Boris Godunov and the Time of troubles from Cambridge History of Russia, volume 1

Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov (1584-1605)

A. P. PAYLOY

At the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign Russia experienced an acute political, social and economic crisis. The protracted Livonian war and natural disas­ters had brought the economic life of the country to a complete collapse. The Novgorod tax cadastres depict a catastrophic decline in the population by the beginning of the 1580s (by almost 80 per cent) and the neglect of arable land (the proportion of untilled land was more than 90 per cent).[1] The crisis affected not only the north-west but the entire territory of Russia.[2] The eco­nomic decline had a deleterious effect on the military capability of the army - many noblemen were unable to provide service from their devastated estates. After Groznyi's death the Polish King Stefan Batory nurtured plans to invade Russia. He counted on finding support in some circles of Russian society. When M. I. Golovin defected to Lithuania he assured the king that he would not encounter any serious resistance in Russia. The country faced a real threat of foreign invasion and internal unrest.

The situation was compounded by a profound crisis in the ruling elites. A power struggle began immediately after the death of Tsar Ivan. On the very night of his death (the night of 18/19 March 1584) conflicts occurred in the duma, as a result of which Tsarevich Dmitrii's kinsmen, the Nagois, were arrested and banished from court.[3] Shortly afterwards Tsarevich Dmitrii was dispatched to his apanage at Uglich. Groznyi's elder son Fedor was elevated to the throne. A sickly and weak-willed individual, he was not capable of ruling independently and, according to contemporaries, he found the performance even of formal court ceremonies to be a burden. The fate of the throne and the state lay in the hands of competing boyar groupings. The viability of Groznyi's protracted efforts to establish 'autocratism' was to be put to the test. In the opinion of S. F. Platonov, the struggle among the elites at the beginning of Tsar Fedor's reign amounted only to simple conflicts for influence at court.[4]But this point of view does not take into account all the complexity and gravity of the situation. At such a time the future political development of the country was in question. At the beginning of Tsar Fedor's reign there were two diametrically opposed positions in the political struggle. At one extreme there stood the upper tier of the hereditary princely aristocracy. The logic of the political struggle created an alliance between the former oprichnina ('court') magnates, the Shuiskii princes, and some former zemshchina men - the Princes Mstislavskii, Vorotynskii, Kurakin and Golitsyn. These boyars could lay claim to the role of the tsar's leading counsellors on the basis of their exclusively eminent lineage rather than of court favouritism. It seems that the political aim of this group was to limit the tsar's power in favour of the premier princely aristocracy. It is not surprising that these 'princelings' should have displayed open sympathy for the system in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), where the king was elected and his power depended on the will of the great magnates.[5]

The social and political antithesis of this princely grouping were the low­born oprichnina ('court') nobles who were concerned with preserving the rights and privileges they had enjoyed in Groznyi's lifetime. At the beginning of April 1584 the most energetic of these men - B. Ia. Bel'skii - attempted to seize power and to force the tsar to continue the oprichnina policy. Bel'skii's venture was unsuccessful, and the former favourite was forced into 'honourable exile' as governor of Nizhnii Novgorod. With Bel'skii's removal the position of the former 'court' nobles was seriously undermined.

Neither the 'princely' nor the 'oprichnina' faction managed to gain the upper hand in the political struggle. A third political force, headed by the Godunovs and the Romanovs, moved to the fore and emerged victorious. By the summer of 1584 these two clans had effected a rapprochement. They concluded a 'testa­mentary alliance of friendship' in which the ageing boyar Nikita Romanovich Iur'ev, Tsar Fedor's uncle on his mother's side, entrusted the guardianship of his young sons - the Nikitich Romanov brothers - to the tsar's brother-in- law, Boris Godunov. This agreement was an advantageous one for Godunov. In all probability it was largely as a result of the support of N. R. Iur'ev that Boris obtained the high boyaral rank of equerry by the time of the new tsar's coronation (31 May 1584). From then onwards the Godunovs' ascent was mete­oric. By the summer of 1584 there were already five members of the clan in the duma. In Vienna in November 1584 Luka Novosil'tsev, the Russian ambas­sador to the Holy Roman Empire, referred to Boris Godunov as 'the ruler of the land, a great and gracious lord'.[6] Thus in the summer of 1584 Godunov emerged from the shadows and was officially recognised as the ruler of the state and de facto regent for Tsar Fedor. For the next twenty years, until his death, he was the central political figure in Muscovy

The regency of Boris Godunov

Boris grasped the reins of government at an extremely difficult time. Ivan Groznyi had left a burdensome legacy for his successors, and it was necessary to lead the country out of a profound political and economic crisis.

One of the most immediate tasks was to overcome the division in the ruling elite and restore the weakened authority of central government. Godunov was unable to resolve this problem fully as long as the Shuiskiis and their supporters stood in his way. Once he had established himself in power, he conducted a deci­sive struggle against them. The first to suffer were the Shuiskiis' supporters - the Golovins, the Princes Kurakin, Golitsyn and Vorotynskii and the most senior duma boyar, Prince I. F. Mstislavskii. Then, at the end of 1586, came the turn of the Shuiskiis themselves. In May 1586 the Shuiskiis, with the back­ing of the head of the Russian Church, Metropolitan Dionisii, and of the Moscow townspeople, organised a petition in the name of the estates of the realm. It was addressed to Tsar Fedor, and begged him to divorce his childless wife, Irina Godunova. But the tsar rejected this proposition. Godunov was not at that time prepared to persecute the Shuiskiis directly. He waited for a more favourable opportunity and collected compromising information against them. The removal of the Shuiskiis occurred soon after the return (on 1 Octo­ber 1586) of a Russian embassy from Poland, when Boris might have received confirmation of his suspicions that the Shuiskiis were in contact with Polish lords.[7] In the autumn of 1586 the Shuiskiis were banished from the capital, and in the following year they suffered severe persecution. The most prominent and active of them - Ivan Petrovich and Andrei Ivanovich - were killed in prison by their jailers, probably not without Godunov's knowledge.[8] Metropolitan Dionisii and Bishop Varlaam of Krutitsa were removed from their posts. The 'trading peasants' who had supported the Shuiskiis were disgraced and then executed.

The end of the 1580s was a major watershed in the political struggle which ended in the complete victory of Boris Godunov. Its main result was the defeat of the elite of the high-born 'princelings' and the removal of the low-born oprichnina guard from power.

Like Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov directed all his efforts towards strengthening the autocratic power of the tsar, subordinating all the various estates of the realm, and the princely-boyar elite in particular. But Godunov pursued this aim by different means. Contrary to widespread opinion, although he himself was a former oprichnik and the son-in-law of the notorious oprichn­ina leader Maliuta Skuratov, Boris was not opposed in principle to the princely elite as a whole. An examination of the composition of the boyar duma leads to a conclusion which is unexpected from the traditional point of view - throughout the entire period of Boris Godunov's rule, both as regent for Tsar Fedor and in his own reign, the highest-ranking princely-boyar elite clearly predominated in the duma.

The essence of Godunov's policy in relation to the boyars becomes clearer if we study the reform of the sovereign's court which was carried out under his rule in the second half of the 1580s. As a wise and hard-headed politician, he realised that neither the continuation of the oprichnina policy nor the estab­lishment of a regime of 'boyar rule' could resolve Russia's political crisis. The regent looked back at the constructive reforms of the court in the middle of the sixteenth century, and especially at the ideas behind the Thousander Reform of 1550, which was intended to consolidate the upper strata of the service class around the throne. Boris Godunov followed this model when he reorganised and reviewed the personnel of the sovereign's court. There is a great similar­ity between the decrees of 1550 and 1587 concerning the allocation of service estates close to the capital to members of the sovereign's court.[9] In the course of the reform of the court in the second half of the 1580s its membership was thoroughly reviewed. The government's aim was to bring the hierarchical structure of the court into line with the social origins of its members, and to remove low-born individuals. The surviving list of members of the sovereign's court from 1588 / 9 indicates that representatives of the most eminent princely- boyar families clearly predominated in the highest court ranks - the boyar duma and the Moscow nobility.[10] The court retained its aristocratic compo­sition throughout the years of Godunov's rule, both as regent and as tsar. At the same time, at the end of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a marked numerical increase in the provin­cial nobility and a growth in its political activity. The provincial nobility was, however, largely excluded from participation in governance. The highest posts in the state apparatus were concentrated in the hands of the predominantly aristocratic elites of the sovereign's court, and also of the secretarial heads of the chancellery bureaucracy. At the end of the sixteenth century the role of the boyars in the governance of the central and local administrative apparatus increased; the boyars and the Moscow nobles played a more noticeable part than before in the work of the chancelleries, and the power of the provin­cial governors was strengthened. In the years of Godunov's regency we can clearly observe the consolidation of the 'boyar' elite, both at court and in the chancellery secretariat, into a special privileged ruling group of servitors.

This consolidation did not, however, lead to any weakening of the power of the autocrat. By the end of the sixteenth century the princely-boyar elite had lost most of their hereditary lands and their previous links with the provincial nobility, and they did not constitute any kind of stratum of great magnates who were all-powerful in the localities. The Russian aristocracy was totally dependent on state service, and it was riven by precedence disputes; it was incapable of acting as a united force in defence of its corporate interests.[11]Many of even the most eminent princes sought the friendship of the powerful regent Boris Godunov, who largely controlled service appointments and land allocations, and they provided him with their support. Godunov did not need to resort to disgrace and execution on a large scale in order to retain the obedience of the elite. But he managed to avoid resorting to the methods of the oprichnina mainly because he was able to take advantage of the results of the oprichnina itself and the achievements of the centralising policies of previous Muscovite rulers.

One of the most important events of Godunov's regency was the estab­lishment of the Russian patriarchate in 1589. This helped to strengthen the authority of the Russian sovereign and of the Russian Church both within the country and beyond its borders. The introduction of the patriarchate led to a further rapprochement of Church and state. It is revealing that the main role in the negotiations with Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, when he came to Russia to discuss the establishment of the patriarchate, was played by representatives of the secular power - the regent, Boris Godunov, and the conciliar ambassadorial secretary, A. Ia. Shchelkalov.[12] At the same time, at the end of the sixteenth century the clergy came to play an increasingly active role in defending the interests of the state. For example, the leaders of the Church hierarchy played a prominent role in the election of Godunov as tsar and the legitimisation of his autocratic power, and in the denunciation of the First False Dmitrii as an impostor. Boris Godunov's supporter Metropolitan Iov became patriarch, and other Church leaders were promoted. They largely owed the strengthening of their position to the regent.

By implementing this policy of consolidating the upper tiers of the service class and of the clergy under the aegis of the autocracy, Boris Godunov man­aged to resolve the country's internal political crisis, to restore the authority of the Russian monarchy and to establish himself firmly in power.

With the aim of strengthening state power, Godunov's government carried out a restructuring of central and local institutions of government. At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, further measures were introduced to improve and extend the chancellery system of administration, and the number of secretaries was expanded.[13] The control of the centre over the districts was again perceptibly increased. An important indicator of this was the development and consolidation of the power of the provincial governors (voevody). A new feature in this period was the appearance of governors not only in the peripheral border towns, but also in the northern and central regions of the country.[14] At the same time, we find a decline in the role of the guba and zemskii ('land') institutions of local self-government by the social estates.

In the realm of foreign policy, Boris Godunov's government aimed to over­come the onerous consequences of the Livonian war and to restore the inter­national prestige of the Muscovite state. After the death of Ivan the Terrible, Russian diplomats conducted tense negotiations with the Poles, as a result of which they managed to prevent a potentially damaging military confronta­tion with Poland and to conclude a prolonged fifteen-year truce, which was extended for a further twenty years in 1601. Taking advantage of a favourable international situation and of internal difficulties in Sweden, in the winter of 1589/90 Russia began military action against the Swedes, with the aim of regaining her former towns on the Baltic coast. In 1595 in the village of Tiavzino a peace treaty was signed with the Swedes, in which Sweden returned to Russia Ivangorod, Iam, Kopor'e, Oreshek and Korela. This was a major victory for Russia, although it should not be overstated - the problem of an outlet to the Baltic Sea was not fundamentally resolved, and the sea-route known as the 'Narva sailing' remained in Swedish hands.[15] Russia's trade with the countries of Western Europe was conducted, as before, mainly through the north of the country. As a result of Godunov's efforts, relations with England were revived. The Russian government extended its patronage to the English merchants and gave them tariff privileges, but it refused to grant them monopoly rights to trade through the White Sea and opened its ports to the merchants of other countries.

If in the west Moscow had managed to stabilise the situation, then in the east and south its policy was more active and aggressive. One of Russia's main foreign-policy successes under Boris Godunov was the final consolidation of its control over Siberia. After the death of Ermak Siberia had again come under the power of the local khans. At the beginning of 1586 government forces headed by the commander V B. Sukin were sent beyond the Urals. The Russian generals did not engage solely in military actions and organised the construction of a whole network of fortified towns in Siberia. In 1588 the Siberian khan Seid-Akhmat was taken prisoner, and ten years later the Russian generals routed the horde of Khan Kuchum. At the end of the sixteenth century the vast and wealthy territory of Siberia became an integral part of the Russian state (see Map 11.1).

Russia's position on the Volga was considerably strengthened. In the 1580s and 1590s a number of new towns were built - Ufa, Samara, Tsaritsyn, Sara­tov and others. The consolidation of Russian influence on the Volga led the khans of the Great Nogai Horde to recognise the power of the Muscovite sovereigns. An entire system of fortified towns (Voronezh, Livny, Elets, Kursk, Belgorod, Kromy, Oskol, Valuiki and Tsarev Borisov) was also built on the 'Crimean frontier'. The borders ofthe state were extended much further south. The international situation was favourable for Russia's southward expansion. The Crimean Horde had been drawn into numerous wars on the side of Turkey against Persia, the Habsburgs and the Rzeczpospolita, and it did not have

sufficient forces to undertake any major campaign against Rus'. Only on one occasion in the combined period of Godunov's regency and reign did the Crimeans manage to penetrate far into the Russian interior. In the summer of 1591 Khan Kazy-Girey came as far as Moscow with a large army. But having encountered a substantial Russian force blocking his advance, he decided not to risk the main body of his troops in battle, and was obliged to retreat.

The period of Boris Godunov's regency marked an important stage in the development of cultural contacts with the countries of Western Europe. Godunov was keen to recruit foreign specialists into Russian service. Seventeenth-century Russian writers even accused him of excessive fondness for foreigners. Boris himself had not had the opportunity to receive a system­atic 'book-learning' education in his youth, but he gave his son Fedor a good education. Endowed with a lively and practical mind, Boris Godunov was no stranger to European enlightenment and he cherished plans to introduce European-style schools into Russia. In order to train up an educated elite, he sent groups of young people - the sons of noblemen and officials - to be educated abroad.

Overcoming the economic collapse and the acute social crisis was a task of primary importance and complexity. The central problem of internal policy at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries was to satisfy the economic interests of the noble servicemen (at that time the cavalry, comprising the service-tenure nobility, constituted the fighting core of the Russian army). In the first year of the reign of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (on 20 July 1584) the government got the Church councilto approve a resolution which confirmed a previous decision of 1580 forbidding land bequests to monasteries, and introduced an important new point abolishing the tax privileges (tarkhany) of large-scale ecclesiastical and secular landowners.[16] Encountering opposition from the Church authorities, however, Boris Godunov's government chose not to go for the complete abolition of the tarkhany and restricted itself to the adoption of Ivan Groznyi's practice of the 1580s of collecting extraordinary taxes from 'tax-exempt' lands. The act of 1584 legalised this practice. The council's resolution forbidding land bequests to monasteries was also put into practice in an inconsistent way. In the sources we find numerous cases of the violation of this law.[17] The measures of the 1580s and 1590s did not halt the growth of monastery landownership and did not fundamentally eliminate the tax privileges of the large landowners. They did not really guarantee either the uniformity of taxation or the creation of a supplementary fund of land for allocation as service estates. Moreover, the government continued to make extensive land grants to monasteries and to prominent boyars. Not wanting to quarrel with the influential clergy, Godunov's government tried to minimise its concessions to the nobility at the expense of the monasteries.

The most important measure designed to satisfy the interests of the nobil­ity was the issuing and implementation of laws about the enserfment of the peasants. Boris Godunov's government at first continued the practice of the so-called 'forbidden years', which had been introduced in Ivan Groznyi's reign at the beginning of the 1580s ('forbidden years' were years in which peasants were deprived of their traditional right to leave their landlords on St George's Day). In the 1580s and 1590s a district land census was undertaken. However, the land census of the end of the sixteenth century did not have such a compre­hensive character as is usually assumed. The absence of complete up-to-date surveys of many regions delayed the process of peasant enserfment. The prac­tice of 'forbidden years' was not in itself sufficiently effective to retain the peasant population in place. It contained a number of contradictions. On the one hand, the landowner had the right to search for his peasants throughout the entire period of operation of the 'forbidden years', and the duration of the search period was not stipulated; on the other, the regime of 'forbidden years' was regarded as a temporary measure - 'until the sovereign's decree'. In addition, the 'forbidden years' were not introduced simultaneously across the whole territory of the country, and this introduced further confusion into judicial transactions. After 1592 the term, 'forbidden years', disappears from the sources. V I. Koretskii expressed the opinion that in 1592/3 a sin­gle all-Russian law forbidding peasant movement was introduced.[18] But other scholars have expressed serious doubts as to whether such a major law of enserf­ment existed.[19] Great interest has been aroused by documents discovered by Koretskii which contain information about the introduction at the beginning of the 1590s of a five-year limit on the presentation of petitions about abducted peasants. By establishing a definite five-year limit for the return of peasants the government was trying to introduce some kind of order into the extremely confused relationships among landowners in the issue of peasant ownership. The new practice annulled the old system of 'forbidden years' and negated the significance of the district land-survey, which remained incomplete in the 1580s and early 1590s, although it had arisen out of the recognition of the fact of the prohibition of peasant transfers. The policies of the early 1590s described above were developed further in a decree of 24 November 1597, which is the earliest surviving law on peasant enserfment. According to this decree, in the course of a five-year period fugitive and abducted peasants were subject to search and return to their former owners, but after the expiry of these five 'fixed' years they were bound to their new owners. The introduction of the norm of a five-year search period for peasants was advantageous primarily for the large-scale and privileged landowners, who had greater opportunities to lure peasants and to conceal them on their estates.

Alongside these measures relating to the enserfment of the peasants, legis­lation was enacted at the end of the sixteenth century concerning slaves. The most important law on slavery was the code (Ulozhenie) of 1 February 1597 which required the compulsory registration of the names of slaves in special bondage books. According to the code of 1597 debt-slaves (kabal'nye liudi) were deprived of the right to obtain their freedom by paying off their debt, and were obliged to remain in a situation of dependency until the death of their master. The law prescribed that deeds of servitude (sluzhilye kabaly) should be taken from 'free people' who served their master for more than six months, thereby turning them into bond-slaves. Thus slave-owners acquired the pos­sibility of enslaving a significant number of'voluntary servants', and thereby compensating significantly for the labour shortage.

