TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII (ring of fire)

by Eric Flint

  Colonel Shuvalov grinned at her. It was a surprisingly friendly grin. "Actually, yes. Though I will admit that it's only because Prince Sheremetev has been quite generous with my family." Then the colonel turned back to Reverend Green. "Kseniya's father in-law and I aren't really in the same boat, not quite. We are both Russian officers. He a captain, I a colonel, but the larger difference is that aside from the lands granted me by the czar, Prince Sheremetev provides additional support. So while my financial boat is hardly a yacht, it is a bit bigger than his and less likely to be swamped by changing economic tides."

  "Speaking of the army, how are the negotiations with the PLC going?" Kseniya asked.

  "Negotiations?" Reverend Green asked. "What are you negotiating with the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth?"

  Now Colonel Shuvalov did look shocked. "Surely you knew! Poland and Russia are at war! We have been since the Truce of Deulino expired over a year ago. The negotiations are an attempt to prevent the shooting war from resuming." Then he looked back at Kseniya. "Not well, when I left Russia. King Wladyslaw is insisting that he is the rightful czar." He snorted. "And I believe the rightful king of Sweden, as well. Prince Sheremetev is convinced that he, like we, has read the history of the other time Smolensk war. So he knows, probably, that it is unlikely that he can actually gain the throne. But considering the degree to which he trounced us in that other time, he seems to expect to receive the war indemnity without actually having to fight the war."

  "How likely is he to trounce you this time if it comes to a shooting war?" Reverend Green wanted to know.

  "I wish I knew," the colonel said. "The Patriarch was sure that we would win before Prince Yaroslav sent his letter, and we might have been in a shooting war before now if Sigismund III had died this time around when he did in that other history. But he lasted six months more. Prince Sheremetev was less convinced of our chances in a shooting war and remains so. At the same time, we have learned a lot from the Dacha and the Gun Shop. Even from those silly board games they are playing in the Moscow Kremlin now. Still, it will be better for all if we can reach a negotiated settlement." Which was, Kseniya knew, the Sheremetev party line. None of them had any way of knowing it but just then a young lieutenant named Timrovich was reporting to his general in a place called Rzhev.

  ***

  "So how was the wedding, Colonel?" Prince Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev asked.

  "I found it quite interesting, sir." said Colonel Leontii Shuvalov. "Though I will admit I was a bit disappointed to find that the Poles had held a war while I was gone and I wasn't invited."

  "Rzhev made things much more difficult," Prince Sheremetev said. "Filaret is back on his invade Poland hobby horse. And without Shein we probably couldn't hold him back. Shein figures we are getting stronger faster so time is on our side for now. But he will switch back as soon as he figures we're ready." Prince Sheremetev shook his head in disgust. "None of them can see that Poland is not the real enemy. The real enemy is Gustav and his new USE. So tell me about the USE, Leontii?"

  Leontii made his report. That the USE was rich and powerful and becoming more so every day was beyond question. He had seen several different kinds of airplanes. The largest of which was dwarfed by the Test Bed but the slowest of which made it seem a snail by comparison. Dirigibles were not a viable weapon of war when airplanes flew. But the real danger was the factories which turned out hundreds of items in the time it would take a craftsman to make just one. Yet Russia had factories too. "While we are behind, we aren't that far behind. A year maybe two. I took a steamer from Rybinsk, one of the ones that they were using to resupply Rzhev. I was amazed by the factories along the Volga." He acknowledged the corrupting influence of the up-timers but pointed out that Vladimir and the Dacha were proving incredibly valuable and were probably essential. "I understand that King Wladyslaw and some of the magnates have recruited up-timers of their own. By the way, how are they taking the events at Rzhev?"

  "The Sejm seems deeply offended at the outcome. More offended than cautioned, unfortunately. It must be our fault and we must have somehow cheated. Made a deal with the devil something, anything, other than that they attacked us and we outfought them. They seem especially offended that we uncultured eastern barbarians had such things as breach-loading cannon and that the walking forts proved so effective.

