Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Tsar Michael nevertheless increased the tax burden on this dwindling population. The unsuccessful war with Poland in 1632–4 created massive debts (an indemnity payable to the Poles plus the wages earned by the defeated Russian troops); while to remedy the weaknesses exposed by that conflict the tsar purchased costly foreign munitions and recruited more Western officers to train more New Formation Regiments. A far larger item of defence spending arose on the southern frontier where, between 1636 and 1654, the central government ordered the construction of almost 50 fortified new towns linked by wooden and earthen ramparts that ran for 800 miles from the Dnieper to the Volga. The western half of Russia's ‘Great Wall’ became known as the Belgorod Line, after the town at its centre, and the eastern half as the Simbirsk Line, after the town on the Volga where it terminated. Although the principal function of the new towns was defence, in the 1660s their inhabitants petitioned with mounting frequency ‘against rapidly increasing tax burdens, suggesting that the incorporation of these regions into the main stream of Muscovite life had been swift and sure'(Fig. 19).12

  These ‘lines’ represented perhaps the greatest military engineering feat of the seventeenth century – but the cost proved crippling. Apart from the capital outlay required for construction, each of the new towns and fortresses required a permanent garrison. In addition, each summer, the government mobilized an army of ‘servitors’ (deti boiarskie: gentry who held lands in return for military service) and sent them south to guard against Tatar invasion. Beyond the fortifications, the central government also supported thousands of Cossacks (perhaps from kazac, the Turkic word for ‘free man’), fiercely Orthodox warriors who patrolled the steppe to disrupt any attack by the Muslim Tatars or their Ottoman overlords.13

  19. The Russian empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  Imperial Russia had to defend itself against two enemies: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the west, and the Crimean Tatars in the south. Against the latter, the Romanov tsars constructed the fortified Belgorod and Simbirsk ‘lines’ that made use of natural features such as forests and rivers. In 1670, the ‘lines’ also halted a Cossack invasion. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had no such defences, and in 1648 a Cossack invasion fatally weakened the state, opening the way to invasions by both its Russian and Swedish neighbours. The Commonwealth briefly ceased to exist.

  The tsars nevertheless sought to avoid outright provocation of their southern neighbours. Thus when a band of Cossacks seized the town of Azov at the mouth of the river Don from vassals of the Ottoman sultan, and offered in 1641 to place the town under Moscow's suzerainty, the tsar convened the Zemskii Sobor (the ‘Assembly of the Land’) and asked for their advice on two questions: whether to accept the Cossacks’ offer, which would inevitably provoke open war with the Ottomans; and, in case of acceptance, how to finance that war. Although almost everyone in the assembly favoured retaining Azov, they did not want to pay for a new war. The provincial gentry, for instance, refused to provide the necessary funds without a detailed land survey to equalize tax demands between large and small estates. They also demanded a thorough reform of the central government: ‘We are ruined by Moscow red tape (volokita) and injustice more than by Turks and Tatars,’ they protested. Likewise, Moscow merchants refused to pay more unless the tsar revoked the special trading privileges granted to their foreign competitors, which placed them at a disadvantage. Perhaps shaken by the demand for so many reforms and concessions, the tsar ordered the Cossacks to return Azov to Ottoman control forthwith.14

  Despite the tsar's military restraint (so rare in the mid-seventeenth century), Russia continued to expand southwards. To begin with, whereas the growing season in Karelia begins in April and ends in September, around Belgorod it begins a month earlier and ends a month later. This important discrepancy enhanced the attraction of the chernozem farmland now protected by the Belgorod and Simbirsk Lines. Admittedly, cutting down forests to create fields gave rise to hotter summers, colder winters, and a greater risk of extreme events such as droughts in the region; but chernozem continued to produce bountiful crops in all except years of exceptional climatic adversity (such as 1647 and 1648). Furthermore, in the 1630s the tsar exempted the pioneers from paying taxes for a decade or more. Not surprisingly, this combination of advantages attracted a substantial migration of peasants from the north. Some joined the Cossacks beyond the Belgorod and Simbirsk Lines, seeking Tatar booty, while others fell victim to Tatar raiders and begged to be ransomed; but most settled and prospered on the hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin farmland now available behind the Lines.

