1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  Even so, it wouldn’t have held for long. But the initial rush was blunted and the Kazakh warriors pulled back. They would circle around, but other defenders were taking up positions between the buildings of expanded Ufa.

  Togym saw the collapse of the charge. More importantly, he heard the shooting. There was no way anyone should be able to shoot that quickly. Once someone with a muzzle-loading matchlock fired, they were done for half a minute. These people were firing constantly, a continuous crackle of fire that increased or faded like waves on the ocean, but never ceased. He looked for gaps, for ways around, and what he saw were more barricades.

  No, this was not the time to waste men in a mad rush. When the rest of the army got here, there would be time to plan and time to organize.

  Colonel Shuvalov wasn’t pleased by the decision, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

  General Izmailov climbed to the kremlin watchtower in time to see the charge bog down and was amazed at how lucky they had been to hold. It made a sort of sense intellectually, but it went against all his experience of warfare. No…that wasn’t entirely true. It fit all together too well with what he had seen and done at Rzhev, both what had happened to his cavalry when they attacked massed infantry, and what had happened to the enemy infantry when they had faced modern guns.

  But still, it felt wrong. Those men at the barrels should have broken and run. Even Streltzi should have broken under that attack, much less peasants. He looked out over the mishmash of buildings that was Ufa and knew they couldn’t hold that much territory. They would have to pull back. They would have to build lines closer in, nearer the kremlin.

  General Izmailov started giving orders. He didn’t have any authority to give orders, not here. But looks were exchanged. First Bernie Zeppi, then Vladimir Gorchakov, and finally Czar Mikhail nodded, and General Izmailov was in command of the defense of Ufa.

  CHAPTER 25

  General Izmailov, for the Defense

  Ufa

  April 1, 1637

  In a room in the Ufa kremlin, there was a sand table map of Ufa. It had been used by Bernie and the Dacha city planners to plan the sewers and streets. They had even managed, mostly, to get people to build their buildings where they were told. That placement had had a lot to do with efficiency of trade and manufacturing, and not much at all to do with defensive works. Even when they had looked at defense, they had focused on attacks from the west, not the southeast.

  Now Artemi Vasilievich Izmailov used that sand table to plan the emergency fortification of Ufa. That they would lose half the city was a given. At least as far as Izmailov was concerned. The people who owned those buildings weren’t so easily convinced. On the other hand, the army that was building up just east of the city was a convincing argument.

  Stefan picked up a ceramic pot full of iron that must have weighed a hundred pounds and set it on the wagon. His chamber factory was in a building that they couldn’t hold, but everything that they could move to a protected location would be something they didn’t lose and something that the Kazakh wouldn’t have to use. Stefan’s factory had a steam engine, an alternator, and induction furnaces. The knowledge, and more than a few of the tools that had been developed in the Dacha and Murom over the last few years, had found their way to Ufa. Now much of it was being stacked up against the wooden kremlin wall in the hopes that it might be used again in the days that followed.

  The same process was going on all over Ufa as people pulled back and jerry-rigged defensive works.

  General Izmailov had made Stefan a captain. Once he got the stuff from the factory into storage, he would be in charge of a hundred yard section of wall.

  “Wall” was actually much too grand a word for what they had, but they were well armed. Not everyone in Ufa had an AK. Not even AK3s. But a lot of them did. And they had plenty of chambers for all the AKs. They were short on cannon, but they had a decent supply of rockets. Stefan loaded a barrel of iron ore onto the wagon, and he and his men went around front to grab the wagon tongue and pull. They had wagons, but not enough horses.

  New Ruzuka

  The villagers heard the fighting at Ufa. It was only ten miles away and there were a lot of guns shooting. They sent a runner and the runner saw the army outside Ufa.

  “Is there any way of sneaking into Ufa?” asked Dominika.

  The scout, one of the young men who had joined the village at Ufa, shook his head. “A few might. But with children and old folks, not a chance we would get there without being caught by the Tatars.”

  They had spent the winter building buildings, and New Ruzuka was full of peasants who had every reason to fortify their position against raids by bandits. The issue was that they didn’t have thousands of people. They had about eight hundred, only two hundred fifty of whom were young men. They had eight-foot palisades with firing steps around the village, but they didn’t have enough men to fully man the palisades.

  Father Yulian took command. They would stand watches and have weapons ready, and everyone would know what to do if the enemy attacked. Then they would pray that the Tatars didn’t notice them. That wasn’t unreasonable. While the fields had been denuded of trees, they were not so much as plowed yet. There were no crops to steal.

  Ufa

  April 2, 1637

  “The convention will come to order,” Alexander called. He pounded on the table with the gavel. “Sit down, everyone. The defense of Ufa is being arranged and we can’t go anywhere, anyway. So we might as well get some work done. The committee, the Rukovoditel Prikaz committee, has a report to make.”

  A direct translation of Rukovoditel Prikaz would be something like “head orderer,” but it could also be translated as “head minister.” Closer to the real meaning would be “chief executive” or “head of government.” It was a part of the constitution that defined the executive branch of government and also would convert the bureaucracy of the United States of Russia into a single cohesive system…or at least something that resembled one a bit more than the mishmash of bureaus that had grown up since the time of Ivan the Terrible.

