Russia under the first Romanovs from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 1

PART III

*

RUSSIA UNDER THE FIRST ROMANOVS (1613-1689)

The central government and its institutions

MARSHALL РОЕ

For the Muscovite state, the seventeenth century was one of evolution and growth, rather than radical change.[1] The century experienced no political revolutions of the magnitude seen during the reigns of Ivan III and Ivan IV. Russia, having recovered from the confusion of the Time of Troubles, remained a strong autocracy held firmly in the hands of a small, martial rul­ing class. This is not to say that there was general stasis. Things still fell apart, though only for brief moments. And one can detect a single important political trend - the remarkable inflation of honours begun under Tsar Aleksei (Alexis) Mikhailovich and radically amplified by his weak successors. Nonetheless, the general picture was one of continuity, punctuated by momentary fits of confusion and gradual change.

The case is much the same in the realm of institutions.[2] Seventeenth-century Muscovy was administered by the same fundamental types of organisation that it had been before the great upheaval ofthe beginning ofthe century. The most important institutions remained the royal family, its court and courtiers (gosudarev dvor) and the administrative chancelleries (prikazy). Similarly, the boyar council and the Assembly ofthe Land-both inventions of an earlier age - continued to operate in the seventeenth century much as they had before. All of these institutions grew, but not so much as to fundamentally alter their essential character.

Finally, we might note that the state existed for the same purpose as it had in the sixteenth century and earlier - to serve the interests of the Muscovite ruling class.[3] Though one occasionally finds biblical tropes in Muscovite ornamental texts about monarchs 'tending their flocks' and such, the truth is that the elite did not hide the fact that they were a self-interested ruling class and that the state was the instrument of their domination. They showed open contempt for peasants, merchants and often clergymen, and almost never missed an opportunity to fleece them - a point made and bemoaned by the well-travelled, well-educated and well-informed political philosopher (and proto-Slavophile!) Iurii Krizhanich in the 1660s.⁴ Any attempt at protest that was not couched in the most subservient terms was met with a rush of horrific violence (violence that only the state could muster, since it was the only organised interest in early modern Russia). As visiting foreigners often noted, there was no talk of the 'commonwealth', the 'common good', or common anything (that would come with Peter and from Europe). Muscovites high and low believed the tsar owned everything - land and those occupying it - by heavenly proclamation.⁵ That he distributed his largesse unequally (and predominantly to the elite) bothered not a soul. No one could conceive of any other order, no one objected to it (at least for very long . . .) and no one even thought it wrong. It was the way of things, and that was that.

The tsar in his court

Muscovites had an entire catalogue of sayings to the effect that the tsar was like God (and, one might add, the God of Moses rather than Jesus),[4] so it is only appropriate that we begin our survey of seventeenth-century institutions with the ruler and his court.

Let us begin with the royal person, for he was an institution in his own right. In contrast to some monarchies, the Russians do not seem to have recognised or even known about the 'king's two bodies' doctrine.⁷ The clergy said and commoners believed that the tsar was selected by the Lord, not to hold the office of tsar, but to be tsar. This is why one finds so much talk of the 'true tsar' and 'pretenders', particularly during the Time of Troubles when it was hard to tell the difference, but also after the ascension of the Romanovs.⁸ Just how one could know the 'true tsar' was anybody's guess, but that there was a 'true' - that is, divinely appointed - tsar was never seriously questioned. There was, then, no office of'tsar'; there was just the 'true tsar', a person and family ordained by the hand of the All Mighty.

We know, of course, that Michael Romanov was elected or, rather, his family won out in a rough and tumble competition dominated by occupying cossacks in 1613. But it was not considered polite (or even safe)[5] to mention this after the fact. That is because Michael was the 'true tsar'. His family and their propagandists spent a lot of effort to drive this point home. They went so far as to argue that they were not only the very descendents and rightful heirs to the Riurikids (via one of Ivan IV's marriages), but that they were in some mystical sense Riurikids themselves. This effort to cloak themselves in other-worldly divinity appealed to the Muscovite mind, but it doubtless had little effect on the men who actually engineered the Romanov 'succession'. They knew, as politicians always know, what had actually happened. Nonetheless, it made no sense for them to do anything but play along. The tsar, after all, was one of them and would - if he were wisely selected - protect their interests. Michael and his successors did just this, and they became 'true tsars' as a result.

Though one reads occasionally in Muscovite didactic texts that the tsar should do this or that (take council, be merciful, be wise),[6] he really had only two hard and fast duties: to produce a suitable heir and to rule the country in consultation with his boyars. There were, naturally, rules about how he would perform these two tasks, the former governed by Christian doctrine and the latter by custom. Since the rights and obligations of Orthodox marriage are

Duma ranks

Boiare <

t

Okol'nichie -4— t

Dumnye dvoriane <

' t . Ceremonial ranks <

n

>Dumnye d'iaki

Figure 19.1. The sovereign's court in the seventeenth century

sufficiently well known (one wife, or at least one at a time), as is the process by which an heir is begotten, let us discuss the rules of Muscovite politics as they were practised in their principal arena, the sovereign's court (gosudarev dvor).¹¹

The sovereign's court was the locus of political power in Muscovy. It was not a place (though the royal family did have quarters in the Kremlin called a 'court' or dvor), but rather a hierarchy of ranks. Figure 19.1 outlines them.

As one would expect, higher ranks were more honourable than lower ranks, and generally less populous. To some degree, different rank-holders did dif­ferent things: the men in the duma ranks (boiare i dumnye liudi) advised the tsar in the royal council (duma), an ill-defined customary body whose power waxed and waned depending on the age of the tsar, the authority of those around him and the number of counsellors present. Those below the duma ranks (the sub-duma court ranks in Figure 19.i) generally worked as footmen of various sorts at court - serving at table, guarding the palace, performing in ceremonies, escorting emissaries and so on. Despite their modern 'servile' connotations, these lines of employ were considered very honourable duty by high-born Muscovites (and certainly better than serving in the provinces). Finally, the administrators served in the chancelleries (prikazy). Because they performed servile work (writing), they were drawn from a less honourable class (sluzhilyeliudipopriboru, or 'service people by contract') rather than from the ranks of hereditary servitors (sluzhilye liudi po otechestvu, or 'service people by birth').[7]

As Figure 19.1 suggests, servitors sometimes moved through the ranks. The rules for entry into and promotion through the upper ranks were as follows.[8]The men in the three duma ranks above dumnyi d'iak (boiarin, okol'nichii, dumnyi dvorianin) were generally recruited from hereditary servitors in the sub-duma court ranks. Elected hereditary servitors could be appointed to any of these three ranks (that is, not dumnyi d'iak). Once they had assumed a rank, they could progress upward, for example, from dumnyi dvorianin to okol'nichii or from okol'nichii to boiarin. Ranks could not be skipped after entry - one could not go directly from dumnyi dvorianin to boiarin. Dumnye d'iaki were generally recruited from the ranks of d'iaki who were themselves recruited from clerks (pod'iachie), all of whom were men of lower birth.[9] Like their hereditary counterparts in the duma cohort, they could progress through ranks after appointment, again, without skipping.

To simplify a bit, the game of Muscovite politics had as its goal either advancement to the high ranks (for individuals and their families) or control of the composition of these ranks (for the royal family, or blocs of allied families). It bears mentioning that seventeenth-century politics had very little to do with policies and everything to do with persons. There may have been debate on this or that issue, but, as we have noted, everyone in the sovereign's court was (to continue our metaphor) on the same team and pursued the same goal - the maintenance and, if possible, the expansion of the elite's interests.¹⁵ Certainly there was conflict over issues. But it is telling that the Muscovites never developed a formal institution that might represent differing political agendas among notables. None was needed. The prime political question, it appears, was always who would pursue this common agenda, and only rarely whether it should be pursued.

There were, in essence, three players in this contest.[10] First, there was the tsar himself. In theory, he made all appointments to and promotions through the ranks. Yet in fact he did not rule alone, but rather with the aid of close relatives, advisers and mentors.[11] The existence of a small retinue of advis­ers around the tsar was recognised by the Muscovites themselves: Grigorii Kotoshikhin, the treasonous scribe who penned the only indigenous descrip­tion of the Muscovite political system, explicitly calls them the 'close people' (blizhnie liudi).[12] These confidants would and could bend the tsar's ear when it came to appointments and promotions. The second major class of players at the Muscovite court were old elite servitors, that is, men of very high, heritable status whose families traditionally held positions in the duma ranks. These were Muscovy's aristocrats: for centuries, they had commanded Muscovy's armies, administered Muscovy's central offices, and governed Muscovy's far- flung territories.[13] Their right to high offices was guarded by mestnichestvo,

The tsar and his retinue

[2-4 f/milies]

The traditional elite

[30 m/n/20 faMies]

Boyars Okol'nichie

)umnye dvoriane Dumnye d'iaki

Younger members of the old\lite

early Russia's mechanism for protecting the order of precedence.[14] Finally, we have men and families serving in the lower orders of the sovereign's court - the thousands of stol'niki, dvoriane moskovskie, and striapchie who occupied minor offices in Moscow and the provinces. They could never reasonably hope to win appointments to the duma. Figure 19.2 describes the three interest groups within the system of ranks.

The contest over the duma ranks was not a fair one. The tsar held the most power - he, as we have said, made all the appointments. The old elite had considerable though less power - by Muscovite tradition, elite families had a special claim on the upper ranks, often passing them on through several generations. And the mass of courtiers had the least power - only very occa­sionally would the tsar reach down into the lower rungs ofthe court to elevate a common stol'nik, but the possibility was always open.

Each of these parties deployed different strategies to gain victory. The tsar's course was one of balance: he attempted to distribute just enough of the ranks to elite servitors so as to guarantee their allegiance, while at the same time reserving a portion for the purposes of patronage, reward of merit, or some

other end. Members of the old elite pursued a strategy of maintenance: they fought to preserve their hold on the duma ranks by keeping new servitors out ofexisting positions and preventing the tsar from creating new posts. The common courtiers' strategy was offensive: they used a variety of mechanisms to win favour with the tsar or elite (service, marriage alliances, etc.) in order to gain a place among the duma men.

Who won? A brief overview of seventeenth-century high politics

As Michael Romanov ascended the throne in 1613, he and the coalition of forces that supported him faced serious difficulties. There were several claimants to the crown (some arguably more legitimate than Mikhail Fedorovich), the country was occupied by Swedes, Poles and numerous rebel bands, and the economy was in shambles after many years of bloody civil war. No one was really sure who the 'true tsar' was. The Romanov party did the only thing it could to maintain power: issue a 'national' call to eject the foreigners, declare a de facto amnesty to those in other camps and begin the slow and painful process of reducing its opponents - alien and domestic - one at a time. First, the rebels were defeated (Zarutskii, Mniszech), then the otherwise distracted Swedes were pacified (the Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617) and finally the Poles were ejected (the Truce of Deulino, 1618). These measures shored up the Romanovs' hold on power. The return of Michael's father, soon-to-be Patriarch Filaret, from Polish captivity in 1619 solidified it. For the first and last time in Russian history, father and son - the head of the Church and head of the state - ruled together.

Aside from this single (albeit dramatic) innovation, the diarchy pursued a moderate course aimed at cultivating political support and recouping the considerable losses incurred during and after the Troubles. Even after the situation had stabilised, there was no general purge of elements who had fought for the 'wrong' side in the previous decades (though the Romanovs did turn hard on their former allies the cossacks). Rather, the sins of the Time of Troubles were forgotten for all but a few. The old boyars returned to their high places, irrespective of what port they had sought in the storm of the Troubles. The administrative class took its station as well, again without suffering for its prior allegiances. And the central and provincial military servitors were prepared for the imminent reckoning with Poland, which finally came in 1634.

Indeed, after the Romanov political settlement, Russian high politics were marked by a general peace for over thirty years. Certainly there were intrigues,

schemes and plots (many of which are unknown to us, hidden by the habit of not writing anything of importance down), but these were the quotidian affairs of every court in every country. The political quiet was shattered, finally, in 1648. Three years earlier, the young Aleksei Mikhailovich succeeded his much venerated father (see Table 19.1). Alexis's former tutor, Boris Ivanovich Morozov, became regent and packed the court and council with his cronies. Though a capable man, he was surrounded by the corrupt Miloslavskii clique (Alexis's first wife was a Miloslavskii; Morozov married her sister, thereby becoming the tsar's brother-in-law). Calls of government corruption grew louder until Moscow and several other cities exploded in riots aimed at bringing Morozov and the Miloslavskiis down. The mob lynched officials, burnt houses and looted shops. At one point, the tsar himself was threatened by the angry crowd. By all reports, this episode had a powerful effect on the youthful, pious ruler.[15] Bowing to pressure, Morozov and the tsar's father-in-law were exiled (only to return shortly), corrupt officials (or at least those the crowd said were corrupt) were brutally executed and the tsar resolved to reform the state in such a way as to make sure such things never happened again.

Alexis turned to the able Prince N. I. Odoevskii for help. He headed a commission designed to solve all the unattended problems faced by Muscovy at one bold, legislative stroke. Perhaps recalling his father's fondness for public input (it had saved them in 1613), Alexis called a massive assembly of 'all kinds of people' in Moscow for this purpose. In hindsight, it was a risky move for an immature leader still reeling from his first taste of popular protest. But the commission did its monumental work, the public acclaimed it, and Muscovy had a roadmap to permanent order - the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649, one of the largest law codes of the early modern period. Like all successful compromises, there was something in it for everyone (or at least everyone who mattered): the powerful had their places next to the tsar affirmed; the gentry received the right to pursue runaway serfs and slaves as long as necessary to return them; and the common urban folks were promised that the corruption would be punished to the fullest extent of the law (which was, we should note, quite far).²² Again, peace reigned at court and in the country. Save two periods of

Table 19.1. The early Romanovs

Roman Iur'evich Zakhar'in

IVAN IV d. 1584

MICHAEL r. 1613-45

ALEXIS m. (1) Mania Miloslavskaia . r. 1645-76

Sophia Regent, 1682-9

PETER I ('the Great') r. 1682-1725

urban unrest brought on by debasement of the silver with copper (1656 and 1662), all was quiet. Or so it appeared. Under the calm surface, however, an important struggle was occurring at the very heart of Muscovite high politics.

The greatest cause of Alexis's reign (and his greatest triumph) was the Thirteen Years War, his effort to recoup the losses suffered at the hands of the hated Poles. Personally marching off to battle in 1654, he took a direct interest in making sure his crusade was brought off successfully. In the course of his campaigning, Alexis must (and here we are speculating) have judged for himself the merits (and demerits) of his soldiers, for he came back to the capital devoted to the idea of reforming, if not overturning, the existing political order.[16] In the context of a rapidly evolving administrative and military situation, the traditional boyar elite had become distinctly less useful. Even men of low status did not respect them, as Kotoshikhin's unflattering portrait demonstrates.²⁴ Talented men - regardless of birth - who were willing to serve and serve well were needed. Given the rules of appointment to the boyar ranks, such 'new men' had no chance to attain the highest honours. Merit was not being rewarded, at least not in the way Alexis believed it should be. Obviously, the rules had to be changed so as to allow the entry of the 'new men'.[17]

The tsar did not bring the 'new men' into the duma all at once. He could not do so without risking a costly and dangerous political battle with the old elites. Rather, he pursued a conservative approach, appointing a few 'new men' at time. But even here his options were limited by the hold of the old elites over the upper ranks. Alexis knew that they would probably grumble if he promoted men oflower status to the highest ranks in the duma orders, forthese were the traditional preserve of the old elite. Neither could Alexis make the more honourable of the 'new men' conciliar secretaries (dumnye d'iaki), for that rank was deemed too low for the hereditary servitors in the sovereign's court. Therefore Alexis opted for a strategy that would at once appease the hereditary boiarstvo and permit him to promote the 'new men': he transformed the rank of conciliar courtier (dumnyi dvorianin). The chronology of events is telling. In 1650, Alexis took the unprecedented step of appointing a fifth man to dumnyi dvorianin. Prior to that act, the largest number of dumnye dvoriane had been four (in 1634 and 1635), and ordinarily there had only been one. By the first year of the war, there were eight of them. During the war, he promoted sixteen more. Among them we find many of Alexis's 'new men'.[18] During the war the tsar began to promote his dumnye dvoriane into the ranks of okol'nichie.²⁷ One of them, A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, was made boyar in 1667 and served as effective prime minister until 1671. In that year another 'new man', A. S. Matveev, took his place, though he was not promoted to boyar until 1674.²⁸

Under Alexis, then, two prominent 'new men' came to rule Russia. Others exercised less visible but no less important roles as leaders in the chancellery system. In all, Alexis appointed forty-eight low-status 'new men' to the duma ranks. As we can see in Figure 19.3, the tsar entrusted them with a great number of Muscovy's highest administrative offices.[19]

Particularly notable is the fact that Alexis placed his 'new men' in the most important prikazy: the Military Service Chancellery (Razriad), arguably the most powerful prikaz in seventeenth-century Muscovy; the Service Land Chancellery (Pomestnyi prikaz), which administered estates given to the gen­try throughout Russia; and the Ambassadorial Chancellery (Posol'skii prikaz), which controlled Muscovy's foreign affairs.³⁰

