as well as nine horses valued at 64 rubles; a woman absconded with 30 rubles in cash and 70 rubles’ worth of clothing and jewelry. Horses were taken by at least 36 families. Fugitives also took cattle, sheep, beehives with bees, grain, clothing, and their masters’ service gear, and in two instances fugitives stole their masters’

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indenture bonds and deeds to better protect themselves against remand. One of E. S. Tol’stoi’s slaves, incited to flight by his village elder, ran off with 250 rubles in cash and property as well as Tol’stoi’s “votchina grant and pomest’e charters and loan indenture and slavery bonds and various deeds.” 64 Some fugitives were also charged with having burned their lords’ harvests and beaten to death their slave stewards. 65 Of additional concern to the Military Chancellery was that 195 of the 568 defendants named in the Kozlov remand cases were alleged to have fled from the estates of 32 members of the upper service class, among whom were such eminent and powerful figures as the boyars D. M. Cherkasskii, B. M. Saltykov, A. V. Khil’kov, F. I. Sheremet’ev, A. M. L’vov, okol’nichii F. S. Streshnev, and stol’nik N. I. Odoevskii. Another 34 defendants were claimed by the archbishops of Riazan’ and Kolomna and the archimandrite of the Novospasskii Monastery (the archimandrite also sued for the remand of an unspecified number of additional fugitives). The remand of the remaining 339 defendants was sought by 94 deti boiarskie and service land atamans, the foreign mercenary Aleksei Perkovskoi, and Prince Kapkun Kudashev, a Tatar in Muscovite service. It was not surprising that the metropolitan nobility and the archbishops should have laid claim to such a large proportion of the defendants, given that they held great votchiny and had more resources to find runaways and pursue lengthy litigation for their remand; and one might expect their remand suits to have the greatest likelihood of success since they possessed considerable political influence the Military Chancellery and Kozlov’s governors could not afford to ignore. Yet we find no evidence of significant numbers of Kozlov enlistees being deported either to them or to the middle service class plaintiffs. Because the materials in Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 121 and 123 are limited largely to authorizations for hearings, they cannot provide a complete picture of the judicial process in fugitive peasant remand suits, and they report too few verdicts to support speculation as to the conviction rate. But enrollment statistics and the reports of Kozlov’s governors would have noted the loss of a few hundred enlistees if any mass remand had actually occurred. They give no indication of any significant reduction in garrison strength. On the contrary, the population of the southern frontier continued to speak of Kozlov as it did of the Don Cossack Host, as a safe haven for fugitives.66 Nor is there any sign that the hundreds of suits filed against alleged runaways taking refuge at Kozlov led to lengthy and complicated investigations and hearings


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overloading Kozlov’s governors and interfering with construction, defense, and other priorities. In other words the Military Chancellery seems to have found a way of streamlining the judicial processing of fugitive peasant remand suits while simultaneously preventing the plaintiffs from using the courts to loot Kozlov and other new frontier garrisons of manpower to replace their former tenants. 67 Two features of the Muscovite legal system made this possible. First, the law on the recovery of fugitive peasants in the 1630s threw up several significant impediments to plaintiffs in remand suits. 68 Even the resources available to a powerful boyar or archbishop might not suffice in locating within the five years permitted by the statute of limitations a runaway who had fled several years before and who had been on the move from one district to another under different assumed names. If a lord should happen to locate his fugitive, almost never was he permitted to take immediate custody of him; suspects could be arrested and summoned to hearings only by the governor, and prior authorization from Moscow had to be received before the governor could act.69 This gave the defendant time to flee again or to enlist the aid of neighbors and service comrades in concealing him.70 When the plaintiff finally received permission to send his agents or a party of constables into a village to make arrests, his men might be ambushed, beaten, and have their warrants and cadastral extracts torn up – as occurred at Goretovo to agents of Prince I. N. Priimkov-Rostovskii in March 1638.71 If he should succeed in having the defendant brought in for hearing, the law still required him to present written documentation in the form of cadastral registration (often unavailable because of the destruction of chancellery records in the Moscow fires of 1612 and 1626) or at least a deed in order to prove that the defendant was in fact his runaway peasant; in the absence of such evidence the court accepted the defendant’s disavowals and the plaintiff could even be fined for filing a frivolous suit. Without cadastral documentation not even Antonii, the Archbishop of Riazan’ and Murom, was able to win custody of six Kozlov deti boiarskie, the court instead ruling that the six defendants had resided under Antonii on contract, as free men.72 Furthermore, cadastral documentation was not incontrovertible proof; the defendant could successfully challenge its authenticity if a polling ( poval’nyi obysk) of the community in which he was alleged to have previously resided turned up a majority of witnesses unable to recognize him or willing to confirm his argument that that he had been recorded in the cadaster illegally, on the landlord’s word alone (za ochi).73

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That the law continued to present so many obstacles to remand reflected the fact that Muscovite judicial procedures were still evolving from adversarial to inquisitorial form in the 1630s. Ironically it was also attributable to the preponderant political influence of the metropolitan nobility and larger monasteries, who in most other circumstances benefitted from these norms because they were more likely than the middle service class to be the harborers of fugitive peasants. Second, legal norms were most elastic when they touched upon interests of state. We have already seen this at work in the example of the decree of 21 March 1636, a special dispensation temporarily redefining juridical eligibility for enlistment so that the garrisons of Kozlov and Tambov could be formed more rapidly. Likewise, once it became clear remand suits were being filed on such a scale as to endanger garrison strengths in these new districts, the Military Chancellery simply revised judicial procedures to make it general policy that southern frontier governors could no longer issue their own verdicts in remand suits without specific authorization from the Military Chancellery. This meant the governor’s court was henceforth responsible only for the stages of hearing (sud) and investigation (sysk), the stage of final deliberation and formulation of the verdict ( prigovor) having been removed to Moscow, to the court of the Military Chancellery.74 In some instances the governor’s investigation may have led him to a tentative finding, but he had to communicate his finding to the Military Chancellery, which then prepared the verdict and sentence which he would actually read to the litigants; but judging from the language of the Kozlov materials it appears that the verdicts were more often “recommended” in advance of the hearing, on the basis of whether there was a cadastral registration or deed upon the defendant.75 The separation of hearing and investigation from verdict deliberation could be justified by the fact that the law insisted upon cadastral documentation to prove property right over a peasant, and service roll documentation to prove that a defendant had been enrolled in service after 1613; most of this documentation was available only at Moscow in the archives of the Service Lands Chancellery and the Military Chancellery, the town governor’s archive holding only the service rolls and cadasters of his own district. 76 But the ultimate rationale for such a practice was probably political expedience: by reserving the power of verdict for itself, the Military Chancellery could intervene to weigh the suit’s merits against the larger considerations of the plaintiff’s political influence and the government’s concern for the success of its campaign for the rapid military colonization of the southern frontier.


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Enlistment and remand policies after 1638 In the 1620s Kursk, Elets, and Livny had been the principal southern frontier destinations of fugitive peasants. But in 1635 the prevailing current of peasant flight shifted to the southeast into Kozlov and Tambov. 77 Most of the pomest’e and votchina estates losing peasant tenants to Kozlov were in other districts of the Nogai Front. Riazan’ lost more tenants than any other district, but because of its larger population its landlords in the aggregate were best able to bear such losses. The less settled districts farther south, which together accounted for over half of the fugitives enumerated in the Kozlov remand suits, were at a greater disadvantage. By expanding eligibility for enlistment at nearby Kozlov and Tambov, the decree of 21 March 1636 had made it harder for landlords in these districts to hold on to peasant labor. In this sense the enlistment drive at Kozlov and Tambov reinforced the tendency towards smallholder odnodvorets economy even outside the borders of these two new districts, across much of the Nogai Front, in districts not subject to the Forbidden Towns limitations. In the past the Military Chancellery had shown its readiness to place its strategic interest in the rapid military colonization of Kozlov and Tambov above the private economic interests of the monasteries and the nobility. But it could not continue to support the enlistment policy it had initially prescribed for the colonization of Kozlov and Tambov once it became apparent that this policy was also depleting the garrisons of the other southern frontier districts. Moscow was increasingly concerned that servicemen already on the rolls in other districts, dissatisfied with the size of their land allotments, or perhaps still awaiting the announcement of their entitlement rates, were defecting to Kozlov in search of more generous remuneration; once they enrolled at Kozlov under assumed names it would be difficult to identify them and send them back. Elets and Voronezh had already lost military manpower to Kozlov in this manner. The governor of Voronezh explicitly blamed this on the law of 21 March 1636, which he felt encouraged the enrollment of men of questionable background. 78 A 28 November 1637 rescript to Samoilo Ivanovich Birkin, who had recently replaced his father as Kozlov’s governor, signalled the Military Chancellery’s new reservations about the enlistment eligibility standards liberalized by the decree of 21 March 1636. Samoilo Birkin was instructed to conduct more rigorous vetting of volunteers and to turn away any revealed to be deeded peasants or men already registered in

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service elsewhere. “It is good to settle a new town, but do not depopulate old ones,” it cautioned. 79 In fact the Military Chancellery’s doubts now extended even to the policy of reliance upon volunteers for the colonization of new frontier districts. The program of voluntary colonization in force at Kozlov, Tambov, and Chernavsk had created new policing problems and overloaded court dockets with remand suits; there were even indications that it was depleting the reservoir of free manpower eligible for resettlement at other new garrison towns, for a shortage of volunteers had already forced the cancellation of plans to establish a new military colony on the Tikhaia Sosna River. In 1637 the government decided that its newest garrison colony, at Userdsk, would be formed through transfers rather than by volunteers. Within a few years colonization by transfer would become the norm in the new districts of the Belgorod Line.80 On 29 April 1638 the Military Chancellery issued a new rescript to Samoilo Birkin at Kozlov officially revoking the eligibility standards set by the law of 21 March 1636. Even if volunteers were former servicemen ruined after 1613, they were now ineligible to enlist if they had been subsequently registered in deeds or cadasters (“Enroll free men, not deeded men and men from plowlands, in the various services at Kozlov”). Furthermore, this was in principle retroactively applicable to deeded men who had already enlisted, making them in theory subject to remand as fugitives. When landlords from other districts now petitioned for the arrest and arraignment of Kozlov servicemen as fugitives from their estates, the governor was required to “search out those fugitive bondsmen and peasants of theirs, place them before thee in eye-to-eye confrontment, interrogate them officially, and give hearings against them. And if on the basis of investigation and hearing deti boiarskie and sundry servicemen of Kozlov have to be handed over as bondsmen or peasants, order those fugitives mercilessly bastinadoed as punishment and handed over at once to those people under whom they had lived previously.” 81 This new ruling was largely a political gesture to landlords, which the Military Chancellery felt it could afford to make because it was not expected to result in a large number of remands from Kozlov. The current law on remand made it difficult for landlord plaintiffs, especially those of middle service class rank, to recover their fugitive tenants. In 1638 the middle service class had not yet achieved clear victory in its petition campaign to extend the statute of limitations on its remand lawsuits; although the government recognized that tenant flight was eroding the military effectiveness of the middle service class, it also remained


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reluctant to risk affront to the economic interests of the upper service class and great monasteries, who often benefitted from tenant flight. So while the government pledged on 20 February 1637 to extend the statute of limitations to nine years for those plaintiffs who were in the middle service class in the central and southern districts, it subsequently hedged this promise with a qualification reducing its usefulness for most middle service class plaintiffs, by ruling that the new nine-year time limit applied only if they had managed to locate their runaways and file suit for remand within five years of the date of flight. The central government began to tilt towards middle service class interests with an extended statute of limitations only from 1641.82 Furthermore, the Military Chancellery was prepared to bend its own new rule on behalf of some of the volunteers it had already enrolled at Kozlov. For example, when the governor of Elets ordered the remand to the Trinity Monastery of Kozlov syn boiarskii F. I. Korovaev, the Military Chancellery overturned Korovaev’s conviction and charged the governor with exceeding his authority – even though Korovaev had enrolled at Kozlov after the new ruling of 29 April 1638 when the argument that Korovaev had advanced in his defense – that he was a free man because he had been in military service until 1615 – no longer had legal standing. 83 To reduce the likelihood of mass remands from Kozlov the Military Chancellery went so far as to alter procedures for processing remand cases in late 1639. A comparison between the hearing authorizations in Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121 and Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123 shows that most of the remand cases up to this point had been heard and investigated at Kozlov by the governor, the Military Chancellery intervening only by sometimes “recommending” a verdict for the governor to pronounce; the few cases heard at Moscow were ones in which charges of robbery or theft were also involved. But starting in late 1639 the entire process – hearing and investigation as well as verdict – was taken out of the governor’s hands and removed to Moscow, to the court of the Military Chancellery. This was a reversal of the policy recently announced in the decree of 29 April 1638, and it may have been improvised in response to the petitions of Kozlov servicemen facing deportation. Something similar had already occurred at Chernavsk, where the governor was stripped of his power to hear remand cases after his garrison petitioned against him for failing to protect them from remand and for profiteering from remand litigation. Moscow responded similarly to the petitions of the servicemen of the new frontier towns of Efremov (1639 and 1647), Vol’nyi (1648), and Dobryi (1648): any remand suits

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against the servicemen of these towns had to be heard at Moscow, by the secretaries of the Military Chancellery.84 Within a few more years this had become standard practice in nearly all southern frontier towns. In 1651 the tsar sentenced the governor of Shatsk to two weeks’ imprisonment for convicting two Kozlov servicemen as fugitive peasants and announced that “in accordance with our decree, our rescripts were sent to the Borderland towns, to the town governors and their staffs, and they were ordered not to give hearings against servicemen or arrest and jail servicemen in the towns in slavery and peasant cases upon the petitions of men of sundry rank.”85 The Military Chancellery’s doubts as to some governors’ probity and impartiality in remand cases was only part of the reason why the hearing of remand suits was increasingly centralized at Moscow. The more fundamental reason was that its successive policy shifts on remand procedure had political repercussions which only the central government had the authority to address. For example, the Military Chancellery’s spring 1636 decision to permit the enlistment of men who had fallen out of service after 1613 committed it to intervene to overturn detentions of Kozlov-bound volunteers by governors who did not wish to lose manpower whose eligibility for enrollment they did not recognize. Two years later, realizing that its liberalized standards for enlistment eligibility were now draining too much peasant and service manpower from the other districts of the Nogai Front, the Military Chancellery had to tighten these standards and reassure landlords it would make it easier for them to recover fugitives who had already been given enrollment. But because the 1613 clause was no longer in effect the number of enlistees who were now of problematic juridical status had risen; hence the number of petitions for remand hearings filed between 1 September 1638 and 31 August 1639 was more than double that of the previous year, and the number of Kozlov inhabitants named as defendants had almost tripled. The processing of remand cases therefore now required far more than the weighing of evidence: the political gains and losses of every remand case now had to be weighed far more carefully, the central government calculating how many remands from Kozlov it could afford to authorize in order to satisfy powerful magnates or the militarily indispensible middle service class pomeshchiki of other southern districts without undermining the government’s manpower investment in the Kozlov garrison. With the 1649 Ulozhenie even tighter central control over remands from the southern frontier became necessary. Whereas pre-Ulozhenie


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legal norms had tended to offer significant protections to defendants, making it easier for the government to protect newly enrolled colonists at Kozlov and other frontier garrisons from remand, such solicitude towards defendants’ rights was no longer politically affordable after 1649. The Ulozhenie had completed the process of binding the peasantry to the land in order to guarantee that the middle service class could continue in military service; in fact the government’s bargain with the middle service class obliged it not only to eliminate the statute of limitations on remand cases, but to take a number of more active measures to facilitate remand. The government now periodically conducted mass dragnets or inquisitions (syski) rounding up large numbers of suspected fugitive serfs, slaves, and urban taxpayers in particular districts and deporting them whence the cadasters and censuses had bound them. An inquisition on Kozlov and Tambov territory conducted by stol’nik A. E. Eropkin in 1664–1665 is fairly representative of the scale of these dragnets; it deported at least 1223 people from Kozlov and another 3014 from Tambov.86 Such dragnets were able to remand far larger numbers of defendants than had been possible under pre-Ulozhenie legal procedures not just because they were organized mass sweeps for suspects but because the Ulozhenie had reclassified peasant flight as a criminal offense against the state, to be investigated by more emphatically inquisitorial means – thereby eliminating the adversarial procedures which had most often offered some protection to defendants. The shift to inquisitorial method is illustrated by the fact that it was the government, not the plaintiff, which initiated the dragnet, and the dragnet’s victims did not have to be already named in a remand suit in order to find themselves arrested and placed under investigation. The dragnet was quicker to resort to torture when the defendant disavowed being the kinsman of peasants registered in a cadaster or census. The new rule of evidence allowed inquisitor Eropkin to convict many of the defendants solely on the evidence of their registration in cadasters that were often already 40 or more years old. Indeed, documentary evidence in the form of cadastral or census registration or written deed was no longer even required for conviction, contradiction in the defendant’s testimony now being considered sufficient. More than a third of the guilty verdicts were in fact reached in the absence of any cadastral, census, or deed documentation of the plaintiffs’ claims. 87 The dragnets of the 1660s demonstrated the government’s willingness to bend to the interests of the serf-owning middle service class, placing its full policing resources at their disposal, saving them the expense of

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traveling to Moscow by bringing the chancellery court to the provinces, and above all expanding reliance on the inquisitorial method in order to reduce defendants’ rights. The justice dealt out by the inquisitors must have been of the most summary character, given that Eropkin processed 228 cases at Kozlov between January 1664 and May 1665. But in order to maintain central control over these mass inquisitions and restrain them from stripping frontier garrison districts of much of their manpower, the Military Chancellery also resorted again to special dispensations exempting particular categories of colonists from remand. A decree of 5 March 1653 gave fugitives who had enrolled in service at Kozlov and other southern frontier towns before 1649 immunity from remand, “so as not to depopulate the defense line.” Nor in practice did all those who had fled to the frontier after 1649 face deportation, judging by Moscow’s readiness to offer landlords generous cash compensations for them. On 20 March 1656 the category of fugitives immune from remand was expanded to include all who had settled in service or in tiaglo in the south before 1653.88 Eropkin seems to have observed this limitation pretty faithfully, and while his inquisition was truly ruthless in deporting fugitives who had arrived after 1653, the Military Chancellery may have found such a purge necessary in order to reduce population pressure on the service land fund, for continued immigration had expanded Kozlov’s service population five-fold over just 12 years – from 2141 men in 1639 to 10,418 men in 1651. 89 Kozlov district still had 4905 men enrolled in service in 1666, even after Eropkin’s dragnet and heavy losses in the Thirteen Years’ War.90 Kozlov had become one of the largest reservoirs of military manpower on the southern frontier by mid-century because the process of its settlement from the beginning had observed an equilibrium between the forces of central bureaucratic control and popular voluntarism. On the one hand, the settlement of Kozlov district was one operation in a frontier-wide military colonization campaign planned and directed by the Military Chancellery, which had to exercise close control over enlistments in order to limit defections from other frontier garrisons and balance Kozlov’s garrison manpower against the Kozlov pomest’e land fund, while simultaneously adjudicating remand suits in order to placate powerful nobles. On the other hand, Kozlov would have been unable to continue drawing thousands of immigrants into the 1650s if the Military Chancellery had been unwilling to risk encouraging volunteer colonization, tacitly accepting (as it did in the decrees of 1636, 1653 and 1656) the enrollment of volunteers it knew to be fugitives, and intervening in the remand process to leave them in service unmolested.


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Settlement subsidies Kozlov’s new colonists were in need of temporary assistance from the treasury while they were building their houses, putting their lands under the plow, and awaiting their first harvests and the payment of their annual service allowances. They might desert if the governor was not forthcoming with billets and special cash and grain assistance outlays. While the Military Chancellery could afford to delay issuing rations money to the labor and defense contingents on loan from other districts, 91 it was obliged to respond more quickly to the needs of the volunteers enlisting in Kozlov’s permanent garrison, for the latter were unattached men and there were other places they might go. In the summer and autumn of 1636 a number of Kozlov enlistees sold off their new houses and lumber, and departed for Tambov when they learned their cash and grain allowances were not soon forthcoming. Arrears in cash and grain subsidies also slowed the recruitment of musketeers for Bel’sk and Chelnavsk. 92 Finding reliable sources of even temporary material assistance was a challenge because the district did not initially have its own sources of revenue and had to depend on grain from the Voronezh granaries and cash sent down from the Military Chancellery, part of which had to be set aside for basic military and administrative stores and for rations to the wall labor contingents. Furthermore, enlistees found it difficult to win leave to travel to Voronezh to buy grain because they were already liable for fortifications corvee and patrol duty while still setting up their homesteads. 93 Since enlistees could not begin building homes until they had been assigned their land allotments, they usually spent their first few months billeted on the peasants of the nearby Chudov and Novospasskii estates. Birkin and Speshnev had to supervise this arrangement lest hosts charge exorbitant prices for board or the billeted enlistees try to extort food, horses, or services without paying. Not all of Kozlov’s garrison was lucky enough to find billets; the elite musketeers sent down from Moscow were lodged in the unroofed towers along the town walls. 94 Once an enlistee was placed on surety bond he was entitled to receive two years’ immunity from all state dues, as well as a special settlement subsidy in cash or grain to be used to settle the debts he had incurred in relocating and to help him build his house and purchase a horse and gear. If he subsequently deserted or was sentenced to remand he was forced to pay double restitution of this subsidy to the treasury. 95 Those enlisting in Kozlov’s deti boiarskie and atamans were entitled to subsidies

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of five rubles cash; the volunteers taken into the patrol cossacks got eight rubles, three measures rye, and five measures oats; all Kozlov, Bel’sk, and Chelnavsk musketeers, gunners, and sharpshooters were initially subsidized at the rate of five rubles, two measures rye, and three measures oats; and gatekeepers got three rubles, two measures rye, and three measures oats. Enlistees in the campaign cossacks were at first offered subsidies at different rates, some receiving as much as eight rubles, three measures rye, and three measures oats, and others receiving nothing, but after they complained of the inequity of this the government agreed to subsidize them all at the maximum rate. Moscow also subsequently raised subsidies for Chelnavsk and Bel’sk musketeers by one measure of oats to compensate them for having to ride all the way to Voronezh to draw their oats, and permitted certain needy Kozlov musketeers to operate bathhouses free of state rent charges as a source of additional income.96

Determining compensation entitlements Every man of service was in principle permitted to draw upon the Sovereign’s bounty for compensation (zhalovanie). This compensation was not a salary – service being compulsory – but it did function partly as reward for service rendered as well as material support for his continued service. Typically he drew it in the form of a land allotment and payments (ostensibly annual) in cash or grain or both. It was a comparatively straightforward process to determine the maximum compensation entitlements (oklady) for members of the lower service class – cossacks, musketeers, gunners, sharpshooters, and treasury smiths and carpenters. In the lower service class the only differentiation of land and cash/grain entitlements within the same formation was by rank. 97 For example, the cossack and musketeer entitlements authorized for Kozlov from September 1635 were 20 quarters of plowland per field for rank-and-file cossacks, and 8 quarters per field for rank-andfile musketeers; cossack decurions got 30 quarters, and musketeer decurions got 9 quarters; cossack quinquagenaries received 40 quarters, and musketeer quinquagenaries ten. Birkin and Speshnev were allowed to set entitlements for Kozlov’s sharpshooters, gunners, and other lower ranks of the lower service class as they saw fit, and they decided gunners and sharpshooters would receive eight quarters of plowland; we do not know what rates they established for gatekeepers and smiths, who in other districts most often received six quarters.98 The most generously compensated formation within Kozlov’s lower service class was that of


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the patrol cossacks, who were each entitled to 50 quarters because they were of higher status and functionally akin to the service land atamans performing ranger duty.99 These were typical land entitlements for the southern frontier lower service class in this period. In most other older southern frontier districts cossacks and musketeers also received cash and grain entitlements; Kozlov’s did not because Moscow considered their plowlands sufficient support for service and because the phasing out of cash and grain compensation in favor of plowland allotments was already becoming the general trend, the treasury trying to reduce expenditures by offering all three forms of compensation only to men assigned to distant campaign duty.100 There were two reasons why lower service class entitlements were standardized across each formation by rank. First, the maximum size of the lower service class contingent at Kozlov, as at other garrisons, was predetermined by the Military Chancellery. If defense considerations warranted it, its size might be subsequently enlarged on Moscow’s order, but it did not expand naturally over the generations through population increase because lower service class troops were pribornye liudi, “contract servitors” recruited as new soldiers or replacements on a case-by-case basis, only when a vacancy occurred. Their sons did not bear hereditary obligation to follow their fathers into the same service formation; in fact a son was usually placed in a vacancy only if his father had at least one other son out of service as a support laborer.101 It followed that the land allotments of lower service class troops could be and ought to be of the same size for all rank-and-file in the same formation, as standardized shares (nadely) of a fixed land fund. Second, members of the lower service class, unlike the deti boiarskie of the middle service class, did not possess the privilege of precedence ordering vis-a-vis their comrades. There was therefore no reason for them to receive different personalized entitlements. This so simplified the entitlement assignment process that once the core of the lower service class contingent had been enlisted the governor could turn over the subsequent contracting ( pribor) of replacements to the cossack and musketeer captains. The governor still exercised some supervision over the captains, of course, to guarantee that they did not tamper with the decreed entitlement rates and enlisted only those socially eligible for duty in the lower service class, free itinerants or the kinsmen of serving cossacks and musketeers. By contrast, the middle service class deti boiarskie who were the majority of Kozlov’s colonists had personally differentiated entitlement rates.

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This made the process of assigning their entitlements considerably more complex, requiring that every applicant undergo personal initiation (verstanie) by submitting to an official evaluation grading his service capacity and assigning him land and cash entitlement rates appropriate to a member of his grade (stat’ia). This evaluation relied partly upon inspection and records checks, and partly upon testimony provided by the applicant and representatives of his community. The determination of middle service class entitlements thereby permitted some occasional negotiation between the state and the service community, reflecting the greater sociopolitical autonomy the state recognized for the middle service class. Like the right to hold service-conditional pomest’e lands and allodial votchina lands, the right to own serfs, and the right to precedence honor, the right to have personalized entitlements determined by initiation was a special privilege of the middle service class, a mark of its status as a petty provincial nobility. From 1616 the middle service class became a closed hereditary corporation, the government in most circumstances (save at Kozlov and Tambov in 1636–1637) restricting access to these four defining rights to those whose fathers were or had been in the middle service class. 102 On reaching the age of 15 the son or brother of a former or current syn boiarskii became a novitiate (novik) eligible to undergo initiation and receive his entitlement rates. In practice a novitiate sometimes served from his father’s or brother’s pomest’e for several years before actually receiving initiation, and until that point he had no right to receive annual maintenance payments or establish claim to a pomest’e of his own; and since initiation merely determined his entitlements, it could take yet another few years before he actually obtained his own land grant and started receiving his cash maintenance. 103 Where and how initiation was conducted varied according to the circumstances necessitating it. Groups as well as individuals submitted initiation requests through their town governors or came to Moscow to petition the clerks of the Military Chancellery directly. Among those requesting initiation were novitiates just beginning military service and already initiated veterans seeking to have their entitlements reset. Initiation could be given to individuals or small parties either at Moscow or in the provinces, or to large masses of men assembled in the field army on the eve of a campaign. It was becoming increasingly common for the government to conduct mass initiations during provincial muster reviews (razbory), as this gave the opportunity for a special reviewmaster from Moscow to inspect a district’s forces, retire or discharge the unfit


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and socially ineligible, and transfer their vacated entitlements to their replacements. 104 After the Troubles the central government was quick to reestablish its direct control over initiations and strip governors of the ability to determine entitlements on their own authority. 105 Part of the reason for this was to prevent governors from embezzling vacant cash, grain, and salt entitlements; it was also necessary lest governors expand district garrison strengths or the land entitlements of their members beyond what the district land fund could accommodate. 106 Above all it was a political necessity, for the boyar cliques running the central government maintained their power in so far as they could accommodate the maintenance and rank interests of the provincial middle service class and therefore could not afford to leave initiations unsupervised, giving governors and assessors a free hand to assign entitlements arbitrarily or inequitably, denying some the rates to which their service and family honor entitled them while placing lowborn men in the higher grades in exchange for bribes.107 The surest way to maximize central control over initiations was to encourage candidates to come to Moscow to receive them. This was especially to be preferred during the initial colonization of a new district, when candidates were less likely to be the sons or brothers of local veterans than to be novitiates from other districts coming to Moscow to petition the Military Chancellery for permission to leave and enroll in the new town. Because the archive of the Military Chancellery held copies of the muster rolls of these men’s home districts it was also easier to have their service capacity vis-a-vis their already initiated comrades graded at Moscow. 108 Large numbers of Kozlov deti boiarskie were still being initiated at the Military Chancellery in the early 1650s.109 But once Kozlov’s garrison core was in place and its plowland fund inventoried it became practical and desirable to offer local initiation more often. A greater proportion of the candidates would now be relatives of men already on the muster rolls, and transactions affecting local pomest’e tenures would have grown more complex, requiring greater reliance on the service records and endowment books stored in the governor’s archive. A larger proportion of the petitions for initiation would be seeking vacated entitlements or confirmation of the right to serve from a father’s allotment, or laying claim to lands the current possession or boundaries of which were in dispute. Offering local initiation would also be a desirable concession to Kozlov’s poorer novitiates, sparing them the expense of travel to Moscow and the cost of board and bribes in the capital.

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But while permitting more initiations to be conducted by the town governor, the Military Chancellery still placed restrictions upon the governor’s powers: the scale of entitlement rates was predetermined by the Military Chancellery (for Kozlov it had been set back in January 1636), and the governor could not alter it without permission; he could not issue rate hikes or grade candidates above their fathers or brothers on his own authority; after the repeal of the decree of 21 March 1636 he was of course forbidden to initiate candidates whose fathers had not been in service; and he could not respond to any request for initiation until Moscow gave him permission, even if there was a manpower shortage and replacements were desperately needed. If he violated any of these strictures he could be fined for wasting state revenues. 110 Furthermore, while it was occasionally necessary to respond in timely manner to individuals pleading for initiation – especially to novitiates already long in service but “dying of hunger” due to lack of entitlement rates – Moscow still preferred that local initiations be conducted en masse during muster reviews or other assemblies, when a reviewmaster or clerk from the Military Chancellery could be present to supervise. 111 In June 1637 Birkin and Speshnev held a muster review to pay out 2700 rubles in settlement subsidies to the over 600 deti boiarskie and service land atamans already enrolled at Kozlov, among whom were 337 novitiates present to receive initiation.112 Birkin and Speshnev were supervised by Military Chancellery clerk Tomilo Perfir’ev, who had brought the strongbox of settlement subsidy money down from Moscow. The three men took their seats at a table set up in the courtyard behind the governor’s office. They had at hand lists of the Kozlov servicemen already initiated at Moscow (with the entitlement rates awarded each) and the novitiates now petitioning for initiation; stacks of written testimonies submitted by the initiation candidates and their assessors, describing each candidate’s status and service capacity; and a copy of the scale of entitlement rates set by the Military Chancellery for new initiates (150 quarters per field and 5 rubles for novitiates placed in the highest service capacity grade, 100 quarters and 4 rubles for those of middling grade, and 70 quarters and 3.5 rubles for those of the lowest grade). 113 Each novitiate then approached the table in turn, mounted and in full kit, to present himself for inspection and questioning. To determine in which of the three grades he was to be placed, the examining board considered three factors: the novitiate’s family eminence (otechestvo), his physical and material capacity to serve (sluzhba), and his rank (chin) if he was already in service.


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Rank ordinarily had less effect upon entitlement rate than for members of the more rank-differentiated upper service class. Deti boiarskie of the same rank might receive different entitlement rates because of personal differences in service capacity and family eminence, while other deti boiarskie of different ranks might get identical entitlement rates because of equity in the same categories. It was the case, however, that deti boiarskie serving in the corps along the defense line tended to have higher entitlement rates than those in town service, as did those in town service performing patrol and ranger duty. 114 Family eminence expressed the positions in the service hierarchy of the candidate’s father and any elder brothers already initiated. It was calculated on the basis of the candidate’s testimony, as confirmed by records checks, as to his kinsmen’s ranks, service grades, entitlement rates, existing land grants, and the campaigns on which they had served. To a lesser extent family eminence might also take into account his family’s precedence honor, thereby admitting into the calculation its genealogical standing as well as as its past service. 115 The factor of greatest weight in determining a candidate’s grade and entitlements was most often his service capacity. Service capacity was a matter of both economic solvency and physical and mental ability, and so it was appraised partly upon the candidate’s testimony as to his existing property holdings and the service he had already performed from them, and partly through inspection to determine his age, physical fitness, and the quality of his mount and panoply. A candidate who was well-qualified by rank, family eminence, and past service experience still might not deserve initiation or promotion if inspection revealed he was now too weak or impoverished to continue performing service. 116 Ideally the personal testimony a candidate gave at review would forthrightly report the size of his father’s pomest’e and the ages of his brothers; it would reveal how much service land or hereditary plowland, meadows, and other appurtenances he already held, even if his current holdings reduced his eligibility for a higher entitlement rate; it would indicate the locations of these properties, the number of peasant and cottar households on them, as well as the number of militia recruits and amount of militia subsidies these households provided; and it would give notice of any changes in the status of his property (additional lands and appurtenances acquired through inheritance, property given out on rent, etc.) since the last cadaster. If the candidate was a novitiate already serving from his father’s pomest’e, he was expected to describe the service he had already performed, giving good reason for any incident of departure from active duty prior to demobilization. The

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prevailing collectivism of the service ethos did not prevent him from drawing the reviewmaster’s attention to his personal feats on campaign but made it more likely that he would emphasize the steadfastness he had displayed alongside his comrades.117 He usually concluded his testimony by describing his mounts and kit and those of his kinsmen, slaves, and peasant tenants appearing in service with him. The penalty for false testimony was confiscation of the candidate’s existing cash and grain compensation, a fine, and further punishment according to the severity of the offense. The larger the garrison, of course, the less likely it was that the governor or reviewmaster would be familiar with the property, lineage, and service record of each candidate and be able to catch them in perjury. He would necessarily have to rely upon the additional testimonies of special assessors (okladchiki) representing the garrison community. Hence working orders instructed governors and reviewmasters to “inspect all the novitiates in person, look them over, and question the assessors about them, asking who is of what lineage and is suited to which grade . . . and to which cash compensation . . . and what service lands and hereditary lands he has and in what districts. Assign the Sovereign’s service land entitlements to serving and nonserving novitiates on the basis of the assessors’ testimony.”118 Under such circumstances assessors’ testimonies carried such weight as to give them in effect the authority to recommend to which grade and corresponding entitlement rate a candidate was to be assigned. They could be used to determine which initiated servicemen should be promoted or demoted, given leave, retired, or able to afford continuing in service without compensation. Assessors could also be given command authority as centurions on cavalry missions, especially in districts like Kozlov where there were too few elite vybornye and dvorovye deti boiarskie to fill these commands. To offer their comrades some protection against assessors’ possible abuse of these powers, the government usually recognized the district middle service class population’s right to elect their own assessors. These elections were conducted either some time prior to a muster, or at one; the elected assessors usually had no fixed length of term and were sometimes replaced only when they became too old to continue serving. The proportion of assessors to rank-and-file varied from district to district; at Kozlov in 1675 it was typical for a village of about 100 households to have two assessors.119 The power of the assessors also presented a potential challenge to the governor’s office and the Military Chancellery, which were dependent


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upon the assessors not only for appraising their comrades’ service capacity but for monitoring their subsequent service performance, mediating their disputes, and officering them on cavalry missions. Because assessors helped articulate their comrades’ needs in collective petitions, they might be able to organize collective protests against the governor’s office. Measures to control them were therefore necessary. All entitlement rate designations still had to be reported up to the Military Chancellery for confirmation, which could disregard them if there was not enough cash or land available to fulfill them; the governor or reviewmaster could challenge assessor appraisals they considered suspicious or inaccurate; and assessors convicted of violating their oaths and giving false testimony faced “great disgrace, cruel punishment, and eternal merciless ruination.” 120 Above all the government had to work to co-opt the assessors and make them the agents of its discipline and surveillance over the service community. This was done by making it the general rule that those eligible for election as assessors had to be higher-ranking vybornye or dvorovye deti boiarskie, or, where there were too few of these, at least the more prosperous and longest-serving members of the district. This gradually encouraged the semihereditary monopolization of the local assessoriat by a handful of privileged families. The emergence of these assessor “dynasties” did not much trouble the government, which viewed them as the most politically reliable element of the community, but did tend to distort the initiation process in favor of the district’s elite and give the rank-and-file more cause to complain their assessors “give us initiation in violation of thy Sovereign’s oath, [placing us] in the second or third grades while conspiring to initiate into the best grade the sons and nephews of their families, who are not deserving.” 121 But the conduct of initiations during the initial settlement of Kozlov provided little opportunity for the formation of such oligarchies of entitlement. The higher entitlement rates listed on Kozlov’s June 1637 muster roll had gone to the deti boiarskie who had received their initiations at Moscow in the Military Chancellery, where there was less need to depend heavily upon assessor testimony. Of the 339 deti boiarskie given initiation at the Kozlov muster, 337 appear to have been novitiates (mostly from lower service class families, especially from Riazhsk cossack families) eligible only for the three junior initiate grades. Furthermore, Moscow had now permitted the reviewmaster to establish additional minimum entitlement rates for these junior initiate grades, two of which omitted any cash compensation in order to save the treasury some money. 122

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Thus only 43 deti boiarskie had entitlement rates higher than the rate for junior initiates of the first grade. This too reflected the state’s interest in minimizing expenditure on service compensations, especially on the southern frontier. While in principle deti boiarskie could win land and cash rate raises for long and distinguished service, raises were actually infrequent and rarely exceeded fifty quarters and four rubles. The deti boiarskie of the southern frontier were also less likely than their counterparts in the center and north to share in the special mass raises issued to commemorate successful campaigns, armistices, or the birth of royal heirs.123 The highest entitlement rates recorded in the June 1637 muster went to veterans Stepan Ivanov Kaznacheev (350 quarters, 14 rubles) and Voin Neustrov Mikhin (350 quarters, 12 rubles). Kaznacheev and Mikhin held potentially significant privileges as elite “court list” servicemen (dvorovye deti boiarskie, the next to highest rank in the provincial middle service class, just below the vybornye dvoriane or “select courtiers”). Genealogical seniority had greater weight in determining their family eminence; in most districts men of their rank were more likely to be paid their cash compensations directly from the central treasuries (iz cheti) rather than from the governor’s treasury (s gorodom), increasing the likelihood that they would be paid in full and every year; they were eligible for appointment as cavalry centurions; and they had the right to inherit and purchase allodial lands and were more likely to own peasants. 124 The rank of court list serviceman had considerable honorific value and was seldom won without decades of service.125 But in Kozlov’s first years it did not guarantee real economic privilege. Neither Kaznacheev nor Mikhin got their compensations directly from the capital, but were paid s gorodom along with everyone else. Kaznacheev’s actual pomest’e grant at Kozlov was just 60 quarters – less than a sixth of his entitlement – and he had been given court list rank at Kozlov to compensate him for the loss of his 90-quarter pomest’e in Riazan’.126 The power Kaznacheev and Mikhin exercised within the Kozlov community derived more from their honor and their service as centurions and assessors than from their economic position. The Moscow initiations and the June 1637 local muster assigned Kozlov’s deti boiarskie 17 different entitlement rates, from Kaznacheev’s 350 quarters, 14 rubles down to the lowest junior initiate grade of 70 quarters, 0 rubles. But nine-tenths of these men received land rates of 150 quarters or less; the average entitlement for Kozlov’s deti boiarskie was 139.1 quarters and 4.33 rubles. In functional terms Kozlov’s middle service class population also included the 148 service land


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atamans, but they all received the same entitlement of 100 quarters, 4 rubles.127 The 116 Don and Iaik Cossacks could be classified as middle service class as well, for although they were not included on the muster list, they received personally differentiated entitlements; but despite the high entitlement rates (350 quarters and 9–11 rubles for their ataman and iasauls, and from 300 quarters, 9 rubles to 200 quarters, 7 rubles for the rank-and-file) they had been awarded in recognition of their service at Smolensk, most of the Don and Iaik cossacks deserted as soon as their rations money fell in arrears and they realized their actual land grants at Kozlov were going to be the same size as the crofts of regular cossacks. The two dozen who remained were eventually reclassified as deti boiarskie with entitlement rates of just 150 quarters.128 The modest size of the average entitlement rate at Kozlov did not derive only from the special initiation circumstances (the preponderance of novitiate candidates over veteran candidates, the conduct at Moscow of initiations for higher rates) one would expect to attend a new district’s initial colonization. It also reflected the Military Chancellery’s strategy for the resumed military colonization of the southern frontier, a strategy giving preference to the formation of garrison communities of odnodvorets smallholders of fairly uniform entitlement. Thus entitlement rates for gorodovye deti boiarskie in the other southern districts comprising the future Belgorod Line likewise averaged from 100 to 150 quarters – considerably lower than the rates for the traditional deti boiarskie in older and more northern districts like Tula, where veterans were entitled to 249.6 quarters and new initiates to 207.9 quarters on average. By 1678 more than 200,000 such smallholding odnodvortsy were residing on the southern frontier. 129 Of course the narrow range of entitlements suitable for the initial colonization of Kozlov later had to be expanded to take into account natural increase in the district’s middle service class population, the rising proportion in it of “serving novitiates” and veterans, and its increasing differentiation between those fit for distant campaign duty ( polkovaia sluzhba) and those fit only for local garrison duty (gorodovaia sluzhba). A new table of rates issued in 1673 therefore introduced five more new initiate grades (from 50 quarters, 3 rubles to as high as 200 quarters, 6 rubles) for novitiates who were already performing campaign duty, besides adding two lower junior grades (50 quarters, 3 rubles and 40 quarters, 3 rubles) for novitiates not yet on active duty of any sort. 130 The average entitlement rate also rose in Kozlov district: at the villages of Borets and Krivskoe in 1675 it was 181.9 quarters and 9.8 rubles for men on campaign duty and 168 quarters, 9.2 rubles for men on garrison

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duty; 45.2 percent of those on campaign duty and 26.7 percent of those on garrison duty had entitlements to 200 quarters or more. The increase in average entitlement rate did not result in a better compensated middle service class community, however. On the contrary about half of the deti boiarskie of Borets and Krivskoe were still novitiates performing service without any entitlement rates at all. And for those who had managed to win initiation, the pomest’ia they had in hand were on average just half the size of their forebears’ in 1637. Whereas the average Kozlov pomest’e grant in 1637 was 50 quarters per field (35–50 percent of the entitlement average), by 1675 it was 22.4 quarters (12.3 percent of entitlement) for men on campaign duty and 25.3 quarters (15 percent of entitlement) for men on garrison duty. 131 This is an important reminder that a syn boiarskii’s entitlement rate expressed only what his community and the state agreed was his service honor – his deserts, not his actual service compensation. The Military Chancellery continued to find ways to show it recognized his service honor while keeping its expenditures on his land and cash service compensation to the minimum possible. This had important consequences for his household economy and his attitude towards the fairness of his service burden.

3 Property, Labor, and the Village Commune

The Tsar’s bounty Most of Kozlov’s middle service class had entitlement to annual cash compensations of no more than four rubles per person, and Kozlov’s cossacks and musketeers had no cash or grain entitlements at all. But if paid in their entirety the cash and grain entitlements assigned at Kozlov by January 1639 would have cost about 6000 rubles annually, all of which was supposed to be paid out of the funds in the governor’s treasury (s gorodom). An additional 14,000 rubles were owed for one-time cash and grain settlement subsidies. The district’s total subsidy and compensation bill therefore must have considerably exceeded the funds it had on hand, as local revenue sources were only beginning to be developed, and much of the 12,384 rubles sent down from Moscow over the period September 1635–April 1638 had to be reserved for equipment and the rations money owed the corvee contingents on loan from other districts.1 The distribution of settlement subsidies and rations money had to be given priority lest mass desertion result. But the treasury enjoyed greater flexibility in the matter of issuing annual service compensations. Although Moscow’s working orders commonly stipulated that town governors pay out compensations every 25 May or 25 September, “on time, to all present,” the government did not feel bound to pay all on schedule and at full entitlement.2 It recognized that once a serviceman had obtained a land allotment and built upon it, it was usually enough to dribble out his cash compensation in infrequent small installments in order to keep him on active duty from year to year. Servicemen garrisoned on the western and southern frontiers, recently initiated, holding entitlements to less than 10 rubles, and having already 117

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performed meritorious service were those most likely to receive the larger and more frequent installments in cash compensation. But those not in these categories might serve for years without getting a kopek. This policy of withholding was followed on such a scale as to save the treasury tens of thousands of rubles annually: in 1632, for example only 1876 of 24,714 deti boiarskie were getting their cash compensations annually and at full entitlement. 3 For this reason servicemen were all the more anxious about possible inequities of payment and filed collective petitions when they witnessed compensations being paid at arbitrarily different proportions of entitlement rate, “unfairly – a great deal for some, a little for others, and for still others nothing.” The most intolerable such inequities, of course, were those obviously due not to accounting errors but to assessor favoritism towards kinsmen and cronies or to embezzlement by the governor or his clerks. There were instances – especially in Siberia – of governors caught trying to embezzle the cash and grain compensations from entitlements left vacant by death or desertion; there were even occasional examples of outright shortchanging, as at Elets in 1630, when the governor tried to measure out grain compensations using a falsebottomed bucket. 4 For fiscal reasons the central government tried to be attentive to such complaints. Embezzlement struck at the heart of its interests, and officials found guilty of it were punished harshly regardless of their rank; thus Anton Savel’ev, the governor of Nerchinsk, was not only forced to reimburse 1669 rubles to the servicemen he had cheated but was knouted, stripped of his rank, and sent into cossack service.5 Embezzlements of cash and grain compensations were detectable unless massive collusion with central government officials was involved. In addition to the muster rolls, information on entitlement assignments and compensation payments was maintained in a number of other records: in initiation books, review books, entitlement books, compensation distribution books, expenditure books, arrears books, inspection lists, service lists, and hybrids of these. Because of the multiplicity of record forms (which sometimes further varied in format by region and by the service formation of the pay recipients), some historians assume it must have been difficult or impossible to monitor against malfeasance; confusion must have prevailed because there was no General Regulation for accounting procedures but considerable variation in record formats and a shortage of experienced accountants. But closer study of the daily administrative routine does not support this conclusion. In practice the lack of uniformity in recordkeeping mattered less than

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its flexibility and thoroughness: the accounting system seems to have worked well enough precisely because it was ad hoc, ready to adapt record formats according to whatever different circumstances attended initiation and payment. Accounting could also rely upon the principle of collective surety to deter and detect abuses: thus the service community’s officers were held responsible for ensuring that their troops all appear in person to receive their cash and grain compensations, with no one substituting for another; enlistees’ guarantors were liable for repaying the treasury the compensations of comrades who broke their bonds and deserted or who had been condemned to remand as fugitive peasants; and the community was required to inform upon officials undermining the Sovereign’s interest. Above all the chancelleries exercised tight control over local expenditure and monitored the town governors, forbidding them to undertake certain crucial transactions without special authorization from the capital (paying compensations above entitlement rate, the altering of entitlement rates, and even the reassignment of vacated entitlements to replacements). In addition to logging initiations and payments in the aforementioned record books, the governors also had to submit to Moscow annual tallies of total income, expenditure, and balance, along with projections for the ensuing year. Recognizing that governors might be delinquent in reporting or compile inaccurate or dishonest accounts, the chancelleries also resorted to outside checks. Cash and grain compensations were usually paid out en masse at musters in the presence of clerks sent down from the chancelleries. An outgoing governor could not depart until his successor had arrived, audited his books and inventoried his treasury, and fined him or forced him to make restitution for any funds missing. While there was as yet no permanent commissariat, the chancelleries did send out special investigators to give complaining communities inquests against their governors. 6 On the basis of his study of the Tobol’sk region (in Siberia, where one would expect central chancellery supervision to be at its weakest), N. V. Nikitin found the system of controls over cash and grain compensation payments to be “on the whole . . . reliable and stringent. . . . The comparatively small amount of data concerning the abuses of administration in the issue of compensations . . . does not appear accidental. Most likely these abuses in the majority of cases did not exceed the limits typical for the seventeenth century, did not take especially flagrant forms, and therefore could not substantially effect state provisioning of the garrisons.”7

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But such controls were designed to safeguard the government’s fiscal interests, not necessarily to guarantee the community adequate compensation. In Moscow’s eyes certain manipulations of entitlements and compensations did not constitute abuses if they worked “for the Sovereign’s profit” by finding new ways to cut expenditures. Thus when the Siberian governor Iurii Suleshev acted on his own to eliminate grain compensations for servicemen holding what he considered “adequate” plowlands (a mere 2.5–5 quarters), the Siberian Chancellery rewarded rather than disciplined him.8 Nor could Kozlov’s servicemen realistically expect receiving plowlands at full entitlement rate. It was not due to some exceptional circumstance that the average Kozlov pomest’e grant in 1637 was just 50 quarters per field, about half the size of grants in central Muscovy and just 35–50 percent of the Kozlov entitlement rates; it was general policy across the southern frontier that new initiates be allotted land at 40–60 percent of their entitlements and supplemental grants to veterans be kept small and infrequent.9 Although land was abundant in new frontier districts like Kozlov, it was still officially the Sovereign’s land, entitlement to which depended upon one’s demonstrable usefulness to the state, and actual access to which was rationed out so that only lengthy service earned small supplements gradually bringing one’s holding closer to full entitlement. In the south it was all the more crucial that the norms for pomest’e allotment be frugal ones reinforcing the connection between continued active duty and land tenure rights, given that the military colonists of the southern frontier were under greater obligation than their counterparts in central Muscovy for year-round defense duty. Furthermore, the Military Chancellery had decided that the new colonists in Kozlov and other southern districts would be odnodvortsy, smallholders who hardly needed allotment at full entitlement rate since they lacked the peasant tenant labor to work more than a few quarters of land. Defense strategy hinged upon establishing large numbers of such odvodvortsy across a broad front; a large reserve of fallow land therefore had to be kept ready for the endowment of future novitiates – yet another reason for keeping both initial and supplemental allotments small. And it was not until the last decades of the century that the Tatar threat had been sufficiently reduced to make it safe to allot plowlands on the virgin steppe beyond the Kozlov wall and Belgorod Line. Thus colonization and defense planning required that the central government exercise tighter control over the pomest’e land fund of the southern frontier than the pomest’e fund of central Muscovy. To achieve


this, de facto jurisdiction over pomest’e allotments on the southern frontier was already being shifted from the Service Lands Chancellery to the Military Chancellery (this transfer was officially confirmed in 1659, in connection with the formation of the Belgorod and Sevsk Army Groups). The Service Lands Chancellery continued to exercise ultimate authority over pomest’e and votchina land tenure by the middle service class in the older districts above the Abatis Line, and over those members of the southern middle service class who held peasants; but the Military Chancellery was now the controlling authority for allotments in the new districts comprising the future Belgorod Line, and for allotments to all odnodvortsy.10 This jurisdictional division made it possible for the Military Chancellery to follow very different norms in allotting service lands in the south. Not only did it grant allotments at a significantly smaller proportion of entitlement rate, but at Kozlov and in many other new districts it preferred to allot not classic individual pomest’ia, but shares in collective block grants. This further differentiated the southern middle service class socioeconomically from the middle service class of central Muscovy. Now the former were not only more likely to be odnodvortsy with considerably smaller allotments; they were more often siabry as well – literally “comrades” or “neighbors,” but more precisely shareholders in one block allotment within common village boundaries, which they themselves partitioned into interspersed strips that were periodically redistributed among their households. The Military Chancellery’s promotion of siabr collectivism at Kozlov and other new southern districts had important consequences for the southern frontier economy. It erected greater obstacles to the alienation of service land than prevailed in the north and thereby reduced opportunities for the emergence of a land market. It also worked to produce a pattern of state–community relations different from that prevailing in the central provinces, by placing siabr households under the authority of the village collective in certain fiscal and policing matters as well as in matters of land use and by empowering the village collective to petition the state on behalf of its members’ interests.

The siabr system of collective allotment The favoring of the principle of siabr collectivism in pomest’e allotment procedures fit well with the odnodvorets format of military colonization in that it offered common use of haymeadows and woods and more frequent access to labor assistance from neighboring households as

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compensations for the reduced size of households’ plowland allotments. It also followed from the nature of the enlistment process at Kozlov and other areas undergoing initial colonization in the 1630s. Individuals could and did come to Kozlov to enlist, receive initiation, and petition for pomest’e allotments, but many of Kozlov’s early enlistees were men of common geographic origin and service background who had migrated to Kozlov in groups (arteli) of a dozen or more men, requested allotments at the same site, and offered surety on each other’s service constancy. By agreeing to give them collective allotment the state was recognizing and supporting artel’ solidarity, making use of it to reinforce its collective surety bonds and to encourage settlers to rely upon mutual aid in establishing and defending their economies. Thus arteli were the original nuclei of some of Kozlov’s earliest villages: 21 of 23 Ranina Poliana’s 23 household heads hailed from Riazhsk, for example, and men whose fathers had been cossacks at Riazhsk predominated at Lezhaisk village.11 Collective allotment to unions of siabry reflected security concerns as well, nucleated settlement at a few defensible points being considered less vulnerable to Tatar raiding than scattered isolated farmsteads. This was the preference of arriving arteli of volunteers seeking safety in numbers through collective allotment, and it harmonized with Moscow’s aims of patterning military settlement for greatest strategic effect, with the result that in several of the newer southern frontier districts “there were no grants . . . to solitary petitioners, because they were given service lands in large villages for protection against raiders,” in contrast to prevailing practice in central Muscovy. 12 Most of the procedures by which collective allotments were made to siabr unions were similar to those involved in the allotment of individual pomest’ia in the districts to the north. In the former case, the initial request for allotment was as likely to have been made by a group as by a lone individual, but in either case the petition still had to be submitted through the town governor or directly to the Military Chancellery, the latter of course requiring a trip to Moscow. Every lone petitioner or member of a petitioning siabr collective still had to report his entitlement rate and indicate the nature of his need: Was he performing service but had no land because he had never been initiated? Had he been initiated only to fail to obtain land in that district, or had he held land but been forced to abandon it? To win expedited action the petitioner usually had to plead desperate straits, portraying himself as “helpless, without shelter,” so impoverished he was in danger of “perishing or leaving thy Sovereign’s service.” It was also important he remind Moscow of


whatever significant past services he had performed; a large number of those allotted lands at Kozlov in 1636–1637 won their lands for their service in the recent Smolensk campaign, for example.13 It was permitted although not required for an individual or collective to request allotment at a specific site, but if the land requested was a vacated allotment rather than unsettled virgin land it was necessary to specify its boundaries, size, previous owner, and whether that land had been abandoned or was being transferred by agreement with its current holder or holders. One could put in a request for two different tracts, leaving it up to the Military Chancellery or the governor to select for the petitioner whichever tract most closely approximated the number of quarters he was claiming. A few higher-ranking servicemen like dvorovyi syn boiarskii Stepan Kaznacheev were even permitted to find and occupy lands on their own initiative ( po zaimke), although as soon as they built upon them they had to file for title and had to surrender whatever exceeded their entitlements.14 For the odnodvortsy of the south, authorizations for allotments came from the Military Chancellery rather than the Service Lands Chancellery. Before it could issue them, however, the Military Chancellery had to order up extracts from the records of the Service Lands Chancellery to confirm the petitioners did not already hold grants in other districts and to verify that the land requested was not under any previous claim. It also had to check its own muster rolls and other records to confirm each petitioner’s eligibility and entitlements, and instruct the local governor to report up the results of his interrogations of the petitioners and his inspection certifying the availability and suitability of the tract requested. Once collated all this information went into the Military Chancellery’s summary report, along with the petition and transcripts of the testimonies of any petitioners it had been able to interrogate at Moscow. In principle it had to obtain permission to award an allotment from the Tsar and his Duma counselors, on the basis of their consideration of the Military Chancellery’s summary report. In practice the Military Chancellery often took the Tsar’s concurrence for granted and issued orders to have the allotment measured off while his verdict was still pending. 15 In the early stage of Kozlov’s colonization this process would have been simpler and faster. Nearly all the district’s arable was virgin soil under no prior claim, there was as yet no need to assign shares of retiring servicemen’s lands to their newly initiated sons, and fewer petitioners were veterans whose grants in other districts had to be catalogued, so there was less need for memoranda to fly back and forth between the

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Military and Service Lands chancelleries requesting records extracts. Birkin and Speshnev also would have had broader than usual discretion as to the siting of allotments, given that it was only thanks to their recent surveying work that Moscow had any idea of the size and lay of the plowland fund. But in all other respects the Military Chancellery closely supervised the allotment process. Kozlov’s governors could not respond to allotment of petitions without its authorization; it was the Military Chancellery, not the governors, which determined what proportions of entitlements were actually to be allotted; and the allotments carried out by the governors were supposed to be recorded in endowment books, allotment books, and boundary books, copies of which had to be submitted to the Military Chancellery for control and future reference. It was only at the next stage – the surveying and boundary delineation of the awarded allotment – that the rules governing allotment at Kozlov to siabry would have begun to diverge from the practice traditional in central Muscovy. First, in central Muscovy the land undergoing surveying was more likely to have been previously occupied, so the surveying party was expected to conduct a preliminary inquest (poval’nyi obysk), questioning local residents under oath as to what they knew as to the tract’s previous status – by what deed or grant charter it had been obtained, and when; whether the owner had died or disappeared and left any surviving family; whether he had already transferred it to some other party or was now voluntarily transferring title to the petitioner; and whether there were current competing claims to the land. The testimony of long-resident neighbors (starozhil’tsy) carried special weight on these points. At Kozlov in the 1630s less attention would have had to be paid to such inquests, as the only starozhil’tsy were the few peasants in the villages along the Voronezh. But Kozlov surveying parties would still have been required to assemble a crowd from the nearest settlements to stand witness as they inventoried the plowland and its appurtenances and measured off the allotment.16 An especially crucial difference was that allotments in central Muscovy were usually marked off as discrete and consolidated personal pomest’ia. The surveyors used rods and long ropes to “measure off the plowland and fallow and steppe land in one field, by desiatiny [about 170 × 64 meters].” Because pomest’e entitlements were expressed in quarters per field, the total area in desiatiny had to be doubled (one desiatina = two quarters) and then divided by three in order to arrive at the number of quarters per field (a total not expected to be precise because the other


two fields in the three-field tenure were not actually measured but only estimated with the aid of the assembled witnesses). Haymeadows and woods were recorded in desiatiny in much the same manner, except that haymeadows were converted to ricks (kopny) rather than quarters, with one desiatina comprising 10 such ricks.17 The new boundaries were then marked with ditches, posts, and blazes, subsequent obliteration or forging of which was punishable by imprisonment. 18 After that the transaction was registered in the allotment book (otkaznaia kniga) and undersigned by the assembled witnesses, or if they were illiterate, by their parish priests; if the allotment was of previously unsurveyed virgin land, its new titleholder was charged a fee of 0.25 rubles. Copies of the allotment book were deposited with the Service Lands Chancellery as well as with the governor’s office. The allotment book was one of the most important records of local land mobilization; because it certified the legitimacy of the allotment process and provided a description of the land allotted, extracts from it were issued as proofs of the right of possession, in the same manner that extracts from cadastral books served as deeds on peasants. A serviceman’s right to an allotment was not in fact secure until the allotment book had been sent to Moscow and an extract from it returned to him; his right to the land could be overturned if competing claims to the land were filed in the interval. By contrast the allotment of land to siabr collectives at Kozlov and other new southern districts did not require that the governor’s surveyor party measure out and fix the boundaries of individual pomest’ia. The surveyors only had to mark off a block of land commensurate in area with the total allotments of the entire collective of men, including surplus land set aside for future allotments. In other words the surveyors merely determined the common boundaries of the village’s service land fund.19 The actual partition of this block among the members of the collective was carried out by the collective itself. However, pomest’e tenure rights for the southern middle service class, just as with its counterpart in central Muscovy, were still assigned to individuals, on the basis of their entitlements, who subsequently retained or forfeited these rights on the basis of the quality of service they rendered to the tsar. It was therefore the case that members of the same siabr collective could have personal grants of different size within the village land fund. For this reason middle service class siabr collectives did not partition the village land block in equal shares, but according to the sizes of their members’ personal grants; and this found reflection in the allotment books, cadastral books, and other land records, which

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continued to list at each village discrete grants to individual pomeshchiki. It also meant that title right continued to be vested in the allotment book extract awarded to the individual pomeshchik.20 Thus a typical entry from Kozlov’s first endowment book reads: In that same hamlet of Staeva, for pomeshchiki: For Mikhail Isakov syn Kartavsov, on his share [zhereb’ia], a house lot sixty sazheni long and forty sazheni across [127.9 × 85.3 meters]; sixty quarters per field [32.68 hectares] of wild steppeland for plowland; 120 ricks [0.63 hectares] of haymeadow between the fields and beyond the field; wood for one hundred sazheni out from his house lot. And he is to plow plowland and mow hay at Staeva hamlet in common boundaries [cherez desiatinu] with the pomeshchiki and hold various appurtenances according to his grant, and he is to enter the Great Voronezh and Khobot Forests in common with the people of the town and district. 21 References in such records to tilling plowland “in common” and “across the boundary and the tenth,” mowing hay “across the rick,” and occupying house lots “equally across the lot” indicate that arable and appurtenances were worked in adjoining interspersed strips. This is reminiscent of the later repartitional commune of the Russian peasantry, except for the fact that siabr property right still attached to personal grant and the numbers and dimensions of the strips comprising an individual’s grant were determined by his entitlement rate rather than by any tax assessment calculation. 22 Siabry carried out these strip partitions in the following manner. The members of the collective were divided into teams of 10 men (this facilitated the calculation of partition size and probably also derived from the practice of decimally organizing the middle service class cavalry for campaign duty). These teams partitioned the plowlands in all three fields and their haymeadow as soon as the governor’s surveyor had marked off their block allotment. First a smaller block of arable and meadow was set aside for each ten-man team; then each of these blocks was divided into 10 strips, usually parallel (at nearby Sokol’sk in 1647 the strips were 213 meters long and 128 meters wide), for which the members of the team drew lots from the decury’s cap. The recipients erected boundary markers along their strips, and often there were uncultivated belts of land separating the strips to allow free passage without trampling one’s neighbor’s grain. Thus the service land grant of a typical siabr consisted of several strips interspersed with those of the


other members of his team, so as to give no one person special advantage in soil quality or distance from the village. Trading of strips was permitted, but periodic redistribution of strips was not automatically required; in that sense the recipient had nearly as full service conditional property right over his strips as did the classic pomeshchik of central Muscovy. He was obliged to observe the same rotation of crops as his neighbors, however.23 Haymeadows were partitioned (at Kozlov they were redistributed every three to four years) but pasturage, forest, fishing sites, mills, church lots, and the reserve fund for future allotments were not, remaining under common use instead. Redistribution or redivision of plowland was considered necessary only when men dissatisfied with the strips befalling them by lot petitioned the town governor, when boundaries were plowed over, when the disposition of a man’s strips did not correspond in total area to his grant rights, or when the collective received new members. Ideally such matters were resolved within the collective lest they lead to litigation or feuding forcing the town governor to interfere, and to head off such conflicts the state stood ready to redistribute or allot additional land to the collective as soon as a pattern of discrepancy between parcel areas and grant rights became apparent. Frequently the disputes requiring repartition were between newcomers and the original settlers, as the land closest to the village naturally tended to be in the hands of the senior teams. 24 The commune as a whole contracted to bring in outsiders as new members to serve and pay taxes from surplus or vacated land, drawing up a bond with them to guarantee shares of land in common boundary in exchange for a pledge of service. It was in the interest of the commune to actively recruit new takers for unoccupied land strips because taxes, dues, and labor service obligations were assessed on the common land fund of the commune. By taking in new members on contract the commune increased its land and cash resources, for the new member would pay an entry fee of two or three rubles and turn over to the collective his original lands in exchange for new allotments alongside his fellow siabry. This gave the collective discontiguous lands for future allotment to new initiates. Although lands allotted by the state were thereby being exchanged for siabr lands by private contract, this did not trouble the state as long as no one held land without serving, disposed of lands to which he had no rights, or obtained land in excess of entitlement.25 It was preferred that veterans winning supplements to their land grants take them out of the village’s reserve fund of unassigned land.

