[7]
1600–1750: A TIPPING POINT: BUILDING A RUSSIAN EMPIRE

GLOBAL PROCESSES AND IMPACTS: THE LITTLE ICE AGE AND GLOBALIZATION

The history of the seventeenth century was shaped by a thickening network of global connections, and by the climatic changes of the Little Ice Age.

In much of the world, climates were unusually chilly between c.1570 and the 1730s.1 Climate change was driven in part by the orbital cycles of the earth known as the Milankovic cycles. But human activities may have exacerbated climate change. European diseases decimated the major population centers of the Americas in terrible “virgin soil” epidemics during the early sixteenth century. Formerly arable lands became forests again, and increased forest cover may have reduced global CO₂ levels enough to lower global temperatures.² In much of Outer Eurasia, chillier climates disrupted the climate patterns on which farmers depended. Geoffrey Parker and others have linked deteriorating climates to the “Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” a series of economic, political, religious, and epidemiological crises that affected much of Outer Eurasia.

In Inner Eurasia, the data are not yet fine-grained enough to yield clear conclusions about the links between regional climate changes and broader historical changes. But there are hints that climate change took different forms here because, as we have seen, both temperature and humidity may have increased in the steppelands during the Little Ice Age.³ This could explain the continued power of nomadic confederations in the Pontic steppes, the Kazakh steppes, and both eastern and western Mongolia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as grasslands and livestock flourished with warmer and wetter climates. It may also explain why Inner Eurasia avoided the worst of the seventeenth-century crisis. Climate change certainly affected agrarian societies in northern and northwestern Inner Eurasia, threatening supplies of food, labor, and livestock. In Muscovy, evidence from tree-rings and other natural sources suggests that between 1650 and 1680 winters were colder than at any other time in the last half millennium.⁴ Yet in Inner Eurasia as a whole, we can rarely catch climate change red-handed as a major driver of change. Indeed, Muscovy suffered its most serious political, economic, and demographic crisis at the beginning of the century, 50 years earlier than the major crises of Outer Eurasia.⁵ Muscovy's seventeenth century was an era of increasing resources and growing military and political power. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, on the border between European Outer Eurasia and western Inner Eurasia, suffered much more. Indeed, the seventeenth century marked the beginning of the end for the Commonwealth. In 1600, the Commonwealth was a European superpower. By 1700 it looked like a client state of Muscovy.

The impact of globalization is clearer than that of climate change because globalization increased the scale and reach of inter-imperial commercial, political, and military rivalries. Within the first global exchange networks created in the sixteenth century, empires, states, and corporations competed with growing intensity and over larger areas for land, people, innovations, resources, and profits. Governments, nobles, and merchants invested in the search for new lands and new sources of wealth, both within and beyond their borders. They encouraged peasants to settle under-utilized borderlands, and adventurers to seek new sources of fish or furs or gold or silver. John Richards has described the impact of this global mobilization effort on global environments, while Victor Lieberman and his colleagues have shown how similar were the techniques used by governments throughout Eurasia as they intensified and diversified their mobilizational efforts.⁶

Taken together, these efforts amounted to a global speedup, an intensified mobilizational effort across much of the world that transformed both agrarian societies and the non-agrarian lands beyond their borders. In the two or three centuries before the Industrial Revolution, agriculture spread faster than ever before, driven by population growth and the increasing scale and intensity of commercial, political, and military competition. In 1400, global croplands covered 180 million hectares of the earth's land surface; by 1700 they accounted for 296 million hectares (a 165 percent increase); and by 1850 for 540 million hectares (a further increase of 180 percent, for a total increase over 450 years of 300 percent).⁷ The mobilizational speedup had its greatest impact in regions such as the Americas or Inner Eurasia, where agriculture had made limited progress. In Inner Eurasia, the spread of agriculture buoyed agrarian polities such as Muscovy. In the east, it supported population growth in China, and China's growing wealth encouraged expansion into eastern Inner Eurasia.

In the century and a half discussed in this chapter, the mobilizational speedup would transform relations between agrarian and pastoralist regions of Inner Eurasia. Hegemonic agrarian empires appeared at the western and eastern ends of Inner Eurasia, squeezing the ancient societies caught between them. This is why the seventeenth century counts as a tipping point in the history of Inner Eurasia. In 1600, there was no single hegemonic power in Inner Eurasia. By 1750, the geopolitics of Inner Eurasia had been transformed. In 1700 Muscovy controlled almost 15 million sq. kilometers, or three times the area it had controlled in 1600, mainly because it now ruled most of Siberia.⁸ Peter the Great renamed Muscovy the “Russian Empire” (Rossiiskaia Imperiia), and when he died, in 1725, the empire dominated western and northern Inner Eurasia. In the 1760s, for the first time, the population of the Russian Empire exceeded that of any other European state.⁹ Its only serious rival within Inner Eurasia was the Qing Empire, which now controlled the eastern steppelands of Mongolia and Xinjiang, after defeating the last great pastoralist empire, that of the Oirat or Zunghars. That victory (described in Chapter 8) ended a contest between agrarian and pastoralist societies that had lasted for almost 2,000 years. It marks the end of the traditional Inner Eurasian smychka.

The balance of power between agrarian and pastoralist mobilizational systems tipped so fast because agrarian polities had opportunities for growth that were not available to polities in the steppes or Central Asia. As the balance of demographic, economic, and military power turned against them, pastoralists found it harder to exact resources from agrarian regions or even to defend their home territories. Relative economic, demographic, and technological stagnation in the steppes and Central Asia threw into high relief the increasing dynamism of Muscovy/Russia and Qing China.

This chapter will focus, first, on the breakdown of the Muscovite mobilization machine early in the seventeenth century, and then on its renovation and expansion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Chapter 8 will discuss changes in other parts of Inner Eurasia during the period from 1600–1750.

BREAKDOWN AND RECOVERY OF THE MUSCOVITE MOBILIZATION MACHINE

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was by no means certain that Muscovy would emerge as a hegemonic power. In 1598, the death of Ivan IV's son, Fedor I, ended the Rurikid dynasty. Within a few years, the Muscovite mobilizational machine broke down during the “Time of Troubles.”10 But it was repaired surprisingly fast, then renovated and improved during the seventeenth century until, by the early eighteenth century, it dominated western Inner Eurasia and ruled, in addition, the northern lands of Siberia, from Europe to the Pacific.

BREAKDOWN: THE TIME OF TROUBLES, 1598–1613

During the Time of Troubles, between 1598 and 1613, the Muscovite mobilizational machine could no longer tax effectively, build viable armies, or bind elites together. It also lost much of the population that supplied its labor and resources. By some estimates, the population of Muscovy fell by 50 percent, though 25 percent sounds more likely.11 For the historian, the breakdown provides an X-ray of the system's weak points, showing how fast the system could break down when leadership failed, reducing mobilizational pressure, and encouraging explosive challenges from below.

