Russia under the Old regime

96

families and clans, whose senior representatives attended the tsar's Council {Duma). This body sat in permanent session at the Moscow Kremlin, and its members were expected to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Clerks holding executive positions also belonged to the service class, as did diplomats. As a rule, the top civil servants owned large landed properties.

To ensure that the service class did not shirk its duties, two offices were established in Moscow in the second half of the sixteenth century. One, the Razriad, has been mentioned already. It seems that at first the Razriad kept track of both personnel records and the estate holdings of servitors, but that later the second task was entrusted to a special Bureau of Pomestia (Pomestnyi Prikaz). Using data from the Razriad, this bureau made certain that all the land held by members of the service class yielded the proper quantity of state service. The efficiency of these establishments must have been of a very high order. It is estimated that in the 1560s, the Razriad maintained records of at least 22,000 servitors, scattered over an immense territory. Occasionally, as in the second half of Ivan iv's reign when control over it fell into the hands of one family (the brothers, Andrei and Vassilii Shchelkalov), the Razriad provided a unique personal power base within the bureaucracy.

Now that its ingredients have been enumerated, one can appreciate the complexity of the Muscovite service structure in the seventeenth century, when the system was fully formed. All appointments of any distinction required that account be taken of three disparate factors in the candidate's background: his pedigree (rodoslovnost'), his service rank (chinovnosf) and the previous posts he has held (razriadnost').s

In the mid-sixteenth century, Russia had an estimated 22,000-23,000 servitors. Of this number, 2,000 or 3,000 were inscribed in the service rolls of the city of Moscow, and composed the 61ite of the pedigreed. They held large properties, sometimes running into thousands of acres. The remainder, some 20,000 strong, were inscribed in the rolls of the provincial cities. The majority of these were exceedingly poor, with average holdings of 100-200 acres. At the end of the sixteenth century, there was one servitor for each 300 taxpayers and clergy. The ratio rose only slightly in the seventeenth century; in 1651, with an estimated population of 13 million, Russia had 39,000 servitors, or one per 333 inhabitants. Apparently this figure represented the maximum that the economy of the time could support.

The Muscovite service class, from which, in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of imperial Russia and the communist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represents a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions. No term borrowed from western history, such as 'nobility' or 'gentry' satisfactorily defines it. It was a pool of skilled