Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

those with lower 'placement' status did not get ahead of those with a higher one.

More important yet were 'placement' accounts regulating relations among the families and clans. The service records of all servitors (consisting, in the seventeenth century, of approximately 3,000 clans divided into 15,000 families) were kept in the rolls of the Razriadnyi Prikaz, or, as it was known for short, Razriad. Preserved to this day, they run into thousands of volumes - a monument to the industry of the Muscovite civil service. From these records it was possible to ascertain what service appointments or what places at ceremonial functions one's ancestors and relatives had ever held, as well who had been above and who below them. These were entered into special mestnichestvo books. The boyars used the records to assure that in making appointments the tsar respected the relative ranking of the clans and of their individual members vis-a-vis one another. Clan honour required that a servitor should refuse any post which would have caused him to serve in a position subordinate to or even equal with anyone whose ancestors or relatives had been subordinate to his ancestors or relatives. To do otherwise debased for ever one's clan and lowered the service status of all its members, living and those yet unborn.* In this reckoning, the nature of the assignment or its intrinsic importance did not matter; all that counted was who served under whom. On the eve of every battle the tsar was besieged with petitions from servitors who objected to being put in command positions below their rightful 'places' (mesta). Were it not for the device of declaring certain military campaigns 'outside places' (i.e. exempt from being recorded and used in future mestnichestvo accounts) it is difficult to see how Moscow could have waged war. But in the civil service, and even more at court ceremonials, petitions and litigations of the most childish kind were commonplace. The following, reputed to be the last instance of a mestnichestvo squabble, may serve as an illustration:

In 1691, on 15 April, the boyars Lev Kirillovich Naryshkin,Prince Grigorii Afanasevich Kozlbvskii... Fedor Timofeevich Zykov, and... Emelian Ignatovich Ukraintsev were told to dine with the Patriarch Adrian. Prince Kozlovskii, for some reasons connected with mestnichestvo reckonings, deemed it improper to attend this dinner and refused on grounds of sickness. But at the court, in the tsar's entourage, they probably knew the reason for Kozlovskii's refusal, and messengers were sent to him to tell him that if he was ill he should, without fail, come in a carriage. Kozlovskii still would not come. Orders were given to inform him that if he did not come in a carriage he would be brought to the palace by force in a cart. Even after this threat, Kozlovskii did not appear. He was then forcibly brought in a cart to the

* This is the reason why the practice of the deliberate lowering of a boyar's service record, used by Moscow to discourage boyar departure, was such an effective deterrent.