Ivan IV died in 1584. He had killed his son and heir, Ivan, in 1581, apparently in a drunken brawl. His second son and successor, Fedor I, lacked his father's intelligence, toughness, and charisma. As during Ivan's minority, weakness at the center encouraged conflicts between leading boyar clans. Fedor's brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, whose career had blossomed under the oprichnina, emerged as the effective ruler. Soon he was playing a role similar to that of the beglerbegi or emirs who had ruled so often in the Muslim world as marriage allies of Chinggisid puppets.

Godunov understood the crisis he faced. Peasants fled extortionate landlords. Revenues fell. And many pomeshchiki were too impoverished to buy the equipment they needed to serve in the army. Godunov tackled these problems with energy and skill, but the challenges were extraordinarily complex, and he lacked the authority of a legitimate Tsar. Like many non-Chinggisid leaders in the steppes and Central Asia, he understood the value of alliances with religious leaders. In 1589, while he was still regent, he established the new institution of Patriarch. Church leaders returned the favor by supporting his election as Tsar in 1598. To check peasant flight, he reduced taxes. To help the pomeshchik class, he decreed in 1597 that peasants who had fled without permission could be forcibly returned to their landlords for up to five years. To modernize the army and government, he recruited foreign military specialists, encouraged officials and nobles to educate their sons in Europe, and considered establishing schools offering a European education.¹²

Nothing helped, and as the mobilizational machine broke down, Muscovy itself became vulnerable. The Crimean khanate began to launch almost annual raids, and in 1591 a Crimean army nearly reached Moscow. Fighting flared with Sweden in 1590, over trade through Livonia. In 1598, Fedor died without an heir, ending the Rurikid dynasty, which had ruled much of Rus’ since the ninth century. Fedor's younger brother, Dmitrii, had died in 1591 on his estate at Uglich, under circumstances that were confused enough to embolden a series of dynastic challenges by pretenders, claiming to be a still-alive Dmitrii. Many professed to believe them, despite an official enquiry which found that Dmitrii had accidentally stabbed himself during an epileptic fit.

Like the death of Khan Berdibek of the Golden Horde in 1359, the end of the ruling dynasty unleashed violent contests for the throne. After complex maneuvers within the small boyar elite, Godunov was crowned Tsar in September 1598. Famine and social breakdown magnified the crisis he faced. In 1601 and 1602, there were catastrophic crop failures, caused by early spring frosts and excessive summer rainfall.¹³ The government reacted energetically, but could do little. Huge numbers took to the road, forming a large vagrant population of potential rebels. Many died of starvation.

In 1604, a motley army of Poles, Russians, and Cossacks attacked from the south-west. It was led by Grigorii Otrepev, an impoverished young noble and the first of several false Dmitriis. The extraordinary support he received indicates the depth of popular discontent, and the vulnerability of a Tsar who, though able, was not a Rurikid. Godunov died suddenly in April 1605, leaving no obvious successor. The only claimant with any pretensions to legitimacy was the pretender, who assumed the throne, only to be murdered in May 1606 because his close ties to Catholic Poland had alienated his Russian Orthodox followers. His successor, the prominent boyar Vasilii Shuiskii, survived a massive revolt led by a former slave, Ivan Bolotnikov, and an invasion by a new false Dmitrii. But he survived only with the support of Polish troops. After trying to gain the support of Swedish troops as well, Shuiskii was forced to abdicate in July 1610.

Now the system finally collapsed. A group of boyars tried to arrange for a Polish successor, either Prince Wladyslaw or his father, Sigismund III. But anti-Catholic feeling, encouraged by the patriotic pronouncements of the Orthodox Patriarch Hermogen, and the collapse of the second false Dmitrii, prompted the emergence of a remarkable anti-Polish “national” army in 1611. Its base was in the provincial towns, and its most prominent leaders were town commanders (gorodovye voevody), led by Prokopii Liapunov from Riazan’ and Dmitrii Pozharskii from Zaraisk, as well as Kuzma Minin, a merchant from Nizhnii Novgorod and a close ally of Pozharskii. Like the many displays of loyalty to Vasilii II during the civil wars of the early fifteenth century, the events of this period show how deeply traditions of elite unity and discipline had penetrated lower levels of Muscovy's mobilizational machine, and the extent to which those traditions depended on a sense of dynastic legitimacy. Elected officials from Vologda and other northern regions had begun raising local militias as early as 1608. Eventually, Pozharskii organized a coalition of local militias, boyar leaders, and Cossacks. With a weakened central government, “only the town commandants possessed the breadth of authority, the military experience and the local bureaucratic machinery necessary to defeat the tsar's enemies and re-establish the autocracy.”¹⁴

Pozharskii's improvised army captured Moscow in 1612, and its leaders summoned an Assembly of the Land or Zemskii Sobor. In February 1613, the Assembly elected Mikhail Romanov as the new Tsar. Though not Rurikids, the Romanovs were related to Ivan IV through Ivan's marriage to Anastasia Romanovna. Mikhail Romanov came to Moscow from Kostroma and was crowned Tsar in July 1613. The senior member of the Romanov clan was the influential Metropolitan Filaret (d. 1633), a cousin to Tsar Fedor, and father to Mikhail. Filaret himself could not be crowned because Boris Godunov had forced him to become a monk, but for several years after his return from Polish captivity in 1619 he would be Russia's de facto ruler and the main adviser to his son, the new Tsar. From 1613 to 1917, Romanov lineage, through descent or marriage, would grant legitimacy to rulers of Muscovy and the Russian Empire, just as Chinggisid lineage had granted legitimacy to steppeland rulers in the centuries after the fall of the Mongol Empire.

RECOVERY

Over the next few decades, the Muscovite mobilizational machine was repaired, rebuilt, and modernized. The speed of recovery shows how deeply Muscovite elites and even middle-rank servitors and merchants were committed to the autocratic political culture that had evolved since the fourteenth century. Nancy Kollmann writes:

Perhaps the best indicator that the Muscovite rulers had managed to increase cohesion in their realm by the end of the sixteenth century was the fact that disparate forces – service tenure landholders from the center, Cossacks of the steppe frontier, communes of the north – mobilized in the Time of Troubles to rescue the state from foreign invasion. Moscow's rulers had at least consolidated an élite sufficiently cohesive to hold the state together.15

Even the successes of pretenders during the Time of Troubles illustrate a widespread commitment to legitimate autocratic Tsars.