  This mass migration created a crisis for the ‘servitors’ of the northern regions, on whom the tsars relied to defend the empire. To finance their military service, most servitors depended on the labour and services exacted from the unfree inhabitants of their estates. Now, the servitors claimed, no sooner had they departed on campaign than either their serfs fled southwards or else neighbouring noblemen kidnapped them as extra hands to work their own estates: they could therefore no longer fulfil their military obligations for lack of peasants. Contemporary evidence bears them out. Servitors claimed that they each required at least 20 peasant households to maintain themselves as a soldier of the tsar, but by the 1630s, at least in the Moscow region, they owned on average only 6 peasant households.15 Not surprisingly, the servitors repeatedly petitioned the central government to compel fugitive serfs to return, and to abolish the time limit for their recovery; but the central government demurred. Although in 1636 the tsar decreed that all former serfs in the south must return, he limited the measure to those who had fled before 1613 and he exempted those who had fled to Siberia. Likewise, although the tsar later raised the time limit for legal recovery to ten years, this fell far short of the total control over serfs which the servitors regarded as essential if they were to discharge their military duties to the sovereign.

  The tsar and his ‘slaves’

  The rapid territorial growth of imperial Russia led to an equally rapid expansion of the central bureaucracy. Tsar Michael created 44 new departments of state in Moscow (known as prikazy: chancelleries), and his son Alexei created 30 more. Both the volume of business handled by each prikaz and the staff employed to handle it grew exponentially. For example, the Military Chancellery employed 45 men in the 1620s but over 100 in the 1660s, and issued orders that ranged from major troop movements down to how many cubic feet of earth should be moved to create ramparts, and how many timber beams of a specified dimension should be used to construct the main gate, of a frontier town.

  The willingness of the tsar's subjects to tolerate such intrusion in their daily lives no doubt reflected the chaos and destruction of the Time of Troubles which ‘profoundly shocked most Russians psychologically, emotionally and spiritually’. According to Chester Dunning, ‘Some regarded the Troubles as God's punishment for the sins of the Russian people or their rulers and concluded that, if God allowed the country to survive, there would be need for significant moral and spiritual reform.’ Most Russians henceforth ‘rejected innovation in favour of restoring as much as possible of the pre-crisis old order’.16 The Romanovs capitalized on these sentiments by stressing their role as patrons of ‘Holy Russia’ (a term first used in 1619): they regularly undertook ostentatious pilgrimages to religious sites, and they occupied pride of place in the annual processions organized every Epiphany and Palm Sunday by the Orthodox Church through what is now Red Square. A chronograph of Russian history written in the second half of the seventeenth century ‘began with the creation of the world based on the Old Testament and then traced a lineage of emperors from Alexander the Great through the Romans and Byzantines’ until it arrived at those sacred defenders of the faith, the Russian tsars, culminating in Michael Romanov.17

  Even as imperial Russia became more hierarchical, one exception remained. In the admirable formula of Valerie Kivelson: ‘All interactions with the state, whether legal disputes in court or communications between
provincial and central offices, were framed as humble petitions addressed directly to the tsar.’ ‘Humble’ seems an understatement: the phrase for ‘petition’ in Russian, bit’ chelom, literally means ‘to beat one's brow [to the ground]'; and all petitioners addressing the tsar called themselves ‘Your slave’ and ‘Your miserable orphans’. Even nobles used demeaning diminutives of their names (‘I, little Ivashko, Your slave, beg you …’).18 Since petitions to the tsar formed the only legal channel by which subjects might request redress of their grievances, and as government intervention in daily life (and, consequently, opportunities for abuse) steadily increased, both grievances and petitions multiplied. To cope with them, Michael Romanov created a special ‘Petitions Chancellery’ and one of its officials always travelled with him in order to direct each petition to the appropriate department of state.

