1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 63

February 1635

Fedor read the newsletter again, his jaws tight.

In an unprecedented move, today Czar Mikhail decreed that “Forbidden Years” are now limited, with some qualifications. Anyone who wants to buy out and leave his current lord may do so, provided he is willing to move to Siberia and look for gold or other metals and resources that are now known to exist.

Treasure Maps For Sale Here! Up-time sources used! Mine for GOLD, SILVER, COPPER! Find OIL!

Angrily, he shoved the paper back at Stepen. “And what are we going to use for labor now, Stepen? The czar has betrayed us!”

“Shhh!” Stepen hissed. “You want to get us killed!”

“I’m as loyal as any man,” Fedor insisted, though more quietly. “But that doesn’t get the crops in. Without our serfs my family will starve… and so will yours.”

Stepen thought that was overstating the case, but it was true that members of the service nobility like himself and Fedor, needed their serfs. There was never enough labor. “They claim that the new machines will take care of the labor problem,” Stepen said, still trying to calm his friend.

“They claim! If we could get them. You know how long the waiting list is and you know the boyars will all have them before we even see one. Which is probably a good thing, because who knows if they will work?”

Stepen considered bringing up the increase in pay, but he was very much afraid that Fedor would start yelling again. Fedor had already made his opinions on the new paper money quite clear, many times. And honestly, Stepen tended to agree with him. How could a piece of paper with printing on it have value? It just didn’t make sense. Whenever he could, Stepen spent the paper as quickly as he could and saved the silver. He wasn’t the only one. By this time a silver ruble, which nominally had the same value as a paper ruble, was buying three times as much. It didn’t occur to Stepen that the new paper rubles were worth three-quarters as much as the silver rubles had been before the paper rubles were introduced. Silver rubles were disappearing into holes and hidden compartments all over Russia, in a classic example of Gresham’s Law.

Stepen and Fedor had recently been transferred to Moscow to appointments within the Bureau of Roads, because the Bureau of Roads was expanding with the introduction of the Dacha scrapers. They had both gotten raises, but those raises hadn’t been in the form of more lands as had been usual. The raise had been more of the new paper money.

They didn’t see Pavel Borisovich sitting in the next cubical with a friend.

“Papa, have you heard about the new proclamation?” Pavel asked Boris. “I was having lunch with Petr Ivanovich over at the bureau of roads and a couple of the new hires were talking. They seemed pretty upset.”

“Yes. I imagine they were.”

“How bad is it?” Pavel asked.

“It probably won’t be too bad for us. We have new plows, a seeder, a reaper and a thresher. But it will ruin a lot of the lower nobility. How many are ruined depends on how many of the serfs can buy out and how many decide now is a good time to run.” Serfs running away had been a major problem for years. They were often aided and abetted by the boyars and the church, who always needed more labor.

Russia had had a well-developed bureaucracy for many years. What Russia hadn’t had when it was developing that bureaucracy, though, was the money to pay the bureaucrats. So whether it was a clerk in Nizhny Novgorodi, a manager in the bureau of roads, the Konyushenny Prikaz, or a cavalry trooper, most of the pay for his service was in the form of land granted on a semi-permanent basis by the czar.

Even at this late date the knots of law and custom that turned a free man into a serf weren’t quite absolute. If you could escape and stay gone for five years, you were free. And the government wouldn’t hunt you; that was up to the person who held the land you were tied to. Also, in theory, there were times when you could buy your way out of your chains. In theory. The last thirty or so years had been “Forbidden Years,” during which even if you could come up with the cash, you weren’t allowed to change your status.

Boris continued. “Politically, it’s hard to say. The czar may gain enough from the high families and with the general population to offset what he’s going to lose with the dvoryane and deti boyars. ” Czar Mikhail had been, at least on the surface, quite clever in how he had implemented the new “Limited Year,” but Boris wasn’t at all sure he had been clever enough.

“It’s a big step forward,” Bernie Zeppi said. “A really big step.”