  "It hasn't made things any easier on the diplomatic front. About the only thing keeping them from a full scale invasion is Gustav on their western border. The Truce of Altmark expires next year and the way that Sweden and the USE have been going, Poland simply can't afford to be involved in a war with us when Gustav gets around to them. What concerns me is I don't see any particular reason for Gustav to stop at the Russian border."

  Through the fall and winter of 1634 the Duma debated. And talks with the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth went nowhere. In the winter of 1634 Patriarch Filaret became ill and much of the heart went out of the "invade Poland" faction. Meanwhile more factories came on line. most of them using forced peasant labor. This upset the peasants because winter was their traditional light time. It also upset the Great Families because they couldn't hire the peasants without their landlords' permission.

  Since the Ring of Fire, the anti-serfdom movement in Russia had slowly grown from two directions, top down and bottom up. With the service nobility caught in the middle. The top down part was a mix of morality and self interest. It was fairly small because the top of the Russian pyramid was small. There were fourteen to twenty great families depending on how you counted and a similar number of really large monasteries. A few hundred people in the great families and no more than a few thousand in the monasteries.

  On the other hand, there were over thirty thousand members of the service, or bureaucratic, nobility-people whose livelihood depended on serf labor. And they were the people holding down the vital mid-level military and civilian posts. They were the tax collectors, the construction supervisors and the managers. In the Russian army they were the captains and the colonels, but rarely the generals. It was the service nobility, bureaucrats and soldiers alike, that had kept Russia from collapsing into chaos during the time of troubles. They had stayed on the job and mostly out of politics, serving whichever czar was in power, and kept the wheels from coming completely off. They were generally non-political, but threatening to take away their serfs would change that in a hurry. As had been shown in 1605, the last year when peasants leaving the land hadn't been forbidden.

  Then there were the serfs themselves, the largest proportion of the Russian population. While many, perhaps most, resented their status as serfs, darned few of them objected to the institution. It wasn't that they found the social order objectionable-just their place in it. They ran to the wild east, they ran south to the Cossack lands, they even ran west into Poland, hoping for a better deal. What they didn't do was stand where they were and say "This is wrong!"

  It was a subtle but important distinction. There was no Harriet Tubman sneaking back into the Moscow province to smuggle other serfs out to the Cossack territories where they could be free. No Russian Frederick Douglass standing proudly and articulately to decry not just his serfdom but all serfdom. At least, they hadn't done that before the Ring of Fire.

  The Ring of Fire changed all that, though it took a while for the change to take root. It took a while… but not that long a while. Rumors fly on the wings of eagles, they say. They fly even faster on wings made of mimeographed paper, and the more radically inclined of the boyar class could afford lots of paper. Russia might not have had its own Frederick Douglass, at least at first. But the writings of the original made their way into Russia and into Russian, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin and other such works. And they resonated. Resonated like jungle drums, like liberty bells. Soon enough, there were Russian serfs putting those thoughts in their own words. By 1635 Russia was starting to look like a powder keg.

  But only starting to. And if it was a powder keg, it was milled powder not corned powder. And a p
oor mix at that.

  No one wanted a return to the Time of Troubles. No one wanted Polish troops flooding into Moscow again. Then there was Rzhev. In military terms, Rzhev wasn't very significant at all. But in emotional terms it was. In Rzhev Russia defeated the Poles. And the army that did it had a good number of serfs in it, with a lot of them involved in the fighting. In Rzhev, the Russians showed themselves to be technologically superior to the Poles. Rzhev brought a new feeling of confidence to Russia, and a great deal of political capital to the czar.

  Patriarch Filaret wanted to spend that capital invading Poland and retaking Smolensk. But Czar Mikhail Fedorovich had a different idea. He lit a match…

  ***

  In an unprecedented move, today Czar Mikhail decreed that "Forbidden Years" are now limited, with some qualifications. Anyone who wants to buy out and leave his current lord may do so, provided he is willing to move to Siberia and look for gold or other metals and resources that are now known to exist.