The revival of royal power also owed something to the extent of the breakdown. For all levels of Muscovite society, from the peasantry to the boyars, the Time of Troubles seemed to confirm the Hobbesian principle that autocracy was the only alternative to anarchy, foreign conquest, and ruin, a principle that had seemed self-evident in Rus’ since Batu's conquest four centuries earlier. “[I]t is manifest,” writes Hobbes in Chapter 13 of Leviathan, “that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.” Forty years before Hobbes wrote his great book, leaders of the Muscovite national army of 1612 told their followers:

And you, sirs, should take counsel together with all the people, mindful of God and of our faith, lest we remain without a sovereign in these times of utter ruin, … [and] lest the Muscovite state be utterly destroyed by such calamities. You know yourselves, sirs: how can we defend ourselves now, without a sovereign, against our common enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians, and Germans [Swedes], and the Russian rogues who are renewing bloody strife in the state? How can we, without a sovereign, negotiate with neighbouring sovereigns about great matters of the state and of the land? And how can our realm stand firm and unshakeable henceforth?¹⁶

Particularly striking is the support for autocracy at lower levels of Muscovite society. Support was strong amongst townspeople and lesser servitors, groups whose critical role in the Muscovite mobilizational system is often hard to see, even though the pomest'e system had increased their military role, and the local government reforms of Ivan IV had increased their role in tax collection and the administration of justice. Among these groups, there already existed sentiments close to modern nationalism, at least in the Orthodox and Slavic-speaking heartland of Muscovy. That mood could take xenophobic forms, as in the appeals of Patriarch Hermogen, who spoke out in 1610 and 1611 against the danger of a Catholic and Polish Tsar. Some of the rhetoric of peasant rebels, or the religious dissenters who appeared after the religious schism of the mid-seventeenth century, suggests that even many peasants shared feelings close to modern nationalism.¹⁷ Writing in the middle of the century, during England's civil wars, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich's English doctor, Samuel Collins, noted the cultural homogeneity that cemented these early forms of popular nationalism.

The mode [sic] of men and women, rich and poor, are all one, all over the Empire, from the highest to the lowest, and their Language one, ye and Religion too, which certainly must hugely tend to their peace and preservation.¹⁸

No one imagined any real alternative to autocracy. In contrast to England's experience during its own time of troubles in the middle of the century, no one offered any alternative vision of how power might be managed or rights and homes protected.¹⁹

The first task facing Mikhail Romanov and his advisers was to expel foreign armies. Assemblies of the Land met several times in the early years of Mikhail's reign and helped mobilize the necessary taxes and troops. Under a truce negotiated with Sweden in February 1617, Muscovy abandoned its last outlet on the Baltic, Izborskaia zemlia, a small coastal strip near the outlet of the Neva river that had offered a meagre outlet to the Baltic since the Middle Ages. A year later, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth agreed to a truce under which Moscow ceded control of Chernigov and Smolensk, and even conceded the legitimacy of Polish claims to the throne of Moscow.

Metropolitan Filaret returned from Polish exile in 1619, and helped re-establish order and rebuild the machinery of fiscal and military mobilization. The apparatus of central government began to expand beyond the royal household and the capital. The number of government bureaux or prikazy increased from more than 30 in 1610 to almost 70 in 1630. In 1619, the government undertook a census. It sent surveyors and inspectors to the major towns to list the resources held in granaries and treasuries, to revise lists of taxpayers, and to record local landholdings. Eventually, such surveys would reduce the need for a consultative body such as the Assemblies of the Land. Indeed, Davies argues that the government ceased to call Assemblies after 1683 because it now received all the information it needed from its town officials, the voevody.²⁰

As in the fourteenth century, dynastic continuity allowed political stability. Mikhail Romanov ruled for a third of a century, until his death in 1645. His son, Alexei Mikhailovich, also ruled for a third of a century, until his death in 1676. There followed a 20-year period of dynastic instability, but there was no breakdown. Alexei Mikhailovich's heir, Fedor, was crowned as a minor, but his elder sister Sophia acted as regent until his death in 1682. Sophia then ruled as regent for Fedor's brother, Ivan, and Ivan's younger half-brother, Peter, until Sophia was overthrown in 1689. Peter, Alexei Mikhailovich's son by his second wife, Natalia Naryshkina, became sole Tsar after Ivan's death in 1696. During Peter's reign the autocracy and the mobilizational machine it managed became more powerful than ever before. Indeed, so powerful was the system now that it was not destabilized even by the lack of a clear successor to Peter after the death of his son, Alexei, in 1718, as a result of beatings received during a trial for treason.²¹

RENOVATING THE MOBILIZATION MACHINE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Traditionally, Russian historiography has seen Peter the Great as the founder of modern Russian autocracy and the expanding empire over which the autocracy presided. In fact, most of the crucial renovations were undertaken in the seventeenth century. Peter completed, consolidated, and built on improvements introduced since the Time of Troubles.

Renovations in the seventeenth century took three main forms: (1) military reforms; (2) economic and fiscal mobilization; and (3) the rebuilding of a unified elite.

MILITARY MOBILIZATION

Armies are the engines of mobilizational systems and warfare the ultimate test of their effectiveness. So building a successful modernized version of the agrarian smychka meant mobilizing large, powerful armies from peasants and the resources they produced, and importing the most modern military technologies and skills. William Fuller writes:

It is difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the army to the history of the Russian Empire. After all, it was due to the army that the empire came into existence in the first place. It was the army that conquered the territories of the empire, defended them, policed them and maintained internal security all at the same time.22

As in the past, the challenge was to form armies that could operate both in the steppes and on the western frontiers, where they would need cannon, siege trains, and large infantry forces. But Muscovy's two frontiers were always closely linked, and they shared resources, men, and mobilizational strategies.²³

Nevertheless, as the power of steppeland armies declined, and gunpowder armies grew and evolved, Muscovy's western frontiers would take up more of the time, resources, and energy of the renovated autocracy. And the differences between the two frontiers did matter. For example, European gunpowder armies were customarily organized in lines that concentrated firepower and could be maneuvered easily. Yet in the more mobile warfare of the steppes, lines could be circled and attacked from behind, so Russian forces had to protect all sides. To do so, they often advanced in squares, behind the mobile wooden walls of a guliai-gorod or walking fortress.²⁴

In the south-west, Muscovy faced a new enemy, the Ottoman Empire, whose armies were also familiar with two types of frontier. Ottoman armies combined infantry and cavalry units, and were even larger than those of Muscovy. Finesse, tactics, strategy, but above all efficient provisioning and supply systems really mattered here. Indeed, Fuller argues that on the Turkish frontier, Russian armies developed styles of fighting that would later be seen as quintessentially Russian. Their main elements included coordinated fire from infantry troops and mobile cannon, as well as the ability to maneuver in unexpected ways and attack fast and violently.²⁵ But improvisation counted, too. Peter the Great countered Swedish cavalry charges simply by equipping his soldiers with spades so they could dig ditches:

such humble instruments as the spade, the pike, and the ax were at least as valuable, if not more valuable, to Peter's soldiers as the musket. The Russian peasant may not have known how to shoot, but he did know how to dig, hack, and stab. Peter's decision to deploy his infantry behind defensive fortifications thus made excellent sense.²⁶

As the importance of the western military frontier grew, Muscovy devoted more attention and resources to building infantry armies with gunpowder weapons, and this huge military project would drive many different types of change.