Boris Godunov's government was thus greatly concerned to satisfy the economic needs of the nobility. But at the same time, in trying to secure the support of the influential boyars and clergy, Godunov clearly did not intend to cause serious damage to their interests in order to please the rank-and-file nobility, and this explains the notorious inconsistency of his 'pro-noble' policy.

In the towns Godunov's government conducted a policy of so-called 'trading-quarter construction', which satisfied the economic interests of the townspeople, since the 'tax-paying (tiaglye) traders' (those townspeople who paid state taxes) included artisans and tradesmen who belonged to monaster­ies and to servicemen. But at the same time, 'trading-quarter construction' was implemented by coercive methods and it led to a greater binding of the townsmen to the trading quarters.[20]

The government's economic policy, together with the securing of peace on its borders, soon bore fruit, and in the 1590s the economy revived significantly. At the end of the 1580s and the beginning of the 1590s the tax burden was also reduced to some extent.[21] Contemporaries are unanimous that the reign of Fedor Ivanovich was a period of stability and prosperity. Boris Godunov deserves much of the credit for this. 'Boris is incomparable', the Russian envoys to Persia said, referring not only to the regent's remarkable intelligence, but also to his unique role in government. At the end of the 1580s Godunov acquired the right to deal independently with foreign powers. He buttressed his exceptional position with a number of high-sounding titles. In addition to the rank of equerry which he had obtained in 1584 he also called himself 'vicegerent and warden' of the khanates of Kazan' and Astrakhan' and 'court [privy] governor', and he adopted the title of 'servant'. Russian envoys to foreign courts explained this last title as follows: 'That title is higher than all the boyars and is granted by the sovereign for special services.'[22]

Slowly but surely, Godunov rose to the summit of power, which he reached by carefully calculated moves. He did not resort to disgrace and bloodshed on any significant scale. In the entire period of his rule, both as regent and as tsar, not a single boyar was executed in public. But Boris was by no means a meek and kindly person. He was both cunning and ruthless in his dealings with his most dangerous opponents. His reprisals against his enemies were clandestine and pre-emptive. The chancellor P. I. Golovin was secretly murdered en route to exile, evidently not without Godunov's knowledge.[23] Boris also disposed covertly of the Princes Ivan Petrovich and Andrei Ivanovich Shuiskii. He played a skilful political game, planning his moves well in advance and eliminating not only immediate but also potential rivals. For example, with the help of a trusted associate - the Englishman Jerome Horsey - Godunov persuaded the widow of the Livonian 'king' Magnus, Mariia Vladimirovna (the daughter of Vladimir Staritskii and Evdokiia Nagaia), to come back to Russia. But when she returned, Mariia and her young daughter ended up in a convent.

In May 1591 Tsarevich Dmitrii, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, died in mysterious circumstances at Uglich. The inhabitants of Uglich, incited by the tsarevich's kinsmen, the Nagois, staged a disturbance and killed the secretary Mikhail Bitiagovskii (who was the representative of the Moscow administra­tion in Uglich), together with his son and some other men whom they held responsible for the tsarevich's death. Soon afterwards a commission of inquiry, headed by Prince V I. Shuiskii, came to the town from Moscow. It reached the conclusion that the tsarevich had stabbed himself with his knife in the course of an epileptic fit. But the version that Dmitrii had been killed on the orders of Boris Godunov enjoyed wide currency among the people. In the reign of

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii this version received the official sanction of the Church when Dmitrii of Uglich was canonised as a saint. For a long time the view that Boris Godunov was responsible for the tsarevich's death was unchallenged in the historical literature. The situation changed after the publication of stud­ies by S. F. Platonov and V K. Klein.[24] Platonov traced the literary history of the legend about Tsarevich Dmitrii's 'murder' and noted that contemporaries who wrote about it during the Time of Troubles refer in very circumspect terms to Boris's role in the killing of Dmitrii, and that dramatic details of the murder appear only in later seventeenth-century accounts. Klein carried out extensive and fruitful work examining and reconstructing the report of the Uglich investigation of 1591. He demonstrated that what has come down to us is the original version, in the form in which it was presented by Vasilii Shuiskii's commission of inquiry to a session of the Sacred Council on 2 June 1591 (only the first part of the report is missing). The version contained in the investigation report has received the support of I. A. Golubtsov, I. I. Polosin, R. G. Skrynnikov and other historians.[25] But doubts concerning the validity of the way the investigation report was compiled have still not been dispelled. A. A. Zimin made a number of serious criticisms of this source.[26] The inves­tigation report is undoubtedly tendentious. But its critics have not managed to advance arguments which would decisively refute the conclusions of the commission of inquiry. The sources are such that the indictment against Boris remains unproven; but neither does the case for the defence give him a com­plete alibi.

Would the death of the tsarevich have been in Godunov's interests? It is difficult to give an unambiguous answer to this question. On the one hand, the existence of a centre of opposition at Uglich, with Tsarevich Dmitrii as its figurehead, could not have failed to arouse the regent's anxiety. But, on the other hand, Boris could have achieved 'supreme power' without killing the tsarevich. Dmitrii had been born from an uncanonical seventh marriage, which enabled Godunov to question his right to the throne. At the same time Boris took pains to enhance the status of his sister, Tsaritsa Irina, as a possible heir to the throne. In a situation where Boris Godunov was the de facto sole ruler of the state, Tsar Fedor's 'lawful wife in the eyes of God' could quite justifiably challenge the right to the throne of Tsar Ivan's son, born 'of an

Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov (1584-1605) Table 11.1. The end of the Riurikid dynasty

IVAN IV m. (1) Anastasiia Romanovna . 1530-84

FEDOR m. Irina Godunova 1557-98

Dmitrii (of Uglich) 1582-91

Fedos'ia 1592-4

then onwards there was strife and rivalry between the Godunovs and the Romanovs. This was not a conflict over different directions in policy, but a struggle for power and for the throne between two mighty boyar clans. Like the Godunovs, the Romanovs exercised an exceptional degree of influence at court, but the latter's role was primarily that of honoured courtiers, and it could not be compared with the Godunovs' role in governance. Boris Godunov pos­sessed real power. He was able to count on the support of a significant number of members of the boyar duma and the sovereign's court, the secretarial appa­ratus, the influential clergy and the merchant elite, and this is what guaranteed his success in the contest for the throne.

On 7 January 1598 Tsar Fedor died. After the expiry of the forty-day period of mourning, an Assembly of the Land was convened in Moscow, and on 21 February it elected Boris Godunov as tsar. The traditional view among histo­rians was that the assembly was stacked with Godunov's supporters and that his election was a 'farce' played out to a pre-written script.[27] V O. Kliuchevskii, however, studied the signatures on the main document produced by the assem­bly - the confirmatory charter - and concluded that the elective assembly of 1598 was entirely conventional in its composition. If there had been some kind of campaigning in favour of Boris, Kliuchevskii commented, it had not altered the composition of the Assembly of the Land.[28] In the more recent historiog­raphy there are various views about the authenticity and completeness of the signatures on the surviving copies of the confirmatory charter, and about the actual membership of the assembly.[29] We have no reason to doubt, however, that an electoral Assembly of the Land did in fact convene in February 1598 and legitimately elect Boris Godunov as tsar.[30] What was considered illegitimate by contemporaries of the Time of Troubles was not the 'juridical' but the 'moral' aspect of Boris Godunov's election - a 'saint-killer' (the person responsible for the death of Tsarevich Dmitrii) could not be a 'true' tsar. As far as the assembly of 1598 itself is concerned, the writers of the Time of Troubles did not doubt its 'correctness' and they even contrasted the legitimate election of Godunov by 'all the towns' to the 'sudden' accession of Vasilii Shuiskii without any consultation of the 'land'.

Tsar Boris

On i September Boris was solemnly crowned as tsar. His coronation was accompanied by a number of lavish ceremonies and formalities. The new tsar made all kinds of efforts to acquire popularity among his ordinary subjects, and solemnly promised to care even for the poorest beggars. On his accession to the throne he granted numerous privileges and favours to various groups of the population. There is even evidence that Tsar Boris intended to regulate the obligations ofthe seigniorial peasants.[31] But although he courtedthe estates of the realm, Boris had no desire to become dependent on them. His aim of becoming the 'great and gracious lord' of his people was an expression of the credo of an autocratic monarch rather than a ruler dependent on his 'electorate'. While granting various favours to his subjects, Boris at the same time demanded their loyalty, and encouraged them to denounce 'villains' and 'traitors'.[32]

But the power of the Russian autocrats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not absolute. As he consolidated his position on the throne, Boris was obliged to conduct a cautious and flexible policy in relation to the boyar elite. If the new-made tsar had acted too decisively and rashly, all the results of his previous policy of consolidating the magnates around the throne would have been negated and he would have encountered serious opposition. As an experienced politician, Boris Godunov understood the danger of a radical break with tradition in his relations with the rulingboyar group, and of exerting direct pressure on the aristocracy. To mark the occasion of his coronation in September i598 Boris Godunov made generous allocations of duma ranks to the top tier of the aristocracy. Towards the end of Godunov's reign the size of the boyar duma was reduced, and the relative weight of the princely aristocracy within it was increased. Of the twenty duma boyars in 1605, twelve belonged to the premier princely clans or were eminent foreigners.[33] It is generally thought that Boris unduly promoted his relatives and supporters and ruled the state with their help. But the actual picture was more complex. In the first year of

Boris's reign four new members of the Godunov clan entered the duma, but they were all awarded not the highest duma rank of boyar, but the rank of okol'nichii. In Boris's reign only two new Godunovs became boyars (via the rank of okol'nichii), but at the same time two older Godunov boyars left the stage. None of the Godunovs who was newly promoted into the duma possessed any great qualities of statesmanship. As in the years of his regency, Boris when he was tsar tried to find support in various boyar groupings, including the premier princely aristocracy. And in this he succeeded. The tsar made clever use of precedence conflicts among the princely-boyar aristocracy in order to further his own interests. S. F. Platonov's view that Tsar Boris was politically isolated in the boyar milieu cannot be accepted as correct. The circle of boyars who came to court and enjoyed the tsar's favour was fairly wide, but - and in this respect Platonov is right - they did not comprise a single cohesive party, and there were few among them who possessed any political talent.[34] This gave rise to the internal weakness in the Godunovs' government which manifested itself after Boris's death.

Weakened by the repressions of the 1580s and lacking support from the boyars, the Church and the townspeople, the Shuiskiis and other eminent 'princelings' were unable to act openly against Godunov. The main threat to Godunov was posed by the boyar clan of the Romanovs, who had not reconciled themselves to their defeat in the electoral struggle. In November 1600 the Romanovs were subjected to harsh forms of disgrace. The eldest ofthe brothers - Fedor Nikitich Romanov - was tonsured as a monk and exiled under the name of Filaret to the northerly Antoniev-Siiskii monastery. His brothers and followers were dispersed to various towns and places of imprisonment, and many of them died in exile. R. G. Skrynnikov has persuasively suggested that the persecution of the Romanovs was linked with Boris's illness.[35] Concerned about the fate of his heir, he decided to strike a blow against them, taking advantage of a denunciation which a slave of the Romanovs made against his masters. The Romanovs' case was the most important political trial in Boris's reign, but it directly affected only a few boyars and noblemen. At the beginning of the I600s Godunov's old opponent B. Ia. Bel'skii was also subjected to repression and disgrace, as was the secretary V Ia. Shchelkalov.

There is a widespread view in the historical literature that the idea ofsetting up a pretender was developed by the boyar opposition with the aim of over­throwing the Godunovs. But we do not have any sources which provide direct and reliable evidence of this. S. F. Platonov's speculation that the Romanovs were party to the pretender intrigue is somewhat dubious.³⁷ The fact that the pretender (Grigorii Otrep'ev) lived in the court of the Romanovs and their followers the Cherkasskiis does not in itself provide a basis for such a view. If we accept this proposition, it is difficult to explain why the custody regime imposed on the disgraced Romanovs should have been relaxed at the end of Godunov's reign, or why many of their supporters were allowed to return from exile. We know that in 1604-5 Tsar Boris appointed the boyars and emi­nent princes F. I. Mstislavskii, V. I. and D. I. Shuiskii and V. V. Golitsyn to head his regiments against the False Dmitrii, and these commanders inflicted a crushing defeat on the pretender at Dobrynichi. The army openly defected from the Godunovs only after Boris's death. And even then by no means all the boyars and commanders betrayed them, and some of the commanders (the princes M. P. Katyrev-Rostovskii, A. A. Teliatevskii and others) returned to Moscow with the loyal regiments. The decisive role in the transfer of the troops to the side of the False Dmitrii was played by the servicemen of the southern towns. Russian and foreign sources unanimously testify that the ini­tiative for surrendering the towns of the Seversk 'frontier district' came not from their governors but from the lower classes ofthe population. In contrast to the opinion of V. O. Kliuchevskii and S. F. Platonov, who considered that the Time of Troubles began 'from above' (in the boyar milieu), the unrest on the eve of the Troubles occurred not at the top of the social ladder but at the lower levels of the social pyramid.

In spite of the recovery in the economy, the consequences of the economic and social crisis had not been entirely overcome by the end of the sixteenth century: most of the arable land and farmsteads in the majority of districts remained unworked, and the rural population had not returned to its pre- crisis level.³⁸ Before it had recovered from the post-oprichnina crisis, Russia's economic system suffered a new blow at the beginning of the seventeenth century - a terrible famine which lasted for three years and which affected the entire territory ofthe country. The famine of 1601-3 cost hundreds of thousands of human lives. Godunov's government enacted energetic measures to alleviate the consequences of this natural disaster. It took steps to combat speculation in grain: royal decrees prescribed fixed prices for grain and the punishment of speculators; large sums of money were distributed in the capital and in other towns to help the starving; and public works were organised. But these measures failed to bring about a significant improvement in the situation.

37 Platonov, Ocherkipo istorii Smuty, p. 160.

38 Kolycheva, Agrarnyi stroi, p. 201; Agrarnaia istoriia, p. 296.

Against the background of famine and economic crisis, social conflicts were exacerbated, and a widespread flight of peasants and slaves took place. In order to alleviate the build-up of social tensions, in the autumn of i60i the govern­ment issued a decree which solemnly announced that the peasants' traditional right of departure on St George's Day was being restored.[36] But this arrange­ment was re-established only on the lands of the provincial nobility and the lowest-ranking courtiers. Peasants on court and state lands did not gain the right to move, nor did peasants who belonged to large-scale ecclesiastical and secular landowners. As before, Boris Godunov did not want to infringe the interests of the influential ruling elite. By making concessions to the enserfed peasantry and to the large-scale landowners, the government damaged the interests of the mass of the gentry. In order to prevent the complete ruina­tion of the petty servicemen, the decree permitted nobles to transfer no more than one or two peasants 'among themselves'. The terms of the 1601 decree were reaffirmed in a new decree of 24 November i602. The practical imple­mentation of the decrees of 1601 and 1602 not only failed to reduce the social discord, but significantly increased it. The peasants interpreted the laws in their own interests, as granting them complete freedom from serfdom, while the noble landowners defied the provisions of the legislation by obstruct­ing peasant movement in every way. The law was not reissued in 1603, and at the end of his reign Boris Godunov returned to his old policy of enserf- ment.[37] This increased the discontent of the peasantry. At the same time, the popularity of Godunov's government among the nobility was significantly undermined.

In a situation characterised by famine and economic crisis, disturbances began among the lower social classes. In the autumn of i603 a large-scale bloody battle took place on the outskirts of Moscow between government forces and a substantial detachment of insurgents led by a certain Khlopko. The government repeatedly sent troops of noble servicemen to suppress dis­turbances in various towns. In Soviet historiography all of these events were considered to be symptoms of class struggle on the part of the peasantry, and to mark the beginning of a Peasant War.[38] This interpretation was con­vincingly challenged by R. G. Skrynnikov, who demonstrated that the popular unrest of 1601-3 had been on a smaller scale than previously thought, and that the disturbances themselves did not amount to much more than ordinary banditry.[39]

The situation on the southern frontiers was particularly tense. At the begin­ning of the seventeenth century great hordes of fugitive peasants and slaves had fled southwards from the central and northern regions of the country and had joined the ranks of the 'free' cossacks. Their numbers were swelled not only by agricultural workers, but also by the boyars' military slaves and even by impoverished nobles. The cossack hosts were fairly numerous; battle- hardened in conflicts with the Tatars and Turks, they represented a military force to be reckoned with. What is more, the cossacks were unhappy about the construction of the new towns on the southern frontier, which drove a wedge into their lands. The sharp increase in grain prices during the famine had encouraged the cossacks to make more frequent raids into Crimean and Turkish territory, which threatened to bring about international complica­tions for Russia. The cossacks also attacked Russian settlements and merchant caravans. All of these developments forced Boris Godunov's government to introduce a number of repressive measures against them, and, in particular, to prohibit the sale of gunpowder and food supplies to the Don.[40] But Godunov's repressions were not able to pacify the 'free cossackry' and merely accelerated the outbreak of its dissatisfaction.

In an attempt to safeguard the food supply of its newly annexed south­ern lands, the government introduced a widespread initiative to compel the local population to perform labour services (barshchina) on state lands (the so-calledgosudareva desiatinnaiapashnia, or sovereign's tithe ploughlands). But because the peasant population in this region was small, the tilling of the land was mainly carried out by the servicemen 'by contract' (pribornye) and by the petty gentry, who had to combine the burden of military service with heavy agricultural labour. All of this could not fail to provoke protest from the servicemen of the southern towns. The small-scale southern landholders were greatly enraged by the expansion of large-scale boyar landownership on to the fertile lands of the south. The proximity of these big landown­ers, who were influential at court, harmed the economy of the petty ser­vicemen, and this provoked their hatred towards the 'boyar' government in Moscow.

At the end of Boris Godunov's reign the southern frontier was a powder keg, ready to explode from any spark. The spark was provided by the incursion into Russian territory of a pretender claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitrii, who had supposedly escaped from the assassins sent by Godunov to kill him. Godunov's government claimed that he was Grigorii Otrep'ev, a fugitive unfrocked monk and former nobleman from Galich, and this remains the most convincing explanation of the identity of the man who posed as Ivan the Terrible's son, Dmitrii.[41]

At the time when it crossed the Russian frontier in the autumn of 1604, the False Dmitrii's army consisted only of 2,000 Polish noblemen and a few thou­sand Zaporozhian and Don cossacks. However, as it advanced further towards the Russian heartland, it recruited impressive new forces. The pretender's suc­cess was guaranteed primarily by the extensive support he received from the free cossacks and from the population of the southern frontiers who rebelled against Godunov. The townspeople of the south voluntarily recognised the 'true' Tsar Dmitrii and handed their governors over to him.