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The reserve fund also made it possible for new initiates or veterans receiving supplemental awards to be given readjustments (odobrivaniia) recalculating the size of their grants to take land quality into account. 26 Originally the 1556 Decree on Service had intended that the serviceconditional pomest’e pass from father to son only upon the father’s death or certification that he was no longer fit to serve, and then only upon the son’s initiation as his replacement; and it had not favored partition of the pomest’e among multiple heirs. By the early seventeenth century it had become economically necessary to compromise on this, the law having to recognize what was already customary practice among the middle service class: the assignment of shareholding rights in the pomest’e to sons already taking up service while their father remained in service, for example, or the provision of pensionary shares of a deceased serviceman’s pomest’e for his widow and minor sons. Over the rest of the seventeenth century the juridical differences between service-conditional pomest’e tenure and allodial votchina tenure eroded even more. 27 By the 1630s it was already established practice in central Muscovy that a retiree retain a pensionary portion of his original land grant, and that upon his death part of it be set aside for his sons or younger brothers following him into service and another part reserved for his widow and daughter. The size of this widow’s portion depended upon the manner of his demise (a larger portion was to awarded if he had died in battle rather than from natural causes) and of course upon the number of male junior kinsmen for whom provision in land had to be made. When his son reached novitiate age and began serving from his late father’s pomest’e or pensionary portion, the son could petition for initiation and receive the rough equivalent of his pension share as his first personal service land grant; he was unlikely to receive his father’s entire pomest’e intact unless he had no female kin requiring a widow’s portion and no brothers for whom shares of equal size were to be set aside for when they reached the age of service. Exchanges, cessions of dowry portions, and even mortgages of pomest’e land were permitted, although extracts from the Military Chancellery’s allotment books still had to be obtained as legal certification of title right.28 This creeping allodialization had made less headway in the south’s siabr communities. Little information survives as to pension and inheritance practices in early Kozlov’s siabr communes. But as odnodvortsy with small allotments, Kozlov’s siabry would have sought to avoid excessive fragmentation by instead giving their heirs separate new allotments from the village reserve fund. As long as the reserve fund held out new initiates could be given their new allotments from it and


there would be no need to curtail allotment sizes for other members of the collective. This provided less opportunity for pomest’e to come to be regarded as familial property and made it essential that the siabr commune maintain control over its reserve fund. In central Muscovy, pomeshchiki were sometimes permitted to lay claim to their own sections of the reserve fund set aside by surveyors for future allotments; they could tack on to their grants “until further decree” the excess land remaining after old grants were resurveyed and new initiates given allotments, or they could even buy these surplus lands as allods. Such rights could not be permitted Kozlov’s siabry. Extra precaution had to be taken against the fragmentation of their already smaller grants, so their reserve funds had to remain state property under the stewardship of their communes.29 There were circumstances under which the siabr collective found it necessary to alienate land shares to outsiders who did not enter the commune. Unoccupied plowlands and appurtenances which the collective could not afford to exploit were rented out to priests, merchants, and peasants as well as to other servicemen. Widows and servicemen too impoverished to perform service and pay taxes could deed their lands to outsiders for some kind of compensation in cash or kind; such cessions by deed were a means of disguising what was actually the sale of service land, as were mortgaging, exchanges in which some cash also changed hands, and transfers of partial or full title for cash or for the assumption of obligations derived from tenancy. A form of transfer which later became widespread at Kozlov occurred when a siabr hard-pressed to meet his military service and fiscal obligations permanently ceded half or a third of his plowland, appurtenances, and houselot to a “service shareholder” ( polovinshchik or tretchik). The latter in return paid a fee, became a member of the collective, and assumed half or a third of the service and tax burden from that share.30 Thus siabry could obtain shares of the collective service land by deed as well as by allotment from the state. But because of its ultimately collective nature, siabr tenure was less free to evolve towards freely inalienable absolute property than the discrete family pomest’e of central Muscovy. Dowry lands, pensionary lands, and deeded lands could not become permanently marked off from other land parcels; they remained held in common boundary, subject to eventual redistribution. In other words, what could be alienated was not an actual tract of land from the collective block, but merely a share in right of access to the block; this is why written purchase agreements did not bother to describe the boundaries of the

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tract “sold.” Furthermore, except under desperate circumstances the siabr collective could not afford to alienate land shares to outsiders whose legal status prevented them from being brought into the collective to shoulder their part of its service and fiscal burden. It was therefore necessary for the collective to regulate alienations. An individual siabr who wanted to sell all or part of his share first had to try to find a purchaser among his fellow siabry, and the latter could not purchase the share without the collective’s approval. Sale also required the consent of the entire collective when it became necessary to look outside the collective for a buyer, and the collective reserved the right to buy the share back. The collective took action against members who ignored these restrictions or tried to consolidate their strips and leave the commune. Finally, the collective knew it could ultimately request the Military Chancellery to intervene and block an alienation transaction that threatened to place shares in the hands of outsiders socially ineligible to assume the corresponding share of the service burden. 31 For these reasons Kozlov’s middle service class colonists were unlikely to have been participants in the kind of booming land market Valerie Kivelson discerns in Vladimir in central Muscovy, where there were fewer restraints upon exchange, donation, dowry transfer, mortgaging, and sale of pomest’e land.32 The emergence of a Kozlov land market had to await the end of the century.33 By then decades of partible inheritance and declining grant rates had forced the land-poor and overtaxed siabr communes to begin selling out to outsiders or to break up in increasingly intractable disputes over how to allocate what was left of the shrinking reserve fund. 34 The cossacks, musketeers, gunners, and other services comprising the lower service class also called themselves siabry and cultivated their lands in common boundary. They too were organized into tenman teams casting lots for parcels of land, and their land allotments were likewise service-conditional. Several historians have therefore found no appreciable difference between the crofts (nadely) allotted to lower service class siabry and the pomest’ia of middle service class siabry. But B. A. Aleksandrov and V. M. Vazhinskii have correctly noted some important differences of both an organizational and juridical nature. 35 The most immediately apparent of these differences was in regard to the layout of the plowlands and appurtenances of the lower service class, which were concentrated at just a few suburban sloboda colonies rather than in outlying villages. More significant differences issued from the legal character of nadel tenure. Because new members were brought into


the lower service class by contractual recruitment rather than by inheriting service obligations from their fathers, a cossack or musketeer still in service did not need to treat his croft allotment as a family trust, partitioned into provisional shares for each of his sons when they reached novitiate age; the croft would be passed on intact to whomever was later contracted to replace him in service, be it one of his sons, a brother, or an outsider.36 Furthermore, the lower service class did not have personal service land entitlements determined by initiation, but entitlements standardized by rank (eight quarters per field for most southern musketeers, for example, nine quarters for their decurions, and ten quarters for their quinquagenaries); so while tenure rights for middle service class siabry officially remained vested in the individual siabr (even though the village collective limited the exercise of these rights to interspersed parcels in common boundary), the lower service class siabr derived his tenure right by virtue of being a member of his collective, at the sloboda where those of his formation were settled. Vazhinskii goes so far as to see the lower service class siabr collective as actually holding corporate title to the land, reflected in the fact that it was sometimes issued a single collective grant charter. 37 Finally, the crofts of lower service class siabry tended to be two to five times smaller than middle service class pomest’ia (at least through the first half of the century, before average pomest’e grant size was sharply reduced), their smaller size reflecting not only the lower status of cossacks and musketeers in the service hierarchy but the absence of a family trust function for their allotments and the standardization of land entitlements under the terms of contractual recruitment. Because the compensation entitlement of a cossack or musketeer was standardized for his rank and had no connection with initiation appraisal of his personal service capacity, the allotment assigned to him was already of the maximum size he could receive in the course of his service at that rank, unless a shortage of land or some other circumstance had prevented his endowment at the rank standard; he could not subsequently petition for a raise in his entitlement rate or for a supplementary grant to approach his full entitlement.38 This had the advantage of saving the collective’s fund of reserve land exclusively for future allotments to new recruits and managing it under tighter state supervision than the reserve funds of middle service class collectives. The collectivism of siabr land tenure tended to reinforce socioeconomic homogeneity in the southern middle service class population. The siabr commune tried to minimize the fragmentation of allotments over successive generations by distributing new or supplemental allotments

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out of the village reserve fund, thereby avoiding having to curtail the size of existing allotments. As long as the village reserve fund could be maintained and defended against outsider usurpers, this limited economic differentiation to those forms permitted by the differentiation of entitlements in the initiation process – and as we have seen there was little such entitlement variation at early Kozlov.39 That the collectivist principle was even more pronounced in the siabr communes of the lower service class is suggested by the fact the commune held collective title to its croft allotments. Meanwhile the practice of contractual recruitment with rank-standardized entitlements meant that stratification among cossacks and musketeers tended to derive largely from rank and from the degree to which individuals and families engaged in local commerce as craftsmen and shopkeepers. The siabr commune was supported but not imposed from above; it was the collaborative creation of the state and the military colonists. From the beginning, when they petitioned by artel’ for allotment, the smallholders had relied upon collective mutual aid for establishing and maintaining their economies. For several decades thereafter, until the exhaustion of its reserve land fund, the siabr commune’s practice of partitioning block allotments into interspersed strips worked to share risk and advantage in small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry. Communal authority also gave households some say in the assessment of dues and taxes, and mobilized them to defend their lands against encroachment by outsiders. The siabry therefore had a real interest in combatting those government measures which threatened to nullify communal rights or undermine communal cohesion. 40 Ultimately the state unwittingly contributed to the disintegration of the siabr commune by laying upon it service and fiscal demands beyond its capacity. But its intent all along had been to encourage and even actively spread both siabr land tenure and siabr communal authority – to make odnodvorets smallholding more viable, and to reinforce discipline and hold households collectively responsible for policing and dues collection. By mid-century the siabr system had become the predominant form of land tenure in the new districts of the Belgorod Line; only a small minority of deti boiarskie in these districts – men with large grants and the peasant labor to work them – held discrete and consolidated classic pomest’ia outside the siabr collectives.41 One could say that siabr collectivism and odnodvorets smallholding worked in tandem to create a new kind of middle service class on the southern frontier, one occupying a socioeconomic niche between the traditional middle service class of central Muscovy and the peasantry.


The general thrust of state policy was to discourage the emergence of alternatives to odnodvorets smallholding and siabr collectivism. Thus Moscow responded to the increased pressure upon the pomest’e fund resulting from immigration and natural population increase by awarding smaller entitlement rates and allotting smaller plowland grants; the new taxes and dues it introduced were assessed upon the commune; the mass dragnets of fugitive peasants in the 1660s had the effect of retarding socioeconomic differentiation by reducing smallholders’ access to peasant labor; and until 1676 the Forbidden Towns decrees protected odnodvorets/siabr landholding by blocking magnates and men of Moscow rank from obtaining virgin land or deeds to existing pomest’e land in certain frontier districts.42

The pattern of settlement at Kozlov, 1635–1638 The speed with which the agricultural colonization of Kozlov proceeded can be documented by examining the pomest’e endowment books (stroel’nye knigi) compiled by Ivan Birkin and Mikhailo Speshnev in 1637 and by Samoilo Birkin in 1638. 43 By the end of 1636 the district had been divided into five bailliages containing 18 villages settled by 503 deti boiarskie and three suburban slobody inhabited by 150 service land atamans. Most of the villages of the deti boiarskie had been built on the banks of rivers and creeks within 30 kilometers from town, although there were already a few settlements at the far northern and northeastern ends of the district; and most of these villages were still hamlets (derevni) averaging 25 households each, although over the next decades some of them would grow into sizeable sela of 100 or more households. 44 The three colonies of atamans standing 6–11 kilometers south of town held from 30 to 60 households each, in keeping with the character of sloboda settlement. A total of 32,188 quarters per field of plowland and 64,916 ricks of haymeadow had been allotted as pomest’ia to these 653 deti boiarskie and atamans. Nearly all of this had been given out as shares in siabr collectives; the one possible exception was at the ataman colony of Ust’ Pol’nogo Voronezha, where arable and haymeadow were apparently held in consolidated plots rather than in interspersed strips.45 Appendix I presents the pattern of plowland and haymeadow distribution by bailliage and settlement, along with the average size of pomest’e grant at each village. It shows that the range of variation in grants to deti boiarskie was narrow – from 40 to 60 quarters, with the larger grants occurring in the smaller villages. This was probably due to the preponderance of new

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initiates in the district population, as these grant sizes corresponded exactly to the range of grant rates Moscow had prescribed for the three orders of new initiates, for whom such rates were generous enough, given their comparatively plebeian origins and the government’s preference for settling odnodvortsy lacking the labor to cultivate more than a few quarters per household. The smaller number of veterans with high entitlement rates may have been disappointed to have received grants within this range but could hope to earn supplements over the course of their service careers at Kozlov. A further reason for granting allotments at just half the average entitlement rate was to preserve village funds of reserve land for future allotment to subsequent generations of deti boiarskie. As of late 1636 only about 7640 quarters of plowland and some 15,000 ricks of haymeadow had been set aside as reserve for future allotment. This was enough for new allotments to fewer than 200 men, using the lowest grant rate then current. It would of course be possible later to identify and mark off additional tracts of virgin steppe land for village reserve funds in Ilovaiskii, Boretskii, and Turmasovskii bailliages. But Oleshenskii bailliage posed a special problem: it was the most densely forested and it already held the largest population in the greatest number of settlements. It therefore had no reserve fund, and its households held less than half of their grants within its borders; on average 51.9 percent of their grants consisted of discontiguous parcels (otkhozzhye pashni) located far off in Turmasovskii and Ilovaiskii bailliages. To work these distant fields and cart home their harvests would have placed the Oleshenskii pomeshchiki at an economic disadvantage besides exposing them to greater risk of ambush by Tatar raiders; and the proportion of outlying discontiguous land to their inlying Oleshenskii lands could be expected to increase over time as they resorted to exchange, purchase, and other transactions to try to obtain additional acreage to offset the fragmentation caused by partible inheritance and continued immigration.46 In the 1630s not even the Oleshenskii households holding only 20–25 quarters within the bailliage boundaries were in immediate peril, however, as tracts of this size were still larger than what an odnodvorets household without peasant tenants could work on its own. At Kursk in 1645, for example, the governor observed that grants of 50 or more quarters were unnecessary as his deti boiarskie “could serve thee, Sovereign, and be satisfied with just twenty quarters.” 47 Miklashevskii and Vazhinskii found that in fact servicemen at Kozlov as well as at Kursk typically cultivated no more than a tenth of their pomest’e grants by mid-century. 48


For this reason it was difficult for Kozlov’s middle service class to raise effective objection to the subsequent reduction of average grant size, which decreased by 50 percent over the period 1637–1675 due to government revision of entitlement and allotment norms as well as to partible inheritance and continued immigration.49 In 1650 some newly initiated Kozlov servicemen requested supplements to raise their grants to eight quarters per field, but the grounds they cited was honorific: their rank required that they hold allotments larger than those of an ordinary musketeer. 50 By the time Samoilo Birkin had compiled the next endowment book (1638) 10 new settlements had arisen (see Map 2).51 No new hamlets arose in already crowded Oleshenskii bailliage, nor in Ustenskii bailliage where the ataman contingent had already reached its limit. But in Turmasovskii bailliage Lezhaisk and Kruglaia Poliana had already grown into large sela and the new settlements of Epanchina Poliana and Glazok had extended the bailliage’s border to the northeast beyond the Lesnoi Voronezh. The northernmost bailliage, Boretskii, experienced the greatest growth: the two settlements at the mouth of Verda creek had become distinct villages (Borets and Sysoevka) and another hundred volunteers had settled there or at Klenskoe across the Ilovai and Lamskoe on the Chelnovaia.52 New settlements also arose at Nazar’eva Poliana and Vysokaia Poliana on the upper Para River. An entirely new bailliage – Slobodskii – had arisen west of the Ilovai river, containing the new hamlets of Istobnaia Poliana, Krivaia Poliana, and Ust’ Stanovykh Rias pod Slobodskim lipiagom. 53 Because the sizes of the district’s lower service class contingents were fixed, Birkin and Speshnev had been able to project that a plowland fund of 11,304 quarters per field would suffice for their crofts. This land lay close to town, along the Lesnoi Voronezh and both sides of Kamenka Creek as far as Khobot Forest. 54 Four suburban sloboda colonies, each for a particular branch of service, were established here by 1638 (this does not include the three Ustenskii bailliage slobody of service land atamans): a Gunners’ Colony, Patrol Cossacks’ Colony, Musketeers’ Colony, and farther off across the Voronezh River, a Corps Cossacks’ Colony. There were two more musketeers’ colonies at the ends of the steppe wall, at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk. The endowment book for 1638 also mentions a Don and Iaik Cossack Colony in Turmasovskii bailliage, and by 1651 there was a colony for Ukrainian emigres in Russian service four kilometers from town in Turmasovskii bailliage. The Military Chancellery tried to preserve the service identity of these colonies by refusing to distribute virgin land or vacated allotments at these sites to men of other service

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categories and by requiring those who received allotments to change over to the branch assigned to that colony.55 Over time population growth and the reassignment of some residents to other service formations made it harder to keep the colonies service-exclusive, however.56 The integrity of the collective allotments of the district’s lower service class siabry underwent further erosion as cossacks and musketeers rented out or mortgaged their crofts to outsiders.57 Both of the Kozlov endowment books had listed only pomest’e grants to deti boiarskie and service land atamans, but it is possible to speculate as to the layout of lower service class plowlands and appurtenances from the example of Bel’sk Fort, where 267 musketeers had households in 1643–1644. Each musketeer had a house lot measuring 40 by 20 meters, a threshing floor of 400 square meters, eight quarters per field of plowland, and right of access to collectively controlled meadows and wood and water appurtenances. The Bel’sk musketeers cut wood along the Pol’noi Voronezh as far as Kasimov Crossing, but only on the Russian side of the river; for lumber to build their houses, they used the Great Voronezh Forest in common with the other district servicemen. The smaller scale of his croft made it possible for a cossack or musketeer to hold it all in a single discrete parcel near his house rather than in interspersed strips or with a discontiguous parcel at another village.58

The defense of property right The record of Kozlov’s first several years is silent about property disputes between individual households. This was partly because the governor’s surveyors did not record the boundary lines of the interspersed strips of siabr shareholders and left disputes over them to be resolved within the siabr communes whenever possible. It was probably also the case that there was less opportunity for disputes between households to arise than in later decades when the district was more densely settled and questions of title had been further complicated by decades of partible inheritance, mortgages, service shareholding agreements, and alienations. What we do find from the beginning are disputes between siabr collectives or between siabr collectives and outsiders over the boundaries of communal reserve funds, haymeadows, and forest and river appurtenances, these often turning violent because such commons were so crucial to the survival of siabr smallholders. In 1649, for example, the deti boiarskie of Taptykovo village lay claim to land along Maksy Creek as their reserve fund for mobile fallowing and for future allotments. The governor’s office did not recognize their


claim because the land in question lay far off from their village and the men of Taptykovo could produce no documentation of their title. The Taptykovans in turn resorted to violence when the governor’s surveyor tried to mark off this land for another village. A second surveying party finally forced them to comply. 59 Conflicts deriving from inadequate documentation and competing interpretations of written title were much harder to resolve. For example, the siabr system of allotment soon led to intercommunal disputes over Kozlov’s haymeadows because the endowment book compiled by Birkin and Speshnev did not explicitly identify the borderline between the respective haymeadows of the villages of Lezhaisk and Krasivaia Poliana, the governors being interested only in getting recorded the locations and number of ricks allotted each siabr in proportion to his pomest’e grant.60 Boundaries were subsequently fixed in the records of the governor’s office, but disputes arose again once some of the boundary markers in the field disappeared. Hence the claim by the villagers of Lezhaisk to meadows within a boundary line set by S. I. Birkin and marked by a blaze on a birch tree came under challenge by the inhabitants of nearby Epanchino after lightning felled the tree in question; the men of Epanchino lay claim to the same meadows on the basis of a boundary they insisted Governor Ivan Rostovskii had reset four years later. The Military Chancellery rejected the argument of the Epanchino commune and reaffirmed the boundary line set by S. I. Birkin, but it did not accuse the Epanchino men outright of obliterating the old markers and even offered them some compensation in the form of narrow livestock runs across the line so they could water their cattle in the Lesnoi Voronezh River.61 There was greater opportunity for property dispute in other southern districts whose governors were apparently more careless or dilatory than Birkin and Speshnev in documenting allotment and surveying activity. The governors of Kursk, Belgorod, and other districts were not always conscientious in submitting to Moscow their allotment and surveying books and records of the interrogations of starozhil’tsy witnesses, and this led to long delays in the award of land grants and the resolution of property disputes.62 Whereas the danger of governors abusing their authority in allotting service lands could be reduced by requiring authorization from the Military Chancellery for each step of the allotment process, there was less that could be done to prevent the red tape resulting from governors’ failure to make timely and accurate report. At Kozlov the more serious challenge to the property right of the siabr collectives came from outside, from the monastery and boyar votchinniki

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on Kozlov’s southwestern border and the governor of Tambov on its eastern frontier – powerful political interests the Military Chancellery could not easily dismiss. A conflict over several thousand quarters of virgin steppeland west of the Ilovai and along the Bol’shie Stanovye Riasy River proved especially intractable because of the vast acreage at stake and because of the involvement of the powerful Chudov Monastery. Archimandrite Kirill of the Chudov Monastery refused to recognize the assignment of this steppeland as an allotment and reserve fund for Kozlov servicemen settling the new villages of Bukhovaia, Klenskoe, Istobnoe, and Beloe Ozero, on the grounds that this land had been granted to the monastery by Patriarch Filaret years before and was registered as the monastery’s votchina in the 1628–1629 cadasters. In fact the monastery had already built its own village at Bukhovaia, and its inhabitants were using violence to drive out Kozlov colonists attempting to settle nearby. Eventually Governor Birkin was able to convince the Military Chancellery that the Chudov Monastery would never have dared to seize these lands before he had founded the garrison of Kozlov and blocked the Tatar trails running along the Ilovai.63 Although Moscow notified the Chudov Monastery it would have to be content with just 50 quarters per field at Bukhovaia – the rest of the land to be set aside for Kozlov pomest’ia – the monastery continued to lay claim to the entire Ilovai steppe for the next six years and even went so far as to bribe surveyors from Lebedian’ to allot the land to them. 64 At the opposite end of the new district, along Lamka Creek, a tributary of the Chelnovaia, the siabry of Lamskoe (founded 1636) soon found themselves struggling to defend their plowlands and fishing sites against the Verkhotsensk court canton peasants who settled at nearby Sosnovka the following year. The Military Chancellery ruled that the Sosnovka peasants could keep their houselots but would have to relinquish to the Lamskoe inhabitants all the land they had seized west of the Chelnovaia River. But the Sosnovka peasants refused to obey, insisting that the endowment books compiled by their own governor, Roman Boborykin of Tambov, had claimed this land for Tambov district, not Kozlov; and in 1647 they even convinced Tambov governor P. F. Levont’ev to send a detachment of cossacks under Captain Vasilii Khlebnikov on a raid against Lamskoe while its servicemen were off at Kozlov for inspection. “They pulled down our houses,” complained the Lamskoe siabry, “and tore everything apart and cut down many of our horses and cows, and cut others with boarspears, and drove our wives and children into the woods. . . . Vasilii Khlebnikov declared to our wives


and children that we, thy slaves, had settled on the land of Tambov district without permission and by force.” No sooner had the Lamskoe servicemen rebuilt than a second punitive expedition of Tambov musketeers tore their houses down again and tipped them into the river.65 A household’s survival depended not only upon plowland and haymeadows but on access to water for livestock, fishing and milling and access to forests for firewood, lumber, hunting, and beekeeping. Although the Military Chancellery had early on removed area apiaries from state rent to facilitate military colonization, fishing sites along Kozlov’s main rivers and creeks fishing continued to be leased by the peasants of F. S. Streshnev and Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, and by 1640 these peasant entrepreneurs had established new apiary leaseholds along the banks and were beating and robbing Kozlov servicemen who tried to fish, draw water, cut wood, or merely try to ford at these sites to tend their fields on the opposite banks. In a collective petition in the name of the entire service community Kozlov servicemen pointed out that all these franchises together yielded the Chancellery of the Grand Revenue a mere 33.45 rubles of obrok rent a year while endangering the pomest’e economies supporting over 2000 Kozlov servicemen and their serviceeligible male kinsmen. The Military Chancellery conducted a review of these leaseholds but did not take decisive action until 1645, when the atamans of Khmelevaia brought to its attention that leaseholders had broken down the defensive forest abatis along the Pol’noi Voronezh; then Moscow shut down all the obrok leases along the Pol’noi Voronezh between Bel’sk Fort and Oleshenka Creek. 66 The fiercest dispute over rights to forest and river appurtenances occurred along the Chelnovaia River marking the boundary between Kozlov and Tambov districts. The Chelnavsk Forest ran for 20 kilometers along both sides of the Chelnovaia from the steppe fort of Chelnavsk and Lysye Gory as far north as the villages of Sosnovka, Viriatino, and Kulevatovo, and as there was no other large source of wood, water, and forage nearby the musketeers Birkin and Speshnev had settled at Chelnavsk Fort depended upon untrammeled access to the Chelnovaia River and the denser woods along its opposite bank. 67 But Governor Roman Boborykin of Tambov considered the entire Chelnavsk Forest along both banks of the river an abatis essential to the military security of his district. He protested the founding of a fort at Chelnavsk, declaring that its musketeers represented a threat to the abatis’ integrity, and then tore down the bridge some Chelnavsk musketeers had built across the river and posted guards “so that no people of any sort may ride through the forbidden forest for any business, cut any wood,

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strip bark, break off branches, or inflict any damage upon the forest or lay down any paths.”68 On several occasions his men fined, jailed, and even fired upon Kozlov servicemen entering the Chelnavsk Forest. Birkin and Speshnev informed Moscow that such violence was discouraging volunteers from enlisting in the Chelnavsk musketeers and requested it guarantee their musketeers at least limited access rights lest “a great livelihood be snatched away and their subsistence not maintained.” 69 They also pointed out that Boborykin was enforcing his ban on entry into the forbidden zone only selectively, exempting from it prosperous Verkhotsensk court peasants who held lucrative apiary leaseholds in the woods and allowing Tambov servicemen to erect their own bridge across the river and cut a road through the woods around the end of the Tambov defense line.70 In July 1637 the Military Chancellery tried to end the feud by partitioning that part of the forest running along the eastern bank, setting aside for the musketeers of Chelnavsk a narrow belt 10 kilometers long for woodcutting and a smaller zone to its south for pasturage, fishing, and haymowing. This took several months to implement, however, because Boborykin refused to cooperate with the surveyors, and in the interval his patrols – supported by Verkhotsensk leaseholders – continued to use violence to enforce their ban across the entire forest. In January 1638 two Chelnavsk musketeers were shot, stabbed, beaten with gunstocks, and carried off to jail at Tambov, where one died of his wounds.71

Labor, production, and consumption The Kozlov region’s fertile black soil, level and comparatively open terrain, and moderate continental climate made it a promising environment for cereal culture, and Kozlov smallholders were able to plow, sow, and reap an equivalent acreage in considerably less time than cultivators in the podzol’ north of Muscovy. But because of the shortage of labor, heavier military service obligations, and low level of technique Kozlov’s colonists could not work their land as intensively and their yields were not significantly higher. In the interest of reducing treasury expenditure on settlement subsidies and other support, the Military Chancellery expected its town governors to press colonists to quickly build on their allotments and put them under cultivation. 72 In contrast to practice in more settled districts, Kozlov’s colonists were held liable for defense duty and fortifications corvee even before they had established their economies; and their military duties and agricultural obligations regularly came in conflict thereafter


because the period of heaviest patrol and corvee duty fell between spring and the onset of winter and thereby coincided with the plowing, sowing, and harvesting cycle. Fortifications labor assigned during the plowing and winter harvest seasons in 1647 caused a district-wide harvest shortfall the following spring, for example; many Kozlov households lost their livestock and had to sell off their clothing and service gear in order to buy grain at inflated prices. The burden of fortifications labor likewise resulted in the loss of 144,000 sheaves at Tambov 20 years later. 73 Kozlov had been settled by volunteers rather than by transfers of entire families from older districts; most of these volunteers were new initiates less likely to have sons approaching the age of majority, or former servicemen whose families had been broken and scattered in the years of devastation following the Troubles; and the government apparently preferred to settle the serving sons and brothers of older enlistees on their own allotments, as the endowment book of Birkin and Speshnev lists just 42 serving deti boiarskie and 6 atamans as residing in the same households as their fathers. For these reasons Kozlov households were small, holding perhaps 1.4 fully labor-capable males on average if we are to credit the numbers of active duty servicemen and non-serving male relatives and dependents reported in the district’s April 1638 service roll.74 By contrast the average at Karpov – which was settled by transfer – was 2.1 labor-capable males per household.75 One might expect average family size to increase once initial colonization had ended. A new initiate replacing his father on Kozlov’s service roll could choose to marry early, as soon as his allotment rights were certified, to try to compensate for the high infant and child mortality rates and produce as many surviving sons as possible to work his land and support him in service. A larger family need not overstrain his land resources, for while his pomest’e grant was smaller than the norm for central Muscovy, he could still feed several adults even if he cultivated no more than a tenth of it. But in practice the state continued to impose limits on the size of southern odnodvorets families. It did this by continuing to promote early separation, so that fewer sons stayed on in the household as support laborers than received separate small new grants when they underwent initiation. 76 This assured that Kozlov’s middle service class contingent remained by far the largest on the southern frontier, but when combined with the policy of welcoming continued immigration (even the immigration of fugitive peasants) it had the negative consequence of consuming the village reserve funds at a faster rate, the exhaustion of

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which is suggested by the 50 percent reduction in size of the average pomest’e grant over the period 1637–1675. From mid-century the state also increasingly commandeered household support labor for military purposes, imposing on able-bodied male kinsmen not in service new corvee duties and new dues to support the field army, or conscripting them into the foreign formation regiments serving in Ukraine and Belorussia. By the 1670s so many Kozlov men had been taken into the regiments that very few households had more than one support laborer for every one or even two of its members in military service. The ratio of support laborers to men in “town service” was especially low. At Borets and Krivskoe villages in 1675 over a third of the deti boiarskie in service had no adult male support laborers who were not already in service themselves. 77 Legally there was no obstacle to an odnodvorets syn boiarskii acquiring serfs, for odnodvorets denoted an economic rather than a juridical condition. But because of the small scale of his economy and the available alternative of enlistment it was very difficult for him to draw and bind tenants. Nine-tenths of the accused fugitives listed in the remand cases of 1636–1640 enlisted in Kozlov’s garrison; only a few dozen became dependent laborers of servicemen. The 10 Kozlov pomeshchiki charged with harboring fugitives as dependent laborers held on average only 4.5 people, including women and children, and the average was further distorted by Captain Petr Krasnikov – no ordinary siabr’ – who held 17 fugitives. 78 It is not even likely many of these harbored fugitives became deeded tenants. Given the conditions in the south in the late 1630s, a Kozlov pomeshchik had better hope of drawing outside labor under less binding terms. It was still legally possible for him to hire an itinerant as a farm labor, provided he could afford it. An impoverished servicemen, fugitive peasant, or itinerant might come to him and agree to attach himself as boarder (zakhrebetnik, sosed, or podsosednik) working his fields in exchange for room and board or for plowland he leased from him; such boarders were de facto economic dependents but remained legally free. He could also resort to poziat’evshchina, contracting to bring a son-in-law or brother-in-law into his household to work for 10 or more years to pay off a bride-price. The outright indenture of a syn boiarskii would be outlawed in 1642, but there remained ways of using loan agreements to convert hire into de facto indenture; it was even possible to “adopt” an adult vagrant as one’s stepson on terms that actually approximated indenture. The commune and governor might assign to him a solitary uninitiated neighbor as an officially recognized support laborer ( prokormshchik or pod’emshchik), juridically free and


eligible for his own eventual initiation but meanwhile obliged to work for his warrantor. Or someone might be willing to pay a few rubles to become his polovinshchik or tretchik shareholder, receiving the right to half or a third of his allotment in return for assuming a proportionate share of his military and fiscal obligations.79 Yet it is striking how few peasant and cottar tenants, boarders, and other dependent laborers were recorded in the 1646 Kozlov census conducted by I. D. Miloslavskii (see Appendix II). No peasants, cottars, or dependent laborers resided in the lower service class slobody south of town or at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk. Of the 1298 members of the district’s middle service class (deti boiarskie, service land atamans, and service Ukrainians, living in 37 villages, hamlets, and suburban colonies), only 90 men held peasants or cottars, and then in very small number (2.2 on average). Fifteen villages were entirely devoid of peasant or cottar tenants. Most peasant and cottar tenancy was concentrated in two villages, Staeva Poliana and Borets, where land allotments tended to be larger (60 quarters per field on average); it was probably also germane that three of the five Staeva Poliana pomeshchiki holding peasants were kinsmen of Captain Krasnikov. 80 Miloslavskii’s census revealed that after a decade Kozlov’s population remained overwhelmingly odnodvorets in the literal sense; the ratio of its peasant and cottar population to the total number of middle service class pomeshchiki was only 0.15:1. By contrast Miloslavskii’s 1646 census in neighboring Lebedian’ district enumerated 7102 peasants and cottars, even though Lebedian’ garrison was considerably smaller than Kozlov’s.81 The endowment book of governors Birkin and Speshnev identified five elements in the typical syn boiarskii’s pomest’e grant at Kozlov in the 1630s: a lot measuring 3000–5000 square meters for his house and outbuildings; an adjoining small tract of 20,000 square meters of woodland for firewood and lumber; access to common pasturage, water, and forest; multiple small strips of plowland interspersed with the village’s other siabry, on average totalling area 50 quarters per field, but most of which likely lay fallow; and haymeadow in proportion to his total plowland holdings, on average totalling 100 ricks per field. 82 His house-lot was typically enclosed on three sides by a stockade, one side of which supported an overhanging roof. Details concerning the manner of house construction in this region before the eighteenth century are scarce. By the mid-eighteenth century the more prosperous odnodvortsy in the area lived in comparatively spacious houses with wattle-and-clay walls, wooden floors, shingle roofs, and chimneys. The

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colonist settling at Kozlov in the 1630s was more likely to have built a smaller and more primitive wooden cabin, given his modest resources and the considerable pressure he was under to build quickly. But he would have had other structures on his lot: a stable, bathhouse, one or two sheds insulated with moss to protect perishables, and perhaps a covered connecting walkway. He had his own open threshing-floor, and a small garden for growing cabbages, onions, carrots, garlic, cucumbers, radishes, and beets; hops might also be planted along the edges of his yard. Such a complex might sell for five or six rubles, with his tools, livestock, and standing and threshed grain bringing in perhaps another 15 rubles. 83 His adjoining private woodlot could provide lumber for occasional repairs but was not large enough to serve as his permanent and exclusive source of firewood. 84 It was therefore essential that he share with his neighbors access to the common wood fund in the more distant Great Voronezh, Khobot, Khobotets, and Chelnavsk forests. The community also needed these forests for fuel for blacksmithing, distilling, and the production of potash. This presented the Military Chancellery with a dilemma, for it considered these woods of greater value to the district intact as abatis; but the government could hardly deny colonists their lumber rights here when its own fortifications projects were removing so much oak and pine timber from the Great Voronezh Forest for the construction of palisades, blockhouses, and anticavalry fences and for the revetting of the earthen steppe wall.85 The records of the Kozlov governors do not speak directly to the scale and pace of deforestation in the district, but as early as 1639 we find Kozlov servicemen having to travel as far as the Khoper River for their hunting and fishing, suggesting that wood-thinning and competition for forest appurtenances inside Kozlov district had already reached critical proportions. 86 At the start of the century the prevailing system of cultivation in the less populous districts south of the Abatis Line had been the long-term mobile fallow ( perelog) system, in which fields were kept in continuous cultivation until close to exhaustion and then left fallow for several years. While this had the disadvantage of requiring a ratio of fallow to sown area as high as 4:1 or 5:1, it was productive enough as long as population remained sparse, virgin land plentiful, and property boundaries fluid. But these conditions no longer applied in the districts above the Abatis Line. Here servicemen and peasants had accordingly made the transition to a more intensive system of tillage: the rotating fallow ( parovoi) system with, optimally, the annual three-field rotation of winter-sown, spring-sown, and fallow fields of equal area. This classic


three-field system had the advantage of increasing the sown proportion of the holding. The planting of spring oats also meant it was possible to keep more horses, since horses, unlike oxen, could not be maintained solely by pasture grazing. Over the course of the seventeenth century the three-field system became more widespread in the newer southern districts as a response to population growth and the decline in the size of the average pomest’e grant.87 But it was probably not yet fully established at Kozlov in the 1630s. While the district’s first endowment book did describe each grant as consisting of so many “quarters in one field, and as many in two,” this was a formulaic expression reflecting the accommodation of standardized allotment procedures to tillage systems already customary in older districts and did not necessarily describe actual cultivation practice at Kozlov. References to winter and spring sowings are likewise not enough to establish the prevalence of a true annual three-field rotation of fields of approximately equal size. An older variant involving three-year rotation on fields of unequal size was still common, as were the practices of sowing spring and winter grains on the same field and sowing the spring crop on the same field several years running; and servicemen with a large part of their grants discontiguous (for example, the servicemen of Oleshenskii bailliage) were likely to work the latter portion on a less intensive mobile fallow basis. There are references to continued reliance upon mobile fallowing in nearby Voronezh, and in some other southern districts to reversion to long-term fallow after years of the three-field rotation without manuring had exhausted the soil.88 Most likely it was a mix of mobile fallowing and some variant of three-field that characterized cultivation at Kozlov in the 1630s and 1640s. There were three reasons to think this. First, rigid adherence to the three-field system required manuring on a scale not affordable by all odnodvorets households; cartage of manure was less practical than in central Muscovy, so southern agriculturalists had to be content with the more primitive method of having their stubble-grazing livestock directly fertilize the fields, and it typically took three to six head of livestock to manure one desiatina in this fashion.89 Second, fields with black soil in the South were more quickly overrun with weeds, so the region’s farmers had additional reason to expand and prolong fallowing – for pasturage, so that their livestock could keep the weeds at bay.90 Above all, at Kozlov in the 1630s–1640s the less-intensive mobile fallow system still made productive sense given the low ratio of labor to acreage. The average Kozlov syn boiarskii was not sacrificing potential productivity by maintaining a large proportion of fallow to cultivated land

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because he lacked the labor and time to work more than a tenth of his pomest’e of 50 quarters per field. The fieldwork cycle at Kozlov began about mid-April when the soil had thawed sufficiently to start plowing for the spring sowing of rye or oats and ended in late August with the reaping of the spring planting and sowing of the winter rye crop. Because of differences in soil quality and particular shortcuts taken by southern agriculturalists (taking fewer pains in stacking ricks, threshing without prior shed drying, reharrowing rather than replowing before reseeding) the actual number of man-days and horse-days required to complete the cycle was significantly lower than in central Muscovy, but given the primitive technology available (the sokha scratch-plow and sickle, the Ukrainian plow and the scythe not yet being widely used) it still would have taken about 200 to 382 man-days and horse-days to plow, harrow, and sow a field of 50 quarters and another 245 man-days to reap it.91 If a syn boiarskii unable to count on the support labor of more than one able-bodied kinsman or prokormshchik was to make himself available for military duty he could therefore expect to work no more than a few desiatiny of his grant, leaving the rest fallow or virgin. 92 The yield averages for the seventeenth-century southern frontier estimated by V. M. Vazhinskii – 1:7 for winter rye and 1:10.5 for spring oats – derive from a sowing norm that was probably lower than prevailing practice in the region. Most other historians’ estimates fall in the range reported by Carol B. Stevens: from 1:3 for winter rye and from 1:2 to 1:6 for spring oats. According to E. A. Shevtsova, sowing norms of 8 pudy rye per quarter and 10 pudy oats per quarter with yields of 1:4 for rye and 1:3 for oats were common in neighboring Verkhotsensk canton in the 1660s. 93 If we assume the optimal cultivated acreage for a Kozlov odnodvorets household was five quarters under winter rye and an equal area under spring oats (which together would require 40–74 man-days to plow, harrow, and sow) and we accept as representative the sowing norms and yields found at Verkhotsensk, the harvests after subtracting for seed could be as much as 120 pudy (1965.6 kilos) of unmilled rye and 100 pudy (1638 kilos) of oats – theoretically enough to feed nine adult males for a year when supplemented by gardening, fishing, hunting, and gathering. 94 A household consisting of a husband and wife, one adult male support laborer, and two minor children therefore might be able to produce a grain surplus of 1400 kilos. To the southwest, near the Ukrainian frontier, animal husbandry played a significant role in the household economies of servicemen. But smaller livestock inventories seem to have been the norm farther east: at Karpov


the average syn boiarskii household kept just 2–3 horses, 1–2 cows, 1 sheep, and 5 pigs, and the average musketeer household owned 2 horses, 1 cow, 1 sheep, and 5 pigs. These figures were probably representative of early Kozlov because of the labor shortage restricting the area of haymeadow (which after all first had to be plowed if it was to lay fallow) and the danger of losing livestock to Tatar raiders. 95 Pressure to adopt a stricter and more intensive three-field regime would be felt more strongly after mid-century as Kozlov’s population grew, the fiscal and conscription demands upon households increased, and protracted mobile fallowing led to declining yields and the need to place more of the district’s virgin land and woodland under the plow. Hence Vazhinskii observes a three-fold increase in arable across 20 southern frontier districts over the period 1630–1700. At Kozlov most of this expansion of arable had to come at the expense of pasturage, meadow, and forest north of the steppe wall because until quite late in the century the Military Chancellery refused to permit pomest’e allotments beyond the wall on open virgin steppe vulnerable to Tatar raiding. 96

Market relations Under governors Birkin and Speshnev servicemen frequently complained that their rations money was useless, there being nothing to buy at Kozlov. The new district was therefore still heavily dependent upon the state provisioning system, especially upon grain, salt pork, and vodka requisitioned from Voronezh. To purchase on the market what the state did not provide, Kozlov servicemen had to ride to Voronezh, 180 kilometers away. Voronezh had emerged as the region’s leading market town soon after the Troubles – its posad contained 65 shops in 1615, and 137 by 1658 – because Voronezh pomeshchiki had numerous peasant tenants and achieved higher yields through more intensive cultivation, and because Voronezh was Muscovy’s vital link to the economy of the lower Don. Don Cossacks came up to Voronezh with fish, honey, wax, and hides to trade for grain and vodka from Voronezh and military stores and manufactures from central Muscovy.97 Unfortunately Kozlov’s dependence upon the Voronezh market continued through the rest of the century. Occasional markets trading grain for small lots of retail goods brought in by peddlers could be found at some of Kozlov’s larger villages towards the end of the century, but the town’s central market never developed into anything resembling Voronezh’s. Most of Kozlov’s urban commerce was dominated by

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a handful of cossacks and musketeers whose involvement was largely occasional; Kozlov never developed a significant posad population living off commerce and capable of organizing and capitalizing its markets and conducting regular wholesale trade with other districts. In 1646 Kozlov had just three posad housholds inhabited by nine taxpayers; three decades later there were 50 posadskie liudi with another 32 adult male kinsmen, but many of the latter were soon after taken into the army. The tradestalls of the posadskie liudi accounted for no more than 20 percent of the total turnover recorded in the customs books of 1657–1658.98 At the end of the century there were still no warehouses or gostinnyi dvor for visiting merchants, and the shops and tradestalls were open for business only on Mondays and Fridays. 99 Several factors worked to restrain the development of market relations at Kozlov. Because of its location Kozlov drew fewer Don Cossack traders than Voronezh; even Tambov, built athwart the old Odnobazarnaia trade route, was better situated in regard to commercial traffic from the lower Don. Furthermore, the tendency over the course of the century was to tighten restrictions on travel from the Belgorod Line garrisons to the Don Cossack settlements in order to prevent desertions and smuggling.100 The opportunity for the formation of a commercially oriented posad population was postponed by the enlistment policies followed during the district’s initial settlement, which made it easier for immigrants of plebeian origin to enroll in the garrison than in tiaglo, and posad growth was subsequently checked by the policy of reassigning posad taxpayers to service in the foreign formation regiments. Finally, the siabr/odnodvorets system of land tenure offered less opportunity for the development of a land market and commercialized agriculture than did the traditional pomest’e tenure prevailing in central Muscovy. The earliest surviving references to grain prices at Kozlov date from 1649 and 1650 and range from 0.02 to 0.033 ruble per pud for rye and from 0.012 to 0.066 ruble per pud for oats.101 If the typical middle service class household was actually capable of producing an annual surplus of about 700 kilos rye and 700 kilos oats it might be able to realize a profit of from 1.36 to 4.21 rubles at these prices. The higher sum was a little more than the annual cash entitlement of a second-grade novitiate and was enough to purchase an additional cow or horse. It could possibly provide the margin of survival for a family whose household head had not received his annual cash allowance for military service. But given unfavorable changes in the weather, wastage, the demands of military service, and losses to Tatar raids, it should not be assumed that a surplus of 1400 kilos could really be mobilized each year. And there is another


reason why it is unwise to extrapolate from it as to the extent of Kozlov households’ involvement in the grain market: judging from a 1699 report by the district’s customs captain, most grain sales went unrecorded because they involved small lots sold on an occasional basis in outlying villages rather than in the supervised central market.102 What Kozlov’s customs books do confirm was the absence of any regular significant wholesale grain trade in the town’s central market. The customs book for 1654–1655 – the earliest surviving – shows only two instances of merchants declaring cash earmarked for grain purchases, and they apparently found nothing to buy. Grain sales do not figure in the 1670–1671 customs book, either. Only in the years 1660–1662 do the customs records show grain sales on a significant scale. In 1660–1661 a total of 1086 rubles – 23.7% of the money for purchases declared to customs officials in 1660–1661 – was declared for grain purchases, by 36 merchants, all but one of whom came from outside the district. In the following year 1300 rubles’ worth of grain were purchased, over half of this by merchants from Zaraisk. But the years 1660–1662 were an anomaly, a reflection of the tremendous inflation in grain prices caused by the government’s currency debasement, which led grain speculators from central Muscovy to descend upon Kozlov and buy up whatever grain was available.103 By mid-century much of the agricultural surplus and investment capital that might otherwise be available to the market was being requisitioned by the state in the form of forced grain taxes, forced purchases, and forced extraordinary contributions. In December 1649 Governor Nikita Pushkin was ordered to purchase at market price 130 pudy of rye and oats from Kozlov’s middle service class households; the cash to make these purchases came from Kozlov’s liquor sales, and when that did not suffice, from confiscations: “Whoever has money at Kozlov is ordered to hand that money over to the governor for grain purchases . . . to buy grain for the new towns in which grain has not grown. And if cash is encountered on the road, being taken out to Moscow, order the courier . . . to turn back to Kozlov with that money.” A few months later Pushkin was authorized to requisition without payment an additional pud of grain from every household but was unable to meet this quota – perhaps an indication that there was little surplus left by this point. 104 In order to mobilize 1500 rubles’ worth of grain for state purchase in 1660 the Military Chancellery forbade Kozlov servicemen “to sell rye to outsiders save for thee, Grand Sovereign, or transport any grain to the Kozlov marketplace.” 105 The introduction of the chetverikovyi khleb grain tax dealt a further blow to the development of the Kozlov grain market:

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in 1662 it levied two pudy from every household in town service and by 1673 was demanding 18 pudy, a rate the tax collectors admitted surpassed the productive capacity of most households: “Many Kozlov men have fled because of grain stores, while those who have not fled pay no grain stores because of poverty. . . . Because of them many Kozlov men are poor, without grain, and no grain stores can be taken from them [even] by righter coercion.”106 The most significant entrepreneurial activity in which Kozlov’s middle service class was likely to engage was milling. Starting in 1637 small water-powered mills arose along the Lesnoi Voronezh, Ilovai, Lavrovka, and Oleshenka, most of them built by cooperatives of 15–20 siabry seeking ways to supplement their cash service compensations. Sometimes these cooperatives leased their mills for eight or so rubles a year to professional millers who could make them more profitable concerns. Initially the milling cooperatives were required to pay a few rubles’ annual rent to the state because their mills were located on pomest’e land that was officially the property of the Sovereign, but by 1675 most of them had been exempted from this because Moscow recognized their need for additional income and because Kozlov’s larger state-built treasury mill could not by itself process all the grain collected for army provisioning and the semi-annual subsidies shipped to the Don Cossack Host.107 Like its grain market, the district’s livestock market was generally decentralized, occasional, and small in scale. Cattle and smaller livestock did not figure much in the transactions recorded in the district’s customs books: in 1654–1655 ten merchants did declare 230 rubles for livestock purchases, but left without buying anything; in 1660–1661 420 rubles for purchases was declared to customs, but actual sales amounted to just 18 rubles.108 There was an unusually intense market for horses in 1660–1661, however, when 594 horses – mostly mares and fillies – were sold at Kozlov for a total value of 4412.12 rubles. About half of the horses sold at Kozlov that year were sold by Kozlov inhabitants; the buyers came from over 20 districts along the Oka, Volga, and Don. Five of the Kozlov vendors appear to be semi-vocational horsetraders with frequent dealings at Tambov, Kursk, and other towns. But the horsemarket of 1660–1661 should not be taken as evidence of some take-off in local horsebreeding; what the customs book probably recorded were resales of horses disposed on the Kozlov market by Don Cossacks (who were exempt from customs duties), and the unusually large number of horses suddenly appearing on the Kozlov market may have been connected with Muscovy’s new alliance with the Kalmyks, who had recently agreed to sell captured Crimean Tatar herds to the


Muscovite border towns. In July 1662 over 900 Nogais came up to the Kozlov–Tambov defense line with horses to trade.109 Most of the leading commodities on the Kozlov market in the 1650s were imported from the Volga, from the southwest, or from central Muscovy: salt from Nizhnii-Novgorod, Riazan’, and Moscow; iron and ironware from Romanov and Skopin; “Moscow wares” (dyes, glue, oil, vitriol, saltpetre, pharmaceuticals); paper, cloth, and notions from Moscow, Arzamas, and Iaroslavl’; and fish from Tambov. Some soap, tallow candles, and leather of local provenance were sold, along with simple craft items like bast and sieves and especially the products of forest and river enterprise – fish, honey, wax, apples, and nuts.110 Despite the fact that military colonization had greatly expanded the scale of agriculture in the Kozlov region, production for the Kozlov market thus remained largely limited to forest and river products, building upon the foundations laid by the fishing, hunting, and beekeeping leaseholds established before 1635. This pattern was not unique to Kozlov; in the districts comprising the Belgorod and Sevsk Army Groups, the ratio of forest and river products to agricultural products in general commodity circulation still stood at 35:1 at mid-century.111 Given the largely odnodvorets format of military colonization pursued in these districts, this suggests that part of the reason for the retarded commercialization of agriculture along the emerging Belgorod Line was the smaller agricultural surplus producible under odnodvorets smallholding and the intensifying conscription and taxation of the odnodvorets population in the second half of the century.