The government imported many of the officers, skills, and weapons it needed from abroad. In an attempt to retake Smolensk, in 1632, Filaret formed large numbers of foreign or “new formation” units. Though their rank-and-file soldiers were mostly Russian, they were commanded by 2,500 specially hired foreign officers, such as the Scottish mercenary Alexander Leslie. At Smolensk, new formation units made up more than half of the 34,000 Muscovite troops. Though they performed well, the siege failed because of strategic blunders and devastating Tatar raids through a southern frontier weakened by the redeployment of troops away from Muscovy's southern defensive lines.²⁷ The new units were also expensive, so most were disbanded after the war, though some were hired for service on the new Belgorod fortified line.

When the 13 years’ war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began in 1654, after the Khmelnitskii rebellion in Ukraine, new formation troops made up most of the active army.²⁸ Moscow won the war mainly because of a massive mobilizational effort. The number of soldiers rose from 40,000 to well over 100,000 at the war's end, after a mobilizational effort that few other states could match. By now, new formation units in the European style had largely replaced the traditional levies of cavalrymen.²⁹ By the end of the century, Muscovy could field armies of more than 200,000, most organized in new formation units.³⁰

The new armies were very expensive, so economic and financial mobilization was critical. Unlike pomeshchiki, foreign soldiers had to be paid in cash and supplied with weapons and equipment.³¹ Some money was saved by recruiting and training Russian nobles (for the officer corps) and peasants (for the ordinary infantry). But in the new formation units, even Russian soldiers and officers had to be supplied with uniforms, equipment, and food. Scattered populations and low productivity made it impossible to support infantry armies on the march, so new formation armies also needed huge and expensive baggage trains. Their horses and oxen usually consumed more food than their soldiers, and slowed the army to the pace of the slowest oxen.³²

New formation soldiers also needed modern arms and equipment. Seventeenth-century Muscovy had little domestic iron (apart from low-grade “swamp ore”), and it lacked saltpeter and sulfur for making gunpowder. So it had to buy weapons and materials from abroad. Some came from England through Archangel, but from the 1620s, increasing amounts came from Holland, in exchange for Russian grain.³³ Copper came mainly from Sweden, an unreliable source given the regular wars between the two countries. The Muscovite government actively sought cheaper and more dependable sources for these strategic resources, and in the 1630s it began to produce iron in the Urals, while in 1632 it established new weapons factories in Tula, with the help of a Dutch entrepreneur, Andries Winius. In this way, military needs generated Russia's first modern industries.³⁴

SERFDOM, AND FISCAL AND ECONOMIC MOBILIZATION

Muscovy's increasing military power depended less on training or tactics than on its ability to mobilize more men and resources. Victory meant being able

to provision one's forces through a long siege, … to overwhelm the enemy with masses of light cavalry. … And above all … to recover from enormous losses and resume the campaign. It was only in regard to this last that Muscovy's investment in foreign formation infantry was finally vindicated, for through peasant conscription on a great scale the infantry regiments could be rebuilt more easily than the old middle service class cavalry units.35

Unlike the old cavalry armies of pomeshchiki, the new infantry formations allowed Muscovy to convert large peasant populations directly into large armies.

The contrast with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is striking. The Commonwealth's rulers tried as hard as Moscow's Tsars to modernize their armies. Wladyslaw IV (1632–1648), Jan Kazimierz (1648–1668), and Jan Sobieski (1674–1696) all created “new formation” armies and introduced new ways of levying peasant recruits, while Polish artillery and cavalry were of very high quality.³⁶ The crucial difference was in the amount of men, money, and resources that could be mobilized. That difference reflected not only on Muscovy's territorial gains but also on the unity and determination of its governments and the increasing mobilizational pressure they could exert. In contrast, in his southern campaigns after 1684 and 1692, Jan Sobieski commanded armies that were far too small. This was hardly surprising, as royal revenues had barely grown in a century. By 1697, arrears of pay amounted to 10 times the annual revenues of the Commonwealth. The Sejm was reluctant to increase royal revenues, which were falling as the Commonwealth lost territory and the grain trade with Europe declined. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Khmelnitskii rebellion in Ukraine and wars with Muscovy and Sweden reduced the population of the Commonwealth from 11 million to almost 8 million. By the early eighteenth century its population was under 7 million.³⁷

Meanwhile, Muscovy's territory and population increased until its human resources began to equal those of the major European states. In the sixteenth century, Muscovy and the Commonwealth both had populations of about 6–7 million.³⁸ By the middle of the seventeenth century, the population of the Commonwealth had risen to about 11 million, and here it stayed for much of the next century. By 1678, Muscovy had a population of about 10.5 million, and by 1719 a population of 15.5 million. According to Vodarskii, the peasant population of Muscovy grew from 9.6 million to 13 million between 1678 and 1719.³⁹ More peasants meant more produce, which may explain why grain prices did not rise during the seventeenth century as grain production kept pace with population growth.⁴⁰

Why did Muscovy's population increase? From the 1620s, political stability and less predatory fiscal policies allowed populations to rebound from the calamities of Ivan's reign and the Time of Troubles. But most important of all was the increase in territory, above all the absorption of left-bank Ukraine and advances into the Pontic steppes. Some of the land incorporated within Muscovy's expanding borders was very fertile. Muscovy's central Black Earth and Mid-Volga regions offered an ideal combination of fertile land, adequate moisture, and plenty of sunlight. Further south, aridity was an increasing problem that would be exacerbated by deforestation as peasants cleared land for farming, particularly along watercourses.⁴¹ There is little evidence of technological improvements, but peasants did adapt to new environments. Most growth was extensive rather than intensive, and for extensive growth, the fundamental requirement was government protection along underpopulated borderlands. This the Muscovite government could provide, as it extended its lines of frontier forts. (See “Expansion into the Pontic steppes,” below.)