Alexis began the process of supplementing hereditary rank-holders with competent 'new men'.[20] It is difficult to overestimate the impact of these appointments on the Muscovite political system. Alexis's alteration of duma appointment policy destroyed the equilibrium between the tsar and the elite families that ended the Time of Troubles. By the end of the Thirteen Years War, the tsar clearly had the upper hand in political matters. Alexis had successfully transformed the duma ranks from a royal council controlled by hereditary clans into a fount of royal patronage to be distributed as the tsar desired. The

DD > DDv > Ok > B

1646 1650 1655 Service Land [1643/4-63/4] 1646 Tsar's Workshop [1635 / 6-46 / 7]

1647 Grand Treasury [1630/1-46/7]; Ore [1641/2]; Ambassadorial [1646/7-47/8]

1648 Grand Revenue [1648 / 9-51 / 2]

1649 1664 Military Service [1648/9-63/4];

Monastery [1667/8-75/6]; New Tax District [1676/7] Kazan' Palace [1646/7-71/2]; Ambassadorial [i652/ 3-64/5]; Novgorod Tax District [1652/3-64/5]; Seal [1653/4-63/4]; Provisions [1674/5] 1655 Equerry [1646 / 7-53 / 4]

Patriarch's Court [1641/ 2-46/7, 1648/9-52/3]

Great Treasury [1634/5-61/2]; Ore [1641/ 2]

1653 Treasury [1639/40-44/5]; Ambassadorial

[1645/6-66/7]; Novgorod Tax District [1645/6-63/4]; Seal [1653/4-68/9]; Monastery [1654/5]; Seal Matters [1667/8]

Investigative [1654/5-56/7] NONE

Moscow (Zemskii) [1655/6-71/2]; Kostroma Tax District [1656/7-70/1]; Financial Investigation [i662/3-64/ 5] Moscow Judicial [1630/1-31/2]; Grand Revenue [1632/3-37/8]; Artillery [1658/9-62/3,1672/3-77/8]; Grand Treasury [1663/4-68/9]

1658 i665 i667 Ambassadorial [i666/7-70/ i]; Vladimir Tax District [1666/7-70/1]; Galich Tax District [1666/7-70/1]; Little Russian [1666/7-68/9]; Ransom [1667/8]

1659 Grand Palace [1657/8-64/5]; Palace Judicial [i664/ 5]; New Tax District [1664/5-68/9]

Figure 19.3. Alexis's new men in the chancelleries

Chancelleries led

DD > DDv > Ok > B

Pronchishchev, I. A. 1661

Leont'ev, Z. F. 1662

Chaadaev, I. I. 1662

Nashchokin, G. B. 1664

Khitrovo, I. T. 1664

Bashmakov, D. M. 1664

Karaulov, G. S. 1665

Durov, A. S. 1665

Khitrovo, I. B. 1666 1674

O.-Nashchokin, B. I. 1667

Grand Treasury [1661/2-62/3]; Monastery [1664/5]; Grand Revenue [1667/8-69/70]; Ransom [1667/8-69/70]; Criminal [1673/ 4-74/ 5] NONE

Moscow (Zemskii) [1672/3-73/4]; Foreign Mercenaries [1676/7-77/8]; Dragoon [1676/7-86/7]; Siberian [1680/1-82/3] Vladimir Judicial [1648/9]; Slave [1658/9-61/2]; Postal [1662/3-66/7] NONE

Tsar's Workshop [1654/5]; Grand Palace [1655/6]; Privy Affairs [1655/6-63/4]; Lithuanian [1657/ 8]; Ustiug Tax District [1657/ 8-58/ 9]; Financial Investigation [1662/3]; Military Service [1663/4-69/70, 1675/6]; Ambassadorial [1669/70-70/1]; Vladimir [1669/70-70/1]; Galich [1669/70-70/1]; Little Russian [1669/70-70/1]; Petitions [1674/5]; Seal [1675/6-99/1700]; Treasury [1677/8-79/80,1681/2]; Investigative [1676/7,1679/80]; Financial Collection [1680/1]

Service Land [1659/60-69/70]; Grand Palace [1669/70]; Postal [1669/70-71/2]; Kazan' [1671/2-75/6]; Moscow (Zemskii) [1679/80]; Criminal [1682/3]; Investigative [1689/90] Postal [1630/1-31/2]; Equerry [1633/4]; Grand Revenue [1637/ 8-39/40]; Musketeers [1642/3-44/5,1661/2-69/70]; Ustiug Tax District [1653 / 4, 1669/ 70-70/ 1]; New Tax District [1660/1-61/2]

Grand Palace [1664/5-69/70]; Palace

Judicial [1664/ 5-69/ 70]

NONE

Figure 19.3 (cont.)

Chancelleries led

DD > DDv > Ok > B

Tolstoi, A. V. Rtishchev, G. I. Ivanov, L. I.

Titov, S. S.

Solovtsov, I. P. Sokovnin, F. P.

Nesterov, A. I.

Patriarch's Court [1652/3-58/9, 1660/1-62/3]; Ambassadorial [1662/3-69/70,1680/1]; Novgorod [1662/3-69/70,1680/1]; Ransom [1667/ 8]; Tsarina's Workshop [1659/60-60/1]; Vladimir [1667/8-69/70, i680/ i]; Galich [i667/ 8-69/ 70, i680/ i]; Little Russian [i667/ 8-69/70, i680/ i]; Pharmaceutical [1669/70-71/2]; Smolensk [i680/ i]; Ustiug [i680/ i] Postal [1649/50-51/2]; Grand Palace [1651/2-53/4]; Musketeers [1653/4-61/2]; Grand Treasury [1661/2-63/4]; New Tax District [1664/5,1666/7,1669/70-75/6]; Ambassadorial [1666/7-69/70]; Vladimir Tax District [i667/ 8-69/ 70]; Galich Tax District [1667/8-69/70]; Novgorod Tax District [1667/8-69/70]; Little Russian [1667/8-69/70]; Seal [1668/9-75/6]; Service Land [i669/70-75/ 6]; Military Service [1673/4-75/ 6]; Ransom [1677/8] NONE

Tsar's Workshop [i649/50-68/9] New Tax District [1662/3-63/4]; Grand Palace [i663/4-69/ 70, i680/i]; Armoury [1663/4-69/70]; Musketeers [1669/70-75/6,1677/8]; Ustiug Tax District [1672/3-75/6,1679/80]; Lithuanian [1674/5]; Investigative [1675/6]; Ambassadorial [1675/6-81/2] Musketeers [1655/6-56/7]; Vladimir Tax District [1655/6-56/7]; Galich Tax District [1655/6-56/7]; Criminal [1656/7]; Military Service [i657/ 8-58/ 9, 1669/70-73/4]; Financial Collection [1662/3-63/4]; Grand Palace [1663/ 4-69/70]; Vladimir Judicial [1663/4] Provisions [1669/70-70/1] Tsarina's Workshop [1666/7-69/ 70, 1676/7-81/2, 1681/2]; Petitions [1675/6] Gun Barrel [1653/4,1655/6,1657/8, 1660/1, 1665/6]; Armoury [1659/60-67/8]; Gold Works [1667/8]

Figure 19.3 (cont.)

Name Ranks Chancelleries led

DD > DDv > Ok > B

Matveev, A. S. 1670 1672 1674 Little Russian [1668/9-75/6];

Ambassadorial [1669/70-75/6]; Vladimir Tax District [1669/70-75/6]; Galich Tax District [1669/70-75/6]; Novgorod Tax District [1669/70,1671/2-75/6]; Ransom [1670/1-71/2]; Pharmaceutical [1671/ 2-75/ 6]

Leont'ev, F. I. 1670 Artillery [1672/3-76/7]

Khitrovo, I. S. 1670 1676 Provisions [1667/ 8-69/70]; Ustiug Tax

District [1670/1-71/ 2]; Monastery [1675/6-77/8]; Judicial Review [1689/90] Poltev, S. F. 1671 Dragoons [1670/1-75/6]; Foreign

Mercenaries [1670/1-75/6]

Naryshkin, K. P. 1671 1672 1672 Ustiug Tax District [1676/7]; Grand

Treasury [1676/7-77/8]; Grand Revenue [1676/7-77/8]

Grand Palace [1669/70-78/9]; Court Judicial [1669/70-75/6,1677/8-78/9] Military Service [1656/7-60/1]; New Tax District [1660/1-65/6]; Ransom [1666/7, 1668/9, 1670/1-71/2]; Ambassadorial [1670/1-75/6]; Little Russian [1668/ 9-75/6]; Vladimir [1670/1-75/6]; Galich [1670/1-75/6]; Grand Treasury [1675/ 6-76/7]; Grand Revenue [1675/6-76/7] Privy Affairs [1671/2-75/6]; Provisions [1675/6-77/8]; Grand Revenue [1675/6]; Investigative [1675/6,1677/8]; Musketeers [1675/6-77/8,1681/2]; Ustiug Tax District [1675/6-77/8]; Judicial [1680/1]; Moscow (Zemskii) [1686/ 7-89/ 90]; Treasury [1689/ 90] NONE

Artillery [1655/ 6]; Foreign Mercenary [1656/7-57/8]; Grand Treasury [1659/60-63/4]; Grand Revenue [1662/3]; Privy Affairs [1663/ 4-71/ 2]; Grand Palace [1671/ 2-76/7]

Equerry [1653/4-63/4]; Gun Barrel

[1653/4]

Tsarina's Workshop [1669/ 70-76/ 7] NONE

Figure 19.3 (cont.)

tsar no longer ruled exclusively with the duma men, but instead via special conciliar and executive bodies. Kotoshikhin described two of them. The first was a kind of privy council chosen from the 'closest boyars and okol'nichie' (boiare i okol'nichie blizhnie). Here Alexis discussed affairs 'in private', outside the large council.³² Second, Kotoshikhin detailed the workings of the Privy Chancellery (Prikaz tainykh del), where the 'boyars and duma men do not enter . . . and have no jurisdiction'.³³ And that chancellery', he wrote, 'was established in the present reign, so that the tsar's will and all his affairs would be carried out as he desires, without the boyars and duma men having any knowledge ofthese matters.'³⁴ Kotoshikhin's understanding of Alexis's relation to hereditary duma men is clear: while he honoured them, he did his real business with the 'closest people'. He was, it is true, hardly the first Russian ruler to surround himself with an inner circle of powerful advisers.³⁵ He was, however, the first to do so since the political settlement that ended the Time of Troubles. For one of the few times in Muscovite history, the tsar had succeeded in liberating himself from the elite of which he was a part. Muscovy became an autocracy - or at least less of an oligarchy - as it had been under Ivan III and Ivan IV.

But only for a moment, for Alexis's new order proved untenable. He was strong enough and clever enough to use his novel tool of patronage sparingly. His successors were neither. As a result of their political insecurity, Fedor, Sophia and young Peter -together with those who urged them on - were forced to 'go to the well' of duma patronage often in order to win support among the boiarstvo. They made hordes of appointments from the ever-expanding court in a desperate effort to curry favour. The result can be seen in Figure 19.4.

The duma ranks ballooned, and thereby lost their meaning even as royal patronage. Alexis's weak successors had, in essence, devalued the currency bequeathed to them by their father. What Alexis had carefully designed as a mechanism to bring new talent into the political class resulted, under his children, in the destruction of that class. Confusion reigned among the elite; mestnichestvo - a nuisance from the point of view of the crown and meaningless from the point of view of the old elite - died an unmourned death.³⁶ As early

32 Kotosixin, ORossii,fo. 36.

33 Ibid., fo. i23v.

34 Ibid., fo.i24.

35 On the existence ofsuch 'inner circles' in previous eras, see A. I. Filiushkin, Istoriiaodnoi mistifikatsii: Ivan Groznyi i 'IzbrannaiaRada' (Moscow: VGU, 1998), and Sergei Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and His Counsellors. Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 135os-157os (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters 2000).

36 Marshall T. Poe, 'The Imaginary World of Semen Koltovskii: Genealogical Anxiety and Falsification in Seventeenth-Century Russia', Cahiers du monde russe 39 (1998): 375-88.

as 1681, even the wise old men of the traditional elite - led in this instance by Vasilii Golitsyn - were actively searching for a new order to replace what had obviously been broken.[21] They failed, and it would be up to Peter, who personally witnessed the corruption of his father's legacy, to forge a new and profoundly monarchical political system.

The chancelleries

While the boyar and court elite led Muscovy, chancellery personnel - the prikaznye liudi - administered it. They were, as we have seen, distinctly second- class citizens at court, 'employees at will' serving at the pleasure of the tsar - or not. But the state was growing rapidly in the seventeenth century, and with it the administrative burden of far-flung, complex operations. Since the prikaz personnel needed organisational skill and a deep knowledge of affairs, the elite generally kept them employed and reasonably satisfied - the state could not run without them. If a chancellery man performed well and had the proper connections, he could advance, first, through the administrative ranks (pod'iachii to d'iak) and, then, to the duma (though very rarely and almost always to dumnyi d'iak, no further). This cursus honorum was steep: only a small proportion of all clerks (pod'iachie) were made d'iaki (secretaries) and few d'iaki were made dumnye d'iaki.³⁸ As we have noted, late in the century some of the prikaz people occupied important positions in the government, and one served as de facto prime minister. This remarkable shift upward was a reflection of the growing importance of administrative work for the state.

The world of the prikaz people was different from that of any other Muscovite in a number of ways. First, the chancellery employees were literate, a fact that differentiated them from even most members of the elite (Koto- shikhin called the latter 'unlettered and uneducated').[22] As the century drew to a close, a few of them would even develop a taste for something we might sensibly call 'literature' (almost all of it imported), a first for Muscovy.⁴⁰ Second, the prikaz people worked in offices run in quasi-rational fashion. The chancel­leries had many ofthe trademarks of the classic Weberian bureaucracy: written rules, regular procedures, functional differentiation, reward to merit.⁴¹ This is not, of course, to say that prikaz employees were insulated from the winds of nepotism, favouritism and even caprice. Far from it: most prikaz people were the sons of prikaz officials, all had patrons and not a few were summarily dismissed without cause. Nevertheless, the rudiments of the modern adminis­trative office were all present in the prikazy. Finally, chancellery workers lived in Moscow cheek-by-jowl with the elite: the prikazy were located in the Krem­lin and Kitai gorod and their employees lived in the environs. This proximity gave them access to power that was unimaginable for the typical Russian.

As the interests of the state expanded, so too did the ranks of the prikazy.[23]The number of prikaz people grew significantly in the seventeenth century, from a few hundred in 1613 to several thousand in 1689. The vast majority of them were lowly clerks (pod'iachie). These men did most of the work in the offices, and their numbers expanded mightily during the century: in i626 there were around 500 of them in the Moscow offices; by i698 there were nearly 3,000.[24] As in all Muscovite institutions, we find hierarchy among the clerks - junior (mladshii), middle (srednii) and senior (starshii). If a man were partic­ularly lucky, he might be appointed to d'iak. D'iaki ordinarily commanded the chancelleries, serving together with an extra-administrative servitor (usu­ally a man holding duma rank). They could be tapped for other services as well, as Kotoshikhin tells us: 'they [d'iaki] serve as associates of the boyars and okol'nichie and duma men and closest men in the chancelleries in Moscow and in the provinces, and of ambassadors in embassies; and they . . . admin­ister affairs of every kind, and hold trials, and are sent on various missions.'⁴⁴ Like the pod'iachie, the numbers of d'iaki grew in the seventeenth century: in i626 there were around fifty serving in the chancelleries; by i698, there were roughly twice that many.⁴⁵ Of the roughly 800 men who served as d'iaki in the century, only forty-seven ever achieved the exalted status of dumnyi d'iak. These men were super-secretaries: they attended the royal council (though they were required to stand during the proceedings), advised the tsar, and administered the most sensitive affairs.⁴⁶ Of them, thirteen achieved the rank of dumnyi dvorianin; four, okol'nichii; and one, boyar.⁴⁷ Naturally, all of these men were advanced late in the century, after Aleksei Mikhailovich had 'opened the ranks to merit'.

The number of chancelleries themselves grew in the seventeenth century as well. In the ten years following the accession of Michael, the number rose from around 35 to around 50; thereafter, the number varied between 45 and 59.⁴⁸ These figures are, however, misleading on a number of counts. First, most chancelleries were quite short-lived, reflecting the fact that they were often created on an ad hoc basis to fulfil a specific mission (for example, the collection of a tax, or the investigation of a particular affair). Only the largest chancelleries administering the most central functions - the Military Service, Service Land, the Ambassadorial and so on - operated continuously throughout the century.

Though the chancelleries were not officially arranged in any 'organisational chart', we can gauge their administrative scope by placing them in functional categories (see Figure 19.5: Numbers and type of chancelleries per decade, i6i0s-i690s).⁴⁹ What is most apparent in Figure 19.5 is the concentration on military and foreign affairs - the prikazy were primarily instruments of war- making. Most of them were either directly engaged in provisioning the army (the military chancelleries, and we should include the Service Land Chan­cellery here as well) or funding the army (the financial chancelleries). Though

44 Kotosixin, O Rossii, fo. 37v.

45 Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, p. 23.

