1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 65

“We need more reapers,” Anya said.

“Well, we don’t have them,” Natasha told her. “And we aren’t going to have them before the harvest is in.”

“What about renting yours out after you have your crops in? With the serfs that have headed for the gold fields, there are a lot of people, even some of the boyars, who still won’t have their crops in by that time. We could probably rent them for near the cost of buying one and still not have enough to supply the demand.”

It was a good plan. It probably would have worked except…

It was mid-afternoon when Peter Boglonovich plotted his measurements. The thermometer was dropping and the barometer was rising; the winds were from the northwest and strong. The front had passed through and was on its way south. And Peter couldn’t tell anyone. Peter had an excellent clock and a small wind-powered generator to power his equipment and provide some creature comforts. What he didn’t have was a radio. He had maps-good ones-and he knew how to use them, having been trained at the Dacha. He received weather data to plot on those maps from other stations once a week and sent his data off with the same messenger. The messenger was due in two days and Peter figured that the cold front would be halfway to Moscow by then.

“What’s the use of a weather station if it doesn’t have a radio?” Peter muttered. He knew the answer. He was up here to provide a plot, a record of weather conditions, that could be used to make the predictions more accurate when they got the radios installed and could do real-time prediction. Establishing a baseline was all well and good, but if Peter’s calculations were right, real-time weather prediction was going to come too late. This storm was going to sweep over Russia, depositing sleet on fields and those crops that hadn’t been harvested were going to get pounded.

Ivan looked out at his fields and saw death. Death for crops under a sheet of ice and sleet. Death for his family this winter as they ran out of food. Ivan lived on a farm forty miles northeast of Moscow and the storm still raged, beating down the stalks and turning the ripe grain to mush. He wasn’t the only one by any means. The storm ripped through Russia’s heart, ruining a full quarter of the expected grain crop for the year-and it could have been much worse.

On a farm thirty miles to the east of Ivan’s, Misha went to the family altar, knelt down in front of the icons and thanked God and his ancestors that he had spent the money to use the reaper, in spite of his wife’s complaint of his spendthrift ways. His crop was in the barn. All of the village crops were in the barn, safe from the storm.

For Misha the storm was good news. Amazingly good news. It meant that the price he could get for his crop would be considerably higher. Even after the taxes and tithes were paid, which would take more than half his crop, he would have grain to sell for the new paper rubles. Perhaps enough to pay off his debt, which would allow him to leave. At least if he promised to go to the gold fields.

Other farms had been missed by the storm or hit only by the edges. Then there were the potato fields. It wasn’t just the potatoes from the Ring of Fire. The patriarch and czar had both read the histories and put in a large order for potatoes with English merchants. It had taken a while, but the merchants had delivered. A ship load of potatoes had arrived in the spring of 1635.

The peasants who had been assigned to grow them had not been pleased. But with the government promising to buy the potatoes at a fixed price per pound, and threats about what would happen if they failed to follow instructions, they had grown them. The peasants were going to be displeased again. Fixed prices worked both ways.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Not with the number of peasants who had managed to buy out or simply run off. That move had delayed the harvest in a number of places and that delay had been crucial. It had destroyed millions of rubles worth of crops. The bureaucratic service nobility placed the blame for the disaster at the feet of the czar. And though they were unlikely to actually starve because of it, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them had been ruined.

“There is grain aplenty in Poland. The storm missed them and they got their harvest in with little damage,” Patriarch Filaret said. The Little Duma, Privy Council, was meeting to discuss the response to the storm and its effect on the price of grain.

“We don’t have the money to buy Polish grain,” Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev countered.

“After what they did to us during the Time of Troubles, they owe us a little grain and Rzhev showed we have the might to take it.”

Mikhail wished he could be somewhere else. The meeting had been going on for hours, mostly in a deadlock between his father and his cousin. Sheremetev wanted to stop the contributions to Gustav Adolf and try for a closer alliance with Poland. The patriarch wanted to keep relations with Sweden good and coordinate with them in attacking Poland from two fronts at once. Mikhail was leaning toward his father’s side, mostly, because he agreed with Sheremetev that Gustav Adolf was, in the long run, the greater danger. But to Mikhail that meant that Gustav Adolf was the one who needed to be wooed, not the one to attack.

Let the Swedish king rule western Europe. He’d earned it. Russia would expand to the east, into territory that they already tacitly owned. A transcontinental railroad from Moscow to the Pacific would give Russia half a continent of growing room. In spite of his respect for the charismatic Emperor Gustav Adolf, Mikhail thought he would prefer to be remembered as a builder rather than a conqueror.

“Given the effects of the storm, we will have to, at least for now, curtail the shipments of grain to the Swedes. But General Shein will prepare the army for the possibility of action between our realm and Poland.” Mikhail raised a hand as Sheremetev started to speak. “Just in case.”

If this were a story they would all shut up now that he had made his royal ruling. But, of course, they didn’t shut up. They kept right on arguing back and forth for another hour. Eventually, after they had forgotten who had suggested it, they agreed on Mikhail’s plan of action. Mikhail would have liked to be satisfied with that, but he wasn’t, His power over the boyars and church were both getting weaker, not stronger, as time went on. When the meeting finally broke up, he happened to see Sheremetev’s expression. It worried him.

This was a disaster, Sheremetev thought as he left the chamber where the Little Duma met. War with Poland would be a disaster for both countries, no matter who won. It would be a disaster for the Sheremetev lands and for both nations, leaving them open to the ravages of the Swede. Russia needed Poland as a buffer against the west. It needed a Poland strong enough to fight off the threats from central and western Europe. And the patriarch was going to destroy that buffer even if he won. There was no other choice. Filaret has to go.

“Natasha, you see Czarina Evdokia often, do you not?” Boris asked.

Natasha, hearing the tone of his voice, took a long look at him. Boris was always a bit pasty-faced, but these days he was dreadfully pale. And had dark circles under his eyes. Which, oddly for the current situation, almost made her laugh. He looked so much like Bernie’s cartoon. “Yes, I do, Boris. Why?”

“I’m worried,” Boris said. “I know there’s something going on. Something bad. But I’m excluded. The word is out that I’m too close to the Dacha to trust.” He sighed. “It’s to be expected, of course. Nevertheless, I do hear rumors. One is that the strelzi are angry, and are making alliances with a number of men in Moscow.”

“What do you want me to tell Evdokia?” Natasha asked.

“To be careful. Very careful. Even to get out of Moscow, if they can.”