Internal stability and a growing bureaucracy allowed the government to mobilize its human resources with increasing efficiency. The institutions described, collectively, as “serfdom” played a crucial role in this mobilizational drive. Even in the sixteenth century, the pomest'e system obliged governments to take care that peasants would keep supplying their military landlords with labor and produce. From the late sixteenth century, governments began to protect pomeshchiki by limiting the right of peasants to move. Just as a strong casing allows a piston to exert more pressure, so, too, restrictions on peasant movement increased the fiscal pressure that landlords and governments could exert on the peasantry. Here is one more illustration of the fundamental rule that in Inner Eurasia, control over labor was generally more important than property rights over land, because land was more abundant. “Labor was the scarce factor of production, and the nobility could be supported only by preventing the peasants from fleeing.”⁴²

Traditionally, peasants had been allowed to leave their landlords around St. George's Day, November 26, just after the harvest. Legislative action to limit peasant mobility began with a 1581 law temporarily prohibiting all peasants from leaving their landlords even on St. George's Day. In the decades that followed, similar temporary bans were reintroduced until finally, in the law code or Ulozhenie of 1649, the ban on movement was made permanent and retrospective. According to article 9 of Ch. XI of the 1649 Law Code or Ulozhenie, servitors could recapture any serfs who had fled their lands:

And whatever peasants and bobyli [poor peasants] are listed with any [landowner] in the census books of the previous years of [1646 and 1647], and who subsequent to these census books have fled, or shall henceforth flee, from those men with whom they are listed in the census books: those fugitive peasants and bobyli, and their brothers, children, nephews, and grandchildren with their wives and with their children and with all their possessions, and with their harvested and unharvested grain, shall be returned from flight to those men from whom they fled, in accordance with the census books, without time limit; and henceforth under no circumstances should anyone receive peasants who are not his and keep them with him.⁴³

This provision bound serfs to their masters, theoretically in perpetuity. But it also bound their masters to the central government, because only the central government had the resources needed to enforce such laws. The nineteenth-century historian S. M. Soloviev described the process vividly:

The chase after human beings, after working hands, was carried out throughout the Muscovite state on a vast scale. Hunted were city people who ran away from tiaglo [tax obligations] wherever they only could, by concealing themselves, bonding themselves [as slaves], enrolling in the ranks of lower grade clerks. Hunted were peasants who, burdened with heavy taxes, roamed individually and in droves migrated beyond “the Rock” (the Urals). Landlords hunted for their peasants who scattered, sought concealment among other landlords, ran away to the Ukraine, to the Cossacks.⁴⁴

As Richard Hellie has shown, many of the higher nobility were unenthusiastic about this coercive solution to Russia's mobilizational problems. With large estates, they did not need to squeeze their serfs as harshly as smaller landowners, whose peasants they could often lure on to their own lands. Besides, many wealthy landlords, with surplus land, woods, and other resources, could generate significant entrepreneurial revenues. Most interested in the new laws were lesser nobles, whose livelihoods and status depended almost entirely on their control of serf labor.⁴⁵

The decision to introduce serfdom in this strong form committed Muscovite and later Russian governments more strongly than before to mobilizational methods that were direct and coercive rather than commercial in form and driven by market forces. (Soviet governments would make similar choices in the 1920s.)⁴⁶ Did Muscovite governments have any real choice? Could a less autocratic and more commercially minded Muscovite government have mobilized more effectively by stimulating the independent entrepreneurial activities of merchants and peasants? Or is it possible that Muscovite governments adopted coercive mobilizational solutions because they were better aligned with Muscovy's autocratic political culture and Muscovy's geographical and military environment? It is striking that, under Inner Eurasian conditions of low productivity and thin populations, even coercive forms of mobilization proved very effective at raising total production. However, while it tightened the fiscal screws on the peasantry, the government was careful not to repeat the mistakes of Ivan IV by pressing so hard that it provoked depopulation and flight, leaving untilled the arable lands on which the wealth of the entire mobilizational machine depended.

Whatever mobilizational strategies it adopted, the government would need more cash as its expenditures rose. In just 30 years, between 1630 and 1660, payments to soldiers increased by four times. So, though the government had few significant cash expenses apart from defense, military reforms forced it to look for new ways of mobilizing cash as well as labor. In 1680, the government prepared the first proper state budget, and in 1679, after completing a new census, it shifted the burden of direct taxes from the land to individual households.⁴⁷ Not surprisingly, this encouraged multi-generational households that paid less tax per person, which is why the experiment would be abandoned within a generation.

Muscovy's cash economy expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that increased the revenues that could be mobilized through indirect taxation. Foreign trade, particularly through Archangel, brought in vital supplies of silver, much of it, now, from the Americas. Foreign silver provided the metal for Muscovite coins. Internally, profits increased from the exploitation of salt mines and fisheries, and increasing sales of Siberian furs and distilled liquor or “vodka.”⁴⁸ Along with tolls on taverns, tolls on trade provided the largest single items of cash revenue in the seventeenth century.⁴⁹ Salt and vodka were powerful generators of cash even in the largely natural economy of Muscovy's villages because they were among the few commodities that every household needed (salt as a preservative, vodka for ceremonial and medicinal purposes), though few peasant households could produce them, so they had to be purchased. Muscovite governments tapped these monetary flows with great success. The production and sale of vodka was particularly profitable as populations grew, as more kabaks or taverns were established in urban and rural areas, and as the government tightened its monopoly on the production and sale of distilled liquor.⁵⁰

The government experimented with many new ways of raising cash. It tried taxes on bathhouses, on furs, on brewing and distilling, on boats, on the production of butter or caviar, on marriages, on river crossings, on the trade in silks, as well as special taxes to pay for particular military contingents such as the strel'tsy, or taxes to support fire brigades.⁵¹ Merchants paid 2.5 percent on the value of their goods every time they crossed a customs station; they paid 2.5 percent for unsold goods, 5 percent for goods sold, as well as fees on the weighing and storage of goods. They paid taxes on their carts and boats, on their homes and shops, as well as road taxes, post taxes, and taxes to ransom slaves captured by the Tatars.

Merchants complained bitterly and regularly, but there is little evidence that tolls significantly depressed their profits. In the seventeenth century, differences in tolls between different towns diminished, which suggests the emergence of flourishing nationwide markets.⁵² Furthermore, though the government competed with its own merchants, the limited evidence suggests that government exports accounted for only about 10 percent of Russian foreign trade in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Besides, many merchants profited from their close relationship with the government. So it is probably not true, as Bakhrushin once argued, that the state squeezed merchants “like a lemon.” On the contrary, Bushkovitch argues that, “in some cases, the merchants squeezed the state dry, as well as the townsmen and peasants who paid the tolls and bought the vodka.”⁵³

In fact, merchants, like nobles, should be seen as shareholders in the Muscovite mobilizational machine. While nobles mobilized directly and coercively, merchants mobilized through markets, but in partnership with the government. They understood markets better than most officials, but, like all entrepreneurs, they were always happy to exploit monopolies or other possibilities for taking “rents,” usually by collaborating with the government. And that is why Russian merchants often looked more like government officials than like independent entrepreneurs. Like officials, they were organized in ranks. The richest, the gosti, included 20–30 of Moscow's wealthiest traders, as well as smaller numbers in other towns. Like the most powerful boyars, with whom they rubbed shoulders, the gosti often handled important and sometimes lucrative government transactions. At lower levels, towns elected elders (starosty) and assistants (tseloval'niki), most of them merchants. Their main tasks were to collect taxes, as well as the commercial tolls and revenues from taverns that provided the largest single sources of revenue in most towns throughout the seventeenth century.⁵⁴

The close symbiotic relationship between the state and the merchantry explains why the Russian merchant seemed so different from English or Dutch counterparts.