46 Kotosixin, O Rossii, fos. 33ff.

47 See Poe, The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 11, p. 35.

48 On all that follows concerning the prikazy, see Brown, 'Early Modern Russian Bureau­cracy' and his 'Muscovite Government Bureaus'.

49 Peter B. Brown, 'Bureaucratic Administration in Seventeenth-Century Russia', inJ. Koti- laine and M. Poe (eds.), Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth- Century Russia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 66. Sub-headings such as 'Man­power mobilisation' indicate areas of competence, and the numbers do not add up to the sub-totals above them.

sive Ambassadorial Chancellery - was a locus of state power which controlled far-flung territories. Chancelleries in these categories were the largest, best funded, most powerful and most honourable of all the administrative organs in the central government.

Like the workaday lower-court nobility, the chancellery personnel grew more powerful during the course of the century for the simple reason that the tsar found their services increasingly indispensable. Modern states cannot operate without relatively efficient - or at minimum, effective - bureaucra­cies. They collect the taxes, recruit personnel, and organise complex affairs generally Throughout early modern Europe, states were travelling a road that made them more and more dependent on the offices of well-trained, skilled administrators. So it was in Muscovy By the close of the century, the status of both administrators and administrative work had risen appreciably More and more of them were elevated to the royal council, and increasingly hereditary military servitors of very high status (the old boyars and 'new men') opted to serve the tsar in the prikazy.⁵⁰ The once entirely martial ruling class gained a hybrid character, working with near equal frequency in the court, army and

50 Robert O. Crummey, 'The Origins of the Noble Official: The Boyar Elite, 1613-1689', in D. K. Rowney and W M. Pintner (eds.), Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of

offices. It was a common story, one that has parallels in Prussia, France and all other successful early modern states.⁵¹

Other central institutions: the 'boyar council' and 'Assembly of the Land'

The tsar, the court and the prikazy were the central stable elements of Mus­covite governance throughout the seventeenth century. This being said, there were two other institutions, quite different in character, that we find in this era: the so-called 'boyar council' (boiarskaia duma) and Assembly of the Land' (zemskii sobor). Both have been the subject of considerable controversy. Early historians, with their eyes to the West, saw in them formal counselling and even representative bodies, the Russian analogues to peer councils and parliaments. Later historians called these views into question, noting that both terms were invented by eighteenth-century Russian historians and that there is very little in law or custom that defined the competence or operation of these bodies. With this in mind, let us look at what is known about these institutions today.

The phrase boiarskaia duma, though a later coinage, has come to stand for the regular high councils held at the courts of Kievan, apanage and particularly Muscovite princes from the ninth to the early eighteenth century.⁵² It appears in no medieval or early modern Russian source. The terms 'council' (duma), 'privy council' (blizhniaia duma) and 'tsar's senate' (tsarskii sinklit) appear in Muscovite sources and refer to a royal council of some sort. In early Mus­covy, dependent service families, not princes or independent lords, staffed the council. Consistent with this fact, the council seems to have evolved into an

Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 46-75. Also see Bickford O'Brien, 'Muscovite Prikaz Administration of the Seventeenth Century: The Quality of Leadership', FOG 24 (1978):

223-35.

51 On the All-European context, see Marshall T. Poe, 'The Military Revolution, Admin­istrative Development, and Cultural Change in Early Modern Russia', Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 247-73, and his 'The Consequences of the Military Revolution in Muscovy in Comparative Perspective', Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 603-18.

52 The literature on the boyar elite (what we have called the duma ranks of the sovereign's court) is immense, while studies of the duma per se are few (largely due to a lack of sources). The standard treatments, all somewhat dated, are: V O. Kliuchevskii, Boiarskaia duma drevnei Rusi. Opytistoriipravitel'stvennogo uchrezhdeniiav sviazi s istoriei ohshchestva, 3rd edn (Moscow: Sinodal'naia tipografiia, 1902); S. F. Platonov, 'Boiarskaia duma - predshestvennitsa senata', in his Stat'ipo russkoi istorii (1883-1912), 2nd edn (St Petersburg: M. A. Aleksandrov 1912), pp. 447-94; V I. Sergeevich, Drevnosti russkogo prava, vol. 11: Vecheikniaz'. Sovetnikikniazia, 3rd edn (St Petersburg, 1908). The best modern treatment is Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and his Counsellors.

instrument of the prince's private administration (his 'patrimony' (votchina)). Officers of the domain ('chiliarchs' (tysiatskie)), 'major-domos' (dvoretskie), 'seal-bearers' (pechatniki), 'treasurers' (kaznacheia)) are identified among his counsellors. Classes appear among the boyars in the council early on: the 'privy boyars' (vvedennye boiare) and 'departmental boyars' (putnye boiare), for example, are distinguished from all others. These men were probably agents of the prince's private administration, but this is not certain. The competence of the council appears to have been extensive but is indistinguishable from that of the prince. No formal definition of powers is found in any source. Similarly, nothing is known of the internal operation of the council in the early period.

The princely council underwent considerable development in connection with the rise of Muscovy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To the old Muscovite service families were added immigrants from defeated apanages, the Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tatar khanates. These new arrivals were at first given minor positions in the grand-princely administration and later, after they had been tested, were given high court rank and served as coun­cillors. Records of this era permit the identification of most of those holding these ranks, something impossible in the Kievan and Apanage periods.[25] The evidence suggests that the number of men holding 'conciliar ranks' (dumnye chiny) was small, hovering around fifteen members in the years of Ivan III and Vasilii III, though it increased in size to about fifty under Ivan IV In this period the competence of the duma - or at least of certain members of the council - is suggested in legislation and legal documents for the first time. The Law Code (Sudebnik) of 1497 directs that the 'boyars and okol'nichie are to admin­ister justice' (suditi sud boiaram i okol'nichim), and it is known from surviving cases that they did so.⁵⁴ In like measure, the duma seems to have had some legislative authority, as can be seen in the often-repeated Muscovite formula 'the sovereign orders and the boyars affirm' (gosudar' ukazal i boiare prigov- orili). Despite these hints, the exact boundaries of the duma's independent competence, if any, remained unregulated.

Towards the end ofthe sixteenth century foreigners provided some sketchy evidence of the operation of the council.⁵⁵ They report seeing the council arrayed during ambassadorial audiences. However, it is evident that on such occasions the members played highly scripted roles that probably did not reflect the proceeding of 'private' council meetings. According to the English ambassador Giles Fletcher, central and provincial administrators, as well as private suitors, appeared before the duma on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fri­days at seven in the morning.[26] The foreigners generally dismissed the duma as an ineffectual body, but this is not entirely accurate.[27] The council was very active during the Time of Troubles and succeeded in imposing an oath on Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii in 1606. According to Kotoshikhin, a similar oath was taken by Michael Romanov in 1613, but this is uncorroborated.⁵⁸

In the seventeenth century, the competence of the council, as well as its exact composition and mode of operation, remained undefined - there was no constitution or even coherent (and inscribed) custom detailing who was (or should be) on it, or what it was to do (other than deliberate with the tsar). Kotoshikhin thoroughly describes general congresses of council members in which affairs were discussed and legislation was considered, affirmed and sent to the chancelleries for promulgation.[28] He tells us that 'although [Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich] used the title "autocrat", [he] could do nothing without the boyars' council'.[29] His son, in contrast, did quite a bit without their council. He favoured smaller groups of familiars (the blizhnie liudi) over the mass of courtiers who were coming to occupy the duma ranks.[30] By the second half of the century, the number of men who held these ranks was in all probability too large for all of them to serve as councillors, and there is no evidence that they did so. The duma ranks, as we have said, had turned into a source of patronage for weakmonarchs and thus the councillors - at least most of them - were deprived of their council.

The history of the zemskii sobor is just as controversial and murky.[31] The phrase itself was coined by the radical Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov around 1850.[32] It is found in no Muscovite source. Nineteenth-century Russian his­torians of a liberal bent tried their best to make out of the thin evidence a 'proto-parliamentary' body that - but for the unbridled power of self-seeking tsars and boyars - might have led Russia to enlightened liberal democracy. More sober historians, focusing on the evidence rather than projecting their fantasies on bygone eras, contradicted this rosy interpretation. The battle continues.

What can be said with confidence is this.[33] Some sort of popular assembly was first called by Ivan IV and, thereafter, occasionally by his successors. The regime of Michael Romanov-weakand attemptingto establishits legitimacy- seemed particularly fond of them (he was 'elected' by one), though his father was not. Though the assemblies (usually called sobory) could be assigned very specific tasks -for example, ratification ofthe Ulozhenie of 1649 (called 'Sobornoe' because it was affirmed by a sobor) - they were generally organised by the government to take stock of opinion on affairs domestic and international.

The composition of the assemblies was never set, though they appear to have had two salient characteristics-they were elite (almost entirely composed of high-born military servitors) and they were ad hoc (the government often simply gathered servitors and clerics already in Moscow). Some were large - several hundred delegates; others were small - several dozen delegates. The assemblies were not regularly conferred according to any schedule. Rather, they seem to have been called in moments of doubt or crisis. Delegates almost always supported the government; there was no forceful 'debate' as far as we know. Their exact competence - like the royal council - was never defined in law or custom, though they were consulted on a wide range of affairs. As we can see in Figure 19.6, some acclaimed tsars, others declared war, while others still adopted legislation.[34]

Delegates were called as a matter of service obligation (and sometimes viewed said service as onerous), not as a matter of 'right'. Neither in years

without assemblies, nor in the year they were extinguished finally, was there any protest or even mention of them in Muscovite sources. Foreigners, who were often careful observers of Russian politics, very rarely note them and when they do attribute little importance to them.⁶⁶

Concluding remarks

In the end, the seventeenth-century Muscovite state proved to be quite robust. Even after it was almost totally taken apart in the maelstrom of the Time of Troubles, the triptych tsar-court-prikazy re-emerged rapidly and in full form. The ruling class wasted no time or effort on costly government experimenta­tion in 1613. It simply picked itself up and got down to business. And its business was rule, plain and simple. For the tsar, his court and the men of offices, the

66 Poe, A People Born to Slavery', pp. 66-7.

entire point ofthe state was to rule over others and live off them. Never was this point seriously questioned. One must admire the single-minded purpose this sort of concentration bespeaks. While other early modern states (whatever their form) might pursue any number of goals - fostering science, patronising the arts, educating the public, spreading the Good Word-the Muscovite elite focused nearly all its energy in ruling others or conquering others so that they might rule them. Domination was their raison d'etre.

As the century closed, this focus was, for good or ill, lost. Peter and his cohort were enamoured of a different vision of the state and its goals, one that was as new to Russia as it was profoundly alien to the Muscovite spirit. Aleksei Mikhailovich could no more have said he was the 'first servant of the state' than he could have sworn off the Orthodox faith. He could not serve the state because he owned the state. It was his instrument to do with as his master - God in Heaven - commanded. Neither could his servitors have said they were serving anything like the 'common good'. Such a thing was impossible, for they were honourable men and truly honourable men served only God and his representative, the tsar. As for the rest - all those who were neither tsars nor servants of tsars - they just did not matter.Local government and administration

BRIAN DAYIES

There were two important developments affecting local government in the period 1613-89. The first was the spread of the town governor system of local administration. In the sixteenth century annually appointed town comman­dants (godovye voevody) with some civil as well as military authority had been found in some districts on the southern and western frontier. But by the 1620s most districts were under commandants turned town governors (gorodovye voevody), with staffs of clerks and constables, and exercising authority over the guba and zemskii elders, fortifications stewards, siege captains and other local officials. Responsibility for most aspects of defence, taxation, policing, civil and criminal justice, the remuneration of servicemen and the regulation of pomest'e landholding at the district level was now concentrated in the town governors' offices. The second development was the increasing reliance of town governor administration on codified law, written instructions and regu­lar reporting and account-keeping. This enhanced central chancellery control over local administration and partly compensated for the avocational nature of town governor service.

The spread of town governor administration

The universalisation of gorodovyi voevoda administration had been a response to the breakdown of the political order in the Time of Troubles. On the one hand, the spread of town governor administration across the southern frontier in the late sixteenth century had helped to fuel the Troubles: mass discontent with the heavy burdens of defence duty and agricultural corvee on the 'Sovereign's tithe ploughlands' had led to the overthrow of several south­ern frontier town governors and placed much of the south in the hands of the First False Dmitrii and successor insurgents. On the other hand, after the disintegration of Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii's regime in 1608 the tasks of defeating the rebels and foreign invaders and re-establishing strong central authority fell by default to other town governors, notably P. P. Liapunov of Riazan' and D. M. Pozharskii of Zaraisk, who had the military experience and political connec­tions to lead the governors and lesser officials of the towns of the north-east into forming an army of national liberation and a provisional government. In coalition with certain boyars and cossack leaders Pozharskii's army drove the Poles from Moscow (1612) and restored the Russian monarchy under the new Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich (1613). It was natural that the new Romanov monarchy should see its continued survival in the utmost centralisation and militarisa­tion of provincial government - the logical agents of which were the town governors, appointed by and accountable to the central chancelleries, selected from the court nobility, and given broad authority over district military, fiscal, judicial and police affairs. Upon Tsar Michael's accession his government was supposedly deluged with collective petitions from the provinces, 'from many towns, from the dvoriane and deti boiarskie and various servicemen and inhab­itants', begging that town governors be placed in charge of their districts, for 'without town governors their towns would not exist'.[35] Whether these petitions really represented local will or its ventriloquism by the central gov­ernment cannot be determined, but three days later the central government authorised the general restoration and expansion of town governor rule, to all districts in need of town governors. Whereas town governor administration had been confined mostly to the western and southern frontiers before the Troubles, it came to prevail throughout the centre and north as well by the 1620s. By 1633 there were 190 governors' offices, and 299 by 1682.[36]

After 1613 most of the local administrative organs common before the Trou­bles were liquidated or were absorbed into town governor administration. The title of vicegerent (namestnik) was still used at court as a ceremonial honorific, but vicegerents no longer governed in the provinces. The fortifica­tions and siege stewards declined in number and became subordinate officials (prikaznye liudi) of the town governors' offices. Customs and tavern adminis­tration remained in the hands of elected community representatives or tax- farmers, but they came under the supervision of the town governors, who supervised their operations and gave them quarterly or annual accountings. District-level and canton-level elected zemskii offices for tax collection and jus­tice continued to exist in the north, but most of them were subordinated to the town governors, so that zemskii officials no longer dealt with the chancelleries directly but only through their local governor; the more important kinds of court cases traditionally heard in the district-level zemskii court were now held in the governor's court, which also became a court of second instance over those matters still heard in zemskii courts; and the tax-collection activities of zemskii officials were subject to especially tight control from the governor's office, for the governor had the authority to beat zemskii officials under righter (pravezh), that is, in the stocks, for any tax arrears or irregularities and the tendency was towards requiring zemskii collections to be turned in to the governor's office.

