Chapter 2. The formation of the Muscovite state

Chapter 2

The formation of the Muscovite state

In the late 15th and the 16th centuries, the Muscovite state assumed a durable form, which it bequeathed to the Russian Empire. Eurasia was undergoing major upheavals, as the dominant horse‑ borne steppe overlordships finally yielded to firearms‑ bearing empires: Ching, Safavid, Mughal, Ottoman, and Muscovite. The Golden Horde had long ago broken up into various smaller khanates, which themselves had little control over raiding Tatar, Nogai, and Kalmyk nomadic bands. By the mid‑ 16th century, the decline of the Hanseatic League and the final eclipse of the Teutonic Knights was creating new opportunities for the nearest powers – Sweden, Denmark, Poland‑ Lithuania, and Muscovy – but also new dangers, to which all the states responded by far‑ reaching reforms of governmental control, taxation, and military establishment.

In the Muscovite case, this meant regularly calling up troops to patrol the frontiers or be sent as fast as possible to where they were needed. The Great Prince could do this only by mobilizing the power of junior princes and boyars. Holders of both votchiny (hereditary estates) and pomestia were required to report regularly for military duty together with their own weapons, horses, and armed men.

The longest and most vulnerable frontier was in the south and east, where nomadic raiders periodically destroyed property and deported local people into slavery. These raiders could be really dangerous: in 1571, Crimean Tatars sacked Moscow itself. To defend its territory, Muscovy began to construct defence lines, consisting of stockades of tree trunks obstructing known raiding routes. Wooden blockhouses and earthen forts were sited at intervals between them. Garrison towns acted as supply depots, bases for the stationing of troops and the despatch of reconnaissance patrols. Initially, the core of the frontier defence forces consisted of light cavalrymen armed with bows, well adapted to steppe warfare. They reported for duty in the spring, summer, or autumn. As military technology advanced, they had to be supplemented by infantry with firearms

Muscovy also enlisted the aid of Cossacks on the Don River – as Poland did those along the lower Dnieper. Cossacks were self‑ governing military communities who occupied the steppes abandoned by the Golden Horde, hunting, fishing, and occasionally raiding towns or villages on their fringes. Moscow offered them money, arms, and provisions in return for patrolling territory beyond the defence lines. Cossacks, though, were unruly and the arrangement proved at times unreliable.

To coordinate this fighting force over such huge territories required an unprecedented degree of central control. Ivan III and Vasilii III (r. 1505–33) absorbed other Rus princely lands, especially the extensive Novgorod territories, and converted them into pomestia. The lesser princes and boyars were given extensive powers to require local communities to fulfil their obligations. The precise terms of military service were laid down by the Service Decree of 1556, which stipulated the weapons, horses, and armed men each pomeshchik (estate‑ holder) had to provide in return for a given quantity of land. Pomeshchiki who failed in their duty would lose status and eventually their land as well. A Military Chancery oversaw the implementation of these arrangements: it kept service rosters, ensured that servicemen reported for duty properly equipped, that they were drawn up in formations and directed to their postings, along with all their supplies. This required a complex system of record‑ keeping – the kernel from which developed the formidable Muscovite/Russian bureaucracy.

The remarkable success of this system eventually gave Muscovy the muscle to conduct offensive operations against the Golden Horde’s successor khanates. It conquered Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, thus establishing its ascendancy in the Volga basin and gaining a departure point from which it conquered the Khanate of (Western) Siberia in the late 16th century.

Muscovy also had contested frontiers in the west and north‑ west, where it launched a campaign in 1558, to gain a direct outlet to the Baltic Sea and prevent any other power dominating the region. The campaign was unsuccessful, since here artillery and trained infantry formations with firearms were vital; Muscovy learned this form of warfare only gradually. Besides, all its fighting there had to be conducted with one eye to the rear, to the danger of raids from the south. This meant its army had to be flexible, disproportionately large for the size of its population, and that good intelligence was crucially important. For this purpose, Muscovy kept envoys posted with all the main Tatar Hordes, collecting information. It was always alert to the possibility of utilizing disagreements within those Hordes and detaching discontented clans to fight on Muscovy’s side. This was normal steppe diplomacy.

How did the state raise the resources required for such heavy military commitments? Most of it came in the form of personal service, through the pomeshchiki (service estate‑ holders) reporting with their equipment and retainers. Gradually, taxes came to be levied in a similar way: pomeshchiki and the holders of votchiny paid the treasury and exacted services from their dependent rural population. Obviously, without reliable peasant input, the service class could not make their contribution to the state’s resources, financial and military. The answer was to enserf the peasants. Already by the late 15th century, they were forbidden to quit their lords’ estates except around St George’s Day (26 November), when harvesting and autumn sowing were complete. During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when peasant flight increased, this brief loophole was first suspended, then closed altogether. The boundaries of serfdom were finally drawn tight in the Law Code of 1649, which gave the state unlimited powers to track down and reclaim fugitive peasants. Significantly, the Code did not use the words ‘serf’ or ‘serfdom’: it merely defined the penalties to be imposed on peasants who fled and on those who harboured them. Nowhere was it stipulated who might become a serf and how he/she might be treated. Serfdom was thus not defined by law but by the evolving practice of personal domination, backed by the state.