Unlike the English or Dutch merchant, he was not part of a vast network of overseas trade nor was he the beneficiary of great empires in America and Asia. He rarely left his own country, used no sophisticated bookkeeping or financial techniques, and by the standards of Amsterdam or London was not a man of tremendous wealth.⁵⁵

Nevertheless, Russia's merchants played a crucial role in the Muscovite mobilizational machine as markets became increasingly important. Merchants were, after all, specialists in commercial methods of mobilization. And many profited handsomely from their close relationship with the Muscovite mobilizational machine.

ELITES: MAINTAINING COHESION

In the seventeenth century, after the temporary breakdown of the Time of Troubles, elite cohesion was re-established and consolidated. We have already seen the astonishing, spontaneous remobilization from below of Russian nobles and officials in 1613. In the following decades, a series of ad hoc reforms tightened the formal and informal ties that cemented Muscovy's autocratic elite culture.

The mushrooming bureaucracy created many new openings for servitors of lower rank. At the accession of Mikhail Romanov, there were about 35 government prikazy, staffed by about 500 pod'iachie, or clerks. By the end of the century there were more than 60 prikazy, served by about 3,000 pod'iachie.56 The tasks of the prikazy indicate the overwhelming importance of military and financial mobilization. The three most important prikazy handled military service and pomest'e allocations (the razriadnyi and pomestnyi prikazy), and foreign affairs (the ambassadorial or posol'skii prikaz). New government positions also appeared in the provinces:

the town governors helped reassemble and update chancellery cadastral knowledge, review the monasteries’ fiscal immunities, return fugitive townsmen to the tax rolls, introduce new extraordinary taxes for military exigencies, suppress banditry and rebuild the pomest'e-based cavalry army by expediting response to petitions for entitlement award and land allotment.⁵⁷

By the 1640s, the staff of governors’ (voevoda’s) offices included about 775 clerks (pod'iachie), but many more clerks served in the regional offices of other government organizations.⁵⁸ The expanding class of lesser servitors increased the power of the Tsar by counter-balancing the boyar elite. Russia's elites were increasingly dominated by officials with little independent power, who could be controlled through royal patronage.⁵⁹ During the unstable 20 years after Alexei Mikhailovich's death, the authority of the Tsar would decline, but not by much. In 1682, the system of mestnichestvo was finally abolished, which created the legal space that Peter the Great would eventually take to re-establish the Tsar's autocratic powers over the high nobility.

The increasing reach and power of the autocracy is apparent even during the political crises it faced. The most dangerous were early in the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, and during the regency of Sophia. In 1648, riots broke out in Moscow and other towns, aimed mainly at the corrupt rule of Alexei Mikhailovich's regent and brother-in-law, Boris Morozov. Momentarily, the riots threatened the life of the young Tsar. They played an important role in the government's decision to summon a new Assembly of the Land in 1649, and concede the demands of lesser servitors that peasants be tied to their land in perpetuity.⁶⁰ In 1656 and 1662 there were further urban riots, caused, this time, by debasement of the coinage. What is remarkable in these crises is the specificity of the rioters’ goals. They were directed at particular royal officials or advisers or specific politics, never, apparently, at the institution of autocracy. This helps explain why no one complained after 1683 when the government ceased summoning the Assemblies of the Land, which had met periodically since the reign of Ivan IV.⁶¹ As with the quriltai in the Golden Horde, few noticed their disappearance. Neither institution had really provided a framework for negotiations with the monarch; instead, they had provided sources of information for autocratic rulers, and mechanisms for consolidating elite unity.

The Orthodox Church played its role in binding society together at many different levels. The great seventeenth-century patriarchs, Hermogen (1606–1612), Filaret (1619–1634), Nikon (1652–1658 or 1666), and Ioakim (1674–1690) used their moral authority, wealth, and political influence to defend autocracy. The church championed what it saw as Muscovite values, and encouraged the quarantining of foreigners, including the Protestant officers of the new formation units, in ghettos such as Moscow's “German quarter.” Occasionally, the authority of the patriarchs seemed to rival that of the Tsars. Patriarch Hermogen played a crucial role during the Time of Troubles, and both Filaret and Nikon occasionally referred to themselves as the Velikii Gosudar’, or “Great Ruler.” But the Russian autocracy was never as dependent on religious institutions as leaders in Mongolia or Central Asia, as Peter the Great demonstrated when, after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, he let the patriarchate lapse.

Russia's elites would maintain their cohesion despite three potentially divisive cultural schisms. The first was a split within the church itself in the seventeenth century. The second was the growing cultural divide between an increasingly westernized upper nobility and a still traditional society. The third was the cultural, linguistic, and historical division that emerged between the Orthodox and Slavic-speaking heartland of Muscovy and the empire's growing population of non-Orthodox non-Slavic speakers.

The religious schism, like many religious conflicts in Inner Eurasia, reflected divisions between the institutionalized religions of the cities and the more magical religious traditions of the villages and steppes. It began with one more attempt to regulate dissident religious practices, by removing Catholic and popular influences that had seeped in from Poland and Ukraine. In 1648 the government banned performances by skomorokhi or minstrels. In 1652, the newly appointed Patriarch Nikon introduced new service books that, under the guise of returning to ancient practice, introduced unfamiliar rituals, some of which offended traditional believers. For example, his reforms required making the sign of the cross with three fingers, rather than two, and denounced the incorrect gesture as heretical. Particularly in rural areas, where magic was a live force and correct ritual was a matter of life and death, salvation or damnation, many were horrified at these changes.

Eventually, Nikon's autocratic manner and exaggerated claims for the church's independence alienated members of the political elite, including the Tsar, and in 1666, a specially convened ecumenical council deposed Nikon as patriarch. But the government persisted with the liturgical reforms despite growing resistance. Some adherents of the “Old Belief,” such as the priest Avvakum, would be exiled and sentenced to death. Avvakum was eventually burnt at the stake. Others went underground, where they would provide support and legitimation for religious dissidence from then until the present day, particularly in rural areas and steppe borderlands such as the Cossack lands.⁶²

The diffusion of European culture within Muscovy created a second fissure between Muscovy's elite and the mass of the population. As foreign visitors noted, Muscovy's cultural traditions were strikingly different from those of Europe.

