Russia under the Old regime

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however, the service estate enjoyed very real material benefits. The most valuable of these was monopoly on land and serfs; until 1861, with brief exceptions, only those registered on the rolls of the service class could hold landed estates and employ serf labour (the clergy, as always, forming an exception to the rule). On the other side, stood the little men or muzhiki who enjoyed neither personal rights nor economic benefits, except such as they managed to acquire in defiance of the law. Their job it was to produce the goods and contribute the labour necessary to sustain the monarchy and its servitors.

The gulf separating the two estates was virtually impassable. Early Moscow tolerated a certain amount of social mobility and in its own interest even encouraged some of it; but the historic tendency pointed unmistakably in the direction of caste formation. The Muscovite state, being interested only in service and incomes, wanted everything to be in its proper place. The bureaucracy was structured to match the society which it administered; it too wanted maximum social rigidity, that is, the least possible movement of people from one category of tax or service obligation to another, since each such shift confused its account books. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, laws were passed prohibiting peasants from leaving their farms and tradesmen from changing their places of residence. Clergymen were forbidden to abandon the priesthood; priests' sons had to follow their fathers' vocation. Commoners were not to enter the ranks of the service class under the threat of heavy penalties. Sons of service personnel upon reaching adolescence had to register in the office that supervised such matters. The cumulative effect of these measures was to make social status in Muscovite Russia hereditary.

We will now take up in turn the history of Muscovite servitors and commoners and show how each became bonded to the monarchy. In general historical surveys it is sometimes said that Russian boyars lost the right of free departure because in time Moscow had gobbled up all the appanage principalities and they no longer had anywhere to go. In fact, however, this right had been effectively subverted before Moscow absorbed the rest of appanage Russia. The practice had never been a popular one with the appanage princes. What made it particularly noxious was that sometimes disaffected boyars quit their prince en masse, leaving him on the eve of battle without troops - a situation Basil 1 of Moscow confronted twice, once in 1433 and then again in 1446. Novgorod is believed, as early as the thirteenth century, to have taken measures to prevent boyars holding votchiny on its territory from enrolling in the service of princes outside its boundaries. Moscow began to interfere with the right of free departure already in the 1370s.2 At first,