On 13 April 1605, at the height of the war against the pretender, Tsar Boris Godunov died suddenly. His son, Tsarevich Fedor, was named as his successor. But in the inexperienced hands of Boris's young heir the wheel of government began to spin out of control. In the final days of his reign Boris Godunov placed great hopes on his talented and ambitious general P. F. Basmanov. But when drawing up the new service register after Boris's death, the influential courtier and boyar Semen Nikitich Godunov appointed his own son-in-law Prince A. A. Teliatevskii 'above' Basmanov, which provoked an angry protest from the latter and led him to betray the Godunovs. But it was not boyar treason, but the stance adopted by the numerous detachments of servicemen from the southern towns (Riazan', Tula, etc.) that had the decisive influence on the course of events. After the defection of the army at Kromy to the pretender in May 1605, the fate of the Godunov dynasty was sealed. On 1 June 1605 supporters of the False Dmitrii instigated an uprising in Moscow which led to the overthrow of the Godunovs. A few days later, on 10 June, the young Tsar Fedor Borisovich and Boris's widow, Tsaritsa Mariia Grigor'evna, were killed by a group of men, headed by Prince V V Golitsyn, who had been specially sent by the False Dmitrii; Boris's daughter, Tsarevna Kseniia, was confined in a convent. Thus the dynasty that Boris Godunov had founded came to a tragic end. The devastating and bloody Time of Troubles had begun.

***

The tempestuous events of the Time of Troubles have to a considerable extent diverted the attention of historians from the significance of Boris Godunov's reformist activity. It is important to bear in mind that thanks to Godunov's efforts Russia enjoyed a twenty-year period of peace at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. In place of exhausting wars and the bacchanalia of the oprichnina there was a period of political stability and a partial economic boom. The country's international prestige was strength­ened. The period also witnessed such significant events for the future of the country as the establishment of the patriarchate and the definitive annexation of Siberia. Boris Godunov's policy for consolidating the ruling elite of the service class around the throne had far-reaching consequences. It was under Boris Godunov that the future direction of Russia's political development was largely determined, and the specific features of the state structure were estab­lished, in which strong autocratic power coexisted and co-operated with the boyar service aristocracy. Yielding to the demands of the broad mass of the service class, Godunov continued the policy of enserfment of the peasantry. But his policy possessed little consistency. The dissatisfaction of the numerous lower classes and also of the petty servicemen, whose interests had had to be sacrificed by Boris Godunov's government, led in the end to civil war and a Time of Troubles in Russia.

Translated by Maureen Perrie

The peasantry

RICHARD HELLIE

Peasant farming and material culture

One way to focus sharply on this topic is to compare the situation of the Russian peasant with that of the American farmer. The American farmer was a completely free man who lived in his own house with his family on an isolated farmstead/homesteadthat belonged to him. The stove in his log cabin vented outside through a chimney and he owned everything in his cabin. Because land was free, he could farm as much land as his physical capacity permitted. His land was comparatively rich and harvests were relatively abundant. He was able to accumulate and store wealth in many forms: grain, cattle, material possessions and cash. Typically he had no landlord and was solely responsible for his own taxes. In contrast, by the end of this period the Russian peasant was for most practical purposes enserfed (see Chapters 16 and 23) and he lived in a village and farmed land that was not his own. Although he may have believed that the land was his, in fact the state believed that the land belonged to it and could be confiscated for a monastery, other Church institution or a private landholder/owner who was in full-time state military or civil service employ.[42]His hut was roughly the same size as the American's log cabin, and it was built in roughly the same way: notched logs stacked on top of one another and chinked with moss and/or clay. The Russian peasant's land, although abundant, was of poor quality and the crop yields were extraordinarily low. As will be described further below, the interior of the Russian peasant's hut was considerably different from that of his American counterpart. Russian livestock, work implements, and crops were significantly different from the

American. For climatological and socio-political reasons, the Russian peasant found it difficult to accumulate wealth, and the collective system of taxation made it dangerous for one peasant to appear more prosperous than another. Lastly, the dress of the Russian peasant was different from that of the American farmer.

During the time period covered by this chapter the area inhabited by the Russian peasant expanded enormously, as detailed in Chapters 9,10 and 11. In brief, in 1462 the Russian peasant inhabited the area between Pskov in the west and Nizhnii Novgorod in the east, the Oka River in the south and the Volga River in the north. By 1613 Russian habitation had moved well across the Volga and the Urals into Siberia in the east, down the Volga to Astrakhan' in the south and also some distance south of the Oka, and finally north of the Volga all the way to the White Sea. Most of this area provided crucial constraints on peasant agriculture and material life that could not be overcome. The frost- free period began around the middle of May and ended towards the end of September, which provided a short frost-free growing season of 120 days or so.² Snow covered the ground nearly half the year.³ Not only was the growing season short, but the soil throughout most of the area was thin (7.5 cm thick), acidic podzol with very little (1 to 4 per cent) humus.⁴

These factors dictated that rye was by far the predominant cereal crop, whose yields were extraordinarily low: the Russians were lucky to harvest three seeds for each one sown. The yields for oats were even lower. In the West those were pre-Carolingian yields, which had risen to 6 :1 by the end of the fifteenth century. The low Russian yields were to a major extent the result of downward selection: instead of saving and sowing the biggest seeds, the Russians used those to pay rent and taxes, and planted either the smallest seeds or the middle- sized ones, and ate the others. As wheat was rarely grown in this period, winter rye was the most important grain crop because it escaped the limitations of the short growing season.⁵ (It was planted in the autumn, germinated before snowfall, and was harvested in the summer.) Oats were grown for human consumption, but primarily for the horses. Nearly as much land was devoted to cultivating oats as rye.⁶ Barley and wheat were also occasionally grown. The

2 I. A. Gol'tsberg (ed.), Agroklimaticheskii atlas mira (Moscow and Leningrad: Gidrome- teoizdat, 1972), pp. 41, 48, 55.

3 Ibid., p. 105.

4 V K. Mesiats (ed.), Sel'sko-khoziaistvennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), p. 403; A. I. Tulupnikov (ed.), Atlas sel'skogo khoziaistva SSSR (Moscow: GUGK, 1960), p. 8.

5 V D. Kobylianskii (ed.), Rozh' (Leningrad: Agropromizdat, 1989), p. 259 etpassim.

6 A. L. Shapiro et al., Agrarnaia istoriiasevero-zapadaRossii. VtoraiapolovinaXV-nachalo XVI v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), pp. 39, 44, 249.

major industrial crop was flax, sown in some western areas, and occasionally hemp and hops.

The Russians typically kept gardens, in which they raised cabbage (their major source of Vitamin C), cucumbers, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, peas, garlic and onions. The harsh climate was not favourable for raising fruit trees, but some Russians grew apples (as many as ten varieties). Much rarer were cherries, plums and raspberries. Mushrooms, berries and nuts were brought in from forests.[43]

As mentioned, Russian peasants lived in villages, not on isolated home­steads. The villages ranged in size from a few households to several dozen.[44]Water for drinking, washing and cooking was either carried from a river or brook or drawn from a village well. Each hut was enclosed in a yard (dvor) by a wooden fence.[45] There was no general system of'village planning' applicable everywhere. In some places the common ancestor's yard was in the centre of the village with those of his descendants surrounding it, in other places yards were next to each other facing a common 'street' in a land with neither streets nor roads that a modern person would recognise.[46] The peasant's gar­den might be in his yard, or outside of it.[47] The purpose of the fence was to keep the peasant's livestock from straying at night. In the daytime, the village's livestock were put out to pasture in a common meadow where one or more of the peasants tended the flock. A typical peasant had one horse for draught purposes, a cow or two for milk, cheese and meat, a calf (the horses and cattle were very small), occasionally sheep or goats, maybe pigs and some chickens which could be expected to lay less than one egg a week.[48] All of this provided a poor, monotonous diet occasionally enlivened by alcohol. Mead (near-beer) was a popular drink and at the end of the sixteenth century many peasants had from two to five hundred beehives, whence came the mead.[49] The origins of vodka are unclear. It was first mentioned in 1174, and probably came into its own as a popular commodity in the relatively prosperous second half of the fifteenth century.[50] Meat was rarely served in peasant households, but fish was much more common.[51]

Also in the yard was a privy, an outbuilding or barn for the livestock in cool weather, a grain drier, a threshing floor and a shed for storing agricultural implements, hay and grain reserves (including seed for the next growing sea­son). The famous Russian bathhouse typically was not in a peasant yard (for fear of fire, for one reason), but close to a source of water, such as a pond, lake or river.

When it became bitterly cold, much (maybe all) of the livestock and food stores such as cabbage moved inside. The major structure inside every peasant hut was the stove, a structure built in one of the corners that occupied much of the room in the hut. It was built of rock and mortar and had three cham­bers for maximum extraction of heat. Had the Russian stove had a chimney, 80 per cent of the heat would have gone out of the chimney, so there was only a smoke hole in the back of the stove which vented the smoke into the room. The heating season was about six months of the year,[52] so that for six months of the year the peasants breathed a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and over two hundred wood-smoke particles that clogged their throats and lungs. The product was the infamous Russian smoky hut, one of the major features of Russian civilisation from the time the Slavs moved east into Ukraine in the sixth century, and then into the Volga-Oka mesopotamia in the eleventh- thirteenth centuries, down until the 1930s. The smoke was so dense that it left a line around the wall about shoulder-high, where the bottom of the smoke cloud hung. The air was so toxic that it disinfected the hut to the extent that not even cockroaches could survive. The Russians had a saying: 'If you want to be warm, you have to suffer the smoke.'¹⁷

Besides the stove, there were benches around the walls of the hut on which the peasants sat during the day and slept at night, on mattresses stuffed with hay or straw. Early tables were made of clay and immovable; movable tables made of wood date from the seventeenth century.¹⁸ Some huts had primitive stools, but usually there were no chairs or other furniture except a trunk (made of wood, leather, and/or woven bark, reeds and other materials) in which the peasants kept their extra and out-of-season clothing. There was a shelf protruding from one of the walls on which cooking utensils were kept. Clay pots were used for storage or mixing. There were typically three or four small windows (to prevent the heat from escaping) covered sometimes with mica (in huts of the more well-to-do), more often with parchment made of bull's bladder. (The huts of the poor had no windows at all.) The windows did not open, and during the coldest weather were covered over with mats to conserve heat. Also to conserve heat, the front door was low and narrow. Internal lighting, such as there was (and the peasant hut was always dark inside), was provided by splinters set alight or a burning wick in oil. Smoky, tallow candles were used first in the seventeenth century, and more expensive wax candles were used where there were many bees.¹⁹ Most huts had dirt floors, probably to facilitate cleaning up the excrement slurry during the coldest months when all the livestock as well as the peasant family lived full time in the hut.²⁰ Feeding the livestock over the winter was a real chore. Supplies often ran out during the late winter or early spring, and the cries of the starving animals could be heard throughout the village. Some animals were so weak by spring that they could not stand and had to be carried out to pasture.

Thanks to the prominence of rye in the Russian diet, the nutritional state of the 'average Russian' was almost certainly better than one might have imag­ined. That does not mean, however, that Russian nutrition was ideal. One

17 Richard Hellie, 'The Russian Smoky Hut and its Possible Health Consequences', RH 28 (2001): 171-84.

18 D. A. Baranov et al., Russkaia izba. Illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia. Vnutrenneeprostranstvo izby. Mebel' i ubranstvo izby. Domashniaia i khoziaistvennaia utvar' (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1999), pp. 114-15.

19 Ibid., pp. 306-7.

20 Ibid. This volume is concerned primarily with the period 1700-1825, but much of it is relevant to the earlier period because traditional life changed very slowly. As this book notes, many huts did not have wooden floors even in the I920s-i930s (p. 55).

problem was an inadequate quantity of meat, caused primarily by the inabil­ity of Russians to winter sufficient numbers of livestock. Although the elite (clergy and laymen) had access to adequate quantities of fish, it is not clear that the 'average Russian' did. The quantity and variety of fruits and vegeta­bles available to the 'average Russian' was also inadequate. Thus Russians well may have been deficient in Vitamin A, niacin, cobalamin, Vitamin D, calcium and selenium. These deficiencies almost certainly made the Russians' bod­ies function at less than optimum levels, made them susceptible to disease and diminished their energy levels. These factors, combined with the impact of the smoky hut, contributed mightily in making the Russian the short­lived, lethargic, marginally productive, minimally creative (original) person he was.

Peasant clothing was simple, nearly all of it home-made out of homespun wool or flax/linen, sometimes hemp. On his head the peasant wore a cap (kolpak) or felt hat (shapka). The woman wore a kerchief. The man's coat was a caftan (kaftan), a woman's coat or long jacket was called a telogreia, a man's tunic was called an odnoriadka and his heavy-duty winter coat a sheepskin shuba. A man's basic garment was a shirt (rubakha, rubashka) and trousers (porty, shtany); a woman's a dress (rubakha, sarafan or letnik). Both sexes wore stockings (chulki), linden bast shoes (lapti) in summer, ordinary leather shoes in less clement weather (bashmaki (men's) or koty (women's)), and felt boots (valenki) in snowy weather. Gloves (perchatki) and mittens (rukavitsy) com­pleted the peasant outfit. Unmarried girls/women wore one braid, married women two. Women also wore earrings, beads and necklaces. Wealthy peas­ants, relatively few and far between, wore furs and expensive jewellery and their houses contained metal utensils and other items purchased in the market, even books.[53] Exhibiting wealth was risky, for the collective system of taxation provided an incentive for poorer peasants to shift their burden to the more prosperous.

The peasant's agricultural inventory was his personalproperty and its nature was determined by agricultural conditions and his crops. Because the podzolic soil was so thin, there was no need for a plough that would turn over a deep furrow. The famous two-pronged scratch plough (the sokha) was adequate to stir up the soil for planting. It was smoothed out by a harrow, a lattice of four or five boards crossing each other at right angles out of which protruded a peg at each intersection to break up the clods of dirt. Both the scratch plough and the harrow were light implements which could easily be pulled by one horse, unless it was so mal-nourished that it could barely walk. The horse was also employed to pull a sleigh in the winter, and a four-wheeled cart in the summer. The peasant also possessed a scythe and sickle for harvesting grain and cutting hay. It is likely that they were almost the only metal items in the peasant's possession, along with a flail, a chain at the end of a stick used to beat the grains out of the stalk. Instead of stacking the harvested grain in shocks to dry, the peasant probably put it into a drier, where moving air removed the moisture while keeping post-harvest rain, hail and snow off the cut grain. An axe completed the peasant's inventory; this he used for cutting down trees in the forest, fashioning logs for his house, cutting firewood for the stove and preparing other wooden objects. Peasants living near navigable bodies of water typically owned a variety ofvessels: canoes, barges, flat-bottomed boats and so on. Water mills are known to have appeared at least as early as the thirteenth

century.[54]

The nature of peasant farming changed significantly more than once during the period covered by the timespan of this chapter. At the end of the civil war between Grand Prince Vasilii II and first his uncles and then his cousins in 1453, population density throughout Muscovy was very low, which led to the initiation ofthe enserfment process. For our purposes right here, however, this meant that free land was everywhere, a fact observed by foreign travellers. This allowed slash-burn/assartage agriculture to be practised everywhere. While it involved quite a bit more strenuous labour than other forms of agriculture, it was also more productive. A peasant moved into a plot of forest and cut it down. He could use the felled trees for housing and fuel. The main point was, however, that he set fire to what remained after the logs had been removed. The resulting ashes produced a comparatively rich topsoil into which the peasant could broadcast his seeds and harvest a fairly high yield. The high soil productivity lasted about three years, and then the peasant moved on to another newly burned-over plot. It took about forty years for the soil to recover its fertility in this extensive slash/burn agriculture, but while there was free, forested land available, it was the most profitable form of farming available to the Russian peasant.

With the rise of Moscow and the consolidation of the Muscovite state in the decades after I453, internal wars ceased and the population began to expand. The years 1480-1570 are generally termed in the literature as a period of economic upsurge.[55] Extensive agriculture of the slash-burn type became less possible. That this was happening was readily observable by 1500.[56] By 1550 the movement from slash-burn agriculture[57] to the more intensive three-field system had progressed to the point that it was expressed in the Law Code (Sudebnik) (see Chapter 16).[58] In the traditional three-field system, one field was planted in the spring and harvested in the autumn; a second field was planted in the autumn and harvested the following summer; and the third field was fallow. What is here called 'the second field' produced the highest yields because there was no frantic rush to plant in the spring or to harvest in the autumn because of the short growing season, but rather leisurely sowing could be done in the summer/autumn and rather leisurely harvesting in the mid-summer. In the winter field the sown seeds typically sprouted before snowfall; in the absence of snow cover, the sprouts might freeze and die, but this happened infrequently enough so that it was not a major risk factor. Article 88 of the Sudebnik of 1550 permitted peasants who had moved on St George's Day (26 November), after the winter crop had been sown, to return in the following summer to harvest that crop.[59] Historians assume that the use of the three-field system was fairly widespread by 1550. Along with this went a system of strip-farming in which fields were divided into long, narrow strips. The strips were allotted to the peasants in a fashion which spread the risks of farming (insect infestations, blights, hail storms) equally among the peasants of a given locale.[60]

This, however, was not fated to last. Paranoid Tsar Ivan the Terrible launched his psychotic oprichnina in i565 in which he split the Muscovite tsardom into two parts: the oprichnina, which he ran himself, and the zemshchina (the rest of the state), run by the seven boyars who typically were in charge of the state when the sovereign was absent. Ivan's henchmen, the notorious oprichniki, among their many barbarous acts 'collected as much rent from their peasants in one year as usually was collected in ten years'.[61] By 1572 this put the peasants to flight, much as had done Vasilii II's civil war, as the agriculturalists moved north of the Volga,[62] east of Kazan' into the Urals and Siberia, south along the Volga and to some extent into the lands south of the Oka. The result was that ensuing censuses found up to 85 per cent of the heartland of Muscovy, especially around Moscow and Novgorod, abandoned and the right ofpeasants to move on St George's Day was gradually abolished.[63] Also often abandoned was the three-field system of agriculture, which was not to become widely used again until the second half of the eighteenth century.[64]

Slavery and the beginnings of enserfment

The vast majority of the population in the years 1462-1613 were peasants who were becoming serfs, perhaps 85 per cent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 per cent were slaves.[65] Relatively insignificant numbers of townsmen, clergy and government servicemen comprised the rest of the population. This balance reflected the very low productivity of agriculture, which required nearly every­one to farm. Even townsmen, most clergymen and even many servicemen raised much of their own food.