For some time the guba constabulary offices for policing and investigating felonies were permitted greater autonomy, for Moscow saw some advantage in keeping the defence of the community against banditry and violent crime in the hands of elected community representatives - especially as those elected as chief constables were supposed to be the communities' 'best men', ideally prosperous dvoriane or deti boiarskie, reporting their investigations directly to the Robbery Chancellery (Razboinyi prikaz) at Moscow for pronouncement of verdict. Besides reducing the need to send down special inquisitors from Moscow, this would have the advantage of shifting blame for policing failures from state officials to community representatives. Moscow's preference for the continued independence of the guba system was indicated in the 1649 Ulozhenie and 1669 New Decree Statutes as well as in a 1627 decree that announced that guba chief constables should be elected in all towns. But this came up against fiscal and manpower concerns: maintaining guba offices cost the community additional taxes, and in wartime prosperous dvoriane and deti boiarskie were needed in the army, not at home performing constabulary duties which could be assumed by the town governors or, in worst cases, by inquisitors from the Robbery Chancellery. The guba system was therefore not expanded; the town governors increasingly sought to subordinate the guba officials de facto; and in 1679 all guba offices were closed.[37]

Enhanced control through improved record-keeping

Town governor administration operated under closer central chancellery con­trol than had vicegerent administration in the previous century because the town governors' offices were held to higher expectations of written reporting and compliance with written instructions. The town governors were guided in their general or long-term responsibilities by written working orders (nakazy), and in more particular and non-routine matters by decree rescripts from the chancelleries; they were expected to submit frequent reports, even if all they had to relate was their progress in implementing relatively routine directives; and they had to maintain an increasingly wide range of rolls, inventories, land allotment and surveying books, court hearing inquest transcripts and account books for various indirect and direct revenues. Inventories of the archives of governors' offices generally show a significant increase in the rate of record pro­duction, especially from mid-century. This reflected the increasing demands upon the governors' offices by the central chancelleries, but also the demands upon them from the community in terms of litigation and petitioning of needs and grievances. [38]

Because the primary purpose of the governor's office was to gather and systematise information to facilitate executive decision-making in the central chancelleries and duma, the clerical staffing of the governor's offices was a cru­cial concern. It was the governor's clerks (pod'iachie) who produced, routed and stored all this information and kept order in the town archive and treasury. The clerks also performed important tasks in the field - supervising corvee, conducting obysk polling at inquests, conveying cash to and from Moscow, or surveying property boundaries. In some districts the governor's clerical staff was too small, too inexperienced or too poorly remunerated to maintain the flow of information required by the chancelleries. The smaller governors' offices might have only one or two clerks in permanent service and so be forced to turn over some tasks to public notaries or even press passing trav­ellers into temporary clerical service. In the 1640s the clericate of the provincial governors' offices officially numbered no more than 775, slightly fewer than the number of clerks staffing the central chancelleries.[39] However, the total clerical manpower at work in provincial administration may have been sig­nificantly larger because this total does not include the clerks serving in the customs, liquor excise, guba and zemskii offices. Furthermore, the small cler­ical staffs of the smaller governorships could be compensated for by making these governorships satellites of the larger offices found in the bigger towns of the region or the capitals of regional military administrations (razriady). The larger governors' offices came to have nearly as many clerks as some Moscow chancelleries and to imitate chancellery internal organisation by distributing them among bureaux (stoly, 'desks') for specialised functions under the gen­eral direction of an experienced senior executive clerk. In the 1640s the Pskov governor's office had twenty-one clerks and by 1699 it would have fifty-four clerks, some of whom had thirty or forty years' experience.[40]

The demand for clerical manpower in the provinces after the end of the Troubles had made it necessary for Moscow to give its town governors a free hand in appointing clerks and to accept as eligible men of all kinds of backgrounds: church clerks, the sons of priests, servicemen, merchants' sons, the sons of taxpaying townsmen and state peasants and declasse itinerants. After about 1640 this was no longer affordable, for taxpayers or servicemen enrolled as clerks thereby left the tax and military service rolls. The central chancelleries therefore began tightening their control over the appointment of clerks (eventually all appointments would be controlled by the Military Chan­cellery). The chancelleries moved towards standardising clerical pay rates, and they gradually reduced the range of social estates and ranks eligible for cleri­cal appointment. Cossacks and musketeers were forbidden to take service as clerks; by the i660s-i670s it was the rule that deti boiarskie could be appointed as clerks only if they had retired from military service, lacked the pomest'e lands to render military service or had not yet received formal initiation into military service. By the end of the century not even this was permitted: now no candidate could be appointed whose father had been registered in military service or on the tax rolls; only those whose fathers had been clerks were allowed to continue clerking in the governors' offices.

Thus the clericate became a closed hereditary corporation. Although this probably had the effect of slowing the growth rate of the provincial clericate, it had the advantage ofimproving clerical training and esprit de corps and making clerical service a life profession. Local clerical 'dynasties' emerged, with clerks accumulating decades of experience in the local governor's office and passing their training on to their sons, some of whom eventually worked their way up into the clericate of the central chancelleries. There was increased likelihood that clerical dynasties would tend to conduct themselves as local elites and exploit their neighbours, but clerical dynasties at least were motivated to attend closely to apprentice training out of self-interest.[41]

Local government in reconstruction and reform

The spread and systematisation of town governor administration was crucial to Patriarch Filaret's reconstruction programme (1619-33): the town governors helped reassemble and update chancellery cadastral knowledge, review the monasteries' fiscal immunities, return fugitive townsmen to the tax rolls, introduce new extraordinary taxes for military exigencies, suppress banditry and rebuild the pomest'e-based cavalry army by expediting response to petitions for entitlement award and land allotment.

In the period 1633-48 policy was made by the succession of cliques led by I. B. Cherkasskii, F. I. Sheremetev and B. I. Morozov. They gave priority to accel­erating colonisation of the southern frontier and eliminating the tax-exempt social categories and enclaves in the towns. Town governor administration played an essential role in both projects.

The years 1648-54 saw town governor authority used to implement several important reforms strengthening the southern frontier defence system: the completion of most of the Belgorod Line; levies into the newly revived foreign formation infantry and cavalry regiments; the subjection of southern service­men to the grain taxes (quarter grain, siege grain etc.) previously paid only by peasants and townsmen; and the laying of foundations for the vast Belgo­rod regional military administration (Belgorodskii razriad), which subordinated several town governors' offices in the south to the senior commander's office at Belgorod, not only for mobilisations and joint military operations but also for review of judicial, fiscal and land allotment matters. An equally significant reform in this period affected civil and criminal justice in governors' courts across the realm: the Ulozhenie law code (1649) greatly expanded and stan­dardised instructions for investigations and hearings in the local courts and streamlined and further centralised judicial administration by giving the duma functions of an appellate court and by further concentrating the supervision of criminal justice matters in the Robbery Chancellery. The Ulozhenie also ended the time limit for the recovery of fugitive peasants, thereby completing the process of peasant enserfment, and provided instructions for the governors' offices to enforce enserfment by conducting mass dragnets of fugitive peas­ants and townsmen as well as holding hearings for fugitive remands. The fact that the zemskii sobor was no longer convened after 1653 may testify to the centre's confidence in town governor administration by this point: apparently the flow of information from governors' reports and accounts and community petitions was now considered regular and reliable enough to support decision- making in the duma and chancelleries without any need to supplement it by periodically assembling representatives of the estates to solicit their views.

During the Thirteen Years War expenditure on army pay (particularly upon the more expensive foreign formation regiments, which accounted for some 75-80 per cent) increased enormously, exceeding a million roubles annually by 1663, about four times what army service allowances had totalled in 1632.[42]The sharp rise in tax rates and infantry levy quotas in the war years was all the harder to bear because grain taxes and infantry conscription no longer fell only upon men of draft (tiaglye liudi) traditionally defined, and because ruinous inflation had resulted from the government's decision to debase coinage. The governors' offices came under great pressure to keep cash, grain and manpower resources flowing while at the same time policing against desertion, taxpayer flight and riot. To tighten central control over their accounting and policing two new chancelleries with broad investigatory powers were created: a Privy Chancellery (founded in 1654) and an Auditing Chancellery (founded in 1656). A second great regional military administration was also established at Sevsk to further co-ordinate resource mobilisation and military operations on the southern frontier.

The Andrusovo Armistice (1667) did not lead to any significant relief from high grain taxation and infantry conscription rates. It remained necessary to garrison eastern Ukraine, to keep Moscow's puppet hetmans Mnogogreshnyi and Samoilovich in power and hold Hetman Doroshenko at bay; it was also necessary to defend against the Crimean Tatars by reinforcing the Belgorod Line and sending troops down the Donto assist (and control) the Don cossacks; and in 1674 a Muscovite army had to take the field in western Ukraine to defeat Doroshenko, who was now actively supported by Ottoman forces. The defeat ofDoroshenko led immediately to the first Russo-Turkish war (1676-81), which depopulated much of eastern Ukraine and deterred the Ottomans from invad­ing western Ukraine but also revealed the need to reform Muscovite military and fiscal practices. More regional military administrations were therefore formed (the Riazan', Tambov, Kazan', Smolensk and Vladimir razriady). A new Iziuma Line was built to extend the southern frontier defence a further 160 kilometres southward and shield military colonisation in Sloboda Ukraine. In 1678-80 six new foreign formation cavalry and ten new foreign forma­tion infantry regiments were created, while the number of southern service­men in the traditional formation cavalry was reduced by limiting eligibility to prosperous men holding at least twenty-four peasant households and there­fore presumably able to maintain themselves in service from their pomest'ia alone, without cash allowances. To meet the higher costs for new foreign for­mation troop pay, a major reform of state finances was undertaken. It started with a new general cadastral survey (1677-9), the first since 1646; led to the decision (1679) to shift to the assessment of direct taxes by household, thereby abandoning the old method of assessing by sokha (i.e. by area and produc­tive capacity of cultivated land); saw the amalgamation of a number of minor direct taxes into a single 'musketeers' money' tax for the army; and culminated in the founding of the Grand Treasury and the production of the first rudi­mentary state budget (1680). The simplification of direct taxation enhanced central chancellery control and permitted a further division of labour over fis­cal matters at the local level, with the town governors' offices made responsible largely for recording and actual collection of taxes left to elected community representatives.

Efforts at bureaucratic rationalisation

Over the course of the seventeenth century voevoda administration came to display more of the characteristics of rational bureaucratic organisation. It was already significantly differentiated: official duties were distinguished from the pursuit of personal interests, it being an already long-established principle that the governor's office (the s"ezzhaia izba, assembly house) was separate from his residence (voevodskii dvor) and that he was forbidden to hold doc­uments or the town seal at the latter; and there was some formal division of labour, at least within the larger offices - horizontally, in the form of dis­crete clerkships or even bureaux with specialised functions, and vertically, with supervising signatory clerks, document clerks and secretaries reporting in turn to the governor. By mid-century it had even become the tendency to rename the governor's office a prikaznaia izba in recognition that its organisa­tion was increasingly resembling that of a small chancellery. Office work was subject to various integrating mechanisms promoting standardised practice: there was a comprehensive and fairly consistent repertory of routines for han­dling incoming business, recording expenditures and services performed and reporting up important information and unresolved business; and although there was as yet no uniform written General Regulation covering all aspects of office work, that sphere of activity where written regulations were most nec­essary - the administration of justice - had finally received a comprehensive code of procedures with the promulgation of the Ulozhenie. Surety bonding, oaths ofconduct, annual and end-of-term audits and investigations went some way towards tightening constraints over the conduct of governors and their staffs. To enhance co-ordination and compensate for the limited effectiveness of central control mechanisms, most executive decision-making was removed from the governors' offices and located above them in the chancelleries, with ultimate executive policy-making removed to an even higher level, above the central chancellery bureaucracy, in the duma counselling circle.

But in one important respect voevoda administration resisted full bureau­cratic rationalisation. Although clerical staffs were expanding and office work undergoing further regulation in the governors' offices, neither process was sufficiently advanced to fully compensate for the fact that the organising link between the central and provincial clericates - the gorodovye voevody - were not themselves career administrative specialists. Those appointed as town governors were court notables serving only avocationally, without any special training for the task, as an occasional respite from their field army and court duties. There was no Muscovite noblesse de robe, trained in the law and seeking promotion to nobility through the path of judicial and administrative service, from which to draw in filling town governorships.

This by itself presented an obstacle to further centralisation of command- and-control, as avocational administration by notables is generally thought to have been slower, less precise, and less unified than fully bureaucratised administration, being 'less bound to schemata and more formless ... and also because it is less dependent upon superiors'.[43] Notables were more inclined to ignore bureaucratic rules and abuse their authority because they were not permanently subordinated to bureaucratic superiors, had not internalised a bureaucratic ethos of impersonalised objectivised service to the organisation and its larger mission, and meanwhile claimed social status above that of pro­fessional bureaucrats. And in Muscovy the problem was further exacerbated by the fact that town governor duty carried less honour and less remuneration than other forms of state service and so was less likely to be sought by notables pursuing promotion and influence at court.

There were various reasons to seek appointment as a town governor. It offered a rest from the rigours and risks of campaign duty, which is why measures had to be taken in wartime to tighten the Military Chancellery's control over appointments lest the provincial governors' offices become havens for shirkers. Those appointed to certain distant towns were immune from lawsuit for the duration of their terms. Governorships 'in array' (v razriade - as when one was appointed to govern a larger town with some authority over the governors of nearby lesser satellite towns) offered the opportunity to demonstrate higher mestnichestvo precedence over certain other nobles. Many seeking governorships were probably drawn by the opportunity to collect 'feeding' income in kind and cash (kormlenie, see below) to supplement their regular annual bounties from the sovereign's treasury.

Petitioners for appointment therefore usually cited as grounds their need for relief: they had been on campaign duty for many years with no real respite, held inadequate service lands, had fallen into debt and so sought governorships 'for their poverty'.[44] There were at any time many metropolitan nobles feeling themselves in need of relief, so there were usually multiple candidates available to take over vacant governorships. The chancelleries therefore had some choice as to whom to appoint - indeed, probably greater choice than in appointments to army commands, which were by nature 'in array' and therefore more subject to mestnichestvo precedence considerations.

But these motives for seeking appointment all treated town governor duty as merely avocational, a temporary surcease from the proper vocations of a metropolitan nobleman, duty in the field army and in the court. The Muscovite state service system had traditionally valorised field army and court duty over administrative duty in the provinces, so that rank promotions and raises to service bounties were much more often awarded for the former than for the latter. When town governors did see raises or royal gifts in honorarium, it was less likely to be as a reward for governor duty than part of a general distribution of largesse across the entire upper service class in commemoration of a special event such as a great military victory or the birth of a tsarevich. Nor was town governor duty as good a path to rank promotion or political influence as army and court duty, which were more visibly meritorious - performed in proximity to the sovereign and one's fellow nobles - and did not require long absence from the circles ofgossip, counsel and patronage at court that were so important to career advancement. Strictly speaking, town governor duty was not even routinely formally remunerated; it did not ordinarily carry its own salary precisely because it was considered a respite from vocational service. A notable appointed to a town governorship was usually expected to live off the annual zhalovanie bounty he already received in accordance with his rank and entitlement rating.¹¹ Whatever feeding arrangement he could negotiate with those he governed was his own concern, unless the chancelleries received complaint that he was extorting too much of it.

Therefore, although governorships were reserved for servitors of Moscow rank, that is, members of the metropolitan nobility, and the governorships of especially important towns like Novgorod and Astrakhan' might go to the elite of duma rank, the vast majority of governorships were given out to the middle and lower Moscow ranks; and while examination of service career patterns shows many metropolitan nobles taking turns at town gov­ernor duty, it presents few instances of them specialising in it. Those serving as town governors did so only avocationally, and most of them only on infre­quent occasions, with little or no prior experience. There was little opportu­nity for them to familiarise themselves fully with bureaucratic routines and norms, and little reason for them to internalise a professional bureaucratic ethos.

Fortunately there were mechanisms partly compensating for the avoca- tional character of town governor service.

While the discipline of career bureaucratic service was largely alien to the Muscovite metropolitan nobility, the discipline of general state service was not. Since the mid-fifteenth century the metropolitan nobility had been liable for compulsory life service to the sovereign - if not so much for provincial administrative service, certainly for court service and especially service in the field army. The Muscovite notable therefore differed from the Western European notable in accepting to a far greater degree the notion that rank and entitlements derived from service to the sovereign (even if town governor duty was not the preferred service track for winning them); more importantly, even while he was resting from campaign duty by feeding in the provinces as a town governor he remained under a military discipline which provided penalties for malfeasance.

In districts where the governor's office had direct responsibility for tax col­lection as well as tax recording the governor could be held accountable to the central chancelleries for any arrears or deficits caused by unfair or negligent collection measures as well as by embezzlement. Even for minor deficits he could be fined, deprived of rank, subjected to corporal punishment, impris­oned or exiled. When such irregularities had been caught at Moscow during examination of records submitted from the governor's office, the task of exact­ing the missing sum and imposing a fine or other penalty was entrusted to chancellery clerks and constables sent down for the purpose. In general, though, irregularities were not so easily discovered this way because until late in the century most chancelleries were not insistent that governors regularly send in full copies of their income and expenditure books (the Military Chan­cellery, for example, began requiring this only from 1685); they only required regular submission of short summaries (smety) comparing the current year's balance with that of the previous year and brief projections (pomety) of rev­enue and expenditure for the coming year. This may be why, when chancellery officials were sent down to exact arrears and deficits, it was sometimes to sev­eral districts in succession, arrears and deficits having been found to have accumulated undetected for some time across a broad region. In 1646, for example, the Ustiug Territorial Chancellery authorised that 35,000 roubles of missing revenues be exacted from the governors of several districts in its jurisdiction.[45]

The chancelleries recognised that central control could not rely entirely on quarterly or annual account submissions and therefore they continued to place greater reliance on subjecting outgoing governors to end-of-term audits by their replacements. The outgoing governor was required to give his replace­ment full assistance in conducting a general inventory and audit. This could take many days to complete, as it involved inspections of fortifications and troops, counting and weighing cash and grain stores, examining s"ezzhaia izba logbooks and archive inventories, reviewing income and expenditure accounts and conducting interrogations into expenditures that appeared to lack autho­risation from Moscow. In some cases the centre expected this audit to assess the profitability of the outgoing governor's administration compared to pre­vious governors' terms, in which case a profit report (pribyl'naia kniga) as well as audit report had to be prepared. The outgoing governor was not allowed to depart until the chancelleries had received these audit results and ruled on whether he had to pay any fines, make restitution of missing funds, or pay any damages to local inhabitants. Fines of a hundred roubles or more were com­mon enough; restitution of missing funds sometimes was ordered at double rate, to the total value of thousands of roubles.