  Treasure Maps For Sale Here! Up-time sources used! Mine for GOLD, SILVER, COPPER! Find OIL!

  Fedor shoved the paper at Igor. "And what are we going to use for labor now, Igor? The czar has betrayed us!"

  "Shhh!" Igor hissed. "You want to get us killed!"

  "I'm as loyal as any man," Fedor insisted, though more quietly. "But that doesn't get the crops in. Without our serfs my family will starve… and so will yours."

  Which, Igor thought, was overstating the case, probably. It was true that members of the "service nobility" like himself and Fedor needed their serfs. There was never enough labor. "They claim that the new machines will take care of the labor problem," Igor said, still trying to calm his friend.

  "They claim! If we could get them. You know how long the waiting list is and you know the boyars will all have them before we even see one. Which is probably a good thing, because who knows if they will work?"

  Igor considered bringing up the increase in pay, but he was very much afraid that Fedor would start yelling again. Fedor had already made his opinions on the new paper money quite clear, many times. And honestly, Igor tended to agree with him. How could a piece of paper with printing on it have value? It just didn't make sense. Whenever he could Igor spent the paper as quickly as he could and saved the silver. He wasn't the only one. By this time a silver ruble-which nominally had the same value as a paper ruble-was buying three times as much. It didn't occur to Igor that the new paper rubles were worth three-quarters as much as the silver rubles had been before the paper rubles were introduced. Silver rubles were disappearing into holes and hidden compartments all over Russia, in a classic example of Gresham's Law.

  Igor and Fedor had recently been transferred to Moscow to appointments within the Bureau of Roads, because the Bureau of Roads was expanding with the introduction of the Dacha Scrapers. They had both gotten raises but those raises hadn't been in the form of more lands as had been usual. The raise had been more of the new paper money. They didn't see Pavel Borisovich sitting in the next cubical with a friend.

  ***

  "Papa, have you heard about the new proclamation?" Pavel asked Boris. "I was having lunch with Peter Ivanovich over at the Bureau of Roads and a couple of the new hires were talking. They seemed pretty upset."

  "Yes. I imagine they were."

  "How bad is it?" Pavel asked.

  "It probably won't be too bad for us. We have new plows, a seeder, a reaper and a thresher. But it will ruin a lot of the lower nobility. How many are ruined depends on how many of the serfs can buy out and how many decide now is a good time to run." Serfs running away had been a major problem for years. Often aided and abetted by the upper boyars and the church, who always needed more labor.

  Whatever Gustav Adolph thought, Americans didn't have a lock on bureaucracy. Russia had had a well-developed bureaucracy for many years. What Russia hadn't had when it was developing that bureaucracy, was the money to pay the bureaucrats. So whether it was a clerk in Novgorod, a manager in the Bureau of Roads, the Konyushenny Prikaz, or a cavalry trooper, most of the pay for his service was in the form of land granted on a semi-permanent basis by the czar.

  Even at this late date the knots of law and custom that turned a free man into a serf weren't quite absolute. If you could escape and stay gone for five years, you were free. And the government wouldn't hunt you; that was up to the person that held the land you were tied to. Also, in theory, there were times when you could buy your way out of your chains. In theory. The last thirty or so years had been "Forbidden Years." Years during which even if you could come up with the cash you weren't allowed to change your status.

  Boris continued. "Politically, it's hard to say. The czar may gain enough from the high families and with the general population to offset what he's going to lose with the dvoryane and deti boyars. " Czar Mikhail had been, at least on the surface, quite clever in how he had implemented the new "Limited Year," but Boris wasn't at all sure he had been clever enough.

  ***

  "It's a big step forward," Bernie Zeppi said. "A really big step."

  "It's a disaster," Filip Pavlovich, Bernie's sometime tutor said. "Labor, Bernie. There's not enough. There's never been enough."

  "Freedom, Filip." Bernie said back. "Why don't people get that people will work harder and produce more if they're doing it for themselves?"

  "Because it isn't true," Filip told him bluntly. "Oh. People probably will work harder if they're paid. But not enough harder to make up for the cost of paying them."