As discussed in Chapter 16, slavery was one of the oldest social institutions in Russia and one of the major concerns of law. As a proportion of all law, the quantity dedicated solely to slavery can only be described as staggering. Slavery in fact was so important in Russia that a special central governmental office was created around 1550 to deal solely with slavery matters. Russia was the sole country in history to have one governmental department in the capital devoted solely to the issue of slavery. Major changes in the institution occurred during the period covered by this chapter. As has been discussed, society was in chaos after the reign of Ivan IV and Boris Godunov, acting in the name of the mentally challenged Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, tried to stabilise the situation by history-making measures enacted in the 1590s involving both slaves and peasants. The one involving slaves radically changed the nature of the institution. By this time the major slavery institution was limited service contract slavery (kabal'noe kholopstvo). A Russian - typically a low-energy, low- initiative down-and-outer - approached another Russian and asked him to buy him. The transaction was phrased in terms of a loan: the 'borrower' took a sum (perhaps 1, 2 or 3 roubles) from the 'lender' and agreed to work for him for a year in lieu of paying interest on the loan.[66] In ancient Parthia, this was known as antichresis. If the borrower failed to repay the loan in a year, he became the full slave of the lender. Almost no such 'loans' were ever repaid, and both parties realised from the start that the transaction was in reality a self-sale into perpetual slavery. Over the course of the sixteenth century limited service contract slavery replaced full slavery as the major relief institution for those desiring to sell themselves into slavery. The difference was that kabal'noe kholopstvo offered hope for a year of manumission, whereas full slavery from the outset was for life and hereditary. The trouble for the government was that slavery usually took an individual off the tax rolls, which the government did not like. Therefore on 25 April 1597, the typically activist government, by fiat, changed the nature of kabal'noe kholopstvo. The sale/loan was no longer for a year, but for the life of the creditor. Upon the death of the creditor, the slave was freed - presumably to go back onto the tax rolls. What the government did not understand was that the dependency created by slavery made it impossible for the freedman to exist on his own, with the result that he soon sold himself back into slavery, often to the heirs of the deceased. The government was unable to 'solve' this problem until Peter the Great by fiat in 1724 converted all household slaves into household serfs (all males, from newborns to decrepit geriatrics, were called 'souls') who all had to pay taxes.

The farming peasantry were also in chaos as a result of Ivan's psychotic reign. Serfdom dates back to the 1450s, with the introduction of St George's Day (26 November) for indebted monastery peasants, who could only move on that date.[67] The Sudebnik of 1497 extended St George's Day to all peasants.

Then in the i580s the government began to repeal the right of peasants to move on St George's Day who lived on the lands of selected landholders. In 1592 this prohibition was extended 'until further notice' to all peasants. The purpose was to stabilise the labour force of the provincial middle service- class cavalry, who could not render military service in the absence of peasant rent-payers. Thus with a flourish of the pen Boris Godunov's hypertrophic government changed the legal status of more than nine-tenths of the Russian population. Enserfment, especially as it descended into a slave-like condition, unquestionably would have been impossible without the fact that the Russians were accustomed to enslaving their own people.

Boris did not end his 1590s social legislative spree with the above. He added another provision to the enserfment decree, a statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive serfs. There was no statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive slaves, but Boris decided that hunters of fugitive serfs should be given five years to locate their chattels and file a suit for their recovery. Five years seems like a long time, but Russia is a big country, and was getting bigger all the time as mentioned above. Once a Russian serf had fled into any of the areas outside the Volga-Oka mesopotamia, finding him became almost impossible. Various elements of the Russian government wanted all of those areas inhabited by scarce Russians, and in fact encouraged migration into those areas. The struggle for scarce labour resources had yet another element: serfs could and did flee not only to the new territories, but also to lands of larger lay and monastic landlords. Such magnates (in the 1630s called 'contumacious people' - sil'nye liudi, literally, 'strong people') had estates in many places, and could move fugitives from one estate to another so that a pursuer could never find them. The five-year statute of limitations was a licence to the magnates and regional recruiters to recruit the peasant labour force of the Moscow heartland middle service-class cavalry. The sequel to this is discussed in Chapter 23.

In i607 Tsar Vasilii IV Shuiskii promulgated an important edict on fugitive serfs and slaves.³⁶ The first important thing was that he linked the two cate­gories of population. Secondly, he extended the statute of limitations to fifteen years for the hunting down and filing suits for fugitive serfs. The linking of serfs with slaves by Shuiskii was an important landmark in the abasement of the Russian peasantry. The St George's Day measures 'only' bound the peasants to the land so that they would be there as rent-paying fixtures for the next

et al. (eds.), Pamiatniki istorii krest'ian XIV-XIX vv. (Moscow: N. N. Klochkov, 1910),

pp. 14-50. The literature on enserfment is vast. See the bibliography for additional titles.

36 Hellie, Muscovite Society, pp. 137-41.

tenants of the land, rather like immovable structures left by one holder of the land for the next one. This was 'legalised' by the state in two forms of state charters. One, issued to the landholder, called a vvoznaia gramota, informed him that the peasants of such-and-such a parcel were to pay him traditional rent. In the first half of the sixteenth century, it is likely that the landholder did not even collect the rent himself, but a third party did. The second charter, called an 'obedience charter' (poslushnaia gramota), was issued to the peas­ants, and informed them that so-and-so was now the holder of the land and that they should pay him the traditional rent. But Ivan IV during his mad oprichnina introduced a dramatic change into the 'obedience charter': instead of ordering the peasants to pay traditional rent, they were ordered to 'obey their landholder in everything'. This gave the landholders complete control over their peasants. This was responsible for much of the peasant chaos that led to the repeal of the right to move on St George's Day. But for the long run, the personal abasement of the peasant was equally important. The 1607 Shuiskii decree enhanced this abasement, which was adumbrated by the simultaneity of the 1592 and 1597 decrees changing the status of the slaves and the peasants.

The period 1462-1613 witnessed intervention by the 'Agapetus state' (see Chapter 16) in the lives of its subjects unparalleled in previous history. Much of the institution of slavery was radically changed, while the freedom of the peasantry was radically abased. At the end of his reign Peter the Great abolished slavery by converting slaves into serfs. Peter's heirs by the end of the eighteenth century converted the serfs into near-slaves, the property of their lords (owners). The 'Agapetus state' was so powerful because it claimed and exercised control over - almost without opposition - two of the three basic factors of the economy, all the land and labour.[68] This had little impact on peasant methods of farming or material culture, but it laid down the course for Russian history until 1991.

Towns and commerce

DENIS J. B. SHAW

'It remaineth that a larger discourse be made of Moscow, the principal city of that country - Our men say that in bigness it is as great as the city of London with the suburbs thereof. There are many and great buildings in it, but for beauty and fairness nothing comparable to ours. There are many towns and villages also, but built out of order and with no handsomeness: their streets and ways are not paved with stone as ours are, the walls of their houses are of wood, the roofs for the most part are covered with shingle boards.'[69]

Richard Chancellor's somewhat disdainful description ofthe city of Moscow, which he first visited in 1553, fairly reflected European reactions to that and other Russian towns in the period before Peter the Great. Russian towns were different from, and much inferior to, the towns of Europe. This is a tradition which has endured down to our own day Both pre-1917 Russian and modern Western scholars have contrasted the commercial dynamism and political liberties enjoyed by European towns in the medieval and early modern periods with the limited and restricted commercial development and politically repressed character of Russian towns at that time.[70] Few if any Russian towns developed the 'urban community' described for the medieval European city by Max Weber.[71] Such an emphasis, needless to say, ultimately stems from a much broader issue: to what extent has Russia ever been, or could it hope to become, European?

Whilst specialists on Russia thus focused on the extent to which Russian towns exhibited fully urban characteristics, students of comparative urbanism increasingly challenged some of the assumptions lying behind such debates. Thus the meaning of concepts like Weber's 'urban community' or the distinc­tive 'urban civilisation' which supposedly characterised medieval and early modern European cities has been questioned with particular reference to their empirical applicability and the degree of generalisation involved.⁴ Marx­ists have argued that, far from being islands of freedom in a sea of serfdom as many earlier scholars had asserted, towns were in fact important bolsters of the feudal nexus.⁵ Furthermore, the assumption that European cities (and European modernity more generally) should be regarded as the standard against which cities (and modernities) elsewhere should be measured has been widely challenged.⁶ Some scholars urge that what should be compared is not cities as separate units but the evolution of urban networks and hier­archies acting as integrators of entire societies and thus as measures of social development.⁷

This chapter will refrain from entering the debate about the 'essential' nature of urbanism and approach Russian towns less as individuals than as interconnected nodes within a network having complex interlinkages with society, economy and government.⁸ The emphasis, in other words, will be less on towns as commercial foci and more on their multifunctional character. But their significance as commercial centres will also be highlighted before the chapter opens out into a broader discussion of commerce in this period.

1984), pp. 3-13; Don Martindale, 'Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City', in Weber, The City, pp. 9-62; Murvar, 'Max Weber's Urban Typology'.

4 Paul Wheatley 'The Concept of Urbanism', in P. Ucko, R. Tringham and G. W Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement and Urbanism (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 601-37; Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 3-15.

5 J. Merrington, 'Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism', in R. Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 170-95; R. H. Hilton, 'Towns in English Feudal Society', in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Collected Essays ofR.H. Hilton (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 175-86.

6 V Liebermann, 'Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Different Areas', in V Lieberman (ed.), BeyondBinary Histories: Reimagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 19-102; G. Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia, 1750-1800 and Pre-Modern Periodization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

7 Ibid.; deVries, European Urbanization,^^. 3-13; G.William Skinner, 'Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China', in G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 211-49.

8 de Vries, European Urbanization, p. 9.

The urban network

The number and relative importance of Russian towns in this period is a matter of uncertainty, a reflection of the patchy and ambiguous nature of the sources. The Russian term for 'town' (gorod) meant little more than a fortified settlement. In the sixteenth century the official sources generally used the word to refer to a place having some administrative and military significance. There is no definitive list of towns in the sources, and scholars of Russian urbanism have been forced to scour such records as cadastres (pistsovye knigi), military rolls and accounts, decrees, chancellery documents, charters and patents to try to construct a definitive list.[72] It is on the basis of such sources that scholars such as Nevolin, Chechulin, Smirnov and more recently French and others have calculated the number of towns.[73] French argues that there were at least 130 towns in the Russian network at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and implies that Chechulin's total of 218 towns existing at some point in the century (not counting Siberian towns) may be slightly too low for the century's end. However, the absence of agreement on how many of these constituted 'real' towns (for example, how many had genuine commercial functions) leaves plenty of scope for dispute.

The unification of the Russian state led to the decline or disappearance of many fortress towns located along the boundaries between the different prin­cipalities. But these losses were more than compensated by the addition of new towns to the network as suggested by the totals given above. Some of the gains came from the acquisition of already existing towns in newly conquered terri­tories along the western border and down the Volga (Kazan', 1552; Astrakhan', 1556). In the west, in addition to towns in the Russian principalities annexed by Muscovy (Novgorod, 1478; Tver', 1485; Pskov, 1510), significant territories were taken from Lithuania and Livonia including the towns ofViaz'ma (1494), Toropets, Chernigov and others (1503), Smolensk (1514) and Narva (1558-81). In 1492 Ivan III built the fortress of Ivangorod on the opposite bank of the River Narva to try to overawe the latter city and entice away its trade. Other forts were built further south along the border. In the north few new towns appeared in this period, but important foundations included Pustozersk, at

the mouth of the Pechora (1499) and Archangel at that of the Northern Dvina

(1583-4).

By far the most significant town founding in the period occurred as a conse­quence of the Russian occupation of the Volga valley. Upstream from Kazan' several new towns (Vasil'sursk, Sviiazhsk, probably Cheboksary) had been founded before the former's capture in 1552. The occupation of the valley down to Astrakhan' was secured by the establishment of fortress towns at Samara (1586), Tsaritsyn (1588) and Saratov (1590). Meanwhile further west, and following the devastating Tatar raid on Moscow in 1571, the government decided to try to overawe the principal Tatar tracks or invasion routes from the open steppe grasslands by building new military towns at Livny, Voronezh (both 1585), Elets (1592), Kursk, Belgorod (both 1596) and several other places.¹¹ East of the Volga, new territories were also now open to Russian occupation as a result of the fall of Kazan'. In 1586, in the same year that they built Samara, the Russians established Ufa, and also Tiumen' in western Siberia, followed by Tobol'sk a year later. Verkhotur'e was founded in the Urals in 1598, and Turiisk two years after. Several towns were constructed along the Ob, culminating in the founding of Tomsk nearby in 1604.¹²

The sixteenth century was thus a dynamic period for the founding of new towns, and especially the latter half. The same cannot be said of the commercial life of towns for which the second half of the century was to prove particularly difficult. Unfortunately the available statistics make tracing the expansion and contraction of towns over this period especially problematic and there are severe uncertainties about urban population levels and the character of the urban hierarchy. There can, however, be no doubt that the pinnacle of the urban hierarchy was Moscow. In the absence of cadastres and census books for the city, population estimates rely upon crude guesses by travellers like Herberstein, who related the tale that a recent official count had recorded 41,500 houses in the city.¹³ This has been interpreted as referring more correctly to the number of adult males in the city. For the end of the century a total population of 80,000-100,000 has been suggested.¹⁴ If this is accurate, it means that Moscow was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time (only nine

11 D.J. B. Shaw, 'Southern Frontiers of Muscovy, 1550-1700', in J. H. Bater and R. A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 117-42.

12 V I. Kochedatov Pervye russkie goroda Sibiri (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1978), pp. 20-1.

13 Sigismund von Herberstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557, ed. B. Picard, (London: J. M. Dent, I969), p. 20.

14 M. N. Tikhomirov, Rossiia v XVI veke (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 66; Istoriia Moskvy, vol. 1, Period feodalizma, XII - XVII vv. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1952), p. 179; Ocherki istorii SSSR, period feodalizma, konets XVv. -nachalo XVIIv. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1955), p. 266. Herberstein's visits were made in 1517-18 and 1526-7.

West European cities had populations in excess of 80,000 in 1600: London, Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Rome, Palermo, Seville and Lisbon).[74] Moscow was, ofcourse, the seat ofthe tsar and government with all the activities which these implied. It was also a major commercial and trading centre, a pivot of military and religious activity and much besides. In other words, it was the geographical focus of the realm.

By comparison with Moscow, other Russian cities paled in size and impor­tance, though the evidence on population sizes is extremely patchy. Nov­gorod, for example, was no longer the leading commercial centre it had been before its annexation by Moscow in 1478 but nevertheless retained a signifi­cant role at least down to its sacking by Ivan IV's oprichniki in 1570. According to Chechulin's calculations, Novgorod had over 5,000 households in the late 1540s which, he believed, indicated a population of over 20,000.[75] Kazan' on the newly annexed south-eastern frontier had considerable commercial and military significance when it was described in a cadastre in the late 1560s. From this source Chechulin estimated a population of up to 15,000.[76] Other size­able towns included Smolensk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Pskov, Kaluga, Kolomna, Vologda, Kostroma and Kholmogory. All appear to have contained at least 500 households at various points in the sixteenth century.[77] Iaroslavl', which was to become a major centre in the seventeenth century, may also have been in their number but the sources are uncertain.[78] Apart from the capital, therefore, Russia's larger towns included the centres of formerly and recently independent states or principalities (Kazan', Novgorod and Pskov), provincial centres (Nizhnii Novgorod, Kaluga, Kolomna, Vologda and Kostroma), and peripheral or border towns whose populations reflected the size oftheir com­merce and/or of their garrisons (Novgorod, Smolensk, Kazan', Pskov and possibly Nizhnii Novgorod). Compared to Western Europe, Russian towns were relatively small at this time, with the important exception of Moscow. Russia lacked sizeable regional centres compared to Western Europe (though it was not unlike England and Scotland in this respect).[79] However, Gilbert Rozman argues that the settlement hierarchy reflected a society which was moving beyond a process of purely administrative integration to a stage where commercial integration was becoming more significant. In his view, Russia had thus reached a stage of development at which countries like England and France had arrived 100-150 years previously.²¹

While cadastres, census books and similar materials can give us an idea of a town's relative size at a particular point, very rarely are they frequent or comparable enough to allow growth or decline to be accurately gauged in this period. Other kinds of evidence can, however, give some notion of general trends. The issue of to what extent Russian towns flourished or declined has been debated, with Soviet historians inclined to take an optimistic view as towns participated in the move towards the 'all-Russian market' postulated by Lenin for the seventeenth century. Clearly, in and of itself, the proliferation in the number oftowns described above does seem to point towards some degree ofurban dynamism. At the same time, from at least the middle ofthe sixteenth century, many towns appear to have suffered, especially in central and north­western Russia. Various kinds of evidence seem to point to the view that Russia shared in the economic upswing which apparently affected much of Europe from the latter part of the fifteenth century. But from the middle of the next century conditions in Russia, unlike Europe, seem to have deteriorated. The most frequently cited reason for this situation is the policies of Ivan IV.²² Ivan's plunging ofthe country into the long and disastrous Livonian war (1558-83) and his reign of terror known as the oprichnina (1565-72) both brought destruction on a large scale with few areas escaping completely. The sacking of Novgorod and Pskov (1570), the Crimean Tatar attack on Moscow (1571), the devastation of large areas ofthe countryside, and the large-scale migrations of peasants are some of the more memorable episodes in this grim period. Then, following Ivan's death (1584) and a brief period of recovery, the 1590s witnessed further war culminating in the disasters of Boris Godunov's reign (1598-1605) including famine in 1601-3, and the period of anarchy and warfare known as the Time of Troubles (1604-13).

Giles Fletcher, who visited Russia in 1588-9, was a witness of some of the depredations which resulted from the troubles of Ivan IV's reign. In Moscow, for example, he noted that 'there lieth waste a great breadth of ground which before was well set and planted with buildings -', the after-effects of the Tatar raid of 1571. Having mentioned a handful of other places, he asserts that 'the other towns have nothing that is greatly memorable save many ruins within their walls, which showeth the decrease of the Russe people under this govern­ment'. In the same vein he notes the desertion of many villages and towns, for

21 Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia, pp. 33-42, 56-66.

22 Richard Hellie, 'Foundations of Russian Capitalism', SR 26 (1967), 148-54.

example between Vologda and Iaroslavl', where 'there are in sight fifty derevni or villages at the least, some half a mile, some a mile long, that stand vacant and desolate without any inhabitant'. According to Fletcher, his informants, some better travelled than he, assured him that 'the like is in all other places of the realm'.[80]

Whether or not Fletcher exaggerated, other evidence confirms his general picture of economic and social depression in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Thus Eaton has estimated that the average number of urban taxpaying households per town declined from 231 to 151, orby35 per cent, between about 1550 and the 1580s; in 25 towns for which household data are available for both periods he calculates an overall decline of 61 per cent.[81] Kolomna, which is believed to have had a population of up to 3,000 in the 1570s, had only 12 urban taxpaying households whilst 54 dwellings were recorded as empty and there were 249 vacant lots. Serpukhov in 1552 had 623 taxpaying households and 143 vacant lots; Murom in 1566 recorded 587 and 151 respectively, and by 1574 only 111 taxpaying households, 157 empty dwellings, and 520 vacant lots.[82] Economic depression is believed to have struck the north-west especially hard, since this was the region where much of the warfare and disorder occurred. But there can also be little doubt that matters varied regionally and that the losses incurred in the centre and the north-west were to some degree balanced by gains on the new peripheries. Voronezh, for example, was founded in 1585 and by the time of its first cadastre in 1615 it had a population of over 800 households including those of 76 urban taxpayers and 87 monastic dependents, most of the latter engaged in trade and crafts. The town had 63 trading stalls (lavki) and half stalls, 23 of which were run by state servitors.[83] Clearly many of the inhabitants of the town had migrated from further north, perhaps in part fleeing from economic difficulties being experienced elsewhere in the country.