The end-of-term audit was also recognised as an opportunity for the inhabi­tants to file complaint against the outgoing governor and askhis replacement to begin an investigation. In the Siberian towns the opportunity to file complaint was an especially important supplement to other central control measures and was accompanied by a special ritual: each new governor was under instruction to invite community representatives to a bienvenue feast, ply them with food and drink - expressly identified as largesse provided by the tsar himself, not by his governor - and then read them the 'sovereign's declaration of vouchsafe' (gosudarevo zhalovannoe slovo), an address promising them the new governor would protect them against extortion and oppression and investigate whatever complaints they chose to bring against the outgoing governor.

The chancelleries sometimes sent down from Moscow special inquisitors (syshchiki) to investigate specific complaints of corruption or abuse of authority made in collective petitions from the community or in denunciations by asso­ciate governors, clerks or other subordinate officials. The inquisitors made audits, took witness testimony, polled the community by poval'nyi obysk, reported up, and then implemented whatever penalty Moscow decreed. A good number of inquest records have been preserved, especially from Siberia, and some are quite long and painstaking and produced verdicts giving vic­tims of governor corruption meaningful relief. But when victims failed to get redress they charged the inquisitor with failing to take particular crucial tes­timonies or misrecording or forging testimonies. In other instances inquests dragged on for years without result.

The struggles against governor malfeasance therefore had to employ pre­ventive measures as well. The tendency over the course of the century was towards standardising the length of town governor terms - to two years in most towns under the authority of the Military Chancellery, with extensions of one or two years for merit or upon the petition of local inhabitants unwilling to risk possibly greater exploitation under a new governor. Besides providing more appointment opportunities to nobles seeking respite from army and court duty, appointing for shorter terms gave governors less time to build local clientage machines and drive their districts to revolt with their extortion and oppression. Governor terms in the larger and more strategic towns, in territorial razriad capitals and in distant Siberian towns were usually longer, to provide greater continuity in frontier defence and diplomatic operations and to reduce opportunities for governors homebound from Siberian posts to smuggle contraband furs in their baggage.

To check abuse of power it was also frequent practice to appoint to the larger towns and razriad capitals a senior governor and one to three associate town governors (tovarishchi) or secretaries on instruction to operate collegially, 'acting together as one, without dissension'.[46] Actual procedures for collegial decision-making were not spelled out (and so may not always have been observed in practice), but it was usually stipulated that the senior governor could put his seal on official acts only in the presence of his associates, that court cases had to be heard by senior governors and their associates together and resolved by unanimous verdict and that a senior governor or one or more of his associates had the right to challenge other kinds of decisions reached unilaterally without consultation.

An especially important means of minimising opportunities for governor malfeasance was sharpening the division of labour between central and local government. Maximum separation of policy-making from policy implementa­tion was sought, with the former centralised in the chancelleries and duma at Moscow and the latter left to the town governors. Governors were forbidden to set entitlement rates on their own initiative, without express authorisation from Moscow. Even many routine expenditures could not be made without prior chancellery authorisation. The 1670s saw efforts to remove the governors' offices further from the business of collecting taxes and entrusting collection to elected elders and deputies. In most capital criminal cases sentence of death could be made only by the Robbery Chancellery, and the governors of mid­dling and smaller towns were usually restricted from hearing civil cases over a certain rouble value. Some of these restrictions were routinised in governors' working orders, while others were imposed in particular circumstances, by special decree. The centre reserved for itself practically any decision which, if left entirely up to the governor's discretion, might become a tiagost', that is, a ruinous burden on the community. The exceptions were matters requir­ing immediate local response, such as military emergencies. Working orders tried to specify such circumstances in advance and instruct governors that in responding to these exigencies they could consider themselves free to act 'according to the matter at hand, and as God so enlightens them', provided they make immediate report to Moscow afterwards.

The practice of concentrating executive decision-making in the central government did not much reduce the range of tasks the governor was respon­sible for implementing - he still investigated and heard court cases and carried out sentences on them, even if the sentence was pronounced at Moscow - so it could be said the governor was still expected to be omni-competent even if forbidden opportunities tempting him to assert omnipotence. Centralising decision-making at Moscow of course had the disadvantage of encouraging prevarication among the town governors, who instead of acting in timely fashion would write repeatedly to Moscow asking for further clarification as to what they were supposed to do. But the sacrifice of speed to central con­trol was exactly the kind of cost an autocracy was willing to pay, preferable to accepting increased abuse of authority, the higher price that would have attached to entrusting greater discretion to the governors.

Given that executive decision-making was increasingly concentrated at Moscow, ever greater emphasis had to be placed on the reportorial function of the s"ezzhaia izba clericate. The governors and their clerks had to make more frequent and detailed reports to Moscow and submit extracts from or copies of their account books. More attention was given to documenting other matters in which the chancelleries had shown less interest in the first half of the century: keeping accurate trial records and obysk polling records, updating prisoner lists, inventorying confiscated property, compiling logs of interroga­tions of travellers and new settlers, issuing travel passes (now detailed enough to serve almost as passports) and submitting more informative protocols on the elections of customs deputies and jail guards. Ideally, the increased flow of information from such record-keeping would support the centralisation of decision-making at Moscow, making it more realistic and proactive; any con­tradictions or omissions discovered in audits and record checks would expose instances of governor malfeasance; and by making information-gathering and reporting the primary function of the s"ezzhaia izba some further devolution of district-level administrative authority from the governors to their clerks could be expected, thereby partly compensating for the governors' compara­tive inexperience.

The results of this push for greater documentation from the governors' offices were mixed. There was clearly a great increase in the volume of s"ezzhaia izba record production after mid-century, especially in the larger towns; some of it was in response to the chancelleries' increased demands for documentation, but some of it was also in response to expanded grievance and need petitioning from the local population. There are some signs already by the 1660s that the flow of information to Moscow had so expanded as to exceed the processing capabilities of certain chancelleries. This was dealt with by restructuring higher administration, in three ways: by forming new territorial razriady so that financial accounting and supervision of judicial mat­ters could be undertaken at the regional level, by razriad commanders stand­ing between the town governors and the central chancelleries; by further subordinating other military-function chancelleries to the great Military Chancellery, so as to streamline and improve co-ordination of military administration; and by creating a Privy Chancellery and Auditing Chancellery to gather intelligence on commanders and town governors, conduct audits of the governors' offices and other chancelleries and investigate malfeasance and red tape.

On the other hand many s"ezzhaia izba and guba, zemskii, customs and excise offices were not up to the chancelleries' demands for fuller, more reliable and timelier reporting and accounting. They fell months or years behind in submitting annual accounts, failed to record important information like vacant entitlements or property boundaries, or miscounted when tallying servicemen or cash and grain reserves. Governors blamed these failures on clerks who were 'drunkards and brawlers . . . stupid and unable to write'.[47] The clerks in turn could complain of the unreliable information provided by the lower prikaznye liudi and elected officials, who were often outright illiterate (at Kazan' in 1627 the fortifications steward, one of the two musketeer captains, the customs chief, one of the two tavern chiefs, one of the two zemskii elders and eighteen of the nineteen customs and tavern deputies were illiterate).[48] We also find instances of governors accused by their own clerks and other subordinates of seriously neglecting their responsibilities.

A large part of chancellery communications to the provinces there­fore comprised warnings and rebukes about delays or errors in submit­ting annual accounts. The chancelleries obviously could not afford to rely entirely upon official reporting and accounting to catch error, and certainly not to expose abuse of authority and corruption in local administration. B. N. Chicherin and other liberal historians attributed the persistence of error and malfeasance to the underdevelopment of bureaucratic rationality in cen­tral administration, to the centre's inability to articulate a General Regulation and enforce it through regular control mechanisms.[49] Actually, the central chancelleries had developed and were continuing to develop a wide range of measures to enhance central control and combat malfeasance. The sys­tem's real weakness was at the local level, and derived from cadre inadequacy rather than insufficient attention to central control measures: the centre still did not receive enough reliable and timely information because most districts had too few experienced clerks, and too often inattentive as well as inexperi­enced governors; and for lack of revenue the centre was unable adequately to remunerate either governors or clerks, thereby giving them greater reason to embezzle and especially to prey upon the community through bribe-taking, extortion and excessive feeding.

The political economy of corruption

The practice of permitting officials in the provinces to take part of their remu­neration in the form of feedings in cash and kind collected from the communi­ties they governed had not actually been abolished everywhere in the reform of 1555-6. Only certain cantons and districts, mostly in northern Muscovy, appear to have availed themselves of that reform by purchasing their removal from vicegerent jurisdiction and the right to elect their own zemskii officials in exchange for quit-rent payments, equivalent to the old feeding norms, paid into the central chancelleries. The military exigencies of the Livonian war and Troubles discouraged the further expansion of zemskii self-government: it was more important to free up the middle service class for campaign duty and to militarise local government in the frontier districts by expanding the powers of their fortifications stewards or placing them under annually appointed com­mandants or town governors. In fact the practice of feeding enjoyed a revival from the 1570s. Vicegerents and feeding obligations were now officially restored in certain towns and districts which had gone on feeding quit-rent just a few years before. Shares of feeding quit-rent revenues from particular regions were officially awarded to certain powerful boyars (the Shuiskiis, Boris Godunov). In most instances, however, the revival of feeding was not officially decreed but privately arranged between officials and the communities they governed, the feeding rates set by custom and negotiation. The centre now exercised less direct control over feedings than before, since feeding arrangements were no longer defined by charter or revenue list as those before 1556 had been. A 1620 decree attempted to criminalise feeding but quickly proved unenforce­able, above all because of the treasury's continued need to keep down costs for salary remuneration; so the central government thereafter had to content itself with threatening penalties upon officials convicted of illegal exactions, without any clear identification in the law of what constituted these.[50] Deter­mining what was an acceptable feeding rate and what was an illegal feeding exaction was left up to the community; the central government did not inter­vene unless it received complaints of extortionate feeding demands so heavy as to leave the community with too little to meet its tax obligations to Moscow.

Because feeding transactions were no longer regulated by charter or revenue list one can only guess as to the spread and scale of feeding of town governors and their staffs in the seventeenth century. Anecdotal evidence from investiga­tion records and the expenditure books kept by zemskii officials in the north suggest the practice was common there and the amounts involved often con­siderable. If Moscow's toleration of feeding was only tacit, it was not much concealed. It was not unknown for a servitor to petition for appointment as town governor on grounds he needed feeding income ('I beg leave to go out and feed') and to request posting to a particular district on the basis of its feeding yield. Upon completing his term as town governor of Kostroma, one Moscow dvorianin complained his appointment had yielded him far less than the 500-600 roubles' feeding previous governors had received; Moscow agreed to find him another appointment after its investigation confirmed that the 400 roubles of feeding he had received at Kostroma had been with community consent: 'He took what they brought him, and plundered no one.'^iS

Many othertowngovernors and prikaznyeliudi didplunderthe communities in their charge, using their power to quash petitions and order jailings and beatings of community representatives in order to extort wildly excessive feedings. This appears to have happened on such a scale as to suggest the town governors treated feeding as a strategy of semi-feudal rent-taking - further evidence that feudal techniques of governance had not been fully supplanted by state bureaucratic techniques.

But there may have been a second reason for the persistence of feeding: the possibility that communities were unwilling to demand its outright abolition or at least a return to its charter regulation because feeding could be turned to some community advantage under the right circumstances. Feeding deliveries were made in the name of the entire community (as what Marcel Mauss called 'total prestations') and were conducted with some ceremony as gestures of obsequy towards the person of the receiving official. Feeding payments not fixed by charter but 'negotiated' between community representatives and the receiving official, arranged at sufficiently generous rates and delivered on time in a confident and ungrudging spirit, could therefore be represented as com­munity gifts and used to partly disarm the official (countering his demand that he be dealt with solely as an outsider present in impersonal superior official capacity, responsible only to the central government), to take his measure (gauging the limits of his greed and his readiness to bargain), to familiarise him (drawing him into a kind of honorary kinship with the community) and finally to obligate him (first in a general sense, and later, at the right moment, to specific favours reciprocating the community's hospitality). The favour sought might be permission for a delegation of petitioners to travel to Moscow, or the governor's favourable report upon the community's petition of need, but occa­sionally it could go as far as requesting that fines or corporal punishment be mitigated or the collection of tax arrears be postponed. In the latter instances there was the danger that feeding was suborning officials, undermining chan­cellery control over them. But because the centre had decided to tolerate feeding remuneration freely offered, the only means it had of counteracting this effect was to engage in its own kind of ritual gifting to the community past the suborned official. Thus the ritual of the sovereign's vouchsafe had the purpose of using gift prestation to re-establish direct personalised reciprocity of trust between sovereign and subjects and to reassert the autocracy's claim that all bounty issued from the sovereign, not from his officials, who merely distributed it on his command.

The same expenditure concerns that left the central government unwilling to suppress feeding complicated its struggle against bribery; and because tol­erance of feeding permitted open collective gift prestation to officials, it was harder to ban outright other more private and particular forms of gifting that could be used to camouflage bribery. Black corruption - obvious embracery and extortion - could be prosecuted, but a large sphere of activity taking the forms of grey and white corruption (purchasing influence and services through tips, gratuities, honorances and feeding prestations) escaped regulation.

The government's commitment to struggle against bribe-taking and bribe- giving in its courts had already been proclaimed in the 1497 Sudebnik, although it took longer for the law to specify penalties and extend them to judges of the highest rank. The 1550 Sudebnik had got around to specifying punish­ments for litigants caught bribing judges or witnesses and for bailiffs, clerks, and secretaries falsifying bonds and court transcripts for bribes; and the 1649 Ulozhenie finally prescribed punishment for witnesses who perjured them­selves for bribes (knouting) and for judges who convicted the innocent or exculpated the guilty for bribes (judges of duma rank were to be deprived of rank, while those below duma rank were to be knouted). By that point it could be said that Muscovite law clearly forbade bribes of embracery (posuly). The bribe of embracery aimed at establishing a relationship between giver and recipient which was prejudicial to state interests and to the interests of the community; it purchased influence or judgements which were denied to others and adversely affected others; and it enabled the bribe-taking official to abuse for his own gain the authority delegated to him by the sovereign, thereby defaming the reputation for impartiality of the sovereign's justice. By these tests, nearly any gift offered or accepted in the courts could potentially result in embracery if complaint of it had been made. Hence the law was most explicit in condemning bribery injudicial settings.

The law also made it a crime for officials to extort illegal payments (vziatki or nalogi i nasil'stvo). There were frequent complaints, especially in Siberia, of governors unjustly imprisoning and tormenting innocent men in order to extort ransoms, and the cash value of some ofthese ransoms was considerable - 20 or 30 roubles or more. If subjects were willing to press a charge that they had been victims of such extortion it was possible to convict a governor and get him deprived of rank or knouted and forced to make restitution to the victims and pay a fine to the treasury.

But there were also various common gift transactions which had the effect of bribes, purchasing some form of official influence yet falling short of obvi­ous discriminatory embracery and deriving from no obvious extortion. The law continued to recognise petitioners' rights to offer officials earnest money and gratuities (pochesti, pominki) to expedite processing of their requests or express their thanks for a service performed. Earnest money and gratuities were in fact such widely accepted income for officials that clerks working in particular chancelleries which traditionally handled a heavy load of court cases or petitioners' requests were usually given lower salary entitlements on the assumption they were better positioned to supplement their pay with gifts. Naturally these clerks came to expect particular gifts for particular services rendered, that is, came to set their own schedules of fees, and such fee-charging in turn received legitimation by analogy with the kormlenie feeding tradition; it even came to be known as 'feeding from services' (kormlenie ot del).[51] Only in one context did the Ulozhenie equate the acceptance of gratuities with the crime of bribe-taking: when a commander discharged troops from service in exchange for gratuities.

This meant it was easy enough, even in a judicial setting, to disguise a bribe as an innocent gratuity provided both giver and recipient connived to support the illusion; and even if such a transaction left an injured party, he might find it difficult to demonstrate the bribe had purchased a judgement that would not have otherwise been forthcoming.

Muscovite law was not unique in struggling to maintain some distinction between innocent gift and corrupting bribe; this problem persisted elsewhere in early modern Europe, especially wherever officials depended at least in part upon fees and gratuities for remuneration. On the one hand, Moscow could not afford to ignore the problem of corruption, as it undermined central control and bureaucratic discipline and discredited the sovereign's claim to offer his subjects protection and redress; therefore there was some chance that community complaints against particularly egregious official corruption could bring about special investigations. On the other hand, Moscow recognised the remuneration of its officials depended partly upon feeding prestations, earnest money and gratuities, so it could not afford a policy of aggressive 'zero tolerance' prosecuting any kind of gifting on the grounds that it had the potential to encourage embracery or extortion; therefore Moscow continued to receive collective petitions complaining that its central chancelleries and governors' offices in general remained too easily bribable by 'strong people', and foreign observers (Olearius, Mayerberg, Perry) continued to consider the selling of verdicts common practice in Muscovite courts.

