1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 62

September 1634

“So how was the wedding, Colonel?” Boyar Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev asked.

“I found it quite interesting, sir,” said Colonel Leontii Shuvalov. “Though I will admit I was a bit disappointed to find that the Poles had held a war while I was gone and I wasn’t invited.”

“Rzhev made things much more difficult,” Sheremetev said. “Filaret is making noise about invading Poland again. And without Shein, we probably couldn’t hold him back. Shein figures we are getting stronger, faster, so time is on our side for now. But he will switch back as soon as he figures we’re ready.” Sheremetev shook his head in disgust. “None of them can see that Poland is not the real enemy. The real enemy is Gustav Adolf and his new USE. So tell me about the USE, Leontii.”

Leontii made his report. That the USE was rich and powerful and becoming more so every day was beyond question. He had seen several different kinds of airplanes. The largest of which was dwarfed by Testbed, but the slowest of which made the balloon seem a snail by comparison. But the real danger was the factories, which turned out hundreds of items in the time it would take a craftsman to make just one.

Yet Russia had factories, too. “While we are behind, we aren’t that far behind. I took a steamer from Rybinsk, one of the ones that they were using to resupply Rzhev. I was amazed by the factories along the Volga.”

Sheremetev grunted. “As new items come out of the Dacha, Princess Natalia doles them out to her friends at court. And they start hiring workmen and setting up ‘factories,’ as they call them. They are merely workshops.”

Leontii looked at his patron questioningly and Sheremetev grunted again. “Granted, they have a lot of serfs working in them except during planting and harvest. And I’ll even grant that the czar’s paper money has increased trade. But I don’t trust it. All these changes. It’s too much, too fast.”

“As you say, my lord,” Leontii said. “But it’s nothing compared to what they are doing in Germany.” Leontii went on to acknowledge the corrupting influence of the up-timers, but pointed out that Vladimir and the Dacha were proving incredibly valuable and were probably essential. “Sooner or later-not even Poles are that dumb-King Wladyslaw or some of the magnates will recruit up-timers of their own. By the way, how are they taking the events at Rzhev?”

“The Sejm seems very upset at the outcome. More upset than cautioned, unfortunately. It must be our fault and we must have somehow cheated, they think.” Sheremetev shrugged, acknowledging that they might have a point. “Made a deal with the devil, something, anything, other than that they attacked us and we outfought them. They seem especially worried that we had such things as breech-loading cannon and that the walking forts proved so effective.

“It hasn’t made things any easier on the diplomatic front. About the only thing keeping them from a full-scale invasion is Gustav Adolf’s presence on their western border. The Truce of Altmark expires next year, and the way that Sweden and the USE have been going, Poland simply can’t afford to be involved in a war with us when Gustav Adolf gets around to them. What concerns me is I don’t see any particular reason for the Swede to stop at the Russian border.”

Through the fall and winter of 1634, the Boyar Duma debated. And talks with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went nowhere. In the winter of 1634, Patriarch Filaret became ill and much of the heart went out of the faction that advocated an attack on Poland. Meanwhile more factories came on line. most of them using forced peasant labor. This upset the peasants because winter was their traditional light time. It also upset the great families because they couldn’t hire the peasants without their landlords’ permission.

Since the Ring of Fire, the anti-serfdom movement in Russia had slowly grown from two directions, top down and bottom up, with the service nobility caught in the middle. The top down part was a mix of morality and self-interest. It was fairly small, because the top of the Russian pyramid was small. There were fourteen to twenty great families, depending on how you counted, and a similar number of really large monasteries. A few hundred people in the great families and no more than a few thousand in the monasteries. Still, they were the most powerful people in Russia.

On the other hand, there were over thirty thousand members of the service, or bureaucratic, nobility-people whose livelihood depended on serf labor. And they were the people holding down the vital mid-level military and civilian posts. They were the tax collectors, the construction supervisors and the managers. In the Russian army, they were the captains and the colonels, but rarely the generals. It was the service nobility, bureaucrats and soldiers alike, that had kept Russia from collapsing into chaos during the Time of Troubles. They had stayed on the job and mostly out of politics, serving whichever czar was in power, and kept the wheels from coming completely off. They were generally nonpolitical, but threatening to take away their serfs would change that in a hurry. As had been shown in 1605, the last year when peasants leaving the land hadn’t been forbidden.

Then there were the serfs themselves, by far the largest proportion of the Russian population. While many, perhaps most, resented their status as serfs, few of them objected to the institution as such. It wasn’t that they found the social order objectionable-just their place in it. They ran to the wild east, they ran south to the Cossack lands, they even ran west into Poland, hoping for a better deal. What they didn’t do was stand where they were and say “This is wrong!”

It was a subtle but important distinction. There was no Harriet Tubman sneaking back into the Moscow province to smuggle other serfs out to the Cossack territories where they could be free. No Russian Frederick Douglass standing proudly and articulately to decry not just his serfdom, but all serfdom. At least, they hadn’t done so before the Ring of Fire.

The Ring of Fire was changing all that, though it took a while for the change to take root. But… but not that long a while. Rumors fly on the wings of eagles, they say. They fly even faster on wings made of mimeographed paper, and the more radically inclined of the boyar class could afford lots of paper. Russia might not have had its own Tom Paine, at least at first. But the writings of the original made their way into Russia and into Russian. And they resonated. Resonated like jungle drums, like liberty bells. Soon enough, Committees of Correspondence sprang up in a number of the larger cities and towns. Small ones, true, but they were able to begin articulating the rebellious thoughts and anger of Russian serfs.

Russia was still not a country anyone would describe as a powder keg. The population was mostly illiterate and mostly rural-and diffuse, at that. And while some elements of the upper classes were becoming radicalized, no one wanted a return to the Time of Troubles. No one wanted Polish troops flooding into Moscow again.

Then there was Rzhev. In military terms, Rzhev wasn’t very significant at all. But in emotional terms it was. In Rzhev Russia defeated the Poles. And the army that did it had a good number of serfs in it, with a lot of them involved in the fighting. In Rzhev, the Russians showed themselves to be technologically superior to the Poles. Rzhev brought a new feeling of confidence to Russia, and a great deal of political capital to the czar.

Patriarch Filaret wanted to spend that capital invading Poland and retaking Smolensk. But Czar Mikhail Fedorovich was beginning to consider other ideas. He’d now had three years to read about the history of what would become the Russia of the Romanov dynasty in another universe. Three fairly easy years, too. Despite his formal prestige, no one really demanded much of the czar, not even his father, so he had plenty of time to think about what he’d learned.

By the end of the year 1634, he’d come to accept the condemnation spoken so many times and so harshly in the speeches of Mike Stearns, the USE’s prime minister. Serfdom had to go. Or, sooner or later, just as it had in another world, it would bring down the Romanov dynasty. Czar Mikhail had no desire to see himself-or even one of his descendants a century or two from now-being shot along with his whole family in a cellar somewhere.

In that other universe, one of his descendants-Czar Alexander II-had attempted to reform serfdom. Had even succeeded, to a degree. Not enough and certainly not soon enough-but that was no excuse for inaction on Mikhail’s part. Alexander’s attempt had happened in 1861, almost a quarter of a millennium in the future.

Two centuries and twenty-seven years was a long time. Still, it was best to get started. Not even Mikhail Romanov was that much of a procrastinator.