Urban society and administration

In much the same way that de Vries regards early modern European cities as points of co-ordination for a whole range of social activities,[84] Russian towns (other than the most insignificant) were multifunctional nodes performing a series of vital tasks in the developing and expanding state. Thus they were administrative centres, points of control over the surrounding territory. They were military and defensive nodes, directed against both internal and external foes. They were commercial foci at various scales. Most ofthem had handicraft and manufacturing activities. All had a religious role. And not a few had intensive gardening and even agrarian functions. Towns were not only vital to the needs of the state but they also had a significant part to play in wealth creation. They were thus places in which many social actors were keenly interested.

The multifunctional character of the town was reflected in its physical mor­phology.[85] The typical sixteenth-century Russian town had a fortified core, usually called the kremlin (kreml') or gorod, which contained the major admin­istrative and military offices and sometimes the residences of the elite or even of a portion of the population. Outside this was the commercial suburb or posad, often again walled and sometimes subdivided by walls into various sections. Beyond the posad, and either adjacent to it or at times separated from it by open space, there might be other suburbs (fortified or not, and sometimes referred to by the term slobody). Occasionally the whole settle­ment or a major part of it might be contained within a single wall which was sometimes described as the ostrog.[86] The typical town therefore had a cellular structure. The morphology of the town will be further explored in Chapter 25.

Urban social structure was usually complex. Towns with any degree of commercial life generally had a population of'taxpaying' or posad people. This part of the population earned its basic livelihood from handicrafts, trade and similar activities and, for the privilege of being allowed to pursue these activities in towns, they were subject to a tax burden (tiaglo) imposed by the state. As well as paying taxes, the tiaglo might include the obligation of performing various services, such as acting as customs officials, guards, watchmen and the like, which obligations could be exceedingly troublesome. The tiaglo was generally imposed on the taxpaying community as a group (sometimes structured into several groups) who were then obliged, by means of an assembly (skhod) or other mechanism to elect officials to administer the burden. The posad community, however, was by no means a group of equals. Rather members were differentiated according to their wealth. At one extreme, in Moscow, were the gosti, the richest and most significant merchants in the realm who were engaged in state service at the highest level. Also wealthy and performing important tasks forthe government were members ofthe Moscow 'hundreds' - by the late sixteenth century, the gostinaia sotnia (merchants' hundred) and the sukonnaia sotnia (cloth hundred). Most members of the posad were divided into three ranks (stati) according to their wealth, but the details seem to have varied from town to town. Also resident in the posad in many cases were cottars (bobyli), labourers and others who seem to have earned a living through lowly trading activities, acting as yard keepers, through casual labour and by other means. These people do not appear to have been full members of the posad community but paid a quit-rent (obrok) to the state. Posad people were most common in towns of the north-west, north and centre although, as we have seen, many in the centre had fled south by the latter part of the sixteenth century. There, however, they often joined the service ranks, a social transition made much easier by the fluid life of the frontier.

Members of the posad, and the land that they occupied, were designated 'black', meaning that such persons were liable to the tiaglo. But not all traders and craftspeople in the sixteenth-century town were designated 'black'. Others were 'white', meaning that they lived in suburbs owned by members of the higher nobility, middle-ranking servicemen, the Church, monasteries and oth­ers. Such people were relieved of the tiaglo on the grounds that they owed their obligations not to the state but to their lords. Many towns had such 'white' suburbs (often called slobody), which were in many ways the remnants ofpast political subdivisions in Russia when princes, monasteries, high churchmen and others customarily derived income from their urban possessions. From the time of Ivan III the tsars had been trying to eradicate them on the grounds that they denied important revenues to the state, while the 'black' people generally resented them because of their tax privileges and the unfair competition which they consequently promoted. Also a problem for the tsars were the private towns, often situated on monastic or patrimonial estates. Smirnov calculated that there were about fifteen fortified private towns in the sixteenth century, reduced to about ten in the first half of the seventeenth.[87]

An important element in the populations of many towns (and also des­ignated 'white') were the military men, for the most part members of the lower-ranking service contingents, including musketeers (strel'tsy), cossacks and others. Unlike middle-ranking servitors (deti boiarskie and others), the lower ranks either had no land and were paid in cash or kind, or they held land in communal fields with others in the same group. Few had serfs or other dependents. Moscow had a large element of service people in its popu­lation. They were less common in the north and parts of the north-west, but very common in the southern frontier towns where they often constituted the biggest element of the urban population. Here, in addition to their mili­tary duties, servicemen engaged in agriculture with their families, and many engaged in trades and crafts as well. They settled in their own suburbs close by the fortified towns where they were administered by their own regimental structures and communal organisations.

Towns also had other groups in their populations. Members of the clergy, monks, monastic and church servitors were an important element, in addi­tion to the already-mentioned monastic dependents living in 'white places'. Moscow naturally contained all social ranks, from the tsar downwards. The social elite tended to live in the capital where they maintained their homes but also held estates elsewhere. Their life in the city was eased by the ministra­tions of dependents - serfs, slaves and others. Some other towns, Kazan' for example, also had members of the middle-ranking service class living in town where they had services to perform. It was more common, however, for such groups to live on their country estates, but they were generally required to maintain dwellings ('siege dwellings') in town, officially for occupation during times of disturbance or conflict. The dwellings were usually cared for in the absence of the owner by a housekeeper (dvornik), often a slave or other depen­dent who frequently engaged in commercial activity. Other groups included non-Russians (European soldiers, ambassadors, merchants and some others in Moscow; European merchants in some other places, notably Archangel and Vologda; Tatar and other minority representatives and groups in Moscow, Kazan', Astrakhan' and other towns), and non-official elements (runaways, beggars, criminal groups).

There is no sense in which the disparate members of the urban population constituted an 'urban citizenry' or could provide any unified political voice or identity for the town. Each group was administered separately, with different interests, and the only unity was provided by the town governor who repre­sented the tsar and whose remit extended over the nearby region as well as the town. In this sense, then, the town barely represented a separate entity from its surrounding milieu, was disunited within itself and fell very much under the aegis of the state. Liberal scholars of the past thus lamented the lack of commercial opportunity, entrepreneurial spirit and civic freedom which, they believed, flowed from the imposition upon towns of the centralised, Mus­covite model of control rather than a more 'democratic' model like the one they postulated for early Novgorod.[88]

From the point of view of a hard-pressed and financially constrained Mus­covite state, however, strict control had many advantages. The problem was that the state was barely in a position to enforce it. The sixteenth century was a time of transition between the fragmented polity which had characterised the post-Mongol period and the more centralised system inaugurated by Peter the Great. As towns had been absorbed by the expanding Muscovite state their princes or other rulers had been replaced by the tsar's representatives (namest- niki), often members of the Muscovite elite. The latter were maintained by a system of 'feedings' (kormlenie) or payments and provisions derived from local sources. Similar payments were made to subordinate officials. As centralisa­tion proceeded, these payments were regulated more strictly, and certain of the functions of the namestnik were transferred to other centrally appointed officials. But some namestniki proved disturbingly independent, incompetent and corrupt, influenced by oscillations in the power of elite families at court. From the 1530s, therefore, various reforms were inaugurated. The first, the guba reform (1538-9), removed the duty of suppressing lawlessness and dis­order from the hands of the namestniki into those of elected local officials. A new law code (1550) regulated provincial administration. The 1550s wit­nessed the inauguration of new local officials to oversee tax collection and civil administration and then, in 1555-6, the abolition of kormlenie and with it provincial administration by the namestniki.[89] What eventually replaced the latter was a system of administration by military governors (voevody) based on the towns and responsible for civil and military affairs within their towns and the surrounding districts (uezdy). Military governors were usually mem­bers of the service class rather than of the central elite. The new system was pioneered on the southern frontier before the end of the sixteenth cen­tury. However, strict and systematic central control of the towns and their subsidiary districts was vitiated, among other things, by the chaotic struc­ture of central government departments (prikazy) which supervised different facets of urban life, and towns in different locations, in a seemingly random fashion. This was a problem which was to persist until the reforms ofPeter the Great.[90]

Urban and regional commerce

The great majority of Russians during this period were peasants, involved in a largely subsistence economy and resorting to the market only where it became necessary to earn money to pay taxes and duties or to purchase essen­tial goods. Many town dwellers also supported themselves to greater or lesser degree by engaging in agriculture and various kinds of primary production. Wealthy landowners, including those engaged in political, administrative, mil­itary and other tasks in Moscow and lesser towns, could often rely on their serfs and other dependents to supply their needs from their country estates. Other urban dwellers, however, including many administrative and military person­nel, clergy, merchants, traders and craftsmen, were more or less dependent on the market. The rise and growth of towns, and particularly the stimu­lus provided by the burgeoning state and its growing needs in raw materials and manufactured goods, were important impulses to market and commer­cial activity. Especially significant in this regard was the role of Moscow, as commercial as well as political and administrative centre of the country and, as has been seen, dominant over all other towns in the realm. The major communications routes (rivers and roads) radiated from the capital to all the populated parts of the territory, and also beyond via ports and frontier posts. A number of scholars have thus seen the basis for an 'all-Russian market' with Moscow as its nodal point being established in this period.[91] The significance of the international market place in Russia's development, whilst impossible to establish with any certainty because of scanty evidence, should probably not be exaggerated. Whilst Russian state-building was clearly partly a response to the dangers and challenges posed by potential or actual enemies beyond the frontiers, the country was unable to benefit fully from the expanding commercial network based on Western Europe and the North Atlantic which was becoming apparent about this time.[92] Not only was Russia geographically peripheral to many of the new developments, but access was hindered by poor communications and its limited coastline.[93]

By clustering around the towns commerce and manufacture were able to benefit from the military protection, access to important officials and geo­graphical nodality available in urban centres. At the same time the state itself encouraged such patterns since it eased the problems of regulation and tax col­lection. Moreover, particularly from the time of Ivan III (1462-1505) the tsars pursued a regular policy of relocating wealthy merchants and craftspeople from peripheral towns to Moscow and other places. Such crude actions seem to have been motivated more by political than by economic considerations and they may well have been to the detriment of commerce. But they do indicate the importance accorded by the tsars to commerce in general and to merchants and craftspeople in particular. The financial significance of the towns to the state was, of course, one of the reasons why the latter attempted to eradicate the privately owned suburbs and towns from the fifteenth century onwards.

Crafts and manufactures were a key feature of the posad of many towns, as well as of many of the 'white' suburbs. Moscow in particular was char­acterised by numerous suburbs owned by the court, the state and private owners (including the Church) whose inhabitants lived not (or not only) by selling their products on the marketplace but by fulfilling the orders of their respective masters. Thus Moscow had its armaments manufacturers (most notably, the cannon foundry, established by Ivan III) and other metalworkers, some of whom were engaged in fine metalwork for the court, those engaged in textile and clothes production, the preparation of food, workers in wood and stone, those engaged in specialist crafts like icon-painting, printing and jewellery manufacture, and many others, often directly serving the needs of court, government or private landowner. But the key point is that the presence of manufacture did not necessarily imply market relations. Moscow's court (or palace and treasury) suburbs originally developed to supply the needs of the court and the government and worked in response to specific orders. Their inhabitants fulfilled the latter on the basis of their obligations as residents of the court suburbs. By the late sixteenth century, however, many of these people seem to have been working for the market also (which might include the state as purchaser) like other residents of the 'black' and 'white' suburbs.

Crafts and manufactures generally took place in the urban suburbs in the homes of the various artisans. The sources rarely permit an insight into the location of different kinds of manufacturing and craft activities in different towns, but in Moscow's case it seems that a few of the suburbs were specialised in this sense, including some of the court suburbs.[94] A prominent feature of many towns was the trading square (torg), usually located at a central and acces­sible point. In Moscow's case this was to the east of the Kremlin by the Moscow River on the site of the present-day Red Square, sometimes supplemented in winter by trading on the actual ice of the river itself. Much of what is now the open space of the square was occupied in the sixteenth century by a series of specialised trading rows (riady) consisting of individual shops (lavki), stalls and sometimes cellars and stores owned or rented by merchants, craftsmen, Church and monastic dependents and others. Shops were predominantly of wood, occasionally of stone. Sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Moscow rows seem to have included a Surozhskii row (trading mainly in foreign goods), shoe row, ironmongery row, cloth row, glove row, women's row, kaftan row, iron row, silver row, tinkers' row and numerous others. Towards the end of the century one or more trading courts (palaty) are recorded which incorporated shops and rows, including a merchants' bazaar (gostinnyi dvor) where visiting or foreign merchants could trade. The streets of the Kitai gorod, Moscow's oldest posad to the east of the trading square, had many trading establishments, including the houses of foreign merchants, whilst some trading bazaars and markets were located in other parts of the city. The latter included markets for horses, cattle, timber and construction materials.[95]

The detailed geographical patterns of trade and commerce across Russia in the sixteenth century cannot be established because of the lack of adequate source materials. The exact nature of the links between Moscow and the rest of the country, for example, is only known in part, thanks to the researches into often difficult source material by a handful of scholars.[96] The character of commerce and trade in Russia's regions and their towns is also known only in part. Very little is known about trade and commerce taking place below the level of the official towns, even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest the rise of trading centres and villages in various parts of the country from at least the fifteenth century. In the north-west, for example, the Novgorod cadas­tres record the existence of numerous small trading points or riady from this time whilst in the north similar places, often dealing in furs, were sometimes described aspogosti. The termposad could also be used to describe such centres, as in the case of Tikhvin Posad in the north-west.⁴⁰ Their inhabitants were often traders and craftspeople rather than agriculturalists. Many settlements of this type were monastic centres. Serbina collected evidence for a hundred or more small trading and commercial centres for various sixteenth-century dates in thirty-four districts (uezdy) of the Russian state. For the ninety-three centres for which it was possible to ascertain ownership, 82 per cent were monastic, a quarter of these belonging to one monastery, the Trinity-Sergius (Troitse-Sergiev), north-east of Moscow.⁴¹ What became of all these centres during the vicissitudes ofthe later sixteenth century is unknown, although it is apparent that several of those located in the north-west and near the western frontier disappeared, perhaps in consequence of the Livonian war.⁴²

Towns often acted as commercial foci for their surrounding regions and many manufactures were oriented to the meeting oflocal and everyday needs. These included the provision of food, clothing, footwear, fuel, building mate­rials, horses and so on to urban and rural inhabitants. In this sense urban economies bore the unspecialised character which was typical of early mod­ern towns throughout Europe. Where they also engaged in more specialised activities, this reflected their locations relative to such features as localised resources, important trading routes, coasts, borders and the like. One exam­ple was the fur trade which had once been the basis of the wealth of the city of Novgorod. By the second halfofthe fifteenth century Novgorod's leading role

Leningradskogo universiteta, 1973); K. N. Serbina, Ocherki iz sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi istorii russkogo goroda: Tikhvinskii posad v XVI-XVII vv. (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1951); Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I980).

40 French, 'The Early and Medieval Russian Town', pp. 265-6; R. A. French, 'The Urban Network of Later Medieval Russia', in Geographical Studies on the Soviet Union: Essays in Honor of Chauncy D. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geogra­phy, Research Paper no. 211, 1984), p. 45; Serbina, Ocherki; V N. Vernadskii, Novgorod i Novgorodskaia zemliav XV veke (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1961), p. 112.

41 K. N. Serbina, 'Iz istorii vozniknoveniia gorodov v Rossii XVI v.', in Goroda feodal'noi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, I966), pp. I35-8.

42 French, 'The Urban Network', p. 46.

had been eclipsed by competition from Moscow and new organising centres for the trade had become significant, such as Velikii Ustiug, Vologda,[97] and Tobol'sk in western Siberia.[98] Likewise the salt trade played an important part in the life of many northern centres as well as others towards the Urals and fur­ther south along the Volga.[99] Iron ore, fish or important agricultural products like flax and hemp helped define the characters of other centres. For towns in central Russia the looming presence of Moscow and the many demands of its marketplace were significant and helped mould the economies of towns across a wide area.

Long-distance and international trade

Referring to Europe's regional economies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Kristof Glamann has written that 'it is isolation, not interaction, that leaps to the eye'.[100] Everywhere the costs and risks of long-distance trade militated against its easy development. Travel by land was particularly prob­lematic. Only where the sea penetrated deeply into the European land mass, as it did most notably in the cases of the Mediterranean and the Baltic and their associated gulfs and bays, or where the land was crossed by great and easily navigable rivers, as was the case on the East European plain, was communica­tion somewhat easier. In the Baltic the rise of the Hanseatic League of north German cities had fostered commercial relations with the Russian principali­ties of Novgorod and Pskov in particular. Hanseatic dealings with the Russians were facilitated by their factories in such centres as Novgorod, Riga, Vitebsk, Polotsk and Dorpat.[101] But Russia's commercial relations were not only with the West. It also had extensive dealings with the East, whose importance for Russia had been enhanced by the latter's dependence on the Golden Horde for two and a half centuries. Communications in this direction were eased by the possibility of using navigable rivers like the Don, the Dnieper and, especially later, the Volga. In the opinion of Fekhner, Russia's commercial links with the East were more significant than its Western ones in the sixteenth century.[102]

Russia's trade with the West, and its policies with respect to that trade, were moulded by two major factors in this period. One was the opportu­nities for trade and development presented by the more dynamic European economies, particularly from the fifteenth century. The other, and not unre­lated to the first, was the growing political instability along Russia's western borders and the eastern Baltic as various powers began to compete for both territory and commercial advantage. Traditionally the German Hanse with its principal centre at Lubeckhad dominated the Baltic trade in such goods as grain, salt and salt fish, woollen cloth, furs, timber and forest products. Baltic products like furs, hides, honey, flax, hemp and wax were in constant demand in Central and Western Europe. From the early fifteenth century, however, the Hanse monopoly was increasingly challenged as the cities of the eastern Baltic attempted to bypass the dominance of Liibeck and its associates. A compli­cating factor was Moscow's annexation of Novgorod (1478) followed by Tver' (1485) and Pskov (1510). This appeared to threaten the balance of power in the region, especially when Ivan III's founding of Ivangorod opposite Narva in 1492 signalled Muscovy's commercial ambitions in the Baltic in no uncer­tain manner. Two years later, however, Ivan closed down the Hanse's major factory at Novgorod which proved a severe blow to those ambitions, hardly compensated for by Ivangorod and the opening up of Russian trade to other foreign merchants. Nevertheless the Muscovite state found itself in increasing need of Western goods as well as of Western technical expertise whilst Russian goods continued to find a market there. The situation therefore encouraged further contacts. In addition to the Baltic, Russia had links to the West via the traditional overland route through Lithuania and Poland though commerce was frequently interrupted by difficult political relations and border changes.[103]Smolensk, taken by the Russians in 1514, was an important trading centre in this direction.