The community's attitude towards bribery in the governor's office may have been ambivalent. Much of the time, when bribery worked against their own interests, they would have had cause to decry it; but, as with feeding, there would also have been opportunities to exploit it. Whether bribery damaged or served community interests depended on the structure of the local market for bribe-subornable government services. If the governor and his staff set cheap enough rates for their own subornment and bribes could be tendered at low risk, the bribe economy underwent some democratisation and those of modest means and status could purchase some ofthe favours connected elites enjoyed as a matter of course. Where the risk of bribe-giving was greater and bribe prices were higher, only the wealthier strong men of the community were likely to be able to purchase services - which they might use to prey upon their weaker neighbours. Under some circumstances the community could counter the bribes tendered by local strong men by increasing the value of the community's own collective prestations of kormlenie; otherwise the community's only resort was to petition the central chancelleries for an investigation.

Travel to Moscow to present a petition in person was generally restricted to those given travel passes by the governor; some chancelleries held audiences for petitioners only at Christmas time; and after 1649 it was illegal to bypass the chancelleries by trying to petition the tsar directly. But the centre could not afford to deny its subjects altogether the right to petition against local strong men or malfeasant officials. The tsar owed his subjects some defence against official malfeasance. This was not seen as limiting his autocratic power, but rather as strengthening it, for by eliminating malfeasance by officials who defied his will he reinforced and re-legitimated his power as autocrat and ultimate source of all justice and bounty. This was another indication of the transitional character of the Muscovite state in this period: when techniques of bureaucratic centralisation failed it, it freely reverted to traditional centralisa­tion techniques invoking the personal patriarchal authority of the tsar. There­fore the sovereign's vouchsafe invited subjects to voice complaints against their outgoing governor; governors caught quashing petitions against themselves could be prosecuted for crimes against the tsar; and petitioners charging their governor or his staff with abuses betraying the sovereign's interest (gosudarevo delo) could circumvent their governor and come to Moscow without his pass to petition the chancelleries in person.

Muscovy at war and peace

BRIAN DAYIES

At the end of the sixteenth century Muscovite territory covered about 5.4 million square kilometres and carried a population of about seven million inhabitants. During the Troubles its territory and population probably con­tracted significantly, for much of the north-west and west fell under Swedish or Polish occupation and Moscow's control over much of the south was contested by rebel cossack bands and the Tatars. But by 1678 Muscovite territory had tripled and its population had recovered and expanded to about 10.5 million

souls.[52]

Much of this territorial expansion had occurred east of the Urals, on land that was sparsely populated and unable to mount much resistance. The real demonstration of revived Muscovite imperial power had been made on the southern steppe frontier and in the south-west and west. Through protracted war, military colonisation and more adroit diplomacy the government of the early Romanov tsars had recovered the lost provinces of Smolensk and Seversk, placed Kiev and eastern Ukraine under protectorate and moved the realm's southern frontier from the forest-steppe zone into the depths of the steppe. In the process two traditional enemies of Muscovite imperial power, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Crimean khanate, found their own military and diplomatic power considerably reduced. Two more powerful challengers, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, had also been fought, but for relatively brief periods and with mixed results (failure to wrest control of the Livonian coast, but success at deterring Ottoman attack on left-bank Ukraine). Recognition that Muscovy was becoming a great power in northern and east­ern Europe was apparent in Swedish and Ottoman efforts in the i62os-i63os to enlist her in coalition against the Commonwealth and German Empire and in Polish and Austrian efforts in the 1680s to bring her into the Holy League.

Muscovy's recovery from the humiliating foreign occupations of the Trou­bles and her emergence as a great power owed a great deal to her ability to learn the art of patience: her greatest gains were won through readiness to wait until the opportune geopolitical moment to exploit her rivals' weaknesses and readiness to devote long-term attention to working out ways to overcome friction in the mobilisation and use of military power.

Recovery and revanche, 1613-34

The first task facing the government of Tsar Michael was to assure its survival. The Swedes still occupied Novgorod and King Gustav II Adolf was bent on occupying north-west Muscovy from Narva down to Pskov, holding Karelia, conquering the White Sea coast as far as Archangel, and placing his brother Karl Filip on the Moscow throne. Cossack insurgencies remained a threat: although Zarutskii's cossack army was destroyed on the lower Volga in 1614, a new cossack army under Balovnia had just appeared in Pomor'e. The Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth still presented a mortal danger; Sigismund III held to his plan of driving on Moscow to place his son Wladyslaw on the throne, and a Polish army under Chodkiewicz and Wladyslaw stood ready for this purpose at Smolensk. Lisowski's force of cossacks and Polish and foreign mercenary freebooters engaged Muscovite armies at Orel and Kaluga.

Fortunately Gustav Adolf's long siege of Pskov had failed by early 1616 and with the encouragement of Dutch and English diplomats he began to shift his attention to a project for war against the Commonwealth that would assist the Protestant cause of weakening Habsburg power in Central Europe. Peace talks mediated by John Merrick finally produced a Russo-Swedish peace treaty at Stolbovo in February 1617. By its terms Gustav Adolf abandoned Novgorod and restored it and Staraia Rusa, Porkhov and Sumersk canton to the tsar; in return the tsar ceded him Korela, Kopor'e, Oreshek, Iam and Ivangorod, thereby surrendering direct trade access to the Baltic. Sweden now controlled the Baltic coast from Livonia to Finland.[53]

In the early autumn of 1618 the Poles made their assault upon Moscow. The army of Chodkiewicz and Wladyslaw advanced upon Moscow from Mozhaisk while a second army of Ukrainian cossacks under Sahaidachnyi moved up from the south. They were beaten back from the gates of Moscow in September, but fears that they would attack again brought Tsar Michael's government to sue for truce. In December 1618 a fourteen-year armistice was signed at Deulino. This treaty's terms were even harsher for Muscovy: the western Rus' territories of Smolensk, Chernigov and most of Seversk - holding about thirty towns in all - were ceded to the Commonwealth, bringing its frontier as far east as Viaz'ma, Rzhev and Kaluga (Russia's western borders in 1618 are shown in Map 21.1). Wladyslaw also maintained his claim to the Muscovite throne.[54]

The Stolbovo and Deulino treaties at least bought Muscovy time for recon­struction and rearmament. Muscovy's reconstruction occurred in two stages. In the first stage (1613-18) the boyar duma worked with the Assembly of the Land to restore basic order by re-establishing chancellery control over the town governors, appointing town governors to districts which had not had them before, suppressing banditry in the provinces, co-opting cossack bands, pres­suring communities to resubmit to taxation and militia levies and imposing extraordinary taxes to raise revenue for further reconstruction. The second phase (1619-30) proceeded under the leadership of the young tsar's powerful father Patriarch Filaret (F. N. Romanov), newly returned from nine years' cap­tivity in Poland; it devoted further effort to these tasks while also attempting to repair and improve resource mobilisation for war. Filaret's administration gave priority to repopulating state lands and posad communes with taxpayers, updating cadastres and restoring accounting for arrears and future regular taxes, issuing commercial privileges to European merchants and restoring chancellery control over the distribution of service lands and service salaries. In both stages there were also unsuccessful attempts to secure large loans from England, the Netherlands, Denmark and Persia in exchange for free transit trade rights.

Filaret was strongly committed to a revanchist campaign to recover the western Rus' territories that had been lost to the Commonwealth during the Troubles. Regaining control of Smolensk was especially important to him, for its massive fortress commanded the main road from the frontier to Moscow. The first few years of his government produced no opportunity to undertake this, however; reconstruction had to take priority, there was some opposition to a war of revanche in the Ambassadors' Chancellery, and Filaret was as yet unable to get assurance that Sweden and the Ottoman Empire would join Muscovy in coalition against the Commonwealth. After their defeat at Chocim (1621) the Ottomans had negotiated a peace with the Poles and were making some effort to restrain the Crimean khan from raiding Commonwealth

territory; Gustav Adolf was interested in alliance with Muscovy, but on terms of commercial concessions too high for Moscow to pay.

But by the end of the decade opportunity had finally presented itself. Gustav Adolf's war against the Poles had ended in an armistice, the Dutch and French having pressed him to sign a peace at Altmark (i629) so he would carry his war into northern Germany instead. But to be free to concentrate his forces in Germany Gustav Adolf now needed a guarantee that the Poles would not breaktheir armistice and drive his garrisons out of Livonia and Ducal Prussia. A Muscovite invasion of eastern Lithuania to reconquer Smolensk could provide the diversion needed to prevent this.

In 1630 Monier, Gustav's ambassador to Moscow, negotiated a commercial agreement of great potential benefit to the Swedish campaign in Germany: Sweden would be given the right to purchase duty-free 50,000 quarters of Muscovite rye annually, for resale at Amsterdam; given that war had disrupted the traditional pattern of the Baltic grain trade, this would yield Sweden a considerable windfall; and in return Sweden would export arms to Muscovy for its invasion of the Commonwealth. The Monier Agreement paved the way for an active Swedish-Muscovite alliance. By i632 this alliance had expanded into a tentative broader coalition with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars. Filaret's campaign to recover Smolensk thereby became part of a more ambi­tious coalition war conducted simultaneously on the German, Hungarian and southern and eastern Commonwealth fronts.[55]

In i630 the Muscovite government began issuing large cash bounties to hire mercenary officers in Sweden, the Netherlands and Scotland to train a new foreign formation force (inozemskii stroi) in the new tactics used so effectively by the armies of the United Provinces and Sweden. Six regiments of infantry (soldaty), a regiment of heavy cavalry pistoleers (reitary), and a regiment of dra­goons (draguny) were formed from Muscovite peasant militiamen, cossacks, novitiate middle service class cavalrymen and free volunteers from various social categories. These regiments would comprise about half the force oper­ating in the Smolensk theatre in 1632-4. Unlike the traditional formation troops the new regiments were outfitted and salaried at treasury expense - at very considerable expense, in fact, the cost of maintaining just 6,610 soldaty in 1633 exceeding 129,000 roubles.[56] Such a heavy investment in units of European type was necessary, though, because the recent Polish-Swedish war had given the Commonwealth reason to begin expanding and modernising its own foreign formation (cudzoziemski autorament).

The death of Sigismund III in April 1632 was followed by an interregnum which Filaret thought would last at least several months and provide a window of opportunity for war to recover Smolensk. Filaret therefore launched an invasion in August 1632, sending M. B. Sheininto Lithuania with 29,000 men. By October Shein had managed to capture over twenty towns and place Smolensk, his main objective, under siege. But then the Russian offensive stalled. Muddy roads delayed the arrival of Shein's heavy artillery. Wladyslaw IV finally took the throne in February 1633 and immediately began assembling an army of 23,000 men to relieve Smolensk. Because Shein's troops had neglected their lines of circumvallation Wladyslaw's army was able to surround them and place the besiegers under siege in August 1633. In January 1634 Shein sued for armistice in order to evacuate what was left of his army. As Moscow had not authorised this, and because a scapegoat was needed for the collapse of the campaign, the boyar duma charged Shein with treason and had him beheaded.[57]

Continuing the war against the Commonwealth was unthinkable now. The war's chief architect, Patriarch Filaret, had died in October 1633; Gustav Adolf had fallen at Lutzen in November 1632 and Swedish forces in Pomerania were now left more vulnerable to a Polish attack; help from the Ottomans could no longer be expected, for internal revolts and war with Persia had prevented the sultan from carrying out the invasion of Poland scheduled for spring 1634. Above all Muscovy again faced a major threat from the Crimean khanate - not so much from Khan Janibek Girey as from certain Crimean Tatar beys and mirzas hungry for plunder opportunities after several years of harvest failure, heavy inflation, and civil war in Crimea. In the spring and summer of 1632 some 20,000 Tatars ravaged southern Muscovy. In 1633 they came in even greater strength - over 30,000 strong - and this time circumvented the fortifications of the Abatis Line and crossed the Oka into central Muscovy, taking thousands of captives in Serpukhov, Kolomna, Kashira and Riazan' districts. This invasion may have contributed to Shein's defeat at Smolensk by provoking mass desertion by those of his troops whose home districts had come under Tatar attack.

The Ambassadors' Chancellery and boyar duma had already decided to seek armistice in November 1633. But Shein's capitulation at Smolensk made it impossible for them to demand that the Poles should evacuate Smolensk and Dorogobuzh as the price of peace. The armistice signed at Polianovka on 4 June 1634 therefore left the Smolensk, Chernigov and Seversk lands in Polish hands. Filaret's project of recovering the western Rus' territories had failed. For Muscovy there was some partial compensation in Wladyslaw IV's agreement to abandon his claims to the Moscow throne, but it was no longer realistic for Wladyslaw to pursue these claims through war.

The Crimean khanate and the Don cossack host

The peace established by the Polianovka Treaty was undisturbed for two decades. Resumption of war between the Commonwealth and Muscovy was deterred by both sides' recognition that their simultaneously reformed military establishments had put them at rough parity; and after 1634 Wladyslaw IV was preoccupied with Sweden, cossack unrest in Ukraine, pay arrears in his army and his magnates' fears of royal military absolutism.

After the Polianovka Treaty Muscovy could no longer expect active support from Sweden. The cheap Russian grain exports Gustav Adolf had counted on to help subsidise Swedish operations had been cut back; Wladyslaw IV was freerto concentrate his forces against Swedish garrisons on the Baltic coast; and meanwhile most of Sweden's allies against the German Empire were suing for peace with Ferdinand II. Oxenstierna therefore had begun withdrawing Swedish forces from Germany in anticipation of a Polish or Danish attack somewhere on the Baltic front. Queen Christina's other regents were even more alarmed and made several important concessions, including Swedish evacuation of Prussia, in order to obtain a truce with the Commonwealth (the Treaty of Stuhmsdorf, 1635).

This shift in the balance of power in the Baltic made it necessary for Moscow to disentangle itself from northern European affairs and maintain cautious neutrality vis-a-vis both Sweden and the Commonwealth. For the most part it kept to this course, departing from it only briefly, in 1643, when Denmark and the Commonwealth tried to tempt Muscovy into coalition against Sweden by holding out the possibility of a marriage between Tsar Michael's daughter Irina and the Danish crown prince Waldemar. Entering such a coalition would have been unwise, for Swedish military power had revived by that point, strengthened by alliance with France and generous French subsidies. The tsar and his councillors fortunately realised this just in time, when a Swedish army under Torstensson invaded and overwhelmed Denmark on the eve of Waldemar's arrival in Moscow. The tsar immediately abandoned the marriage project and even placed Waldemar under house arrest to reassure the Swedes he would no longer listen to Danish blandishments.

As there were no opportunities for territorial expansion or influence on the Baltic and western Rus' fronts, Muscovite diplomatic and military activity in 1635-54 focused almost entirely on defending the southern frontier against the threat from the Crimean khanate.

It was logical and necessary to give the Crimean problem priority because the khanate was now more dangerous than ever, its behaviour more unpre­dictable and more resistant to traditional means of containment. The Crimean Tatar invasions of southern and central Muscovy in i632-3 showed that the khan was losing control of his beys and Nogai confederates, that they were willing to defy him and launch attacks on Muscovite border towns with nearly as many troops as the khan could mobilise on his own authority. Furthermore, less could now be expected from Moscow's traditional diplomatic approach to deterring Crimean aggression - appealing to the Ottoman sultan to rein in the khan - for the Crimean nobility was increasingly anti-Ottoman and even separatist in spirit and the khans under greater pressure to play to this spirit in order to keep themselves in power.[58]

Meanwhile Muscovy had lost much of its leverage over its own vassal polities on the Kipchak steppe. It could not count on the fealty of the Great Nogai beys as a counterweight to the khanate, for the Great Nogai Horde was in disintegration and many of its elements driven west across the Volga by the invading Kalmyks and forced into alliance with the Crimean Tatars and Lesser Nogais. The Don cossack host remained implacably hostile to the khanate and the Porte, but also ready to defy Moscow whenever their interests diverged; it had baulked when called upon to support an expedition out of Astrakhan' to punish the Lesser Nogais in 1633, and it repeatedly ignored Moscow's urgings to cease making naval raids on Crimean and Ottoman territory. Don cossack raiding activity thereby risked provoking retaliation not only by the Crimean Tatars but by the Turks. But there was little Moscow could do to prevent it; reducing the semi-annual cash and stores subsidy (Don shipment, Donskoi otpusk) sent down the Don just had the effect of giving the host more reason to turn to raiding to make up its lost revenue. In fact throughout this period the independent political-military course taken by the host would be nearly as much a problem for Moscow as the hostility of the Crimean khanate.

As diplomacy could accomplish little, security on the southern frontier came to depend all the more on military measures: resuming military coloni­sation in the forest-steppe and steppe, on a vastly expanded scale and using new, more cost-effective manpower categories; strengthening and expanding defence lines; experimenting with new military formations and tactics, and reorganising command-and-control; and giving greater attention to small- scale offensive operations, sending small forces down the Don to put more pressure on the Crimean Tatars while tightening Moscow's control over the Don cossack host.

