Download PDF | Brian L. Davies - State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia_ The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1649 (2004).
319 Pages
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 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.”
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 (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 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 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 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.
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.
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.4
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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).
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