The beginning of the Livonian war in 1558 proved an important milestone in Russia's commercial relationships with the West. The capture of Narva by Russian forces in that year meant that Russia now had a secure port on the Baltic which proved attractive to merchant vessels from many parts of northern and western Europe. In Kirchner's view, within ten years Narva had developed into one of the Baltic's wealthiest ports as well as one of its most significant political focal points.[104] Kirchner argues that, had the Russians retained Narva for longer than they did, it might have proved a most potent instrument in the country's Westernisation and that its loss to the Swedes in 1581 was a serious setback which was only rectified by Peter the Great. But this argument appears to give too much weight to the importance of a single port - compared to the disasters of the Livonian war, the oprichnina and the other calamities which befell Russia in the late sixteenth century Narva's loss appears a relatively minor affair. Nevertheless the loss did mean that Russia now lacked its own Baltic port, becoming dependent on Sweden for its Baltic trade links via Revel' and Narva. This fact severely restricted the country's Baltic connections down to Peter the Great's time.

It is in this context that the arrival of an English merchant fleet under Richard Chancellor at the mouth of the Northern Dvina on the White Sea in 1553 assumes significance. The English had participated to some degree in the Baltic trade but their northern venture had been directed more at discovering a north-east passage to Asia than at finding a new route to Russia. Nevertheless within two years an English Muscovy Company had been established to exploit this new commercial opportunity. The English were soon joined by the Dutch, the French and others. At first the trade involved a rather difficult transhipment and transit of goods to Kholmogory, situated some way up the river at a point which could not be reached by larger vessels. In 1583-4, however, the government, possibly responding to the loss of Narva, decided to build the new port of Archangel close to the river's mouth and accessible to the large sea-going ships used by the English and Dutch to negotiate the difficult passage around the North Cape. Within a few years, it seems, Archangel had become Russia's most important port.[105] According to Bushkovitch, the importance of Archangel lies not so much in the kinds of goods traded there but in the fact that Russia now had direct contact with West European states, bypassing the Swedish middleman. Statistics for the early years of trade at Archangel are almost completely missing, but some for the English Muscovy Company in the mid-1580s seem to show that agricultural products (flax and hempen cordage, tallow) were more important exports than the traditional forest products by this stage.[106] This may reflect some of the ways in which the Russian economy had changed during the course of the sixteenth century. Archangel, though remote, was destined to play an important role in Russian commerce down to the eighteenth century. Its communications links with central Russia via the Northern Dvina and Sukhona routes and then via Vologda and Iaroslavl' to Moscow, and its link to Siberia via Velikii Ustiug, Viatka and Perm', brought the benefits of long-distance trade to a significant number of northern centres.

The meagre sources recording Russian trade with countries to the south allow only the most general picture to be presented.[107] Down to 1530 or so the Ottoman Empire seems to have been the main trading partner and Russian merchants regularly travelled to Kaffa in Crimea either via the Don or another route. Later, routes through Poland and Moldavia to the Ottomans seem to have been favoured. But trade with the Ottomans appears to have declined from 1580 or so whilst that with Persia via the Volga and Astrakhan' flourished. Persian silks and other textiles were in demand by the Russians whilst Russian leather and furs travelled towards Persia. Many of the Volga towns and also Moscow itself benefited from this trade.

Conclusion

Sixteenth-century Russia and its towns underwent many vicissitudes. From apparent buoyancy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the towns, and commercial life in general, seem to have entered a more problematic phase after about 1560. Yet Russia continuedto expand territorially and this expansion was accompanied by the spread of urbanism and commercial activity into new regions. Unfortunately the nature of the source material is such as to make the detailed study ofsuch apparently contradictory processes extremely difficult. What can be said is that the growing network of towns was of central importance for the whole process of Russian state-building. Whilst the towns may not have compared with those of Western Europe in their commercial dynamism and civic development, their overall significance for Russia's quest to build a strong and expansive empire is clear.

The non-Christian peoples on the Muscovite frontiers

MICHAEL KHODARKOYSKY

When Ivan III was crowned as grand prince of Moscow in 1462, he became the ruler of a small but ambitious principality. First among equals, the grand prince ofMoscowwas one among several Russian Orthodox princes who ruled over the East Slavic lands. By the time of his death in 1505, Ivan III was the ruler of a sovereign Muscovite state which now subsumed most of the other Russian Orthodox principalities, and was an heir to the Byzantine emperors. The long reign of Ivan III marked two important phases in Muscovite history: political unification of the Russian Orthodox Christian lands under a single sovereign, and territorial expansion into the neighbouring lands populated by non-Christians.

The conquest in the north and north-east

The rise of Moscow had always been closely connected with its expansion in the north and north-east. There, the dense woods and numerous lakes and rivers of the north offered abundant supplies of precious furs and the primitive hunters of the region could be easily compelled to pay such tribute. From the late fourteenth century, Moscow was attempting to establish its control around the Dvina River in the north and in the Perm' region in the north-east. Moscow fought several wars with Novgorod over control of the northern region and its inhabitants who had already been paying tribute to Novgorod. Throughout the fifteenth century, Novgorod was forced to cede more and more of its northern colonies to Moscow until Novgorod's final defeat by Moscow in 1478 brought the region under Moscow's sway.[108]

The newly risen Orthodox Muscovy stood alone against Roman Catholic Sweden in the north-west and Lithuania in the west, the Islamic Golden Horde and its successor khanates of the Crimea and Astrakhan' in the south and Kazan' in the east. Except for the western borderlands which were overwhelm­ingly populated by the Christian communities, Moscow was surrounded by a vast non-Christian world. It is here, on its non-Christian frontiers, that Moscow enjoyed its major military successes, acquired new confidence, crystallised its own identity, and built its first empire.

Before the ultimate collapse of the Golden Horde in the early sixteenth century allowed for Moscow's expansion south and east, the natural direction of Muscovite expansion was the north-east. Moscow's increasing appetite for furs, salt and metals led to Muscovite penetration ofthe distant lands populated by various animist peoples.

In contrast to Novgorod, which was solely interested in exacting tribute from the native population of the north, the Muscovites undertook a full-scale colonisation of the region. The traditional landscape of the northern region, previously dominated by primordial wilderness and the hunting and fishing societies of the aboriginal population, was undergoing a thorough transfor­mation. New villages, forts, towns and monasteries emerged with the arrival of Russian peasants, soldiers, townsmen, traders and bureaucrats who were to settle and colonise the lands, and clergy seeking to convert the pagan popu­lation. North of the Urals, the construction of Pustozersk allowed Moscow to set foot in the arctic tundra populated by the Nenets (Samoed), while the Mus­covite towns of Ust'-Vym, Cherdyn' and Solikamsk had firmly put the Great Perm' region populated by Komi (Zyrians) under Moscow's control. Previ­ously sporadic missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church received a new impetus with the foundation in 1462 of the first large monastery in the Urals, the Ioanna-Bogoslovskii monastery in Cherdyn'.[109]

In the 1550s, the title ofthe recently crowned tsar of all Russia, Ivan IV began to include the territories east of the Urals, 'Obdor, Konda and all Siberian lands'. More often than not, such claims over new lands and peoples were premature, and Moscow's limited influence in the region continued to rely on exchange treaties with the natives. The Muscovites would have to wait until the 1590s, when the construction of the forts and towns of Berezov, Obdorsk and Verkhotur'e did indeed give Moscow greater control over lands east of the Urals mostly populated by the Khanty (Ostiaks) and Mansi (Voguls).[110]

By the middle of the sixteenth century the Muscovite expansion in the north­east was encroaching on the various peoples in the Volga-Kama Mesopotamia. These were the northern boundaries of the magnificent Muslim khanate of Kazan'. At the same time Moscow's expansion brought it directly to the gates of the city of Kazan', which remained the main barrier preventing Moscow's expansion east into Siberia and south towards the Caucasus.

The conquest of Kazan' and Astrakhan'

The conquest and annexation of the Kazan' khanate was one of the critical watersheds in Russian history. It set the stage for Moscow's relentless territorial aggrandisement throughout the following centuries. The upstart Muscovite state was rapidly turning into an empire, whose ruler claimed to be a Universal Emperor destined to rule over the diverse multitudes of pagan and Muslim peoples.

The long-term strategic and economic importance of the conquest of Kazan' was obvious: to control the riches of the mid-Volga area, to gain access to the wealth of Siberia and to dominate the commercial routes to Central Asia and China as well as Iran and the Caucasus. In other words, Kazan' was Moscow's window on the East.

But even greater was its immediate symbolic significance. Kazan' was one of the successor states of the Golden Horde and its rulers were the Chingisids, the direct descendants of Chingis khan. Given the centuries of humiliation and the grand princes' subservience to the khans of the Golden Horde, Moscow undoubtedly saw the conquest of Kazan' as an ultimate testimony to its newly won sovereignty, the superiority of its arms and, most importantly, a Divine Indication that Moscow had become the centre of Christendom.

Ofcourse, Ivan IV was not the only one claiming to be a Universal Christian ruler, and his Habsburg contemporaries, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his son Philip II, king of Spain, had laid similar claims prior to Ivan IV Is it possible that Ivan IV was, in fact, inspired by the Spanish feats which followed in short succession: the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, the swift conquest of America and its animist population and finally Charles V's conquest of Tunis in 1535, celebrated as a crusading triumph against the World of Islam?

Immediately after Kazan's conquest, Moscow showed a zeal similar to its Spanish counterpart: the mosques were destroyed and the Muslim population faced slaughter, expulsion, forced resettlement and conversion to Orthodox

Christianity.[111] Those who were converted at the initial stage of conquest become known as the old converts (starokreshchennye). Yet Moscow's rule over the conquered Muslim domains proved to be very different from that of Spain. Shortly after the annexation of Kazan', Moscow changed its policy to a mixture of carrots and sticks, choosing to rely more on accommodation and co-optation than on concerted violence. The Muscovite rulers never resorted to the sort of violent campaign which characterised the Spanish Reconquista: wholesale conversion to Christianity and massive expulsion.

Belatedly and unconvincingly Moscow also tried to make Kazan' into its own Reconquista, claiming that Kazan' had always been a patrimony of the Russian princes. Such a claim could justify the conquest to Muscovite and Western audiences, but it certainly found little appeal among the population of the Kazan' khanate and Muslims outside it. Unlike Spain, which was a part of a larger Roman Catholic Europe, Moscow was surrounded by powerful Islamic states and numerous non-Christian peoples whom it simply could not afford to antagonise, even less to dispense with. To legitimise its conquest among the population of the former Golden Horde, Moscow had to take the mantle of the khans and to claim to be an heir to their glory. It would not be the last time that Moscow's political theology of a crusading state destined to rule and convert the pagans and the Muslims was moderated by the reality mandating a more accommodating approach. For a long time to come, Moscow's pragmatic political concerns continued to coexist uneasily with its theological visions.

Annexation of the Kazan' khanate added numerous non-Christians to the Muscovite realm. These were the Mordva, Chuvash, Mari (Cheremis) and Udmurts (Votiaks) who comprised prosperous agricultural communities along the banks of the Volga, Viatka and Kama rivers and remained predominantly pagan. But most significantly, for the first time Moscow acquired large numbers of Muslims who were to become the subjects of the Christian tsar. These were Tatars mostly residing in and around Kazan' and Bashkirs in the territory east of the Volga.

The conquest and annexation of Kazan' in 1552 was the culmination of a long process: Moscow's incremental but determined territorial aggrandisement, driven above all by its growing economic and military might on the one hand and the increasing rivalry and debilitation among the successor khanates ofthe Golden Horde on the other. Moscow's expansion was also based on a complex set of its ever-changing relationships with the various constituent parts of the former Golden Horde.

Thus, it was no secret that Moscow's measured military successes between 1480 and 1509 were due to its alliance with the Crimea. Of course, what was de facto an alliance was seen in the world of steppe politics as a relationship of two unequals. The Crimean khans claimed to be the heirs to the heritage of the Golden Horde and referred to themselves as the Great Khans of the Great Horde (Ulug Ordugunun Ulug Khan), while continuing to regard the grand princes as the rulers of a subservient tributary state. Such indeed was the status of the Russian princes since the mid-thirteenth century, when they had been pressed into submission by the khans of the Golden Horde. The Muscovite grand princes tacitly agreed with such assumptions and never challenged them openly as long as the Crimea and Moscow had common enemies: Poland- Lithuania and the Great Horde.

In the middle of the fifteenth century several branches of the Chingisids seceded from the Golden Horde. They used traditional commercial hubs to establish new political centres on the fringes of the Golden Horde: thus emerged the khanates of the Crimea, Kazan', Astrakhan' and Siberia. What was left of the Golden Horde was the Great Horde, a nomadic confederation deprived of its vital economic centres, whose khans could claim to be the heirs of the Golden Horde with greater legitimacy than any other members of the Chingis dynasty and were therefore the main rivals of the Crimean khans. In 1502, having suffered the last devastating blow by the Crimeans, the Great Horde ceased to exist, its people and herds captured and brought to the Crimea. With their common antagonist gone, the interests of Moscow and Crimea began to diverge. In their effort to establish Crimean authority over the parts of the former Golden Horde, the Crimean khans sought to control Kazan', Kasimov and Astrakhan' and continued to demand tribute and military assistance from Muscovy.

In the meantime, Moscow had its own agenda. With its hard-won sovereignty, Moscow was in no mood to have the Crimea replace Sarai, the former residence of the khans of the Golden Horde. It slashed the payments of customary tribute, procrastinated in helping the Crimeans against Astrakhan' and, most importantly, zealously guarded its influence over Kazan' where, however intermittently and indirectly, Moscow had exercised control since 1487. When in 1519 Moscow installed in Kazan' Shah Ali, a member of the rival branch of the Chingisid dynasty and a nephew of Ahmed, the deceased khan of the Great Horde, the Crimean khan Muhammed Girey had had enough. In 1521, Muhammed Girey approached his arch-rival, the khan ofAstrakhan', and offered peace and alliance against Moscow. At the same time, pro-Crimean forces in Kazan' organised a coup and successfully installed on the throne Sahip Girey, the son ofthe deceased Crimean khan, Mengli Girey. The deferred hostil­ity which had characterised the relationship between Moscow and the Crimea since 1509 now turned into an open war. The military campaign launched against Muscovy from both the Crimea and Kazan' was one of the most dev­astating in the history of the Muscovite state.[112]

With the final dissipation of the Golden Horde, the steppe lost any sem­blance of central authority, which led to further turmoil and the emergence of new actors and new alliances. From the mid-i52os Moscow's military success was, in no small degree, based on its alliance with the Nogais, a powerful nomadic confederation of Turko-Mongol tribes. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Nogais found themselves under increasing pressure from other nomadic peoples, the Kazakhs and Kalmyks, and were forced to move further west, approaching the Muscovite zone of influence. De facto crucial players in the turbulent politics of the steppe, the Nogais had no claims to the throne of the Great Khan of the Horde because their rulers were not descendants of Chingis khan. The Nogais played a critical role in annihilating the Great Horde and assisting Moscow in the conquests of Kazan' and Astrakhan'.[113]

Moscow's annexation of Kazan' represented more than a military victory; it was also an ultimate challenge to the Crimean pretensions to rule and control the territories of the former Golden Horde in the name of the horde's khans. Vocabulary of images spoke louder than words. To celebrate his victory over Kazan', Ivan IV ordered the construction of the most unusual cathedral. Erected in the Red Square near the Kremlin, St Basil's cathedral, with its eclectic architecture, stood as the ultimate symbol of Moscow's place in its self-construed theological and political universe. Moscow was to be the New Jerusalem and the New Sarai, both at the same time.

The deluge of foreign embassies and envoys in the wake of Moscow's mil­itary victory was a further confirmation of Moscow's rise to international prominence. The author of the Kazan' Chronicle did not doubt the biblical importance of Moscow's victory over Kazan', when he included the Baby­lonians among many foreign envoys arriving to honour the Muscovite tsar.[114]

The first ones to recognise the new status of the tsar as a successor to the khans of the Golden Horde were those most interested in seeking Moscow's economic and military assistance. After the conquest of Kazan', recognising the sovereignty and supremacy of the Muscovite ruler, the Nogais began to refer to Ivan IV as the 'White Tsar' more frequently, while one Nogai mirza, Belek-Bulat, decided to surpass others in his flattery and called Ivan IV 'the son of Chingis'.

The Nogais of Ismail and Belek-Bulat mirzas, whose pastures were located along the banks of the Volga, remained Moscow's crucial allies. The fact that Moscow's ambitions did not end with the annexation of Kazan' was made clear in Ivan's letters to Ismail mirza in early 1553. Ivan asked Ismail to let him know of an opportune moment to begin their campaign against Astrakhan' and to advise him how best to conquer the Crimea.[115]

In the spring of 1554, following Ismail's advice, Ivan sent an army of 30,000 men down the Volga to rendezvous with Ismail's Nogais and to install on the Astrakhan' throne a Muscovite and Nogai protege, Dervish Ali from the Astrakhan' dynasty. Unlike the conquest of Kazan', the conquest of Astrakhan' tookplace without much struggle or drama. The Astrakhan' khan, Yamgurchi, fled to Azov with no attempt to resist the Muscovite siege of the city, and Moscow declared Dervish to be the new khan of Astrakhan'. Ismail was given thirty Muscovite musketeers and expected to guard the land approaches to Astrakhan', while Ivan was to secure the water routes.