  On Michael's death in 1645 his 16-year-old son and successor Alexei faced so many petitions, many of them from groups of servitors protesting about the shortage of serf labour, that the Swedish envoy in Moscow believed they presaged a general uprising; but the new regime averted disaster by reducing the military service obligation of the gentry by one day, and promising to undertake a new census of all Russia as a preliminary step towards abolishing all restrictions on reclaiming fugitive serfs.19 Inspectors from the central government duly visited each administrative region to ascertain the number of taxable households (and whether they paid less or more now than before); the amount of land under cultivation (as well as land abandoned); and the economic activities of each village (including estimates of crop yields). They also compiled lists of all serfs who had fled their original estates during the previous ten years. But no edict abolishing the time limit for recovering fugitive serfs materialized – not least because Alexei's chief adviser (and brother-in-law) Boris Morozov led the way in welcoming runaway serfs to his own extensive estates and in concealing them from the government's inspectors.

  Morozov acted much like royal ‘Favourites’ in western Europe. First he drove from office those who had advised the previous tsar and then, in order to fund military expenditure (primarily hiring foreign army officers, and building the Belgorod and Simbirsk Lines), he made some highly unpopular fiscal decisions. He instructed another of the tsar's brothers-in-law, treasury minister Peter Trakhaniotov, to freeze the wages earned by the streltsy – the corps of musketeers recruited from the gentry, on whom the government relied to preserve law and order in the capital – creating a group of discontented subjects who were both organized and armed. Moreover, Morozov approved a proposal from Nazarii Chistyi, a prosperous Moscow merchant, to introduce indirect imposts modelled on Dutch prototypes. In 1646 imperial decrees imposed a ‘stamp tax’ on the paper required for all official transactions and created state monopolies for the sale of tobacco and salt. The salt monopoly, in particular, provoked widespread resentment because it increased prices fortyfold. Faced with such brutal inflation, consumers purchased far less salt (causing sales and tax revenues to fall dramatically) and made protests. Late in 1647 the tsar brought some 10,000 musketeers into the capital to preserve order, but when popular unrest continued he reluctantly revoked the salt monopoly.20

  Other anomalies in the Russian tax system also caused unrest. Morozov entrusted control over the commerce of the entire capital to another of his relatives, Levontii Pleschcheev, who not only increased the bureaucratic ‘red tape’ but also extorted bribes of unprecedented size in return for rendering justice. Moreover, in an attempt to make good the shortfall caused by the revocation of the salt monopoly, the treasury began the ruthless collection of tax arrears from the previous two years. A recent study estimates that these measures together ‘tripled the tax burden for 1648’.21 Morozov had thus managed to alienate almost simultaneously the town elites, the servitors and the ordinary taxpayers of Muscovy.

  In April 1648, Morozov ordered the servitors to mobilize and march south to parry an anticipated Tatar raid – but when no incursion occurred, he disbanded them without pay. The Moscow contingent was still in the capital, alienated and angry, when the following month some of the tsar's subjects decided to present their grievances to him in the accustomed manner: through a formal petition. The local servitors no doubt shared the outrage of the crowd as they watched the imperial entourage intercept the petition so that the tsar would not see it. Instead, he and his family left the city on a pilgrimage to a nearby monastery.22

  ‘The whole world is shaking’

  According to Adam Olearius, Moscow was always a dangerous city. The Russians, he asserted, were drunken, sex-crazed sodomites whose lust spared neither horse, man nor boy. Violent street crime posed a constant threat, he continued, because of the large number of underpaid household slaves who could not afford to live on their allowance and so survived by robbery. Patrick Gordon, who served in the tsar's army for almost four decades, agreed. The Russians, he wrote, were ‘morose, avaricious, niggard, deceitful, false; insolent and tirrannous, where they have command; and, being under command, submissive and even slavish, sloven and base, and yet overweening and valuing themselves above all other nations’.23 The failure of Tsar Alexei to receive his subjects’ petition stirred up these passions and, while he was absent on his pilgrimage, crowds gathered in and around the churches of the capital to vent their grievances. They decided to try again to make him listen when he returned, and on 11 June 1648 a large group of citizens emerged from the city to greet their ruler, bearing not only the customary bread and salt but also copies of a petition denouncing the corruption of Levontii Pleschcheev. Once again, the imperial entourage intercepted the documents and Alexei's guards used their whips to drive the crowd back. At one point they opened fire.