4 Governing Kozlov

The personnel of the governor’s office In longer-settled districts in the Muscovite interior the organization of administrative authority was often complex: judicial authority might be divided among the governor, the elected criminal justice elder, the elected elders and deputies of rural and urban communes, landlord’s stewards, and the archbishop, for example. But Kozlov’s population was more homogeneous, limited largely to odnodvorets servicemen and their families living under a tighter unrelieved military discipline than their counterparts in the interior. This simplified the character and structure of authority at Kozlov, militarizing it and leaving more of it concentrated in the hands of the governor and his staff ( prikaznye liudi). Of course it was still necessary for some responsibility for policing, resource mobilization, and interest representation to devolve upon the community’s elected representatives – the lower officer ranks, the assessors, and the parish clergy. This sometimes created opportunities for the community to protest, ignore, or renegotiate certain directives. The modalities and effectiveness of such resistance is an important subject, to be explored in our final chapter. The governors who followed I. V. Birkin and M. I. Speshnev continued to enroll volunteers and expand Kozlov’s fortifications. But the working orders for the terms of Governors Samoilo Ivanovich Birkin (November 1637–December 1638) and Ivan Fedorovich Kikin (December 1638–late 1639) already show greater priority given to enlarging the governor’s clerical and constabulary staff, developing local revenue sources, regulating the movement of people and commodities, policing, maintaining military discipline, and judging civil and criminal suits. Whereas I. V. Birkin and M. I. Speshnev had to prioritize the recruitment of colonists, their 152

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successors’ agendum could place greater emphasis on expanding the administrative apparatus, routinizing its operations, and strengthening its surveillance and disciplinary functions. This latter agendum still took decades to achieve because of the shortage of administrative expertise and funds, however. The Kozlov governor’s residence (voevodskii dvor) consisted of a fenced compound containing a two-storey wooden house with a veranda and extensive cellars, two older cabins in front and rear (the latter with a kitchen), a dugout bathhouse, three storage sheds, stables, and seven granaries for the district’s treasury grain stores. But the governor was supposed to conduct all official business at a separate office complex, the assembly house (s”ezzhaia izba, which after mid-century was renamed the chancellery house or prikaznaia izba in yet another sign of the increasing bureaucratization of local government). Kozlov’s assembly house, a pine building connected by a portico to a pine storehouse and archive, originally stood in the granary courtyard near the powder vault but was later moved over to the town’s east gates as a precaution against fire. Judging from descriptions of governors’ offices at other towns, its main chamber was probably hung with red draperies, with the keys to the town gate and arsenal hanging below some icons in one corner of the room. The governor sat on a cushioned bench behind a table covered with red cloth on which rested his various books and papers, inkwells, a box containing the town’s silver seal, and (after 1649) a copy of the Ulozhenie law code. The governor’s clerks sat on uncushioned benches. Guards, constables, and bailiffs stood at the doorway to await instructions or usher in petitioners. Those records not relegated to the archive shed were held in trunks or heaped about on the floor and on the benches.1 A 1647 inventory listing the records from Kozlov’s first five years of existence gives the impression of recordkeeping not yet fully routinized and systematized recordkeeping that was more likely to be initiated in response to new contingencies than continued from year to year for long-term planning and monitoring. 2 This is what one would expect of a district still in the process of colonization. Thus only certain kinds of records – muster rolls, boundary inspection books, land transfer books, land division books, registries of market shops and stalls, and annual inventory updates and budgetary estimates – came to occupy a prominent and regular place in the inventories after the 1640s, when it had become more necessary to keep frequently updated records of land alienations, shopkeepers’ rents, and customs and pothouse revenues. Nor was there yet reason to compile some of the records which governors in the

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second half of the century would have greatest need to keep close at hand for frequent reference: remand books produced in the course of dragnets for fugitive peasants; the records of grain stores collected for shipment down the Don; and collations of the testimonies given by servicemen at the general reviews (1658, 1675) of the regiments of the Belgorod Army Group. The 1647 inventory also made no mention of report drafts or rescripts on more routine matters, or inspection lists and service rolls of a more routine or ephemeral nature; these may have been shifted to the archive shed without cataloguing in the 1647 inventory, to be searched for when needed. If unlocatable they could be retrieved from the Military Chancellery. More surprising is the absence of any reference to logbooks or copybooks of incoming and outgoing communications, given their importance for information management in so many other governors’ offices. Probably Kozlov’s small clerical staff was too overwhelmed to keep up such logs and relied upon memory instead. Ivan Birkin and Mikhailo Speshnev had been able to get by with just a single resident clerk, Osip Prutskii, because many enlistees were still receiving their initiations at Moscow and most of the business of paying out cash allowances and settlement subsidies could be transacted by clerks sent down from the Military Chancellery. But by early 1637 Prutskii was struggling “day and night” to manage the expanding volume of paperwork connected with construction, land grants, and litigation, and he had not received his remuneration for the year (15 rubles and 20 measures of rye and oats) because cash and grain were in such short supply at Kozlov. He had fallen into debt just to feed himself. Moscow therefore gave permission to take on a second clerk, Ivan Shumovskii, who had a few year’s clerical experience at Valuiki but had been left penniless after ransoming his brother’s widow and children.3 Shumovskii’s entitlement was set at just five rubles, however, and Prutskii would remain unpaid up to his death in 1638 – his grain issue was even discontinued – the Military Chancellery having decided it could not afford to show special solicitude towards Kozlov’s clerks when the pay of so many clerks at Belgorod, Voronezh, Oskol’, and Novosil’ was also in arrears. It reasoned that the clerks of the southern frontier districts could support themselves from their service lands and income from court fees; this would not only save on treasury expenditure but motivate the local courts to handle more cases. Besides, it knew it could continue to find more volunteers for clerkships regardless of the niggardly remunerations it offered, as there were enough eligible older veterans who had fallen on hard times. Thus Prutskii was replaced by Mikitka Molechkin,

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who had clerked at Elets for 10 years and served at Smolensk and Tula in the foreign formation infantry and dragoons but had subsequently been reduced to “wandering with my family without any refuge . . . dying of hunger” because he had lost his land allotment. Clerk Trofim Ratov had been shot through one arm and lost an eye in the Smolensk War.4 By 1647 Kozlov’s assembly house had acquired three clerks at entitlements of 20 measures each, and they could be helped out on occasion by the public notary, an itinerant who had enrolled in the patrol cossacks and did some writing of petitions and deeds for hire. By 1700 the clerical staff had grown fivefold, with a senior signatory clerk (pod’iachii s pripis’iu) overseeing 14 clerks assigned to specialized bureaus (for cash accounts, grain accounts, judicial affairs, etc.) and periodically travelling to Moscow or Belgorod to deliver cashboxes and records or inspect troops.5 The expanding paperwork load handled in the Kozlov’s governor office by the 1660s–1670s is apparent in a later archival inventory from 1676 (Appendix III). 6 The number of rescripts and memoranda received from the central chancelleries had grown considerably, but what was especially striking was the greater number of petitions and court cases now being stored. The accumulation of paper and multiplication of tasks derived not just from the chancelleries’ demands for greater transparency but from the district population’s demands for action upon their grievances. Clerical staffing was crucial to the maintenance of chancellery authority over Kozlov and other districts. It was the clerks who logged and filed chancellery communications and drafted responses to them, compiled rolls and inventories, conducted records checks for precedents, recorded initiation testimonies and trial transcripts, kept the accounts of cash and grain and military stores received and disbursed, and kept order in the archive and treasury; they also performed tasks in the field, supervising corvee, conducting obysk polling, and surveying property boundaries. Although often underpaid they generally managed to keep the central chancelleries provided with a flow of information that was at least voluminous, if sometimes disorganized and late. This information was then used to centralize administrative initiative in the chancelleries, to compensate for the governors’ lack of expertise. Some speed and efficiency were thereby sacrificed, but this was the choice preferred by an autocracy valuing centralization above all. Because of their managerial experience and familiarity with the records some signatory clerks might be made collegial associates (tovarishchi) of their governors, sharing executive authority with them; and even ordinary

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clerks could have some input in decisonmaking because they were usually recruited from the local population and were therefore more conversant with local needs and precedents than the governors sent down from Moscow. On occasion this resulted in a clerk acting as mediator between the community and the town governor or even as a spokesman for the community against the governor, as when clerk Savin Kartavtsov fled to Moscow in 1648 to petition on behalf of the Kozlov servicemen seeking the removal of Governor Boborykin. 7 But the clerks more often sided with Moscow and the governor against their own community because they were paid officials of the chancellery apparatus and saw themselves as entitled to their own share of the district’s feeding deliveries.8 They doctored the account books to cover the traces of the governor’s and their own extortions; they quashed petitions against malfeasance; they even falsified trial records. Since clerks had access to the local treasury and controlled the processing of petitions, they could easily set themselves up among the district’s exploiters (“strong men,” sil’nye liudi) and accumulate cash, lands, and indentured labor by illegal means. Their inclination to hold themselves apart from the rest of the service community was reinforced by changes in recruitment procedures. The task of rebuilding local government after the Troubles had made it necessary to accept nearly any literate candidate for a clerical post regardless of his social origins, so the town governors had taken into their offices church clerks, the sons of priests, servicemen, merchants’ sons, the sons of taxpaying townsmen and state peasants, and declasse itinerants. After 1640 this was no longer affordable, since taxpayers enrolled as clerks thereby left the tax rolls to become men of service exempt from taxation; therefore the recruitment of clerks from taxpaying backgrounds was now forbidden and the discretion to appoint provincial clerks was limited to the central chancelleries. The recruitment of taxpayers as clerks had not been that common on the southern frontier as there were no zemskii organs from which to recruit, few large customshouses until late in the century, only occasional small colonies of taxpaying townsmen, and fewer clergymen than in more settled areas; most southern clerks were instead local or transferred servicemen. But in the south too it proved necessary to restrict social eligibility for clerical appointments – in this case to maintain garrison strengths. District musketeer and cossack contingents were fixed in size, so it would not do to allow cossacks and musketeers to enter clerical service and rise into the middle service class, thereby eroding the identity of the middle service class as a closed hereditary corporation to boot. Decrees in the

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1660s and 1670s therefore held that men of the lower service class were ineligible for clerkships. Then came measures to separate the clerical corps from the middle service class as well: deti boiarskie could be appointed as clerks only if they had been retired from military service or lacked the pomest’e lands to perform military service; sons of deti boiarskie could also be made clerks provided they had not yet been initiated into military service and their fathers had other sons to assume their service obligations when they retired or died. By the end of the century not even this was permitted; now no candidate could be appointed whose father had been registered in service or on the tax rolls. Only those whose fathers had been clerks were allowed to continue clerking in the governors’ offices. 9 There was another factor working to alienate clerks from their communities. Promotion usually occured only when the retirement or death of a senior colleague left a vacant entitlement, so it took on average five to eight years for a clerk to move up one remuneration entitlement grade. In this sense a clerical post resembled the pomest’e right of a syn boiarskii – it was an entitlement to remuneration won after lengthy service and therefore ought to be held for life if possible and transmitted to one’s son or younger brother at career’s end. This transmission was not automatic; the Military Chancellery could award the post to someone else. But as there was no institutionalized schooling for clerical service in the provinces an advantage accrued to those candidates whose fathers possessed clerical skills and who could arrange apprenticeships for them in the governor’s office. Hence hereditary clerical “dynasties” (the Panovs, Sveshnikovs, and Topil’skiis) began emerging at Kozlov as early as the 1660s.10 These clerical dynasties further distanced themselves from the Kozlov middle service class community when they began moving their members up into the central chancellery apparatus. Aleksei Topil’skii, Ivan Topil’skii, Gavrilo Sveshnikov, Mikhail Shelkovnikov, and Aleksei Panov eventually entered the Military Chancellery, while Divei Topil’skii became a clerk in the Robbery Chancellery. 11 One might think Moscow would not welcome the formation of entrenched family dynasties of clerks, as they were more likely to act as strong men, treating their offices as sinecures and using them to accumulate wealth and patronage power. In fact the government sometimes permitted the community to challenge appointments forming or extending clerical mafias. But on the whole it continued to give preference to candidates who were relatives of serving clerks because Moscow was less concerned with fighting corruption than with differentiating the clerical calling from other forms of service and with building stable, self-renewing and qualified clerical cadres. 12

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Originally Kozlov’s governors had selected servicemen on an ad hoc basis to serve as constables and messengers, but they soon shifted to the practice of attaching certain cossacks and musketeers to the governor’s office for special duty as orderlies (nedel’shchiki) on weekly rotation, with about a dozen men serving per shift. Besides acting as constables these orderlies stood guard at the treasury and other government buildings, performed courier duty, and rode as bailiffs to outlying villages to make arrests and deliver court summons, for which services they received special travel compensation of a few den’gi per mission.13 Towards the end of S. I. Birkin’s term the police establishment also included an executioner, an unspecified number of jail guards and wardens, and an elected captain and three deputies to collect customs duties and regulate market transactions. In some southern districts the town governors had direct command over the musketeer and cossack detachments, there being no musketeer or cossack captains ( golovy).14 But Kozlov had a captain of cossacks and musketeers from the start: Petr Krasnikov (December 1635–December 1639, succeeded by Vasilii Figlev). As was general practice in the south, Captain Krasnikov was a syn boiarskii of higher entitlement – in this instance 30 rubles, paid from the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery, earned from previous services as interpreter in the Ambassadors’ Chancellery, troop mobilizer, and captain at Voronezh. Krasnikov was clearly the district’s first “strong man.” He had a pomest’e of 100 quarters at the village of Staeva Poliana, worked by several fugitive peasant dependents, and he would later win appointment as governor of Taletsk. Kozlov’s satellite garrison of Chelnavsk acquired its own musketeer captain in April 1638: Putilo Bykov, who had been performing various military duties since late 1635. Bykov’s status was in no way comparable to Krasnikov’s; his entitlement was to just eight rubles, payment of which was long in arrears, and he had not succeeded in obtaining a pomest’e at Kozlov even though the Military Chancellery recognized he had been “at thy Sovereign’s affairs without deviation, and his services to the Sovereign and his zeal at the earth wall labor were great.” Bykov therefore resorted to “great bribetaking, violence, and imposts,” which led to his dismissal in July 1639. He was replaced by Afanasii Safonov. 15 Some captains – especially those of the musketeers – had sufficient administrative responsibilities to warrant having their own office cabins and clerks. Their routine duties included inspecting and disciplining their troops; supervising the allotment of the plowlands, contractually recruiting replacements, and recording allowance distributions; collecting

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cash and grain dues from their men; policing against felonies and penalizing the suretors of deserters and other miscreants; supervising whatever shops and bathhouses were run by cossacks and musketeers; and hearing suits filed against their men by outsiders. Bykov and Krasnikov also commanded combat detachments more often than their counterparts in the interior and were very involved in the supervision of fortifications labor at Kozlov. They managed the roadblock system, surveyed the Chelnavsk Forest, conducted a cadastral census for the levy of peasant militiamen to man the steppe wall, and frequently travelled to Moscow with reports. A captain’s power in the community could derive from his extralegal activities as well as his privileges of rank. Krasnikov, for example, may have been able to build a coterie among his troops by shielding from remand the many fugitives who had enlisted in their ranks. There were instances of southern musketeer and cossack captains following the example of their governors and demanding their own feedings. One of Kozlov’s later cossack captains required his men to assemble for inspection three times a week so he could have more opportunity to fine those absent without leave; the fines he extorted sometimes amounted to as much as a measure of grain per man. Because a captain could deal with the central chancelleries only indirectly, through his governor, the governor was supposed to be able to control him and punish him for any malfeasance; but working orders were not always specific enough in delimiting their respective jurisdictions, with the result that a captain could end up at odds with his governor and protest his interference in his affairs. Because of his social distance from his troops, a captain was unlikely to be able on his own to incite them to mutiny against the governor, but he was quite capable of abandoning a discredited and embattled governor and placing himself at the head of the insurgency building against him; thus captains Maksim Ostanin, Larion Petrov, and Sungur Bardakov all joined the revolt against Governor Roman Boborykin in 1648. For such reasons Moscow eventually abolished most southern captaincies and transferred their duties to the governors. The Kozlov governor assumed full military and judicial authority over the district cossacks in 1670. 16

The district service order Below these agents of the governor’s office were the elected representatives of the service community.

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There was no comprehensive district-wide organization offering representation to the middle and lower service class populations together. Kozlov did have a district service order (sluzhilyi gorod), but it was exclusively for the middle service class. It comprised the district’s contingent of middle service class cavalrymen and the rudimentary staff of officers and assessors they elected to organize themselves for muster, initiation review, campaign duty, selfpolicing, and collective interest representation. In origin the sluzhilyi gorod was the collaborative creation of the state and the middle service class, constructed upon the foundations of the muster roll and its updates at verstanie reviews. The muster roll listed the district’s serving novitiate and initiate deti boiarskie and service land atamans hierarchically, by rank and by service capacity grade, and with the names of their suretors. From this list they were mobilized into the campaign army, into cavalry centuries (sotny) under elected centurions (sotennye golovy) and their adjutants (zavoevodchiki) and standardbearers (znamenshchiki). To maintain discipline when the cavalry was not on campaign the century structure was permanently maintained at the village level by giving one or two centurions supervision over each village. 17 The village also had to elect assessors who could testify about their comrades standing for initiation or promotion at the next muster. The heightened need to collect such testimonies to reconstruct the many district muster lists destroyed in the great Moscow fire of 1626 provided further reason for Moscow to expand the practice of permitting regular election of village assessors. 18 In 1647 the Kozlov sluzhilyi gorod consisted of 1270 deti boiarskie and 150 service land atamans at 26 settlements supervised by at least 27 centurions. Another 52 elected leaders were either assessors or adjutants and standardbearers.19 The primary purpose of the sluzhilyi gorod was therefore to organize the middle service class for military duty. But by granting it the right to elect its officers and assessors the state was also recognizing for the sluzhilyi gorod certain rights of collective interest representation. Elected officers and assessors would be able to remonstrate on behalf of their electors against abuses of authority by the governor and his clerks. They could head up collective petition drives to ask Moscow for the governor’s removal or for new decrees clarifying and safeguarding community privileges. When the sluzhilye goroda of several districts cooperated in a general petitioning campaign they might even succeed in upholding or establishing rights for the middle service class population of a region or of the entire realm – winning legislation that authorized new cadastral surveys, banned settlement by men of Moscow rank in the Forbidden Towns, extended the statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive

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peasants, or restricted recruitment of peasants and pribornye liudi into its ranks.20 Some historians therefore go so far as to view the sluzhilyi gorod as a “gentry corporation,” an estate-representative institution legally recognized as the guardian of gentry rights and privileges and given at least occasional national-level representation at the Assembly of the Realm. But this claims for the sluzhilyi gorod a formal corporate existence it did not actually possess. Its elected representatives were a skeleton organization and it had no office staff or recordkeeping of its own; it took formal shape only as a muster list maintained by the governor’s office and the Military Chancellery. 21 Whereas the middle service class populations of some frontier districts (Voronezh, Riazhsk, Shatsk) did occasionally send elected or appointed representatives to the Assembly of the Realm, other districts, among them Kozlov, did not. Furthermore, the decisions most affecting the sluzhilyi gorod’s obligations and entitlements continued in practice to issue from the governor and the chancellery, and the governor pretty freely interfered in its elections. 22 Socioeconomic differentiation within the service population also tended in most districts of southern and central Muscovy to render sluzhilyi gorod solidarity largely fictive. Those who were elite in terms of rank, entitlements, and labor resources naturally sought to consolidate themselves as a more formal local political elite. A handful of vybornye and dvorovye or those few gorodovye deti boiarskie with high entitlement rates often managed to monopolize the offices of elected centurion and assessor – sometimes on a hereditary basis – in order to use the authority of these offices to dictate to the rank-and-file and give preference to their own clans and followers. They were thereby able to exempt their own clients and relatives from distant and onerous service, give testimony slighting their opponents at initiation review, and conduct property partitions and boundary reviews to their own advantage. In representing the service community before state authority they misrepresented their own narrow interests as those of the rank-and-file. On various issues they colluded with the governor and his clerks, thereby allowing the governor’s office to ventriloquize the sluzhilyi gorod’s assent and support. They enlisted the governor’s backing against their rivals or intimidated their opponents through boycott, arson, or assault. 23 Authentic sluzhilyi gorod solidarity was likely to be firmer in southern odnodvorets districts where socioeconomic differentiation was less pronounced. At Kozlov in the 1630s there was little such differentiation (no vybornye, only two dvorovye, and not more than a dozen men with entitlements over 200 quarters) and no clear indication that it

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had political consequences. There was a report that some members of the sluzhilyi gorod were issuing petitions falsely claiming to represent the grievances of the entire middle service class community, but we do not know who these men were and there is no evidence that an elite had taken control of most of the sluzhilyi gorod’s elective offices. Ten years later Kozlov did experience factional conflict, at least of a temporary nature, connected with social stratification. This is apparent in the collective petitions denouncing Governor Boborykin’s cronies and other district strong men, and especially in the assaults upon certain assessors and centurions during the rioting of June 1648. Most of the district’s elective offices in 1648 remained accessible to the rankand-file, however; only a few of those serving as assessors or centurions could be identified as strong men. In 1675 we still find the villages of Boretskii bailliage choosing as their assessors men of low rank with small pomest’ia, some of whom had not even received initiation. Nor should it be assumed that an assessor with high rank and a generous entitlement rate was necessarily well off or unlikely to have common interest with his poorer neighbors. Although Sysoevo village’s assessor Andrei Khludenev had retired from Kozlov service after 35 years with the rank of reitar, an entitlement to 200 quarters and 10 rubles, and a pomest’e grant of 60 quarters, he was impoverished, surviving only by hiring out his own labor; two of his three sons had fallen in battle in the Razin campaign and in Ukraine and the third had committed a felony and fled to the lower Don, leaving him with no labor to work his allotment.24 Kozlov’s lower service class was separately constituted under the command of the appointed musketeer captain and cossack captain, but did have its own elected lower officers, the quinquagenaries ( piatidesiatniki) and decurions (desiatniki).25 Reference can be found to at least six cossack quinquagenaries and four musketeer quinquagenaries representing the 308 campaign cossacks, 60 patrol cossacks, and 600 musketeers at Kozlov and its forts at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk in 1648; there was also an elected elder (starosta) for the town’s 50 gunners and sharpshooters.26 The elections of elders, quinquagenaries, and decurions were of course subject to review by the governor’s office and in the state’s eyes served primarily to extend and legitimate the captain’s command authority across the various sloboda colonies of the lower service class. Hence the governor retained the power to bastinado or jail elected officers who gave cossacks or musketeers leave without his permission or failed in other ways to uphold military discipline. However, there were instances in which the lower service class elected younger, less veteran men who

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resented their subordination to appointed captains of middle service class background and were ready to defy them in the defense of rank-and-file interests. Such circumstances enabled Kozlov’s cossacks, musketeers, and gunners to mount and sustain mass protest campaigns (1674, 1678–1682, 1684) against such practices as inequitable tax assessments upon their land allotments. 27 The history of subaltern protest at Kozlov indicates that it was easier to put together small short-lived coalitions uniting particular siabr collectives28 than to maintain a solidarity uniting the majority of servicemen across the district. This was in part because of the limited autonomy of the sluzhilyi gorod, but also because the middle and lower service classes had separate organizations and status claims, and it was not guaranteed that one would support the other’s grievances. In fact the state’s requirement that service corporations speak with one voice on behalf of their constituents tended to generalize conflicts that had started between particular elements within the middle and lower service classes. For example, in 1639 a collective petition in the name of Kozlov’s deti boiarskie, atamans, and campaign cossacks accused the district’s musketeers and patrol cossacks of insubordination and lawlessness. When the musketeers and cossacks countercharged them with slander they backed down and disavowed their petition, explaining that a few troublemakers had written it without the approval of the entire service corporation. This may have been the case. But soon after there were further allegations that musketeers and patrol cossacks were assaulting and robbing deti boiarskie on the roads as part of a campaign to pressure them to quit the district. Moscow instructed Governor Kikin to try to make peace by reassuring the musketeers and cossacks the other service formations had not unanimously and formally charged them with felony. If this failed he was to investigate and resort to “merciless punishment.”29

The church In central and northern Muscovy the church often exercised considerable power on the local level. But at Kozlov the church was institutionally underdeveloped, too weak to be of much assistance in reinforcing the state’s authority over the service population. The archbishop and cathedral clergy were less likely to have credible authority in the community than the village clergy elected by their parishioners. Kozlov religious institutions in this period were alternately under the supervision of Antonii, the Archbishop of Riazan’ and Murom (1637–1641,

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1644 on) or were under the direct authority of Patriarch Iosif at Moscow (1635–1636, 1642–1643). We are so accustomed to encountering a high degree of centralization in Muscovite administrative practice that it is something of a surprise to learn that neither the Archbishop nor the Patriarch had the administrative apparatus to effectively monitor the monastic, cathedral, or parish clergy at Kozlov; their interest in church operations at Kozlov was largely limited to the collection of fees from the parish clergy, and for this they had to rely upon locally elected lay tithesmen or priest elders whose services were remunerated with feeding charges they collected for themselves from the church duespayers. The Archbishop had only these tithe agents as his link to the multitude of parishes comprising his vast diocese, and the Patriarch in turn exercised only nominal supervision over him. Gregory Freeze maintains that even in central Muscovy ecclesiastic administration remained so unramified, ad hoc, and understaffed through the rest of the seventeenth century that bishops and archbishops “had no regular control over parish units; they were powerless to contain heresy, superstition, or flagrant violations of church law.”30 Georg Michels has found “substantial evidence that church attendance was very low during most of the seventeenth century and that a significant number of Muscovites did not take communion, go to confession, or have their children baptized.” 31 Until late in the century there is little to indicate that conflicts over matters of morality and family law at Kozlov were referred to ecclesiastic courts for adjudication under canon law, even though such a practice would have helped reduce case overload in the governor’s court. The kinds of matters suitable for canon law adjudication (like the case of Okulinka Kucheneva, described below) were instead heard in the court of Kozlov’s governor. This was probably because the Archbishop’s court was almost as distant as the Patriarch’s court at Moscow and his diocese was too vast to effectively adjudicate. As for the representatives of higher church authority residing at Kozlov – the monastic and cathedral clergy – they were too preoccupied with economic survival to be very effective in reinforcing state authority or even in serving the community’s spiritual needs. The launching of Kozlov’s military colonization in 1635 had checked the growth of the largest monastic votchiny in the area, the villages long held along the district’s southwestern edge by the powerful Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries based in central Muscovy. Many of their peasants fled to enroll in Kozlov’s garrison, while those who remained found their household labor resources overstrained by Kozlov fortifications corvee

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and militia levies. Servicemen continually encroached upon their apiary woods and fishing sites, and the Chudov Monastery eventually lost its claims upon the plowland fund along the Ilovai. Both monasteries’ villages along the Voronezh were finally taken over by the central government and converted into dragoon colonies in 1647 – an action tantamount to a retroactive application of the 1637 Forbidden Towns decree, establishing that large-scale ecclesiastic allodial landholding would not be permitted to coexist alongside odnodvorets smallholding in those districts which were on the front line of the southern frontier defense system. All that now remained to the Chudov and Novospasskii monasteries in the Kozlov region were a few apiary and fishing leaseholds. Other monastic establishments subsequently arose, but all were comparatively impoverished. In 1627 Dmitrii Pozharskii’s peasants had given the monk Iosif permission to build a small chapel in the woods along the Lesnoi Voronezh near Urliapovo, and in 1636 Archbishop Antonii authorized the construction of a larger wooden cathedral church and a cloister of five cells at this spot; Birkin and Speshnev then assigned this new Trinity Monastery 50 quarters of plowland and 500 ricks of haymeadow between the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh; and a few years later it obtained rent-free rights to exploit a two-wheeled mill at the mouth of the Ilovai to pay for candles, incense, icons, and other needs. But the monastery was slow to prosper. It was noted that “there are few icons and books in the church, and no bells; they must beat on a sounding-board to summon for services,” and by 1645 the monastery’s closing was being considered. In the early 1650s its fortunes temporarily improved: the cloister expanded to 10 cells with 13 monks and 8 lay servitors, a belltower and small hospital was built, 11 households of cottars were established, and another 60 quarters of plowland were acquired. Then in 1658 its economy was dealt a fatal blow when all but one of its cottars were conscripted into the army.32 A nunnery dedicated to the Prophet Elijah arose on the outskirts of town in 1636, built by Mikhailo Speshnev on the order of the Novgorod Territorial Chancellery. By 1658 it was home to 25 nuns – probably mostly local widows – but still lacked an abbess, having only a male priest presiding. For some time the Elijah Nunnery had no plowlands of its own and was entirely dependent upon charity and upon the ruga, a small cash and grain subsidy issued from the state treasury. By 1672 there was finally an abbess supervising 60 nuns, and the nunnery had obtained 20 quarters of plowland – but this was not much larger than the standard allotment to a village church and the nunnery had no peasant tenants

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to cultivate it. This made it difficult for the nunnery to pay the Archbishop the annual dan’ levy of 1.46 rubles which was assessed for serving a parish of 41 households.33 The only generously endowed establishment in the district was the town cathedral (sobor) consecrated to the Shroud of the Virgin in May 1636. Political considerations required that the cathedral stand as a monument to state as well as to ecclesiastic power, so it was built and adorned at government expense, the Great Court and Treasury Court chancelleries sending Birkin and Speshnev whatever missals, regalia, communion wine, and incense they requested.34 The cathedral church was originally supposed to be staffed by two priests, a clerk, sacristan, sexton, and communion wafer baker, all volunteers from other districts chosen by the Military Chancellery in consultation with the Patriarch. Although the cathedral clergy had no plowlands or peasants, they were exempted from the Archbishop’s annual cash levy (dan’) and they received annual ruga subsidies from the state treasury. The two priests, Eufimii Titov and Dmitrii Ermolov, were each initially entitled to eight rubles’ cash and about 2000 kilos of rye and oats annually; in their third year of service these grain issues were halved, but the cash component of their entitlements was raised to 12 rubles in compensation. They also received outlays of a few rubles to build their houses, and the governor’s office periodically paid them small fees for offering prayers for the health of the tsar.35 In return Moscow expected the cathedral clergy to assist in the policing of the district population by inculcating respect for the state order and providing guidance in doctrine and conduct to the largely uneducated parish clergy. But until mid-century the cathedral clergy were strikingly ineffective at these tasks. By 1642 Father Eufimii had driven out the cathedral’s sacristan, clerk, and baker, apparently so as not to have to share parishioners’ fees with them; yet he left town and could not be located whenever it fell his turn to sing weekly services. As a result there were often no Sunday services in the main cathedral, and no baptisms had been held in the Georgii chapel for some time: both churches “stand empty, without any singing,” the governor reported.36 To the extent that Father Eufimii exercised any real authority in the community it was as political crony of the governor rather than as shepherd of his flock; in 1647–1648 he and the cathedral priest Iakov were denounced by the community as predators and henchmen of the despised governor R. F. Boborykin. Because of the organizational and economic weakness of the higher church at Kozlov it was the parish clergy that had the greater opportunity

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to play an active role in political discourse, most often as supplicants on behalf of communal interests. This role fell to them by default, due to their social position in the villages; and they probably spoke on behalf of their parishioners with some trepidation, knowing that they ran some risk for voicing community demands the government might consider insolent. In contrast to the cathedral priest appointed by the Archbishop or Patriarch, the parish priest was elected by his parishioners, who were free to choose any candidate regardless of his social rank and regardless of whether he was the son of a priest. All that was required was that he meet the minimal standards for ordination by being able to read and to sing the liturgy. This right of election had never been prescribed by canon law; it was simply accepted as necessary because there was no ecclesiastic bureaucracy for recruiting candidates and no formal system of training for the clerical calling. 37 The parish priest was ostensibly a legal dependent of the Patriarch and Archbishop, owing them various petty dues and the annual dan’ assessment and to be tried in their courts on all charges save murder and robbery. But in practice their authority over him was largely fiscal since they lacked the machinery to effectively monitor his conduct and discipline him. Many parish priests were not even genuinely literate, having passed the test for ordination by memorizing the necessary texts or by offering bribes. Some districts in central Muscovy had a proliferation of parish priests because election to the post exempted one from state corvee and state taxes. 38 This was not the case at Kozlov or most other southern frontier towns because the smaller scale of household economy in the south made it difficult for a parish priest to support himself. Only a small proportion of the parish clergy in post-Troubles Muscovy received the ruga tithe; their income derived from small allotments of glebe plowland, the fees and tips they received from baptisms and confessions, and side employment. At 13 of Kozlov’s 23 villages Birkin and Speshnev had set aside plowland allotments of 20 quarters per field for parish chapels. This was at the upper end of the glebe allotment range in the south (and in some other districts actual holdings were considerably smaller), but it should be kept in mind that 20 quarters was less than half the land allotted a syn boiarskii and in this instance was supposed to suffice to feed a priest, a sexton, and a communion wafer baker and their families. Few parish clerks had peasant tenants helping them to work these allotments. By 1647 there were 27 parish churches in the district and at least 43 ordained parish priests, but there were just 14 cottars living on parish land, at three churches in the slobody of the

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service land atamans, gunners, and patrol cossacks; none of the clergy in middle service class parishes farther from town had any peasant tenants and therefore had to till their plowlands on their own and struggle to collect enough in fees and honoraria to meet the archbishop’s dan levy and his tithesmen’s feeding assessments.39 In 1647 several Kozlov parish priests filed complaint that their dues burden was extortionate. They also expressed resentment of the cathedral clergy, who held power in the town and drew generous ruga subsidies while neglecting their duties at the cathedral. 40 The comparative deprivation that alienated the parish priest from the privileged cathedral priest and from the archbishop and his tithesmen made him the logical candidate to speak for the interests of his parishioners, the servicemen who were his neighbors in the village. He could of course refuse to confront state authority on their behalf, but his community had cause to consider him obliged to try. He usually came from the same home district and same social milieu as his parishioners and owed his office to their mandate. They had elected him, built and maintained his church at their own expense, and taken turns helping him to till his plowland. They had already come to expect of him the basic spiritual services the cathedral clergy were neglecting, and they believed him to be all the more accountable to them because he obviously had so little real accountability to the Archbishop. Above all, his village was a siabr commune, and his parish therefore coterminous with the commune. It was in the refectory of his church that the commune convened to apportion plowlands, resolve disputes, and draw up legal documents; the commune’s record books and deeds were stored in the church archive; and he or his sexton was most likely the only literate member of the commune trusted to sign deeds, testimonies, and petitions for illiterate individuals and for the commune as a corporate entity. When the commune needed to present its grievances to the state, it called on him to draft and sign its petition, publicize and circulate it within the district, and issue part of parish funds to whomever was selected to carry the petition to Kozlov and to Moscow.41 The village priest put himself at considerable risk in assuming the responsibility for writing, signing, and presenting community petitions. If the petition made what the state considered nonnegotiable demands or merely failed to use properly supplicatory language, it might be treated as seditious; and the priest was likely to be punished for this, especially as his might be the only signature on the petition. Because of his low rank and humble origin the village priest had no truly sanctified aura with which to shield himself in the event he angered the governor.

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Thus Governor Boborykin, who considered Father Savva of Egor’evskii parish a nuisance, reportedly beat him and knocked the crucifix from his hand when Savva came to Boborykin’s house after Easter matins to bless him.42 Yet in 1647 we find a significant part of the Kozlov parish clergy defending community interests in a directly confrontational manner, not only denouncing the cathedral clergy but demanding the governor’s resignation. They risked this because they also had grievances of their own to press, complaints of extortion and illegal corvee impositions – including labor for the governor’s household – that threatened to ruin them and their families.

Taxation While Kozlov servicemen had good reason to complain of the burden of defense duty and fortifications corvee they were required to bear, the cash and grain levies assessed them were comparatively light up to the late 1650s. The central government did not want to overburden their small odnodvorets household economies while it was still counting on them to fortify and patrol the frontier. The necessity of subjecting odnodvorets households to some of the same taxes borne by tiaglye liudi in order to support protracted operations by the new foreign formation regiments off in Ukraine had not yet arisen; and the government expected that most local administrative expenses and allowances would continue to be covered by revenues mobilized outside the district. The only local revenue sources being exploited at Kozlov were indirect in form, charges on use and exchange, for which men of service as well as men of draft had traditionally been liable – customs and tavern duties, judicial duties, leases on state properties, and a few other small ad hoc collections – and they yielded very little. The operations of the Kozlov governor’s office therefore remained heavily dependent upon subsidy from the central chancelleries. The costs incurred by January 1639 for munitions and equipment, remuneration for labor on the town and its steppe fortifications, settlement subsidies, and annual service compensations likely exceeded 27,000 rubles. A few hundred rubles more would have been necessary for miscellaneous petty expenditures: to purchase paper, ink, and candles for the governor’s office; to issue supplemental rations to troops sent out on special missions; to pay honoraria and ruga tithes to local clergymen; and to offer some relief to widows and impoverished servicemen. 43 To meet the larger costs of construction, munitions, settlement subsidies,

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and service allowances it had been necessary to bring down funds from Moscow and grain from Voronezh, and it is doubtful Kozlov’s local revenue sources would have been sufficiently developed by 1639 to mobilize even a few hundred rubles for miscellaneous petty expenditures.44 In the fall of 1638 Governor Samoilo Birkin tried to reduce Kozlov’s dependency on subsidy through the Military Chancellery by founding a customs office to collect duties on district commerce. But the customs system then in effect imposed so many different duties on goods and transactions as to discourage Kozlov’s commercial development, thereby unwittingly prolonging the district’s dependence on outside funding and grain provisioning. There were two available models for organizing customs collection at Kozlov: duties could either be collected “on oath,” that is, by unremunerated elected officials, or “on franchise” by revenue-farmers. The perceived advantage of the former was that elected customs officials could be put on surety bond and held accountable for every kopek of shortfall from the annual collection quota Moscow had set them, and if the customs captains and their deputies were unable to repay the shortfall under righter coercion it could then be exacted from their electors.45 But during the reconstruction following the Troubles the government had often had to settle for the alternative practice of collecting on franchise, allowing revenue-farmers to pocket most of the profits above the annual collection quota. This was because the chancelleries and town governors were then too preoccupied with other matters to provide adequate supervision of collections on oath, and because those most experienced in commercial matters and prosperous enough to cover revenue shortfalls – the merchants and taxpaying posad shopkeepers – found revenue-farming (at least in commercially developed districts) more rewarding than unremunerated service as elected customs officials. For Kozlov the Military Chancellery initially opted for collection on franchise. On 1 September 1638 S. I. Birkin put up for franchise the right to collect Kozlov’s custom for one to three years. Apparently no one offered the minimum bid of 40 rubles, seeing too little promise of profit – so in November the Military Chancellery resorted to collection on oath, authorizing the Kozlov service population to select a customs captain and three deputies from among its most reliable and prosperous members. Moscow recognized that these posts would probably all fall to servicemen, the district lacking townsmen or court peasants with experience in commerce. On 10 December the district chose syn boiarskii S. A. Fefilov as customs captain, with two cossacks and a gunner as his deputies. They were to serve until the next elections on 1 September 1639.

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The customshouse also needed a clerk, but at that time Birkin had only one clerk in his own office and could spare no one for this. 46 Collection on oath was governed by ordinance charters which laid down comparatively detailed norms concerning monthly and annual accounting, supervision by the governor, and the illegality of unauthorized expenditure. But Kozlov’s elected customs officials were not always capable or willing to observe these norms; in 1642, for example, they had to be bastinadoed and forced to make restitution after illegally loaning the revenues they had collected over the last five months to the shopkeeper Mikhail Cherkashenin, who then lost the money when thieves broke into his shop.47 It was difficult to find literate and experienced candidates willing to serve, since they received no special remuneration for their duty while facing heavy fines, confiscations, or corporal punishment for malfeasance or merely for failure to meet collection quotas. Across the country there were instances of men fleeing to other districts to avoid election to the customshouse, as well as instances in which the richest and most powerful members of the community rigged the elections to saddle the poorest men with the burden of customs work. 48 Before 1653 – when a single standard duty was created, marking the emergence of a more unified national market – there were considerable local variations in the types of duties collected and their value. 49 Kozlov’s customs ordinance charter prescribed over 20 different fees, duties, and tolls. Some kind of charge was assessed on virtually every conceivable marketing transaction: on merchant travel and the transport of goods, on both purchase and sale, on the unloading and weighing and storing of goods, and on the recording of fees. Even passing merchants who were not planning to stop at Kozlov for marketing transactions were still required to declare their wares at the customshouse and pay a duty of 0.01 ruble; the duty on wares intended for sale was 0.01 ruble, and the fine for attempted circumvention customs was set at 2.12 rubles. The most important single charge was the ruble duty (rublevaia poshlina), which at Kozlov was assessed from both buyer and seller 2.5 percent of the total cash value passing between them.50 These duties were designed with some protectionist intent, with rates differentiated so that local vendors paid less than merchants arriving from other districts; the latter paid storehouse charges at six times the rate of Kozlov merchants, for example. But for both groups the great variety of duties was irksome; not only did it complicate the merchant’s task of calculating in advance all his costs on a commercial journey, but the many small charges could add up to significant sums once goods had been transported, declared, weighed and warehoused, and these

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costs were especially hard to absorb at Kozlov, where most commodities were cheap staples marketed in small lots. This complicated array of dozens of different small charges suggests that government policy in the 1630s and 1640s remained shortsighted, more interested in squeezing revenue out of every transaction than in using customs policy to foster commercial expansion.51 Even then the revenue yield at Kozlov was modest; the first mentioned gross annual yield, from 1642–1643, was just 133.5 rubles. The 1653 reform brought some improvement: 178.81 rubles were collected in 1654–1655, indicating total cash turnover on the Kozlov market had been about 3500 rubles that year. In 1670–1671, 314.28 rubles were collected. 52 By the summer of 1638 Kozlov also had a liquor distillery and government tavern (kabak) held on franchise, but nothing is known of their operations and revenues before mid-century. The state collected rent on mills and bathhouses, and starting in the late 1640s from some shops and stalls in town; but the revenue from Kozlov shop rents in 1648–1649 amounted to only 6.66 rubles.53 The governor’s working order also authorized him to collect judicial duties: the grivna duty (10 percent of the cash value of each suit), the pravyi desiatok (a verdict fee of 10 percent of suit value), and peresud (for case review, at 0.76 ruble per case). 54 These revenues were earmarked for local expenditure, the grivna duty applied towards various local expenditures, the other two duties usually towards maintenance for clerks, constables, and other court personnel. They were mandatory for most litigants, although musketeers and cossacks were exempted from the grivna duty when the value of their suits exceeded 12 rubles, as were plaintiffs suing musketeers for values greater than 100 rubles. Between 16 July 1648 and 25 November 1649 the Kozlov governor collected 66.87 rubles in grivna and peresud duties. There were also fees for constables serving summons; various duties on the signing and stamping of instruction memoranda, investigation authorizations, and judgment charters; charges for fettering and feeding prisoners; and revenue from auctions of the property confiscated from the convicted.55 In exempting lower service class troops from grivna duties on smaller suits the government intended to protect them from strong men seeking to harass them with trumped-up slander suits; in some districts it also placed musketeers’ suits under the juridiction of the musketeer captain, leaving the governor only the right of review over such cases, lest the governor engineer such harassing suits in order to collect more in judicial duties. In 1638 Kozlov’s cossacks and musketeers petitioned against the governors of Kozlov and other towns, accusing them of illegally charging

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them judicial duties on cases under 12 rubles’ value and profiting from the frivolous and slanderous suits being filed against them. Moscow ordered the governors to desist from this practice.56 Unlike liability for indirect duties (poshliny), liability for direct taxes was socially differentiated. Men of service were legally free and therefore ostensibly tax-exempt, not held responsible for tiaglo, the cash and natural direct taxes and state corvee borne by peasants and townsmen and assessed by sokha or inhabited quarter.57 By the 1630s, however, some southern servicemen were already being assessed certain direct levies (podati) in cash, kind, or labor service that were not so different in form from the tiaglo rendered by unfree taxpayers. Were these levies in force at Kozlov as well? And at what point in their evolution could it be said they set precedent for the eventual reclassification of much of the southern odnodvorets populations as taxbearing state peasants? One of the most important early examples of such levies was the duty of southern frontier servicemen – most often cossacks and musketeers – to perform agricultural corvee on the tsar’s demesne lands alongside or in place of peasants. Such desiatinnaia pashnia corvee was introduced in the late sixteenth century in Belgorod, Voronezh and certain other southern districts assigned to amass state grain reserves for siege provisioning, famine relief, seed, and service compensations. But it seldom produced respectable yields, and it was so despised by servicemen as an interference with their other duties and an insult to their status that the rising of some southern towns against Godunov during the Troubles has been attributed to it. Other revolts against desiatinnaia pashnia corvee took place in the 1630s–1640s after Moscow had tried to extend it into other districts. Thereafter it was commuted to direct payments in kind, called posopnyi khleb or otsypnyi khleb.58 After the Troubles major undertakings like the Smolensk War were subsidized by extraordinary cash levies like fifths money, a 20 percent levy on those with annual personal income over 10 rubles, and because few peasants had such income it fell upon servicemen not in active service as well as elite merchants, clergymen, and zakhrebetnik boarders. Servicemen engaged in commerce might also be assessed an extraordinary cash levy called on-demand money (zaprosnye den’gi), which had no fixed rate. In 1637–1638 “cash for field army compensations” was collected to pay for construction and manpower mobilization on the new Belgorod Line and for the repair of the Abatis Line; it was assessed on cadastrally registered land at socially differentiated rates, so that an inhabited quarter held by clergymen paid 1.20 rubles; by servicemen of Moscow rank and elite merchants, 0.60 rubles; by taxpaying townsmen and

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court peasants, 0.50 rubles; and by deti boiarskie, 0.30 rubles. In 1638 this levy yielded 72,309 rubles in addition to 5687 peasant militiamen and 3280 requisitioned horses.59 Some smallholder servicemen in Elets, Riazhsk, Dankov, and Lebedian’ were even permanently reclassified outright as tiaglye liudi when they settled on abandoned taxbearing allotments, Moscow having decided it needed the tax revenues from these lands more than it needed continued military service from their new occupants. 60 But before mid-century Kozlov’s odnodvortsy were not held responsible for any of these ordinary or extraordinary direct levies. Desiatinnaia pashnia corvee was imposed on nearby Sokol’sk, but not on Kozlov. The principal grain taxes (osadnyi khleb, zaprosnyi khleb, chetverikovyi khleb) assessed upon southern servicemen as well as men of tiaglo were not introduced at Kozlov until 1649. 61 Peasants and townsmen had been paying the musketeers’ grain tax (streletskii khleb, to provide service compensations for musketeers) since the Time of Troubles, but it was not assessed upon servicemen until the second half of the century and then did not spread that rapidly and widely across the South; in the early 1660s it was being levied only in the older districts predating the founding of the Belgorod Line. 62 The extraordinary cash levies fell mostly upon the central and northern districts and there is no mention of their collection from Kozlov servicemen in the 1630s. The practice of reclassifying men of service as men of tiaglo occurred only when servicemen settled on abandoned taxbearing land, and then only in those districts which (unlike Kozlov) were under the jurisdiction of the Service Lands Chancellery. 63 Probably the only cash dues Kozlov servicemen paid in the first half of the century were captive ransom money ( polonianichnye den’gi) and occasional petty levies ad hoc. Captive ransom money served to ransom Russian prisoners from the enemy, and while serf-owning members of the middle service class did not have to pay it, odnodvorets deti boiarskie and cossacks and musketeers joined men of tiaglo in paying it. In 1668 Kozlov paid 42.29 rubles in captive ransom money (4015 households of servicemen paid at 0.01 ruble per household; 41 households of townsmen paid at 0.04 ruble per household; and 25 households of free hired laborers paid at 0.02 ruble per household). But its yield in 1638 – if it was already being assessed – would probably have been only about 10 rubles, and captive ransom money was not collected every year.64 The money to build and maintain Kozlov’s treasury buildings, provision the governor’s office with paper, candles and fuel, and pay special personnel like executioners, jailers, and town criers had to come out of judicial

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and customs duties, or if these sources were inadequate, from various petty levies ad hoc. The town executioner recruited in 1638 had a grant of eight quarters per field but also an annual cash compensation of two rubles, paid out of judicial revenues; meanwhile Kozlov’s jailers and jail deputies received assistance subsidies specially levied for this purpose on a sokha or inhabited quarter basis (by 1677 these subsidies were costing each Kozlov servicemen 0.03 ruble). 65 The drawback of special ad hoc collections was that they were more likely to turn extortionate; hence 150 musketeers at Bel’sk Fort complained in 1647 they were being assessed an annual total of 4.5 rubles for jailer subsidies, contrary to the practice in other towns, and frequent abuses finally forced the government to abolish special levies for the construction of jails and governors’ residences in 1679.66 The most burdensome dues were labor services – not easily quantifiable in cash terms, but the subjects of the greatest complaint by servicemen. Smallholders without peasants personally performed fortifications corvee at the town and along the steppe wall, for there was considerable repair work and new construction even after the terms of Birkin and Speshnev. It is likely this was the most resented part of a serviceman’s fiscal burden because it limited the time he could spend on the cultivation of his own lands; for this reason escalating fortifications corvee demands helped spark the 1648 mutiny at Kozlov. Other labor services included the feeding of the mounts provided to the Moscow musketeers temporarily stationed at Kozlov, and transporting stores and personnel, which required servicemen rent horses and carts and provide drivers and road supplies. 67 It was also common for the governor and his clerks to collect cash, food, and labor services from the community for their personal use. This practice was called feeding (kormlenie). General prestations from the entire community were made upon the new governor’s arrival and on particular holidays; in addition, individuals or groups of petitioners presented gratuities and honoraria to encourage the governor’s office to respond expeditiously to their requests. Officially, feeding remuneration was supposed to have been abolished with the zemskii reform of the mid-sixteenth century, and the central government tried to suppress it again in 1620. But in fact it persisted through the seventeenth century because the governors and clerks considered the service allowances they received from the central treasury insufficient to cover their expenses in the provinces, and because communities could sometimes turn feeding to their own advantage, using it to obligate local officials and make them more solicitous of community interests. Therefore Moscow had to

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continue countenancing it as long as subjects’ prestations did not turn into bribes establishing private solidarities prejudicial to state interests and as long as local officials did not demand feeding prestations so excessive as to provoke local unrest or endanger the community’s ability to pay its taxes. Feeding had two faces, then. On the one hand, it was one of the principal ways governors from the metropolitan nobility exploited the governed for personal gain; on the other, it could also serve as a form of generalized exchange enabling local society to negotiate favors or the mitigation of state requisitions from officialdom. In northern Russia, where the feeding tradition was more deeply rooted and where taxpayers’ elected zemskii representatives kept detailed records of their prestations, the annual value of a district’s feeding payments to its governor and clerks might be as much as 500 or 1000 rubles. 68 Feeding demands upon southern frontier communities consisting largely of free servicemen were probably not as heavy, though they may also have been more likely to be disguised as other charges; for example, Kozlov governor Roman Boborykin demanded his servicemen turn over horses and purchase fancy saddlebags at 0.50–0.60 ruble apiece.69 In some cases southern governors and clerks also falsified official dues accounts or withheld receipts to dues-payers in order to charge them more than was authorized.70 The existence of such unofficial or illegal levies makes it harder to estimate the total average fiscal burden per odnodvorets household. V. M. Vazhinskii believes the average annual cash, grain, and corvee dues burden on a southern frontier odnodvorets household at mid-century was about 3.5 rubles.71 This was a great sum, given the small scale of odnodvorets acreages and allowance rates; it was the cost of one good horse or 175 pudy of rye at Kozlov market prices. But Kozlov’s servicemen probably did not carry so heavy a fiscal burden, as several of the dues included in Vazhinskii’s calculation (corvee on the Sovereign’s tithe demesne, grain taxes) did not yet apply to them. The fiscal burden borne by Kozlov’s service population in the second half of the century is another matter. After the completion of the Belgorod Line there was less need to keep as much of Kozlov’s large garrison population ready for local defense duty, and with the outbreak of the Thirteen Years’ War heavy new grain and cash taxes, labor levies, and troop levies were imposed upon the service populations of Kozlov and other Belgorod Line districts to support Belgorod Army Group operations in Ukraine. The main objective of fiscal policy on the southern frontier thereby shifted from collecting petty indirect charges and ad hoc direct dues for local expenditure to collecting heavier tiaglo-form

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direct dues (notably chetverikovyi khleb) for the Belgorod Army Group. As we shall see, by the late 1660s Kozlov servicemen considered the burden of taxation and conscription they bore to have reached ruinous proportions. It was from this time that their increasing subjection to the same direct taxes borne by tiaglye liudi also set the precedent for their eventual loss of juridical freedom. Towards the end of the century part of the southern service population – those not in active service in the regiments – would be forced to pay a prototype of Peter I’s soul tax to support their comrades in the regiments, thereby beginning the process of reclassifying them as unfree taxpayers equivalent in legal status to state peasants.

Restrictions on movement By the time of S. I. Birkin and I. F. Kikin most of the same police apparatus and norms that regulated community life in the older districts of the heartland was in place at Kozlov. To establish and maintain order the governor’s office could rely upon its captains and constables and also upon the decimal hierarchy of elected officers, the self-interest of siabr collectives, and the surety bonding of every individual. A permanent system of proactive surveillance to prevent the spread of fires, epidemics, immorality, felony and banditry, riot, and seditious discourse was in effect. This surveillance could take highly intrusive forms. To protect Kozlov from fire, for example, the working order to Governor Kikin (1638) required residents living within the outer palisade to obtain the governor’s permission to heat their houses in warm weather and to do all their cooking and baking in outdoor ovens set up in their gardens.72 By 1661 those free Kozlov residents not already enrolled in military service were assigned to special decuries for neighborhood night watches and fire patrol duty, under penalty of bastinado for noncompliance. 73 The record of this surveillance activity suggests that Kozlov was more intensely policed than the longer-settled districts of central Muscovy. The heavier hand of police power at Kozlov was connected with the special circumstances of frontierity: the more pervasive and sustained militarization of Kozlov’s community life, for example, and the character of local settlement patterns and siabr’ land tenure, which tended to embed the individual more deeply in the collective. It also reflected the fact that police authority at Kozlov was less divided, more thoroughly concentrated in the hands of the governor. In central and some parts of southern Muscovy the authority to arrest

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and investigate violent felonies was removed from the governor and vested in an elected criminal justice elder ( gubnoi starosta) responsible directly to the Robbery Chancellery. The criminal justice elder was usually a retired syn boiarskii (in southern districts, often one of higher entitlement) elected by or confirmed by acclamation by the district middle and lower service classes; district taxpayers joined servicemen in choosing his deputies. Although many criminal justice elders appear to have made themselves despised as extortionists of bribes and protectors of the district strong men, their presence at least gave the community greater control over the exercise of police power, and for this reason the criminal justice elder was usually the community representative best positioned to defend community rights against the town governor. At Voronezh and Kursk the criminal justice elders even placed themselves at the head of open mutinies against their governors.74 But Kozlov elected its first gubnoi starosta, P. I. Ovinov, quite late, in 1658, and did away with the office altogether three or four years later. The Kozlov governors thereafter directly supervised criminal justice matters in Kozlov district and reviewed cases the lower-ranking prikaznye liudi in Lebedian’, Dankov, Dobryi, and Sokol’sk districts lacked the authority to resolve (the Kozlov community did still elect deputies to verify that the governors’ investigations and hearings followed proper procedures, however). Nationally the elected criminal justice elders were abolished and their powers transferred to the town governors in 1679, ostensibly to spare the populace the cost of their feedings, and although criminal justice elders were reestablished in 1684 they were now merely subordinates of the governors, responsible just for making arrests and impounding contraband. 75 An important policing function was the surveillance and control of population movement. The years 1635–1638 had seen a temporary liberalization of regulations on geographic as well as social mobility, with the Military Chancellery choosing not to look too closely at the status of Kozlov-bound volunteers in order to populate its garrison as quickly as possible; but even in those years visitors were interrogated at roadblocks and at the governor’s office and enlistees travelling back and forth between Kozlov and their previous residences had to bear passes (otpuski) issued by the governor. After the tightening of eligibility standards for recruitment in 1638 restrictions on travel were correspondingly strengthened. Whereas private and court peasants travelled on documents issued by their stewards or village elders, servicemen and taxpaying townsmen required passes from the governor’s office. The governor was expected

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to report to Moscow on every pass he issued, regardless of the grounds on which release had been requested – even if for just a few days to Voronezh to buy grain or to revisit and close down one’s old pomest’e in another district. Permission for leave had to be carefully rationed out lest too many servicemen absent themselves from defense duty and fortifications corvee. Sometimes the governor was forbidden to issue passes to certain categories of men – officers whose absence would have been especially disruptive, for example – without prior authorization from the Military Chancellery. Governors were expected to be especially cautious in issuing passes to travel to Moscow, a large city in which a petitioner might be tempted to permanently disappear, or to the lower Don, where the encampments and hamlets of the Don Cossacks offered a haven to deserters. Unless the purpose of travel had been to petition the chancelleries against the governor’s malfeasance, departure without the governor’s pass was considered tantamount to desertion and was punished by knouting or by bastinado and imprisonment. 76 All visitors stopping anywhere in Kozlov district had to report to the governor’s office for interrogation and registration (iavka); this testified to the effort to monitor travel more closely on the southern frontier than in central and northern Muscovy, where it was usually enough for the visitor to declare himself to village officials. No one could stay in Kozlov or its outlying villages without such iavka, regardless of whether he was a stranger travelling on business or a visiting relative of local residents. The governor examined each traveller’s papers; logged his name, his rank and home town, the purpose of his visit, and the names of his hosts; and then placed him in eye-to-eye confrontment with the residents he had named as his hosts and acquaintances. If they disavowed him or were unable to vouch for him, he was placed on bond or jailed until his identity and intentions could be verified or request for his extradition was received. He could be questioned under torture if he was of taxbearing status and he was suspected of some felony or espionage. Residents who hosted unregistered visitors were subject to fines and corporal punishment. 77 The Razin Rebellion (1666–1671) convinced Moscow of the need to tighten restrictions on traffic, especially on traffic to and from the lower Don. In 1671 the Military Chancellery authorized the creation of several permanent checkpoints along the principal highways (at Tarbeev Ford, for Kozlov district) and decreed that any serviceman seeking to travel south to the Don had to submit to his governor a written petition giving his name, the purpose of his journey, the name and town of origin of every man accompanying him, and the expected duration of

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the journey. The governor had to log all this information in a special book, put the travellers on surety bond, and issue them a letter of transit ( proezzhaia pamiat’) The letter of transit more closely resembled a passport than the old otpusk pass; it even had to give a physical description of each member of the travelling party and had to bear the governor’s personal signature (simply stamping it with the seal of the governor’s office was no longer sufficient, the governor now having to personally vouch for the travellers). The letter of transit had to be produced at every town and checkpoint en route, and the penalties for violators of the new ordinance were raised to “merciless” corporal punishment, confiscation of pomest’e and cash compensation, and exile to Siberia for life. 78 A likely motive for these tougher regulations was to finally establish an official border between Muscovite territory and the lands of the Don Cossack Host and increase vigilance against Don Cossack smuggling and subversive infiltration. The interrogations attending iavka and the issue of letters of transit also made it easier to sniff out renegade Russians spying for the Crimean Khan – there were such traitors, and in 1646 their reconnoitering had helped the Tatars penetrate the Belgorod Line – or Ukrainian spies infiltrating on behalf of the renegade hetmans. Fears of enemy infiltration were so great by the late 1660s that Kozlov’s governor Andrei Shchepotev, having heard that Belgorod authorities arrested spies in clerical garb sent by renegade Hetman Briukhovetskii, immediately resorted to torture to interrogate a Ukrainian monk found sleeping on the porch of the Krivaia Poliana parish church and unable to produce Kozlov acquaintances who could vouch for him.79 The new ordinance of 1671 was also motivated by efforts to keep the service rolls and tax rolls of southern frontier districts at full strength. In April 1672 the governors of all towns in the Belgorod Army Group were ordered to conduct censuses recording the rank or estate, district of origin, and date of arrival of every resident man of service or draft. Copies of these censuses were to be sent to Kursk where G. G. Romodanovskii, the Army Group’s commander, was to compile a general summary for the Military Chancellery. This was needed because Moscow had learned that some governors were illegally placing fugitive servicemen and taxpayers from other districts on their service rolls or tax rolls, settling them as zakhrebetnik boarders or polovinshchiki, or remanding them to landlords without Moscow’s authorization. Governors caught committing such violations were now to be exiled to Siberia. 80

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As measures to combat desertion, mandatory otpusk and iavka in one sense testify to the practical limits of state power; they were an extreme recourse necessitated by the ineffectiveness of all other available deterrents. The existing penalties for desertion were all counterproductive: the standard five-ruble deduction from entitlement imposed for desertion would have ruined the average Kozlov odnodvorets; confiscating his pomest’e essentially dismissed him from service altogether; conscripting his harborers or holding his family hostage until he turned himself in tended to spread the spirit of resistance through the rest of the community; and hanging him ended any chance of ever rehabilitating him for service. Therefore the state had little choice but to divert much of its resources to regulating a serviceman’s movements so as to deny him any opportunity to desert.81 On the other hand, mandatory otpusk and iavka had some ideological value to the state as emblems of the autocratic power it claimed. Even on the distant frontier the chancelleries regularly displayed the power to ration out permission to travel, even for one’s livelihood. This communicated that everyone had his place and his temporary presence elsewhere was allowed only with registration and on surety bond; permission for him to visit relatives or ride to Voronezh to buy grain could be obtained only from the state, through supplication. The requirement of otpusk and iavka of course also assisted in the immobilization of peasant tenant labor in the districts to the north. Once Kozlov’s lower service contingents were in place and the 1613 clause had been annulled, it made sense to enforce iavka more energetically so as to deny fugitives haven at Kozlov and thereby ease the remand case load in the governor’s court. Greater attention to this task is already apparent in the 1638 working order to Governor Kikin. With the completion of the enserfment process in 1649 serfowners expected the government to place more of its power at their disposal for the full immobilization of the peasantry. We therefore find the state authorizing selective application of the death penalty to deter mass flight by slaves, and the knouting of those caught harboring fugitives (1655, 1658); requiring that governors leave no deed or other transaction on dependent laborers unregistered, and that they send the Military Chancellery the logs recording their interrogations of all new arrivals; creating special new steppe patrols and roadblocks to prevent flight to the Don Cossack Host; and of course organizing mass dragnets out of the Chancellery of Investigative Affairs to take the initiative in locating and remanding runaway serfs.82 Of course the Military Chancellery also chose when to relax such controls in order to channel some peasant

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flight into new districts on the Belgorod Line and exempt from remand those who had settled in these districts before 1649.