  It took some more banging, but eventually Alexander got the delegates to come to something vaguely resembling order. And the committee on Rukovoditel Prikaz made its report. There would, in the nature of things, be more members in the house of commons than in the house of lords. If both houses voted on the head minister, then the lower house would consistently elect one of its own. The head minister would usually be a commoner, and the lords would not consent to being put under the command of a commoner. Not a majority of the time, not even occasionally. Mestnichestvo, the Russian system of social ranks, still held sway.

  The committee had two proposals. One that the Rukovoditel Prikaz, head minister, would be elected by the house of commons, and the second that he must be a member of the house of lords. Yermak Fedov was on the side of the nobles in this one. Even though his Cossacks were strongly anti-slavery, they had their own form of nobility and Yermak was a member of it.

  The convention had more commoners than nobles. It passed the first and voted down the second. At that point it was a good thing that the town was surrounded, else a bunch of the nobles would have walked out. In fact, several of the nobility did leave the chamber, and not without justification. The Rukovoditel Prikaz had proposed the two rules as a compromise, and when the nobles had voted for the first one it was in the expectation that the commoners would vote for the second one. The nobles felt like they had been cheated.

  General Izmailov walked along the lines talking to people, trying to get a feel for this place and the people who occupied it. Partly, that was because he had command of the city’s forces under the authority of Czar Mikhail. It wasn’t like he could surrender, but as long as he limited himself to military matters, he mostly had a free hand. He stopped at the section of the wall where Stefan Andreevich was in command and found Vera Sergeevna talking with him. He learned that Vera, the delegate from the village of New Ruzuka and representative of the manuf
acturers of Ufa, was also Stefan’s wife. They talked politics for a few minutes and defensive works for a few more. General Izmailov left, wondering how long an independent Siberian state would survive if it had this on its southern border.

  General Shein was considering joining the United Russian States, but he was also considering declining to join. And if Ufa was any example, that last might be a very bad idea.

  Salqam-Jangir Khan wasn’t happy with Togym, but wasn’t going to admit that in front of Colonel Shuvalov. This might have been over if Togym had just had the guts to carry through. Now that Ufa had had time to fortify, taking it was going to be a lot more costly.

  But he needed those guns Shuvalov promised. The reports for the first day’s battle had made that plain. Salqam-Jangir hated the guns, and the effect he could see them having on war and warriors. But hate them or love them, they were here. If a bunch of peasants could hold off warriors with the rifles, what was to become of the warrior’s training and creed? What mattered the strength and valor of a man of war if any beggar off the street who had a gun could bring him low?

  “We will have to make a coordinated attack,” he said. “Togym, you will take a third of the army and…”

  Czar Mikhail looked out at the crowd. He didn’t have time for this. There were Kazakh khanate soldiers investing his city at this very moment. Ivan Alexandrovich Choglokov was there, with his cousin’s wife. And this trial was to determine if her dead husband, Ivan Petrovich Choglokov, had been murdered. It was clear that she had been crying, but she wasn’t any more. Her eyes were too full of hate directed at the well-dressed former serf, Stefan Andreevich of New Ruzuka, the accused murderer. Mikhail looked over at Timofei Fedorovich Buturlin and said, “Let’s get started.”

  Buturlin called up the first witness and questioned him. It was one of the men who had been at the improvised barricade.

  “I don’t know how it got started,” the man said. “I saw a bunch of people with guns heading up Irina Way. And they said that the Mongols were attacking. I wasn’t going to let my shop get burned, so I grabbed my gun and joined them.” The story went on from there till he got to the argument about where to set up the barricade. “Well, we were starting to move barrels and stuff to keep the Mongols out of Irina Way, and this guy says we’re in the wrong place. He grabs the captain by the arm.”

  “One moment,” Buturlin said. “You said he grabbed the captain. What captain?”

  The man pointed at Stefan Andreevich. “Him.”

  “What made you think he was the captain?”

  “Well, look at him. Besides, a bunch of the men were asking him stuff as we were going along the road and he’s the one who started people making the barricade. And I sure wasn’t going to argue with him.”

  Mikhail looked over at Stefan Andreevich. The man stood over six feet tall and probably weighed two hundred fifty pounds, all of it muscle. He didn’t look all that much like a captain to Mikhail, but he didn’t look like a serf either. Mikhail could understand why the man didn’t want to argue with someone that size.

  Buturlin looked at the big man and nodded. “Go on.”

  “The captain tells him to go somewhere else if he don’t like it here and turns back to giving orders. Then the guy grabs him again and the captain, he turns like a cat and punches the guy. The guy goes flying back and bounces off a wall. The punch must have been hard enough to stop his heart. But the captain had gone back to giving orders. We hopped to it too, I’ll tell you.”

  There was more testimony. Mostly repeating the story the first man had told. None of the witnesses had paid much attention to the man who died. They had been in the middle of a battle.