In the figurative arts there was no free-standing portraiture, still life, landscapes or urban scenes, history painting or domestic genre. There were icons, wood prints and illuminated manuscripts, but no painting in oil on canvas. … Printing (introduced in 1564) was in its infancy. Muscovy had no theatres or universities. It had produced no poets, dramatists, philosophers, scholars or even theologians. It lacked both theoretical concepts of “the arts” and political theory.⁶³

However, extensive borrowing from the technological and military traditions of Europe, and particularly from Ukraine after that region's incorporation within the empire, ensured that western cultural influences would seep into Muscovite society, particularly through the elite circles close to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and his son, Fedor. In the capital, foreign military experts mingled with leading officials. In 1672, Alexei Mikhailovich invited a European theater company, and European artists worked in the Kremlin Armory. Prince Vasilii Golitsyn knew Latin, owned foreign books, prints, instruments, and curiosities, and collected secular portraits. Though limited to the elite, such influences generated disquiet. In 1690 Patriarch Ioakim advised the young Tsars Ivan and Peter “to resist new Latin and alien customs and not to introduce the wearing of foreign dress.”⁶⁴

The third cultural division, between the Orthodox heartland and the non-Russian, non-Orthodox, and non-Slavic peoples that Muscovy was incorporating within its expanding empire, would become increasingly significant from the eighteenth century.

EXPANSION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

However, Muscovy's renovated mobilization machine proved so robust that none of these divisions seriously weakened it. The best proof of its increasing power was its ability to expand within Inner Eurasia. In 1600, Muscovy ruled over c.5.4 million sq. kilometers; by 1678 it controlled three times that area, or almost 16 million sq. kilometers.65 Muscovy's expansion was both a cause and a result of its increasing mobilizational power.

Muscovy expanded in three main directions, each of which posed distinctive challenges. (1) To the west, Muscovy's main opponents were the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, and expansion took Muscovy into Ukraine. (2) To the south, Muscovy expanded into the Pontic steppes; here, its main opponents were the Crimean khanate and the Ottoman Empire. (3) In this period Muscovy also began expanding for the first time beyond the Volga and the Urals, into Siberia and the Kazakh steppes. This chapter will describe expansion to the west and south, while the next chapter will describe Muscovite expansion beyond the Urals, along with the parallel process of Chinese expansion into Inner Eurasia. (See Map 6.1 and Figure 6.2.)

EXPANSION TO THE WEST

Since the collapse of the Livonian Order in 1560, Sweden, Lithuania/Poland, and Muscovy had fought over the farmlands and commerce of the Baltic provinces. For a century, Muscovy gained little from these expensive wars, while Sweden had secured much of modern Estonia, and Lithuania/Poland controlled most of modern Latvia and northern Lithuania. The 1618 treaty of Deulino left the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in control of Ukraine and much of Belarus, including Smolensk. The Smolensk war of 1632 did little to change the situation.

The balance of power in the west was transformed in the middle of the century after a 1648 revolt against the Commonwealth in Ukraine. It was led by a disgruntled Cossack officer, Bohdan Khmelnitskii, who was elected leader (Hetman) of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in March 1648. He allied with Nogai troops from the Crimean khanate, and in May their combined forces crushed two Polish armies. Their success encouraged anti-Polish uprisings throughout Ukraine. Rebels attacked Polish landlords and officials, Catholic clergy, and many Jews. In December, Khmelnitskii arrived in triumph in Kiev, now as the leader of a new state of “Rus’.”

The Polish Commonwealth had neither the cash nor the troops needed to respond effectively, and its rulers were weakened further in 1652 when the Sejm recognized the right of any individual member to veto legislation through the liberum veto. Nevertheless, Khmelnitskii was also vulnerable and looking for allies, particularly after the desertion of his Crimean allies led to a humiliating defeat in 1651. He opened negotiations with both the Polish and Ottoman governments, and even considered accepting Crimean suzerainty, but these negotiations achieved little. In January 1654, in Pereiaslav, he swore allegiance to a fellow Orthodox believer, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He accepted the Tsar as the new ruler of Ukraine, in return for the promise of military support.66 But what Khmelnitskii and his followers saw as an alliance, Muscovy saw as an acquisition. Ukraine soon found it had a new overlord, much less willing to negotiate than the Commonwealth, but much more powerful (Map 7.1).

Map 7.1 Muscovite expansion into Ukraine. Rywkin, Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, 104.

In defense of its new acquisitions, Muscovy now took up arms against the Commonwealth, launching a 13-year war that would end with the armistice of Andrusovo in 1667. The 13-year war devastated Poland, because it was largely fought on Polish soil. Polish populations diminished and would not recover to the 1648 level of about 11 million until the middle of the eighteenth century. Under the treaty of Andrusovo, Muscovy gained suzerainty over all of Ukraine east of the Dnieper, as well as over the capital, Kiev. Moscow began stationing troops along the eastern bank of the Dnieper (“left-bank Ukraine”), and exacting taxes that had once gone to the Commonwealth. In 1686, Muscovy signed a so-called “Treaty of Eternal Peace” with King Jan Sobiecki of the Commonwealth, but in fact the treaty marked Muscovy's increasing dominance.⁶⁷ Ukraine retained some autonomy and would continue to elect its own leader or Hetman, though the elections were often influenced by Moscow.

With control over left-bank Ukraine, Muscovy now found itself confronting a more powerful rival than the declining Commonwealth. This was the Ottoman Empire. In 1676–1681 the two countries fought their first major war over Russian attempts to extend control to west (right-bank) Ukraine. The war ended in a stalemate.⁶⁸

EXPANSION INTO THE PONTIC STEPPES

On its southern frontiers, Muscovy expanded into the borderlands of the Crimean khanate. As in the sixteenth century, Muscovite expansion was defensive in its aims, but expansionist in its outcomes. The government's main aim was to defend its territory against Crimean raids that cost lives and money, and forced Muscovy to divert troops from its western borders. Nevertheless, southward expansion would multiply the human and agrarian resources available to Muscovy's rulers, as peasants settled and farmed the rich soils of the Pontic steppes.