Most studies of Russia, rightly, have a lot to say about the central state, yet no less important were local communities. The immense mobilization effort would not have been achieved if they had not been able to deliver. They were organized on the principle of ‘joint responsibility’ (krugovaia poruka ). All the inhabitants of a rural or urban settlement were jointly responsible for the payment of taxes, the provision of army recruits, the discharge of labour duties, and the maintenance of peace through the apprehension of troublemakers and criminals. If one household failed in its duties, the other households had to make up the shortfall. Such joint responsibility was common in medieval Europe and Asia, when rulers lacked the administrative apparatus to carry out what we would regard as normal state functions. (In England, the equivalent system was known as ‘francpledge’. ) The duties of local communities, the service estate, and the laws governing them were set out in the Law Code of 1550.

The ruler who bore the main burden of making this system work was Ivan IV (r. 1533–84 – the ‘Terrible’). He aimed to demonstrate beyond doubt that he was undisputed ruler of Rus, that the princes and boyars were his subjects, not partners or even subordinate allies. He insisted on adopting the title of Tsar, the Russian equivalent of Caesar, translatable here as ‘sovereign’, that is, no longer owing tribute to any earthly ruler. He made some effort to give his authority a broader backing by convening occasional gatherings of representatives of local elites to consult on major issues of policy. Historians have called these gatherings zemskie sobory (assemblies of the land), though contemporaries did not use the term. They were not convened regularly, nor was there an established electoral procedure for them. They were occasions, not institutions.

Ivan also intended to establish once and for all that the crown would be hereditary in his family. When in 1553 he fell ill, he required his boyars to take an oath to his son, Dmitry. Many of them were reluctant, and he interpreted their hesitation as treason. He also tended to regard military defeat as evidence of treason among the commanders.

Not altogether without reason. The Lithuanian kingdom, which had competing claims to the lands of Rus, offered its aristocracy higher status and a more effective role in governance. Rus boyars and princes enjoyed a traditional right to choose their own master, and it was always tempting to exercise it and defect to Lithuania. To deter them, Ivan imposed a system of mutual surety on them: if they defected, their extended families or their bail‑ holders would have to pay large penalties or suffer worse punishment. Failure to give warning of an impending defection was considered an offence, and so the system encouraged denunciations.

In December 1564, Ivan decided to confront ‘treason’ with an act of theatre. He suddenly withdrew from his court and set out with his family, the state treasury, and several beloved icons for a favourite residence outside Moscow. From there, he sent a missive to the boyars and church leaders accusing them of obstructing his efforts to uncover and root out treason. He demanded the right to proceed against traitors as he saw fit. He also sent a letter to the people of Moscow informing them of his accusations and reassuring them that they had not incurred his wrath. The people sent a petition begging him to return,

not to leave the country and deliver us to the wolves like unhappy sheep with no shepherd, and to protect us from the strong. . . . Who will defend us from attack by foreign peoples? . . . How can we live without a lord?

Here we see one of the recurring themes of Russian history: the ordinary people welcome a strong ruler because he can defend them both from external aggressors and from their own internal strongmen, who exploit them and sometimes fight one another, unleashing destructive warfare in which everyone suffers. When power is mediated through persons rather than institutions, those persons are always liable to give priority to their own individual, family, or factional interests. Ivan, for all his paranoia, was endeavouring to combat this tendency and assert the priority of state service.

His improvised method of doing so was to carve out his own personal territorial realm, in which he would rule as he saw fit. He called it the oprichnina – literally, widow’s portion. The remaining territory he left to the boyars to rule according to their own customs. In the oprichnina, he expropriated most of the boyars and appanage princes, deporting them to the new territories now available around Kazan, and awarded their ancestral lands as pomestia to his own servitors. His oprichniki rode the country on black horses, each carrying a dog’s head and a broom, as it were to sniff out treachery and sweep it away. Supposed traitors were tortured and murdered. Ivan believed that, as God’s chosen, uniquely among men he was entitled to commit evil in order to do good. The grotesque cruelty of his campaign, however, divided the elites among themselves and weakened Muscovy’s resistance. It was during the oprichnina that the Tatars successfully raided Moscow; shortly afterwards, Ivan abolished it.

On the whole, though, boyars accepted the Tsar’s dominance, since they recognized that feuding among themselves was mortally dangerous in Muscovy’s geopolitically exposed situation. In a sense, the Muscovite polity was the product of a tacit compact between Tsar and boyar elite: the latter acknowledged the Tsar’s symbolic omnipotence in return for his ensuring stability and internal peace, including their own dominance over other social orders.

Compared with many of his European contemporaries, Ivan was relatively successful at creating unified authority – though not central control, which was impossible in such a huge and relatively primitive country. This was the impressive side of his achievement. Yet so great were the costs that he left behind him a realm hopelessly overstrained, underpopulated, and devastated. Peasants fled exorbitant taxes and labour dues to seek refuge in monasteries or to try their luck on the open frontier. Above all, he bequeathed a tradition that, to fulfil its demanding functions, the Russian state has to be harsh and domineering, to the extent of violating both human customs and divine laws, and also to depend on personal ties and patron–client networks rather than on stable institutions and laws.

Moreover, Ivan’s style of diplomacy impeded the integration of Muscovy into the European diplomatic system. His insistence on the title of Tsar and on precedence over non‑ hereditary rulers, the failure to develop expertise in European languages and cultures, similar to that which Rus already deployed to deal with the steppe khanates, Byzantium, and the Balkans, all put Muscovy at a disadvantage and closed it to the Renaissance, Reformation, and other developments going forward at the time. In the technical sense, Rus kept up with European military developments, but in other respects remained a closed and rather isolated world of its own.