  There was also discussion of how long it had taken for them to get the barricade set up and how quickly the Kazakh warriors attacked after the barricade was finished.

  Buturlin asked the room in general, “Does anyone know where Ivan Petrovich Choglokov wanted them to move?”

  There were a lot of head shakes. Someone offered, “I think his leather works was a couple of blocks north.”

  “Which way was he pointing?”

  “North, I think.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said General Izmailov. “The issue was time, not location. If they had moved anywhere, it would have delayed the construction of the barricade and the Kazakh warriors would have overrun them before the barricade was ready.” Then General Izmailov looked at Czar Mikhail. “Your Majesty, the decision of whether to move or stay where they were isn’t the issue. The question is who had the authority to make it. An army needs discipline above all else.”

  Mikhail knew what he was talking about. The first attack on Rzhev had been a cavalry charge led by an idiot of high social rank, who had gotten his command slaughtered. He’d been able to do it by using his status to co-opt military command of part of the army. Later, an aide of Izmailov, also with high social rank, had usurped command authority, and in doing so saved the battle. For political reasons, the second incident had been kept quiet. And that aide was now General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev, commander of the defense of Kazan.

  But that wasn’t what Izmailov was talking about. Even if Stefan was perfectly right in what he did, there was still the question of whether he had the right to do it. The issue was command authority within the army versus social status. If social status controlled, Stefan should have obeyed the commands of the higher-ranked Ivan Petrovich Choglokov. If it was military rank that had precedence, then it got a lot murkier.

  “I understand, General. However, in this case, neither man was in legal authority over the other.”

  Buturlin was looking back and forth between them, not knowing what they were talking about. Well, there were only a few people who did know what had happened at Rzhev. Most people thought Boris Timofeyevich had been acting under General Izmailov’s orders when he moved the guns.

  Izmailov shrugged. “I’m among the last to support the notion that social rank should trump military rank and discipline, Your Majesty. But there was no military rank involved here.”

  “I disagree, General,” Buturlin said.

  “Oh?”

  “The core of the defenders of Irina Way were workers in Stefan Andreevich’s factory. That gave him de facto command of the largest contingent of the defenders. While Ivan Petrovich Choglokov clearly had the higher social rank, it seems to me that Stefan Andreevich had the military rank. None of Ivan Petrovich Choglokov’s workers were there.”

  Sofia Choglokov broke then. “I don’t care about your battle. My husband is dead and that serf killed him!” She pointed at Stefan Andreevich.

  Back in Novgorod, that was all that would have mattered. Here and now, what mattered was that Stefan’s actions had held that street and stopped the attack.

  Ivan Alexandrovich Choglokov turned to her. “Sofie, there are Kazakh warriors surrounding the city. They will have no respect at all for your rank or little Petr Ivanovich’s. This man didn’t try to kill Cousin Ivan. He was just trying to protect the city.”

  Czar Mikhail reentered the hall, waved, and a gun butt crashed against the floor.

  The crowd quieted and Mikhail stepped up to the throne and took his seat. “We are here gathered to judge not one man, but the laws under which he would be judged. We are in a time of flux, when the laws of Russia are being reformed, and the first act of that change was the emancipation proclamation I issued when I was freed from my own captivity. It was under that promise that Stefan and his family—his whole village—came east to the frontier, risking life and limb. And it is that promise to him that must govern his mestnichestvo.

  “But mestnichestvo is not all that is involved. In fact, Stefan Andreevich was in military command of the scratch force that assembled around him to guard the entrance to Irina Way. And, as must always be the case in the heat of battle, that rank—not social rank—must control. The confusion was the fault of the circumstances, not Stefan Andreevich or Ivan Petrovich Choglokov. The death was not murder, but an accid
ent of war.

  “In order to prevent future accidents, I make Stefan Andreevich now a captain in the Ufa militia, and a dvoriane with the family name of Ruzukov. But be aware, Stefan Andreevich Ruzukov, of all that this means. You are now under the orders of your lawful superiors in the defense of Ufa, and failure to obey those orders quickly and to the last, will be met with harsh punishment.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Word of Ufa

  April 3, 1637

  In Kazan, the report of the attack on Ufa came as a shock, but there was very little they could do about it. Ivan and Tim talked about this a lot, both before and after Czar Mikhail had escaped from captivity. The question was: how did the new guns change warfare? The answer was complicated by the fact that there was no direct corollary to the weapons mix they had now in that other history. By the time the other history had anything close to the AKs—even the AK3s much less the AK4.7s—they had machine guns.

  Well, present day Russia had a sort of machine gun, but it wasn’t even up to the standards of the American Civil War Gatling gun. At the same time, if not quite up to the 1903 Springfield, the AK4.7 was close in terms of combat effectiveness. As long as you had preloaded chambers, it probably had a better rate of fire than the Springfield. At any rate, that’s what Tim assumed was the case. He had never seen a 1903 Springfield, not even one of the down-time made knockoffs. But he had experience with the AK4.7, and he knew what he could to with his. So far as accuracy and rate of fire, his AK4.7 was at least comparable to what the Springfields were purported to do.