  Natasha felt like burying her head in her hands. Or possibly screaming at the top of her lungs. Instead, she took a deep breath, and said, "Gentlemen, this isn't a productive conversation. Can we get back on topic, please?"

  "It will make Czar Mikhail even more popular than the win at Rzhev," Anya pointed out.

  Bernie grinned his sloppy grin at the girl who'd apparently captured his heart. Anya's presence at the meeting-or, rather, her speaking in the meeting-was an indication of just how much Bernie's presence had affected the Dacha. Bernie was blind to class and it was rubbing off. Anya had started off as a cook's assistant and with help from Bernie had become the Dacha's household accountant. In the process she had become involved in the development of the EMCM, Electro-Mechanical Calculating Machine.

  Natasha didn't really understand why or how the little tart had done it, but Bernie admitted to a "fondness for the underdog." Natasha would just as soon have sent the baggage packing. There was something wrong about Anya. Natasha just couldn't put her finger on what. Still

  … a happy Bernie was a productive Bernie, so she put up with Anya. Besides the girl did the work, as much as Natasha hated to admit it.

  "Popular with who?" Filip asked. "Serfs don't have weapons. The service nobility does. And so does the strelzi. And it's they who will be most affected. When your Czar Lincoln talked about limiting slavery, not abolishing it, it caused a revolution and that was in a country where only a third of it had slavery in the first place. In Russia, serfs are everywhere." Then apparently remembering who he was talking to. "I'm not saying serfdom is a good thing, Bernie. But it's too soon to do this."

  "More money for Vlad," Bernie said. "Reapers and threshers are going like hotcakes. What's weird to me is that you-" He pointed at Natasha. "-aren't freaking out about losing serfs. You've got all these lands to take care of."

  "I," Natasha said, "can afford to hire help. And people want to work for us, because we can afford to take a smaller cut because we have more people. Most of the truly wealthy are the same way, you know. As is the church. We can make a deal, attract more of the labor force. It's the, lesser nobility, people like Boris and Filip, who need the serfs tied to the land. That's what concerns Patriarch Filaret. Ill as he is, he counseled the czar against this move. And Czarina Evdokia is very, very worried. But the boyars and Duma men are all for it. It will make it much easier for us to poach serfs from the lower nobility. There's a lot of nervousness in Moscow right now."

  "And it wo
n't take much to start a firestorm," Filip said. "It's not like we haven't had them before. Or wouldn't have them in the future. Remember Peter the Great. For that matter, remember 1917. That's why I said it's too soon, Bernie. There aren't enough plows and reapers yet to make much of a difference in overall production. And members of the service nobility like me mostly don't have them yet."

  Anya sighed. "I understand your point, but already serfs are being put to work in factories. Rented out, or close enough to make no difference, to make their lord extra money. It will never be the right time! Slavery and serfdom don't just fade away. No oppression does. It takes people standing up and saying enough, no more! And making it stick."

  Natasha knew that was true. Evdokia had discussed it with Mikhail. Bernie was wrong. It was probably true enough that people worked harder when they were working for themselves. And the evidence was pretty clear that societies without serfs were over all more productive than those with serfs. But that extra productivity didn't go into the pockets of the lord. It went to buy the former serf a new suit of clothes or an extra room of the house, maybe some toys for their kids. Which worked just fine for society as a whole, but sucked so far as the lord was concerned since he now had to pay for labor that he used to get for nothing or at least a lot less.

  ***

  Grantville

  "What's up, dude?" Brandy asked. Calling Vlad dude in her empty-headed surfer girl voice usually got a laugh and sometimes led to other things.

  "Huh? What?"

  But not this time apparently. "What's wrong, Vladimir?

  Vald sat down heavily. "I'm worried. There's bad news from Moscow, but I'm not sure how bad it really is. Boris is being reticent. It could just be that he's busy I guess… but it could also be that he's distancing himself from the family. Father Gavril showed me some letters from his family which indicate that the dvoriane in the military are badly upset with Czar Mikhail and increasingly concerned with foreign influences on him."