Vagabonds and bandits One might think that another motive for such close regulation of population movement would be to eliminate the threat to property and peace from vagabondage. In early modern Western Europe the rise of vagabondage – a consequence of the capitalist transformation of rural economy – was considered to pose a double threat: vagrants were suspected of an innate inclination towards larceny, and their “choice” of idleness over productive labor was also a moral offense against the construction of a culture of wage labor. Therefore the campaign against vagabonds in Western Europe started in the early sixteenth century with measures to expell and exclude them in order to protect local property and culminated in the late seventeenth century with measures to immobilize them alongside the local poor in workhouses and set them to rehabilitative labor at wages set by the local authorities. 83 But in Muscovy there was less need to dedicate police resources to such a campaign. Muscovite law did hold certain kinds of strangers under automatic suspicion. The Ulozhenie prescribed that travellers with clipped ears (the mark of conviction of a felony) were to be jailed and investigated if they bore no papers certifying they had been released from jail in other districts. 84 In the Voronezh region in the 1650s all travellers save merchants were detained in jail until their identities could be verified; this was an emergency response to an upsurge in violent crime committed by fugitive peasants.85 And poor itinerants were more likely to be singled out for detention because as vagrants they were less likely to be able to give convincing account of themselves.86 But the law did not explicitly mark vagrants as a category under automatic suspicion of criminality. While the Ulozhenie did provide for the torture of a vagrant, this was only after he had been accused of crime by an informer and recognized by him at eye-to-eye confrontment, and if no members of the polled community could vouch for his character; and he had to be freed on bond if he did not confess under torture.87 The mandatory registration of every visitor and the requirement he find lodgment with a responsible host could certainly serve to turn out vagrants, but at Kozlov and other southern districts it was much more likely to be used to achieve the opposite, to attach vagrants, Kozlov’s smallholders being eager to sign surety for

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itinerants whose labor they could then exploit on a contractual basis as their boarders and cottars. Because state service, limited service contract slavery, and serfdom so readily absorbed vagrants no elaborate discourse and code of sanctions was needed to establish that vagrancy by itself threatened the moral order, and no system of workhouses was needed to reclaim vagrants for honest wage labor. 88 While the state did act in the 1680s and 1690s to round up itinerants and enroll them as “treasury cottars” or as infantrymen in the Belgorod Army Group, this was undertaken to expand the tax rolls and muster rolls, not because of any need to eliminate vagabondage as a major threat to property right and capitalist morality. 89 One of the most obvious tests of the state’s powers of social regimentation was its ability to protect against banditry in the provinces. In the sixteenth-century brigandage more than any other form of crime had spurred the systematization of criminal justice norms in the Muscovite guba and zemskii charters and the 1550 Sudebnik Law Code. It seems to have remained pandemic a century later. Adam Olearius, Ivan Pososhkov, and Iurii Krizhanich (who placed some of the blame on the collusion of underpaid provincial officials) saw it as so,90 and Moscow’s continuing concern about the problem is evident in its New Decree Statutes on Theft, Robbery, and Murder Cases (1669), which reemphasized the community’s duty to inform and hunt down suspects and those who harbored them, provided for the despatch from Moscow of special inquisitors leading military detachments, expanded use of the inquisitorial method in hearing banditry cases, and prescribed even more draconian punishments. By the end of the century the harboring of robbers and the mere possession of stolen property had been reclassified as capital crimes. 91 In the 1630s Kozlov stood on the southern frontier of Muscovite state power. Great numbers of people were passing through the region, most of them rootless, many of them fugitives; among those electing to settle at Kozlov were some Don Cossacks and some pardoned survivors of the Balash Rebellion. State authority in the region was but newly established and preoccupied with matters like encouraging enlistments and tracking down Tatar raiding parties. Such circumstances provided ripe opportunity for brigands, and from the short period 1636–1638 we have references to nine incidents of robbery (razboi) occurring inside Kozlov’s borders or committed by Kozlov residents and involving at least 27 different suspects. 92 Not all of these incidents are described in enough detail to identify precisely what kinds of the criminal acts were involved, and razboi was a generic term covering different

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varieties of armed robbery. But enough information does survive to document that these incidents included gang raids to plunder farmhouses, highway robberies by individuals and gangs, and at least one case of a semiprofessional gang of bandit Tambov deserters and fugitive peasants based in the Matyra steppe south of Kozlov. The development of Muscovite criminal law from the guba charters of the sixteenth century to the 1669 New Decree Statutes reflected the emergence of a public, triadic legal system relying upon the inquisitorial method, placing social defense above restitution to the plaintiff, and prescribing harsher and sometimes overtly terroristic sanctions to achieve deterrence as well as punishment. A similar shift towards triadic inquisitorial norms observable in early modern Western Europe is sometimes argued to have been a response to a dramatic increase in larceny rates, which is in turn seen as an expression of the intensified class conflict accompanying the rise of capitalism. The character of brigandage, the boldest form of larceny, is also considered to have changed; previously the avocation of local feudalists caught in blood feuds or resorting to techniques of primitive accumulation, it now more often served as a tactic of retaliation in the class struggle by impoverished declasse elements; and occasionally, as social banditry, it even recruited support from the local lower classes. 93 It therefore now posed a greater threat to the entire established order and required a more preemptive response by the state, involving use of the inquisitorial method to ferret out accomplices and harborers and harsher penalties for greater deterrent effect. But social banditry as a form of resistance to the formation of capitalist class relations is harder to discern in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Soviet historiography pointed to the creation of elected criminal justice charters and the preoccupation with brigandage in the legal code as evidence that social banditry must have been sufficiently widespread in Muscovy to cause real alarm among local elites. But the law’s continued reliance through the seventeenth century on poval’nyi obysk polling of the community to confirm the criminal reputation of a suspect suggests otherwise, as such a procedure would be useless against a Robin Hood supported and harbored by the community. 94 Of those men described as committing razboi at early Kozlov, only the gang based on the Matyra steppe appear to have been classic social bandits living permanently outside the law with the help of elements of the community. The other incidents of robbery appear to have been committed by deti boiarskie and cossacks who did not live outside the law but occasionally slipped over it, and there is no evidence their actions met with sympathy

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from their neighbors. Organized banditry was common, but even through the seventeenth century its practicioners were more likely to be servicemen and occasionally even magnates engaged in “brigandage from above” than true outlaws involved in social banditry rationalized as social rebellion. 95 Their targets were more likely to be their neighbors in the service community. The gang that attacked and plundered the pomest’e of a widow near Voronezh in 1638, stealing horses and goods worth 130 rubles, consisted of 15 deti boiarskie and atamans and one peasant.96 Because of the stagnation of regional commerce the first reported instance of the highway robbery of merchants at Kozlov occurred relatively late, in 1649, when four merchants from Sapozhok and Kasimov were ambushed on the road near Iur’evo by a serviceman and two fugitive Lebedian’ peasants belonging to the boyar I. A. Vorotynskii; two of the merchants were killed and the bandits made off with their horses and three wagonloads of bast wares; the horses were later found in the possession of a Bel’sk cossack.97 Instances of peasants and slaves committing arson, robbery, and murder in the course of fleeing their masters and travelling to Kozlov could be said to constitute a fleeting form of banditry as class warfare, especially when they returned to their former masters’ estates to plunder them and incite other bondsmen to flight.98 And while it might not take the form of classic social banditry, the involvement of Kozlov cossacks in highway robberies and raids on pomest’ia could have been a kind of social protest, an expression of resentment by formerly independent cossacks of the terms of their registration and resettlement as garrison troops (for this reason the state tended to more quickly consider cossack banditry as not merely razboi, but treasonable revolt, vorovstvo).99

Policing For most of its history Kozlov had no elected criminal justice elder. Responsibility for policing against banditry therefore fell upon its governor. Working orders and the judicial record indicate that the range of the Kozlov governor’s investigative authority also extended to cases of treason, murder, theft, arson and malicious property damage, battery, petty assault and dishonoring language, abduction, whoremongering, gambling with dice, bootlegging, the use of or traffic in tobacco, and military insubordination.100 In certain murder, robbery, and theft cases the governor conducted the investigation but was then required to refer the case up to the Robbery Chancellery for resolution; but it can be said that the governor was responsible for

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general preventive policing and at least arraignment and preliminary investigation in all felony and misdemeanour cases. In principle this gave him enormous power. It is important to note that his power had its limits in practice, however. The active participation of the community was still required in carrying out surveillance, arrests, and investigations, and some conflicts were suppressed or mediated within the community before they could become matters for formal police action. Kozlov’s police record is too fragmentary to permit much more than speculation about crime rates, patterns of offense, and sources of conflict in the district’s early years. The only information for the years 1635–1639 comes from brief references in the peasant remand cases to crimes committed by fugitive peasants (most of which occurred en route to Kozlov); references to violence attending land disputes (described in Chapter 4); an inventory of the governor’s archive listing 27 cases left unresolved from Samoilo Birkin’s term of office; and a handful of passing references scattered through various stolbtsy.101 The Military Chancellery remarked that Governor Samoilo Birkin needed a full-time executioner because “there are many arrests of various people in various felony cases at Kozlov,” and Kozlov’s cossacks and musketeers complained in April 1638 of being harassed with many extortionate lawsuits before the governors of other districts, but we lack the data to determine what constituted “many” in this context or determine what kinds of actions were the cause of these arrests and suits. 102 More information is available for the second half of the century from special judicial stolbtsy, lists of prisoners, and judicial revenue books, but in this period crime rates and patterns likely changed in connection with new demographic and socioeconomic conditions as well as the new legal norms of the 1649 Ulozhenie and 1669 New Decree Statutes. 103 Most of the case load heard in the Kozlov governors’ court in 1635– 1639 of course consisted of suits for the recovery of fugitive peasants and the property they had stolen from their masters. The cash value of stolen property was specified in 38 such hearings seeking its recovery from at least 151 alleged fugitives; and peasants fleeing to Kozlov had also committed two arsons, two murders, and one flight from justice in a dishonor case. Most of these offenses had been committed in other districts by individuals who had not yet been made members of the Kozlov community. However, there are also references to 58 offenses involving 83 Kozlov defendants who were not under investigation as fugitive peasants: 104

Governing Kozlov

Offense Abduction, incitement to flight Theft Dishonor, insult Murder Assault Robbery Arson Fraud (sale of stolen horse) Manslaughter False accusation Poaching Grain trampling, property damage Debt Sedition or treason Admin. malfeasance Indeterminate Total

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Number of charges

Number of defendants

11 9 5 2 3 4 1 1 1 1 1 4 4 3 3 5 58

12 11 5 4 6 8 1 1 1 1 4 5 4 3 11 6 83

Unfortunately our information concerning these offenses comes largely from hearing authorizations and inventory titles of unresolved cases, so little can be said about the circumstances of their commission, the losses and damages they allegedly caused, or with what verdicts they met. The above table may even significantly underreport violations of the law as it does not include minor offenses (upravnye dela) such as liquor violations and insubordination. As part of their responsibility for maintaining military discipline governors usually dealt with these minor offenses without holding hearings, set their own punishments, and did not bother to report the incidents to Moscow. There may have been a great number of such minor disciplinary actions given the overwhelmingly garrison nature of the Kozlov population and the need to maintain steady military discipline on the Nogai Front. At Tobol’sk in 1639–1640, where the governor did log disciplinary actions, they accounted for over half of all punishments; at Voronezh in 1634 there was even a separate jail for those convicted of them.105 One is therefore left to speculate about the levels and forms of lawlessness and insubordination in early Kozlov and the social polarizations they may have expressed; and this speculation must remain highly tentative because so little as yet has been done to study crime patterns in other Muscovite regions with which Kozlov could be compared.

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There were some reasons to expect a higher level of conflict relative to population density than would have been encountered in longersettled districts in the interior. Most obviously, Kozlov was a frontier community, far from Moscow or any other towns; and our own history has accustomed us to seeing frontier communities as Frederick Jackson Turner did, as populations “impatient of restraints,” establishing their rights to property through usurpation and ready to defend them through extrajudicial means such as blood feud and lynch law. So it is possible that the same conditions prevailed at Kozlov as in fourteenth-century England, when homicide rates were higher and conviction rates lower in those counties farthest from the center of royal power in London. 106 Moscow’s authority at the local level – embodied in the town governor – was only recently established, and the officers and constables enforcing the governor’s law were often absent on missions connected with construction, provisioning, and defense. In the district’s first few years the docket of the governor’s court was clogged with suits for the recovery of fugitive peasants, and some of Kozlov’s later governors (Beklemishev, Pogozhev) clearly lacked the energy or intelligence to be vigilant police superintendants. 107 Furthermore, in the 1630s the district’s inhabitants were nearly all men of military background living under arms, most of whom were still strangers to each other, having recently arrived from other districts where they had lost or failed to obtain salaries and plowlands of their own. Many of them were young initiates who did not yet have families to support (a responsibility which ordinarily could be expected to help distrain them from reckless behavior). Some of them were pardoned renegades, the veterans of the Balash Uprising. A much larger number, especially in the lower service class, were fugitive peasants concealing their pasts. This might incline some of them to peaceable behavior in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves; Timofei Levshin, for example, found himself sought as a fugitive slave by two different owners as soon as he had been arrested for the murder of another Kozlov serviceman. But others were prepared to move again in order to keep one step ahead of remand, and knew they would be beyond the reach of the law once and for all if they reached the steppe forts of the Don Cossacks. Under such circumstances they might not shrink from criminal activity at Kozlov. If they chose to remain at Kozlov they would have to compete with local peasants and other siabr collectives for meadows, wood, and water. On the whole the government tried to limit zaimka squatting and closely regulate legal access to land and appurtenances, but its authority on allotment matters was sometimes ignored and the boundaries it drew might be vaguely fixed and open to dispute. Litigation and often

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violence then resulted, and the intensity and duration of these property disputes tended to be magnified by their collective nature. Conflicts over plowlands became more common after mid-century, when there was greater population pressure upon the village land fund and the question of tenure rights had been muddied by decades of partible inheritance, alienations to outsiders, and sharecropping arrangements. Colonists also had to struggle to establish their honor, not only in the eyes of the state but in the eyes of neighbors who might otherwise contest their eligibility for higher entitlement rates and rights to land or even challenge their freed status and point them out as fugitive peasants. Challenges to honor included not only insults and brawling but also deliberate assaults and land expropriations which could escalate into long-running violent feuds if not mediated by the siabr commune or by the governor’s court.108 But the omnipresence of military discipline, the practice of surety bonding, and artel’ solidarities within the village commune may have worked to stifle some conflicts in their early stages. Affairs of honor did not inevitably lead to violence because the state went to considerable lengths to provide nearly all elements of society access to its courts for the defense of honor, and honor broadly conceived to include reputation as well as inviolability from assault. Offended parties had reason to turn to the courts to defend or recover their honor because the prospect of involvement in lengthy litigation was often enough to pressure their opponents to settle. 109 Offenses more heinous than dishonor were often resolved by settlement (mirovaia sdel’ka); 13 percent of all the Voronezh court cases from after 1649 studied by E. N. Beliaev were settled out of court, usually before the defendant had even been summoned to court. 110 The village commune offered the insulted and injured its own alternative to feud or litigation in the governor’s court: the tret’eiskii sud, a mediation hearing by one’s neighbors assembled in front of the parish church.111 The weak found their best defense in collective action. Solidarities on the basis of rank, artel’, or communal membership were available for this, as were various tactics, violent and nonviolent, legal and extralegal. In 1696 seventy Kozlov siabry at the village of Levye Lamki conducted a campaign of shunning and boycott aganist the “commune-devourer and slanderer” Aleksei Pribytkov. They pledged to exclude Pribytkov from communal deliberations, bar him from their homes, deny him use of the communal bridge to reach his fields, and expel his livestock from the commons; any member of the commune failing to uphold this pact had to pay a forfeit to the parish church.112 If boycott failed the commune could turn next to gathering signatures to a group petition urging the

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central chancelleries to pressure the governor to provide redress. And if collective petitioning failed, there was yet the option of organized collective violence. In 1678 the deti boiarskie of several villages in Kozlov’s Boretskii bailliage dressed themselves as Tatars and raided the estate of okol’nichii F. F. Khil’kov in revenge for his seizure of their lands.113 In Kozlov’s first decade the general rough equality in entitlements and allotments made it likelier that many conflicts could be quashed early on by communal consensus or informally mediated in communal court. In this period there was little sign of conflict between unequal parties other than some complaints against captains Krasnikov and Bykov and some poaching and thievery at the expense of the Vel’iaminovs, who were not members of the garrison community. Among Kozlov’s first colonists were persons later identified as strong men exploiting and assaulting their weaker neighbors, but their names do not yet figure as defendants or plaintiffs in the earliest court records. From the start there was inequality between service formations, and therefore occasional conflict between them, the earliest noteworthy instance being the 1639 tension between the middle service class and the musketeers and patrol cossacks. But it was soon suppressed through the tightening of discipline and does not seem to amount to an “antifeudal protest” of the lower service class against the socioeconomic hegemony of the middle service class; rather it appears to have involved complaints about unequal distribution of the military service burden and middle service class resentment at receiving summons and discipline at the hands of constables who were mere cossacks and musketeers. But resort to the governor’s court became more necessary in subsequent decades with the increase in stratification by rank and wealth and the fracturing of artel’ and communal solidarities. Maintaining the credibility of the governor’s court depended on a number of factors, but among them was the nature of power relationships within the service community. The greater the discrepancy of status between litigants, the more likely the stronger party was inclined to press his suit towards penalties ruinous for his opponent, giving the weaker party greater reason to fear and resist litigation if he doubted his empowerment before the court. 114 On the one hand, this resulted in more settlements out of court; on the other hand, it raised the danger of discrediting the tsar’s justice and giving strong men who were confident they would always triumph in litigation a freer hand to prey upon their weaker neighbors through brigandage, land seizure, or debt entrapment. This latter danger was already apparent in the Kozlov by the late 1650s, when Kozlov’s strong man S. I. Koltovskii was able to intimidate several plaintiffs

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into dropping charges that he had committed rape, mutilated their cattle, enclosed common haymeadows, destroyed houses, and lured away their boarders and cottars.115 Soviet historiography tended to view the governors exclusively as allies of the privileged against the plebeian elements and therefore as deserving targets of antifeudal protest. This was sometimes but not always true. Collusion with the district’s stong men offered a governor opportunities for personal gain, but it also risked provoking community complaint to Moscow, which held the governor responsible for any damage this caused to the population’s ability to sustain its burden of service and taxes. But in choosing to intercede for the weak the governor also risked provoking a backlash by the district’s strong men, who could make great trouble for him with petitions of complaint and acts of vengeance undermining garrison discipline. When Sokol’sk’s governor arrested several leading dragoons for stealing fish from the creeks of their poorer comrades, they first filed complaint against this miscarriage of justice shielding the district’s “true felons” from the punishments they deserved; then they incited mutiny against him.116 For this reason – and also because governors had small constabularies – Moscow had long made it a policy to hold the community itself responsible for several aspects of its policing; a fugitive’s individual suretors were responsible for apprehending him, for example, and the village was responsible for reporting visitors, handing over suspects, giving hue and cry, and providing obysk testimony. By involving the community in such tasks it became possible to offer the weak some officially recognized power of public self-defense against exploiters, diffuse blame when the governor’s constabulary failed in its duties, and even give police authority some semblance of popular assent, thereby enlisting community outrage and vigilantism in support of the governor’s constabulary and court. Thus the neighbors of the highwayman and kidnapper syn boiarskii Feoktist Komarev took advantage of his arrest to petition to “have that felon Feoktistka Komarev ordered removed from them, from the hamlet of Radostnaia, to wherever thou, Sovereign, decrees, so that they may not perish to the last from his, Feoktistka’s, felonies.” The governor knouted Komarev, clipped his ears, and jailed him until Moscow could order his exile.117 The price Moscow paid for involving the community in selfpolicing was the greater pressure it came under to renegotiate those of its verdicts which affronted community norms. In 1646 Demka Kuchenev accused Okulinka Kucheneva and her son-in-law Sergushka Ermolov, an itinerant, of murdering syn boiarskii Ortemii Kuchenev, Okulinka’s husband and

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Demka’s father. Under questioning Okulinka admitted that she and Ermolov had murdered her husband and thrown his body in the Voronezh but had done it because Ortemii had sexually molested her eight-year-old daughter. Sergushka Ermolov was cast into Kozlov jail, while Okulinka and her children were held under musketeer guard. Eight Kozlov deti boiarskie intervened on her behalf, directing Moscow’s attention to the fact that Ortemii Kuchenev had been a notorious criminal and bigamist with two wives and sets of children. “His wives had appeared before the mir against him [testifying] that he, Ortiushka, had molested their daughters and little stepdaughters. And now Ortiushka’s wife killed him for such a crime . . . and all ranks of people in Kozlov [district] and Kozlov town know about his past and current crimes and about his murder.” Okulinka Kucheneva and Sergushka Ermolov remained in custody at Kozlov for another four years because Governor Fedor Pogozhev had failed to keep arrest records and depositions and his successor Roman Boborykin was preoccupied with political squabbles, but the Military Chancellery did finally get around to searching its records and ordered their sentences commuted from death to knouting “because, according to the obysk testimony of Kozlov people of various ranks, Ortiushka Kuchenev was a felon and had murdered many people, and they, Sergushka Ermolov and his [Ortiushka’s] wife killed him for his, Ortiushka’s, many crimes.” 118 Although justice for Okulinka Kucheneva was grossly delayed, the government’s eventual concession to community interest and commutation of her sentence is noteworthy in that a few years later it would have violated the legal code: while the 1621 Robbery Chancellery Ordinance Book and the 1649 Ulozhenie did not specify the penalty for a wife who murdered her husband, the 1669 New Decree Statutes did, calling for her to be buried alive, “even though the children of the murdered man or others close to his clan do not wish that she be punished. Show her no mercy, and hold her in the ground until she dies.”119 The Kucheneva case also illustrates the persistence of private retribution as an indication that the community could not in every instance expect effective social defense out of the governor’s office. It had been left to Okulinka Kucheneva to put an end to her husband’s crimes, and then left to sympathetic neighbors to get her freed. Timofei Levshin, the prime suspect in the murder of Larion Tiuneev, was acquitted but was himself murdered a few years later; Levka Komarev, kinsman of the notorious recidivist Feoktist Komarev, was murdered by a Bel’sk musketeer in 1648.120 The 1648 mutiny likewise provided an opportunity for several men to exact vengeance for past personal

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offenses at the hands of neighbors; Governor Boborykin was not its only target. Judging from practice in neighboring districts Kozlov’s town criers and musketeer watch routinely assisted the nedel’shchik constables on their police beat and patrolmen were instructed to give special attention to surveilling the marketplace and tavern, following large crowds, and breaking up fistfights. Some towns’ ordinances also instructed the police to halt reckless bathing in rivers and lakes during thunderstorms, musicmaking and the singing of unseemly songs, gambling, lewdness, bearbaiting, and the cavorting of travelling buffoons (skomorokhi).121 Arrests could be made upon a complainant’s petition, not only by constables but by the suspect’s suretors or the complainant, but it was especially important that constables and members of the community be ready to arrest a thief red-handed, the mainour ( polichnoe) with which he was seized serving as grounds for placing him under torture and as evidence of his guilt. Stolen objects, livestock, documents, and abducted persons were considered admissible mainour if the complainant had made formal declaration of their loss and if they were found at the scene of the crime or at the suspect’s house in the presence of witnesses; but if the arrest had been made by the complainant without the assistance of constables the suspect could successfully argue that the mainour had been planted on him.122 Police surveillance also relied more generally upon the decimal organization of village authority and the community’s duty to denounce. When report came that robbers who had been preying upon merchants, rich men, and foreign mercenary officers at Moscow had taken refuge at Lebedian’, Dobryi, and other towns near Kozlov, the “hundred-men, elders, taxpaying townsmen, and men of all ranks” in these districts were ordered “to secretly collect intelligence, by every means, concerning those felons and robbers: which of them is staying with anyone in their colony or hundred; who the unreliable people (shatskie liudi) are; who now has any [unexpected] goods or spare cash; who roams the pothouses and drinks up all his cash and gear . . . and where stolen goods have been entrusted to someone.” Tavern officials and shopkeepers were to note when customers tried to pay with certain kinds of preciosities and luxury goods listed in the rescript. If the inhabitants were afraid to try to make their own arrests they had to immediately inform their hundred-men, elders, and governor. Anyone knowingly harboring robbers or buying stolen goods was to be executed and his house and other property confiscated. 123

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Although judicial procedure took an increasingly triadic and inquistory character, policing still had to rely in part upon the community’s obligation to give hue and cry because the governor’s office continued to lack the constabulary staff to catch thieves red-handed and flush out bandits on its own. Thus townspeople and villagers were held responsible for heeding their neighbor’s cries and coming to their aid and pursuing their attackers. Either the crime rate rose significantly over the course of the century or the populace’s commitment to assisting in hue and cry flagged, for we find the law strengthening sanctions for failure to join in. In the 1631 Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery those who failed to participate were fined in compensation to the plaintiff (unless the felon was caught without their help), and if they refused to join in a search that tracked a felon to their own village they could be charged with harboring him and subjected to interrogation under torture. The 1649 Ulozhenie added knouting to wergild exaction as a penalty for failing to join in the hue and cry; servicemen harboring criminals lost their service lands and had to pay the plaintiff’s damages, or were knouted if they had no service lands. By the time of the 1669 New Decree Statutes inhabitants shielding felons from hue and cry were fined 50 rubles each or were knouted if they had no money. These statutes also established new norms formalizing the role of village decimal authorities in the hue and cry. Henceforth the ten-man and hundred-man were required to assemble at the scene of the crime with a posse and follow the suspect’s trail. If it did not end in a marsh or well-traveled road but led to another village, this second village was required to join the hue and cry; if its inhabitants refused, the hundred-man brought in constables from the governor’s office and interrogated each of the villagers to root out the suspect or mainour. Such obysk interrogations aimed at discovering “who of them is harboring thieves, robbers, murderers, witches, arsonists, members of gangs of thieves and robbers, and sundry criminals . . . and who is in league with whom, maintaining a camp and sanctuary for them and favoring them and trafficking in goods obtained in thefts and robberies . . . and where along the roads, in the wastelands, and the forests criminals assemble and pitch their camps.” The entire village was fined and every tenth inhabitant was knouted if any one lied under oath in denying there were felons in their midst. 124 In Kozlov’s first years villages of servicemen were more likely to comply with the duty of hue and cry than the privately held villages along the Voronezh, which remained loath to recognize the governor’s

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authority over them even though they already rendered corvee to Kozlov. In April 1638 some of Prince Pozharskii’s Goretovo peasants had to be arrested for feeding and clothing escaped prisoners from the Kozlov jail, and at Bukhovaia, a village owned by the Chudov monastery, the elder demanded a special warrant before he would hand over to Governor Samoilo Birkin’s constables the one escaped inmate he had managed to detain.125 The governor was ultimately accountable to the chancelleries for all jail prisoners. But the Kozlov garrison community was responsible for building and repairing the jailhouse as part of its fortifications corvee obligations, and Moscow intially tried to hold the inhabitants responsible for electing and subsidizing the jail’s wardens and guards as well. Deti boiarskie Lomachka Dubovitskii and Ivan Piankin, musketeer decurion Zotko Belkin, and nine other men were the district’s elected wardens and jailers. Because the terms of their surety bonds held them personally accountable for any escapes, lost documents, or embezzlements they were bastinadoed for negligence after a jailbreak in 1638. In later decades the community election of jailers became increasingly impractical at Kozlov, as in many other districts; it was harder to find candidates willing to shoulder the responsibility, so those elected opted out by hiring surrogates or the chancelleries turned to the practice of appointing jailers and paying them out of the treasury. Jail escapes continued to be a frequent occurrence, partly because of the negligence of guards but also because communities balked at the costs of repairing or expanding jail facilties. At Kozlov the jail was a wooden cabin too small to accommodate all the governor’s prisoners, some of whom had to be lodged in the fortress watchtowers. 126 In order to curtail expenditure governors’ offices seldom issued prisoners rations or money to buy food; those whose families did not appear regularly to feed them might be “let out of prison each day, in pairs, shackled and guarded, to beg for alms in money and bread in the marketplaces and courtyards; and whatever they collect each day . . . they and their fellow prisoners together divide it all up among themselves.” 127 The Ulozhenie reflected some awareness of the possible benefit of having prisoners earn their keep through forced labor, but except for the use of some exiles as agriculturalists on the tsar’s tithe demesne lands forced labor was much less common than in Western Europe. This may have reflected the absence in Muscovy of capitalist notions of the link between idleness and criminality and the need for correction through labor, but it was more likely due to the reduced need for penal labor in a society already dependent upon serf labor, where

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fortifications corvee was imposed even on the free and there was as yet no galley fleet. The principal jails were intended for temporary detention, not penal incarceration; they were holding pens, too few, too small, and too primitive to be effective in correction. But the Kucheneva case shows that prisoners might remain behind bars for years before their cases were resolved, and when sentences did prescribe imprisonment – most jail sentences were under four years – prisoners often sat for years beyond their sentences; on the roll of inmates in the Voronezh jail in 1667 was a syn boiarskii who had murdered his wife and had already sat for 18 years. In the second half of the century Moscow paid greater attention to purging its provincial jails, primarily to reduce overcrowding but in some instances to free innocent men, for Moscow knew it was all too common for governors to imprison guiltless men in order to extort bribes for their release. Governors were therefore required to submit annual rolls indicating each inmate’s social condition, the charge under which he was sitting, whether he had been interrogated under torture, whether he had confessed and named accomplices, how long he had served towards or beyond sentence, and whether he was still languishing in expectation that someone would eventually post bond on him.128 Yet another reason for purging the jails was to provide punishment that was swift as well as terrible, for greater deterrent effect; hence the 1669 New Decree Statutes ordered that people convicted of murder, robbery, theft, witchcraft, and other capital crimes be held no more than one month, then “hanged in those places where they committed their crimes, or where they lived, so that others observing them will learn not to commit such crimes.” 129 There were various ways to cull the jails. The Robbery Chancellery might send out special inquistors to review the status of prisoners and pass final sentence, with the governor’s cooperation; or for lesser crimes the governor might be authorized to make his own review and verdict, with the reminder that he faced a hundred ruble fine if he left prisoners incarcerated too long.130 Sometimes the chancelleries “recommended” these verdicts. For example, the same 1651 decree authorizing the release of Okulinka Kucheneva and Sergushka Ermolov also ordered the final disposition of the fates of the other inmates in Kozlov’s jail: Lavrushka Ziuzin was to be executed for the murder of a carter, while musketeer Eroshka Dymovskii was knouted and released “because he committed the murder [of Levka Komarev] without cunning, unintentionally, and he has sat in jail a long time.” As for Andrei Dymokurov and Grishka Plotnik, “choose one of them by lot for execution, but

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leave the other for interrogation and eye-to-eye confrontment with their comrades Oska and Nifontka Rylinik.” Four days later the governor executed Dymokurov.131

Justice The working order of Ivan Birkin and Mikhailo Speshnev had stated, “If servicemen and residents of the new town petition the Sovereign against anyone for offenses, violence, or in sundry litigations, Ivan and Mikhailo are to order these people to bring petitions to them; they are to hold hearings upon those people’s petitions and investigate by all means of investigation, and are to administer justice [upravu delat’] among them without red tape, according to the hearings and investigations.” Ivan Kikin’s working order used substantially the same language, adding that the governor’s policing and judicial jurisdiction covered the town and its posad, the outlying colonies of the lower service class, and the entire district. 132 “Sundry litigations” tried upon private complaint here referred to civil as well as criminal suits. Civil suits included not only suits to recover fugitive peasants or to resolve disputed boundaries, but also torts (loan defaults, abrogations of contracts for hire or indenture, etc.) and actions seeking compensation for property damage or for verbal or physical assault. Ordinarily these would comprise a large part of the docket; Olearius believed that “cases involving debts and debtors are more numerous than any other kind.” 133 But the Kozlov civil judicial record of 1635–1639 was largely limited to one kind of civil suit – fugitive peasant remand cases (of which there were certainly many). There were a number of reasons why few civil suits were recorded at Kozlov. Civil suits among the district’s cossacks and musketeers were probably heard by their captains, while the peasants of the Chudov and Novospasski monastery villages, the villages of Dmitrii Pozharskii, and the other privately held villages along the Voronezh were tried in their own manorial courts in civil suits among themselves (their suits were heard by the governor only if Kozlov servicemen were litigants in them). Furthermore, it was general policy that governors in smaller towns where there were no secretaries in the assembly houses were allowed to judge slavery, pomest’e, and votchina cases only upon special authorization from Moscow. A Military Chancellery decree of June 1639 which forbade governors at Orel and other “borderland towns” to hear civil suits on matters of more than 10 rubles’ claim may have been applied as well to Kozlov. In later decades it also became standard practice to let

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governors who had no secretaries judge only those suits whose values were less than 20 rubles.134 In limiting the governors’ jurisdiction and separating hearing from verdict the government was again following its strategy of centralizing some decisionmaking in the chancelleries to avoid overrelying on such avocational nonspecialist officials as the town governors in instances of costlier consequence. Prior to the 1649 Ulozhenie the codes used in chancellery and provincial courts were exclusively criminal codes. The procedures used to try civil suits can be reconstructed from trial records, however. The law already placed great emphasis on the requirement of written loan agreements (kabaly) and contracts (zapisi). In the absence of such documentation a claim could still be upheld on the basis of the unanimous testimony of witnesses of sufficient number and social status, but documentary evidence was always decisive over witness testimony.135 Contracts and loan agreements had to be written and witnessed in town by public notaries, and repayment had to be registered on the loan document or by signed receipt. The law entitled the plaintiff to recover loaned principal, but the collection of interest was forbidden in accordance with the Church’s strictures against usury. Members of the middle service class could be placed under righter coercion for a month for every 100 rubles to be exacted, and cossacks and gunners (but not musketeers) could also be turned over to the plaintiffs to work off what they could not pay under righter coercion. The elements of inquisitorial process typical of criminal hearings – such as obysk polling and eye-toeye confrontment – that we encounter in some hearings against alleged fugitive peasants were less common in other types of civil cases but still made their appearance when the question of outright fraud was involved. For example, eye-to-eye confrontments were given to plaintiffs who while still minors had been cheated of shares of their father’s service land by other kinsmen; a defendant charged with imposing a contract by fraud or force could be tortured to exact his confession and then sentenced to be knouted, jailed for six months, and forced to pay dishonor compensation; and a public notary “who feloniously proceeds to write such documents in the absence [of a party]” was to have his hands cut off. 136 The Kozlov governor’s criminal justice authority was considerably greater. Except for a few years in the late 1650s, he did not have to yield the investigation and hearing of felony cases to an elected criminal justice elder; 137 from the beginning his criminal jurisdiction extended not only over the district’s service population but over the villages held by the Chudov and Novospasski monasteries, Dmitrii Pozharskii, and other

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lords (“and the votchina and pomest’e owners themselves are forbidden to investigate and pass sentence in such matters”); 138 and from 1653 his jurisdiction was even extended over criminal cases in Lebedian’ district. 139 A few decades later the Kozlov governor’s jurisdiction was widened again to cover all criminal justice matters in Dankov, Dobryi, and Sokol’sk districts in connection with the formation of a Tambov regional military-administrative command headquartered at Kozlov.140 The Military Chancellery’s 1635 working order to governors Birkin and Speshnev authorized them to punish felons “with bastinado or the knout, according to their guilt, and write about it to the Sovereign” (i.e. presumably to the Military Chancellery).141 By the time of Governor Kikin’s 1638 working order the governor was additionally authorized to impose corporal punishment and imprisonment “according to guilt and according to the man,” that is, taking into account as well whether the condemned was a notorious recidivist; and now the governor was required to report about felony cases to the Robbery Chancellery rather than the Military Chancellery.142 The working order to Kikin was also more explicit in empowering the governor to use interrogation under torture as an investigative tool and to arrest those named as accomplices in confessions given under torture. In at least noncapital crimes the governor had the power of verdict ( prigovor) as well as of hearing (sud) and investigation (sysk), although he had to notify Moscow of the sentences he pronounced. 143 But neither working order made clear whether Kozlov’s governor could pass sentence of death. They mention only imprisonment and corporal punishment as sanctions, so in capital cases the governor was probably required to send his investigation records up to Moscow for final resolution unless the tsar had already authorized him to give take a particular case all the way through to verdict (as was authorized in the case of the murder of Larion Tiuneev).144 The criminal code in use at Kozlov in the 1630s was the Second Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery (Ukaznaia kniga razboinogo prikaza), a 1555 codification reworked and expanded in 1616–1631 during the revival of the Robbery Chancellery following the end of the Time of Troubles. Much of the Second Ordinance Book may have been modelled upon norms from sixteenth-century Lithuanian law.145 The manner in which town governors administered criminal justice is too ambitious a subject to be treated here in detail; it requires considerable comparative study and is deserving of its own monograph. As our concern here is the weight of state power upon the Kozlov service community, we will limit ourselves to the questions of the role of torture

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in the inquisitorial process, how strictly the court adhered to the procedures laid down by the Second Ordinance Book regarding its use, and what chance defendants had of saving themselves from it. To address these questions we will examine the most detailed criminal case from early Kozlov – the November 1637–October 1638 investigation of deti boiarskie Timofei Levshin, Trofimko Staroi, and Savelii Mikhin for the alleged robbery and murder of syn boiarskii Larion Tiuneev, who had accompanied these men on a journey to Voronezh and whose mutilated body was reportedly found outside the village of Lopatka.146 Although poval’nyi obysk still played an important role in the criminal investigation process in the 1630s, the statutes promulgated since the beginning of the century were placing ever greater emphasis on the use of torture to produce confessions and the naming of accomplices. It has become almost a historical commonplace that one of the signs of the emergence of absolutism was the development of a more triadic system of criminal justice in which the state, no longer content to merely mediate the duel between plaintiff and defendant, was now intent on putting the defendant to its own questions under torture in order to identify accomplices and thereby combat crime more proactively. The absolutizing intent behind growing reliance on judicial torture was indeed clear enough; but so were certain weaknesses the developing state had not yet surmounted. The courts relied so heavily on torture to produce confessions because it was the only substitute for other proofs which the courts still lacked the time and expertise to identify and evaluate. For example, in the Tiuneev case Governor Samoilo Birkin immediately resorted to interrogations under torture; he conducted no on-site investigation of the scene of the crime, probably because it was too far off and his docket too full; nor did he conduct an inquest to determine the identity of the victim’s body (half-eaten by dogs). The judicial process’ dependence on torture to extract denunciations of accomplices (iazychnye molvki), taken together with the police system’s dependence upon the community’s collective responsibility for informing on and apprehending criminals, also reveals the inefficiency of police officials in most districts: it was easier to rely on informers to impeach than upon police officials to catch criminals in the act. The Robbery Chancellery had been producing increasingly specific and thorough norms governing poval’nyi obysk and judicial torture. The courts continued to administer justice in an arbitrary and inequitable manner, but not because there was not enough written law to guide them; they simply ignored the law when politically expedient. The spirit of legality had not yet developed to the point where all judicial organs

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accepted it as fully binding on themselves. One might imagine that it was the governors who were most guilty of judicial arbitrariness; in the Tiuneev case, surprisingly, it was the Military Chancellery. In authorizing Birkin to torture the defendants it violated the Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery on four separate points, for the defendants were deti boiarskie – not peasants or vagrants – there was no mainour as cause for torture (not even an identifiable body), no prior iazychnaia molvka against the defendants, nor any poval’nyi obysk testimony against them.147 Perhaps the Military Chancellery was so nervous about crime at this stage of the Kozlov colonization process that it was ready to bend the law in order to enlarge temporarily the governor’s sphere of inquisitorial initiative. One might think that the defendant stood little chance of prevailing in a judicial system so reliant upon torture and so capable of ignoring its own norms. Probably that was most often the case; but what is especially interesting about the Tiuneev investigation is the ability of defendant Timofei Levshin – or more powerful and knowledgeable patrons acting on his behalf – to find within the law the means of mounting an effective defense. The strategy Levshin hit upon was remarkably complicated and ingenious and is partly documented in his letters to his relatives and friends, which Governor Birkin intercepted. Recognizing that Birkin was about to subject him to another round of torture and that he was likely to crack under it, Levshin called out the Sovereign’s Word (i.e. declared knowledge of or involvement in some seditious or treasonable action) and thereby forced a change of venue to Moscow, to the court of the Military Chancellery. This bought him enough time to set his friends at Kozlov to work bribing witnesses into testifying for his innocence and bribing officials to keep other witnesses from being summoned to Moscow. The next step was to cast doubt on the notion that a murder had occurred at all – this was possible, given that the identity of the body found at Lopatka remained uncertain – so Levshin had his fellow defendants petition Moscow with the rumor that Larion Tiuneev was alive and serving at Azov with the Don Cossacks. This was then used to request a year’s postponement, giving Levshin time to request a poval’nyi obysk of the community to establish his reputation. If a majority of them vouched for him he would be freed on surety bond with charges dropped. If they called him a known felon, he would come under torture again. He faced execution if he confessed to murder or even only to robbery under one of the next three rounds of torture; but even here he had a chance, for before he came under torture again he

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could request a second obysk on the grounds that those testifying in the first polling had perjured themselves out of personal enmity towards him; then, if the second obysk produced 15 or 20 more supporters than there were opponents, he could be freed. Or if the first obysk condemned him but he still did not confess under torture, Levshin would be jailed for life but at least he would not be executed, even though murder was a capital crime; if he succeeded in discrediting the murder charge but was still condemned of theft, he would be subjected to corporal punishment but then set at liberty on surety bond.148 Levshin did not pin all his hopes on a poval’nyi obysk. Postponement of the investigation would also give Levshin the opportunity to intimidate the plaintiff, Larion Tiuneev’s brother Iakov, into dropping charges and settling out of court. Levshin intended to threaten Iakov with a countersuit charging him with false accusation and seeking dishonor and mutilation compensation for his sufferings under torture.149 For mutilation – his injuries under torture – Levshin could probably receive compensation according to their severity; for dishonor, he was entitled as a provincial syn boiarskii to damages equivalent to his cash service entitlement.150 An inquisition with torture would be required to prove that Tiuneev’s charges were deliberate slander,151 and this by itself might frighten Tiuneev into dropping the charges. Levshin claimed to have some friendly party inside the Robbery Chancellery ready to put Tiuneev under torture and was making arrangements to bribe a chancellery bailiff to serve Tiuneev with a summon. Private reconciliation settlement was not allowed in criminal cases, especially in the chancelleries, but it was permissible as a means of resolving Levshin’s civil countersuit for dishonor and mutilation. 152 Levshin’s plan of defense was remarkably complex and clever. Unfortunately the investigation record does not report the outcome of the Tiuneev investigation, but Levshin’s plan evidently worked, for by 1639 he was at liberty delivering messages to Voronezh from the Robbery Chancellery. At the time of his death in 1645 – at the hands of one of his in-laws, Denisko Rukin – he was a slave of the powerful boyar Prince Iakov Cherkasskii. Cherkasskii might have been one of the intercessors who saved him in the Tiuneev affair, and indenture the price of his protection. 153 It is telling that Levshin’s defense strategy relied so much upon poval’nyi obysk – a remnant of the era of diadic legal relations, which made it possible for the defendant to fall back upon community solidarities to defeat the inquisitorial state. Its potential effectiveness is suggested by the fact that the governor’s court and the Military

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Chancellery had to go so far as to ignore their own laws in order to deny poval’nyi obysk to Levshin and the other suspects at the outset, and instead, take their investigation immediately to the stage of torture. And even at an advanced stage of the investigation it was still possible for Levshin to scheme for winning a second chance at poval’nyi obysk and to use it to clear himself. Finally, it is striking that Levshin seems to have survived not only Iakov Tiuneev’s charges but Governor Birkin’s exposure of his conspiracy to subvert the law. This may illustrate the power of another weapon available to some defendants: the bribe. Even a lowly provincial syn boiarskii could extricate himself from what looked like a hopeless situation by buying powerful protectors. We tend to assume that the Muscovite judicial system was most subornable in the provinces, in the town governors’ courts; but judges in central chancellery courts were just as amenable to bribe offers as long as they could be passed off as nonobligating gifts of gratitude. 154 Hence Levshin risked additional prosecution for treason to get his case transferred to Moscow, where he believed a bribe would have greater chance of success. It should be noted that the trial record gives no indication that the Military Chancellery or Robbery Chancellery responded to Governor Birkin’s warnings of Levshin’s conspiracy to buy his freedom. This raises interesting questions – to be addressed in the next chapter – concerning the potential effectiveness of bribery and gifting as personal and community strategies for subverting state authority.

The southern frontier as a distinct political culture? Thus far the story of Kozlov’s settlement and early governance presents us with the picture of a community that was remarkably (although not entirely) “state-determined.” Because of its strategic importance much of the state’s power was brought to bear on the colonization of Kozlov. To minimize cash expenditures on the construction of the new garrison town and its elaborate system of steppe fortifications the Military Chancellery took at least 10 percent of the population of the other garrisons of the Nogai Front as corvee laborers and levied additional laborers from the votchina villages of the region. The Military Chancellery was able to settle over 2000 men in Kozlov’s garrison between October 1635 and January 1639. It accomplished this by invoking the tsar’s patrimonial authority to call in leaseholds on the region’s river and forest appurtnenances and to redistribute steppe land as service-conditional pomest’ia (which it rationed out at rates considerably below entitlement

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and only after several years’ novitiate duty); by using roadblocks and the governor’s authority to control and channel migration; and by suspending its own norms concerning social eligibility for enlistment and the remand of fugitive peasants. The state’s powers of surveillance and regimentation were subsequently on display in the way it dictated settlement patterns; held colonists under a highly centralized administrative authority reinforced by garrison command authority; restricted travel as well as emigration; took household labor reserves away into remand or state service; confiscated capital; bonded its colonists under collective surety to inform upon each other and actively assist in policing; and imposed on colonists a burden of defense duty and corvee heavy enough to limit their ability to exploit their small land allotments and retard the commercialization of the district’s agricultural economy. We do not claim this pattern of state–community relations held true all across Muscovy or even across the older districts of the southern frontier. It reflected the particular conditions of odnodvorets colonization in the South after the Time of Troubles. We see Kozlov as an example of a distinct, historically specific southern odnodvorets political culture. The historiography of seventeenth-century Muscovy has finally begun to move beyond its preoccupation with the development of central metropolitan institutions to recognizing the significance of multiple coexisting political cultures in Muscovy built upon regional variations in settlement history, custom, economy, and strategic specialization. A. I. Kopanev has shown that the state peasantry in the more commercially developed far north disposed of the allotments they held from the tsar as if they were their own allods and has documented how theirs were the only zemskii organs in the realm managing to preserve any real degree of self-government after the Troubles, Moscow having conceded them such autonomy in order to encourage the resettlement of abandoned arable, lower administrative costs, and promote state peasant prosperity for fiscal ends.155 Valerie Kivelson’s social history of Vladimir in central Muscovy describes middle service class families which were longer established on the land, more likely to have some peasant tenants, and were under less demanding and constant military service obligations than their Kozlov counterparts; they were therefore freer to concentrate on expanding their landholdings through transactions on the local land market, pursuing marriage strategies to preserve their property and enhance their local influence, constructing patronage networks, and generally ordering their lives in the manner of a local gentry. 156

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The degree of economic and political autonomy enjoyed by the Vladimir middle service class was not possible for the odnodvorets garrison communities of Kozlov and other Belgorod Line districts. These communities were established considerably later, on territory that had no ancient tradition of independent sovereignty. Private initiative had played much less role in their settlement, and existing large-scale private landholdings were in fact liquidated whenever they conflicted with the strategic plan of the Military Chancellery. Their inhabitants, including those of comparatively elite vybornyi or dvorovyi rank, were all recent arrivals and could not assert status as scions of clans wielding influence and commanding respect on the basis of generations of local residence as landholders. The circumstances of service recruitment in the south resulted in the formation of garrison communities full of ruined ex-servicemen who had labored under indenture, sons of cossacks and musketeers, or runaway peasants – men who could less credibly pretend to gentility than the pomeshchiki of Vladimir. The southern odnodvorets communities began their existence under heavier obligations for active military duty, with fewer or briefer respites, and their service burden became all the more taxing over the course of the century: a large part of their inhabitants were shifted from local defense duty in the traditional formations to distant campaign duty in Ukraine in the new foreign formations of the field army, while the remainder was subjected to heavy taxes to provision the field army. The land and labor resources of the southern odnodvortsy were more modest from the start and shrank further under the pressure of conscription, taxation, and population growth. Finally, their siabr system of land tenure set them off from the traditional middle service class and when combined with their liability for tiaglo further servilized their status and, as we shall see in the following chapter, eventually reclassified them as state peasants. The more clearly subaltern political culture of the southern odnodvorets communities thus derived from the particular circumstances of southern frontier life. This is paradoxical only if we remain wedded to the old metaphor, hallowed in the traditional historiography of the American frontier, of frontier as largely empty and unbounded space, distant from the center of authority and therefore offering colonists the freedom to throw off old bondages and reinvent themselves.157 This metaphor of frontier as open field is misleading in that it fixates upon a freedom derived from a solitude that lasted only the briefest liminal moment. Once solitude gave way to community there invariably began the “drawing of lines on a map, the definition and allocation of ownership . . . and

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the evolution of land from matter to property,” 158 which process involved considerable coercion and produced relations of domination and servilization. Closer comparative study of this process may show that “compulsion and legally reinforced forms of social hierarchy were more generally characteristic of frontier society than were equality and freedom.” 159 On Muscovy’s southern frontier the demarcation and enforcement of these lines of entitlement and hierarchy was ultimately controlled by the state rather than by competing private interests, was carried out primarily by militarized means and for military ends, and had the effect of reserving for the state a greater preponderance of power and property right than was possible in many other societies.

5 Supplication, Subversion, and Resistance

Although subject to greater regimentation and surveillance, southern odnodvorets political culture was hardly totalitarian; its fundamental terms (recognition of the tsar’s autocratic sovereignty; life service; central chancellery control over the defining and distribution of entitlements and honor; heavy community responsibility for policing, etc.) could not be directly challenged, but there persisted within it an officially recognized space for supplication, grievance, and bargaining with state power concerning more particular terms. Individuals, groups, and communities were also attentive to signs of the slippage of state power which might present opportunities to successfully subvert or even openly resist the governor’s authority. The garrison regime pursued the aim of bending the entire community to service to the autocrat. Yet in practice it could not prevent some multiplication and decentering of its subjects’ allegiances. The forms of community organization or association for self-administration over which the state had fullest control were those the state had created and imposed: order (soslovie), service formation (sluzhba), service colony (sloboda), and surety circle (krugovaia poruka). But there were also forms of organization that were collaborative creations of the state and the subaltern community, representing reciprocal accommodations: the sluzhilyi gorod and its elected assessors and centurions, the siabr commune, and the parish church. The state could make use of them to mobilize, discipline, and surveille the community as long as it did not deny them the right to represent their needs (e.g. the determination of entitlement rates and allotment of pomeste lands, the defense of collective honor, and protection against official malfeasance). A third form of community association, ad hoc but open in nature, was of entirely subaltern initiative: the collective feeding prestation and the collective petition drive. The 207

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former had to be tacitly tolerated in order to staff the governor’s offices; the official ideology of a paternal and solicitous tsar regulating the flow of social bounty made it necessary to protect the latter, at least as long as the language and requests in collective petitions respected the official ideology in turn. Finally there were smaller subaltern associations of an ad hoc, exclusive, and usually hidden or camouflaged nature: combinations based on kinship, artel’ comradery, clientage, indenture, criminal complicity, or simply shared interest, pursuing their aims through private influence rather than through the officially prescribed manner of supplication. These were “natural” units of social organization which state-created associations could not entirely absorb or suppress. They went largely unmentioned in the records of the Military Chancellery until the moment they made themselves dangerous by openly corrupting state officials or by helping to mobilize community resistance (these combinations could also promote division and open conflict within the community when they served particular interests at odds with the general interest of the community).

Bribery, feeding, and the politics of gift exchange The successive law codes since the late fifteenth century had all tried to criminalize the taking and giving of bribes (posuly, vziatki). But it proved difficult to convict officials of accepting or soliciting bribes due to the absence of an outright ban on all forms of gifting to the Sovereign’s officials. The law continued to recognize petitioners’ right to offer officials earnest money and gratuities ( pochesti, pominki) to expedite processing of their requests or express their thanks for a completed transaction, for example, reasoning that these prestations were not corrupting as long as their intent was merely to express gratitude for the Sovereign’s bounty distributed by his officials; indeed, it would have been wrong to deny a subject the opportunity to return the Sovereign’s gift with a smaller gift of his own which could then be recirculated as the Sovereign’s bounty. 1 In keeping with this logic the lower clerical salaries went to clerks working in those chancelleries where a heavier load of court cases or petitioners’ requests were handled, on the assumption these clerks were better positioned to supplement their pay with gifts.2 A gift became an illegal bribe when willingly offered and accepted in the intent of embracery, or when unwillingly extorted. The bribe of embracery aimed at establishing a relationship between its giver and the recipient official which was prejudicial to state interests and to the interests of the community, the bribegiver purchasing influence or

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judgments which were denied to others and adversely affected others, and the bribetaking official abusing for his own gain the authority delegated to him by the Sovereign in such a way as to defame the reputation for impartiality of the Sovereign’s justice. Therefore upper service class officials caught in bribetaking for embracery were to be deprived of rank and those of lower than Duma rank were to be knouted and discharged from office. The most common tactic officials employed to extort bribes was to unjustly imprison and torment innocent men until they agreed to pay a ransom (the price of which might run as high as 30 rubles). As extortion was an even more egregious assault upon the reputation of the Sovereign’s justice, an official found guilty of it was usually not only dismissed from office but forced to pay restitution to the victim plus a sizeable fine to the treasury.3 Such efforts to distinguish between innocent gift and corrupting bribe were not unique to early modern Russian law. 4 But in practice the distinction was not always sustainable or meaningful. A bribe could easily be disguised as an innocent gratuity if both giver and recipient connived to support the illusion, and the injured party might find it difficult to demonstrate the bribe had purchased a judgment that would not have otherwise been forthcoming. Furthermore, the government’s commitment to campaigning against bribery went only so far as was politically convenient to it. A major complaint voiced in collective petitions in the 1630s and 1640s was that the central chancelleries and governors’ offices were too easily suborned by the strong people. Moscow had to be seen as offering redress of this injustice; but on the other hand, if it waged too vigorous a struggle against embracery this might discourage any private gifting to its officials, thereby putting greater pressure on the government to pay its officials larger salaries. Besides, the freedom to occasionally slip its own constraining legal norms in order to reach politically expedient compromises with powerful or useful private interests was still essential to the state’s ability to govern, and the bribe remained a crucial instrument of negotiating, pricing, and binding such compromises. Russian folk literature and the record of collective petitioning and town uprisings indicate the subaltern population viewed this bribe regime with comparable ambivalence, decrying it when it worked against their interests – which was much of the time – but exploiting it whenever possible. Communities frequently resorted to collective petitioning to rid themselves of extortionist officials, but because the bribe could also give them some access to the favors connected elites enjoyed as a matter of course they kept themselves ready to reach an understanding with

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officials who set cheap enough prices for their own subornment. This popular ambivalence towards the bribe regime is neatly expressed in the seventeenth-century Tale of Shemiaka’s Judgnment: the judge Shemiaka, thinking the peasant defendant is signalling him that he has a bribe for him enfolded in his cap, decides in the peasant’s favor only to discover he had actually been concealing a stone which he was prepared to hurl at the judge if convicted.5 How intolerable the state and local society found bribery therefore depended upon the structure of the local market for bribe-subornable government services. Where the risk of trying to suborn officials was greater and bribe prices higher, only the wealthier strong men of the community were likely to be able to purchase government influence – at the expense of the resentful and fearful mass of their weaker neighbors. In a more open market bribe-prices for certain services declined and access to subornable favors thereby underwent a certain democratization, making bribery a more acceptable fact of local political life to the mass, since a man of modest means now had some chance of purchasing government services for a small sum (although it remained unlikely he could outbid a wealthy rival for them). In the most open market bribery became so omnipresent, cheap, and casual it ceased to serve as a significant source of community complaint but now posed a greater threat to the legitimacy of state authority than did occasional high-priced bribery benefitting a few elites, for if any service or verdict could now be bought then no official need be feared.6 The degree of openness of a local market for bribe-subornable services of course fluctuated in connection with turnover of administrative personnel, the growth or enfeeblement of patronage networks, socioeconomic differentiation within the governed community, and other changes. But on the national level the tendency over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was towards a more exclusive but considerably more profitable bribe/service market dominated by the wealthy few. This was due to a number of factors: the reduction of guba and zemskii autonomy and the concentration of even greater power in the hands of the town governor; the greater violence the state now regularly employed against disobedient subjects; the increasing comprehesiveness and complexity of the law’s efforts to regulate conduct; the heightened risks from Peter I’s misguided efforts to root out all official corruption; and the greater potential profits to be realized from corruption now that the state was receiving far more tax revenue, recognizing an enlarged sphere of private property right, expanding export trade, and awarding contracts to industrial entrepreneurs.