“It’s a disaster,” said Filip Pavlovich, Bernie’s sometime tutor. “The czar’s gone mad. Labor, Bernie. There’s not enough. There’s never been enough. Look, Bernie. I know that serfdom is wrong. You’ve convinced me. You and Anya. But the service nobility will not stand for this.”

“Freedom, Filip,” Bernie said back. “Why don’t people get that people will work harder and produce more if they’re doing it for themselves?”

“Because it isn’t true,” Filip told him bluntly. “Oh. People probably will work harder if they’re paid. But not enough harder to make up for the cost of paying them. Besides, what is the service nobility going to pay them with?”

Natasha felt like burying her head in her hands. Or possibly screaming at the top of her lungs. Instead, she took a deep breath, and said, “Gentlemen, this isn’t a productive conversation. Can we get back on topic, please?”

“It will make Czar Mikhail even more popular than the win at Rzhev,” Anya pointed out.

The presence at the meeting of Bernie’s former leman-or, rather, Anya’s ease at speaking in the meeting-was an indication of just how much Bernie’s presence had affected the Dacha. Bernie was blind to class and it was rubbing off. It had been rubbing off now for three years-on Natasha herself most of all, she sometimes thought.

Anya had started off as a cook’s assistant and with help from Bernie had become the Dacha’s household accountant. In the process she had become involved in the development of the EMCM, Electro-Mechanical Calculating Machine.

“Popular with whom?” Filip asked. “Serfs don’t have weapons, unless you count an ax as a weapon. The service nobility does. And so does the Streltzi. And it’s they who will be most affected. When your Czar Lincoln talked about limiting slavery, not abolishing it, it caused a revolution and that was in a country where only a third of it had slavery in the first place. In Russia, serfs are everywhere. I’m not saying serfdom is a good thing, Anya. But it’s too soon to do this.”

“More money for Vladimir,” Bernie said. “Reapers and threshers are going like hotcakes. What’s weird to me is that you-” He pointed at Natasha. “-aren’t freaking out about losing serfs. You’ve got all these lands to take care of.”

“I,” Natasha said, “can afford to hire help. And people want to work for us, because we can afford to take a smaller cut, because we have more people. Most of the truly wealthy are the same way, you know. As is the church. We can make a deal, attract more of the labor force. It’s the service nobility, people like Boris and Filip, who need the serfs tied to the land. That’s what concerns Patriarch Filaret. Ill as he is, he counseled the czar against this move. And Czarina Evdokia is very, very worried. But the boyars and Duma men are all for it. It will make it much easier for us to poach serfs from the service nobility. There’s a lot of nervousness in Moscow right now.”

“And it won’t take much to start a firestorm,” Filip said. “It’s not like we haven’t had them before. Or wouldn’t have them in the future. Remember Peter the Great. For that matter, remember 1917. That’s why I said it’s too soon, Bernie. There aren’t enough plows and reapers yet to make much of a difference in overall production. And members of the service nobility like me mostly don’t have them.”

Anya sighed. “I understand your point, Filip. But already serfs are being put to work in factories. Rented out, or close enough to make no difference, to make their lord extra money. It will never be the right time! Slavery and serfdom don’t just fade away. No oppression does. It takes people standing up and saying ‘enough, no more!’ And making it stick.”

Natasha knew that was true. Evdokia had discussed it with Mikhail. Bernie was wrong. It was probably true enough that people worked harder when they were working for themselves. And the evidence was pretty clear that societies without serfs were, over all, more productive than those with serfs. But that extra productivity didn’t go into the pockets of the lord. It went to buy the former serf a new suit of clothes or an extra room of the house, maybe some toys for their kids. Which worked just fine for society as a whole, but very badly so far as the lord was concerned, since he now had to pay for labor that he used to get for nothing or at least a lot less.

Meanwhile, Bernie was grinning. Natasha raised an eyebrow in question.

“It’s just that it’s the poor middle-class getting squeezed between the rich liberals and the poor, just like back in the twentieth century.”

Anya shook her head. “Yes, but your middle-class didn’t keep slaves, Bernie.”