Ismail's delivery of Astrakhan' into Muscovite hands set off anew the dor­mant hostilities between the Nogai chiefs. As in the past, the internal wars among the Nogais were waged along the factional lines of a pro-Russian versus an anti-Russian coalition. In early 1555 the members of the victorious pro-Russian coalition assumed the leadership positions among the Nogais and Ismail became their beg (a supreme chief). When in the following year the recalcitrant Nogai nobles rebelled against Ismail beg and Dervish khan chose to forge close ties with the Crimea, Ivan IV dispatched his army against Astrakhan' once again. Dervish khan fled and Astrakhan' fell without any resistance. This time, however, as in his experience with Kazan', Ivan decided to rely on the puppet Chingisids no longer. Astrakhan' was now annexed and was henceforward ruled by the appointed Muscovite voevodas (military governors).[116]

A foothold in the North Caucasus

The Muscovite annexation ofAstrakhan' transformed Moscow overnight into a significant player in the Caucasus region. Throughout the early i550s, the envoys of various Kabardinian princes from the Piatigorsk region in the North Caucasus arrived in Astrakhan' and Moscow. They came to explore the possi­bility of a military alliance against their adversaries: the Crimeans in the west and the Kumyks in the east. The Crimean khan continued to demand a levy of Kabardinian boys and girls, who were in high demand at the Ottoman court. Any refusal to supply the youths invited punitive raids from the Crimea. On the other side, to the east, the Kabardinian villages suffered from the debili­tating raids of the Kumyks. Ruled by the shamkhal (a title of a Kumyk ruler) from his residence in Tarki in northern Daghestan and closely allied with the Crimeans and Ottomans, the Kumyks were one of the most significant mili­tary and economic powers in the North Caucasus. The slave trade in captured Kabardinians, Georgians, and other peoples ofthe Caucasus was a vital source of revenue for the Kumyks, who sold their human booty to the merchants from Persia and Central Asia at the thriving slave markets in the Kumyk town of Enderi (Andreevskaia in Russian). Enderi together with Kaffa, the Ottoman port in the Crimea where the human cargo from the Slavic lands had been sold and shipped to distant lands, were the two most important slave-trading centres in the region.

One group of the Kabardinian nobles led by their grand prince Tem- riuk Idarov was particularly enthusiastic about the newly founded alliance with Moscow. In exchange for serving Moscow's interests, Temriuk expected Moscow's help in protecting his people from the Kumyk raids and in suppress­ing the rival Kabardinian princes. Perceived in terms of traditional political culture, Temriuk was to be Ivan IV's kunak, that is, a valued guest, friend or ally. From Moscow's point of view, however, Temriuk's relationship with the tsar could only be that of a subject with his ruler. The notion that the Kabardinians became Muscovite subjects as early as the 1550s was construed by the Muscovite chroniclers of the latter day and uncritically accepted into the historiographical tradition. More than two centuries later, after the Ottoman Porte was compelled to concede that the Kabardinians were now in Russia's sphere of influence, the Kabardinian nobles refused to swear allegiance to Russia insisting that they had always been Russia's kunaks, but not subjects.[117]

Whatever the differences in the interpretation of their relationship, both the Kabardinians and Muscovites were keenly interested in establishing close ties between them. Probably few expected at the time that these ties would become so close. In 1561, shortly after the death of his first wife, Ivan IV married the daughter of Temriuk Idarov. She was brought to Moscow, baptised, named Mariia and remained Ivan IV's wife until her death in 1569.[118] The marriage was the most eloquent testimony to Moscow's ambitions in the Caucasus and its first attempt to establish a foothold there through the loyal Kabardinian princes.

The royal marriage with the Kabardinian princess may have been prompted by more than geopolitical goals. The Muscovite officials believed that Kabar- dinians were Orthodox Christians before they became Muslims, and because the influence of Islam on the Kabardinians was barely discernible, Moscow hoped to have them converted or reconverted without much difficulty. In 1560, when dispatching Muscovite troops to assist the Kabardinians against the Kumyks, Ivan also included several priests, who were instructed to bap­tise the Kabardinians. But if any major conversion of the Kabardinians was indeed envisioned, it did not happen. Achieving Moscow's missionary goals as well as military objectives proved to be a more formidable task than Moscow expected.[119]

Moscow's increasing activity in the North Caucasus had finally attracted the attention of the Ottoman sultan, Suleymanthe Magnificent. Despite initial concern over Moscow's conquests of Kazan' and Astrakhan', the issue of containing Muscovite ambitions did not become a priority while the Porte was engaged in a protracted struggle with the Habsburgs in the West and Safavid Persia in the East. By the early 1560s, however, it became apparent that Moscow's rapid expansion southward along the Volga and Don rivers was threatening Ottoman strategic interests in the area and could no longer be ignored. The Don cossacks' raids disrupted land communications with the Ottoman fort of Azov (Azak), and the Russian military governors in Astrakhan' did not allow safe passage of Muslim pilgrims from the Central Asian khanates to Mecca.

In 1567, the sultan and khan discovered that the Muscovites were construct­ing Fort Tersk on the Terek River in the eastern corner of the North Caucasus. Moscow's expansion further south now suddenly endangered the Porte's vital communications with its newly acquired possessions on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and threatened the Crimea's control of parts of the North Caucasus and its Kabardinian subjects. The Porte revived the plan to send an expeditionary force in order to construct a canal connecting the Don and the Volga rivers. Ottoman success in building such a canal would have allowed Istanbul to conquer Astrakhan', to dominate the entire North Caucasus region and to control the trade routes connecting Bukhara, Khiva, Urgench and Tashkent with the Ottoman markets.

In 1567 news reached Moscow that the new Ottoman sultan, Selim II, was preparing an armada of 7,000 ships to sail to Azov under his personal command, and then he and the Crimean khan would set out against Astrakhan'. The Crimean khan, Devlet Girey, expressed his concern over Moscow's expansion to the Muscovite envoy in the Crimea: 'Before Ivan used to send tribute (shuby, literally fur coats) to Kazan', and then he seized Kazan' and Astrakhan', and now he founded Tersk.' With the support of an Ottoman army behind him, the Crimean khan wrote to Ivan raising the price of peace with Moscow. Devlet Girey demanded that Ivan return Kazan' and Astrakhan' to the Crimea ('because from the old days Astrakhan' and Kazan' were part of the Muslim world and the iurt [apanage] of the khans of our dynasty'), send valuable and numerous presents and give up building a fort on the Terek River. Otherwise, the khan warned, there would be no peace.[120]

In the spring of 1569 a large Ottoman-Crimean force set out on the cam­paign. Digging a canal between the Don and the Volga at their nearest point proved to be too difficult an undertaking, and the work was soon aban­doned. The Ottoman-Crimean expeditionary force approached Astrakhan' in September 1569. Instead of continuing the campaign so late in the season, the decision was made not to storm the city but to build a fort nearby and winter there in anticipation ofreinforcements in the following year. In the end, rumours of a large Russian army sailing down the Volga and a Persian army dispatched to assist Astrakhan' forced the Ottoman retreat.

Although a military fiasco, the Astrakhan' campaign of i569 convinced Moscow that the Porte's concerns had to be taken more seriously. Ivan IV's assurances that he meant no harm to Muslims and the Islamic faith, and that he had conquered the Volga khanates merely to ensure their loyalty, did not satisfy Selim II. The sultan insisted that the regions of Astrakhan' and Kabarda in the Caucasus were traditional Ottoman domains with Muslim residents. He demanded that the pilgrims and merchants from Bukhara and elsewhere be allowed to proceed through Astrakhan' en route to Mecca. In 1571, eager to prevent another campaign against Astrakhan', which Moscow could ill afford to defend at the time, Ivan IV informed the sultan that Fort Tersk was being demolished and the Astrakhan' route reopened.[121] Propelled almost instantly into the forefront of a struggle with Islam, Moscow was not yet prepared for such a confrontation. For the time being, the government refrained from missionary or any other activity that could provoke the Ottomans.

The conquest of Siberia

While Moscow's ambitions in the Caucasus collided with the interests of its powerful regional contenders, the Islamic states ofthe Crimea, the Ottomans and the Persians, no such major power stood in Moscow's way in Siberia. Here no other state insisted on its sovereignty over the indigenous peoples or claimed religious affinity with the predominantly animist population. It was not until the Russians reached the distant frontiers on the Amur River in the second half of the seventeenth century that they were confronted with the competing interests of another powerful state, Ming China.

This absence of a rival sovereign state extending its claims to the Siberian lands and the commercial nature of the Siberian frontier may explain why the conquest and colonisation ofSiberia were put into private hands, the powerful family of the Novgorod merchants and entrepreneurs, the Stroganovs. After all, the royal charters to the Stroganovs to colonise Siberia in the sixteenth century and a charter to the Russian-American Company to exploit Alaska in the nineteenth century are the only two known instances, short-lived as they were, when the colonisation of the new frontiers was entrusted to large commercial companies similar to the better-known cases in the history of the Western European expansion.

The Stroganovs' success in colonising the Kama River region, which Ivan IV had entrusted to them in a charter of 1558, encouraged Ivan IV to issue a series of similar charters granting the Stroganovs a twenty-year exemption from customs and taxes and the right to construct the forts and recruit its own military in order to colonise the region east of the Urals.

Moscow's plans for further expansion were impeded by the forces of Kuchum Khan, the ruler ofthe rising Siberian khanate. A former part ofthe Golden Horde, the Siberian khanate mostly comprised the territory between the Tobol' and Irtysh rivers. When in 1563 Kuchum seized the throne of the khan, he only rightfully restored the rule of the Chingisid dynasty over the Siberian khanate, which was wrested away from Kuchum's grandfather Ibak (Abak) in 1495 by the local nobles of the Toibugid clan. In the following decades, relying on the military force of the Nogais and Bashkirs, Kuchum imposed tribute on the local Khanty and Mansi peoples and created a powerful khanate, which he ruled from his winter residence in Sibir' located at the confluence of the Tobol' and Irtysh rivers.[122]

It was not long before the reach of the Stroganovs' entrepreneurial activity encroached on the borders of the khanate. The disputes over tribute-paying Khanty and Mansi led to clashes and raids against the Muscovite forts and set­tlements. Kuchum and his khanate represented a direct challenge to Moscow's claims of sovereignty over the newly vanquished peoples and to a Muscovite monopoly on the fur trade. Moreover, the privileges granted to the Stroganovs over the Kama region had expired, and the Stroganovs had strong incentives to expand and defend their enterprises east ofthe Urals. With these goals in mind, Grigorii Stroganov undertook to finance and organise a military expedition deep into Kuchum's khanate.

In the autumn of 1581, a Volga cossack named Ermak set out at the head of a 500-strong band of mercenaries to confront Kuchum Khan. Like the Spanish kings, who had hardly expected that the small bands of conquistadors under Hernando Cortez and Francisco Pizarro sent in the early sixteenth century to explore the Americas would in fact conquer the entire continent, neither the Stroganovs nor Ivan IV could have anticipated that Ermak's expedition would lay the foundation for a conquest of Siberia.

Sailing down the rivers, Ermak's mercenaries plundered the natives' villages and met no resistance until they reached the estuary of the Tobol' River. Here, in the autumn of 1582 the first major battle between the cossacks of Ermak and Kuchum Khan was fought. Kuchum's army was devastated by the cossack firepower and the subsequent battles proved again that the arrows of Kuchum's armed men were no match for the cossacks' muskets and cannon.

Kuchum fled and the cossacks triumphantly entered the khan's capital, the town of Sibir'. The joy of easy victory did not last for too long, however, and what the Tatar arrows failed to accomplish, the diseases and inhospitable envi­ronment did. In time, some ofthe local chiefs, who initially sided with Ermak, abandoned him after they began to realise that Ermak came simply to replace their former Tatar overlords. In the summer of 1585, isolated and lacking sup­plies and ammunition, Ermak and his followers were ambushed and killed.[123]

Moscow was caught unaware of the Stroganovs' expedition of 1581 and its initial reaction was that of outrage. Ivan IV chastised the Stroganovs for hiring a band ofthe unruly Volga cossacks without Moscow's consent. Equating their action with treason, Ivan IV accused the Stroganovs of needlessly provoking Kuchum Khan and causing the natives to raid the Muscovite forts and towns. He instructed the Stroganovs to have Ermak and his cossacks return to the Perm' region, and to make sure that it was done promptly, he dispatched a detachment of Muscovite troops with orders to bring Ermak's cossacks back to Perm'.[124] Ivan IV's reluctance to support the Stroganovs' adventure in Siberia eventually doomed Ermak and his companions.

Ivan IV's death in 1584 brought about a complete reversal of the govern­ment attitude towards the Siberian campaign. Without further delay, Moscow declared an annexation of Siberia and promptly dispatched the troops to secure Ermak's success. In 1586 the Muscovite troops laid the foundation of Fort Tiu- men' and a year later of Tobol'sk. Both forts were built near the traditional and now ravaged residences of the Siberian khans: Tiumen' on the Tura River near Chimga Tura and Tobol'sk near the last residence of the khan, Sibir'.

In the following three decades, while the rival factions of the Chingisids and Toibugids continued to be at war with each other, the Muscovites con­solidated their power in the region and expanded rapidly into central Siberia, reaching the western banks of the Enisei River. A sprawling network of the abundant Siberian rivers provided a perfect transportation. The mushroom­ing Muscovite towns and forts were witnesses to both the direction and the rapidity of the Muscovite advance. After the founding of Tobol'sk in 1587, the Muscovites sailed south-east erecting towns up the Irtysh River (Tara, 1594), up the Ob River (Surgut, 1594, Narym, 1596, Tomsk, 1604), and on the Enisei River (Eniseisk, 1619). Built on the edge where the Siberian forests receded into an open steppe, these forts became Russia's outposts in dealing with the various Turko-Mongol nomads of the steppe. In the north, the forts of Mangazeia, built on the Taz River in 1601, and of New Mangazeia on the Enisei in 1607, laid the ground for Muscovite dominance over the local Nenets.

In some sense, Siberia was conquered in spite ofthe Muscovite government, which preferred a slow and cautious pace of expansion. But when Kuchum's armies proved to be ineffective, Moscow quickly moved to build on the cos­sacks' bold actions. The colonisation of Siberia was no longer left in the hands of the Stroganovs but became a government enterprise similar to Muscovy's other frontiers. Another part ofthe former Golden Horde had been conquered and annexed by the Muscovite state. By the end of the sixteenth century, with the exception of the Crimea, the Muscovite rulers could claim control over the entire territory of the former Golden Horde.

The structure of the indigenous societies

Throughout its relentless expansion in the sixteenth century Moscow came across a variety of peoples, who spoke different languages, worshipped differ­ent gods and abided by different laws and customs. Yet along the entire expanse of the Muscovite frontiers in the north, east and south, the indigenous peoples had one undeniable feature in common: they were not organised into sovereign states but were instead traditional, kinship-based societies with non-existent or weak central authority. The degree of their social and political organisa­tion varied from the perpetually fragmented kinship groups under the local chiefs of the reindeer-herding Nentsy of the arctic north, to the socially more complex agricultural societies of the Mordva, Chuvash, Mari and Udmurts of the Volga and Kama rivers, to the hunting and fishing societies of the Khanty and Mansi of western Siberia, and finally to the more socially stratified and centralised societies of the pastoral nomads of the Bashkirs or Nogais in the southern regions of the steppe.

The authority of the local chiefs was limited to their own iurt (an apanage; a territory controlled by a group of kin) or some other tribal unit. At times of war, one chief could become the supreme leader, but he was rarely able to sustain his authority after the military campaigns were over. One such Mansi chief of Pelym rose to power when he united local forces against the Muscovite forts and settlements after Ermak's departure in 1581 exposed the Muscovite rear. More centralised were the Nogais, whose society was a more cohesive confederation oftribes and clans with the established social and administrative hierarchy led by the supreme chief (beg).

The most complex and developed societies, socially and politically, were the Muslim khanates of Kazan', Astrakhan' and Siberia. The Turkic peoples, commonly known as Tatars, were the dominant element in these khanates ruled by the khans of a Chingisid lineage. Deprived of political power after the Muscovite conquests, the Turkic peoples and the Kazan' Tatars, in par­ticular, remained an important part of the Islamic civilisation and the most sophisticated society among Muscovy's new and numerous subjects.

The terms of encounter

By the late sixteenth century the boundaries ofthe former Golden Horde in the east and south had largely become Muscovite boundaries and the ruling Turko- Mongol elites had been replaced by the Muscovite administrators. From the beginning, Moscow relied on the existing concepts and structures to rule over the vanquished population. The three basic concepts on which the relationship with the indigenous population was based were all of Turkic provenance: shert', amanat and iasak. The first one implied an oath of allegiance and vassalage to the tsar, the second intended to secure such an oath by delivering the native hostages into the Muscovite hands and the third emphasised economic subservience to Moscow through the payment of fur or some other sort of tribute. Such at least was Moscow's view, which was not always shared by the natives.

In 1483 a military band of Muscovites crossed the Iron Gates or the Rocky Belt, as the Ural Mountains were referred to at various times. It was not the first time that various adventurers, mostly from the city of Novgorod, had crossed the Urals in order to explore the riches of the unknown lands and to establish trade with the local peoples. However, when they did so again in 1483, they arrived as representatives of Ivan III, the ruler of the rapidly expanding and self­consciously Orthodox Muscovite state. The Muscovite officials described one such encounter and the ceremony involved in striking a peace treaty between the chiefs of the Khanty and Mansi peoples and the Muscovites:

And their custom of making peace is as follows: they put a bear skin under a thick trunk of a cut pine tree, then they put two sabres with their sharp ends upwards and bread and fish on the bear skin. And we put a cross atop the pine tree and they put a wooden idol and tied it up below the cross; and they began to walk below their idol in the direction of the sun. And one of them standing nearby said: 'that who will break this peace, let him be punished by God of his faith'. And they walked about a tree three times, and we bowed to the cross, and they bowed to the sun. After all of this they drank water from the cup containing a golden nugget and they kept saying: 'you, gold, seek the one who betrays'.[125]

The same event was registered in the Russian chronicle, but described quite differently: 'and the local princes swore not to bear any ill-will, not to exhibit any violence, and to be loyal to the Grand Prince of Muscovy'.[126] Obviously, things did not look the same from the banks of the Siberian rivers and from Moscow. What the local chiefs considered a peace treaty struck with the newly arrived strangers, Moscow regarded as the chiefs' oath of allegiance to the grand prince, their submission to Moscow. The opening salvo of Russia's conquest of Siberia was made and continued to be based on mutual misconceptions. While Moscow attempted to perpetuate an image ofthe natives as the subjects of the tsar, the natives saw in Russians another military and trading partner.

It is likely that to some of the indigenous peoples, who were former subjects to the khans of the Golden Horde and later its splinter khanates, the terms of engagement were less ambiguous. Some simply continued the established practices, switching their allegiances and tribute from the old Turko-Mongol overlords to the new one in Moscow. This was typical of the peoples of the middle Volga region, or most of the Khanty and Mansi in western Siberia. Yet for many others Moscow's demands of unconditional vassalage, hostages and tribute were both incomprehensible and offensive.