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The danger posed to the rank-and-file of the community by corruption benefitting narrow local elites is illustrated by the case of Filipp Kabakov, a prosperous Ustiug townsman who was so successful in suborning the governor with his “great bribes and honoraria” that he became a resident in the governor’s household, “all day whispering in the governor’s ear . . . slandering many townsmen and canton peasants . . . for his own idle profit,” and inciting the governor to subject innocent men to beatings to extort protection money.7 The central government generally tried to grant an investigation when a significant part of the victimized community petitioned for one; but it was often difficult for victims to get a denunciatory petition past a governor and strong men resolved to quash all complaints against them. In the Kabakov case it took repeated petitioning before the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery got wind of the affair and launched an investigation. Kabakov was eventually condemned to hard agricultural labor in Siberian exile; his property was sold off to compensate his victims. Fortunately the victims of bribe-suborned officials had another recourse, provided they comprised the community majority: they could counter or preempt the commodity exchange of private bribe for private favor by undertaking their own generalized exchange of public gifts (what Marcel Mauss called “total prestations”) for public favor. The old tradition of feeding (kormlenie) could sometimes provide the ideal cover for this because of its dual character. On the one hand, feeding right served as the local official’s primary instrument of semifeudal exploitation, his rationale for extorting periodic supplemental maintenance in provender, cash payments, and labor services from the governed population in recognition of the honor and power of his office. In this aspect feeding was at the least an unwelcome burden (tiagost’ ) upon the community and in the worst instances a ruinous extortion. On the other hand, precisely because the feeding prestation took the form of community gifting, communicating obsequy towards the person of the receiving official, it could also be bent to the community’s own interest, turned into an investment yielding significant future returns. Feeding prestations of generous value delivered regularly in a confident spirit could work to partly disarm the official (i.e. to counter his demand that he be dealt with exclusively as an outsider present in an impersonal superior official capacity, responsible only to higher external authorities), to take his measure (gauging the limits of his greed and his readiness to bargain), to familiarize him (i.e. to draw him into a kind of ritual kinship with the entire community), and then to obligate him (at first in a general sense, but later, at the right moment, to specific favors reciprocating the

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community’s hospitality). At this last point the function of the feeding prestation shifted from generalized exchange to approach a kind of commodity exchange like that served by the bribe itself. We therefore find instances of feeding prestations to governors, captains, and clerks successfully purchasing special favors for the community: permission for delegations of petitioners to travel to Moscow; reports supporting community requests; postponements of collections of tax arrears; and even mitigations of fines and corporal punishments. 8 But because the feeding gift was a total prestation, a collective gift in the name of the entire community, the favors for which it bargained were favors to the community as a whole, including favors countering or preempting the discriminatory preference individuals and small groups sought to obtain through bribery. It was the state’s objective (never fully realized) to enclose both its officials and its subjects within a fixed, highly centralized, and rationally bureaucratized chain of vertical relationships responsive to central command. This project was subverted whenever feeding prestations succeeded in familiarizing the recipient official, establishing the community’s own personalized horizontal relationship with him, and obligating him to offer some mitigation of or protection from the state’s commands. The central government could not protect against this by suppressing the practice of feeding – a 1620 decree attempting to criminalize feeding proved unenforceable – but it could at least try to counteract it by engaging in its own generalized exchange with the community past the suborned official. The Siberian Chancellery, for example, made it a common practice to order a new governor to invite the community’s representatives to a bienvenue feast, the food and drink at which were to be expressly identified as largesse provided by the tsar himself, not by the governor; the assembled guests were then to be read the “Sovereign’s declaration of vouchsafe” ( gosudarevo zhalovannoe slovo), an address promising them the new governor would pay them their service compensations, protect them against extortion and oppression, and investigate whatever complaints and suits they chose to bring against the outgoing governor. 9 The Sovereign’s vouchsafe thus used gift prestation to reestablish a direct personalized reciprocity of trust between Sovereign and subject and to reassert the notion that all bounty issued from the Sovereign and was distributed by his officials according to his mercy. An example of this can be seen in the vouchsafe speech Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich gave at Moscow soon after the 1648 riots against the corrupt Morozov clique dominating the central chancellery apparatus:


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after feting the Moscow musketeers with vodka and mead, the Tsar announced, “It has pained me greatly to learn of the abuses of Pleshcheev and Trakhaniotov, done in my name but against my will. In their places have now been appointed honorable men acceptable to the people, who will administer justice to all impartially, without bribetaking, over which I myself will closely watch.”10

The theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance The 1648 Moscow riots had been sparked when Tsar Aleksei’s musketeer bodyguard dispersed with gunfire a crowd of petitioners bearing gifts of bread and salt and seeking redress against the corrupt chancellery official Levontii Pleshcheev. Valerie Kivelson sees the riots as marking an increasing dissonance between traditional and bureaucratizing political discourses. The petitioners had expected a personal audience with the tsar because they still subscribed to the traditional image of the tsar as a merciful ruler extending his personal protection to his people out of paternal solicitude; and they had expected redress from this audience believing that the tsar would not tolerate the presence in his government of evildoers whose actions abused his authority and undermined his unity with his people. That the petitioners were instead forcibly dispersed “contrary to all custom and expectation” signalled that the government no longer adhered to this traditional ideology of personalized paternal sovereign authority, that the process of bureaucratization had now depersonalized, distanced, and buffered sovereign authority. Thus the 1649 Ulozhenie (Chapter X, article 20) would soon after deny petitioners’ direct access to the tsar’s person and require that all petitions be forwarded through the appropriate lower organs (the governors and the chancelleries) under pain of bastinado. “A new form of authority had entered the corridors of the Kremlin, while the public still responded to authority as traditionally conceived, as the earthly incarnation of a moral, divine cosmology.” 11 This view overstates the incompatibility between the traditional and bureaucratic conceptualizations of autocratic sovereignty. In reality autocracy still derived as much of its power from primitive as from bureaucratic centralization, and in discoursing with society it still found it necessary to invoke the traditional personalized model of sovereignty exemplified in the Sovereign’s declaration of vouchsafe. Nor was the traditional personalized model of sovereignty merely a naive monarchism, the exclusive production of the masses, a mark of their inability to fully comprehend the rational discourse of bureaucracy.

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There remained important elements of irrationality in the bureaucratic self-image. At the same time that emergent bureaucracy demanded new behaviors from the community in the name of rationality it offered the community membership in a larger transcendental and redemptive order (the phenomenon of nationalism represents the continuation, even expansion, of this practice in more secularized form). In order to sanctify itself as maker and preserver of that order bureaucracy did not merely accommodate to traditional discourse; it co-opted it and further elaborated it. Like a church it required of the community certain regular rituals of obeisance; it insisted that it be addressed in formal, repetitive, and supplicative language comparable to prayer; transgressions of thought as well as of deed had be confessed to its inquisitors, who equated words and gestures of political defiance with blasphemy; its sanctions were increasingly presented as morally corrective, redemptive like penances; and in pursuing empire it aimed at surmounting history and establishing itself as eternal fiat. Bureaucratic discourse actually attempted to expand the locus of sanctity in political life; it claimed not only that the tsar was divinely ordained, but that his officialdom was sacralized in their role as enforcers of universal order, so that redemptive justice could be expected through officialdom’s intercession on behalf of the tsar. Therefore the shortcomings of its justice could not be explained in purely rational terms; they had to be absolved through a compelling “theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance” demonstrating that the perfection of the bureaucratic order survived the sins of the fallible human agents enforcing it.12 This allowed the state to purge evildoers from its officialdom without risk of its delegitimation – and without it having to promise to limit by law the powers of its officials. The theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance thereby served as an indispensible prop for Muscovy’s bureaucratized autocracy: it reassured the Sovereign’s subjects they had nothing to fear from the considerable power he had delegated to his officials, only from the occasional abuse of this power by flawed men, against which it promised a defense by recognizing victims’ right to petition for redress. Meanwhile the state’s subjects had good reason to subscribe to the theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance because it not only recognized their right to remonstrate but reduced the political risk of remonstrance, allowing and even encouraging petitioners to seek justice against corrupt individual officials as long as they continued paying homage to the sanctity of officialdom as a whole. Hence the Sovereign’s declaration of vouchsafe pledged that the new governor could be trusted to protect the community’s interests and that injured parties should now come forward to report to him their complaints


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about his corrupt predecessor. And for the same reason Tsar Aleksei responded to the 1648 Moscow riots by removing the Morozov clique from power, treating most of the arrested rioters with leniency but then proceeding to introduce in the Ulozhenie the new regulation that henceforth petitions must be submitted through appropriate bureaucratic channels. The underlying rationale of this theodicy, the postulate about the nature of state legitimacy that allowed the dialectical reconciliation of a traditionally personalized royal sovereignty with an increasingly bureaucratized administration, was gosudarevo delo (roughly translatable as “the Sovereign’s business”), a term which was found in both the official and popular discourses after the Troubles. It asserted that all authority and power issued from the Tsar; that effective governance required him to delegate authority and power to subordinate officials; that every administrative act by subordinate officials ostensibly remained under the tsar’s control, requiring his preliminary authorization or his subsequent notification by official report; and that every complaint or request by the tsar’s subjects potentially touched upon his interests and therefore should be addressed to him and passed up to him through his officials. In the official discourse the concept of gosudarevo delo primarily served to define and prosecute resistance to state authority; having sacralized the tsar’s officials as agents of his authority, it could then deal with riot, insubordination, and even disorderly and disrespectful petitioning directed at his officials as if they constituted treason against the tsar himself. But gosudarevo delo also permitted the state to enlist the community’s help in combatting malfeasance by the tsar’s officials. The community had the right and even the obligation to petition against an official whose corruption or incompetence threatened to sabotage the tsar’s business by hindering his subjects’ ability to discharge their duties to the state – as when the excessive corvee imposed by Governor Boborykin endangered the Kozlov garrison’s ability to feed itself and remain ready for patrol and pursuit duty. The community likewise was expected to denounce an official who presumed to gosudaritsia, to usurp some of the rights and dignity of the tsar (hence Governor Shcherbatyi was considered guilty of lese-majeste when he told the people of Tomsk, “Am I not Moscow here?”). This in turn allowed the community to exploit gosudarevo delo in representing its own interests and needs. The community’s formal grievances were less likely to be treated as insubordinate and more likely to obtain favorable quick response if they pointed out that the malfeasance from which it sought relief also amounted to lese-majeste or wrecking

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endangering the state’s interests. This aspect of gosudarevo delo in fact worked to reinforce the traditional subaltern discourse of personalized sovereignty. It brought the state’s theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance in line with the central claim of popular “naive” monarchism, that all power issued from a merciful tsar who succeeded in governing justly in so far as he relied upon his realm, the communities of his faithful subjects, in his struggle against the corrupt officials who would seek to thwart his will and undermine his interests.13

Grievance The Sovereign compelled his subjects to serve, but in return for their service he bestowed on them his bounty in rank and honor, land and money, and justice and mercy. To distribute this bounty he had to guarantee his subjects opportunities to represent their needs and grievances to the governor’s office and to the chancelleries at Moscow. Hence the right of the realm’s inhabitants, including dependent peasants, to petition and file suit had been recognized in Muscovite law since the late fifteenth century. The processing of petitions and suits already comprised a significant part of the paperwork in the Kozlov governor’s office by the end of the 1630s and its relative weight in the office’s overall document production increased markedly thereafter as Kozlov’s population expanded and underwent further social differentiation. The large number of petitions and suits filed at Kozlov should not, of course, be taken as a direct indication of the government’s responsiveness to requests and grievances. A petitioner was unlikely to win speedy and full satisfaction upon his first request and would often have to file repeatedly, sometimes over the course of several years; and many requests would never be satisfied because they sought resources in short supply or types of redress the center considered politically unthinkable. On the other hand there was as well supplication and complaint heard in the governor’s office that was never processed through official channels, business that was conducted off the record and never put to paper because it was accompanied by bribes and feeding prestations to purchase the governor’s personal influence and persuade him to bend the rules and offer special treatment. Such unofficial appeals were most likely to succeed when the transaction requested could be easily concealed and carried little risk for either the giver or the recipient, that is, when the gift supported a request for a relatively routine and inexpensive action that the governor’s office was already empowered to perform, required no gross violation of administrative norms, and involved no real damage


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to the state’s fundamental interests. Thus there was less risk in offering a gift or bribe to obtain leave than to get a disbursement from the treasury or granary, even if it was of a subsidy in arrears; it was safer to ask to have a ruling expedited or postponed than to have it stretched or overturned. The substition of unofficial favorseeking for offical supplication in some circumstances mocked the Sovereign’s claim to be the fount of all bounty. But in other circumstances favorseeking served as a technique of primitive centralization, a necessary backup for the bureaucracy’s inefficiency in distributing bounty. 14 The right of supplication was extended not only to individuals and groups making routine requests for particular benefits, but to entire communities, regions, and social estates so that they could collectively petition to voice grievances of larger political importance. The 1630s and 1640s saw a series of collective petitions in the name of the middle service class in particular regions or across the entire realm, seeking to confirm and sometimes to expand that class’ corporate rights; and most of these collective petitions were satisfied by the central government. This has led some historians to classify early seventeenth-century Muscovy as an estate-representative monarchy, the preservation of a real right of collective remonstrance supposedly having checked for the time being the full triumph of bureaucratic absolutism. 15 But this falsely assumes that full-blown bureaucratic absolutism could afford to dispense with rights of remonstrance and would choose to do so. It also overlooks the fact that all the concessions the middle service class won through corporate remonstrance had the additional effect of reinforcing the provincial petty nobility’s ability to render service to the state. The central government could afford to satisfy middle service class petition drives to win the redistribution of pomest’ia confiscated from falsely accused shirkers, to increase and finally abolish the time limit for the recovery of fugitive peasants, to forbid the enslavement of deti boiarskie by indenture, to reshuffle certain chancellery jurisdictions in order to reduce red tape in the courts, to confirm for the middle service class the right to sue officials for taking bribes, and to declare particular districts off-limits to magnate manorial colonization. If some of these concessions came at the expense of the social and economic privileges of the magnates, they all served the higher goal of preserving the middle service class, the core of the army. But those demands that would have required some reduction of the power of the state were rejected. The middle service class failed to win the decentralization of administration and the general revival of self-government by elected officials as remedy for the partiality of the chancelleries and governors’

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offices to the interests of the rich and powerful; in place of this Moscow offered the new Ulozhenie law code, which pursued further centralization and explicitly proclaimed that the chancelleries and governors’ courts provided equal justice for all, from the highest rank to the lowest.16 Likewise, the particular concessions won by Kozlov’s service population through collective petitioning in the district’s first two decades could all be justified in terms of keeping colonists available for military service, either by giving them additional land and appurtenances or by eliminating distractions from military duty. Kozlov’s servicemen eventually won recognition of their rights to the disputed plowland along the Ilovai claimed by the Chudov monastery, to the former obrok leaseholds along the Pol’noi Voronezh, and to a strip of the Chelnavsk Forest claimed by Tambov (1635–1645). They got confirmed their exemption from judicial duties on suits of less than 12 rubles’ value so that governors in other districts would be less likely to grant hearings against them on frivolous and mendacious charges (1638). They convinced Moscow to forbid criminal justice elders from other districts from serving summons or conducting searches on Kozlov territory by arguing such incursions had been disrupting their fortifications labor and patrol duty (1653). And it was probably in response to their petitions that the Military Chancellery ruled eligible for Kozlov enlistment men who had lost their service status before 1613 (the decree of 21 March 1636) and subsequently took out of the governor’s hands the responsibility for investigating, hearing, and resolving fugitive peasant remand cases (1639). Certain other larger grievances at Kozlov were resistant to redress through collective petitioning, however, either because the state had no straightforward solution for these problems or because full redress would have required that it betray its own interests. For example, even in an odnodvorets community such as Kozlov there existed some conflict arising from perceived inequalities in status, service burden, or wealth. In the district’s first several years these inequalities were slight and derived largely from differences in the resources and skills volunteers had brought to Kozlov, the service formations in which they enrolled, and the entitlements they received at initiation. But by 1639 there was sufficient antagonism between Kozlov’s middle and lower service classes over slights to corporate honor as to spark a petitions war of mutual denunciations and even some vendetta violence. This antagonism was apparently contained but not eliminated, for the service community’s campaign to remove Governor Boborykin in 1647 foundered in part because cooperation between the district’s deti boiarskie and its cossacks and musketeers had broken down. Over time particular


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advantages in terms of family size, entrepreneurial talent and luck, and kinship and patronage connections (including connections with the governor and his staff) accrued to some men, who came to be despised as “strong men” and “devourers of the commune” once it became clear they were using their greater wealth and connections to exploit their neighbors. At Kozlov the earliest evidence of group and community conflict with strong men dates from the middle of the century and is to be found in the charges collective petitioners made against Governor Boborykin’s “cronies” in 1647 and in the lawsuits against S. I. Koltovskii in the 1650s. Suits and collective petitions were unlikely to lead to satisfying redress against the strong men, for the strong men could drag them out or quash them altogether by using their influence with the governor. Even when the complainants prevailed the most they were likely to win was redress upon a particular charge; they were unlikely to get the strong man stripped of his power. In 1648 Kozlov and Sokol’sk experienced bloody mutinies fueled in part by widespread frustration that the governor’s office was unable or unwilling to protect the community against the strong men’s predations.17 The prospects of success were also limited for remonstrations protesting new and heavier fiscal and service obligations imposed upon the community in disregard of what the community considered its customary rights. Kozlov’s service population was unable to stop Moscow from reducing entitlement and allotment norms in the second half of the century. A major grievance against Governor Boborykin in the collective petitions campaign of 1647 and in the mutiny of the following year was the excessive fortifications corvee Boborykin levied upon Kozlov’s deti boiarskie, but it was one of the few complaints against him to which Moscow gave no credence. Attempted mutiny against the conscription of over 2000 kinsmen of Kozlov servicemen into the new foreign formation regiments at Iablonov was squelched. 18 Thereafter a large part of the Kozlov community was compelled to perform campaign duty in the regiments, and conscription rates and regimental grain taxation rates rose inexorably despite periodic collective petitions pleading for relief. In desperation many men deserted the regiments or fled the district. 19 The terms of service and taxbearing were crucial matters of the Sovereign’s business, ostensibly determined by his will alone. Therefore it was generally risky and futile for the community to challenge these terms head-on, attacking them as bad policy. However, the principle of gosudarevo delo did provide the community with cover to challenge them indirectly as miscarriages of what the Sovereign was presumed to

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have willed. It was permitted to protest the brutality and inflexibility with which the Sovereign’s officials administered service and fiscal obligations, and thereby get obligations partly mitigated – to have taxes reapportioned, for example, or arrears collections postponed. To accomplish this the petitioners had to convince Moscow the tsar’s officials were unfairly apportioning duties and taxes, using undue violence in imposing them, or levying them at rates exceeding the community’s capacity, for such actions had the effect of threatening the community’s survival; and as the Sovereign would never have willed this, these actions must constitute official malfeasance thwarting the Sovereign’s interest. The theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance made it impossible to blame an injustice upon the tsar, but it often made it necessary for the tsar to join with his subjects in blaming it upon certain of his officials. On these grounds collective petitions to get a governor or other district official removed from office had a reasonable chance of success. Governors were removed for incompetence and excessive brutality in carrying out the Sovereign’s business, but especially for corruption and profiteering and for exceeding their authority ( proizvol’), as such actions clearly usurped or contravened the Sovereign’s will.20 The removal of especially unpopular governors had become fairly common practice from the 1620s, especially in Siberia, where governors were more tempted to exceed their authority and where service communities had a strong cossack complexion with a tradition of krug collective action.21 The right to petition against state officials was of course hemmed in by all sorts of qualifications which tended to discourage its actual exercise. Most supplicants would never have the opportunity to present their petitions directly to the tsar, bypassing the town governors and the chancelleries at Moscow, and from 1649 the Ulozhenie (Chapter X, article 20) forbade efforts to do so, under penalty of imprisonment and bastinado; one could approach the tsar’s person with a petition only after one had already petitioned the appropriate chancellery and been unjustly rebuffed. Opportunities to present petitions directly to chancellery directors at Moscow were also limited. To travel to Moscow for petitioning or for any other purpose normally required that one first obtain leave from the governor; departing without his permission got one jailed and perhaps bastinadoed. A serviceman already granted leave to travel to Moscow on some other business – to appear at a special campaign muster, for example, or to testify in a chancellery hearing – might find time in the course of his stay at Moscow to visit the appropriate chancellery and turn in a petition, provided this was around Christmastime, as it was becoming general practice for chancelleries not to accept personally


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delivered petitions at other times of the year lest this encourage servicemen to shirk campaign duty. Most routine requests, grievances, and suits therefore had to go through the town governors. As the center had no means of guaranteeing that a governor would comply in sending a petition on to Moscow it had to settle for disciplining the governor caught quashing petitions, and it was hard to catch him in this given the governor controlled the community’s communications with Moscow and other towns. Since it was maintained that governors were required to forward all petitions to Moscow – because all petitions were addressed to the tsar, the ultimate dispenser of all bounty – a governor who suppressed a petition could be charged by the injured party with the state crime of usurping the Sovereign’s interest (gosudarevo delo) in just and orderly governance. But how then to assure that a new petition accusing the governor of quashing petitions found its way to the Sovereign’s chancellery secretaries at Moscow? One way was to exempt from the usual ordinances against unauthorized travel those subjects trying to reach Moscow to accuse their governor of quashing petitions or of other state crimes. Thus we find in some working orders articles “forbidding” governors to deny such petitioners leave or detain them or take them off the road. But the more common practice, more easily enforced, was to extend such special protection retroactively, by giving petitioners of this sort immunity from punishment by any official when they were caught travelling without their governor’s leave. Complainants seeking redress against their governor were most likely to succeed when they could count upon the support of others. Collective remonstration undertaken in the name of the entire community was much harder to suppress than the complaint of an isolated individual; not only was the report of it more likely to spread outside the district, but it was more likely to carry greater weight with Moscow; therefore we often find the grievances of individuals embedded within community remonstrations in collective petitions. Sometimes it was possible to enlist the help of some other more sympathetic local authority – an assembly house clerk or musketeer captain estranged from the governor, or an official of the church. In some instances local abbots and archbishops issued passes in their own names and even provided travel subsidies to make sure that community representatives got safely to Moscow to petition against the governor. The period of Sovereign’s vouchsafe offered by a new governor also provided an opportunity to lodge individual or collective grievances against the outgoing governor and his staff. 22

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Petitioning had to be done with caution, whether it was petitioning in complaint or in support of a modest routine request. The petitioner had to be careful what he said and how he said it. The penalties for making false charges in a petition or merely failing to cite due cause were imprisonment and bastinado or knouting. All petitions had to be addressed to the tsar – in recognition that all bounty flowed from him – and had to observe the standard formulae of respectful address and adopt the doleful and servile rhetoric of supplication: “Sovereign, Tsar, and Grand Prince of all Rus’ Mikhail Fedorovich! Thy bondsman [kholop] kowtows [chelom byot] to thee!”. It was also advisable that the petitioner remind the Sovereign of his lengthy loyal service, stress the wretchedness of his current plight, and beg the Sovereign’s favor and bounty not only “for the sake of our bleeding heartfelt tears” but so that he might survive his travails and continue rendering service.23 Even the most powerful boyars observed these formulae in their petitions. Olearius and other foreign observers took this as further evidence of the thorough servilization of Russian society under autocracy or even of the inborn servility of the Russian character. It could be taken as sign of the former, given that the use of self-abasing rhetoric was mandatory for all. But it should not be taken as proof of the latter. Over time these formulae had become the conventional language of courtly civility, the Muscovite equivalents of Western European expressions like “Your humble and obedient servant,” and Muscovites probably did not much reflect upon their literal meaning. Furthermore, metaphors of self-abasement were perfectly capable of conveying cunningly euphemized reproaches to authority. Recounting the sacrifices the supplicant had made on behalf of the Sovereign’s service, they asserted the supplicant’s entitlement to the Sovereign’s protection and rewards, for a just Sovereign would respond to their humble requests in no other way. 24 The spirit in which a petition was presented to officials could have equally important consequences. Bribing an official to accept and send on one’s petition was a common practice, and in certain chancelleries and assembly houses it was understood to be a necessity. But it was also supposed to be illegal, punishable by imprisonment and bastinado or knouting, so a petitioner ran some risk that his honorarium might be be rejected and get him arrested. Officials expected petitioners to respect the honor they held from their personal precedence status and the higher honor they held as representatives of the Sovereign’s command authority; an insult to the latter was an offense against the honor of the Sovereign himself; therefore they had grounds to ask the Sovereign to defend his and their injured honor by turning down or punishing


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petitioners who had come to them “in tumult and disrespect.” Inquisitor I. I. Lobanov-Rostovskii, sent to Kozlov to investigate community complaints against Governor Roman Boborykin, reported that Kozlov’s cossacks and musketeers had “come into the assembly house uninvited, laid their petition on the table, but would not let themselves be questioned and went out with shouts and noises and great disrespect.” Boborykin seized upon this incident in crafting his defense: his enemies had entered “with great noise and dishonored me and barked every unseemly curse at me. . . . Favor me, Sovereign, and order me defended against those felons and conspirators so they will not dishonor me.”25 In fact the tendency in post-Troubles administrative practice was to treat this kind of unruly conduct not only as a dishonor offense but as a possible state crime. Part of the reason for this was the state’s heightened anxiety about insurrection after 1613; it also followed logically from the conflation of the official’s honor with the honor of the Sovereign. Boborykin was trying to evoke this new understanding by calling the complainants “felons and conspirators.” Soon after the 1648 disturbances at Moscow and Kozlov the classification of such conduct as a state crime would be made explicit in the law: the Ulozhenie (Chapter Two, articles 20–22) would make it a capital crime for individuals or groups to approach the tsar’s officials in an insubordinate and threatening manner. It did not matter whether actual violence (bunt) ensued; the perception of some personal intent or conspiracy (samovol’stvom, skopom i zagovorom) to assault or rob officials or commit other unspecified felonies against them was sufficient.26 At first glance these articles would seem to give officials pretext to suppress all unwelcome petitioning. That this did not happen is a testimony to the supremacy of the principle of gosudarevo delo, and to that principle’s flexibility. The Sovereign needed to be able to call upon his subjects to denounce malfeasance by his own officials; therefore Article 22 of the Ulozhenie provided for full investigation when an official charged petitioners with threatening conduct, including investigation by community polling ( poval’nyi obysk); and it exempted from punishment those accused who could present in evidence community testimony that they “did not approach them [the officials] as part of an insurrectionary plot, but rather that only a few people approached them [to submit] a petition.” Article 22 further stipulated that officials who falsely charged petitioners with threatening conduct were themselves to be “severely punished . . . as the Sovereign decrees.” Hence the Kozlov musketeers and cossacks Boborykin accused of threatening conduct got two successive special commissions appointed by the tsar

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to investigate their grievances and were not punished for their disorderly behavior. Thus poval’nyi obysk testimony became the principal defense of the right of remonstrance agaist state officials. This had the effect, however, of investing the right of remonstrance in the community as a whole rather than in smaller groups or individuals. Groups and individuals had no real hope of pressing serious charges against local officials if they did not have the support and protection of a community majority. At the very least this support had to be tacit; when matters reached the stage of poval’nyi obysk, it had to become active and undivided and unyielding, manifest in neighbors’ willingness to testify in endorsement of the petitioners’ complaint. Therefore serious accusations against local officials were best made in collective petitions in the name of a village commune, preferably in the name of an entire service formation, and ideally in the name of the entire service community (vsem gorodom i uezdom, “the entire town service corporation and district”). At Kozlov in June 1647 three separate but mutually supporting collective petitions against Governor Boborykin were submitted on behalf of the district’s middle service class, lower service class, and parish clergy. Given the widespread illiteracy of the time it was not reasonable to require that a collective petition bear the signature of every member of the remonstrating collective, but officers and parish clergy had to sign as representatives and were held personally accountable. Those putting their signatures to collective petitions could be charged with felony if any member of the collective subsequently gave notice or testified at obysk that he had been coerced to support the petition or had not been informed of the petition or asked to endorse it. It was therefore in the signatories’ interest to get all members of the collective to assemble (v kruge) to approve the petition’s text and subscribe to a compact of solidarity (odinachnaia zapis’) pledging “to stand up for each other and not betray each other in any way.” 27 It was especially important that the collective maintain its solidarity under poval’nyi obysk. The obysk Lobanov-Rostovskii conducted at Kozlov aimed not only at testing the veracity of the community’s charges against Governor Boborykin but at determining how many members of the community were willing to stand by the petitioning against him. LobanovRostovskii was under instruction to put to further closer questioning those who gave confused or unsteady accounts of their role in the petition drive. “And if Kozlov people of various ranks say they have not sent petitioners to the Sovereign . . . and have not signed petitions,” and if the obysk cleared Boborykin of the most serious of the charges the


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petitions had levied against him – murder – the petition signatories and others implicated in the obysk as ringleaders were to be bastinadoed in the presence of the community for the felony of false accusation and sent up to the Military Chancellery for further prosecution. 28 Conversely, a governor seeking to discredit a collective petition attacking him would try to produce witnesses ready to testify that the petition was “false and felonious,” composed behind the backs of most of the community by a small faction of conspirators. To accomplish this he could try pressuring and threatening the collective, to break its solidarity and produce defectors, or if this failed, he could set his own local allies and hangers-on (khleboiadtsy) to writing their own counterpetition in the name of the community. Boborykin insisted the petitions against him had been sent “past” the community by a small cabal who “hired as their petitioners tavern beggars . . . men who plow no lands and have no domestic undertakings . . . felons who can feed themselves only by crime . . . deserters and known felons,” likely led by syn boiarskii Iurii Tolmachev, who had been previously prosecuted for forging documents. This cabal was intent on slandering the governor “to avoid wall labor and guard duty,” that is, to shirk the Sovereign’s service – a state crime. 29 A counterpetition “from all the town,” asserting that the complaints against Boborykin were fraudulent and the work of “known felons,” was composed in Boborykin’s house by Voin Mikhin, Afanasii Safonov, the cathedral priest Father Iakov, and a few other of the governor’s cronies; some village priests put their signatures to it after being threatened with violence or the assignment of their family members to wall corvee. But their counterpetition backfired when presented to the secretaries of the Military Chancellery at Moscow: it was exposed as a put-up job when Boborykin’s deputation was placed in eye-to-eye confrontment with 60 complainants against the governor. This gave the Military Chancellery grounds to reopen the investigation under a new commission of leading figures from the Duma and chancelleries. 30

The repudiation of Governor Roman Boborykin The Boborykin case is interesting in showing how effective the principle of gosudarevo delo could be as a sanction for collective remonstrance against an unpopular governor. Not only did Kozlov servicemen take great pains to recast their grievances against Boborykin as protests on behalf of the tsar’s interest, but they appear to have targetted Boborykin precisely because they understood from the moment of his arrival that his bad reputation made him especially vulnerable to the charge of

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usurping or undermining the Sovereign’s business. The older members of the Kozlov community remembered the violence Boborykin had done them a decade before, when he had served as governor of neighboring Tambov; and it was apparently general knowledge that he had been demoted from stol’nik to Moscow dvorianin in 1646 and that past collective petition drives had succeeded in getting him removed from Shatsk, Tambov, and Iablonov for “beating and tormenting people and taking great bribes.”31 Accusations that Boborykin was undermining the Sovereign’s business had begun in March 1647, just after he had arrived at Kozlov and while he was still examining the accounts of departing governor Fedor Pogozhev. In fact the first such charge against him accused him of betraying the Sovereign’s vouchsafe, colluding with Pogozhev to cover up Pogozhev’s crimes instead of looking into the community’s complaints against the outgoing governor. The charge was made by syn boiarskii Ivan Mal’gin, whom Boborykin had ordered knouted for forging obysk testimonies in the investigation of a pomest’e expropriation. Initially Mal’gin’s accusation appeared groundless, simply his desperate ploy to save himself from punishment, for Mal’gin invoked the Sovereign’s Word and levelled the charge just as he was being stretched out on the sawhorse to receive the lash. After a few weeks, though, it did seem more credible that Boborykin had arrested Mal’gin and others to stop them from airing complaints against the outgoing governor, for Boborykin kept Mal’gin in jail at Kozlov instead of complying with the Military Chancellery’s order to send him off to Moscow for further questioning, and musketeer Ustin Zlobin, arrested as Mal’gin’s alleged accomplice in a second forgery case, suddenly died under mysterious circumstances while in Boborykin’s custody.32 Over the next two months various elements of the community took advantage of Boborykin’s unpopularity to seek redress for particular injuries and perhaps to test Boborykin’s repurtation with Moscow: Stepan Sheboldin represented 145 Bel’sk musketeers in a complaint that Boborykin had beaten and jailed some of their number for insubordination when they had balked at performing fortifications labor, despite the fact that the tsar had exempted them from such corvee; and the Kozlov service land atamans and Chelnavsk musketeers protested Boborykin’s ban on haymowing on the southern side of the Pol’noi Voronezh. In both instances Boborykin was rebuked by the Military Chancellery and ordered to desist. By June 1647 the success of these remonstrations combined with the spread of outrage on behalf of Ustin Zlobin’s death to spark three collective petitions denouncing Boborykin for crimes against the Sovereign.


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On 6 June Ivan Agaurov, Mitka Chernov, Ivan Belenin, Ivan Smagin, and Titko Ushakov presented the clerks of the Military Chancellery with a petition against the governor in the name of Kozlov’s deti boiarskie and atamans, supplementing it with an oral account adding complaints “from the entire town and district.” 33 Five days later the Military Chancellery received a petition on behalf of Kozlov’s musketeers, cossacks, gunners, sharpshooters, gatekeepers, and smiths. 34 Shortly thereafter seven parish priests submitted a third petition voicing their own grievances against the governor. 35 All three petitions sought Boborykin’s removal from office on the grounds that he endangered the Sovereign’s interest by inflicting “violence and imposts” reducing their ability to render service or driving them to flee the district. The petition by the deti boiarskie and atamans complained that they were unable to till their own plowlands because Boborykin had set them to work alongside the cossacks and musketeers repairing and extending the steppe wall and erecting a new governor’s residence at Bel’sk. He had requisitioned all their best horses for fortifications labor, even from men who had already lost mounts on patrol missions, who were forced into debt to buy replacements. He had even ordered their foals destroyed – thrown into the town ditch – to free up their mares for fortifications labor. “And he beats and torments people and tells them that if they can’t afford to serve they will be turned over to his brother [as bondsmen].” The free men residing with them as boarders, service shareholders, and adopted sons “he, Roman, takes for himself into his house as peasants, against their will. . . . They are scattering in various directions because he is driving them out, assaulting them.” Boborykin also has men “beaten without cause, extorting two rubles from each man.”36 Ustin Zlobin had died in Boborykin’s custody, and an ataman, Nester Striukov, had been fatally cudgelled. Agaurov’s delegation also added charges against Boborykin’s accomplices in crime, Musketeer Captain Maksim Ostanin, Father Eufimii of the Kozlov cathedral, and the governor’s clerks Savin Kartavtsov and Petr Bogdanov for “inflicting great imposts and soliciting bribes (at two rubles per household) and petty honoraria, and bastinadoing them. . . for minor offenses and regardless of their innocence.” 37 The cossacks and musketeers likewise charged that Boborykin “throws upon us imposts and tasks of every sort, beyond our power to fulfill.” He had taken them from their spring sowing to drag timber from the district’s northern woods and dig the cellar for a large new gunpowder vault; he had ordered them to take down the governor’s residence and

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reassemble it at a new site, and build him a second residence at Bel’sk; he set them to work building a new earth wall, palisades, anticavalry fences, and a two-kilometer ditch connecting the cossack colonies with the Lesnoi Voronezh, which projects seemed to them unnecessary; he had requsitioned their own oats to sow atop the new earth wall, to protect it from erosion; he had them shovel the snow inside the town walls, and guard his goats, swans, geese, and dogs while their own livestock starved from neglect. They could no longer use the wells Birkin and Speshnev had dug for them, for Boborykin had fenced them off. He forebade them to take immigrants into their households as hired laborers; itinerants seeking work at Kozlov were instead to be arrested, beaten, and expelled lest they eventually try to rent land from the reserve funds of the musketeer and cossack colonies. They had also suffered at the hands of Captain Ostanin, the governor’s clerks, and cathedral priests Eufimii and Iakov, who were “swindlers, slanderers, and cheats.” Some years before Ostanin had been caught robbing a shop in the Kozlov tradestalls, and it was in Ostanin’s house that the prisoner Ustin Zlobin had perished. The governor required that all petitioners use the notary services of Father Iakov, who charged 0.10 ruble for every document he wrote; fathers Iakov and Eufimii were so initimate with the governor he usually put them in charge of the town in his absence. The cossacks and musketeers reminded the Military Chancellery of their already heavy service burden. “We are solitary folk, and we serve summer and winter along the wall at the forts and river fords, and we go out on campaign and in ranger parties to the Matyra, to the two Forests, to the Bitiug, Don, and Khoper.” A fortunate few could get exemptions from steppe duty, but only if they paid the governor a bribe of two rubles. 38 The seven parish priests petitioning against the governor related that they had all been in pastoral service at Kozlov since its founding but feared ruination because Boborykin had illegally conscripted their male kinsmen, sextons, and clerks for labor on the new earth wall, on a new bridge across the Voronezh, and digging new wells. They also had to stand day and night watch at the towers, brew beer and distill liquor for the governor’s household, and perform other petty services; and Boborykin was trying to extort 0.20 ruble per head from all village priests and parish personnel. This made it all the harder for them to meet their tithe to the archbishop, and several of their colleagues had already fled the district. Boborykin had jailed Nikol’skii parish priest Savva and had nearly bastinadoed Savva’s son Andrei to death. 39


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Each of the three petitions also contained an assertion of claims to corporate honor derived from loyal service and the argument that Boborykin further subverted the Sovereign’s business by treating the Sovereign’s servitors with dishonor. They had sent him a delegation with the customary feeding prestation of bread and fish, but Boborykin had his constable drive them off his porch with cudgels.40 Not only was the corvee burden he imposed beyond their capacity to bear, but he enforced it in a needlessly brutal and humiliating manner, with blows and curses. He forced men to carry earth from the trenches in their cloaks and coats. He sentenced innocent men to bastinado and then further humiliated them by having them stripped of their shirts for their beatings. The deti boiarskie and atamans were particularly indignant about being set to work digging and carrying earth alongside the cossacks, musketeers, and townsmen because they were already uneasy about the erosion of their status: the last governor, Fedor Pogozhev, had begun initating cossacks and musketeers into their ranks over their protests. In the time of Birkin and Speshnev the deti boiarskie and atamans had done their part in fortifications labor, but that had been under a different circumstance, to fortify an unsecured wilderness; why now should they be taken from steppe patrol duty to be worked like navvies on projects that appeared unnecessary or counterproductive? Boborykin even appeared to be taunting them for their concern about their status when he threatened to turn impoverished deti boiarskie into indentured servants for his brother.41 The petition filed by the parish priests went so far as to suggest Boborykin’s visible contempt for the service community concealed contempt for the earthly and heavenly Sovereigns as well: “On Easter Day, after matins . . . we came with our crosses to bow before him, Roman Boborykin . . . but he . . . beat Egorevskii parish priest Savva and knocked the crucifix from his hand.” 42 Moscow gave these petitions serious and immediate attention. Some of the leading Duma boyars and chancellery directors were named to a special investigatory commission (boyar prince I. A. Golitsyn, head of the Investigations Chancellery; boyar V. P. Sheremet’ev, who had recently headed the Robbery Chancellery; okol’nichii B. I. Pushkin, currently of the Robbery Chancellery; Duma secretary M. D. Volosheninov, of the Military Chancellery; and Duma secretary Nazarii Chistoi, former director of the Chancellery of the Grand Treasury and a major figure in the clique of boyar B. I. Morozov, which dominated the chancellery apparatus at this time).43 This commission sent stol’nik Prince Ivan Ivanovich Lobanov-Rostovskii and Military Chancellery clerk Fedor Nikitin to Kozlov to conduct an inquest. Lobanov-Rostovskii and Nikitin conducted

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a poval’nyi obysk to determine who had supported any of the three petitions against the governor (the obysk polling included in this category any members of the community now willing to speak up with new complaints). Each of the three petitions against Boborykin was treated as a separate bill of indictment; he was questioned upon all three in succession and placed in eye-to-eye with individual accusers. LobanovRostovskii even made an inspection of the new fortifications projects to determine whether they exceeded what Moscow had authorized or constituted an unreasonable burden upon the community. This inquest began on 21 June and was completed in the first week of July. 44 The povalnyi obysk polled 1841 individuals.45 Most of the respondents did not give personal testimonies in camera; rather, Lobanov-Rostovskii and Nikitin went from village to village asking the assembled inhabitants for a show of hands as to how many subscribed to the petitions of complaint and inviting those who now wanted to give personal testimony for or against the complaint to step forward. The publicity of the polling may have intimidated some from volunteering to testify; by including in the poll more than 400 non-residents the inquisitors raised the suspicion that they were trying to dilute the vote against the governor; and by conducting the polling by settlement rather than at one central location the inquisitors knowingly or unknowingly made it more difficult for middle and lower service class complainants to maintain their solidarity. In fact Lobanov-Rostovskii never polled Kozlov’s cossacks, musketeers, gunners, and sharpshooters, for they refused to participate out of suspicion that Lobanov-Rostovskii was manipulating the polling process for purpose of a whitewash. Some Kozlov deti boiarskie had informed them that the inquisitors had copied names off the service rolls so they could forge testimonies from men who were absent from the district at the time.46 A crowd of cossacks, musketeers, gunners and sharpshooters therefore chose instead to push their way into the inquisitors’ office and present a new collective “testimony” they had written themselves, on behalf of 544 of their number. This action ended any hope of achieving redress through the enumeration of an obysk majority against the governor. A majority (57.7 percent, or 594 men) of Kozlov’s deti boiarskie had made use of the obysk polling to reaffirm their opposition to the governor: 165 men (mostly from the villages of Lavrovka, Lipovka, Gavrilovka, Krasivoe, Lezhaisk, and Epanchino) had declared they had endorsed the petition Agaurov had delivered to Moscow; another 429 men had not been involved in the Agaurov petition but were willing to be counted among its supporters (90 of these men had petitioned against Boborykin and his cronies on


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past occasions). All but one of the service land atamans (143 men) also took advantage of the polling to denounce the governor. But because Kozlov’s lower service class had not presented itself for obysk polling Lobanov-Rostovskii had no grounds for further questioning of the defendant; and Boborykin seized upon their refusal as proof that the cossacks and musketeers had feared polling would reveal their petition to be “false and felonious . . . sent past [i.e. without the consent or knowledge of] the entire town and district.”47 On the fifth or sixth of July Lobanov-Rostovskii wrapped up his investigation and sent his report and transcripts off to the Military Chancellery (they arrived on 15 July). His inspection had determined that the construction projects of which the petitioners complained did not impose unreasonable corvee demands. Boborykin’s own testimony was detailed and confident; he defended each of these projects as in accordance with his instructions from Moscow and levied “on all, equitably,” and he had a rebuttal to every charge of violence, imposts, and corruption save the matter of Ustin Zlobin’s death, on which Lobanov-Rostovskii did not press him. Taking his testimony at face value, Boborykin portrayed himself as a loyal and vigilant guardian of the Sovereign’s interest, at worst guilty of some overzealousness on the Sovereign’s behalf in the attempt to repair his reputation, unfairly blackened on past assignments. The real betrayers of the Sovereign’s interest, he insisted, were the servicemen who “are all petitioning against me feloniously and falsely, to avoid wall labor and guard duty.” 48 The obysk transcript also recorded some deti boiarskie as withdrawing some of their accusations and noted that ataman Strukov, allegedly beaten to death at Boborykin’s orders, had shown up for the polling; ataman Titko Ushakov, who had been listed among the delegation presenting the petition of complaint by the deti boiarskie and atamans, had denied any involvement in the petition and claimed it had been written za ochi, without the consent of the atamans; and 66 deti boiarskie at Beloe Ozero had volunteered the speculation that the cossacks and musketeers attacking Governor Boborykin for assigning them to corvee duty were probably angry because this took them off constable duty, depriving them of the opportunity to subject their neighbors to torment and extortion. 49 The unity of “all the town and district” against the governor had dissolved. Lobanov-Rostovskii explained that he had discontinued his investigation into the death of Ustin Zlobin because Zlobin’s widow was absent from the district and the cossacks and musketeers had refused to present themselves for obysk.

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But Boborykin’s opponents still had one recourse against him. Some members of the delegations they had sent to Moscow to petition the Military Chancellery were still in the capital.50 Anticipating that LobanovRostovskii’s inquest would absolve Boborykin, they petitioned the Military Chancellery on 11 June to keep the investigation open and interrogate them as to the circumstances of Ustin Zlobin’s death, which Lobanov-Rostovskii seemed unwilling to examine.51 This was granted. They testified that Boborykin had knouted Ustin Zlobin twice on charges of complicity with Ivan Mal’gin in the forging of documents and three days after the second beating had sent Zlobin under escort to the office of Captain Maksim Ostanin with orders to have him held in shackles – and perhaps with additional instructions to have Ostanin beat him again to extort money from him. It was their conviction that “Ustinko died from Roman’s beating and from Maksim’s torture, and Roman had ordered the torture for money.” 52 They also stood by their charges that Boborykin bastinadoed innocent men, that Father Eufimii oppressed the populace in the governor’s absence, and that the governor’s clerks took bribes. The other charges they had made in their past petitions they now disavowed. On 11 August 1647 the Military Chancellery announced a verdict from the Tsar and Duma. Captain Ostanin was found guilty of killing Ustin Zlobin and was sentenced to knouting on the sawhorse for this felony (vorovstvo).53 But Governor Boborykin bore contributing responsibility (vina) for Zlobin’s death by beating him so mercilessly and was sentenced to pay 50 rubles’ compensation to Zlobin’s widow. Boborykin was to serve the remainder of his term as Kozlov’s governor but was warned that he would face a heavier fine, disgrace, and “merciless punishment” if there were any more complaints that he imposed corvee duty endangering servicemen’s ability to cultivate their plowlands or if he failed to rein in his clerks from bribetaking and extortion. As for the delegation of petitioners at Moscow, they were to be jailed for three days because they had admitted the falsity of some of their original accusations. But this was a lenient penalty, for under the terms of inquisitor LobanovRostovskii’s working order they could have faced bastinado for false accusation.54 No doubt the central government considered this verdict a sensible compromise. The government had gone to great lengths to demonstrate its solicitude towards the petitioners. It had granted them an immediate obysk and then had allowed them to reject its results and have investigation turned over to a special court of the Military Chancellery. It had rejected Boborykin’s countercharges that they were felons and shirkers


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and guilty of treasonable bunt in disrupting the obysk. It dealt surprisingly leniently with the delegation of petitioners at Moscow, choosing not to inflict the full penalty for false accusation. On the other hand the government had also rejected the petitioners’ principal grievance, that Boborykin’s corvee assignments betrayed the Sovereign’s interest because they were too onerous and endangered their livelihood: inspections, the governor’s testimony, and many obysk testimonies had failed to show this, and anyway the labor projects in question were authorized, as part of the Sovereign’s plan to strengthen defenses west of Kozlov, as far as the new garrison towns of Usman’ and Orlov, in response to recent Tatar attacks along that segment of the Belgorod Line. The government had decided there were insufficient grounds to remove Boborykin from office, given that the community had failed to stand together behind its other accusations against him in the course of the obysk and a number of men had asserted their support for the petitions had been falsified. But it had been possible to condemn Boborykin for unnecessary cruelty on the basis of witness testimony, and to put him on warning the tsar would deal more harshly with him if there were more complaints against him. Boborykin, however, was angered that this compromise had been made at the expense of his reputation. As the Military Chancellery had not defended his honor, he resolved to defend it himself. He made no effort to soften his conduct towards the district population. Instructed to place the former votchina villages of Goretovo and Sokol’e in dragoon service as satellite garrison colonies, he went even further, assigning them to wall labor against the protests of their governors and ordering the Goretovans to interrupt their harvesting to relocate their homesteads at safer sites on the other side of the Voronezh River. These actions greatly exacerbated the serious harvest shortfall felt across the entire district by March 1648. Even servicemen with long-established economies lost livestock to starvation and had to sell off their arms and clothing to buy grain at inflated prices.55 Bent on obtaining harsher punishment for those who had petitioned against him the previous spring, Boborykin jailed their families and fined their suretors and dictated to dvorovyi Voin Mikhin and syn boiarskii Afanasii Safonov a petition “from the entire towns and district” denouncing the 1647 petitioners Agaurov, Smagin, Bel’ianin, and Tolmachev as felons, forgers, and false witnesses.56 Moscow continued to receive petitions against Boborykin from particular villages and service formations seeking particular redresses short of the governor’s removal: lifting of the ban on haymowing across the Pol’noi Voronezh; review of the project to erect palisade and other

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defense works on the fords of the Pol’noi Voronezh; suspension of the governor’s order for immediate evacuation of Goretovo; more equitable allocation of plowlands at the Goretovans’ new settlement site at Il’inskoe Gorodishche. But the previous year’s experience had shown the governor’s apponents they had no chance of getting the governor removed as long as they were unable to maintain the solidarity of “the entire town and district” under obysk polling and in the face of counterpetitioning by Boborykin’s adherents. Their frustration may have found some outlet in vendetta for the perceived betrayals of the previous year. Boborykin noted an unusual crime wave at Kozlov over the course of the winter and early spring. There were six murders, at least three of them of Kozlov servicemen, with the bodies dumped at various spots. “And at many places in the colonies, villages, and hamlets, brigands are burning the houses and the grain on the threshing floors of deti boiarskie, service land atatmans, and cossacks; and they are stealing horses and slashing horses in their barns, and they are assaulting and robbing along the roads.” So many suspects appeared to be involved that Boborykin was unable to investigate every offense.57 Boborykin was also alarmed at the growing open insubordination from the rank-and-file and even from his officers. He reported that Savin Kartavtsov, one of his two clerks, had fled to Moscow and had thrown his support to the circle of “felons and tavern beggars” petitioning against the governor. Maksim Ostanin, knouted for the death of Ustin Zlobin and dismissed from his captaincy, had also gone over to the camp of the enemy. (Kartavtsov and Ostanin may have been motivated by personal revenge for having been made scapegoats for the governor in the verdict of 11 August.) The new captain of the Kozlov cossacks and musketeers, Larion Petrov, had joined with Bel’sk musketeer captain Sungur Bardakov “to incite and direct . . . a conspiracy against me. . . . They come to me in great tumult, to murder me, and because those captains have advised them their crimes would bring them no gain as long as I, thy slave, remain here.” Kartavtsov, Petrov, and Ostanin had been among the party of cossacks and deti boiarskie who assaulted Captain Iakov Shetilov of the Chelnavsk musketeers on 14 April, “beating him and cutting him about the hands [and head] with their sabers and knives.” Not one of Petrov’s men had come to help put out a fire in town even though Boborykin had rung the alarm bell so long and hard its clapper had broken. Captains Petrov and Bardakov had refused to bring their 600 troops in reinforcement to Boborykin’s column pursuing Kalmyk raiding parties on 16 April, assign any of their men to fortifications labor, or even obey Boborykin’s summons to his office.


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Petrov “has implemented a firm ban that, regradless of the Sovereign’s business at hand, the musketeers and cossacks of his command are not to go to me; and if I, thy slave, should send [orderlies or details of men] to him for some business of the Sovereign’s, he would order those details and orderlies beaten to death. . .. [His men] are continually coming against me in tumult, cursing and dishonoring me, obeying me in nothing, and always threatening me . . . with every evil deed and with murder.” 58 Petrov wrote to the Military Chancelery with his own version of these events, denying that he had disobeyed any of the governor’s orders; the governor was charging him and his men with insubordination to punish them for having dared to petition against him. He could not answer for their continued obedience, however. “Many men have scattered due to [Boborykin’s] oppression and righter beatings and various imposts and cruel punishments, and others – Vaska Borisov and comrades – have left to petition thee, Sovereign,” and more were likely to desert in the future because of the governor’s cruelty and his insistence on assigning duties “which are not in accordance with their ability and strength and take them away from their plowlands and grain.”59 The active support that clerk Kartavstov and captains Petrov, Bardakov, and Ostanin now offered, along with the new threat represented by the counterpetition being cooked up by Boborykin’s henchmen, spurred the governor’s enemies to attempt yet again to request his removal by collective petition in the name of the entire service corporation and district. By late April 60 men had assembled at Moscow for this purpose, most of them having departed Kozlov without leave: Ostanin, Kartavtsov, Iurii Tolmachev, and three other deti boiarskie; 20 cossacks; 20 Kozlov musketeers; 8 Chelnavsk musketeers; and 6 Bel’sk musketeers. Their new petition charged that Boborykin had resorted to brutal righter beatings to force the community to cover the “losses” the petitioners had inflicted on him (that is, the 50-ruble restitution he had been forced to pay Zlobin’s widow). He had cudgelled three gunners, breaking their arms and legs and bloodying their heads, and had savagely bastinadoed a cossack and three deti boiarskie. He had quadrupled each man’s share of earth wall labor, with the result that “all summer we did not plow for grain or mow hay and were away from home, so we are without oats.” He had driven so many parish priests from the district that there was no one left to administer last rites to dying men or stand vigil over women in childbirth. Once again they characterized the governor’s actions as prejudicial to the Sovereign’s business, this time more explicitly. “He, Roman, lays waste to thy royal service land grants: some of us deti boiarskie . . . have cottars on our service lands, and he, Roman, takes

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those cottars of ours for himself and jails them and orders them to submit petitions so that they end up in service against their will, intending thereby to ruin us, thy slaves, even though those cottars of ours were declared and registered to us in the census books. . . . And other cottars he takes for himself, for his household, and sends them to his votchina.. . . He, Roman, knowing he will not be replaced before winter, ruins the rest of us, thy slaves, and has driven out many and left us, thy slaves, impoverished and without bread. . . . And he has depopulated thy patrimony, Sovereign, just as he did at Tambov.” The inquest conducted by Lobanov-Rostovskii had been improperly conducted; it had polled Rizhsk servicemen who could have little knowledge of the governor’s crimes, and it falsely listed as supportive of the governor some of those who were off at Moscow petitioning against him. The counterpetition Voin Mikhin had composed and Afanasii Safonov had just brought to Moscow should also be disregarded, for these men were “notorious swindlers . . .conspirator cronies, slanderers” who had forged their petition on the governor’s instruction “and ridden around the district with it, forcing priests to sign against their will.” It was common knowedge that the Safonov delegation was staying at Boborykin’s Moscow town house, enjoying his board. 60 Under further questioning by the secretaries of the Military Chancellery, Savin Kartavtsov insisted that further investigation would show the new petition against Boborykin had the support of the district majority. It had not been signed, but that was because the village priests dare not put their names to it from fear of the governor’s retribution. But if the priests were brought to Moscow for interrogation they would confirm its charges. “When the Sovereign orders Roman replaced, the town will have a list of Roman’s offenses . . . imposts . . . fines and bribes, and a list of those he beat and mutilated. . . . But right now they do not dare hand in testimonies about such people as they remember, because Roman would know about that testimony and they would extort petitions and bonds against those people. They have a draft ready for that extorted petition.” 61 On 10 May Kartavtsov and his comrades were placed in eye-to-eye with Safonov’s delegation. A member of Safonov’s party, musketeer Grishka Peshkov, admitted to reciting false testimony dictated to him by Boborykin’s ally Father Iakov, and said that a draft of it in Iakov’s hand could probably still be found if Boborykin’s house was searched. Another of the Safonov men, Dementii Gal’, retracted his testimony that he had never signed any of the petitions against Boborykin; he could no longer remember. While insisting that Lobanov-Rostovsakii’s


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inquest had been proper and impartial, the Safonov delegation allowed that they were no longer certain that all listed in the obysk as supporting the governor had truly been present in Kozlov at the time. “God and the Sovereign are free to order a new investigation or to give a verdict on the basis of Prince Ivan Lobanov-Rstovskii’s earlier obysk,” they conceded.62 As a result of these testimonies a new investigative commission was formed (boyar Prince P. I. Pronskii, Prince M. P. Pronskii of the Gunners’ Chancellery and New Territorial Chancellery, okol’nichii Prince I. I. Romodanovskii of the Vladimir and Galich Territorial chancelleries, and Duma secretaries Nazarii Chistoi and Mikhail Volosheninov). It began to draw up new charges against Roman Boborykin. Some of the 60 complainants against the governor returned home, but a new delegation of complainants – cossack Safon Kobuzev and musketeers Osip Druzhinin and Grigorii Samandakov – arrived in the capital on 1 June. But that same day the tsar’s musketeers used force to disperse crowds demanding the arrest of Levontii Pleshcheev and other members of the despised Morozov clique, including commission member Nazarii Chistoi. Riots broke out the following day, and Chistoi fell into the hands of the mob and was torn limb from limb. The Morozov faction fell from power on 3 June and fires swept through the city, destroying over 24,000 houses. It was unclear who would now set policy for the chancelleries, and it appeared unlikely the new government could afford to attend to the grievances against Boborykin before his term as governor elapsed at the end of the year. So Kobuzev, Druzhinin and Samandakov returned home. When they reentered Kozlov on 11 June and spread word of the riots they had witnessed at Moscow, much of Kozlov immediately rose up in revolt against Governor Boborykin. 63 “A large gathering from outside town came against me, with all their arms,” Boborykin would later write, “and they chased me out of town; and approaching me, they intended to beat me to death and beat to death those Riazhsk men and Kozlov deti boiarskie and men of various ranks who did not support their felony. . . . And those people of various ranks who did not succeed in escaping those brigands were beaten to death, while many others, beaten almost to death, they threw into the depths of the river. And they plundered many houses and shops.” 64 Boborykin was forced to flee to the dragoon villages along the Voronezh, accompanied by a small group of loyal deti boiarskie and some Riazhsk servicemen. He had to leave behind his wife and children, although he had the presence of mind to take along his income–expenditure books and court records. The violence at Kozlov spread to Bel’sk and Chelnavsk and several outlying villages and reportedly lasted for four days. Boborykin was

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convinced the principal ringleader was Captain Larion Petrov; witness testimony gathered in the subsequent inquest also identified syn boiarskii Iurii Tolmachev, former clerk Savin Kartavtsov, and former captain Masim Ostanin as playing leading roles. Tolmachev and 28 other men, mostly cossacks and musketeers (among them petitioners Druzhinin, Kobuzev, Samandakov, Chernoi, and Kozlov) ran through the posad “plundering houses and shops and beating merchants and other people and casting them into the ditch.” They took money and goods valued at over 1200 rubles. 65 There were beatings, armed robberies, and housebreakings at the Don Cossacks’ and Patrol Cossacks’ colonies and at the village of Dubovoe in Ilovaiskii bailliage. The one confirmed fatality was an aged musketeer, Timofei Chunbulov, robbed and beaten to death at Chelnavsk on 12 June. Some but not all of the looting of posad shops by Tolmachev’s band appears to have been to settle old political scores: two of the despised Father Iakov’s shops were ransacked to the tune of 500 rubles in books, clothing, weapons, and gear, and the shops of syn boiarskii Vasilii Dvizhkov (assessor at the Don Cossack Colony) and Akinfii Taraborin (elected elder of the Kozlov gunners) were also hit. But the other shops plundered (those of gunners Karpik Militsyn, Senka Militsyn, and Vaska Chebotar, whose kinsman Titko Chebotar’ had signed the lower service class’ petition against the governor) appear to have been selected out of simple opportunism. The mob did not touch the shops held by two tradesmen of the elite merchants’ guild, the three shops run by a peasant belonging to stol’nik M. I. Morozov, or the shops held by seven deti boiarskie, five cossacks, a musketeers’ widow, and eight other gunners. Although the Sosedov and Dubovitskii families remained allied with the governor, the shops of deti boiarskie Afanasii Dubovitskii, Onisim and Spiridon Sosedov escaped damage.66 A clearer picture of organized retributive violence emerges at Chelnavsk, Dubovoe, and the cossack colonies. At Dubovoe seven deti boiarskie led the violence against the village’s “best men,” beating centurion Fedor Savin, assessor Dementii Nekrasov, syn boiarskii Fedor Vystavkin, and Father Kirill; they also plundered the parish church. At the Don Cossacks’ Colony syn boiarskii Ivan Severov was bludgeoned, his wife beaten, and his house robbed of goods worth 100 rubles; the despoilers then auctioned off the stolen goods on the portico of the parish church. As punishment for refusing to join their comrades’ “dangerous council” (sovet) at the parish church in the patrol Cossacks’ Colony, cossacks Samsonko Deev and Grishka Tisheninov and Tisheninov’s wife and daughter were dragged before the rebels’ assembly (krug) and beaten


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and robbed on 14 June. At Chelnavsk on 12 June, as soon as news arrived of the riots at Kozlov, musketeer quinquagenaries Fedka Khlebnikov and Ianka Rogachev and musketeer Grishka Beketov ordered the alarm bell sounded and the drums beaten to call to assembly, then locked the gates and led an armed attack on some of their comrades. “They began to beat people to death with cudgels and gun barrels, without cause.” Among those assaulted were Captain Iakov Shetilov, quinquagenaries Timofei Riashenin and Ivan Firsov, and the monk Simeon. A group of about a dozen musketeers left the fort and went to the house of Timofei Chunbulov, robbing him and then dragging him back to the fort, where they beat him savagely “and threw him into the ditch, leaving him for dead.” Under interrogation 10 suspects in this affair would later admit “the whole mir” had put Chunbulov to death “because he had devoured the mir.”67 Those members of the community most closely associated with the governor or likely to be resented as strong men feared they would be the next to be targetted; thus Prince Fedot Selekhovskii and 22 other deti boiarskie (including nine elected centurions and assessors, Boborykin’s supporters Afanasii Safonov, Voin Mikhin and Grigorii Polukhin, and members of the influential Dubovitskii and Iankov families) smuggled out a petition begging they be transferred to Usman’: they dared not remain at Kozlov because “we Kozlov men have endured every harm, remembering as we do thy Sovereign’s oath on the cross. For that the ringleaders Savin Kartavtsov, Maksim Ostanin, Iurii Tolmachev, and Captain Larion Petrov and many of their comrades are now threatening us, thy slaves, with murder.” 68 During the late summer inquest into the Kozlov uprising both victims and suspects made references to the insurgents acting in the name of their siabr communes (miry) or forming special councils (sovety) or assemblies (krugi) to mete out punishments and divide up plundered goods. Captain Shetilov even characterized the uprising as a “communal mutiny” (mirskii miatezh).69 It would be tempting but misleading to take him literally. The mutineers never came together to form a single, self-aware districtwide insurrectionary commune. At most the mutiny against Boborykin involved a congery of smaller solidarities, some of them perhaps representing majorities within particular village communes, but others less inclusive and formed ad hoc with the primary aim of taking vengeance upon neighbors who had failed or refused to stand together with them in the past. The violence at Chelnavsk, for example, pitted one half of the musketeer garrison against the other, each half led by its own quinquagenaries, despite the claim of the Chelnavsk insurgents that they were acting in defense of the entire mir. The “ideology” of the mutineers