  A few of the enraged protestors now followed the tsar into the Kremlin with their formal ‘Supplication’, but Morozov had them imprisoned. Half an hour later, as the tsaritsa returned from the monastery in her carriage, the crowd tried to present their grievances to her, but once again the guards drove them back. At this, ‘the entire crowd, totally exasperated, threw stones and used cudgels against the guards’.24 Both parties had transgressed important boundaries: the tsar had unexpectedly and inexplicably rejected a petition, the only legitimate avenue for subjects to bring their problems to his attention; while a group of subjects had forced their way uninvited into the Kremlin, a sacred space for both Church and State.

  A far worse ‘transgression’ occurred the next day during a religious festival, when the royal family left the Kremlin to worship. Crowds surrounded the tsar as he returned from church, begging that he accept their ‘Supplication’. Although the document used the customary self-abasing style of petitions to the tsar (‘Your slaves and poor subjects’), it also contained some notable innovations. First, it claimed to speak in the name of the ‘common people of Russia’ (not just of Moscow or a particular group), and it lamented the intolerable ‘bribes, presents and gifts’ demanded by bureaucrats in return for any official act (the tsar could easily identify the offenders, the document claimed, because they ‘build themselves houses that are not appropriate to their stations’). The supplicants complained that they had already presented petitions, but ‘great ones’ had intercepted them, so that

  It has been brought to this: that they [the great ones] have stirred up Your Imperial Majesty against the people and the people against Your Imperial Majesty. So it now appears that such injustice has driven the whole population of the entire Moscow region and its adjoining provinces to revolt. As a result great confusion is brewing in your Imperial capital and in many other regions and towns.

  They boldly reminded the tsar of ‘the history to be found in your imperial palace [the Kremlin] of the Greek king in Constantinople, Justinian’, who averted divine punishment by issuing laws that ended the oppression of the poor:

  Now Your Imperial Majesty can do the same, if you wish to avoid the punishment of God that now threatens your kingdom. Let the unjust judges be rooted out; get rid of the incompetent; pun
ish all bribery and injustice, the obstruction of justice, and all unfairness. Delay and prevent the many innocent tears that fall. Protect the lowly and the weak from violence and injustice.

  Just in case Alexei missed the point, the Supplication reminded him that his father Michael had been ‘designated and chosen by God and the whole people’ to rule ‘when the land of Muscovy was nearly completely exhausted by evil people'; and yet currently ‘all one hears from the common folk is [talk of] uprising and revolt because of the injustices inflicted on them by the powerful’.25

  This time the ‘great ones’ in the imperial entourage tore this petition ‘into tiny pieces and flung the pieces in the petitioners’ faces’ while their servants thrashed the supplicants. Again the crowd pursued the tsar towards the Kremlin – but this time, when Morozov ordered the musketeers to close the gates to the complex, they refused. Several thousand demonstrators gathered in front of the tsar's apartment and demanded immediate redress of their grievances, which now included the execution of the hated Levontii Pleschcheev.26 When Morozov appeared on the palace balcony to reason with the crowd, they shouted back ‘Yes, and we must have you too!’ Morozov's servants urged the musketeers in the Kremlin square to fire on the crowd; but the troops, no doubt remembering Morozov's refusal to pay their arrears, ‘replied that they had sworn [allegiance] to His Imperial Majesty and to no other, and that they would not fight for the nobles against the common people’. A delegation of musketeers told the tsar to his face that ‘They would not make enemies of the people for the sake of the traitor and tyrant Pleschcheev’, while those in the square assured the demonstrators that they ‘would not oppose the crowd but would much rather give them a helping hand’.27