Moscow's policy of demanding an immediate submission to the tsar was typical for both the southern and eastern frontiers. In 1589, for example, follow­ing his orders from Moscow, the commander of the recently rebuilt Fort Tersk in the North Caucasus instructed the Kumyk shamkhal to dispatch the envoys and to petition to become the tsar's subject or otherwise face military retribu- tion.[127] In the same year, in response to the Muscovite demands for pledging loyalty and submitting hostages, the Kabardinian chief, Alkas, replied: 'I have reached an old age, and hitherto people believed my word in everything, and I have never given hostages or taken an oath to anyone.'[128] A few years later, on the Siberian frontier, the Muscovites received a more dramatic reply from the Kalmyk chief Kho-Urluk. Upon the first encounter with Kho-Urlukin 1606, the envoys from the Siberian town of Tara presented him with an ultimatum to swear allegiance to the Muscovite suzerain and surrender hostages, or else to vacate the land. Insulted by such demands, Kho-Urluk ordered the Muscovite envoys put to death.[129]

In the end, however, the Kabardinian, Kalmyk and numerous other chiefs chose to comply with the Muscovite demands, which were accompanied by the irresistible offers of presents, annuities and military aid. In return for their oath of allegiance and hostages, the local chiefs were rewarded with cash, woollens, furs and various luxury items, 'so that other peoples would follow the example and come into submission. . .' Thus, Alkas consulted with his nobles (uzden) and agreed to Muscovite conditions, provided that Moscow paid him an annuity, let his people hunt and fish along the rivers freely, ferried them across the rivers and helped them against adversaries.[130]

Yet Moscow's objective of turning the natives into loyal, tribute-paying sub­jects remained unrealised for a long time. The natives continued to construe their relationship with Moscow in their own terms, which were pointedly dif­ferent from Moscow's. The shert', which Moscow conceived of as an oath of allegiance, was seen by the local chiefs as a peace treaty with mutual obliga­tions. Providing hostages was one of the concessions offered by the local chiefs to Moscow's adamant demands for such human surety. Moscow's assurances to treat the hostages as honourable guests and reward them upon return helped the chiefs to convince their kin that this was the only way to secure a peace treaty and receive benefits from Moscow. In the North Caucasus, for example, such 'hostages' appeared to be more military liaisons than hostages. For sev­eral years they resided in Fort Tersk with their retinues and joined Muscovite military campaigns in return for generous rewards and payments.[131]

Even iasak, which is usually considered to be a tribute or tax paid by the natives to Moscow and an unquestionable sign of their submission, was in reality a fur trade, an unequal exchange between the equal parties. One con­temporary observer commented that the native chiefs were collecting furs from their own people and bringing them to the Muscovite officials voluntar­ily. And many a Muscovite official bemoaned the fact that without the expected payments in kind, or presents in Muscovite vocabulary, the natives refused to offer their furs.[132]

Finally, annual payments and intermittent presents which in Moscow's eyes were annuities and favours granted by the tsar to the local chiefs in exchange for their allegiance, had been regarded by the natives as a rightful form of tribute or payments due to them as a condition of a peace treaty. When such payments did not arrive on time or were brought in insufficient amounts, the

Nogai, Kabardinian, Kalmyk and other chiefs felt free to launch raids against Muscovy to demand the restoration of the status quo.

In the seventeenth century, Moscow and its restless neighbours along the frontiers would continue to struggle in defining and redefining the terms of their relationship. Time, however, was on Moscow's side. We shall revisit these issues at greater length in Chapter 22. Suffice it to recapitulate here that from the time of the initial encounter Moscow and the natives perceived each other in different terms and construed different realities which continued to coexist along the Muscovite frontiers.

Methods of conquest

Contested vocabularies and terms of engagement notwithstanding, one unde­niable reality remained: Moscow's expansion in the sixteenth century was made possible by its overwhelming military, economic and political superi­ority vis-a-vis the disparate peoples along Muscovy's northern, eastern and southern frontiers. Everywhere the conquests were facilitated by an almost perpetual state of warfare between and among the tribal societies and the rival chiefs. Some chiefs sought Moscow's assistance against the contenders for power and before long found themselves completely dependent on Moscow. Other chiefs were won over by various forms of early modern economic aid: payments, presents, trade privileges, exemptions from customs, and bribes. Often the local chiefs requested that the Muscovites build a nearby fort for their protection. Thus, the construction of Fort Sviiazhsk near Kazan' could not have taken place without the co-operation of some of the Chuvash and Mari chiefs, Fort Tersk in the North Caucasus without the Kabardinian chief, Temriuk Idarov and his descendants, Forts Tomsk and Eniseisk in central Siberia without the Mansi chief, Alachev, and Fort Mangazeia in northern Siberia without the chief of the Nenets tribe of the Mongkansi.[133]

While some native chiefs and princes chose to serve Moscow's interests so they could aggrandise their power among their own people, numerous others preferred to leave their kin and settle in the Muscovite lands. Indeed, it was Moscow's long-standing policy to employ and actively recruit the services of the native elites. At first, content to join the Moscow grand princes on occa­sional military campaigns in return for rewards, various indigenous princes were soon ready to settle in Muscovy and perform military service in exchange for a stable income: grants of land, supplies of grain, cash and generous gifts. The increasing number of such renegade native princes in Moscow's service was directly proportional to the increasing turmoil in their own societies.

One of the best-known, if somewhat exceptional, cases was the arrival in Moscow of Kasim, the son of the khan of the Golden Horde, Ulu-Muhammed. In 1452, Grand Prince Vasilii II granted Kasim a frontier town in the Meshchera lands (Meshcherskii gorodok). Later known as Kasimov, it became the resi­dence for numerous members of the Chingisid dynasty for over two centuries. At first an autonomous Muslim enclave on the Muscovite frontier ruled by the legitimate khans, it soon became a puppet khanate within Muscovy and a con­venient springboard to install the loyal Chingisids in Kazan' and Astrakhan'.[134]

After the initial conquest of Kazan', Moscow chose to resort to the same policy of forced resettlement and exchange ofpopulations which it traditionally applied in the Muscovite lands proper. Thus, the Tatars were expelled and some resettled as far as Novgorod and Russian Orthodox townsmen and peasants were brought in to settle in the Kazan' area. However, the incendiary nature of such policies became apparent shortly thereafter. The government realised that expanding into lands with non-Russian and non-Christian populations required a more gradual approach.[135]

Likewise, the initial zeal in asserting the victory of the Christian arms over the Muslim khanate by burning the mosques of Kazan' and converting the Muslims by force had quickly abated. Facing local revolts and the threat of the Ottoman-Crimean intervention, Moscow had to postpone any immedi­ate plan for transforming the Muslim lands into Christian ones. The religious conversion of the non-Christians did not cease, but any large-scale evangelisa­tion had to wait for better times. Moscow was compelled to resort to a more gradual and pragmatic approach which prevailed until the early eighteenth century. (For a more detailed discussion of the issue of the religious conversion in the seventeenth century, see Chapter 22 below.)

While the threat of conversion to Christianity by force was avoided for the time being, the fears and rumours that such conversion was imminent drove many non-Christians to flee their lands. Some were expelled, others chose to flee to avoid the new landlords, administrators and tax collectors. The Muscovite conquests, particularly in the most densely populated mid- Volga region, resulted in a massive migration of the native population further east and south-east. By the early eighteenth century, some of the migrant Mari, Chuvash, Udmurts and others in the Bashkir lands formed a special social category of registered peasants, known as tepter (from defter - a registry book, in Turkic languages). By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were about 300,000 of them: they were all Muslim and were now listed as Bashkirs.

The newly conquered territories were ruled haphazardly. The official poli­cies were a typical combination of carrots to those nobles and chiefs who proved to be loyal and sticks to the recalcitrant ones. Of course, the ultimate 'carrots' were reserved for those who chose to convert to Orthodox Christianity: the nobles could retain their lands, status and privileges and the commoners were promised temporary exemptions from taxes and one-time payments in cash or in kind.

Moscow's policies towards its new non-Christian subjects and Muscovite practices often happened to be far apart. The reality of governing the remote frontier regions populated by different peoples who spoke different tongues and abided by different laws proved to be far more ambiguous than the gov­ernment's decrees allowed. The Muscovite government in the frontier regions was rife with corruption with the frontier administrators often subverting the very laws they were supposed to enforce. Thus, despite the government order banning the construction of new mosques in the Kazan' region, many new mosques were erected and the Church officials squarely laid the blame on the shoulders of the local governors. In Siberia, to secure the supplies of furs, the government tried to limit the conversion of the natives, who would otherwise be resettled among the Muscovites and stop delivering iasak. But the conver­sion of the natives to Christianity was one of the surest ways for the corrupt local officials to enrich themselves: the converts were often enslaved by the government officials, sold into slavery to others, or exploited in a number of different ways. In the seventeenth century, the instructions to each new gover­nor sent to administer Siberian towns strictly forbade the government officials to enslave or sell the new converts.[136] It may not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that Moscow expended no less an effort in fighting the corruption

of its own officials than it did in subduing the natives.

***

By the end of the sixteenth century Muscovy was dramatically transformed from the backwater principality ruled by the grand prince to one of the largest empires, whose rulers could no longer be dismissed as over-ambitious upstarts by other major powers. At the time, unable to challenge its neighbours in the west, Moscow pursued relentless expansion in all other directions. Building on the previous colonisation of the northern regions undertaken by Novgorod, Moscow's expansion in the north and north-east came across little notable resistance. The native population was quickly overwhelmed by a combination of state, peasant and monastery colonisation of their lands.

In the east and particularly in the south, the challenges were more formidable. In the east, Moscow's expansion was largely driven by commercial concerns with the primary goal to secure the supplies of furs at all costs: trade, tribute or whatever combination of the above. In the south, Moscow's objec­tives were military and geopolitical: to secure its frontiers from constant pre- dations and to turn their restless nomadic and semi-nomadic neighbours into reliable auxiliaries. With the exception ofthe brief interlude by the Stroganovs, the matters of colonisation in the east and south were entirely in the hands of the state.

The expansion of Muscovy was occurring at the same time as other Euro­pean empires were expanding overseas. The New Worlds of both the Euro­peans and Muscovites included the territories occupied by large numbers of animists. What set the Muscovite empire apart from its European counter­parts, however, was that it expanded into the contiguous territories populated by Muslims in addition to the animists. Only one other European power, Spain, found itself in the same situation in the fifteenth century when it expanded into the lands occupied by the Muslims. Spain's 'final solution' of purging itself of any non-Christian elements, Muslims and Jews, was quite different from Moscow's. Unable and unwilling to apply the Spanish solution, the Christian rulers of Russia would continue to rule over a heterogeneous empire with a large number of Muslim subjects. In this sense, Russia was much more like an Ottoman empire, where Muslim sultans ruled over their many Christian subjects.

The Orthodox Church

DAVID B. MILLER

In 1448 Grand Prince Vasilii II of Moscow and a council of bishops of the see of Kiev and all Rus' within his control elevated Bishop Iona of Riazan' to the office of metropolitan. They did so to forestall the appointment of a metropolitan unsympathetic to Moscow and, worse, sympathetic to the union with Rome concluded at Florence in 1438. Vasilii and the bishops expected that an Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople would consecrate Iona, but in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. By the time Iona died in 1461, Vasilii and his bishops agreed that his elevation without the patriarch's approval was canonical. Moscow's rulers and their prelates chose Feodosii (1461-4) and Filipp (1464-73) to succeed Iona with the title 'metropolitan of all Rus''. But the Rus' they administered was commensurate with the authority of the Muscovite state. Moscow's metropolitans continued to claim jurisdiction over the Lithuanian and Novgorod eparchies, but they were to administer only those coming under Muscovite rule. Yet Muscovites interpreted Iona's elevation in a manner that accorded the see an exceptional destiny. In one of many letters demanding that they accept him, Iona told the Orthodox bishops of Lithuania that, when Constantinople accepted union with Rome, it forfeited divine protection and fell to the Turks. Another letter said that Iona was 'by God's will installed in this great office ... by all the archbishops and bishops of the present Orthodox great Russian autocracy of the sovereign and my son the Grand Prince Vasilii Vasil'evich'.[137]

The structure of the Church was as rudimentary when its Council of One Hundred Chapters (Stoglav) met in 1551 as it had been in Iona's time. Nine bishops and archbishops were in attendance. A tenth eparchy was created in 1552 for Kazan'. By 1589 Pskov became the eleventh. The vastness of the metropolitanate and its eparchies, and eparchial traditions ofautonomy, made supervision of the parish clergy impossible. The Church's solution resembled that of Moscow's rulers. It appointed plenipotentiaries called 'tenth men' (.desiatel'niki) to administer the ten districts of each eparchy. The 'tenth men' collected tithes from parishes and adjudicated cases falling under Church law. Their courts had jurisdiction over the clergy and, in cases of heresy, witchcraft, sexual infractions and family law, also over the laity. On Church lands they shared jurisdiction with civil courts in matters pertaining to Church properties and crimes threatening public order. Like the ruler's governors, they had arbitrary powers and, given the inability ofthe Church to pay them, lived from a share of the tithe and from fees for court judgements. Most were laymen and their titles - boyars, junior boyars (deti boiarskie), clerks - mimicked those of the ruler's officialdom. Parishioners or estate owners recruited priests who went to bishops for ordination. Most priests married locally and lived in rural settlements. They supported themselves by farming lands provided by the community, from fees for administering sacraments and from modest state subsidies. Priests viewed 'tenth men' as rapacious and resented being managed by laymen.[138] Needless to say, they were ill equipped to instruct the clergy, let alone their parishioners, in what it meant to be Christian.

In 1914 E. V Anichkov, equating an understanding of confessional theology with religious belief, wrote that only from the fifteenth century did the peas­antry become Christian. Anichkov might have included elites in his indictment, because most evidence of religious culture concerns princes, landowners, prelates and monks.[139] It was a culture in which the literacy of the clerical elite, judging by the manuscript legacy extant in Rus', was within a narrow range of liturgical books, collections of sermons and homilies, chronicles and lives of saints. Until about 1500 little was translated locally and, excepting hagiogra- phy, original works were few. Prelates, originally from monastic brotherhoods, might obtain grounding in canon law and theology, and the aristocracy and urban well-to-do may have had a functional literacy in the language of clerks; but the populace, Archbishop Gennadii Gonzov of Novgorod complained to Metropolitan Simon about 1500, was so ignorant that 'there is no one to select to be a priest'.[140] Although they were not to ordain priests or deacons lacking a proper education, prelates had little choice but to do so. Yet it would be a mistake to view popular religiosity as other than rich, diverse and, by the sixteenth century, distinctive.

Popular religiosity

Russian Orthodoxy added many feasts to the liturgical cycle inherited from Constantinople. But without regular or centralised procedures of canonisa­tion, no calendar was the same. The Stoglav warned of lay persons who were false prophets of miracles or revelations, but central authorities, when con­fronted with popular cults promoted by local clerics, usually capitulated.⁵ Thus, in 1458 the clergy in Ustiug reported healings at the grave of the holy fool Prokopii (d. 1303). In 1471 a church went up at his gravesite; by 1500 there was a biography reporting miracles and powers of prophecy. Finally, in 1547 a council designated Prokopii a local saint (8 July). Nor could authorities ignore the Muscovite cult of the holy fool Vasilii the Blessed (d. 1552?). His ostensibly foolish behaviour and insults - even to the ruler - followed from an ability to see truths invisible to others. When his grave became known for healings, Tsar Fedor I had Vasilii reburied in a chapel adjoining the church of the Inter­cession on Red Square in 1588. So great was his following that the church to which his chapel was attached to this day is known by his name (St Basil's).⁶ But most saints entering the calendar in the sixteenth century - sixteen of at least twenty-one - were monastic founders whose successors exhumed their relics and promoted their miracles. For example, Hegumen Gelasii initiated the cult of Savva Visherskii who had founded a monastery near Novgorod in the 1450s. It became famous because Archbishop Iona had hagiographer Pakhomii the Serb write Savva's biography. The Church recognised Savva a 'national' saint by 1550. Of fourteen 'earlier' saints about whom hagiographers wrote biographies, eight were monks and one a nun.

Muscovite expansion shaped the accretion of new feasts. After its conquest by Moscow, Novgorod prelates refused to observe feast days of Muscovite

Olga Raevsky-Hughes (eds.), Slavic Cultures in the Middle Ages (Christianity and the East­ern Slavs, vol. i) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 179-86; Emchenko, Stoglav, pp. 285-6; Jack E. Kollmann, Jr., 'The Stoglav Council and Parish Priests', RH 7 (1980): 66-7, 74-6.

5 Richard D. Bosley 'The Changing Profile of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovy's For­mative Years', in A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff (eds.), Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584 (Moscow: ITZ-Garant, 1997), pp. 26-38; Emchenko, Stoglav, pp. 311-12.

6 Slovar' knizhnikov i knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi, vol. ii, ed. D. S. Likhachev (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1988-9), pt. 1, pp. 322-4; Natalie Challis and Horace W Dewey, 'Basil the Blessed, Holy Fool of Moscow', RH 14 (1987): 47-59.

saints. Thus, hegumens of its major monasteries refused to participate when Gennadii, the archbishop appointed by Moscow, organised a procession on 8 December 1499 during which he conducted services to Moscow's metropolitan saints Peter and Aleksei. Gennadii thereupon compromised; in a procession a week later the hegumens joined him in a procession that included services to the Muscovites, but also to St Varlaam Khutynskii of Novgorod.[141] Metropolitan Makarii vigorously promoted the nationalisation of the calendar. In 1547 a council recognised as 'all-Russian' saints eighteen persons whose feasts had been celebrated locally. Makarii gained recognition for at least fifteen more 'all- Russian' saints, probably at a council in 1549. Reflecting on the canonisations in his 'Life of Savva Krypetskii of Pskov' (1555), hagiographer Vasilii wrote that the Russian land, like Constantinople, the second Rome, radiated with feasts of many saints. 'There', he said, 'Mohammedan falsehoods of the godless Turks had destroyed Orthodoxy, while here the teachings of our holy fathers ever more illuminate the Russian land.'[142] The councils failed to establish procedures for canonisation and no calendar of'all-Russian' saints resembled another. But universal calendars reflecting these canonisations henceforth were celebrated throughout Russia.

To celebrants the original meaning ofnumerous feasts became intertwined or confused with traditional rites coinciding with the summer and winter sol­stices or with periods in the agricultural cycle. On the eve of the Epiphany, for the Orthodox a celebration of Christ's baptism, revellers proceeded to the river to immerse themselves symbolically in the river Jordan in a rite of purification.[143] Passion Week, with its promise of renewal, and Trinity Saturday (the eve of Pentecost), contained echoes of reverence for the Slavic pagan sun god Iarilo, who in the spring was reborn to assure bountiful crops. On these occasions celebrants commemorated ancestors with offerings and enquired of the dead about prospects for their salvation. Peasants drove livestock to pasture on St Gregory's day and prayed to Elijah against drought. Russians also prayed to icons of saints and inscribed them on amulets integrating folk­ways - in which signs, portents and intercessions were phenomena capable of upsetting, or setting right again, the moral order - with faith that Christian saints possessed powers to heal, to benefit the salvation of souls or to keep families and communities in equilibrium. Mary, as Mother of God, was an intercessor for or against just about anything. Women turned to St Paraskeva- Piatnitsa, venerated originally as a martyr, to secure a marriage or a birth and to guide them in domestic matters. Women prayed to Saints Gurios, Samonas and Abibos to suppress hostile thoughts towards their husbands, to St Conon to cure children of smallpox.¹⁰