During the Smolensk war the total strength of the Borderland and Riazan' arrays had been reduced to about 5,000 men. It was now substantially increased, to 12,000 men by 1635 and 17,000 men by 1636. This made it easier for the corps of the Borderland and Riazan' arrays to reinforce each other and for the Great Corps (Bol'shoi polk) finally to begin providing a forward defence, to march south from Tula to the relief of the towns south of the Abatis Line. The Military Chancellery also undertook a general inspection of the Abatis Line, and in 1638-9 it put 20,000 men to work rebuilding some 600 kilometres of the line. The forces manning the repaired Abatis Line now included foreign formation infantry and dragoons - some from regiments that had served in the Smolensk campaign, others newly enlisted - and although their deployment was only seasonal, this at least set the precedent for using foreign formation units on the southern frontier against the Tatar enemy.[59]

Military colonisation beyond the Abatis Line was resumed in order to estab­lish an outer perimeter far to the south of the Oka. Several new garrison towns were built in 1635-7 (Chernavsk, Kozlov, Verkhnii Lomov, Nizhnii Lomov, Tambov, Userdsk, Iablonov, Efremov), mostly in the south-east, to secure the territory threatened from the Nogai Road. An earthen steppe wall built from Kozlov to the Chelnova River proved especially effective in blocking Tatar raids up the Nogai Road. By early 1637 this had convinced the tsar and duma to authorise 111,000 roubles to build similar new garrison towns and steppe wall segments to the south-west, to stop Tatar movement up the Muravskii, Iziumskii and Kal'miusskii trails. These new towns and steppe wall segments were built in such proximity that it was an easy matter to link them with the older steppe town of Belgorod to form a single defence line network, the central length of the future Belgorod Line.[60]

The Military Chancellery wanted to settle these new garrison towns as rapidly and cheaply as possible, so it took up new methods and formats of military colonisation. It mobilised thousands of volunteers by relaxing stan­dards of social eligibility for enlistment in military service, even to the point of permitting the enlistment of ruined former servicemen who had been forced by poverty or calamity to take up residence under lords as peasant tenants; and it altered standards and procedures in court hearings for the remand of fugitive peasants, to make it harder for lords to recover peasant tenants who had fled south to enrol illegally in the new garrison towns. Revolt in Common­wealth Ukraine was driving thousands of Ukrainian refugees into southern Muscovy; many of them were settled in special new service colonies in the south-west, on the steppes below Belgorod and Valuiki, in what would come to be called Sloboda Ukraine, while others were distributed among the new garrison towns of the Belgorod Line, even as far east as Kozlov. Their cos­sack experience and their skills at milling, distilling and mouldboard plough farming would contribute significantly to the success of the Muscovite drive to colonise the southern steppe. And in a decision very consequential for the sub­sequent social history of southern Muscovy, the Military Chancellery chose not to reproduce in the new southern frontier districts the kind of middle service class - deti boiarskie with service lands of over 200 quarters per field and peasant tenants - traditionally encountered in central and northern Mus­covy. Instead it reconfigured the middle service class, adapting it to southern frontier economic and service conditions, by enrolling deti boiarskie who were also odnodvortsy and siabry - yeomen with much smaller service land entitle­ment rates and land allotments, lacking peasant tenant labour and holding their service lands as repartitionable allotments within collective block grants administered by their village communes.

These measures strengthening southern frontier defences helped Muscovy weather the crisis that broke out in spring 1637 when the Don cossacks mur­dered the Ottoman diplomat Foma Cantacuzene and besieged and captured the Ottoman fortress of Azov. Azov had been left suddenly vulnerable to a Don cossack attackbecause Khan Inaet Girey's forces were mostly off in Bucak fighting Khantimur and Sultan Murad IV was preoccupied with wars in Persia and Hungary. The Don host couldjustify seizing Azov because its garrison had provided support for Tatar raids upon Don cossack settlements on the lower Don, and Ataman Ivan Katorzhnyi may also have calculated that possessing Azov would allow him to bargain for more generous treatment from the tsar and larger Don shipment subsidies. But Moscow had no reason to authorise the seizure of Azov. While Azov's Ottoman garrison was too small to pose a threat to the towns of southern Muscovy, its presence had been enough to serve as a tripwire providing the sultan with cause, if he chose to make use of it, to retaliate directly against Don cossack or Muscovite aggression. If the sultan should get the impression that Moscow was in any way complicit in the attack on Azov it would damage Muscovite trade at Azov and Kaffa and might even drag Muscovy into war with the Porte.

As long as the Don cossacks occupied Azov (1637-42) Moscow therefore followed the policy of strengthening its southern frontier defence while simul­taneously using diplomacy to absolve the tsar of any blame for the crisis. Tsar Michael sent some grain and munitions to the host but refused their request to send troops and place Azov under his protection. An Assembly of the Land convened in 1642 was all for going to war, but Tsar Michael ignored it and resumed paying tribute to the new Crimean khan even while Muscovite envoys sent to Crimea were being abused. Missions were sent to Sultan Murad IV and, after his death in 1640, to Sultan Ibrahim, to give reassurance that the murder of Cantacuzene and seizure of Azov had been the work of brigands acting 'for reasons unknown... without our instruction'.[61] In June-September 1641 a large Ottoman army commanded by the pasha of Silistria besieged the cossacks in Azov; although it failed to retake Azov, it clearly demonstrated how important recovery of Azov was to Sultan Ibrahim, so when Ibrahim issued a new ultimatum to Moscow in March 1642 Tsar Michael complied and ordered the Don cossacks to evacuate Azov. Ottoman forces reoccupied Azov in September 1642 and reinforced its garrison.

War with the Ottoman Empire had been avoided. The new Turkish garrison at Azov carried out some retaliatory raids on Don cossack settlements but left the southern Muscovite border towns alone. There had been Crimean Tatar raids into southern Muscovy in 1637 and 1641-3, but they had been undertaken by beys and princes acting on their own, driven by famine and livestock epidemics in Crimea (Inaet Girey's successors Begadyr Girey, r. 1637­41, and Mehmed Girey, r. 1641-4, were no more able to curb the Crimean nobility).

Muscovite-Ottoman relations had suffered serious damage, however. The Don cossacks had rebuilt their forts and settlements near Azov and were again attacking Turkish troops; Sultan Ibrahim demanded the tsar remove the host from the lower Don, a request beyond the tsar's power to fulfil. The new Crimean khan Islam Girey III (r. 1644-54) decided the best way to tame the Crimean nobility was to realign with the Ottoman sultan and put himself at the head of major invasions against the Commonwealth and Muscovy. Therefore 20,000 Tatars invaded the Commonwealth and another 20,000 swept across southern Muscovy in the summer of 1644, carrying off about 10,000 prisoners. Another 6,000 Muscovite captives were taken the following year. Sultan Ibrahim gave his approval for these operations.[62] By unleashing Islam Girey III and threatening direct Ottoman military retaliation Ibrahim was able to stop the Polish-Muscovite rapprochement. In 1646 Wladyslaw IV renewed peace with the Porte and resumed tribute gifts to the khan.

Moscow therefore had to increase investment in its southern frontier defence system. The Tatar incursions of 1644-5 had taken advantage of partic­ular weaknesses in that system: the absence of unified command in the corps of the southern field army, and the over-centralisation of command initia­tive in the Military Chancellery; the inability of the field army (still stationed along the Abatis Line) to offer a forward defence for the districts to its south; large gaps in the Belgorod Line, especially between Voronezh and Kozlov and between the Tikhaia Sosna and Oskol' rivers; and Moscow's inability to stop Don cossack raids further provoking the Tatars and Turks.

The new government of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich addressed each of these weaknesses in i646-54. Several more garrison towns were built and linked up with the Belgorod Line. Most of the gaps in the line were filled by 1654; by 1658 the line extended all along the southern edge of the forest steppe zone, from Akhtyrka on the Vorskla River to Chelnavsk about 800 kilometres to the east, and a second defence line some 500 kilometres long extended from Chelnavsk to the Volga. Twenty-five garrison towns stood on or just behind the Belgorod Line; thousands of odnodvortsy deti boiarskie, service cossacks and musketeers had been settled on ploughlands in these new garrison districts.

In 1646 the corps previously deployed far to the north in the Borderland and Riazan' arrays were restationed along the new perimeter formed by the Belgorod Line. The Great Corps, Vanguard and Rear Guard now stood at Livny, Kursk and Elets each spring and shifted in June to Belgorod, Karpov and Iablonov. Garrison contingents and small field units south of the Abatis Line no longer had to march north to rendezvous with the corps but could move south to join them on the Belgorod Line.

This in turn led to new command-and-control practices along the Belgorod Line. Because southern garrison forces could now play a larger role in rein­forcing corps operations, it became necessary for the corps commander at Belgorod to take up broader year-round operational and logistics authority over all the troops residing in the Belgorod Array territory, those in the gar­risons as well as the Belgorod corps. The town governors of the southern garrison towns were thereby subordinated in military affairs, and gradually in broader administrative affairs, to the commander at Belgorod, to whom the Military Chancellery could now devolve resource logistic and monitoring functions that had previously been centralised at Moscow. By 1653 one can speak of a large Belgorod Line regional military administration (Belgorodskii razriad) operating out of the corps commander's headquarters at Belgorod or Kursk. During the Thirteen Years War this new principle of regional military administration would take on even greater importance: similar territorial razri- ady would be formed on the north-western front at Novgorod and Smolensk and the westernmost districts of the Belgorod razriad spun off into a separate Sevsk razriad.

After the Smolensk war most but not all of the expensive foreign formation regiments had been disbanded. A few thousand foreign formation soldaty and dragoons had manned the Abatis Line in 1638,1639 and 1642, but it had not been considered cost-effective to deploy them every year. But in 1646 the government decided to make foreign formation units an important permanent element in the southern frontier defence system. A number of officers were hired abroad, especially in the Netherlands; a kriegsbuch on the exercise of musket and pike was translated into Russian, to help in training Muscovite infantry; a new census was conducted to levy troops by household rather than from inhabited chetvert'; and Tsar Alexis endorsed the Military Chancellery's recommendation that the southern garrisons cease relying on irregularly levied peasant militia to help defend the Belgorod Line and instead place entire peasant communities in standing service as 'settled' dragoons and infantry, drilled in their villages year-round under foreign officers. In Komaritskaia canton in 1646 5,125 state peasants were taken into three dragoon regiments; the next year several private votchina villages along the Voronezh River west of Kozlov were likewise put in dragoon service.[63]

In 1648 a new cossack revolt in Ukraine, led by Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and in alliance with the Crimean Tatars, dealt devastating defeats to Polish armies at Zhevty Vody and Korsun'. The massacre of another Polish army at Batih in May 1652 placed Khmel'nyts'kyi in control of most of Ukraine as far west as Kamienets in Podol'ia and made the prospect of Muscovite alliance with rebel Ukraine more attractive and war with the Commonwealth in Ukraine and Belarus' more likely. The Military Chancellery therefore began organising foreign formation units for the southern field army, not just for local defence. Four regiments (8,000 men) of soldaty were formed at Iablonov, in the Belgorod razriad, filled largely from conscripts levied from the non-taxpaying populations of eighteen southern districts. The next year some soldat regiments were also formed near Smolensk on the north-western front.[64]

Moscow also took steps to tighten its control over the Don cossack host. Larger Don shipment subsidies were dispatched in 1644,1646 and 1647, but there were also attempts in 1646 and 1648 to 'reinforce' the host with new Muscovite manpower in such a way as to bind it to Moscow-directed operations. Larger expeditions, resupplied by river flotillas built on the Voronezh and upper Don, were sent down in 1659-62; although they still held back from assaulting Azov, they did join the Don cossacks in land and sea raids to harass Ottoman forces building new fortresses on the Mertvyi Donets and Kalancha rivers. From 1662 to 1671 Muscovite forces on the lower Don refrained from operations against the Turks and devoted their attention to distributing the Don shipments and keeping the host under surveillance.

All of these Don expeditions suffered heavy losses to hunger and desertion, and they did not accomplish much against the Tatars and Turks. But they did give the Muscovite army valuable experience in land-sea operations and did begin to restrict the Don cossack host's freedom of initiative. By the late 1660s the host was in transformation. Muscovite military colonisation of the Belgorod Line had set off a cascade migration of thousands of deserters and fugitive peasants southward into the Don host. The resources provided by the Don agricultural economy and Don shipments were not enough to support them. Meanwhile Moscow's diplomacy to get the sultan and the khan to stop attacks in Ukraine on behalf of Hetman Doroshenko (see below) meant that Moscow could no longer sanction Don cossack raids on the khanate or on Ottoman coastal towns. Denied plunder opportunities on the Black Sea, part of the host rebelled and followed Stepan Razin on a campaign of piracy on the Caspian and then on a revolt against Ataman Kornilo Iakovlev and Muscovite garrisons on the lower Volga. Razin's defeat in 1671 left the host further servilised to Moscow.[65]

The Thirteen Years War, 1654-67

As early as 1649 Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had tried to convince Moscow to assist his revolt against the Commonwealth and put Ukraine under the tsar's pro­tection. At that time Moscow had not been interested; taking responsibility for Ukraine as a client or vassal polity had been a major objective of Muscovite grand strategy, and joining the Ukrainians in war upon the Commonwealth also meant going to war against the Crimean Tatars, who had left their alliance with Khmel'nyts'kyi. By late 1652, however, the tsar's government was ready to ally with Khmel'nyts'kyi. Khmel'nyts'kyi's great victory at Batih meant that Muscovite intervention in Ukraine was likely to meet a greatly reduced Polish military threat, and there was still hope that Ukrainian and Muscovite diplomacy could convince the Crimean khan to rejoin the alliance against the Poles. But the primary reason Tsar Alexis accepted Khmel'nyts'kyi's alliance proposal in June 1653 and formalised it in the Pereiaslav (Pereiaslavl') Treaty in January 1654 had much less to do with Ukraine than with Muscovite designs upon Lithuanian Belarus'. The Commonwealth's war against Khmel'nyts'kyi's cossacks had left very few troops defending Lithuania and the west Rus' ter­ritories - Smolensk, Seversk, Chernigov - wrested from Muscovy during the Troubles. Reconquering these territories promised to be considerably eas­ier than in 1632-4, particularly now that Khmel'nyts'kyi promised to send thousands of cossack troops north to assist such a campaign. Furthermore, Moscow felt that the window of opportunity to accomplish this was closing, for Lithuanian Grand HetmanJanusz Radziwill, aware of Lithuania's vulner­ability to Muscovite invasion, was trying to get the hospodar of Moldavia to mediate a peace treaty between the Commonwealth and Khmel'nyts'kyi's hetmanate.

There was therefore an impulsive element in Moscow's decision to inter­vene in Ukraine. Muscovite military preparations for the war were thorough: the invasion of Lithuania was soundly planned, and it was decided that for­eign formation units would comprise a larger part of the field armies on the Lithuanian and Ukrainian fronts, towards which end 40,000 muskets were bought from the Dutch and Swedes and more enlistees and conscripts were taken into the soldat regiments of the Belgorod razriad.¹⁵ But the full strate­gic consequences of placing Ukraine under Muscovite protection were not yet apparent. Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had created a de facto independent het- manate across most of Ukraine in six years of war; it was Khmel'nyts'kyi's mil­itary leadership and diplomatic cunning which held this hetmanate together;

15 A. N. Mal'tsev, RossiiaiBelorussiiav seredine XVllveka (Moscow: MGU, 1974), p. 23.

and it was Khmel'nyts'kyi's vision of an autonomous Ukraine in loose con­federation and military alliance with Muscovy that his colonels understood to be the objective of the Pereiaslav Treaty. But once Khmel'nyts'kyi passed from the scene the hetmanate would be riven by conflicts between the cos­sack elite and rank-and-file, between cossacks and townsmen and peasants and between the cossack colonels and the Muscovite commanders garrisoning the larger Ukrainian towns. The task of protecting Ukraine would inevitably give Moscow reason to increase the number of its garrisons, make greater demands upon Ukrainian revenue sources to provision them and thereby encroach upon Ukrainian liberties. Furthermore, because Khmel'nyts'kyi had been pursu­ing an imaginative but complicated diplomacy since i648 before turning to Moscow for protection, the Crimean Tatars, Moldavians, Wallachians, Tran- sylvanians, Ottomans and Swedes had come to have stakes in what happened to Ukraine. Muscovite protectorate over Ukraine therefore had serious reper­cussions for Muscovy's relations with these nations, and Ukrainian cossacks growing disillusioned with Muscovite protectorate would have alternative alliance models (Ottoman-Tatar protectorate, reincorporation in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later, Swedish protectorate) to which to turn.

On 15 May 1654 Muscovite armies invaded Lithuanian Belarus' and entered eastern Ukraine. The primary objective in this opening campaign was clearly the recapture of Smolensk and the west Rus' territories annexed to the grand duchy of Lithuania. Three large army groups entered Lithuanian territory: a main army of 40,000 men under the command of the tsar himself, moving from Viaz'ma towards Smolensk; a second army of 15,000 under V P. Sheremetev, advancing from Velikie Luki against Polotsk and Vitebsk; and another army of 15,000 under A. N. Trubetskoi, moving from Briansk towards Minsk. A smaller force under L. Saltykov also advanced from Pskov, and Khmel'nyts'kyi sent some 20,000 Ukrainian cossacks under Colonel Zolotarenko to invade Belarus' from the south. Muscovite troop deployments in Ukraine were considerably smaller: 4,000 troops under A. V Buturlin were sent to reinforce Zolotarenko, and 2,500 troops went to garrison Kiev. Another 7,000 Muscovite troops held the Belgorod Line against Tatar attack.[66]

The invasion of Belarus' and Lithuania was strikingly successful. The Mus­covites had overwhelming numerical superiority (Lithuanian Grand Hetman Janusz Radziwill, charged with the task of throwing them back, had no more than 6,000—7,000 effectives); their operation had been planned long in advance;

and the tsar's presence with the army provided better command-and-control than if supreme command had remained back at Moscow. In June the Mus­covites took Belaia, Dorogobuzh and Roslavl'; by late August they had captured Mstislavl', Orsha, Mogilev and the capital at Vilnius; Smolensk fell to them in September, and Vitebsk in November.