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is not easily identified; 13 of the 84 servicemen arrested or hunted for mutiny after 9 July had signed their names to one or more of the petitions filed against Governor Boborykin, but there is no way of knowing whether any of the remaining 71 men had supported the petitions campaign, and many of their victims had not been named in the petitions as Boborykin’s accomplices in oppression. Cossacks, musketeers, and service Ukrainians comprised the majority of the men arrested, but there were also 17 deti boiarskie and atamans taken into custody. 70 The mutineers had Kozlov in their hands for nearly three weeks – inquisitor stol’nik Emel’ian Buturlin did not enter Kozlov with his detachment of Moscow musketeers and Boborykin’s replacement Vasilii Volynskii until 1 July, and he began making arrests only on 9 July – but in the interval nothing took form at Kozlov comparable to the revolutionary coalition government the cossack krug formed with associate governor Il’ia Bunakov at Tomsk in 1648–1649. Some witnesses stated that Captain Petrov and Iurii Tolmachev tried to assume control over Kozlov, but their actions appear to have been limited to releasing five of the jail’s 56 prisoners and sending out six atamans to spy on the forces of the governors of Sokol’sk and Dobryi, whom Boborykin had called upon for help in retaking Kozlov.71 There is no record of the Military Chancellery receiving any new petitions of grievance from the insurgents or manifestoes declaring their justifications and intentions over the period 11 June to 1 July, and Buturlin’s entry into Kozlov met with no resistance. A firmer and more inclusive solidarity with a more coherent ideology of insurgency appears to have been prevented by multiple internal divisions, some of them dating back at least to the first collective petitions against the governor and others beginning from these petitions’ failure the preceding summer. In the course of Lobanov-Rostovskii’s obysk some conflict between Kozlov’s middle and lower service classes did surface – notably in the condemnation of the petitioning cossacks and musketeers by the deti boiarskie of Beloe Ozero – but it did not take the form of the simple class conflict Soviet historiography tended to see as driving the urban uprisings of mid-seventeeth-century Muscovy, for it cast certain cossacks and musketeers, not deti boiarskie, as the exploiters (by virtue of the former’s constabulary duty on behalf of the governor). One can also discern divisions by commune (six villages of deti boiarskie voiced their opposition to the governor at the obysk while another 23 villages supported him or maintained neutrality) and within communes (as expressed in the violence at Chelnavsk). There may also have been some suspicion and resentment over the attempts by former targets of


241

the petitions campaign (Ostanin, Kartavtsov) to place themselves at the head of the June mutiny. Because of these divisions the Kozlov uprising was unable to economize its violence and direct it solely against the governor and his allies; most of its violence fell upon neighbors within village and colony communes in an effort to purge the communes of those who were perceived to be enemies of or obstacles to the communes’ transformation into insurgent solidarities. Because the Kozlov mutineers were unable to establish and maintain a clear majority solidarity they were unable to make optimal use of the principal of gosudarevo delo to legitimate their insurgency. Their collective action can be contrasted with those undertaken by certain other instances over the course of the century where communities were able to repudiate their governors and turn them out yet avoid punishment for treasonable bunt because they had closed their ranks and taken pains to issue explanations characterizing their insurgencies as legitimate defensive actions to safeguard the Sovereign’s business. At Tomsk (1648–1649) Governor K. O. Shcherbatyi was brought down by cossack krugi which shrewdly invoked gosudarevo delo in their manifestoes (declaring they would have no dealing “with traitors to the Sovereign, . . . who do not wish the Sovereign well”), formed a united front with the other communes of the district, co-opted or intimidated Tomsk’s small middle service class into neutrality, and selected Shcherbatyi’s associate governor, Il’ia Bunakov, to maintain order until the Sovereign sent a replacement. It was not in the autocracy’s interest to formally recognize this “right” of repudiation in its legal codes, but it was often politically convenient for Moscow to tacitly recognize this right in practice by letting it go unpunished. Moscow’s willingness to allow a community to repudiate a corrupt and oppressive governor depended on several factors, of course: the breadth of support the camp of repudiators enjoyed; whether they could convincingly show the governor had seriously damaged the tsar’s interest; whether they refrained from inciting other districts to overthrow their officials; and whether they continued to honor the theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance by accepting the authority of other of the tsar’s officials. Thus Moscow took punitive action against the Tomsk cossack krug only when it overreached itself and began sending circulars to cossacks and peasants in other districts urging them to follow their example and send petitioners to Moscow against their own governors. Likewise the petitioners at Gremiachii (1651) who succeeded in getting Governor Dementii Raevskii bastinadoed and fined for oppression and bribetaking were themselves sentence to bastinado when they presented the inquisitor with a written manifesto declaring their intent

242


to stand together any resist any official who tried to beat or jail them or “cause any oppression.”72 In another sense, however, the breakdown of insurgent solidarity at Kozlov had some fortunate consequences for the mutineers. If it prevented them from organizing to present their action as an exercise of the right of repudiation, it also prevented them from forming a solidarity that could be characterized as a single large treasonable conspiracy. It thereby spared many of their number harsher punishment. From Vasilii Volynskii’s reports (we do not have the transcripts from Buturlin’s inquest) it appears that 83 servicemen and one of Boborykin’s house slaves were arrested for the June mutiny (yet another man, Grishka Beketov, had fled and was still being sought for inciting the rioting at Chelnavsk). Only two of those arrested were cleared of guilt. But corporal or capital punishment was visited upon only a few of the rest. Musketeer Grishka Nesterov was bastinadoed; Boborykin’s slave Mishka Grigor’ev was knouted, as were the 10 Chelnavsk musketeers implicated in the death of Timofei Chunbulov. Although Savin Kartavtsov, Maksim Ostanin, Larion Petrov, and Iurii Tolmachev were identified as ringleaders of the revolt, their rank evidently served them to advantage, for the only one of them sentenced to corporal punishment appears to have been Iurii Tolmachev (perhaps because he had a prior record and had been identified as leading the looting of the posad shops). But cossack Safon Kobuzev, musketeer Osip Druzhinin, and musketeer Grigorii Samandakov were sentenced to hang, for they were the men who had returned from Moscow on 11 June and incited Kozlov to mutiny by describing the riots they had witnessed at Moscow. They were the connecting link between disorder in the capital and the spread of disorder in the provinces; disturbances at Voronezh, Sokol’sk and other southern towns were being sparked by men like them, agitators returning from the capital to report that the people had risen up against the tsar’s boyars. 73

The limits of resistance Given the complexity of community organization there could be no clear fixed boundary defining the community’s recognized sphere of autonomy; at most such boundaries were shifting ones, under constant contestation. On the one hand the central government and its local officials had to continually struggle to maintain control over community associations, resorting to coercion or concession as the circumstances dictated; sometimes neither tactic sufficed and community associations linked up into a general mobilization for protest or open revolt. On the


243

other hand, the associations built on community initiative were too compromised or divided to establish a stable zone of interdiction against bureaucratic power. Furthermore, the rules of political discourse provided no real opening for subjects and their representatives to repudiate their subaltern identity. Having assented to the principle that the Sovereign was the ultimate allocator of all subaltern entitlements to livelihood, in exchange for which he demanded the service of all, subjects had the right to negotiate some of the terms of state service but not the right to refuse service. The state’s control over the production of social identity extended even to its subjects’ personal and clan honor, which were partly rooted in estate and rank and other ordering categories created by the state, and conflicts over which were supposed to be resolved in the state’s courts, according to its legal norms. To be successful subaltern protest against the terms of service had to take an obeisantly supplicatory tone and follow the terms of official discourse; such protest also had to have the unwavering support of most of the community. The former was relatively easy to achieve, for the overlap of popular and official conceptions of gosudarevo delo highlighted certain tradition-hallowed formulae by which petitioners could attack particular service norms or the manner of their enforcement as ruinously excessive innovations damaging their ability to continue rendering loyal service. But lasting solidarity in protest was often difficult to sustain because of the complexity of community organization, some divergence of middle service class from lower service class interests, the existence of some social hierarchy within service formations, and the presence of “reactionary” factions consisting of the governor’s cronies and accomplices. The alternative to legal protest was resistance. The most economical tactics of resistance were the most routinized but covert and subtle ones, what James C. Scott has called “the weapons of the weak” – evasion, footdragging, deception, slander, and flight. A sustained campaign of small-scale hidden resistance directed against the governor, central control’s point of contact with the community, could have the effect of deceiving and frustrating central control as well as checking the governor. It was also possible to direct covert resistance against the center itself by using bribery and feeding to coopt the governor and thereby cut the line of central control at the district level. Feeding was an especially low-risk form of resistance in that it reinforced community-wide solidarity and was camouflaged as custom and routine, expected by the receiving official and tacitly tolerated by the central government.

244


Open resistance in the form of strike and mutiny could successfully communicate the community’s unwillingness to sell out for minor concessions and even force the central government’s hand, compelling Moscow to withdraw the offending official and conduct an investigation. But it might backfire once its unity was broken by splits and and defections or once its actions and rhetoric overstepped what the theodicy of bureaucratic malfeasance allowed. It provoked harsh repression when it clearly repudiated the legitimacy of the fundamental political assumptions and institutions underlying the state’s hegemony. It was also true that resistance was invariably reactive and defensive in purpose, the community’s ability even to imagine making a full frontal attack upon such assumptions and institutions being limited by the dual nature of subaltern consciousness – its occasional capacity to act independently and defiantly on behalf of its own interests as deduced from its own economic and political experience, which capacity was, however, often blocked by borrowed or inherited hegemonic assumptions the subaltern mind had internalized as common sense.74 But this common sense should not be dismissed as entirely naive; it had its own cunning as a tactic of limited self-defense aware of the preponderance of the power of the state and ruling class.

Epilogue: the degradation of the odnodvorets condition Over the next several decades Kozlov servicemen petitioned against the rising conscription rate for the field army and the increase in chetverikovyi khleb dues, and occasionally they got the Military Chancellery to investigate these “ruinous imposts” and pledge some partial exemptions or postponements. But the 1647–1648 collective action against Roman Boborykin was the Kozlov community’s last broadly supported act of open resistance demanding general reform of the garrison regime. By this time the strategic function of the Kozlov service community had already begun to change; having performed their task of securing the Nogai Front, the Kozlov servicemen were increasingly seen as potential manpower for distant campaign duty on the lower Don and in Ukraine, or as duespayers supporting comrades on campaign duty. These two new missions resulted in the further servilization and stratification of the Kozlov community. By 1652 much of the Belgorod Line had been completed; Kozlov’s new satellite garrisons at Dobryi and Sokol’sk had demonstrated the adaptability of the southern peasantry to foreign formation service; and the Assembly of the Realm had weighed the arguments for accepting


245

the fealty of Khmel’nitskii’s cossacks in Ukraine and preparing for war against the Commonwealth. Among the preparations for this war was the decision in October 1652 to form four regiments of foreign formation infantrymen (soldaty) at Iablonov on the Belgorod Line. These 8000 infantrymen were to be raised by levying peasant militiamen, enrolling free volunteers, or conscripting half of the adult male kinsmen of the active servicemen in 18 districts. Kozlov was one of these districts, but its importance as the largest reservoir of military manpower on the Belgorod Line is indicated by the fact that it was expected to contribute 2475 men. In fact Kozlov subsequently provided over half of the strength of the Iablonov regiments when its satellite garrisons at Dobryi and Sokol’sk (contributing 1817 men) are counted. This levy was greatly resented at Kozlov for stripping servicemen’s households of much of their supporting labor, and when Governor Pushkin assembled the Kozlov recruits for the march to Iablonov in May 1653 many of them refused. Pushkin managed to avert open mutiny by arresting a few ringleaders and promising the rest Moscow would make good on their pay arrears. 75 The outbreak of war with the Commonwealth in 1654 led to further mobilizations of Kozlov men into the field army. A Belgorod Army Group of 20,000 men (9202 infantrymen, 5000 dragoons, 2400 reitary, 600 Moscow musketeers, and 2050 traditional formation cavalrymen) was raised from 38 districts in 1658. Another 3385 men from Kozlov, Dobryi, and Sokol’sk were assigned to it: Kozlov servicemen, the few Kozlov peasants and cottars who had not already fled, left on remand, or entered Kozlov town service, and the dragoons of Dobryi and Sokol’sk dragoons (in violation of the Military Chancellery’s 1647 pledge that the dragoons would never be liable for distant campaign duty). 76 Subsequent levies for the Belgorod Army Group were even more comprehensive. The levy of 1673 was supposed to leave two men in each Kozlov household for town service for every recruit taken into the regiments, but there were complaints that the troop mobilizers had ignored this norm and had swept up too many of the able-bodied adult kinsmen of those assigned to the town service. Later in the decade the recruit quota was raised again, leaving town service households with almost no labor support and reducing labor support in the households of Army Group infantrymen to just one man on average. In 1700 the government began conscripting males younger than 15 years provided they stood at least 1.53 meters tall, with the result that Kozlov’s households had “no one left on the plowland, they enroll everyone who meets the measuring stick.”77

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Kozlov servicemen were given no opportunity to replace their conscripted kinsmen with cottars or boarded dependent laborers. Most of their cottars and boarders had already been taken into the regiments in the 1658 levy, and the 124 new households of cottars and dependent laborers formed between 1658 and 1668 were largely emptied by subsequent levies and by Eropkin’s 1664 dragnet for fugitive peasants. The 4405 deti boiarskie and service land atamans listed at the review of 1675 had among them just 300 slaves or dependent laborers. 78 Three years later the category of free itinerant was effectively abolished on the southern frontier when the itinerants were rounded up, forced into the foreign formation infantry regiments, and ordered to serve from rations money alone, without land allotments. Meanwhile natural population increase, continued immigration, and the government’s continuing ban on agricultural expansion south of the steppe wall acted to sharply reduce the size of the average pomest’e allotment at Kozlov, so that by 1675 the grants of those serving in the regiments were 44.8 percent and the grants of those in town service 50 percent smaller than the average grant of the late 1630s.79 Testimonies at the 1675 review reveal a growing number of men who had been in active service for several years without entitlement rates or any plowland grants. In the 1660s and 1670s the rising desertion rate in the regiments and mounting protest across the south against levies for the regiments convinced the Military Chancellery that the burdens of field army duty and town defense duty ought to be equalized to render the latter a less attractive haven from the currently more onerous former. Moscow therefore saddled the men enrolled in town service with new corvee obligations and new dues, both of an increasingly tiaglyi character, to provide material support for their comrades enrolled in the regiments and engaged in distant campaigning. In addition to having to build barges and longboats at the Voronezh wharf and serve as rowers and escorts on Don expeditions, those in town service now had to pay the chetverikovyi khleb tax to provision the regiments. The rate of this tax increased ninefold over the years 1662–1674. 80 Those without the labor resources to pay it had little recourse but to flee. It was an ugly irony that the Kozlov town service formations were relegated to this exploited condition by their own effectiveness in securing the Nogai Front from Tatar raiding. Local defense duty was no longer as important an element of Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy as field army operations far off in Ukraine or on the lower Don. From the beginning the small scale of their land allotments, held in siabr collective tenure and worked without much dependent labor, had placed


247

them in an economic condition closer to the lower service class and peasantry than to the traditional middle service class of central Muscovy. Now their military obsolescence and their liability for some of the same taxes paid by the tiaglye liudi worked to further degrade their legal status. By the end of the century they were being turned from men of service into men of draft. In an effort to increase the relative weight of the infantry in the field army by cutting back the traditional formation cavalry centuries, a decree of 1 December 1696 ruled that eligibility to serve in the latter was henceforth restricted to the dvoriane and deti boiarskie residing in particular districts and owning at least 17–20 peasant or cottar households (these men were no longer to receive annual cash compensation, but were to serve from their pomest’ia alone). Those members of the middle service class with small pomest’ia or none at all, who needed cash allowances in order to serve, would receive annual compensations of six rubles cash and 9.5 measures of grain if they gave up the last of their land allotments, resettled in special colonies at Belgorod, Kursk, and other towns, and joined their conscripted kinsmen and the itinerants in the foreign formation infantry and musketeer regiments stationed there. Their resettlement was thought necessary to cut mobilization time and to minimize the conflict that might otherwise arise if they had continued residing alongside the householders who were now being turned into taxpayers to support them. A third category of southern odnodvortsy without peasants – about 25,000 men – were left in town service but were still required to pay grain taxes. The fourth and largest category consisted of 83,547 men residing in the Belgorod Line districts farthest from Belgorod – dragoons, deti boiarskie, cossacks and musketeers in town service, and those reitary, lancers, and soldaty no longer needed in the regiments – who were now released from all military service obligations but were expected to pay cash and grain to maintain the reformed infantry regiments. This fourth category included the population of Kozlov and its satellite garrisons. On 20 October 1699 a precursor of Peter I’s soul tax was introduced on the southern frontier, a cash tax assessed on individuals regardless of their land resources, to be paid by all those off active regimental service or enrolled in town service and by their few remaining peasants. Subjection to this tax collapsed the legal distinction between odnodvortsy and state peasants paying rent from treasury lands. This new understanding was on display in the census of 1710, which redefined the term odnodvorets to mean “men of the old services” who now bore tiaglo. By 1728, from the old services 24,483 Kozlov men were officially listed as tiaglye odnodvortsy.81

248


The land, freedom, and status that had drawn thousands of volunteers to Kozlov in the 1630s had thus proved elusive. Once Kozlov’s colonists had succeeded in ending the threat of Crimean Tatar and Nogai penetration into central Muscovy they found themselves subjected to intense exploitation, their entitlements and allotments reduced and their labor resources and grain surpluses taken to subsidize imperial expansion elsewhere on the frontier. By the end of the century this process had stripped most of them of their legal freedom.

Total

Ilovai Ilovai II

Total

Staeva Poliana Lavrova Poliana Lavrova Poliana II Lipovka Gavrilkova Gavrilkova II Zhidilkova Poliana Ranina Poliana Radostnaia Ternovaia Poliana Ostraia Luka

Oleshenskii

Ilovaiskii

Village

Bailliage

116

57 59

205

5 12 25 15 12 13 22 23 18 35 25

Pomeshchiki

46.3 46.1

60 q./field 49.1 55.2 50.6 51.6 49.2 50 52.6 50 49.4 49.6

Average grant

5360

2640 2720

10678*

300q. 590 1380 760 620 640 1100 1210 900 1730 1240

Total granted

34 holdings/1440 q.

33 holdings/1400 q. per field 1 holding/40 q.

0 holdings, 0 q.

Reserved for future grant

Appendix I: Pomest’e Allotments at Kozlov, by Bailliage and Settlement, 1635–1638

36

Total 653

150

30 60 60

Total

Borshchevaia Pol. sl. Ustenskaia sl. Khmelevaia sl.

30 6

Ust’ Rechki Verdy Ust’ Rechki Verdy II

140

21 39 25 29 26

Pomeshchiki

50 50 50

50 58.3

52.3 48.9 43.2 43.4 45.3

Average grant

2150

32188

7500

1500 3000 3000

>182 holdings/>7640 q.

>100 holdings/4000 q.

48 holdings/2220 q.

6530 1500 350

7 holdings/340 q. 1 holding/40 q. 15 holdings/680 q. 11 holdings/520 q. 14 holdings/640 q.

Reserved for future grant

1100 1910 1080 1260 1180

Total granted

Source: F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’ 1, ed. Khr. 198, pp. 1–362; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 1–362. * Of which only 5544 q. are in Oleshenskii bailliage; rest is discontiguous land in Turmasovskii and llovaiskii.

District total

Ustenskii

Boretskii

Turmasovka Izosimovka Lezhaisk Krasivaia Poliana Kruglaia Poliana

Turmasovskii

Total

Village

(Continued)

Bailliage

Appendix 1

250

Village

Staeva Poliana Lavrova Lipovka Gavrilkova Gavrilkova II Zhidilkova Poliana Ranina Poliana Radostnaia Ternovaia Poliana Ostraia Luka

Ilovai Ilovai II Klenskaia Beloe Ozero

Istobnoe Selo Stanovye Riasy Krivaia Poliana

Bailliage

Oleshenskii

Ilovaiskii

Slobodskii

– – –

46.3 46.1 – –

60 q./field 49.1 55.2 50.6 51.6 50 52.6 50 49.4 49.6

Average pomest’e grant in 1636–1639

0 0 0

2 0 0 0

5 1 0 0 0 1 5 0 4 4

No. of pomeshchiki holding peasants, 1646

0 0 0

4 0 0 0

24 1 0 0 0 8 10 0 5 4

No. of peasants and cottars they held

55 39 12

90 59 5 59

0 31 15 12 13 20 18 18 30 20

Pomeshchiki lacking laborers

Appendix II: Dependent Labor at Kozlov, 1646

0 0 0

0.04 0 0 0

4.8 0.03 0 0 0 0.3 0.4 0 0.14 0.16

Ratio of peasant labor to pomeshchiki in village

Village

Turmasovka Izosimovka Lezhaisk Krasivaia Poliana Kruglaia Poliana Epanchino Glazok Lamki Pupki Pupki II Podgornaia Iur’evo Donskaia sloboda

Ust’ R. Verdy I, II Sysoeva Nazar’eva Vysokaia

Borshchevskaia sl. Ustenskaia sl. Khmelevaia sl.

Bailliage

Turmasovskii

Boretskii

Ustenskii

50 50 50

50, 58.3 – – –

52.3 48.9 43.2 4324 45.3 – – – – – – – –

Average pomest’e grant in 1636–1639

90

4 4 5

20 7 4 6

2 6 3 1 0 0 0 3 1 1 0 0 1

No. of pomeshchiki holding peasants, 1646

Source: F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’ 1, ed. Khr. 230, pp. 249–279.

Total/Average

(Continued)

Appendix II

204

5 8 6

41 14 8 21

2 18 13 4 0 0 0 3 2 2 0 0 1

No. of peasants and cottars they held

1259

34 69 68

35 28 43 30

21 37 40 44 40 42 52 46 18 ? 14 22 80

Pomeshchiki lacking laborers

0.15

0.13 0.1 0.08

0.7 0.4 0.17 0.5

0.08 0.4 0.3 0.08 0 0 0 0.06 0.1 ? 0 0 0.01

Ratio of peasant labor to pomeshchiki in village

252

Afanasii Beklemishev, 7148–7150 Ivan Rostovskii, 7150–7151 Ivan Liapunov, 7151–7153 Fedor Pogozhev, 7153–7155 Roman Boborykin, 7155–7156 Vasili Volynskii, 7156–7158 Nikita Pushkin, 7158–7159 Ivan Alfer’ev, 7159–7161 Petr Pushkin, 7162–7163 Semen Koltovskii, 7163–7164 Vasilii Likharev, 7171–7172 Ivan Likharev, 7167–7168 Vas. & Ivan Likharev, 7169–7171 Vasilii Likharev, 7171–7172 Ivan Vel’iaminov, 7172–7174

Governorship

120 44 139 186 142 199 154 >182 183 100 209 65 128 72 88

Rescripts

– – – – – 53 67 83 92 30 68 87 – 59 –

Memoranda

– – – – – – – – – – 95* – – 153** –

Petitions

– – – – – – – – – – – – – 250*** 150

Iavka declarations

9 28 – 145 (76 unresolved) 98 248 (60 unresolved) 132 (incl. Lebedian guba cases) 67 260 (incl. many peasant remands) 240 484 **** 332

– –

Court cases, arraignments, and investigations

Appendix III: Communications, Petitions, and Court Cases Processed in the Kozlov Governor’s Office, 1639–1676

(Continued)

101 94 55 72

Rescripts

Petitions

– – 50 – 55 memoranda & petitions 60 –

Memoranda

125 70 94 65

Iavka declarations 579 422 306 272

Court cases, arraignments, and investigations

Source: Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 445, pp. 159–180. *accumulated over 7148–7162. **accumulated over 7162–7167. ***accumulated over 7167–7172. ****256 felony cases from previous governorships transferred to Kozlov’s guba office in 1658 were now transferred back to the governor’s office.

Andrei Shchepotev, 7175–7177 Stepan Khrushchev, 7177–7180 Afanasii Khrushchev, 7180–7182 Eremei Pashkov, 7182–7184

Governorship

Appendix III

254

Abbreviations

AAE

AI AIu

AIuB

AIuZR

AMG

Arkhiv Baiusheva

ChOIDR Chuvash

DAI

DR ITUAK Kotoshikhin

OMAMIu PSZ RBS

Akty, sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi imperii arkheograficheskoiu ekspeditsieiu imperatorskoi akademiia nauk 4 vols + index. St Petersburg, 1836, 1858. Akty istoricheskie, sobrannyia i izdannyia arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu 5 vols + index. St Petersburg, 1841–1843. Akty iuridicheskie, ili sobranie form starinnago deloproizvodstva, izdannoe arkheograficheskoi kommissii 1 vol. + index. St Petersburg, 1838, 1840. Akty, otnosiashchiesia do iuridicheskago byta drevnei Rossii, izdannyia arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu 3 vols + index. St Petersburg, 1857, 1864, 1884, 1901. Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii iuzhnoi i zapadnoi Rossii, sobrannyia i izdannyia arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu 15 vols + supplements. St Petersburg, 1863–1892. Akty Moskovskago gosudarstva, izdannye imperatorskoiu akademieiu nauk, ed. N. A. Popov 3 vols. St Petersburg, 1890–1901. Materialy istoricheskie i iuridicheskie raiona byvshago prikaza kazanskago dvortsa. Tom pervyi. Arkhiv kniazia V. I. Baiusheva, ed. N. P. Zagoskin Kazan’, 1882. Chteniia v obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete. Sbornik 264 vols. Moscow, 1845–1918. Dmitriev, V. D. “‘Tsarskie’ nakazy kazanskim voevodam XVII veka,” Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institute pri sovete ministrov Chuvashskoi ASSR. Sbornik statei 3 (1974): 285–419. Dopolneniia k aktam istoricheskim, sobrannyia i izdannyia arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu 12 vols + index. St Petersburg, 1846–1875. Dvortsovye razriady, izdannye II-m otdeleniem sobstvennoi ego imp. velichestva kantseliarii 4 vols. St Petersburg, 1850–1855. Izvestiia Tambovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi kommissii 13–57 [1–12 not published] Tambov, 1877–1917. Uroff, Benjamin P. “Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin, On Russia in the Reign of Alexis Mikhailovich: An Annotated Translation,” PhD. dissertation, Columbia University, 1970. Opisanie dokumentov i bumag, khraniashchikhsia v Moskovskom arkhive ministerstva iustitsii 21 vols. St Petersburg, 1869–1921. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii. Sobranie pervoe 45 vols. St Petersburg, 1830–1843. Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ 25 vols. St Petersburg, 1896–1918. 255

256

Abbreviations

RIB

SGGD 1669 New Decree Statutes

SNM

Solov’ev Sudebnik 1550

Uchenye zapiski RANION Ulozhenie

Vremennik ZARG Kommentarii

ZARG Teksty

ZhMNP

Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, izdavaemaia arkheograficheskoiu kommissieiu ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 39 vols. Moscow, Leningrad, 1872–1927. Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov 5 vols. St Petersburg, 1813–1894. “Newly Promulgated Articles on Theft, Robbery, and Murder Cases, 1669.” In Readings for Introduction to Russian Civilization, trans. and ed. Richard Hellie, 182–209. Chicago: University of Chicago, Social Sciences Collegiate Division, Syllabus Division, 1977. Tsentral’nyi Statisticheskii Komitet Ministerstva Vnutrennykh Del Spiski naselennykh mest Rossiiskoi imperii. Tom 92-i. Tambovskaia guberniia St Petersburg, 1866. Solov’ev, S. M. Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen 15 vols. Moscow, Leningrad: Sotsekgiz-Mysl’, 1959–1966. “The 1550 Sudebnik,” Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556, comp., trans., ed. Horace W. Dewey, 45–74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Michigan Slavic Materials no. 7, 1966. Uchenye zapiski Rossiskoi assotsiatsii nauchno-issledovatel’ skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk 7 vols. Moscow, 1926–1929. Richard Hellie, trans. and ed. The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, Part One: Text and Translation (The Laws of Russia. Series I, Medieval Russia, Vol. 3) Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks Jr, Publisher, 1988. Vremennik imperatorskago Moskovskago obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh 25 vols. Moscow, 1849–1857. Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Institut istorii SSSR. Leningradskoe otdelenie Zakonodatel’nye akty Russkogo gosudarstva vtoroi poloviny XVI-pervoi poloviny XVII veka. Kommentarii Leningrad: Nauka, 1987. Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Institut istorii SSSR. Leningradskoe otdelenie Zakonodatel’nye akty Russkogo gosudarstva vtoroi poloviny XVI-pervoi poloviny XVII veka. Teksty Leningrad: Nauka, 1986. Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 434 vols in 2 series. St Petersburg, 1834–1917.

Note on Bibliography A full bibliography is available on the worldwide web at //colfa.utsa.edu/colfa/ hist/bdavies/spcebiblio.pdf

Notes Introduction 1. On the grounding of social history in “socially specific, exacting accounts of power, resistance, and constraints in loci,” see David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 7–12. 2. See, for example, “Ex Tempore: Muscovite Despotism,” Kritika 3, 3 (2002), pp. 473–507, a recent exchange among Marshall Poe, Valerie Kivelson, and Charles Halperin. 3. Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1982), pp. 3, 16. 4. Marshall Poe, “The Truth About Muscovy,” Kritika 3, 3 (2002), p. 485. 5. These criticisms are most justified in the case of Richard Pipes’ Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner’s, 1974), which especially emphasizes the patrimonial foundations of autocracy. For further remarks on Pipes’ book, see Robert O. Crummey, “Seventeenth-century Russia: Theories and Models,” Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte 56 (2000), pp. 129–130. 6. Valerie Kivelson, “On Words, Sources, and Historical Method: Which Truth About Muscovy?” Kritika 3, 3 (2002), pp. 490–491. 7. Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 11, 16–20; Valerie Kivelson, “Merciful Tsar, Impersonal State: Russian Autocracy in Comparative Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997), pp. 651–655, 660–661. 8. L. V. Cherepnin, Zemskie sobory Russkogo gosudarstva v XVI–XVII vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), pp. 397–398; Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917. Volume Two (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 12–13. 9. An early and influential example of this tendency is Boris N. Chicherin’s Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia v Rossii v XVII veke (Moscow, 1856). 10. Orest Subtelny, Domination of Eastern Europe. Native Nobilities and Foreign Absolutisms, 1500–1715 (Kingston, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 1986), pp. 86–88. 11. Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2nd edn, 1979), pp. 69, 76; J. H. Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe: The Subject and the State, 1650–1800 (London, New York: Longman’s, 1986), p. 65; Merle Fainsod, “Bureaucracy and Modernization: The Russian and Soviet Case,” Bureaucracy and Political Development, ed. Joseph La Palombara (Princeton: Princeton University, 1967), p. 242. 12. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 187, 204, 229. 13. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45 (1986), pp. 130–131. 14. Raeff, Well-Ordered Police State, p. 204. 257

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15. Roland Mousnier, Social Hierarchies, 1450 to the Present (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. 115–125. 16. Shennan, Liberty and Order, p. 66. 17. On practices to limit the disruption of appointments by precedence suits, see Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics. The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1987), p. 117, and Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton: Princeton University, 1983), p. 45. 18. To speak of “absolutizing policies” enables us to avoid the false impression that royal Absolutism was a political condition achieved anywhere in seventeenth-century Europe. 19. P. Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII stoletiia i reforma Petra Velikago (St Petersburg, 2nd edn, 1905), pp. 17–18, 34, 40, 44–45, 48–50. 20. J. L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 49. 21. E. D. Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” Russkaia istoriia v ocherkakh i statiakh, ed. M. V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii (Kiev, 1912), 3, p. 28. 22. Brian Davies, “Village Into Garrison: The Militarized Peasant Communities of Southern Muscovy,” Russian Review 51, 4 (1992), pp. 482, 487, 492. 23. The state’s power of eminent domain met with more frequent challenge in interior districts away from the frontier, where settlement patterns were older and denser and communities’ views of their property rights and fiscal obligations were more fixed in custom and more resistant to the state’s attempts to escalate requisitions. This can be seen by contrasting the Kozlov project with the reconstruction of the Abatis Line as described in A. I. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta Moskovskogo gosudarstva v XVII veke. Ocherk iz istorii oborony iuzhnoi okrainy Moskovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1916). 24. A. V. Chernov, “O klassifikatsii tsentral’nykh gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii XVI–XVII vv.” Istoricheskii arkhiv 1 (1958), pp. 195–202; Peter B. Brown, “Muscovite Government Bureaus,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 3 (1983), pp. 273–278. 25. Borivoj Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs,” Russian Officialdom. The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds Walter MacKenzie Pinter and Don Karl Rowney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980), p. 26; S. B. Veselovskii, “Prikaznyi stroi upravleniia Moskovskago gosudarstva,” Russkaia istoriia v ocherkakh i stat’iakh, ed. M. V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii (Kiev, 1912), 3, pp. 166–167; P. N. Miliukov, Spornye voprosy finansovoi istoriiMoskovskogo gosudarstva (St Petersburg, 1892), pp. 131–133. 26. Brown, “Muscovite Government Bureaus,” p. 324; A. V. Chernov, “Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, kak istochnik po voennoi istorii Russkogo gosudarstva do XVII v.,” Trudy Moskovksogo gos. istoriko-arkhivnogo instituta 4 (1948), pp. 119–121. 27. John Le Donne, Absolutism and Ruling Class. The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University, 1991), p. 65. 28. S. V. Bakhrushin, “Politicheskie tolki v tsarstvovanie Mikhaila Fedorovicha,” Trudy po istochnokovedenii, istoriografii i istorii Rossii epokhi feodalizma (Nauchnoe nasledie) (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), pp. 100–101.

Notes 259 29. V. P. Alekseev, “Biudzhet razriada v 1650–1652 gg.” Drevnosti. Trudy arkheograficheskoi kommissii Imp. Moskovskogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 2,1 (1900), pp. 3–10, 160; N. F. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia v Rossii XVII veka i ee rol’ v formirovanii absoliutizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 124. 30. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 23–24. 31. Ibid., pp. 81–101, 105–109, 118–128. 32. Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries,” pp. 34–35; Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 158–162, 168–171, 173–174; Peter B. Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478–1718,” PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1978, pp. 104–105. 33. N. P. Zagoskin, Stoly razriadnago prikaza, pokhraniashchimsia v Moskovskom arkhive Ministerstva iustitsii knigam ikh (Kazan’, 1879); “Zapisnaia kniga Moskovskago stola, 1636–1637 gg.,” RIB 10, pp. 35–39, 2, pp. 248–250; A. A. Golombievskii. “Stoly razriadnago prikaza 1668–1670 godakh,” ZhMNP 270 (1890), pp. 14–15; Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 154–155. 34. Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries,” p. 25. 35. M. N. Tikhomirov, “Prikaznoe deloproizvodstvo v XVII veke,” Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo XV–XVII vekov (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), pp. 370–378. 36. N. N. Ardashev, “K voprosu o kollegial’nosti prikazov,” Trudy vos’mago arkheologicheskogo s”ezda v Moskve 3 (1890), pp. 264–266; Veselovskii, “Prikaznyi stroi,” pp. 185–186. 37. Ardashev, “K voprosu o kollegial’nosti,” pp. 258–263, 268–273; O. F. Kozlov, “Perekhod ot prikaznoi sistemy k kollegial’noi v russkoi dorevoliutsionnoi i sovetskoi istoriografii,” Istoriografiia i istochniki istorii gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii i obshchestvennykh organizatsii SSSR. Sbornik statei, ed. N. P. Eroshkin (Moscow: Moskovskii gos. istoriko-arkhivnyi institut, 1983), pp. 28–32; Max Weber, Economy and Society, eds Guenther Ross and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California, 1978) 2, p. 172; Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy,” pp. 122–130; George Weickhardt, “Bureaucrats and Boyars in the Muscovite Tsardom,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 3 (1983), pp. 349–350; Veselovskii, “Prikaznyi stroi,” p. 183. 38. Le Donne, Absolutism, pp. 54, 65. 39. I. D. Martysevich and V. S. Shul’gin, “Pravo i sud,” Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVII veka, Chast’ pervaia, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii Universitet, 1979), p. 323; Veselovskii, “Prikaznyi stroi,” pp. 173–174; Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (RGADA), Fond 210, Razriadnyi prikaz, Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 365–367 and Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 593, pp. 357–360. 40. Brown, “Early Modern Bureaucracy,” p. 232; A. G. Man’kov, Ulozhenie 1649 goda. Kodeks feodal’nogo prava Rossii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), pp. 19, 31. 41. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 148–152. 42. Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries,” p. 27; Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy,” pp. 279–292, 413–426; N. N. Ogloblin, “K istorii chelobitnago prikaza (1642–1644 gg.),” ZhMNP 281 (1892), pp. 282–298; I. Ia. Gurliand, Prikaz velikago gosudaria tainykh del (Iaroslavl’, 1902); Veselovskii, “Prikaznyi stroi,” pp. 168–171, 177–179. 43. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 143–144; Plavsic, “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries,” p. 38.

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44. K. B. Gazenvinkel’, Gosudarevo zhalovanie posluzhnikam sibirskim. K istorii Sibiri XVII veka (Tobol’sk, 1892), pp. 18–20. On office management and information processing in the governors’ offices, see N. N. Ogloblin, “Provintsial’nye arkhivy v XVII veke (Ocherk iz arkhivnogo dela v Rossii),” Vestnik arkheologii i istorii, izdavaemyi arkheologicheskim institutom 6 (1886), pp. 74–206 and D. Ia. Samokvasov, Russkie arkhivy i tsarskii kontrol’ prikaznoi sluzhby v XVII veke (Moscow, 1902). 45. Thus P. P. Golovin, the most brutal of the Siberian governors, boasted “Although my sin will incur punishment and the tsar’s wrath draws nigh . . . and I will not see the Sovereign’s eyes next year, they will also order me to be governor in some town and nothing more will happen to me.” V. F. Ivanov, Pis’mennye istochniki po istorii Iakutii XVII veka (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1979), p. 111. 46. Brian Davies, “The Politics of Give and Take: Kormlenie as Service Renuneration and Generalized Exchange, 1488–1725,” Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584, eds A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff, UCLA Slavic Studies n.s. 3 (Moscow: ITs-Garant, 1997), pp. 39–67. For an example of the shortage of even basic literacy in some districts’ administrations, see S. F. Porfir’ev, Neskol’ko dannykh o prikaznom upravlenii v Kazani v 1627 g. (Kazan’, 1911), p. 4. 47. Brian Davies, “The Town Governors in the Reign of Ivan IV,” Russian History/ Histoire Russe 14 (1987), pp. 100–143. 48. There were at least six candidates for the governorship of Kozlov in 1693 – all stol’niki who had participated in several important campaigns. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 1436, pp. 103–104; A. K. Kabanov, “Akty o naznachenii i smene voevod v Pereiaslavle Riazanskom,” TRUAK 25, 2 (1912), pp. 1–28 and 26, 1 (1914), pp. 15–35. 49. A. I. Markevich, Istoriia mestnichestva v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XV–XVII vv. (Odessa, 1888), pp. 371–376. 50. Brian Davies, “Service, Landholding, and Dependent Labour in Kozlov District, 1675,” New Perspectives on Muscovite History: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. Lindsey Hughes (London: St Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 130, 137; AMG 2, nos 405, 418; V. M. Vazhinskii, “Usilenie soldatskoi povinnosti v Rossii v XVII v. (Po materialam iuzhnykh uezdov),” Izvestiia Voronezhskogo gos. pedagogicheskogo instituta 157 (1976), pp. 51, 65–66. 51. On the composition of the court elite and clique influence in the first half of the seventeenth century, see S. F. Platonov, “Moskovskoe pravitel’stvo pri pervykh Romanovykh,” Stat’i po russkoi istorii (St Petersburg, 1912, 9th edn), pp. 339–406; Robert O. Crummey, “Court Groupings and Politics in Russia, 1645–9,” Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte 24 (1978), pp. 203–222; Robert O. Crummey, “The Reconstitution of the Boyar Aristocracy, 1613–1645,” Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte 18 (1973), pp. 187–219. 52. Valerie Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 131.

1

Kozlov and the pacification of the Nogai Front

1. A. V. Dulov, Geograficheskaia sreda i istoriia Rossii, konets XV-seredina XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), pp. 58–59; R. A. French, “Introduction,” Studies in

Notes 261

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

Russian Historical Geography. Volume One, eds J. H. Bater and R. A. French (London: Academic Press, 1983), p. 16. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’. Volume Seven: The Cossack Age to 1625 (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1999), pp. 46–50, 101–102, 108, 198–203; Iu. Kondufor, I. Slabeev et al. eds. Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR. Tom vtoroi (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1982), pp. 179–181, 384. Robert I. Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War, 1655–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993), pp. 6–7, 18; Frank Sysyn, “Ukrainian Social Tensions Before the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising,” Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, eds Samuel Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University, 1997), pp. 54–57, 63. Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Institut Istorii SSSR, Istoriia krest’ianstva SSSR s drevneishikh vremen do velikoi oktiabr’ skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii. Tom vtoroi. Krest’ianstvo v periode rannego i razvitogo feodalizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), p. 400; Dulov, Geograficheskaia sreda, p. 10; I. Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the European Forest-Steppe,” Studies in Russian Historical Geography. Volume One, eds J. H. Bater and R. A. French (London: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 46–48. On the controversy over the respective roles of the state and popular initiative in the colonization of Muscovy’s southern frontier, see Denis J. B. Shaw, “Southern Frontiers of Muscovy, 1550–1700,” Studies in Russian Historical Geography. Volume One, eds J. H. Bater and R. A. French (London: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 117–118; D. I. Bagalei, Ocherki iz istorii kolonizatsii stepnoi okrainy Moskovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1887); V. P. Zagorovskii, “Nekotorye voprosy rannei narodnoi kolonizatsii polevoi ukrainy Rossii,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii Evropy, 1968 g. (1972), p. 37; A. A. Elfimova, “Pravovoe polozhenie krest’ian Voronezhskogo uezda v XVII v.” Izvestiia Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 157 (1976), p. 69; N. A. Gorskaia, Istoricheskaia demografiia Rossii epokhi feodalizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 121; V. P. Zagorovskii, “Nekotorye osobennosti kolonizatsionnogo protsessa iuzhnoi okrainy Rossii v XVII veke i ego periodizatsiia,” Iz istorii voronezhskogo kraia 3 (1969), p. 89. William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1964), pp. 4–6; Shaw, “Southern Frontiers,” pp. 120–121. M. N. Tikhomirov, Rossiia v XVI stoletii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), pp. 423–424. Davies, “Village Into Garrison,” p. 501. A. A. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba Moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII v. (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1948), pp. 435–436. For estimates of the population of Muscovy, see Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii za 400 let (XVI-nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1973), p. 27; B. A. Rybakov, ed. Istoriia SSSR s drevneishikh vremen do kontsa XVIII veka (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1975), pp. 200, 269; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, p. 88. M. A. Alekberli, Bor’ba ukrainskogo naroda protiv turetsko-tatarskoi agressi vo vtoroi polovine XVI-pervoi polovine XVII vekov (Saratov: Saratovskii universitet, 1961), pp. 107–108; V. V. Kargalov, Na stepnoi granitse. Oborona “krymskoi ukrainy” Russkogo gosudarstva v pervoi polovine XVI stoletiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), p. 10; Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, A Description of the

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

Notes Ukraine (Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1993), pp. 48–53; L. J. D. Collins, “The Military Organization and Tactics of the Crimean Tatars, 16th–17th Centuries,” In War, Technology, and Society in the Middle East, eds V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (London: Oxford University, 1975), pp. 258–260. R. G. Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1992), p. 427. Brian Davies, “The Foundations of Muscovite Military Power, 1453–1613,” in The Military History of Tsarist Russia, eds Frederick W. Kagan and Robin Higham (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 24–25. A more detailed examination of the evolution of Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy over the sixteenth and seventeenth century is forthcoming in Brian Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe. V. A. Serchik, “Rech’ Pospolita i kazachestvo v pervoi chetverti XVII v.,” Rossiia, Pol’sha i Prichernomor’e v XV–XVIII vv., ed. B. A. Rybakov (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 174–196; Sysyn, “Ukrainian Social Tensions,” pp. 66–68. I. Beliaev, “O storozhevoi, stanichnoi, i polevoi sluzhby na pol’skoi okraine Moskovskago gosudarstva do tsaria Alekseiia Mikhailovicha,” ChOIDR 4 (1846), pp. 40, 45–46. E. D. Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina 1632–1634. Organizatsiia i sostoianie moskovskoi armii (Kiev, 1919), pp. 130, 169; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 150–154, 205; Iu. A. Mizis, Zaselenie tambovskogo kraia v XVII–XVIII vv. (Tambov: Tambovskii gos. pedagogicheskii institut, 1990), p. 21; V. P. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta (Voronezh: Voronezhskii universitet, 1969), pp. 25, 49. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 178–179, 209–221. E. D. Stashevskii, “K istorii kolonizatsii iuga (Velikii boiarin Ivan Nikitich Romanov i ego slobody v Eletskom uezde),” Drevnosti. Trudy arkheograficheskoi kommissii Imp. Moskovskago arkheologicheskago obshchestva 3 (1913), pp. 242, 244, 290–293; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 25, 27; P. N. Chermenskii, Kul’turno-istoricheskii ocherki Tambovskoi gubernii. Vypusk pervyi (Tambov: Proletarskii svetoch’, 1926), p. 33; Zagorovskii, Bor’ba, pp. 163, 165. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 14–21; “Smetnyi spisok 7139 g.,” Vremennik 4 (1849), pp. 19–27. Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina, pp. 238–239, 294–301, 304–305, 314; AMG 1, no. 372, pp. 374–375. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 209–214. P. N. Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii tambovskago kraia (Tambov, 1911), pp. 9, 66. These rivers were usually icebound from November to early April. Ministerstvo Geologii SSSR. Geologicheskoe Upravlenie Tsentral’nykh Raionov, Gidrogeologii SSSR. Tom 4. Voronezhskaia, Brianskaia, Orlovskaia, Lipetskaia, Tambovskaia oblasti (Moscow: Nedra,1972), pp. 34, 46–47; SNM, pp. iii, x; Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion,” pp. 46–47; V. M. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie i skladyvanie obshchiny odnodvortsev v XVII veke (Po materialam iuzhnykh uezdov Rossii) (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. pedagogicheskii institut, 1974), p. 43. Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 206, 250; Chermenskii, Kul’turno-istoricheskii, pp. 5–7; S. V. Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda vostochnoevropeiskoi lesostepi v X-nachale XX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 65, 68; Stefan Bereznegovskii, “Nekotoryia istoricheskiia i statisticheskiia zamechaniia o Tambovskoi gubernii,” ITUAK 55 (1913), pp. 18, 95; Ministerstvo Geologii,

Notes 263

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

Gidrogeologii, pp. 46, 48; SNM, p. x; “1636 goda. Gramota v Kozlov voevodam Birkinu i Speshnevu o postroenii vala mezhdu r. Pol’nym Voronezhem i r. Chelnovoi,” ITUAK 41 (1897), p. 108. V. V. Dokuchaev, Russian Chernozem, trans. N. Kaner ( Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1967), pp. 215–217, 228, 231; SNM, pp. xv–xvi. Neighboring districts experienced summer droughts and harvest failures in the 1630s, however. Ministerstvo Geologii, Gidrogeologii, pp. 39–45; M. K. Snytko, Geografiia Tambovskoi oblasti (Voronezh: Tsentral’no-chernozemnoe knizhnoe izd., 1973), pp. 18–24; Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda, pp. 68–69; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 43. On Russian, Finnic, and service Tatar colonization of the region up to the Troubles, see P. N. Chermenskii, Proshloe tambovskogo kraia (Tambov: Tambovskoe knizhnoe izd., 1961), pp. 6–12; P. Paducheva, O tambovskoi starine (St Petersburg, 1864), pp. 7–8; Mizis, Zaselenie, pp. 10–18; I. N. Nikolev, ed. Materialy, otnosiaishchiesia k istorii tambovskago kraia. Vypusk pervyi. G. Tambov i ego uezd (Tambov, 1884), p. 67. Mizis, Zaselenie, pp. 10–18; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 16, 40–42, 57–60; Bereznegovskii, “Nekotoryia,” pp. 32–33, 40, 96, 171; E. A. Shvetsova, “Kolonizatsiia Tambovskogo uezda v XVII veke,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1964 g. (1966), p. 209; E. A. Shvetsova, “Khoziaistvo dvortsovykh krest’ian Verkhotsenskoi volosti Tambovskogo uezda vo vtoroi polovine XVII v.,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1966 g. (1971), pp. 172–178. On the 1623 cadaster for Verkhotsensk canton, see ITUAK 37 (1893), pp. 87–90, 106. I. I. Dubasov, Ocherki iz istorii tambovskago kraia. 6 vols (Moscow, 1883–1897), 4, p. 37; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 74, 76, 80–81; “Materialy dlia istorii Cherneev monastyia,” ITUAK 13 (1887), pp. 25, 45, 46. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 74–75, 80–81, 84–88, 99–102, 119–131; V. P. Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie i zaselenie Kozlovskogo uezda v XVII veke,” Trudy Voronezhskogo universiteta. Vypusk tretii. Iz istorii voronezhskogo kraia (1969), pp. 96–97; I. I. Dubasov, “K istorii votchin Novospasskogo monastyria v tambovskom krae,” ITUAK 15 (1887), pp. 7–11. Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 10–11; Bel’iaev, “O storozhevoi,” p. 11; Chermenskii, Proshloe, pp. 17–18. P. I. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov dlia istorii zapadnago kraia Tambovskoi gubernii i eparkhii (Tambov, 1878), p. 2. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 212. See for example the heavy fortifications corvee and provisioning norms laid upon the Cherneev monastery in 1635–1638 in connection with the founding of Tambov, which apparently violated the exemptions the monastery had held since 1613. “Materialy dlia istorii Cherneeva monastyria,” pp. 45–46. The Chudov and Novospasski estates were assessed at 24 and 19.5 inhabited quarters; Pozharskii’s estate at 2.5; the Vel’iaminovs’ at 2.25; and the pomest’ia of the Riazhsk servicemen at a total of 0.625 inhabited quarters. Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 20; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 13–14; Bel’iaev, “O storozhevoi,” pp. 64–65; SNM, pp. xxvi–xxvii. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 214–224, 228–234; Cherepnin, Zemskie sobory, pp. 249–251; Kochekaev, Nogaisko-russkie otnosheniia, pp. 115, 120–122; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 172; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, Drevniia gramoty, 2, no. 58.

264

Notes

38. Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 56; A. I. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta Moskovskogo gosudarstva v XVII veke (Moscow, 1916), p. 47; S. K. Bogoiavlenskii, Prikaznye sud’i XVII veka (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1946), pp. 267, 294; S. B. Veselovskii, ed. D’iaki i pod’iachie XV–XVII vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 113, 287. Gavrenev, a Kashira dvorianin by origin, headed the Military Chancellery from 1630 until 1661. Larionov had served as a clerk in the Military Chancellery from 1620, had been promoted to secretary in 1631, was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands the following year, and continued to serve as a secretary in the Military Chancellery until 1654. 39. The next year there were over 17,000 troops deployed along the Borderland and Riazan’ arrays. KR, pp. 753–757; DR 2: 454; Bel’iaev, “O storozhevoi,” p. 46. 40. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta, pp. 44–46. 41. On the chancellery planning of new towns: N. F. Gulianitskii, ed. Gradostroitel’stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVI–XVII vekov (Moscow: Stroizdat, 1994), p. 12; V. V. Kirillov, “Sibirskii prikaz i ego rol’ v organnizovom stroitel’stve gorodov na novykh zemliakh,” Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo 28 (1980), p. 14; and I. N. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta Moskovskago gosudartsva. Chast’ pervaia. Zaselenie i sel’skoe khoziaistvo iuzhnoi okrainy XVII veka (Moscow, 1874), p. 23. Grigorii Kireevskii participated in the cadastral registration of Lebedian’, Dankov, Sapozhok, Riazhsk, and Riazan’. After his term at Kozlov Mikhailo Speshnev served as governor of Kolomna (1637) and Ustiug Velikii (1639); he died at an advanced age sometime around 1641. S. B. Veselovskii, Soshnoe pis’mo. Izsledovanie po istorii kadastra i pososhnago oblozheniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve (Moscow, 1916) 2, pp. 30–31, 36, 222–223, 248, 568, 585, 605, 637; RBS, s.v. “Kireevskii, Grigorii Fedorovich”; A. P. Barsukov, Spiski gorodovykh voevod i drugigh lits voevodskogo upravleniia Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVII v. (St Petersburg, 1902), p. 568; DR 1, pp. 290, 344, 732; P. P. Smirnov, Posadskie liudi i ikh klassovaia bor’ba do serediny XVII veka (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1948), 2, p. 38; A. Ts. Merzon and Iu. A. Tikhonov, Rynok Ustiuga velikogo XVII v. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1960), pp. 34, 39, 59, 188, 344. 42. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 3. 43. Ibid., pp. 3–7; I. I. Dubasov, “Soobshchenie I. I. Dubasova,” ITUAK 16 (1887), p. 7; V. I. Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte. Kozlovskii val,” Izvestiia Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 26 (1958), p. 135. 44. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 12. 45. Ann M. Kleimola, “Genealogy and Identity Among the Riazan’ Elite,” Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584, eds A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff (Moscow: ITZ-Garant, 1997), pp. 291–292; RK 1475–1598, pp. 368, 438; Platonov, Ocherki po istorii smuty, pp. 212, 403; RBS, s.v. “Birkin, Ivan Ivanovich”; V. P. Zagorovskii, Istoriia vkhozhdeniia tsentral’nogo chernozem’ia v sostav Rossiiskogo gosudarstva v XVI veke (Voronezh: Voronezhskii Gos. Universitet, 1991), pp. 181–193, 198–202. 46. AAE 3, no. 32; K. B. Gazenvinkel’, “Knigi razriadnyia v offitsial’nykh ikh spiskakh, kak material dlia istorii Sibiri XVII veka,” Izvestiia Obshchestva arkheologii, istorii, i etnografii pri Imp. Kazanskom universitete 10, 5 (1892), p. 526; RBS, s.v. “Birkin, Ivan Vasil’evich”; Bogoiavlenskii, Prikaznye sud’i, p. 236; Boiarskaia kniga 7135 goda, p. 218; Barsukov, Spiski gorodovykh voevod, p. 439; Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina, p. 177; “O voronezhskikh voevodakh,” p. 196; E. D. Stashevskii,

Notes 265

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

Zemlevladenie Moskovskogo gosudarstva v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow, 1911), p. 48; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 292. Boiarskaia kniga 7144 goda, p. 6, and Boiarskaia kniga 7148 goda, p. 20, give his entitlement rate as 1000 quarters per field and 110 rubles. Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 26; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 292. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 53. Ibid., pp. 51–52, 54, 441–443, 445–449, 451, 453–455; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 144–145. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 102; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 100–101. “1636 goda [sic] sentiabria 5. Nakaz iasel’nichemu i voevodam Ivanu Birkinu i Mikhailu Speshnevu o postroenii goroda mezhdu voronezhskim i tsenskikh verkhov na Urlanove [sic] gorodishche, ili gde luchshe,” ITUAK 41 (1897), pp. 151–158. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 14–21. “1636 goda [sic],” pp. 151–153, 155–156; A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia priiamogo oblozheniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve so vremeni smuty do epokhi preobrazovaniia (St Petersburg, 1890), p. 283. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 152; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 404–406. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 12; “Nakaz voevode kniaziu Ivanu Kugushevu,” pp. 4–5. The initial outlay for the Urliapovo project came from the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery simply because it had surplus funds available at the time; hence 88 percent of all sums it dispersed in 1645 were transferred to other chancelleries for military expenditure. Kotoshikhin 2: 237–238 (Chapter VIII, article 10); I. Ia. Gurliand, Rospis’. Kakie goroda v kakom prikaze vedomy (Iaroslavl’, 1901); DAI 3, no. 20; G. V. Alferova, “K voprosu o stroitel’stve gorodov v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XVI–XVII vv.,” Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo 27 (1979), p. 21; Chicherin, Oblastnyia, pp. 117–118; Kirillov, “Sibirskii prikaz,” p. 13; LappoDanilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 462–463; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 48, 450; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 172, 177, 178, 607, 608–611; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 182–184, 233–236, 242, 336–337; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 7; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 10, 58, 61, 317; Knigi prikaznogo stol no. 2, p. 3 obv. AI 3, no. 116; DAI 3, nos 18, 20; PSZ 3, no. 1579; Chicherin, Oblastnyia, p. 254. This was the distance given by Andrei Vinius’ Book of Travel Distances (1662). V. A. Petrov, “Geograficheskie spravochniki XVII v.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 5 (1950), pp. 121–125. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 210, pp. 62, 105, 107, 123, 137–139, 145–146, 163. The post and official transport system is described in I. Ia. Gurliand, Iamskaia gon’ba v Moskovskom gosudarstve do kontsa XVII st. (Iaroslavl’, 1900). By contrast it would take S. Vel’iaminov 45 days to select the site for the new town of Usman’ in 1645. By all indications Birkin’s and Speshnev’s quick survey was thorough and strategically sound, however. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 113. Later a short stretch of earth wall would be added. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 183–184; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” p. 97; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 3–8, 11, 13; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 656, pp. 23–24; Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda, p. 68.

266

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63. “1636 goda [sic]”, pp. 153–154; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 174, 184 obv.; Chicherin, Oblastnyia, p. 119; G. V. Alferova, “Organizatsiia stroitel’stva gorodov v Russkom gosudarstve v XVI–XVII vekakh,” Voprosy istorii 7 (1977), pp. 63–64. 64. The boundaries of newly settled districts had to accommodate the projected number of service colonists and the amount of land available for their endowment; otherwise there was no standard district size, nor any standard system of subdividing districts, which might consist of bailliages (stany), cantons (volosti), parishes (pogosti), constableships ( guby), or other divisions of varying size and historical origin. Vodarskii, Naselenie, pp. 138–141; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 61. 65. For example, Pozharskii’s village of Goretovo was only 20 kilometers from Kozlov but over 100 kilometers from Riazhsk. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 183, 377–378. 66. Ibid., pp. 374–375, 377–379, 418–420; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 11–13, 69–77. 67. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 154. 68. A. A. Spitsyn, “Obrochnyia zemli na Viat’ke v XVII v.,” Izvestiia Obshchestva arkheologii, istorii i etnografii pri Imp. Kazanskom universitete 1 (1892), pp. 22–26, 36, 43–45; Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 19–23, 35–40; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 122–124; Zagorovskii, “Obshchii ocherk istorii zaseleniia,” pp. 6–8. 69. Miklashevskii, K istorii, pp. 123–125; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, p. 61; V. P. Zagorovskii, “Zemledel’cheskoe naselenie v pridonskikh uezdakh na Belgorodskoi cherte v seredine XVII veka i voznikovenie pervykh sel ‘za chertoi,’” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1964 g. (1966), p. 206; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 188; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 239–243, 264–268, 278–286, 475–478; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 96–97. 70. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 375–376. 71. Ibid., pp. 376–377, 503; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 9, 10, 64–65, 77, 264–265, 278, 280–281, 284–286; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 119–120. 72. Kozlov eventually had two intelligence couriers at Dobryi, two at Tambov, and four at Lebedian’. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 503; “1636 goda [sic],” p. 156; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 33–36. 73. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 254, 384–385; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 7. 74. Birkin had estimated the wall’s length as 12 versts, but these were “surveying versts” twice as long as the 500-sazhen’ (1.067-kilometer) “measuring versts” used on other occasions. 75. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 498–499; Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” p. 136. Not to be confused with chevaux de frise, nadoloby were anticavalry barriers consisting of two or three large posts joined at the top with a wooden crossbar; the crossbar was set about three meters off the ground in order to force any cavalryman trying to pass underneath to dismount. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 82; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 115. 76. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 502; Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” p. 139. 77. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 384–385, 501. 78. Ibid., p. 502.

