Russia under the Old regime

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entitled to do so. But the posad also faced competition from serfs of the service people and the clergy. Peasants living on 'white' properties of lay and clerical landlords set up in most cities and in many rural localities regular markets known as slobody (a corruption ofsvoboda, meaning freedom) where they traded without bearing their share of tiaglo. In some localities the posad was a mere nucleus surrounded by slobody and occasionally a prosperous sloboda turned into a large market town, How significant such competition was may be gathered from the situation in Tula where at the end of the sixteenth century the posad people owned only a fifth of the stalls, while the remainder belonged to soldiers and peasants.8 Competition from this quarter caused great bitterness and bred constant conflicts in the Muscovite city. From time to time the government took steps to placate the posad population, but without success. The posad never succeeded in shaking off the deadly rivalry of tiaglo-exempt groups.

Given these circumstances, no one stood much to gain from membership in the posad, and all the prohibitions notwithstanding, posad people in droves fled their communities. The best chance of making good their escape lay in finding a landlord or a monastery willing to take them under its wings and thus enable them to trade without bearing tiaglo. How desperate the situation of the posad community must have been may be gathered from the not uncommon practice of their members bonding themselves as slaves. Apparently the status of a slave (which carried with it exemption from all state obligations) was preferable to that of a shopkeeper or artisan - a telling commentary on the conditions of the Russian middle class. The government had to take drastic measures to stop the exodus of such people, imposing heavy penalties for unauthorized separation from the posad. To help the posad communities fulfil their responsibilities, it pressed into their depleted ranks vagabonds, impoverished dvoriane and anyone else whom it caught living outside the service-tiaglo structure. But the effect was minimal and the exodus continued. The modest growth in the number of cities during the seventeenth century was due to the expansion of Russia and the construction of military-administrative outposts along the eastern and southern frontiers.

The Muscovite city reflected accurately the threefold division of Muscovite society at large - servitors, bearers of tiaglo and clergy; it was a microcosm not a world unto itself. The servitors, peasants and clergy, who made up over two-thirds of the urban population of Muscovite Russia had their roots outside the city, while the trading-artisan class was enserfed. The diverse social groups comprising the city population not only enjoyed no administrative and judicial autonomy but even lacked any legal status binding them to one another. The Muscovite city