In the summer of 1655 Sweden's King Karl X Gustav (r. 1654-60) began his own invasion of the Commonwealth in order to exploit the Muscovites' suc­cesses in Lithuania while pre-empting their advance towards his own intended sphere of influence in the region. As most Polish and Lithuanian troops were already engaged against the Muscovites the invading Swedes were able to make remarkable progress in just a few months - and their sudden gains threatened to usurp everything the Muscovites had won to that point. On 13 June Swedish troops landed in Riga and seized Dunaburg, then under siege by the Muscovites; on 17 August, a week after Muscovite troops had taken Vilnius, Lithuanian Grand Hetman Janusz Radziwillll signed the Treaty ofNiej- dany, recognising Karl Gustav as grand duke over all of Lithuania; and on 8 September the Swedes entered Warsaw, forcing Jan Kazimierz to flee into exile in Silesia.

Karl Gustav had no desire to see the Muscovites seize Riga or any other part of the Baltic coast, but he had been prepared to accept Muscovite control over the southern Lithuanian hinterland if this kept his peace with Muscovy while he finished off the Poles.¹⁷ But Moscow was not interested in such a compromise, for it had revised its original war aims: A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the rising star of Muscovite diplomacy, now considered it paramount that Muscovy secure its dominion over occupied Lithuania and win access to the Baltic, and he therefore urged the tsar to negotiate a peace withJan Kazimierz and an alliance with him against the Swedes. This was against the advice of Khmel'nyts'kyi, who was seeking to form a Swedish-Ukrainian alliance which would finish off the Commonwealth and guarantee the liberation of right-bank Ukraine. In fact Ordin-Nashchokin so felt the need for haste that Muscovy declared war upon Sweden in May 1656 while peace talks with the Poles at Vilnius were still in their preliminary stage. A treaty with the Commonwealth was finally signed in November, but it was only for an armistice, not a permanent peace and true alliance, for the Muscovite envoys at Vilnius had not been satisfied with Jan Kazimierz's offer to cede Smolensk and Seversk and had held out for even larger concessions: the cession of Lithuania, or the 'election' of Tsar Alexis as Poland's king upon the death of Jan Kazimierz.

17 L. V Zaborovskii, Rossiia, Rech' Pospolitaia, i Shvetsiia v seredine XVII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), pp. 118,121.

Muscovy's war with Sweden mostly took the form of operations against small Swedish garrisons in Karelia, Izhorsk and Livonia. In the summer and autumn of 1656 Muscovite forces were able to capture Dunaburg, Koknes and Iur'ev (Dorpat), but they failed to take Riga even after three months' siege because they had no fleet to blockade its reinforcement by sea. The Swedes launched a counter-offensive the next year, defeating the Muscovites at Walk but failing to capture Gdov.

In December 1658 the breakdown of peace talks with the Commonwealth and Vyhovs'kyi's betrayal in Ukraine forced Tsar Alexis to sign a three-year armistice with the Swedes. Sweden was ready for truce; the Polish and Lithua­nian hetmans had joined in confederatio against the Swedes and had brought back Jan Kazimierz, who had regained the military initiative; and Karl X Gustav's operations against Prussia and Denmark had provoked the Danes, Prussians, Austrians and Dutch to join the Commonwealth in coalition against him. His sudden death in February 1660 gave his successor, Karl XI, the oppor­tunity to sue for peace while terms were still favourable. The Treaty of Oliva (May 1660) recognised Hohenzollern sovereignty over Prussia in exchange for recognition of Swedish control over Livonia and Jan Kazimierz's abandonment of his claim to the Swedish throne. The Treaty of Kardis (June 1661) established a permanent peace between Sweden and Muscovy and compelled Tsar Alexis to return to Swedish control the Baltic towns and territories he had captured since 1656.

The 1656-8 armistice between Muscovy and the Commonwealth had not bound Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi from continuing his operations against the Poles, or the Crimean Tatars from continuing their raids into Ukraine and southern Muscovy. Khmel'nyts'kyi's attempts to bring Moldavia and Wallachia into alliance with him and George II Rakoczi, along with Zaporozhian and Don cossack raids on Azov, had the effect of provoking a rapprochement between the Poles and the Turks and Tatars. The sultan and khan launched a punitive invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia and offered Jan Kazimierz detachments to strike against the Ukrainians and the Don cossacks.

Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi died in July 1657. His secretary Ivan Vyhovs'kyi was proclaimed the new hetman. From the start three problems confronted Vyhovs'kyi: it was now clear that any chance for resumed alliance with the khanate required reconciliation with the Poles as well; his own authority was being challenged by Pushkar, the colonel of the Poltava regiment, and by Barabash, the Zaporozhian ataman, who enjoyed the protection of the Muscovite general Romodanovskii; and there was growing dissatisfaction in Ukraine with the Muscovite protectorate. Moscow diplomats had been ready at the Vilnius talks (from which Ukrainian envoys had been excluded) to trade Ukraine for Polish recognition of Tsar Alexis's future right to the Polish throne; and in preparation for resumed hostilities with the Commonwealth Moscow was establishing more garrisons in Ukraine and requisitioning army provisions and transport at ruinous rates.[67]

When Muscovy's war with the Commonwealth resumed in Lithuania in September 1658 it was therefore without a secured Ukrainian rear. On 6 September Vyhovs'kyi signed a treaty with the Poles at Hadiach, by terms of which Jan Kazimierz agreed to reincorporate Ukraine in the Commonwealth as a grand duchy of Ruthenia, recognise Vyhovs'kyi as grand duke subject to the king alone, and dismantle the Uniate Church (although the Sejm ratified but never honoured this treaty, Hadiach henceforth served as an alternative model of Ukrainian autonomy for those cossacks unable to trust in Muscovite protectorate).

Military alliance with Vyhovs'kyi's cossacks allowed Jan Kazimierz to redou­ble his efforts against the Muscovites on the Lithuanian front. The war here took an increasingly brutal turn involving long sieges and ambushes provok­ing the Muscovites to cruel reprisals against the local population - thereby intensifying resistance to Muscovite occupation. Fighting Vyhovs'kyi and his Tatar and Polish allies in Ukraine also required much larger Muscovite forces than the Ukrainian theatre had previously seen. G. G. Romodanovskii's corps had some success against them at Lokhvitsa, but S. I. Pozharskii's corps was ambushed and crushed at Konotop in July 1659. Muscovite forces then began to withdraw from Ukraine to regroup at Sevsk. Fortunately for Moscow, its protectorate over Ukraine - at least over its left bank - was saved at this moment by a cossack revolt against Vyhovs'kyi. Muscovite armies exploited this revolt and re-entered Ukraine. In September 1659 Vyhovs'kyi was deposed and Muscovite troops awarded the hetmanate to Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi's son Iurii.

Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi was inexperienced and easily led, and Moscow was determined to do the leading; the chance that the new hetman might also turn renegade had to be prevented. Moscow therefore took his accession as the opportunity to redefine its protectorate responsibilities so as to limit the hetman's authority. The kind of Ukrainian autonomy Moscow had intended to recognise in the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty can still be debated; but it is very clear that the revised Pereiaslav Articles promulgated in 1659 aimed at greatly reducing Ukraine's autonomy. Chernigov, Starodub and Novgorod Severskii were declared part of Muscovy, not of Ukraine, and were put under full Mus­covite administration; the hetman could no longer receive foreign envoys or undertake his own campaigns without the tsar's permission; and a successor hetman could not be chosen without 'report' to Moscow.[68]

Not surprisingly the 1659 Pereiaslav Articles had the opposite effect to what Moscow intended: they heightened cossack discontent with the Muscovite protectorate and increased the pressure on Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi to follow the example of Vyhovs'kyi and turn renegade. In the autumn of 1660 a large Muscovite army under V B. Sheremetev drove into Volynia with the objec­tive of crushing the Polish-Lithuanian field army and capturing L'viv. Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi's army was supposed to reinforce Sheremetev at Chudnov, but Iurii instead signed a peace treaty with the Poles and pledged to restore Ukraine to the Commonwealth. Sheremetev's army of 40,000 men, surrounded by Polish and Crimean forces, was forced to surrender.

Operations in Ukraine in 1660-2 generally took the form of raids and counter-raids across the Dnieper. Polish and Tatar attacks on the left bank did the greatest damage; Khmel'nyts'kyi's cossacks were less effective because their ranks were increasingly divided by doubts over the ultimate intentions of their Polish and Tatar allies. Khmel'nyts'kyi's army suffered a serious defeat in July 1662 when the Crimean Tatars failed to come to his rescue from Romodanovskii. In January 1663 a cossack assembly at Chyhyryn deposed Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi and elected Pavel Teteria hetman. Teteria, a supporter of the Hadiach Articles and alliance with the Poles, was rejected by the Zaporozhian host and the cossacks of the left bank, who in June 1663 proclaimed Ivan Briukhovets'kyi, a client of Moscow, as their hetman.

November 1663 to January 1664 saw the last great campaign of the war. Three large corps under King Jan Kazimierz, Stefan Czarniecki and Hetman Teteria crossed the Dnieper, sacked a number of small towns on the left bank, and pushed as far east as Hlukhiv and Novgorod Severskii before being thrown back by Romodanovskii's and Briukhovets'kyi's forces.

Both sides were now too exhausted to continue major operations. There were no major battles in Belarus' or Lithuania in 1665, and, except for some raids near Korsun' and Bila Tsirkva, no Muscovite attempt to push deep into right-bank Ukraine.

In 1666 Petro Doroshenko, Teteria's successor as hetman on the right bank, provided further reason for the Commonwealth and Muscovy to begin peace talks: he suddenly broke with the Poles and allied with the Crimean khan in a campaign to liberate and unite both banks of Ukraine. In January 1667 the Commonwealth and Muscovy signed a thirteen-year armistice at Andrusovo. With the signing of the Andrusovo Armistice the Poles finally con­ceded Smolensk, Seversk and Chernigov to Muscovy (a concession they had been ready to make in 1656 at Vilnius) and confirmed Muscovite sovereignty over left-bank Ukraine. They also left Muscovy in temporary control of Kiev, having agreed to postpone final resolution of the Kiev question to expedite signing of the armistice and free their forces for campaign against Doroshenko.

The strain the war had placed on Muscovite finances and manpower mobil­isation had been considerable but not as permanently damaging as the strain upon the Commonwealth's resources. The Tsar's government was not under the same political restraints as the Polish crown; its ability to mobilise troops and provisions did not depend upon the vote of a Sejm fearful of feeding a royal military absolutism. The decision to increase the relative weight in the army of the foreign formation troops (7 per cent of the Muscovite military establishment in 1651, 79 per cent in 1663) had been sound. With the excep­tion of the better-trained elite guards regiments based in Moscow the soldat infantry were still of limited tactical effectiveness on the battlefield. More importantly, though, the soldat regiments were conscripted from politically subaltern commoners, so it was easier to rebuild them than damaged units of traditional middle service class cavalry. Over the course of the war about 100,000 men were conscripted into the soldat regiments; the original rate of one conscript from every twenty-five households (1658) was soon increased to one from every twenty (1660) and in many districts on the Belgorod Line this rate was ignored and men taken from nearly every household. Furthermore, although the government was still unable to collect cash taxes on a scale suffi­cient to pay its growing foreign formations (and the inflation of the early 1660s made this all the harder), it was free to compensate by switching to payment in grain and imposing new grain taxes, even on social categories previously considered exempt.[69] For these reasons it did not take long after Andrusovo for Muscovite military resource mobilisation to recover and demonstrate its ability to meet the even greater demands of the continuing war in Ukraine.

Conflict with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars, 1667-89

After the Andrusovo Armistice the Muscovite government pursued a very cautious policy towards Sweden. It did press for right of free trade at Riga and Revel' in 1673 and significantly reinforced its border near Narva in 1677, but throughout the Scanian war (1674-9) it rebuffed Denmark's efforts to drag it into conflict with Sweden, even though this might have provided Moscow an opportunity to regain Livonian territory. Sweden eventually prevailed in the Scanian war, but at the cost of some temporary weakening of its military power, so the Swedish threat to Muscovy through the 1680s was considerably

reduced. [70]

Muscovite attention in this period was instead focused largely upon the situation in Ukraine, where it faced four major threats to its control of the left bank: the emergence of a rival right-bank hetmanate bent on rolling back the Muscovites and reunifying Ukraine; the Commonwealth's resistance to Ordin-Nashchokin's project of a permanent peace and alliance and, worse, the possibility the Commonwealth might break the Andrusovo Armistice and resume war with Muscovy; the continuing problems of Crimean Tatar raiding; and the growing danger of Ottoman invasion.

By 1663 the military and political stalemate had already resulted in the de facto division of Ukraine along the Dnieper. This division was formalised at the peace talks at Andrusovo in 1667, from which Ukrainian cossackrepresentatives had been excluded. Cossacks on both banks of the Dnieper were therefore deeply dissatisfied with the outcome of the Andrusovo talks. By 1666 many cossacks on the left bank had come to resent the tsar's protectorate: there were now over 11,000 Muscovite troops garrisoning Kiev and the left-bank towns, Muscovite voevoda administration was spreading, mill and tavern revenues now went to the tsar's treasury and Hetman Briukhovets'kyi was unsuitably obsequious towards Moscow. Meanwhile cossack colonels on the right bank had abandoned any hope of relying on Polish assistance to reunify Ukraine under their own hetman, Petro Doroshenko, and had instead chosen to pursue alliance with Crimean khan Aadil Girey and Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV

Hetman Doroshenko's acceptance of Ottoman political and military sup­port threatened the Polish-Muscovite armistice as well as Muscovite control over the left bank. This gave Doroshenko the freedom to campaign against either Muscovy or the Commonwealth while holding out to each the possibility that the right concessions might give him reason to break with the Turks and reconcile.

Ordin-Nashchokin, by this time in declining health, had limited options in dealing with the Doroshenko problem. The missions he sent to Istanbul and Edirne to get the sultan to accept Andrusovo were rebuffed, and his efforts to negotiate with the sultan through Crimean Tatar mediation were blocked by the Zaporozhian host, which went so far as to assassinate the Crimean and Muscovite envoys. This left him no real alternative but to concentrate on diplomacy with Warsaw, communicating his willingness to negotiate some kind of shared Polish-Muscovite suzerainty over the right bank in order to transform the Andrusovo Armistice into a permanent peace and a mutual defence pact against the Ottomans. He also sent missions to Vienna, to enlist at the least the emperor's mediation and optimally his agreement to join in coalition against the sultan.

But besides risking giving Doroshenko, the khan, and the sultan provo­cation to declare war, these negotiations caused alarm among the left-bank cossacks, who feared Ordin-Nashchokin might give back Kiev or even part of the left bank to the Poles in order to achieve his alliance project. Many of those left-bank cossacks losing faith in Muscovy's readiness to stand firm for a unified Ukraine freed from Polish rule began defecting to Doroshenko, who appeared at the time a more resolute defender of these principles even with his troublingties to the Turks and Tatars. Support for Doroshenko on the left bank reached such proportions that eventually even Briukhovet'skyi recognised the extent of his delegitimation, turned renegade, and began expelling the Mus­covite garrisons. Briukhovets'kyi apparently expected that Doroshenko and the sultan would reward him by confirming him as vassal hetman over the left bank and Zaporozhia. But Briukhovets'kyi was deceived: Doroshenko crossed the Dnieper and overthrew him, replacing him with commissioned hetman Demian Mnogogreshnyi.

Ordin-Nashchokin retired in 1671. Within a year the new director of the Ambassadors' Chancellery, Artamon Matveev, confronted a simpler if starker and more dangerous situation in Ukraine. Muscovite control over the left bank had been partly restored: Mnogogreshnyi had shifted his allegiance to Moscow and had ratified the Hlukhiv Articles (February 1669). The Hlukhiv Articles had the effect of quelling anti-Muscovite feeling while putting the left- bank hetman on a tighter leash: they conceded some greater autonomy to the hetman's administration (revenues to maintain the Muscovite garrisons and voevody were once again to be collected into the hetman's treasury, not into the tsar's) yet reaffirmed the tsar's right to maintain garrisons for the time being in other towns besides Kiev and to control the Hetmanate's foreign relations.[71]When Mnogogreshnyi began chafing under these restraints Moscow easily deposed him (June 1672) and replaced him with the more compliant Ivan Samoilovich.