Notes 267 79. Ibid., p. 184. 80. Ibid., pp. 376–377; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 77. 81. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 503; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 119–120; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 9, 10. 82. Gulianitskii, Gradostroitel’stvo, p. 51; Aleksandr Opolovnikov and Yelena Opolovnikova, The Wooden Architecture of Russia. Houses, Fortifications, Churches (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), p. 91. 83. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 155. 84. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 16–21; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 184–185; Sevskii stol stolbets no. 108, pp. 231–233; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, p. 26; Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 29; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 80, 235. 85. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 155; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 402. 86. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 490; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, p. 143. 87. Kirillov, “Sibirskii prikaz,” p. 16. 88. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 157; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 187–188, 196; A. A. Shennikov, “Poseleniia,” Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVII veka. Chast’ pervaia, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii gos. universitet, 1979), p. 177; M. G. Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal’nogo goroda. Gorozhane, ikh obshchestvennyi i domashnii stroi (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), p. 135; Chermenskii, Kul’turno-istoricheskii, p. 28; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 237; D. I. Bagalei, Ocherki iz istorii kolonizatsii stepnoi okrainy Moskovskogo gosudarstva. Chast’ pervaia. Istoriia kolonizatsii (Moscow, 1887), p. 59. 89. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 256, 259, 263–265, 282, 384–388. 90. Ibid., p. 442. 91. Ibid., p. 294. 92. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 83, 215–216. 93. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 163; Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” p. 136. 94. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 7; Gulianitskii, Gradostroitel’stvo, pp. 73, 76. 95. Boborykin at this time was only in his late twenties but had already served as governor at Shatsk; he was a frequent table companion of Tsar Mikhail. Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 35. 96. Dubasov, Ocherki, 4, pp. 11, 27–29; Bereznegovskii, “Nekotoryia,” pp. 41–42, 109–110, 116; “Opisanie goroda Tambova i Verkhotsenskikh volostei, uchinennoe kniazem Vasiliem Vas. Kropotkinym v 7186 (1678) g.,” Letopis’ zaniatii arkheograficheskoi kommissii, 1865–1866 gg. 4, 3 (1868), p. 48; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, p. 206. 97. P. N. Chermenskii, “Gorod Tambov v XVII kak tip voennoi storozhevoi kreposti,” Izvestiia Tambovskogo obshchestva izucheniia prirody i kul’tury mestnogo kraia 2 (1927), pp. 3–8. 98. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 283. 99. Ibid., pp. 116 obv., 119, 120. 100. “1636 goda. Gramota v Kozlov voevodam Birkinu i Speshnevu o postroenii vala,” ITUAK 41 (1897), p. 108. 101. Rodenburg apparently remained in Russian service until 1646. AI 4, no. 14; Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta, pp. 45–46; Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina, pp. 190–192; Gulianitskii, Gradostroitel’stvo, p. 36. 102. The term here translated as “redoubt” was shanets, which derived from the German schanze (“entrenchment”). Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 121–123; Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” pp. 140–141.

268

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103. Andreev subsequently consulted on the reconstruction of the Abatis Line. AMG 2, no. 137; Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta, p. 156; L. M. Tverskaia, Russkoe gradostroitel’stvo do kontsa XVII veka. Planirovka i zastroika russkikh gorodov (Leningrad, Moscow: Gos. izdat. literatury po stroitel’stvu i arkhitektury, 1953), p. 64; Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” pp. 138–139; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 89; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 33–34; “1636 goda [sic],” pp. 110–111. 104. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 121–123. 105. Ibid., pp. 170–172, 176–178, 192, 223–224. 106. On levies of pososhnye and datochnye liudi, see Pavel Nebol’sin, “O russkikh soldatakh i drugikh voennykh chinakh do Petra Velikago,” Sovremennik 13, 2 (1849), p. 138; Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 378–379, 385, 388–389; V. M. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo v chernozemnom tsentre Rossii v XVII veke (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. pedagogicheskii institut, 1983), p. 66; I. Andreevskii, “Otnoshenie pravitel’stva k stroitel’nomu delu v Rossii v kontse XVII i nachale XVIII veka,” Lektsii po istorii politseiskago prava i zemskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii, ed. D. Volkov (St Petersburg, 1883), p. 18. 107. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 266–273, 496–498; Koshelev, “Po belgorodskoi cherte,” pp. 137–138; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 98–99. 108. This was because corvee levies cost the treasury much less than hired labor. The standard rate the treasury paid to a hired worker on fortifications projects in the 1630s–1640s was two rubles per sazhen’ of wall erected, whereas a corvee conscript only received 0.015–0.04 rubles per day for rations. Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 399–400; A. A. Spitsyn, Podati, sbory i povinnosti na Viat’ke v XVII st. (Viat’ka, 1887), p. 21; Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta, pp. 89, 180–189. 109. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 229–230, 385–386; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 79–90, 98–135, 366–367. 110. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 221, 229–230; “1636 goda. Gramota,” pp. 109, 111. 111. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, p. 494; Knigi prikaznogo stola no. 1, p. 68. 112. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 389, 440–441; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 49–53, 149–158; Dubasov, “Dokumenty, otnos. k pervonachal’nomu ustroistvu,” pp. 11–14. 113. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 603–606. 114. Ibid., pp. 607–611, 63–64; Knigi prikaznogo stola no. 1, pp. 102, 107; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 89. 115. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 145–147, supplemented by data from Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” pp. 142–145. 116. Remnants of the western end of the steppe wall are still visible today at Khmelevoe and near Bel’sk Fort, eds N. Nikulin, I. Stepanishchev, A. Bukharev, and I. Kostrikin, Michurinsk (Tambov: Tsentral’no-chernozemnoe knizhnoe izd., 1969), p. 11. 117. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 144–145; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 3–9; Mizis, Zaselenie, pp. 31–32. 118. Bereznegovskii, “Nekotoryia,” pp. 13–114; “Materialy dlia istorii Cherneeva monastyria,” pp. 41–44; Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 38. 119. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, pp. 369–370; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 120; Sevskii stol stolbets no. 108, pp. 241–242.

Notes 269 120. Koshelev, “Po Belgorodskoi cherte,” pp. 145–146, 148; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 9. 121. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 254–256, 260–262, 311–313. 122. Ibid., pp. 311–313, 315, 386–387. Bykov and Krasnikov had to undertake another pursuit in mid-December, the details of which are not recorded. 123. Kochekaev, Nogaisko-russkie otnosheniia, p. 116; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 234. 124. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 234–235. 125. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 360–361, 374–375. Governors kept special logs to inform the Military Chancellery of the names of Russian casualties and of those who took prisoners from the enemy. AAE 4, no. 206; AI 5, no. 161; Chuvash., nos 3, 4. 126. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 356–360. 127. Ibid., no. 92, pp. 374–378. In reality once Kozlov’s steppe wall went up the less imposing Tambov fortifications between Lysye Gory and Kuz’mina Gat’ became the preferred target of the enemy. In July 1644 a force of about 5000 Tatars broke through the Tambov Line and burned two wooden forts on the Chelnovaia. Mizis, Zaselenie, p. 39. 128. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 235–236. 129. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 296–301. 130. Ibid., p. 61. 131. Ibid., pp. 62–64. 132. I. I. Dubasov, “Dokumenty, otnosiashchiesia k pervonachal’nomu ustroistvu goroda Kozlova,” ITUAK 39 (1885), p. 11; RIB 10, pp. 23, 26, 30; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 236–237; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 203–204; AMG 2, no. 72; Dubasov, Ocherki, 4, pp. 12–14, 16; T. N. Avdeeva, Iu. A. Mizis, I pyl’ vekov ot khartii otriakhnuv. Khrestomatiia po istorii tambovskogo kraia (Tambov: Tambovskii gos. pedagogicheskii institut, 1993), p. 18. 133. AAE 3, no. 268; AMG 2, no. 57; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, pp. 203, 274. 134. AMG 2, no. 116; Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda, pp. 56–57. 135. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 46; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 292; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 76, 88; Dubasov, Ocherki 6, p. 60. 136. AAE 3, no. 268. 137. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 17, 72–74, passim. 138. Gulianitskii, Gradostroitel’stvo, pp. 75–76. 139. Novosel’skii, Issledovaniia, pp. 181, 183; Iu. V. Got’e, “Zametki po istorii zashchity iuzhnykh granits Moskovskogo gosudarstva,” Istoricheskie izvestiia, 2 (1917), p. 51; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 371–372. 140. Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii v kontse XVII-nachale XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 104–106. 141. V. P. Zagorovskii, “Sudostroenie na Donu i ispol’zovanie Rossieiu parusnogo-grebnogo flota v bor’be protiv Krymskogo khanstva i Turtsii,” Kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1961. 142. Carol B. Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University, 1995), p. 37. 143. M. K. Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1996), p. 304.

270

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Notes

Enlistment and the construction of social identity

1. V. A. Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko na iuge Russkogo gosudarstva v XVII veke,” Kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet (1947), pp. 103–111. 2. A. A. Novosel’skii, “Praviashchie gruppy v sluzhilom ‘gorode’ XVII v.,” Uchenye zapiski RANION 5 (1928), pp. 228–230. 3. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 153–155; AMG 1, no. 142. 4. “1636 goda [sic],” pp. 152, 156. 5. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 210, p. 399; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 93–94, 188–192, 556, 594–602; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina da Mikhaila Speshneva, p. 359 v.; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 143–150. 6. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 156. 7. Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 108–109, 120–121. 8. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 58. 9. Judith Pallott and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 36; R. G. Skrynnikov, Sotsial’nopoliticheskaia bor’ba v Russkom gosudarstve v nachale XVII veka (Leningrad: Leningradskii gos. universitet, 1985), pp. 116–120. 10. Skrynnikov, Sotsial’no-politicheskaia bor’ba, pp. 118, 120; Pallot and Shaw, Landscape and Settlement, pp. 36–37. 11. For an example of how such concessions were used to form the new foreign formation regiments on the Belgorod Line, see Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” p. 113. 12. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 157. 13. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 404–405. 14. A. A. Novosel’skii, “Vol’nye i perekhozhye liudi iuzhnykh uezdov Russkogo gosudarstva v XVII v.,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR, AN SSSR (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 72. 15. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 95. 16. This was confirmed in a second decree of 1 June 1636 responding to a Chern’ landlord’s petition for the remand of two of his fugitive peasants from Kozlov. 17. Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 111, 131; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 115–118. 18. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 300; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” p. 99. 19. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 43–45; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 158–161. 20. Ibid., no. 121, pp. 10–13; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 318–321, 331–332. 21. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 332; E. V. Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia v Rossii v pervoi polovine XVII veka (30–40-e gody) (Voronezh: Voronezhskii universitet, 1974), pp. 113–114. 22. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 330–331. On the defection of Mtsensk servicemen to Kozlov, see AMG 2, no. 101. 23. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 94. 24. Ibid., pp. 95, 155–156, 287. 25. A. A. Novosel’skii, “Pobegi krest’ian i kholopov i ikh sysk v Moskovskom gosudarstve vtoroi poloviny XVII veka,” Uchenye zapiski RANION 1 (1926), p. 341.

Notes 271 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 286, 474. Ibid., pp. 71–72. Ibid., pp. 480, 484. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, p. 37. Ibid., no. 103, pp. 31–36; A. Kizevetter, “Zagraditel’nye otriady XVII veka,” Sbornik statei po russkoi istorii, posviashchennykh S. F. Platonovu (Petrograd, 1922), pp. 314–322. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 131, p. 44. Ibid., p. 40; Dubasov, Ocherki 4, p. 30. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 9–11. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2, pp. 1–28, 251–330. Ibid., pp. 29–29 v. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 408–409; for examples, see Knigi prikaznogo stola nos 1, 2. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2, pp. 361–381; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 12. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, p. 147; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, p. 59. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 157; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 421–426; M. V. Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia ispol’nitel’noi vlasti v Moskovskoi Rusi,” Russkii svobodnyi universitet v Prage. Nauchno-issledovatel’skoe ob”edinenie. Zapiski, 4, 24 (1936), pp. 42–45; Horace W. Dewey and Ann M. Kleimola, “Suretyship and Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 18, 3 (1970), p. 344. On the origins of Muscovite surety practice, see Ann M. Kleimola, “The Duty to Denounce in Muscovite Russia,” Slavic Review 21, 4 (1972), pp. 770–773. The duty to combat sedition was further conceptualized in Chapter Two of the 1649 Ulozhenie. The reign of Tsar Aleksei also saw greater emphasis given to the notion that state service was not merely a duty but a social virtue. I. L. Andreev, “Dvorianstvo i sluzhba v XVII veke,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1998), pp. 165–166. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 152. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, p. 244; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 103–109; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, p. 86. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 430, 434; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 287, 620–623. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 188–192; Sevskii stol stolbets no. 108, pp. 239–241; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 148–149. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, p. 85; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 54, 57–58; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 443–450. Sevskii stol stolbets no. 108, pp. 239–241; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 55–57, 72–74; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 148–149. Chelnavsk had 225 musketeers and Bel’sk had 88 musketeers by 1643. Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 133–134. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, p. 84; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 188–192; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 54; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 9, 306; F. 1209, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina, p. 359 v.; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 148–149.

272

Notes

48. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, pp. 85, 367; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 54; opis 6, ed. khr, 2, Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2, p. 359 v., 360; F. 1209, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina, p. 359 v.; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 236–241; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 148–149. 49. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 90, pp. 148–149. The district service population was even larger – somewhat over 3000 men – in nearby Tambov, where the 1613 clause expanding eligibility for enrollment was also in effect. 50. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2. 51. The first request for enlistment, in mid-October 1635, came from a group of 50 men describing themselves as “Roslavl’ cossacks” – probably pardoned rebels who had participated in the Balash Uprising that had contributed to the collapse of the Smolensk campaign. Moscow authorized their enrollment in the Kozlov service land atamans. But the 1637 muster does not confirm whether they actually entered Kozlov service. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 176–178; V. P. Zagorovskii, “Kazaki-Balashovtsy v voronezhskom krae,” Voronezhskii krai na iuzhnykh rubezhakh Rossii (XVII–XVIII vv.) (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. universitet, 1981), pp. 63–66; I. L. Andreev, “Dvizhenie Balashovtsev,” Voprosy istorii 6 (1977), pp. 118, 125–127; AMG 1, nos 478, 584. 52. Novosel’skii, “Vol’nye i perekhozhye liudi,” pp. 69–71, 74–75; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 298–300. 53. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 22–26, 95–98, 100–101. 54. Ibid., pp. 49–54, 85–89, 100–103. 55. This estimate of 1700 possible remands assumes an average of 5.6 persons per fugitive peasant family, as suggested by Novosel’skii’s examination of the records of a 1664–1665 fugitive peasant dragnet in neighboring Tambov. A. A. Novosel’skii, “K voprosu ob ekonomicheskom sostoianii beglykh krest’ian na iuge Moskovskogo gosudarstva v pervoi polovine XVII v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski 16 (1945), p. 58. 56. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 164–166; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 66, 95–99; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” p. 127. 57. Very few of those who had fled in earlier years were taken into Kozlov’s middle service class, but a good number of the 1636–1637 fugitives were made deti boiarskie or service land atamans, probably because the rate of enlistment in the middle service class took off only with the mass initiation held in 1637. 58. They accounted for just 50.3 percent, whereas those who had fled in autumn 1635 to autumn 1637 counted for 66.8 percent. 59. The district from which flight allegedly occurred was indicated for all but three of the 568 defendants. 60. S. V. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI veka (St Petersburg, 1897), p. 355. 61. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 156–157. 62. Novosel’skii, “K voprosu ob ekonomicheskom sostoianii,” pp. 58–61. 63. Ibid., pp. 60–61. 64. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, p. 255. 65. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 227–230; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 182–187. 66. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 403.

Notes 273 67. A. A. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve kak istochnik dlia izucheniia istorii zakreposhcheniia svobodnogo naseleniia na iuge Rossii v XVII veka,” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1962 g. (1963), p. 150. 68. This is dealt with at greater length in Brian Davies, “The Recovery of Fugitive Peasants From Muscovy’s Southern Frontier: The Case of Kozlov, 1636–1640,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 19, nos 1–4 (1992), pp. 29–56. 69. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 51–52; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 331–332. 70. Thus A. V. Trubnikov had to abandon his efforts to take custody of a fugitive who was being hidden by Kozlov’s gunners. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 148–155. 71. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 189–202; A. A. Novosel’skii, “Otdatochnye knigi beglykh, kak istochnik dlia izucheniia narodnoi kolonizatsii na Rusi v XVII veke,” Trudy Moskovskogo gos. istoriko-arkhivnogo instituta 2 (1946), pp. 131–132. 72. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve,” pp. 147, 148; see XI, articles 15 and 16 of the 1649 Ulozhenie; I. D. Martysevich and Shul’gin, “Pravo i sud,” Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVII veka. Chast’ pervaia, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1979), p. 329; ZARG Teksty, nos 226 and 279, pp. 166–168, 182; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 31–34. 73. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 43–45, 300–301, 338–342. On the rules governing the conduct and evidentiary value of poval’nyi obysk, see F. M. Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii i grazhdanskago apellatsionnago sudoproizvodstva ot sudebnika do uchrezhdeniia o guberniiakh (Moscow, 1899), pp. 260–262; Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia,” Zapiski 4, 24 (1936), pp. 137–138; Chapter X, articles 161–167 of the 1649 Ulozhenie; AIuB 2, no. 230, p. xxxiv; AIu, no. 345; J. L. H. Keep, “Bandits and the Law in Muscovy,” Slavonic and East European Review 25, 84 (1956), p. 210. 74. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve,” p. 150. 75. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 11–13, 17, 21, 26, 344. 76. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve,” pp. 152–153; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 31–34. 77. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 303. 78. AMG 2, no. 101; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 330–331. 79. Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, p. 303. 80. Zagorovskii, “Iz istorii gorodov,” pp. 9, 12; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” p. 126. 81. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 334. 82. In 1641 the statute of limitations was extended to 10 years (and to 15 years for suits seeking the return of peasants abducted by other lords). In response to collective petitions from the middle service class in 1645 the government promised to abolish the statute of limitations altogether upon the completion of a general census (1646–1647) to replace the cadasters as the documentary foundation for peasant ascription. But it actually took the Moscow riots of 1648 to bring the chancelleries to finally honor this pledge. The recovery time limit was finally abolished in the 1649 Ulozhenie. E. D. Stashevskii, “K istorii dvorianskikh chelobitnykh. Kollektivnaia chelobitnia 3 fevral’ia 145 g.,” Letopis’ istoriko-rodoslovnago obshchestva v Moskve 1–4 (1915), pp. 110–118;

274

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103.

104.

Notes ZARG Teksty, nos 237, 238, 256, 287, 307, 311, pp. 176–177, 183–184, 195–200, 211–212, 214–215; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 139. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve,” p. 151. Ibid., pp. 150–151; Novosel’skii, Bor’ba, pp. 403–404. Novosel’skii, “Dela o krest’ianstve,” p. 152. F. 1209, Gorod Shatska kniga no. 12090, no. 3, pp. 1–564; Novosel’skii, “Otdatochnye knigi beglykh,” pp. 144–145. The use of torture in such investigations invoked Chapter XI, article 22 and Chapter XX, article 25 of the 1649 Ulozhenie. The norms laid down in the 1656 decree would remain in force until 1683. A. G. Man’kov, “Voprosy krepostnogo prava na iuzhnykh i zapadnykh okrainakh Russkogo gosudarstva vtoroi poloviny XVII veka,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1960 g. (1962), pp. 180–181; Novosel’skii, “Otdatochnye knigi beglykh,” pp. 140–141; L. V. Cherepnin, “Klassovaia bor’ba v 1682 g. na iuge Moskovskogo gosudarstva,” Istoricheskie zapiski 4 (1938), p. 43; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 527, p. 104. Mizis, Zaselenie Tambovskogo kraia, pp. 48, 64. Avdeev and Mizis, I pyl’ vekov, p. 17. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, p. 122. Ibid., pp. 41, 235–236; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 105–106; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 209, 211–214, 223–225. Alferova, “Organizatsiia stroitel’stva gorodov,” p. 59. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 201, p. 403; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 93–94. Belgorodskii stol slbets no. 92, pp. 9–17. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 290–292, 427–429. RIB 35, no. 328, pp. 615–618; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 141–144; M. D. Rabinovich, “Sud’by sluzhilykh liudei ‘starykh sluzhb’ v periode formirovanii reguliarnoi armii v nachale XVIII veka,” Kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoriko-arkhivnogo Instituta (1953), p. 95; AMG 1, no. 716, p. 658. “1636 g. [sic],” p. 152; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, pp. 362–368. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, p. 363. See, for example, a December 1635 tabulation of the cossacks and musketeers at Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, Pronsk, Mikhailov, and Riazhsk: Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 362–365; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 227, 232–240, 250–251, 264, 266, 270; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 141–142. AAE 3, no. 199; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, pp. 61, 65, 81; “Streletskaia sluzhba,” p. 17; DAI 4, no. 34; Chuvash., no. 3, pp. 336, 338; AMG 1, no. 283, p. 324; V. N. Glaz’ev, “Voronezhskie strel’tsy i ikh rol’ v ekonomicheskom razvitii kraia v XVII veke,” Istoriia zaseleniia i khoziaistvennogo osvoeniia voronezhskogo kraia v epokhu feodalizma, ed. Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi universitet (Voronezh: Voronezhskii universitet, 1987), p. 27. Hellie, Enserfment, p. 53. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, p. 288; V. I. Sergeevich, “Voennye sily Moskovskago gosudarstva,” ZhMNP 11, 9 (1905), pp. 20, 24; A. N. Zertsalov, “O verstanii novikov vsekh gorodov 7136 g. (1627–1628 gg.),” ChOIDR 4 (1895), pp. 10–11; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 9–56, 58. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 288–290; PSZ 1, nos 86, 481. On legislation centralizing authority over initiation procedures, see Chicherin, Oblastnyiia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 123–127.

Notes 275 105. Stashevskii, Ocherki po istorii tsarstvovaniia, p. 115; V. N. Kozliakov, “Istochniki o novichnom verstanii v pervoi polovine XVII v.,” Issledovaniia po istochnikovedeniiu istorii SSSR dooktiabr’skoi perioda. Sbornik statei, ed. AN SSSR, Institut Istorii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1991), p. 91. 106. S. V. Bakhrushin, “Ocherki po istorii Krasnoiarskogo uezda v XVII veka,” Nauchnye trudy. Tom chetvertyi (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1959), p. 272. 107. AMG 2, no. 85. 108. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 255–259; Kniga razriadnogo stola no. 2, pp. 359–360; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 34. 109. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 84, 108. 110. Arkhiv Baiusheva, no. 138; Bakhrushin, “Ocherki po istorii Krasnoiarskogo uezda,” p. 62; PSZ 1, no. 86; DAI 3, no. 83; AI 5, no. 240. 111. PSZ 1, nos 86, 481, 615; SGGD 3, no. 59; A. A. Golombievskii and N. N. Ardashev, Prikaznyia, zemskiia, tamozhennyia, gubnyia, sudovyia izby Moskovskogo gosudarstva. Obzor dokumentov (Moscow, 1908), p. 33. 112. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2, pp. 1–381. 113. These new initiates’ rates remained in effect at Kozlov until at least 1642. In some other frontier districts there could be five or more rates set for new initiates, with those of the first order carrying entitlements to as much as 300 quarters per field. Rates in newer frontier districts settled by odnodvortsy tended to be lower than those in the districts along the Oka. F. Zaitsev, “Tsarskie gramoty na Korochu voevodam i chelobitnyia korochan tsariam,” ChOIDR 2 (1859), p. 5; Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor istorii, p. 567; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 109–112; A. Tan’kov, ed. Istoricheskaia letopis’ kurskago dvorianstva. Tom pervyi (Moscow 1913), p. 277; Zertsalov, “O verstanii novikov,” p. 111. 114. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 246–248, 256–258. 115. Precedence honor was more likely to have significant weight in the initiations of men of upper service class families. 116. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 240–246; Sergeevich, “Voennye sily,” pp. 19–20, 26. 117. Andreev, “Dvorianstvo i sluzhba,” p. 169. 118. Bel’iaev, O russkom voiske, p. 28; AAE 3, no. 236, pp. 346–347. 119. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 690, pp. 1206–1215; Novosel’skii, “Praviashchie gruppy,” pp. 322–323, 330. 120. Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, p. 57; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds. Drevniia gramoty 3, no. 173; Arkhiv Baiusheva, nos 1, 2; Smirnov, Ocherki zhizni i byta, p. 47. 121. SGGD 3, no. 59, p. 239; Keep, “The Muscovite Elite,” pp. 241–243; Novosel’skii, “Praviashchie gruppy,” pp. 323–329; Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 241–243; Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” p. 29. 122. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 2, pp. 1–381. In 1631 about half of the middle service class populations of Voronezh, Belgorod, Riazhsk, and 12 other southern districts had been initiated out of cossack families. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta, p. 11. 123. Arkhiv Baiusheva, no. 65; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 114; N. A. Rozhkov, Proiskhozhdenie samoderzhaviia v Rossii (Petrograd, 2nd edn, 1922), p. 75; N. I. Nikitin, “Gosudarstvennoe obespechenie garnizona Tobol’ska do serediny XVII veka,” Istoriia goroda Sibiri dosovetskogo perioda, XVII-nachalo XX vv.,

276

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124.

125. 126.

127.

128.

129.

130. 131.

3

ed. AN SSSR, Sibirskoe otedelenie, Institut istorii, filologii, i filosofii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1977), p. 139. Some of those attaining the rank of “select courtiers” might subsequently be invited to Moscow to serve at court for three years and perhaps even win promotion to zhilets, the rank of entry into the upper service class. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, pp. 32–33; V. I. Novitskii, Vybornoe i bol’shoe dvorianstvo XVI–XVII vekov (Kiev, 1915), pp. 4, 68; Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 330, 334; Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” pp. 27–28. For E. M. Vorypaev’s petition for promotion to Kozlov’s court list, see Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 141–142. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 80–81; F. 1209, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina, p. 259 v.; V. N. Storozhev, Pistsovye knigi riazanskogo kraia XVI–XVII vv. Tom pervyi, vypusk vtoroi (Riazan’: Rinfo, 1997), p. 120. In certain other districts service land atamans might receive personally differentiated entitlement rates. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 76, p. 367; P. Vasenko, “Zametki k istorii sluzhilogo klassa v Moskovskom gosudarstve. Atamany sluzhilye pomestnye,” Dela i dni 1 (1920), pp. 37–38; A. L. Stanislavskii, “Pravitel’stvennaia politika po otnosheniiu k ‘volnomu’ kazachestvu (1612–1619 gg.).” Istoriia SSSR 5 (1984), pp. 72, 74, 77; AMG 1, no. 285, p. 315. Kniga prikaznogo stola no. 1, pp. 4–24 v.; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, p. 245; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 93–94, 209, 21–214, 223–225, 554; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 450–452; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 161–173. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 28; E. I. Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie i zemlepol’zovanie v Chernskom uezde v pervoi polovine XVII v.,” Novoe o proshlom nashei strany. Pamiati akademika M. N. Tikhomirova, ed. AN SSSR, Otdeleneie istorii, Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), p. 268; G. M. Belotserkovskii, Tula i Tul’skii uezd v XVI i XVII vv. (Kiev, 1914), p. 222; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 109–110; Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii v kontse XVII v., p. 104. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 656, pp. 65–66. Davies, “Service, Landholding,” pp. 139–144.

Property, labour and the village commune 1. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 48, 50; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 172, 177, 178, 607–611; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 182–184, 233–236, 242, 336–337; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 7; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 10, 58, 61, 317; Sevskii stol stolbets no. 108, pp. 239–241. 2. DAI 3, no. 93; Chuvash., no. 2, p. 336; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 76–80. 3. Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” p. 28; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 78. 4. Bakhrushin, “Ocherki po istorii Krasnoiarskogo uezda,” pp. 75–76, 172, 175; Keep, “The Muscovite Elite,” p. 215; Ivanov, Pis’mennye istochniki, pp. 110–111. 5. Ogloblin, “Obozrenie stolbtsov i knig,” pt. 1, pp. 23–24. 6. Ibid., pt. 3, pp. 170, 180, 187–191. 7. Nikitin, Sluzhilye liudi, pp. 126–127.

Notes 277 8. V. N. Kopylov, “Sud’ba odnogo iz ‘pribylykh del’ P. I. Godunova,” Russkoe naselenie Pomor’ia i Sibiri ( period feodalizma), eds A. P. Okladnikov, B. A. Aleksandrov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 129–131; E. V. Vershinin, “Pribyl’naia deiatel’nost’ sibirskikh voevod v XVII v.,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia os’maia: Istorii 3 (1989), pp. 60–70. 9. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 111–112. 10. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 70, 107; Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, p. 319. 11. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 35–37, 49–52, 54–56, 232. 12. Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, p. 348; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 168. 13. A. M. Gnevushev, “K istorii pomestnago zemlevladeniia v Novgorodskoi oblasti,” Sbornik statei v chest’ Matveiia Kuz’micha Liubavskago (Petrograd, 1917), p. 525; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 109; Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, p. 313; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 35–37, 48–52, 70–71, 80–84, 155–158. 14. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 108–109; V. A. Miakotin, Ocherki sotsial’noi istorii Ukrainy v XVII–XVIII vv. Vypusk pervyi (Prague, 1924), p. 153; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 134, pp. 80–81; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 198, p. 259 v. 15. V. B. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, “Istochniki i sostav otkaznykh knig pomestnogo prikaza (30–40-e gody XVII veka),” Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1962 g. (1963), pp. 157–160. 16. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, “Istochniki,” pp. 160–163; Gnevushev, “K istorii pomestnago zemlevladeniia,” pp. 527, 529; I. E. German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia (Moscow, 1910), p. 95; Arkhiv Baiusheva, no. 53; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 35. 17. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 35–39; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 103. 18. If the attempt to establish a boundary met with dispute and could not be resolved by examining deeds and polling witnesses, the disputants cast lots to determine which side was to be allowed to set the boundary by walking in procession with icons. Surveyors convicted of laying cheating property lines were knouted. Ulozhenie, Chapter XVII, articles 50–53, Chapter X, articles 231–234, 237. 19. Pallot and Shaw, Landscape, p. 40; P. Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki (Neskol’ko novykh materialov po istorii melkago zemlevladeniia),” ZhMNP 350 (1903), p. 414. 20. Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki,” p. 415; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 170–171. 21. F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 198, pp. 1–2. 22. It most closely resembled the pool-share (skladnichestvo-delovoe) system of peasant land tenure in the North and Siberia. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 167, 174; Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki,” p. 406; V. A. Aleksandrov, “Land Reallotment in the Peasant Communes of Late-Feudal Russia,” Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia. Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, ed. Roger Bartlett (New York: St Martin’s, 1980), p. 40. 23. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 170–175, 177; Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie,” pp. 269–271; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 228–229; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 2322, pp. 251–262. 24. Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki,” p. 438; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 175–177.

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25. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 190–192. 26. For example, land appraised as of middling quality was held equivalent to 75 percent of the same area of high quality land, so that a serviceman might be given 125 quarters of the former in place of 100 quarters of the latter. The additional 25 quarters were called his naddacha or “enhancement.” Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 273–278; Arkhiv Baiusheva no. 53, pp. 55–57; S. I. Kotkov and N. S. Kotkov, eds. Pamiatniki iuzhnovelikorusskogo narechiia. Otkaznye knigi (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 78–80. 27. Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 56–57; Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” pp. 24–26; Ulozhenie, Chapter XVI, article 34. 28. Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” pp. 24–26; ZARG Teksty, no. 234, pp. 171–174; Rozhdestvenskii, Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie, pp. 297–300; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 84. 29. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 101–102, 115–116, 170; ZARG Teksty, no. 93, pp. 98–100; Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie,” p. 269; Ivanov, “Siabrypomeshchiki,” p. 418. 30. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 131–135; Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki,” pp. 423, 426–427; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 2322, pp. 251–262. 31. Miakotin, Ocherki, pp. 147–150, 154–158; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 161, 187, 130; Ivanov, “Siabry-pomeshchiki,” pp. 409, 420–422, 429–431. 32. Kivelson, Autocracy, pp. 45, 2–94, 126. 33. Price data comes mostly from the end of the century. Prices for undeveloped steppe land ranged from 0.15 to 0.33 rubles per quarter. Vazhinskii considers 1.5–1.7 rubles per quarter the average southern frontier price in the 1680s for plowland with its haymeadow and other appurtenances. Dubasov, Ocherki, 4, p. 34; Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Muscovy, 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), pp. 392–393; PSZ 3, nos 637, 638; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 2249, pp. 31–39; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 134. 34. Miakotin, Ocherki, pp. 165–167. 35. Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 209–226. 36. His remaining sons and brothers provided labor support and were kept out of service until vacancies opened for them somewhere in the garrison; in the second half of the century many of them would be taken into the foreign formation regiments. 37. Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 277, 281, 283; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 192–193, 142–145; Denis B. Shaw, “Landholding and Commune Origins Among the Odnodvortsy,” Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia. Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, ed. Roger Bartlett (New York: St Martin’s, 1990), pp. 110–112, 114; Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie,” p. 267; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 189. 38. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 145, 193. 39. Ibid., pp. 115, 116. 40. Ibid., p. 169. 41. Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie,” p. 271. 42. Kozlov was officially listed among the Forbidden Towns only from 1671, but magnate colonization had actually been shut out there from 1647 when the estates along the Voronezh River had been confiscated and reorganized as dragoon colonies. Davies, “Village Into Garrison,” pp. 487, 491–494, 501.

Notes 279 43. F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina da Mikhaila Speshneva, pp. 1–362; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 103–108. 44. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 169–178; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 107–114; SNM, p. 64. 45. Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina, p. 347. 46. Ibid., pp. 119 v.–120, 142 v.–143 v., 152–153; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 67–69; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 70–71, 83; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 272–273; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 126. 47. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 112. 48. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 163; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 171. 49. Davies, “Service, Landholding,” p. 150. 50. Rabinovich, “Sud’by sluzhilykh liudei,” p. 443. 51. Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 107–108. 52. Lamskoe was later shifted to Turmasovskii bailliage and Klenskoe placed in Ilovaiskii bailliage. 53. Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” p. 108; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 142–148. 54. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 69–70. 55. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 188–189; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 140; Zagorovskii, “Formirovanie,” pp. 106, 107, 110; Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, p. 30; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, p. 27. 56. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 253–256. 57. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 145, 193. 58. Chermenskii, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii, p. 32; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 142; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 267–268, 272–273. 59. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 70–74. 60. Ibid., no. 134, pp. 232–239, 249–251. 61. Ibid., no. 265, pp. 79–95. 62. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 105; Rozhdestvenskii, Proiskhozhdenie samoderzhaviia, p. 82; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 131–134. 63. Ibid., “Formirovanie,” p. 103; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 296. 64. Ibid., “Formirovanie,” pp. 102–103; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 35–63, 198–221, 249–263, 289–304, 307–360; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 8–13. 65. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 73, 147 v.–156, 388–389; Nikolev, Materialy, pp. 4–5; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 56–57; N. Novombergskii, “Ocherki vnutrennago upravleniia v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII st. Prodovol’stvennoe stroenie. Materialy, ch. vtoraia,” Zapiski Imperatorskogo moskovskogo arkheologicheskaogo instituta imeni Imperatora Nikolaia II, 20 (1915), p. 153. 66. This did not eliminate every appurtenance lease in the district. The Novospasskii and Chudov monasteries continued to lease fishing sites and apiaries along Ranova Creek, the Polova River, and Voronezh River up to 1684; other leases were under Streshnev’s and Veliaminov’s peasants and the famous icon painter Semen Ushakov. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, pp. 77, 167–178, 239–243, 245–248, 264–281, 284–286, 382–386; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 474; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 361, 364–365; Novombergskii, “Ocherki vnutrennago upravleniia,” 2, pp. 330–332; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 115–117. 67. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 154–155.

280

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68. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 215–224; Iu. A. Mizis, “Iz istorii tambovskoi cherty XVII veka,” Voronezhskii krai na iuzhnykh rubezhakh Rossii (XVII–XVIII vv.), ed. V. P. Zagorovskii (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1981), p. 58; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 9; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 45–48. 69. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 154–155; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 222–234, 239. 70. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, p. 122; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 223. 71. Memory of these events may have contributed to the mutiny of the Chelnavsk musketeers against Boborykin in 1648. 72. “Nakaz voevode kniaziu Ivanu Kugushevu,” Vremennik 14 (1852), p. 4. 73. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 5, 235–236; V. M. Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei v iuzhykh russkikh uezdakh vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Moskovskoi Oblastnoi Pedagogicheskii Institut (1963), pp. 49–50. 74. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 306–310. 75. Review testimonies from 1675 suggest the typical Kozlov syn boiarskii did not start a family until two to five years after his initiation. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 690, pp. 1–49, 205, 344–394; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 159–161; Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii, p. 48. 76. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 690, pp. 1–49, 344–394. 77. Davies, “Service, Landholding,” pp. 150–151; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 44–48; Dela raznykh gorodov, kn. no. 36, pp. 724–998. 78. Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 121, 123. 79. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 34–43. 80. F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, Perepisnaia kniga stol’nika I. D. Miloslavskogo 7146 goda, pp. 349–379. 81. Ibid., pp. 321–322 v. 82. The rick size usually figuring in cadastral records was the five-pud rick, 10 of which could be produced on one desiatina of meadow; a meadow of 100 such ricks could support six horses on average. But calculating the plane area and yield of Kozlov meadows is complicated by the fact that southern agriculturalists often fashioned larger irreular ricks to save time. F. 1209, Pistsovaia kniga pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina, pp. 1–2; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 125; Samgina, “Sluzhiloe zemlevladenie,” pp. 267–268; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 18–19; Novombergskii, Ocherki vnutrennogo upravleniia v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII st. Prodovol’stvennoe stroenie. Materialy, ch. pervaia (Tobol’sk, 1914), pp. 662–663; L. V. Milov, Velikoriusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), p. 205. 83. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 13; L. N. Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVII veka. Chast’ pervaia, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1979), p. 48; Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’, p. 311; Novombergskii, Ocherki vnutrennego upravleniia, pt. 2, no. 671, p. 684; Dubasov, Ocherki, 4, p. 36; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, p. 155; Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, Institut etnologii i antropologii, Russkie. Narodnaia kul’tura (istoriia isovremennost’). Tom vtoroi: Material’naia kul’tura (Moscow: RAN, 1997), p. 130; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, Drevniia gramoty 2, no. 17, pp. 199–200.

Notes 281 84. Colonists in seventeenth-century New England burned an annual average of one acre of forest (30–40 cords) per household. Their open fireplaces were less energy-efficient than the enclosed stoves of Kozlov’s settlers, but the small woodlots of Kozlov’s households would still have been depleted very early on if they had been the only source of firewood. William Cronon, Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 120, 123. 85. Repair work on the Kozlov steppe wall in 1679–1680 used up 37,000 oak logs. Even heavier demands upon lumber reserves resulted when Kozlov, Dobryi, and Sokol’sk became shipyards building large fleets of barges and longboats to sail supplies and expeditionary forces down the Don. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 994, p. 159. 86. The ratio of forested to cleared land across all of Tambov oblast’ is estimated to have been about 1:1 in the sixteenth century, declining to 0.4:1 by 1696; another 220,000 hectares of forest were lost over 1696–1725. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 143, pp. 224–225; Snytko, Geografiia tambovskoi oblasti, pp. 34–35; M. A. Tsvetkov, Izmenenie lesisosti evropeiskoi Rossii s kontse XVII stoletiia po 1914 g. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1957), pp. 27, 30, 110, 111, 147; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 20; Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion,” pp. 53–54; Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda, pp. 66–67. 87. Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion,” p. 53; Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” pp. 29–31; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 12–13; B. H. Slicher von Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500–1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), p. 60; Janet Martin, “‘Backwardness’ in Russian Peasant Culture: A Theoretical Consideration of Agricultural Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, eds Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University, 1997), pp. 25–26. 88. Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” p. 29; R. A. French, “The Introduction of the Three-field Agricultural System,” Studies in Russian Historical Geography. Volume One, eds J. H. Bater and R. A. French (New York: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 67–69, 71–72; Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion,” p. 53; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” pp. 51, 52, 54. 89. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 11–12; Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’, pp. 102–103. 90. Households lacking the livestock for this would have to periodically burn their fallow land. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’, pp. 62–63. 91. Ibid., pp. 205–206. 92. Indova, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” pp. 40–41, 43; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” p. 50. 93. Droughts, premature frosts, locusts, and late summer downpours led to lower yields and harvest failures over much of the south in 1637, 1639, 1644, and 1649. Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, p. 11; Tkhorzhevskii, “Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo,” p. 74; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 231; S. G. Strumilin, Ocherki ekonomicheskoi istorii Rossii (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1950), p. 144; Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” p. 45; Shvetsova, “Khoziaistvo dvortsovykh krest’ian,” p. 173; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 15, 17.

282

Notes

94. This assumes a daily consumption minimum of one kilo of grain per adult; it does not factor in wastage or livestock’s consumption of oats. Shvetsova, “Khoziaistvo dvortsovykh krest’ian,” pp. 173–174. 95. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 17, 19; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” p. 53; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 162; Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” pp. 53–54; Dubasov, Ocherki, 4, p. 34; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, Drevniia gramoty 2, no. 117, pp. 199–200; Shvetsova, “Khoziaistvo dvortsovykh krest’ian,” p. 175; RAN, Russkie. Narodnaia kul’tura, p. 188; Pallot and Shaw, Landscape, p. 22. 96. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 96–98, 103–106; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 1406, pp. 7–23; Zagorovskii, “Zemledel’cheskoe naselenie,” pp. 206–207; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 18–19. 97. Voronezh was one of the largest state granaries on the frontier in part because it had an unusually large peasant and cottar population (1579 households in 1635) paying grain taxes into the Voronezh granary at an annual average of 200–300 kilos per household. E. Kalinina, Istoriia goroda Voronezha (Voronezh: Voronezhskoe oblastnoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1941), pp. 108, 112, 117; Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, Ocherki istorii Voronezhskogo kraia. Tom pervyi: S drevneishikh vremen do velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Voronezh: VGU, 1961), pp. 36, 54; Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 215–216; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 27, 28; Denis J. B. Shaw, “Urbanism and Economic Development in a Pre-industrial Context: The Case of Southern Russia,” Journal of Historical Geography 2 (1977), p. 115. 98. F. 1209, Perepisnaia kniga stol’nika Miloslavskogo, pp. 354–379; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 90–94; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 31; V. I. Kholmogorov, “Materialy dlia istorii goroda Kozlova. (1) Stateinaia zapis’ 158 g. s posadskimi liud’mi v tiaglo gul’iashchikh, torgovykh, i remeslovykh,” ZhTGUAK 33 (1891), pp. 59–66. 99. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 160–161. 100. Iu. A. Mizis, “Donskaia torgovlia v XVII-nachale XVIII vv.” Problemy izucheniia istorii tsentral’nogo chernozem’ia, ed. A. N. Akinshin (Voronezh: Tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniia Chernozemnogo kraia, 2000), pp. 136–138. 101. The national averages calculated by S. G. Strumilin were of course higher: 0.04 ruble per pud for rye, 0.081 ruble per pud for oats. AMG 2, no. 418; Pomestnyi prikaz kn. no. 199, pp. 446–462; Tikhonov, Pomeshchich’i krest’iane, p. 108. 102. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, p. 161. 103. Knigi denezhnogo stola no. 259, pp. 1–49; Knigi denezhnogo stols no. 314, pp. 167–186; V. M. Vazhinskii, “Khlebnaia torgovlia na iuge Moskovskogo gosudarstva vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo oblastnogo pedagogicheskogo instituta imeni N. K. Krupskoi 7 (1963), pp. 9–10; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 12–13; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” p. 119; K. V. Bazil’evich, Denezhnaia reforma Alekseia Mikhailovicha i vosstanie v Moskve v 1662 g. (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1936), p. 33. 104. AMG 2, nos 405, 418. 105. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 417, p. 55. 106. Dela raznykh gorodov kn. no. 36, pp. 312–313; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 21.

Notes 283 107. Novombergskii, “Ocherki vnutrennogo upravleniia,” 2, pp. 76–77, 188, 357–358, 365, 368–369; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 159, p. 171; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 691, pp. 32, 70, 77 passim; knigi denezhnogo stola no. 314, pp. 568–574; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” pp. 73–74. 108. Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” appendices 1, 2; for livestock prices in Muscovy, see Hellie, Economy and Material Culture, pp. 40–50; Vdovina, “Zemledelie i skotovodstvo,” pp. 53–54; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziastvo, p. 20. 109. Knigi denezhnogo stola, kniga no. 314, pp. 286–322, and kn. no. 329, pp. 615–788; Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” pp. 173–174; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 63–64. 110. Vazhinskii, “Razvitie rynochnykh sviazei,” pp. 83–86, 111, 193–196, 200, 207–208, 214, 250, 252–253, appendix 1. 111. Pallot and Shaw, Landscape, p. 30; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 29.

4

Governing Kozlov

1. Kholmogorov, “Materialy dlia istorii goroda Kozlova,” 74; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 264–266; AI 5, no. 180; N. N. Ogloblin, “Provintsial’nye arkhivy v XVII veke (Ocherk iz istorii arkhivnago dela v Rossii),” Vestnik arkheologii i istorii, izd. Arkheologicheskim institutom 6 (1886), pp. 92–95, 193–194; D. Ia. Samokvasov, Russkie arkhivy i tsarskii kontrol’ prikaznoi sluzhby v XVII veke (Moscow, 1902). 2. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, pp. 24–50. 3. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 97–99. 4. Ibid., no. 92, pp. 164–169, 217–218; AMG 2: no. 37, pp. 19–20; Avdeev and Mizis, I pyl’ vekov, pp. 15–16. 5. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, pp. 397–399, 213–232; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 2419, p. 1–22. 6. Ibid., no. 445, pp. 159–180. For a partial listing of the muster rolls, allotment and surveying books, accounting books and other records kept maintained under the later Kozlov governors, see Golombievskii and Ardashev, Prikaznyia, zemskiia, pp. 29–37. 7. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 131, p. 138. 8. Before Kartavtsov turned against Boborykin the community had denounced him as one of the “swindlers, slanderes, and cheats” helping the governor to despoil them. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 90, 93. 9. N. N. Ogloblin, “Proiskhozhdenie provintsial’nykh pod’iachikh XVII veka,” ZhMNP 295 (1894), pp. 129, 131, 134, 141–149, 232–233; Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy,” pp. 106, 112, 340; N. F. Demidova, “Prikaznye liudi XVII v. (Sotsial’nyi sostav i istochniki formirovanie,” Istoricheskie zapiski 90 (1972), pp. 340, 344, 347–348, 350–351; N. F. Demidova, “Sotsial’naia baza komplektovaniia mestnoi gruppy prikaznykh liudei XVII v.,” Feodalizma v Rossii. Sbornik statei i vospominanii, posv. pamiati akademika L. V. Cherepnina, ed. V. L. Ianin (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), pp. 245–246, 249; AI 5, no. 161; PSZ 3, no. 1650; Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 54–55. 10. Demidova, “Sotsial’naia baza,” p. 248; Ogloblin, “Proiskhozhdenie,” pp. 122, 125–126, 133, 139, 236–240; N. F. Demidova, “Biurokratizatsiia

284

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

Notes gosudarstvennogo apparata absoliutizma v XVII–XVIII vv.,” Absoliutizm v Rossii (XVII–XVIII vv.) Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia i 45-letiiu nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiatel’nosti B. B. Kafengauza, ed. N. M. Druzhinin (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), p. 218; Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, p. 70; Demidova, “Prikaznye liudi,” pp. 345–346. But most had at least done a stint of cavalry duty at Kozlov. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 784, pp. 37–41; Veselovskii, D’iaki i pod’iachie, pp. 465, 521, 579–589; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 784, pp. 40–41; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 82–83. Demidova, “Prikaznye liudi,” pp. 345–346. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 200–201; DAI 2, no. 48, pp. 82–83; Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia,” pt. 1, pp. 215, 222–238; Chicherin, Oblastnyia, p. 104. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 216. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 201, pp. 441–449, 451–453; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 231–232, 99–100; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 33–37. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, pp. 1–2; Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 138–140, 157, 363–364; Myshlaevskii, Ofitserskii vopros, p. 12; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, p. 107; “Streletskaia sluzhba,” pp. 17–22; Bel’iaev, “O russkom voiske,” pp. 79–80; Glaz’ev, “Voronezhskie strel’tsy,” p. 25; Nikitin, Sluzhilye liudi, pp. 42–43; AI 5, no. 207; AI 3, no. 154; DAI 4, no. 134; Chuvash., no. 3; P. N. Chermenskii, Gorod Lebedian’ i ego uezd v XVII veke (St Petersburg, 1913), pp. 27, 38; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 216. Even a village containing less than a full century of men would need its own centurion. Decimal military organization may have been all the easier to routinize at Kozlov, where village economic life was organized upon the foundation of decimal siabr teams. V. N. Kozliakov, “Sluzhilyi ‘gorod’ Iaroslavskogo uezda v kontse XVI-pervoi polovine XVII veke,” Arkhiv russkoi istorii 6 (1995), p. 92. The same source names an additional 17 centurions who were “at regimental affairs and at the various wood and earth fortifications” under Governor Boborykin in 1647–1648, without identifying their villages; yet another six names appear to have been of standard-bearers. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, p. 239; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, pp. 358–360; I. L. Andreev, “Sotennye golovy v Rossii XVII veke,” Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Istoricheskie zapiski 5 (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. universitet, 2000), pp. 6–17. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 221–222; Novosel’skii, “Praviashchie gruppy,” pp. 334–335; A. A. Novosel’skii, “Gorod kak voenno-sluzhilaia i kak soslovnaia organizatsiia provintsial’nogo dvoriantsva v XVII v.,” Issledovaniia po istorii epokhi feodalizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 189; Kivelson, Autocracy, p. 52. Keep, “The Muscovite Elite,” p. 213; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, p. 30; Kivelson, Autocracy, p. 55. Perhaps as a district of largely odnodvorets population Kozlov was not entitled to Assembly representation. Cherepnin, Zemskie sobory, pp. 266, 288–292, 320, 327; Peter Brown, “The Zemskii Sobor in Recent Soviet Historiography,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 10, 1 (1983), p. 84. A 1639 investigation at Kostroma collected over 10,000 testimonies implicating assessors from the Polozin clan in initiation malfeasance, robbery, and torture. Novosel’skii, “Praviashchie gruppy,” pp. 324–330.

Notes 285 24. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 690, pp. 441, 1210. 25. Nikitin, Sluzhilye liudi, p. 31; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 220–221. 26. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, p. 360; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, p. 289; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, pp. 80–81. 27. Keep, “The Muscovite Elite,” p. 202; S. L. Margolin, “K voprosu ob organizatsii i sotsial’nom sostave streletskogo voiska v XVII veke,” Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo oblastnogo pedagogicheskogo instituta. Tom 27. Trudy kafedry istorii SSSR 2 (1954), pp. 91–92; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 207–208. 28. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, pp. 220–222. 29. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 123, pp. 54–58. For a similar petitions war between the deti boiarskie and cossacks of Iakutsk, see N. N. Ogloblin, “Iakutskii rozysk o rozni boiarskikh detei i kazakov (Ocherk iz zhizni XVII veka),” Russkaia starina 91 (1897), pp. 375–392. 30. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 115–116; Gregory Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1977), pp. 48–51; Gregory Freeze, “Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850,” Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, eds Jane Burbank and David Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 211–212; V. S. Shul’gin, “Religiia i tserkov’,” Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVII veka. Chast’ vtoraia, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii gos. universitet, 1979), pp. 303–304, 308. 31. Georg Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-century Muscovy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 188, 227, 183. Much of the Mordovian population in neighboring Shatsk had not yet been converted to Christianity. In 1656 Archbishop Misail attempted to conduct mass baptisms among them with the help of troops from Shatsk but was ambushed and killed by Mordovian bowmen on skis outside the village of Ianbirevaia. Avdeev and Mizis, I pyl’ vekov, pp. 35–37. 32. Istoricheskoe opisanie troitskago kozlovskago monastyria (Moscow, 1849), pp. 6–8, 49; P. A. D’iakonov, “K istorii kozlovskago troitskago monastyria,” ITUAK 16 (1887), pp. 13–15. 33. Each nun received an annual grain ruga of one measure of oats. “Knigi okladnyia Tambova goroda i Kozlova. Tambovskiia i kozlovskiia desiatiny, 1676 (7184) g.,” ITUAK 39 (1895), p. 297; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 38, 43, 124–125. 34. Sometimes governors made their own donations to cathedral churches. Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, p. 67. 35. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 488–495; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’1, ed. khr. 199, pp. 446–471 v. 36. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 252–253. 37. Freeze, The Russian Levites, pp. 58, 60, 78, 150; Shul’gin, “Religiia,” p. 308. 38. Ibid., pp. 17, 22, 48, 62, 65, 78; Shul’gin, “Religiia,” pp. 302–303, 309. 39. F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, opis’ 1, ed. khr. 198, Kniga pistsovaia pis’ma i mery Ivana Birkina da Mikhaila Speshneva, pp. 1–362, and ed. khr. 230, pp. 350–379; Shul’gin, “Religiia,” pp. 309–310; Debra Coulter, “Clerical Livelihood in Seventeenth-century Russia: Payroll Problems of the Parish Priest,” Irish Slavonic Studies 21 (2000), pp. 113, 114, 116–117. 40. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 94–97, 115–117. 41. Freeze, The Russian Levites, pp. 149–150. 42. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, p. 116.

286

Notes

43. For examples of such minor outlays, see the breakdown for the 456 rubles’ expenditures recorded in the 1648–1649 expenditure books of the Kozlov governor’s office. F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, kn. no. 199, pp. 430–471 v. 44. At Iablonov, for example, just 59.06 rubles out of the 2289.95 rubles in the governor’s treasury were clearly of local provenance – from judicial duties, leases on commercial bathhouses and kvas breweries, or fines paid by deserters’ suretors – with the remainder having been sent down from Moscow. This was already four years after Iablonov’s founding, and Iablonov had a smaller bill for settlement subsidies and service compensations and had granaries filled by local corvee on the “Sovereign’s tithe demesne.” Miklashevskii, K istorii khoziaistvennago byta, pp. 300–303. 45. Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 412, 436–438; O. N. Vil’kov, “Tobol’sk – tsentr tamozhennoi sluzhby Sibiri v XVII v.,” Goroda Sibiri. Ekonomika, upravlenie i kul’tura gorodov Sibiri v dosovetskii period, AN SSSR, Sibirskoe otdelenie, Institut istorii, filologii i filosofii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1974), pp. 133–134, 147–148. 46. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 104, pp. 72–78, 84–85, 275–276. 47. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 108–115. 48. Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, p. 412; Vil’kov, “Tobol’sk,” pp. 147–148. 49. Iu. A. Tikhonov, “Tamozhennaia politika Russkogo gosudarstva XVI v. do 60-kh godov XVII v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski 53 (1955), p. 245; A. T. Nikolaeva, “Otrazhenie v ustavnykh tamozhennykh gramotakh Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVI–XVII vv. protsessa obrazovaniia vserossiiskogo rynka,” Istoricheskie zapiski 31 (1950), p. 245; AAE 3, no. 241; Timothy R. Mixter, “Internal Travel in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” unpubl. ms., 1976, p. 113. 50. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 104, pp. 108–115; Tikhonov, “Tamozhennaia politika,” pp. 263–267; Nikolaeva, “Otrazhenie,” pp. 245–248; S. Shumakov, “Drevnerusskie kosvennye nalogi,” Sbornik iuridicheskago obshchestva, sostoiashchago pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom universitete i ego statisticheskago otdeleniia 7 (1897), pp. 262–263; A. N. Kopylov, “Tamozhennaia politika v Sibiri v XVII v.,” Russkoe gosudarstvo v XVII veke. Sbornik statei, ed. AN SSSR, Institut istorii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), pp. 340–345; Mixter, “Internal Travel,” pp. 105–106. 51. Only in 1642 do we find the first indication to the contrary: 200 Kozlov musketeers and 36 cossacks were allowed to trade duty-free in “carried goods” valued from 0.5–1.0 ruble. But they still had to pay duties on all shop trade and on transactions of over a ruble in value. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, pp. 222–226; Aleksandrov, “Streletskoe voisko,” pp. 290–292, 313. 52. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 210, pp. 269, 358; Knigi denezhnogo stola, kn. no. 329, pp. 615–788; Knigi denezhnago stola, kn. no. 354, pp. 482–574. 53. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 104, p. 564; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, kn. no. 199, pp. 445. 54. “1636 goda [sic],” ITUAK 41 (1897), p. 158; “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” Sinbirskii sbornik. Chast’ istoricheskaia, tom pervyi (Moscow, 1844), p. 36. 55. Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 77, 165, 272–273, 422–423; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, p. 29; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, kn. no. 199, pp. 436 v.–444 v.; ZARG Teksty, no. 128, p. 117. 56. Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii pp. 308, 422; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 284–285.

Notes 287 57. Until the 1620s the main unit of tax assessment had been the sokha, a measure of land area differentiated by productive potential (1 unit of good land was equal to 1.25 units of middling land or 1.5 units of poor land) and also by the social estate of the landowner (1 unit owned by a monastery equalled 1.6 units held by a lay pomeshchik or votchinnik, for example). Sometimes assessment was also done by vyt’, a subdivision of a sokha. The sokha subsequently gave way to the zhivushchaia chetvert’ (inhabited quarter) which better gauged actual fiscal solvency because it included as well the number of peasant and cottar households per unit. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza-Efrona, s.v. “Sokha” and “Zhivushchaia chetvert’.” 58. Tkhorzhevskii, “Gosudarstvennoe zemlevladenie,” pp. 64–78; Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, pp. 50–51; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 54–57; O. V. Skobelkin, “Formy ekspluatatsii sluzhilyh liudei voronezhskogo kraia feodal’nym gosudarstvom vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Istoriia zaseleniia i khoziaistvennogo osvoeniia voronezhskogo kraia v epokhu feodalizma, ed. Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet (Voronezh: Voronezhskii universitet, 1987), p. 47. 59. Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii, 42–50; Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 73, 75; AI 3, no. 206, pp. 361–363; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 53. On the assessment and collection of such extraordinary levies, see Iakovlev, Prikaz sbora ratnykh liudei, pp. 91–109. 60. Lappo-Danilevskii, Organizatsiia, pp. 52–53; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 208; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 52–53. 61. Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, p. 52. 62. Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 126, 163–164; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 60–61; Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, p. 47; AI 3, no. 132, pp. 206–207. 63. Communication to the author from Carol B. Stevens. 64. In 1677 Kozlov servicemen were also assessed 0.06 rubles per man as post money to maintain the district’s post service, but this due had probably started only in 1658 when we finally find reference to a Kozlov post station. The Kozlov post station employed 10 tax-exempt post riders, each receiving an annual compensation of 20 rubles from post money. Hellie, Enserfment, p. 60; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 53; Skobel’kin, “Formy ekspluatatsii,” p. 52; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 921, p. 519; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, p. 77; ZARG Teksty, no. 106, pp. 105–107; I. Gurliand, Iamskaia gon’ba, pp. 230–236, 239; Miliukov, “Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo,” pt. 1, p. 7; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 53; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 921, p. 519. 65. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 343; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, kn. no. 199, p. 45; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 921, p. 519; AAE 3, no. 163; AI 5, no. 13. 66. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, pp. 438–440; PSZ 2, no. 780. 67. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 65–67; AMG 1, no. 667, p. 618. 68. A. I. Kopanev, “The Canton,” Soviet Studies in History 3 (1987–1988), p. 46; Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 74; Davies, “The Politics of Give and Take,” pp. 51–52. 69. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, p. 103. 70. AMG 1, no. 248, pp. 264–265. 71. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, pp. 77–78.

288

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72. “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” pp. 34–37; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, kn. no. 199, p. 458. 73. A. M. Sakharov, “Iz istorii Moskvy serediny XVII veka,” Vestnik Moskovskgo universiteta 3 (1963), pp. 45–52; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 47–48. 74. Ulozhenie XXI, article 3; Kivelson, Autocracy, pp. 143, 145–150; V. N. Glaz’ev, Vlast’ i obshchestvo na iuge Rossii v XVII veke: protivodeistvie ugolovnoi prestupnosti (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. universitet, 2001), pp. 89–101. 75. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 37, 75–77; Prikazni stol stolbets no. 432, pp. 82–85; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 1650, pp. 727–729; Glaz’ev, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, 113–114, 121–123, 141–155. Kivelson, Autocracy, p. 150. 76. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 129–130; AI 5, no. 161; PSZ 3, no. 1579; AAE 4, no. 206, p. 274. For procedures at Kozlov in the 1630s, see Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 103, pp. 322, 331–334 and Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 74, p. 3. 77. DAI 3, no. 67; “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” pp. 35–36; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 129–130; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds Drevniia gramoty 3, no. CI, pp. 21–23; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 656, pp. 43–44; AAE 4, no. 206, p. 273; “Nakaz voevode kniaziu Ivanu Kugushevu,” Vremennik 14 (1852), pp. 7–8; AI 5, no. 161, p. 282; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, p. 58; AMG 3, no. 180, p. 158; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 130, 304–307; “Streletskaia sluzhba,” p. 18. 78. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 66–67; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 656, pp. 65–69; O. V. Skobelkin, “Mery feodal’nogo gosudarstva po bor’be s pobegami voronezhskikh sluzhilykh liudei na Donu v poslednei treti XVII veka,” Istoriia zaseleniia i khoziastvennogo osvoeniia voronezhskogo kraia v epokhu feodalizma, ed. Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. universitet, 1987), pp. 116–126. 79. Shchepotev exceeded his authority in torturing a clergyman. Some working orders did authorize governors to torture travellers upon evidence they were intending crimes or agitation to insurrection or were travelling to join up with renegade cossacks, but the general rule in treason cases was that only tiaglo-bearing men could be tortured on the governor’s own initiative, and then only upon evidence of imminent danger to the state. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 271–278; G. G. Tel’berg, Ocherki politicheskago suda i politicheskikh prestuplenii v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XVII veke (Moscow, 1912), pp. 283–284; V. Z. Dzhincharadze, “Bor’ba s inostrannym shpionazhem v Rossii v XVII veke,” Istoricheskie zapiski 39 (1952), pp. 242–245. 80. Sevskii stol stolbets no. 250, pp. 124–135, 347–349. 81. E. N. Shveikovskaia, Gosudarstvo i krest’iane Rossii. Pomor’e v XVII veke (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii Tsentr, 1997), p. 213; Andreev, “Dvorianstvo i sluzhba,” p. 168; Ulozhenie, Chapter VII, articles 8, 9, 19; N. D. Sergeevskii, Nakazanie v russkom prave XVII veka (St Petersburg, 1887), p. 27; PSZ1, nos 302, 480; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 251; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, p. 83; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 117; “Streletskaia sluzhba,” pp. 18, 21; Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia,” pt. 1, p. 45. 82. A. A. Novosel’skii, “Kollektivnye dvorianskie chelobitnye o syske beglykh krest’ian i kholopov vo vtoroi polovine XVII v.,” Dvorianstvo i krepostnoi stroi Rossii XVI–XVIII vv. Sbornik statei posviashchennyi pamiati Alekseia Andreevicha Novosel’skogo, ed. N. I. Pavlenko (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 303–343. A. G. Man’kov, Razvitie krepostnogo prava v Rossii vo vtoroi

Notes 289

83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

polovine XVII veka (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 24, 29–30, 215; AAE 4, no. 206, pp. 275–276; Dela raznykh gorodov, kn. no. 36, pp. 81–184; Sevskii stol stolbets no. 250, pp. 134–135, 347–353; Skobelkin, “Mery feodal’nogo gosudarstva po bor’be s pobegami,” pp. 116–126; I. A. Bulygin, “Beglye krest’iane Riazanskogo uezda v 60-e gody XVII v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski 34 (1953), p. 132; F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz, g. Shatska kn. no. 12090, no. 3. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), pp. 118, 121–123, 175; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 83–90; Raeff, The Well-ordered Police State, pp. 88–89. Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, article 19. For 15th–16th century orders to detain suspicious strangers and charge them with felonies without evidence, see AN SSSR, Institut gosudarstva i prava, Razvitie russkogo prava v XV-pervoi polovine XVII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), p. 246. Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds. Drevniia gramoty 3, no. CI, pp. 21–23. Kleimola, “The Duty to Denounce,” p. 778. Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, article 38. Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 693–694; Raeff, Well-ordered Police State, p. 90. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 41. Carol B. Stevens, “Banditry and Provincial Order in Sixteenth-Century Russia,” Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1389–1584, eds A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff (Moscow: ITZ-Garant, 1997), pp. 580–582; Keep, “Bandits and the Law,” pp. 200–201; John M. Letiche and Basil Dmytryshyn, Russian Statecraft. The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 198. 1669 New Decree Statutes, articles 58, 116, 120; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, p. 132; DAI 12, no. 56. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 92, p. 574; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 180–181, 370–372, 227–230; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 73–75; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 291–292; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 335–341. Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 77–82. See the 1631 Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery, AI 3, no. 167, pp. 294–310. Horace W. Dewey, “Muscovite Guba Charters and the Concept of Brigandage (Razboj),” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 1966 51 (1965), pp. 286–288; Solov’ev, 7, p. 425. Compare with Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University, 1979), pp. 205–208. Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds. Drevniia gramoty 2, no. 10, pp. 177–178. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 15–18, 27. Ulozhenie, Chapter XX, article 4. Stevens, “Banditry and Provincial Order,” p. 597. “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” p. 36; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 656, pp. 45–48 v. Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 121, 123, 134, 159. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, p. 284.

290

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103. Some idea of the increasing case load is suggested by the yield from court fees and duties, which totalled 66.87 rubles from 56 cases in July 1648– November 1649 and 780 rubles from 228 cases over the period 1657–1669. Vazhinskii thinks an average of 100–170 cases were heard annually at Kozlov in later decades. These figures do not differentiate criminal from civil cases. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 13–15; Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 38. For case loads in other districts, see AIuB 2, nos 129, 130; AIuB 3, no. 323; DAI 11, no. 11. 104. These are taken from the stolbtsy mentioned above. The number of instances did not correspond to the number of hearings: continuations have not been counted, and some defendants stood under multiple charges as the same hearing. In the theft cases beehives, followed by horses, were the property most often stolen. The abduction and incitement of flight charges involved Kozlov servicemen carrying off peasants and slaves from other districts as well as from Kozlov (dvorovyi Stepan Kaznacheev was a repeat offender in these abductions). All three instances of treason or sedition involved defendants held under other charges who declared the Sovereign’s Word and Deed – that is, involvement in or knowledge of treasonable or seditious activity – in order to obtain a change of venue to Moscow and avoid torture at Kozlov. The three instances of administrative malfeasance refer to two illegal impoundings of grain and one instance in which nine jail guards were prosecuted for allowing convicts to escape. 105. The various infractions of military discipline were defined at midcentury in Chapter VII of the Ulozhenie, in the Ustav ratnykh, pushchenykh, i drugikh del, and in Uchenie ratnogo stroeniia pekhotnykh liudei. These codes left penalties for these infractions unspecified because they were determined by the commander or governor. “1636 goda [sic],” p. 158; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, pp. 146–148, 155–156; Nikolai Lange, Drevnee russkoe ugolovnoe sudoproizvodstvo (XIV, XV, XVI i poloviny XVII vekov) (St Petersburg, 1884), pp. 116, 122; M. A. Lippinskii, “Rospis’ komu imianem i za kakuiu vinu kakoe nakazanie bylo s priezdu v Tobol’sk voevod kniaziu Petra Ivanovicha Pronskogo, da Fedora Ivanovicha Lovchikova, da d’iakov Ivana Trofimova da Ondreiia Gal’kina,” ChOIDR 1 (1883): 17–41; Glaz’ev, “Voronezhskie gubnye starosty,” p. 29. 106. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, pp. 56, 98. 107. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 140, p. 160. 108. Baron, ed. Travels of Olearius, pp. 138–139. 109. Kollmann, By Honor Bound, pp. 100, 107–109, 116–117. 110. E. N. Beliaeva, “Grazhdanskoe sudoproizvodstvo v Voronezhskom uezde vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Iz istorii Voronezhskogo kraia, vyp. 3, ed. A. M. Akinshin (Voronezh: Uchebnaia literatura,1998) pp. 47–48. 111. Vazhinskii, Zemlevladenie, p. 295. 112. Ibid., p. 188. 113. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 502, pp. 1–342. 114. Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, “The State, the Community, and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe,” Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, eds J. A. C. Gattrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europa Publications, 1980), p. 27; Alan MacFarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in

Notes 291

115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126.

127.

Seventeenth-century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 168. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 13–15. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 227, pp. 73–79. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 107–109. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, pp. 253–254; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 67–69. 1669 New Decree Statutes, articles 100, 111. The discrepancy may illustrate a further erosion in the status of women and the archaization of norms arising from the Statutes’ imitation of such Byzantine codes as the Procheiros Nomos. The Statutes said nothing about husbands who murdered their wives, and also punished with death any woman who aborted a fetus conceived through adultery or fornication in an unmarried state. However, Nancy Kollmann has recently shown that Muscovite patriarchalism and misogyny were partly mitigated by the great emphasis the law placed on protecting even females against dishonor (bezchestie); the law thus offered women significant “protections of their personal dignity and physical inviolability,” guaranteeing this through “judicious and responsible investigations and adequate compensation.” Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” Russia’s Women. Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds B. Clements, B. Engel, and C. Worcobec (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 68. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, p. 59. Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia,” pt. 2, pp. 116–117; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 189–190. Shakhmatov, “Kompetentsiia,” pt. 2, pp. 143–144; AI 3, no. 167, articles 21–23; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, articles 50–57, 81. Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, pp. 131–134. AI 3, no. 167, articles 25–29; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, articles 59–61, 63, 79; 1669 New Decree Statutes, articles 58, 59, 116–118; V. G. Geiman, “‘Sochenie sleda’ v Belozerskom uezde XVII v.,” Trudy Leningradskogo otdeleniia instituta istorii. Tom vtoroi. Voprosy ekonomiki i klassovykh otnoshenii v Russkom gosudarstve, XII–XVII vekov (Moscow, Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960), pp. 92, 95, 98. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 92, pp. 335–341. At their most overcrowded (350 inmates) the wooden jailhouses at Ustiug Velikii offered less than a half square meter of floor space per inmate. In regions where little lumber was available prisoners were lodged in pits covered at ground level with wooden trap doors with tiny windows. Ibid., pp. 300–302, 398–400; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 367, 467; Martysevich and Shul’gin, “Pravo i sud,” p. 337; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, articles 97, 98, 101; Iu. B. Arsenev, “Iz deloproizvodstva kashirskikh gubnykh starost vo vtoroi polovine XVII veka,” Drevnosti. Trudy arkheologicheskoi kommissii Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 2, 1 (1990), pp. 92–93; AAE 4, no. 72; DAI 3, no. 115, pp. 404–405; Piskarev, Sobranie materialov, p. 69; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, article 101; Kunkin and Stratonitskii, “Gorod Kashin,” pp. 78–79. Kotoshikhin, 1, p. 228 (Chapter VII, article 47); PSZ 3, no. 1595; Arsen’ev, “Iz deloproizvodstvo,” p. 93.

292

Notes

128. Martsevich and Shul’gin, “Pravo i sud,” pp. 336–338; E. V. Chistiakova, Voronezh v seredine XVII veka i vosstanie 1648 goda (Voronezh: Voronezhskoe knizhnoe izd., 1953), p. 7; Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds. Drevniia gramoty 1, no. XXXIV, pp. 109–111; DAI 4, no. 134, p. 337; AI 5, no. 181. 129. 1669 New Decree Statutes, article 123. 130. Ibid., articles 126, 127; Arsen’ev, “Iz deloproizvodstvo,” pp. 90–91; AI 5, no. 55; PSZ 1, no. 527. 131. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 67–69. 132. “1636 goda [sic],” ITUAK 41 (1897): 158; “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” p. 36. 133. Baron, ed. Travels of Olearius, p. 229. 134. AAE 3, no. 227; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 135–136, 142–143; Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 77, 155, 301, 303; Ulozhenie, Chapter XX, articles 6, 28, 72, 73; AMG 2, no. 173, p. 112; Kotoshikhin, 1, p. 232 (Chapter VIII, article 3). 135. Kotoshikhin, 2, pp. 543–544 (Editor’s commentary). 136. Ulozhenie, Chapter XVI, articles 23, 54, 59, and Chapter X, articles 251–261, 266. 137. Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, article 3. 138. Kotoshikhin, 1, p. 261 (Chapter XI, article 5); Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 153–172; Dmitirev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 96, 98, 112–113. 139. This was apparently done because plaintiffs in other districts had sent inquisitors and constables to arrest Kozlov servicemen on trumped-up charges. Moscow finally forebade these police raids on the grounds they were causing Kozlov settlers to abandon their homes and “flee from fortifications labor . . . . Kozlov is a borderland town and needs servicemen in it.” Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 194, pp. 41–44; AMG 2, no. 585; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 121–127. 140. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 432, pp. 82–85. 141. “1636 goda [sic],” ITUAK 41 (1897), p. 158. 142. “Rodoslovnaia rospis’ Kikinykh,” p. 36. 143. For an example, see Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 265, pp. 107–109. 144. Although the seventeenth-century codes devoted great attention to the enumeration of capital offenses, it was left up to particular working orders whether a governor could pass death sentences or had to report his findings up to a chancellery for the latter to pronounce a death sentence. The former was more likely to be permitted in major towns a great distance from Moscow, and then only in the century’s first decades. Nor is it clear whether capital sentences could be passed by criminal justice elders or only by the Robbery Chancellery. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 121, pp. 213–214; AAE 4, no. 206; Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 301–302; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 148–150; A. I. Iakovlev, Namestnich’i, gubnyia i zemskiia ustavnyia gramoty Moskovskago gosudarstva (Moscow, 1909), p. 98; V. I. Kurdinovskii, “Gubnyia uchrezhdeniia Moskovskogo gosudarstva,” pt. 2, ZhMNP 301 (1895), p. 310; P. I. Piskarev, “Kopiia s ukaza o bytii v Efremove gubnym starostoi Tikhonu Bezsonovu,” ITUAK 24 (1889), p. 44. 145. AN SSSR, Institut gosudarstva i prava, Razvitie russkogo prava, pp. 34, 43. For its text, and commentaries to it, see AI 3, no. 167, pp. 294–310; ZARG Teksty no. 80, pp. 85–91; ZARG Kommentarii pp. 126–131.

Notes 293 146. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 116, pp. 2–48. 147. AI 3, no. 167, articles 1, 4, 5, 15, 16, 18, 21. 148. AI 3, no. 167, articles 5, 9, 12, 63, 64; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, articles 28, 39, 42, 43, 76; Lange, Drevnee russkoe ugolovnoe sudoproizvodstvo, pp. 144, 149. 149. The penalties for false accusation (iabednichestvo) in the Code of 1589 were knouting with 100 blows for the first offense, and death for the second offense. By the time of the Ulozhenie the penalties for false accusation had been eased so as not to discourage subjects from their duties as informers. But the penalties were probably still fairly harsh in the 1630s when the voevoda system of local government was still under construction and there were many complaints of legal harassment through false accusation. Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 165–166; Horace W. Dewey, “Morality and the Law in Muscovite Russia,” Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives, ed. William Butler (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), pp. 56–57, 61–62; Ulozhenie, Chapter X, articles 18, 186–188. 150. Ulozhenie, Chapter X, articles 93, 95. 151. Ibid., article 18. 152. AI 3, no. 167, article 141; Ulozhenie, Chapter XXI, article 31; Dmitriev, Istoriia sudebnykh instantsii, pp. 416–418; Lange, Drevnee russkoe ugolovnoe sudoproizvodstvo, pp. 176–177; Arkhiv Baiusheva, no. 135. 153. Vtorov and Aleksandrov-Dol’nik, eds. Drevniia gramoty 1, no. 10, pp. 177–178. 154. Captain John Perry, The State of Russia Under the Present Czar (London, 1716), pp. 189–190; Avgustina Maierberg, “Puteshestvie v Moskovoiu,” Utverzhdenie dinastii, ed. A. Liberman (Moscow: Fond Sergeiia Dubova, 1997), p. 105; H.-J. Torke, “Crime and Punishment,” pp. 7, 16. 155. Kopanev, Krest’iane russkogo severa v XVII v., p. 227; Shveikovskaia, Gosudarstvo i krest’iane, p. 107. 156. Kivelson, Autocracy, p. 238. 157. For Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb the frontier was a place “where the individual has been given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific administration of government,” where “his aloneness meant that man was at last really on his own. He could do in this new environment anything he wanted to do and as much as he wanted to do without opposition.” Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1986), p. 217; Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1979), p. 4. 158. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 27. 159. William H. McNeill, The Global Condition: Conquerors and Community (Princeton: Princeton University, 1992), p. 28; Stephen Saunders Webb, The GovernorsGeneral. The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1979), p. 4; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1992), p. 123.

5

Supplication, subversion, and resistance 1. A. D. Gorskii, ed. Rossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo X–XX vv. Tom vtoroi: Zakonodatel’stvo perioda obrazovaniia i ukrepleniia Russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva

294

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

Notes (Moscow: Iuridicheskia literatura, 1985), pp. 54, 62, 97, 102, 195; P. V. Sedov, “Podnosheniia v moskovskikh prikazakh XVII veka,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 1 (1996), p. 147. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, pp. 141–142. Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 195–196. This can be seen in the defense offered by Sir Francis Bacon at his 1621 trial for corruption and in the persistence of litigant gifting to French judges for decades after it was ostensibly forbidden under the Ordinance of Blois (1579). Davies, “Politics of Give and Take,” pp. 44, 60–61; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Seventeenth-century France (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2000), pp. 87–88. “Povest’ o Shemiakinom sude,” Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. XVII vek. Kniga vtoraia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), p. 184. Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1988), pp. 133, 136. O. P. Senigov, Pamiatniki zemskoi stariny (St Petersburg, 1903), pp. 38, 43, 190–191, 195, 221. Davies, “The Politics of Give and Take,” pp. 59–60. DAI 4, no. 40; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, pp. 97–99; Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 121–122. A. I. Kirpichnikov, Vziatka i korruptsiia v Rossii (St Petersburg: Alfa, 1997), p. 29. Valerie Kivelson, “The Devil Stole His Mind: The Tsar and the 1648 Moscow Uprising,” American Historical Review 98, 3 (1993), pp. 733, 738, 742, 755–756; Kivelson, Autocracy, pp. 217, 221–222. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 102. Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 224–227; N. N. Pokrovskii, “Sibirskie materialy XVII–XVIII vv. ‘po slovu i delu gosudarevu’ kak istochnik po istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia,” Istochniki po istorii obshchestvennoi mysli i kul’tury epokhi pozdnego feodalizma, ed. N. N. Pokrovskii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1988), pp. 24–27. For examples from the state peasant cantons of the far north, see A. I. Kopanev, Krest’iane russkogo severa v XVII v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), pp. 217–225. Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, p. 194. Kozliakov, Sluzhilyi gorod, pp. 142–149; P. P. Smirnov, “Chelobitnye dvorian i detei boiarskikh vsekh gorodov v pervoi polovine XVII v.,” ChOIDR 253, nos 3, 4 (1915), pp. 1–73; Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, p. 194. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 257–258; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 227, pp. 73–79. Ibid., pp. 260–262. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 385, pp. 175–196; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 859, pp. 150–161; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 876, pp. 131–133; Novombergskii, Ocherki I, no. 529; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 709, pp. 21–25; Dela raznykh gorodov, kniga no. 36, pp. 312–313, 776 obv., 1213; Zagorovskii, “Zemledel’cheskoe naselenie,” p. 203. AMG 2, nos 269 and 270; Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, p. 329; Kivelson, Autocracy, p. 164. Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 174–176.

Notes 295 22. Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, p. 328; PSZ 3, no. 1597; Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 171, 188, 225–226, 242, 245. 23. Ulozhenie X, articles 14, 20; E. I. Indova, ed. Krest’ianskie chelobitnye XVII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 4; Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 232–233; Kozliakov, Sluzhilyi gorod, pp. 143, 152–153. 24. Marshall T. Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 2000), p. 212; Kozliakov, Sluzhilyi gorod, p. 153; Kivelson, Autocracy, pp. 245–246. 25. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, p. 241. 26. G. G. Tel’berg, Ocherki politicheskago suda i politicheskikh prestuplenii v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XVII veke (Moscow, 1912), pp. 60, 94–99. As an example, see the incident at Kolomenskoe in 1663: members of an unarmed crowd who approached Tsar Aleksei “in an angry and rude manner, threatening that if he did not turn over those boyars to them voluntarily they would take them from him themselves” were massacred or branded and hanged as insurrectionists. Kotoshikhin VII, article 9. 27. Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, p. 186. 28. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 105–112. On obysk procedures for investigating charges of malfeasance by governors and other local officials, see Aleksandrov and Pokrovskii, Vlast’ i obshchestvo, pp. 279–283. 29. Iurii Tolmachev may have been the kinsman of Voronezh criminal justice elder Petr Tolmachev, who had led a successful petition campaign against Voronezh governor Afanasii Boborykin two years before. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 130–131, 201. 30. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, pp. 207–210. 31. Ibid., p. 205. 32. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 1–12; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 172, pp. 297–298. 33. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 87–89, 103–104. 34. This was signed by three musketeer quinquagenaries, eight cossack quinquagenaries, three gunners, and seven parish priests. 35. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 115–117. 36. Ibid., pp. 87–89, 103–104. 37. Ibid., pp. 90, 95–96. 38. Ibid., pp. 94–104. 39. Ibid., pp. 115–117. 40. Ibid., pp. 90, 94. 41. Ibid., pp. 94, 103. 42. Ibid., p. 116. 43. Ibid., p. 120. 44. Ibid., pp. 98–114, 123–171. 45. By service formation: 1028 deti boiarskie; 144 pomestnye atamany; 51 service Ukrainians; 43 parish clergymen (no cathedral clergy were polled); 150 Bel’sk musketeers; 9 gatekeeprs and smiths; and 416 middle and lower service class troops on temporary assignment from Riazhsk and other districts. 46. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, p. 230. 47. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, p. 297. 48. Ibid., p. 241. 49. Ibid., pp. 164–166, 177–180.

296

Notes

50. Deti boiarskie Ivan Agaurov, Ivan Samgin, and Ivan Bel’ianin; ataman Agapko Tret’iakov; cossacks Mishka Isaev, Trofimko L’vov, Filatka Chernoi, Il’iushka Nekliudov, Volodka Efremov, and Kirilko Olkolelov; and musketeers Alferko Rudakov and Isaika Kozlov. 51. On 27 June Lobanov-Rostovskii admitted he had left out of the final version of his inquest record one of Boborykin’s responses to questioning on the Zlobin affair. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 350–352. 52. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, pp. 239–248, 353. 53. Ostanin was found responsible on the testimony of Zlobin’s widow, who finally reappeared and stated that Zlobin had gone to Ostanin’s office of his own volition, not under conveyance by Boborykin’s orderlies. Ibid., pp. 350, 365–366, 369–370. 54. Ibid., pp. 354–355, 361, 365–366. 55. Vladmirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 5, 44–48, 52–61, 66, 200–211, 235–236, 296–297; Belgorodskii stol stobets no. 227, p. 56. 56. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 570, p. 379; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, p. 206. 57. Vladmirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 136–138, 140, 143–156, 278, 329–332. 58. Ibid., pp. 119–123, 131–138, 140, 143–156, 278, 329–332, 373–377. 59. Ibid., pp. 131–132, 363–364. 60. Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 284, pp. 204–208. 61. Ibid., pp. 219–221. 62. Ibid., pp. 209–234. 63. Vladmirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 158–159; E. V. Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia v Rossii v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gos. universitet, 1974), p. 128. 64. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, p. 350. 65. Ibid., p. 17. 66. Ibid., pp. 17, 28–53, 155–158; Kholmogorov, “Materialy dlia istorii goroda Kozlova,” pp. 59–66; Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia, p. 129. 67. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 131, pp. 136–138, 140, 143–156, 278, 329–332; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, pp. 4–10. 68. Vladimirskii stol stolbets no. 131, p. 3. 69. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, pp. 58–61. 70. In all 84 men were arrested, of whom two were cleared. 71. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, pp. 58–61. 72. Chicherin, Oblastnyia uchrezhdeniia, p. 328; V. A. Aleksandrov and N. N. Pokrovskii, “Mir Organizations and Administrative Authority in Siberia in the Seventeenth Century,” Soviet Studies in History 3 (1987–1988), p. 51; OMAMIu 15, Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 276; Pokrovskii, “Sibirskie materialy,” p. 55; Pokrovskii, Tomsk 1648–1649 gg., pp. 24–25. 73. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 268, pp. 11, 263. 74. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith (New York: International, 1971), pp. 55, 323, 325–326. 75. In 1651 Kozlov and its forts at Bel’sk and Chelnavsk had 3290 men in service, with another 4950 service-eligible male kinsmen and dependents. By contrast Voronezh had only 1461 men in service and Belgorod 1240. Hellie, Enserfment, p. 193; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, pp. 146, 149, 154–155, 262–263; AMG 2, no. 496; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 859, p. 153; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 921, p. 517.

Notes 297 76. Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 859, p. 158; Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta, p. 155. 77. Vazhinskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo, p. 49; Prikaznyi stol stolbets no. 859, pp. 150–161; V. M. Vazhinskii, “Usilenie soldatskoi povinnosti v Rossii v XVII v. (Po materialam iuzhnykh uezdov),” Izvestiia Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 157 (1976), pp. 51, 65–66; V. P. Zagorovskii, Iziumskaia cherta (Voronezh: Voronezhskii universitet, 1980), pp. 38–39. 78. Davies, “Service, Landholding, and Dependent Labour,” pp. 134–135. 79. Ibid., p. 150. 80. Ibid., pp. 137–138; Belgorodskii stol stolbets no. 709, pp. 21–25. 81. V. M. Vazhinskii, “Vvedenie podushnogo oblozheniia na iuge Rossii v 90-kh godakh XVII v.,” Izvestiia Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta 127 (1973), pp. 90–92, 94–95, 97; Rabinovich, “Sud’by sluzhilykh liudei,” pp. 462–463, 513.

Archival Sources RGADA (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov, Moscow) F. 1209, Pomestnyi prikaz Opis’ 1, Knigi nos 198, 199, 230. Gorod Shatska kniga no. 12090, no. 3. F. 210, Razriadnyi prikaz Opis’ 6, Knigi prikaznogo stola nos 1, 2. Opis’ 6, Knigi denezhnogo stola nos 2, 314, 329, 354. Dela raznykh gorodov kniga no. 36. Boiarskie knigi, nos 1–12. Novgorodskii stol zapisnaia kniga no. 11. Novgorodskii stol stolbtsy nos 322, 330. Moskovskii stol stolbtsy nos 115, 205, 329, 392. Pomestnyi stol stolbets no. 35. Sevskii stol stolbtsy nos 16, 108, 186, 215, 223, 250, 339. Vladimirskii stol stolbtsy nos 74, 90, 131. Belgorodskii stol stolbtsy nos 76, 92, 104, 176, 201, 210, 227, 245, 284, 417, 593, 639, 640, 684, 709, 784, 848, 876, 921, 984, 1013, 1021, 1101, 1120, 1301, 1429, 1458, 1557, 1650, 1720. Prikaznyi stol stolbtsy nos 92, 103, 121, 123, 134, 140, 159, 162, 172, 194, 251, 265, 268, 318, 343, 365, 367, 379, 385, 432, 445, 502, 527, 554, 570, 643, 656, 690, 691, 694, 695, 698, 699, 835, 859, 866, 875, 1185, 1400, 1406, 1436, 1986, 2249, 2322, 2401, 2419.

298

Index Abatis Line, 35, 36, 43–4, 60, 66, 71–3, 92, 121, 144, 173 agriculture and climate of Kozlov region, 140–1, 146 cultivation systems, 144–6 fieldwork cycle, 146 plow technology, 32, 46 and soil of Kozlov region, 30 in southern Muscovy and Ukraine, 30, 32 surpluses and consumption norms, 146–7 and terrain of Kozlov region, 38, 50, 55, 66, 140–7 yields, 140, 146–7 see also animal husbandry; appurtenances; labor; markets; siabr collectivism; taxes Aleksandrov, V. A., 130, 270n1, n11, n17, 271n46, 272n56, 273n80, 274n100, 275n120, 277n8, n22, n23, 278n35, n37, 279n46, n58, 282n95, 286n51, 294n3, n9, n13, n15, n16, n21, 295n22, n23, n27, n28, n72 allodial estates (votchiny), 10–11, 46, 81, 96, 108, 114, 128, 165 animal husbandry, 132, 146–7 annual service remuneration (zhalovanie), 22, 26, 106, 114–15, 117–20 see also entitlement rates (oklady) Antonii, Archbishop, 163–5 appurtenances forest, 40, 51, 52, 53, 126, 136, 139, 144 haymeadow, 121, 125–7, 126, 136, 278n33 mills, 127, 150 river, 52–3, 136, 139, 279n66

state leasehold (obrok), 52, 84, 85, 111, 124, 126, 129, 130, 136, 189, 218 see also property disputes; service land ( pomest’e); siabr collectivism Assembly of the Realm, 6, 25, 36, 161, 244 assessors (okladchiki), 28, 62, 76, 87, 109, 110, 112–14, 118, 152, 160–2, 207, 239 associations (arteli), 122, 208 autocracy, 4–7, 11, 14, 21, 27–8, 33, 155, 213, 214, 222, 241 see also political culture, Muscovite; tsar Bagalei, D. I., 261n5, 267n88 Belgorod Army Group, 18, 26, 154, 176–7, 180, 183, 245 Belgorod Line, 1–3, 18, 27, 35, 56, 76, 100, 115, 120–1, 132, 148, 151, 174, 176, 180–2, 205, 233, 244–7 Kozlov and, 70–4 Belgorod Regional Command, 73 Bel’sk, 18, 33, 66, 72, 89–91, 105–6, 135–6, 139, 143, 162, 175, 185, 192, 226–8, 234, 235, 237, 268n116, 271n46, 295n45, 296n75 Bel’skii, Bogdan, 33 Birkin, Ivan Vasil’evich founder of Kozlov, 25–7 governor at Kozlov, 50 qualifications for Urliapovo mission, 45–6 recall and promotion, 71 at Urliapovo Gorodishche, 49–50 working order, 47–9 see also Speshnev, M. I.; Birkin, Samoilo Ivanovich Birkin, Samoilo Ivanovich, 46, 71, 99, 100, 133, 135, 152, 170, 186, 195, 200 299

300

Index

black soil (chernozem), 30–1, 32, 34, 39, 140, 145 Boborykin, Roman Fedorovich, 26, 59, 66–70, 85–6, 138, 139, 140, 156, 159, 162, 166, 169, 176, 192–3, 215, 218, 219, 223–4, 225–42, 244 Boyar Duma, 6, 20, 21, 60, 74 Brown, Peter B., 258n24, n26, 259n32, n37, n40, n42, 283n9, 284n22 Bykov, Putilo, 46, 49, 54, 62, 67, 70, 85, 86, 89, 90, 158, 159, 190, 269n122 captains, responsibilities of, 158–9 see also cossacks; musketeers; town governors (gorodovye voevody); subaltern belief and practice cavalry centurions, 160 central control, 24, 28, 87, 102, 104, 109, 243 Chancelleries (prikazy), 14–22 centralization of decision-making, 24 clerks of, 17–20 directors of, 20 internal organization into bureaux, 7 issuing decrees and processing reports, 20–2 jurisdictions of, 5, 9–10, 19 norms for office management and recordkeeping, 18–22, 25 powers of clerks, 19–20 role of boyar cliques, 16, 20, 21 see also central control; Military Chancellery (Razriadnyi prikaz) Chancellery of Foreign Mercenaries’ Provender, 49 Chancellery of Peasant Militia Levies, 15, 49 Chancellery of the Great Court, 15, 52–3 Chelnavsk, 18, 52, 55, 65, 69, 70, 72, 89, 90, 91, 105, 106, 135, 139, 140, 143, 144, 158, 159, 162, 218, 226, 234–40, 242, 271n46, 280n71, 296n75 Chelnovaia Creek, 1, 38, 54, 135 Cherkasskii, Ivan Borisovich, 16, 43, 78 Chermenskii, P. N., 262n17, n22, n24, 263n27, n28, n29, n31, n36, 266n69, n72, 267n84, n88, n96, n97, 269n133, 279n58, 284n16

Chicherin, Boris N., 257n9, 265n56, n57, 266n63, 274n104, 279n62, 284n13, 286n45, n48, 291n121, n126, 292n134, n138, n144, 294n9, n20, 295n22, 296n72 Chistiakova, E. V., 270n21, 292n128, 296n63, n66 Chistoi, Nazarii, 229, 237 Chudov Monastery, 33, 40–1, 62–3, 83, 105, 138, 164–5, 195, 197, 198, 218, 279n66 Church and canon law, 164, 167 cathedral clergy, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169 and ecclesiastical administration, 33, 164, 165, 166, 167 glebe land, 167 Kozlov Cathedral, 55, 164, 166, 227 monasteries and nunneries in Kozlov region, 33, 40–1, 59, 62, 69, 83, 96, 101, 137–8, 164–6, 195, 197, 198, 218 parish clergy, 28, 152, 164, 166–7, 169, 224 subsidies and tithes, 105–6, 169–70 see also allodial estates (votchiny); Chudov Monastery; Novospasskii Monastery civil justice, 197–203 collectivism, 112 Collins, L. J. D., 261–2n10 colonization by private initiative, 13, 31, 33 by state initiative, 15, 35–6 by transfers, 13, 48 by volunteers, 47–8, 57, 58, 75, 76–8 by yeoman smallholders (odnodvortsy), 3, 79–80, 120–1, 123 in Commonwealth Ukraine, 1–2, 30–1 and Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy, 2, 27, 32–4, 35–6, 71, 79, 246 social and geographic origins of Kozlov colonists, 91–3

Index see also annual service remuneration (zhalovanie); enlistment eligibility and vetting; entitlement rates (oklady); fugitive peasants and townsmen; initiation (verstanie); lower service class ( pribornye liudi); middle service class; service land ( pomest’e); settlement subsidy; siabr collectivism; surety bonding compulsory service, see political culture, Muscovite corruption, 7, 8–9, 21, 23–5, 27, 28, 117–21, 157, 208–13, 215, 220, 231 see also central control; petitioning; Sovereign’s business ( gosudarevo delo); subaltern belief and practice corvee agricultural, 31, 173 fortifications, 18, 47, 105, 140, 164, 169, 175, 179, 195–6, 219 cossacks corps cossacks at Kozlov, 90–1, 135 Don cossacks, 13, 59, 68, 73, 90, 147, 150, 179, 183, 188, 201, 238 patrol cossacks at Kozlov, 48, 53, 90–1, 106, 107, 135, 155, 162, 163, 168, 190, 238 Zaporozhian cossacks, 30–1, 59 Crime causes and forms, 182–90 policing against, 177, 185–95 see also criminal justice; guba criminal justice administration Crimean Tatars as long-term threat to Muscovy, 1, 34, 36, 38, 42 impact of Kozlov Wall and Belgorod Line on, 70–4 invasion trails, 1, 34–5, 38 invasions by, 69 and Ottoman Empire, 36, 38, 73 raiding of southern frontier, 1–2, 30, 32, 34–9, 42–3, 44–5, 47, 50–2, 53–4, 57 raids in Kozlov region, 66–70 and slave trade, 34–5 see also Nogais

301

criminal justice, 22, 183, 197–203 Crummey, Robert O., 257n5, n17, 260n51, 264n38 customs administration, 48, 168–75 Dankov, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 53, 58, 61, 62, 94, 174, 178, 199 Davies, Brian, 258n22, 260n46, n47, n50, 261n8, 262n12, 273n68, 276n131, 278n42, n49, 280n77, 287n68, 294n4, n8, 297n78 Decree on Service 1556, 78, 79, 128 Demidova, N. F., 259n29, n30, n32, n33, n41, n43, 283n9, 238–4n10, n12, 294n disorder and riot as state crimes, 223–4, 242–4 at Kozlov, 162, 190, 223, 232, 234, 237–9 district service order (sluzhilyi gorod), 159–63 see also assessors (okladchiki); subaltern belief and practice Dobroe Gorodishche (later Dobryi), 18, 38, 42, 72, 81, 101, 178, 193, 199, 240, 244, 245 Don River, 1, 33, 37, 38 Dubasov, I. I., 263n29, n30, 264n43, 267n96, 268n112, 269n132, n135, 271n32, 278n33, 280n83, 282n95 Elets, 33, 37, 44, 47, 49, 61, 71, 72, 82, 91, 94, 99, 101, 118, 155 enlistment eligibility and vetting, 80–3 entitlement rates (oklady), 106 and actual remuneration rates, 106–16 see also initiation (verstanie) Eropkin, A. E., 103, 104, 246 feeding (kormlenie), 175–6, 211–13, 229 field army arrays, stations, and strengths, 109, 142, 205 divisions (polki), 35 operations, 3, 15, 246

302

Index

Filaret, Patriarch, 27 Forbidden Towns decree, 14, 33, 133, 165 foreign formation troops, 43, 74, 91, 142, 148, 155, 169, 205, 219, 244–6 Foreign Mercenary Chancellery, 43 forest-steppe, 1, 31, 34, 38, 72, 73, 74 forests in Kozlov region, 32, 37–44, 50–5 free itinerants, 77, 107 Freeze, Gregory, 164, 285n30, n37, n41 French, R. A., 260–1n1, 261n4, n5, 281n88, 294n4 fugitive peasants and townsmen flight patterns to Kozlov, 93–8 remand procedures after Ulozhenie, 102–3, 198 remand procedures before Ulozhenie, 182–3, 195, 213 funding for fortifications work at Kozlov, 27, 47 for governor’s office expenditures, 24 for settlement of volunteers, 133–6 Galich Territorial Chancellery, 49, 237 Gavrenev, I. A., 16 Glaz’ev, V. N., 274n101, 284n16, 288n74, n75, 290n105 Godunov, Boris, 12 Golovin, P. P., 260n45 Goretovo, 41, 52, 57, 63, 69, 97, 195, 233, 234 governor’s office (s”ezzhaia izba) clerks of, 155–7, 172 constables and other personnel of, 153, 158, 172 description and location of, 153 internal organization of, 22 relations with garrison community, 2–3, 138 rules of office management and recordkeeping (deloproizvodstvo), 18, 22, 25 see also town governors (gorodovye voevody); district service order (sluzhilyi gorod)

Gramsci, Antonio, 296n74 guba criminal justice administration, 28, 152, 178, 198 gunners and sharpshooters, 48, 51, 57, 91, 106, 162, 227, 230, 235 Gunners’ Chancellery, 15, 237 Halperin, Charles, 257n2 Hanawalt, Barbara, 289n95, 290n106 Hellie, Richard, 4, 257n3, 263n37, 270n17, 273–4n82, 274n102, 278n27, n33, 283n108, 287n62, n64, 288n81, 289n88, 296n75 Herzfeld, Michael, 294n12 Iakovlev, A. I., 95, 258n23, 264n38, n40, 267n101, 268n103, n108, 275n122, 287n59, 292n144 Indova, E. I., 281n92, 295n23 initiation (verstanie), 106–16 inquest polling ( poval’nyi obysk), 97, 124, 184, 200, 201, 202, 203, 223, 224, 230 see also crime; criminal justice Ivan IV (tsar), 5, 12 Iziuma Line, 35, 44, 58, 71, 73 Kartavtsov, Savin, 156, 227, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 242 Keenan, Edward L., 257n13 Keep, J. L. H., 258n20, 261n9, 273n73, 275n121, 276n124, 276n4, 284n21, 285n27, 288n81, 289n90 Kireevskii, Grigorii Fedorovich, 44, 264n41 Kirikov, S. V., 262n24, 263n26, 265n62, 269n134, 281n86 Kivelson, Valerie, 6, 130, 204, 213, 257n2, n6, n7, 260n52, 278n32, 284n20, n21, 288n74, n75, 293n156, 294n11, n20, 295n24 Kleimola, Ann M., 260n46, 264n45, 271n39, 289n86, n90 Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 6, 257n7, 258n17 Koltovskii, S. I., 190, 219 Kopanev, A. I., 204, 287n68, 293n155, 294n14

Index Koshelev, V. I., 264n43, 266n75, n76, 267n93, n102, 268n103, n107, n115, 269n120 Kozliakov, V. N., 275n105, 284n18, 294n16, 295n23 Kozlov and bureaux of Military Chancellery, 17–20 call for volunteers to settle at, 47–8, 75–80, 81–3 climate and terrain of Voronezh–Tsna corridor, 38–9 construction of, 55–9 district boundaries, 39, 51, 62, 139–40 enlistment targets and total service population, 89–91, 133, 160, 162, 246–7 pre-1635 settlements, 40 and securing of Nogai Front, 36–43 settlements founded in 1635–1638, 133–6 surveying for fortifications and settlements, 49–55 see also Urliapovo Gorodishche Kozlov Wall, 1, 59–66, 72 Krasnikov, Petr, 46, 49, 54, 56, 58, 61, 67, 70, 90, 93, 142, 143, 158, 159, 190 Kucheneva, Okulinka, 164, 191, 192, 196 labor boarders and semi-dependent labor, 77, 93–4, 142–3, 173, 180, 183, 191, 227, 246, 251 family size and, 95, 141, 148, 218–19, 272n55 peasant and cottar, 11, 63, 78, 79, 99, 132–3, 143, 165, 183, 235–6, 245–6 service shareholder, 85, 129, 180 see also agriculture; free itinerants; siabr collectivism; lower service class ( pribornye liudi); middle service class; service land ( pomest’e); yeoman smallholders

303

Lappo-Danilevskii, A. S., 265n53, 266n68, 268n106, n107, 287n59, n60 Le Donne, John, 258n27, 259n38 Lebedian’, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 53, 58, 61, 62, 63, 71, 83, 84, 92, 94, 138, 143, 174, 178, 185, 193, 199 Lesnoi Voronezh River, 1, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 65, 67, 69, 135, 137, 150, 165, 228 Levshin, Timofei, 188, 192, 200, 201, 202, 203 Liubavskii, M. K., 269n143 Lobanov-Rostovskii, Ivan Ivanovich, 223, 224, 229, 230, 231, 232, 236, 240 lower service class (pribornye liudi), 107, 162 contractual recruitment of, 107 crofts or allotment shares (nadely) of, 10, 107, 130 see also cossacks; gunners and sharpshooters; musketeers; siabr collectivism MacFarlane, Alan, 290n114 MacMullen, Ramsay, 294n6 McNeill, William H., 261n6, 293n159 magnate, 14, 16, 22, 30, 35–6, 74, 80, 102, 133, 185 colonization, 14, 31, 33–4, 217 Maierberg, Avgustin, 293n154 markets grain prices and grain trade, 148–51 impact of state requisitions, 149–50 in Kozlov town, 147–8 in Kozlov villages, 149 land market, 121, 130, 148, 204 livestock prices and livestock sales, 34 organization and capitalization of, 148 trade in forest and river products, 151 trade routes, 59, 148 in Voronezh, 147–8 see also customs administration Martin, Janet, 281n87 Martsevich, 292n128

304

Index

Matyra River, 38, 42, 53, 54, 69, 228 Mauss, Marcel, 211 men of draft (tiaglye liudi), 10, 11, 169 Miakotin, V. A., 277n14, 278n31, n34 Michels, Georg, 164, 285n31 middle service class higher ranks of (dvoriane, vybornye and dvorovye deti boiarskie), 45, 61, 78–80, 87–92, 94, 100, 106, 136, 174, 227, 229–31, 234–5, 237–40 rank-and-file (deti boiarskie), 29, 47, 51, 68, 78, 82, 87–9, 96, 100, 107–16, 118, 132–4, 141–3, 157, 160, 162, 163, 184, 185, 190, 192, 195, 200, 201, 217–19, 247 service in field army (polkovaia sluzhba), 73, 115, 245–7 service in town garrisons (gorodovaia sluzhba), 115, 246–7 southern, distinguished from central Muscovite, 78, 90–2, 94, 97, 105, 226, 229–30, 237 see also Decree on Service 1556; initiation (verstanie); novitiates (noviki); service land (pomest’e); siabr collectivism; yeoman smallholders Mikhailov, 37, 42, 43, 47, 58, 61 Miklashevskii, I. N., 134, 264n41, 264–5n46, 265n47, 266n68, n69, n75, 267n92, 269n135, 270n3, 277n16, n17, 278n37, 279n46, n48, n55, 280n75, 281n93, 282n95, n97, 285n34, 286n44 Military Chancellery (Razriadnyi prikaz) and appointments of commanders and town governors, 15–16 as supreme war council, 15 and bureaux responsible for administration of Kozlov, 19, 46 clerks of, 87, 108, 227 directors of, 18, 43 exercising power of verdict in remand cases, 96, 101–3, 142, 181 and jurisdiction over southern frontier yeoman smallholders, 121 and planning of Kozlov Wall, 56–9

and planning of Urliapovo Gorodishche project, 43–9 and Service Lands Chancellery, 15–16, 19, 98, 121, 123 setting standards of eligibility for enlistment at Kozlov, 80–3 and working order to Birkin and Speshnev, 50–1 see also Belgorod Line; central control; Chancelleries ( prikazy); field army Miliukov, P., 258n19, n25, 287n59, n64 Mizis, Iu. A., 262n15, 263n27, n28, n36, 265n47, 267n84, n95, 268n117, n118, 269n127, n132, 274n89, n90, 280n68, 282n100, 283n4, 285n31 Moscow Riots of 1648, 273n82 Mousnier, Roland, 258n15 musketeers Bel’sk and Chelnavsk, 89–90, 91, 105, 106, 140, 192, 234, 242 Kozlov, 46–8, 57, 58, 77, 87, 91, 93, 106, 117, 162–3, 172, 186, 223, 227, 230, 235 Moscow, 63, 105, 213, 226, 240, 245 see also captains; lower service class (pribornye liudi) Musketeers’ Chancellery, 15, 43 muster review, 108, 110 muster rolls, 90, 109, 118, 123, 153, 183 Myshlaevskii, 284n16 New Decree Statutes of 1669, 183, 184 Nikitin, N. I., 275n123, 276n7, 284n16, 285n25 Nogai Front colonization and defense of, before 1635, 37, 39–40, 79–80, 151 impact of Kozlov’s founding on, 36–7, 43 impact of Smolensk War on, 36 Nogai Road, 1, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74 Nogais, 1, 36, 38, 42, 68, 69, 70, 72, 151 Novgorod Territorial Chancellery, 165 novitiates (noviki), 78, 108

Index Novombergskii, N., 279n65, n66, 280n82, n83, 283n107, 294n19 Novosel’skii, A. A., 261n9, 262n15, n16, n21, n33, n37, 269n123, n124, n128, n132, n139, 270n2, n14, n18, n25, 272n52, n55, n62, n66, 273n67, n71, n72, n74, n76, n77, n79, 274n83, n84, n85, n86, n88, 275n119, 284n20, n23, 288n82 Novospasskii Monastery, 33, 40, 41, 62, 63, 83, 96, 105, 164, 165 odnodvortsy, see yeoman smallholders Ogloblin, N. N., 259n42, 260n44, 276n5, 283n1, n9, n10, 285n29 okol’nichie, 16 Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery, 194, 201 Ostanin, Maksim, 159, 227, 228, 232, 234, 235, 238, 239, 241, 242 Paducheva, P., 263n27 Pallott, Judith, 270n9 patrols and ranger parties, 34, 41–2, 53–4, 67, 71, 89, 90–1, 111, 229 Pereiaslavl’-Riazan’, 37, 43, 49, 62, 69 Perry, Captain John, 293n154 petitioning against corrupt officials and strong men, 211 against Governor Roman Boborykin, 225–42 for needs, 87, 216 rules and rhetoric of, 213, 216–25, 241, 243 see also corruption; Sovereign’s business ( gosudarevo delo); strong men (sil’nye liudi); subaltern belief and practice Petitions Chancellery, 21 Petrov, Larion, 159, 234, 235, 238, 239, 240, 242 Piskarev, P. I., 263n32, 267n84, 279n46, n66, 282n98, n99, n102, n103, 283n109, 284n11, 285n33, 287n64, 288n73, n75, n77, n78, 289n91, 290n103, 291n115, n123, n126, 292n144 Platonov, S. F., 260n51, 264n45, 271n30

305

Plavsic, Borivoj, 18, 258n25, 259n32, n34, n42 Poe, Marshall T., 4, 257n2, n3, n4, 295n24 Pogozhev, Fedor, 26, 188, 192, 226, 229 Pokrovskii, N. N., 294n3, n9, n13, n15, n16, n21, 295n22, n23, n27, n28, 296n72 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 30, 79 see also Ukraine political culture, Muscovite and bureaucratization, 27–9 and compulsory state service, 10–14 and development of town governor administration, 22–6 and effect on rate of frontier colonization, 31–6 models of, 3–8 primitive centralization, 9–10, 27–8, 217 regional variations in, 204–6 see also autocracy; petitioning; subaltern belief and practice Pol’noi Voronezh River, 1, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 50, 51, 52, 54, 64, 65, 67, 68, 136, 139, 165, 218, 226, 233–4 Pozharskii, Dmitrii Mikhailovich, 33, 40, 41, 45, 50, 52, 62, 63, 139, 165, 195, 197, 198 precedence (mestnichestvo), 11, 26, 108, 258n17 Privy Chancellery, 21 Pronsk, 37, 43, 47, 49, 58, 61, 67, 68, 69, 94 property disputes, 14, 53, 136–40 Prutskii, Osip, 46–7, 56, 154 Quinquagenaries and decurions, 162 Raeff, Marc, 8, 257n12, n14, 289n83, n88 Riazan’, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 42–6, 49, 68, 71, 72, 74, 78, 83, 94–9, 114, 151 Riazhsk, 37–42, 44–7, 49, 53, 58, 61–3, 67–9, 71, 78, 83, 91–4, 113, 122, 161, 174, 237 Robbery Chancellery, 157, 178, 185, 194, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 229

306

Index

Rodenburg, Jan Cornelius von, 60–1 Romanov, Ivan Nikitich, 33, 37 Rozhdestvenskii, S. V., 272n60, 274n103, n104, 275n114, n116, n121, 276n124, 277n10, n12, n13, 278n26, n28, 279n62 Sapozhok, 37, 44, 61, 69, 84, 185 Scott, James C., 243 service land ( pomest’e), 8, 15, 18, 22, 25, 33, 46, 48, 50, 51, 78, 80, 87, 89, 95, 96, 99, 104, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 120–5, 128–37, 139–50, 157, 179, 226, 246 discontiguous lands, 127, 134 inheritance and alienation of, 18, 111–12, 121, 130, 134 reserve fund, 120, 125, 127–9, 132, 134 surveying and allotment of siabr shares, 136–40 surveying and allotment of traditional individual pomest’ia, 121–6 widow’s portion, 128 see also agriculture; appurtenances; property disputes, siabr collectivism service land atamans, 57, 65, 87–8, 90, 91–2, 94, 96, 107, 110, 133, 135–6, 143, 160, 168, 226, 231, 246 Service Lands Chancellery, 15, 16, 19, 43, 98, 121, 123, 125, 174 servicemen (sluzhilye liudi), 10 state service system, 9–12 settlement subsidy, 105–6 settlements hamlets (derevni), 133 house-lots, 48, 57, 126, 136 lower service class colonies (slobody), 51, 57, 133, 135, 143, 167 surveying for, 49–55 villages (sela), 133, 135 Shakhmatov, M. V., 271n39, 273n73, 284n13, 288n81, 291n121, n122

Shatsk, 37–42, 44, 47, 53, 58–9, 62, 68, 69, 71, 94, 102, 161, 226 Shaw, Denis J. B., 261n5, n6, 270n9, n10, 277n19, 278n37, 282n95, n97, 283n111 Shetilov, Iakov, 234, 239 Shvetsova, E. A., 263n28, 281n93, 282n94, n95 siabr collectivism siabr commune, 128–32, 136, 168, 189, 207, 239 siabr defined, 121–2 siabr land tenure, 131, 132 see also entitlement rates (oklady); initiation (verstanie); labor; lower service class (pribornye liudi); middle service class; property disputes; service land (pomest’e); yeoman smallholders Skobelkin, O. V., 287n54, n64, 288n78, 289–90n82 Skrynnikov, R. G., 262n11, 270n9, n10 Smolensk War, 36, 42, 43, 45, 60, 77, 155, 173 Sokol’e (later Sokol’sk), 18, 72, 126, 174, 178, 191, 199, 219, 233, 240, 242, 244, 245 Sovereign’s business ( gosudarevo delo), 215, 219, 220, 226, 229, 235, 241 Sovereign’s gain ( gosudareva pribyl’), 21, 120 Sovereign’s vouchsafe ( gosudarevo zhalovannoe slovo), 28, 215–16, 219, 221, 223, 225, 241, 243 Speshnev, M. I., 27 early career of, 44–5 role in Urliapovo Gorodishche project, 46–7 surveying and other activities at Kozlov, 49–50 Stashevskii, E. D., 258n21, 262n15, n17, n20, 264n46, 267n101, 273n82, 275n105, n121, 276n124, n3, 278n27, n2 steppe fortifications, 1, 44, 52, 59–61, 64, 71, 75, 169, 203 Stevens, Carol B., 146, 269n142, 281n93, 287n58, n61, n62, n63, 289n90, n99

Index strong men (sil’nye liudi), 27, 76, 156, 157, 162, 172, 178, 190–1, 210, 219, 239 subaltern belief and practice, 2, 3, 6, 160–3, 167–9, 189–90, 192, 202, 205, 207–8, 242–4 see also disorder and riot; petitioning; siakr collectivism Sudebnik law codes, 20 Sukhotin, Fedor, 56 surety bonding, 88, 177, 189 Tale of Shemiaka’s Judgment, 210 Tambov, 15, 18, 38–9, 53, 59, 65–6, 68–72, 82, 83, 85–6, 98–100, 103, 105, 108, 138–41, 148, 150–1, 184, 199, 218, 226 taxes direct, 149–50, 173–7 indirect, 170–2 subjection of yeoman smallholders to, 247–8 Time of Troubles, 9, 12, 24, 33, 77, 82, 174, 199, 204 political reconstruction after, 24–6 Tiuneev, Larion, 192, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 Tolmachev, Iurii, 225, 233, 235, 238, 239, 240, 242, 295n29 town governors ( gorodovye voevody) appointments of, 22 avocational nature of town governor service, 25, 198 functions of, 23 limitations on initiative of, 24 in political reconstruction after the Time of Troubles, 24–5 promotions and remuneration of, 22–3 see also central control; corruption; feeding (kormlenie); governor’s office (s”ezzhaia izba); working orders trampled lands, the, 37 travel couriers and post, 42, 53, 67, 89, 158 to Don, 148, 179 to Moscow, 59, 87, 103–4, 109, 155, 159, 179, 212, 220–1 to Voronezh, 49, 58, 105

307

Trubetskoi, Aleksei Nikitich, 40, 41, 62, 63 tsar and central decision-making, 4, 5, 20, 21 see also autocracy; Sovereign’s business (gosudarevo delo); Sovereign’s gain; Sovereign’s vouchsafe Tsna River, 38, 39 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 188, 293n157 Ukraine, 2, 14, 30–2, 34–6, 73, 74, 142, 162, 169, 176, 205, 244–6 see also Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Ulozhenie (1649), 21, 102–3, 153, 182, 186, 192, 194, 195, 198, 213, 215, 218, 220, 223 Urliapovo Gorodishche, 37, 39, 43–9, 50 see also Kozlov Ustiug Territorial Chancellery, 62 Vazhinskii, V. M., 130, 131, 134, 146, 147, 176, 260n50, 262n23, 263n26, 266n64, 268n106, 270n8, 274n98, n100, 275n109, n113, n123, 276n129, n3, 277n9, n10, n12, n13, n14, n17, n20, n22, n23, n24, 278n25, n28, n29, n30, n31, n33, n37, n38, 279n46, n47, n48, n55, n57, n58, n62, 279n46, n47, n48, n55, n57, n58, n62, 280n73, n77, n79, n82, n83, 281n86, n87, n88, n89, n92, n93, 282n95, n96, n97, n98, n103, n106, n107, n108, n109, n110, n111, 284n14, n16, n20, 285n27, n28, 287n58, n59, n60, n62, n64, n67, n68, n71, 289n89, 290n103, n111, 297n77, n81 Vel’iaminovs, 45, 62, 63, 190 Verkhotsensk canton, 38, 40, 42, 52, 59, 69, 70, 138, 140, 146 Veselovskii, S. B., 258n25, 259n36, n37, n39, n42

308

Index

Vodarskii, Ia. E., 261n9, 266n64, 269n140, 276n129, 280n75 volunteers, see colonization Voronezh, 32, 37–40, 45, 58, 61–2, 63, 67–70, 71–2, 83, 91–2, 94, 99, 139, 145, 147–50, 158, 170, 179, 182, 187, 189, 194–5, 197, 200, 233–4, 237, 242 Voronezh River, 1, 33, 38–9, 40–1, 44, 50, 51–4, 56, 64, 135, 137, 168–9, 218, 226, 228, 233 Webb, Walter Prescott, 293n157 Weber, David J., 9, 293n159 Weber, Max, 259n37 working orders, 19, 22, 23, 24, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 76, 80, 89, 112, 117, 152, 159, 172, 177, 181, 185, 197, 199, 221, 232

yeoman smallholders, 3, 40, 73, 79–80, 115, 120, 121, 123, 128, 134, 143, 174, 205, 247 Zagorovskii, V. P., 261n5, 262n15, n17, 263n30, 264n45, 265n60, n62, 266n68, n69, n75, 267n84, n88, 268n103, n114, 269n135, n137, n141, 270n18, 272n51, 273n80, 276n129, 279n43, n44, n51, n53, n55, 280n68, 282n96, 288n81, 294n17, n19, 296n75, 297n76, n77 Zaporozhian Cossack Host, 30, 31 zemskii administration, 28 Zlobin, Ustin, 226–8, 231–2

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Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History)

Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State

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