In the seventeenth century, Moscow's armies still lacked the ability to attack Crimea directly. There were two attempts, in 1687 and 1689, under the leadership of Prince Vasilii Golitsyn. Both demonstrated the limits of Muscovy's military power in the steppes. The perennial difficulty, for Muscovite armies, as for Qing armies in the Far East, was how to keep infantry armies supplied with water, food, and fodder once they entered the steppes. In 1687, Golitsyn planned to attack Perekop, on the isthmus between Crimea and the Pontic steppes, with an army of more than 130,000 men, after marching them across 300 kilometers of steppeland. In June,

some 180,000 combatants and support personnel and 20,000 wagons of supplies, moved south, along the eastern side of the Dnepr … in two formations: a vanguard of seven infantry regiments, and a monstrous rectangular wagenburg or protective circle of wagons, measuring 1.5 m across and perhaps 5 km in length. The Muscovite and Ukrainian cavalry was deployed outside the wagenburg, close in along each side, out of fear of Tatar attack.69

To survive in the Pontic steppes for over four months, the army would need some 23,000 tons of grain and 9,000 tons of fodder, and it is a sign of the effectiveness of Muscovite military provisioning that the needed grain was brought by wagon and barge to the assembly points. What the army lacked was fodder, as Crimean forces burnt the grassland in front of the advancing armies. Golitsyn's far less mobile army could only move at about 10 kilometers a day through the steppe, because it could not outpace its ox-drawn baggage trains. Once it was clear that all potential fodder had been burnt, Golitsyn turned back. The second Crimean expedition, in 1689, would get further but suffer the same fate, turning back once it was clear there was not enough fodder or water.

So Muscovy had to use more indirect methods to manage the steppes. To gain the support of Don Cossack communities, the Romanovs maintained the subsidies they had begun to pay under Ivan IV. They also encouraged trade in grain (vital to the Cossacks, whose raiding limited possibilities for agriculture), liquor, textiles, and lead and gunpowder, in return for salt, fish, horses, and even furs.⁷⁰ Though Muscovy had little direct control over the Cossacks in the seventeenth century, trade and subsidies gave it plenty of indirect influence.

But the most important way of controlling the steppes was by continuing the sixteenth-century policy of building forts at strategic points.⁷¹ These were the land equivalents of the fortified “factories” established by the first European empires. Like these overseas bases, strategically based strongpoints in the steppe could project military and commercial power over large areas, so they were well suited to the distinctive Inner Eurasian challenge of mobilizing resources at great distances.

In the 1630s, after highly destructive Crimean raids in 1632 and 1633, made possible by the diversion of Russian troops to the siege of Smolensk, Muscovy resumed the building of fortified lines. Between 1635 and 1637, a huge mobilization of labor helped build 11 new garrison towns, most of which were settled by smallholders with no peasants of their own.⁷² As Khodarkovsky writes, this immense project was “Russia's most ambitious and important strategic undertaking in the seventeenth century. It was to become Moscow's own Great Wall to fend off the ‘infidels’ from the southern steppe.”⁷³

The new defensive lines linked natural barriers, fortified towns, wooden stockades, and lookout posts into a single system, whose aim was to block or render unusable the traditional invasion routes from the south. Forts were built at river crossings or portages or at crucial river junctions, and staffed with garrison troops commanded by the local governor or voevoda. Between fortified points forests were left uncut or cut down to form barricades. Observation posts were built out in the steppes, from which guards could watch for raiding parties. At first, garrison troops were paid, but over time many were given land grants from which to support themselves. Peasants were often settled near fortified towns to supply the towns and their garrisons with food. But compulsion was not always necessary, as many peasants were attracted to the rich steppe soils and willing to face the risks of frontier life.

Between 1635 and 1646, the government completed the so-called Belgorod line, with its western end at Akhtyra on the Vorskla river, and its eastern end at Tambov, 800 kilometers away (Map 7.2).⁷⁴ After the Stenka Razin revolt, in 1671, the government began introducing all the paraphernalia of a modern border to check emigration, including the issuing of travel documents giving permission to cross the line, and patrols to pick up those without the proper documents.⁷⁵ In the next decade, with the aid of Dutch and Huguenot military experts, the line was extended further east, reaching the Volga river at Simbirsk (modern Ulyanovsk). By 1655, the fortified line along Muscovy's southern borders extended from the Polish border to the Urals.⁷⁶ From 1658, troops of the southern frontier were led by a commanding general based at Belgorod.

Map 7.2 The Belgorod line in the mid-seventeenth century. Shaw, “Southern Frontiers of Muscovy,” 128. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.

The new fortification lines increased the dangers and reduced the rewards for Tatar raiding parties. Slave raids declined after 1654, and were undertaken by smaller raiding parties that could neither travel as far nor take as many captives as larger armies.⁷⁷ Meanwhile, Crimea itself began to suffer from Kalmyk and Don Cossack raids. A visitor to the region in the 1660s and early 1670s found many villages abandoned because of Cossack raids.⁷⁸ So threatening were Kalmyk raiders that in the 1660s, the Crimean khanate began building its own fortified lines to protect the grazing lands of their Nogai allies north of the Crimean peninsula. They also built a special stone wall to protect the Crimean heartland.⁷⁹

As the balance of power shifted in the Pontic steppes, more peasants headed south, driven by overpopulation in their homelands, and drawn by the rich steppe soils and the protection of border forts. Many settlers were poor middle servicemen with just two or three serfs or none at all. Most settled near forts, but others moved beyond the fortified lines into Cossack lands. The borderlands offered many opportunities for advancement, as undermanned forts and garrisons often accepted new recruits without asking too many questions, and frontier towns desperately needed labor, particularly for building.⁸⁰ Migration accelerated after the completion of the Belgorod line in the 1650s; the populations of Belgorod and Sevsk regions quadrupled between 1650 and 1710.⁸¹ Sometimes, whole villages arrived together, to settle along the forested shores of rivers. Because new arrivals sometimes displaced local Cossacks and pastoralists, their arrival could provoke violent conflicts, and these played a significant role in the Zaporozhian revolt of 1654 and the Stenka Razin uprising of 1670–1671.⁸²

Illegal migration raised complex problems for the government as it deprived landlords in central Russia of labor. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich commented that, “It is good to settle a new town, but not by emptying out old ones.”⁸³ On balance, though, it is clear from the expense and effort that successive Muscovite governments devoted to their fortified lines that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, as Muscovy's vast “walking walls” of forts inched south through the Pontic steppes, shielding a vast army of peasant settlers.

THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AS A GREAT POWER

By 1700, the Muscovite mobilizational machine was larger, more modern, and more unified than a century earlier. It disposed of more people and more resources. And it was using those resources successfully to expand to the west, south, and east. The reign of Peter the Great is often seen as a turning point in Russian history, but Peter built on the achievements of his predecessors, though he did so with more deliberation and a clearer sense of purpose. The speed and success of Peter's reforms are as much a testament to the success of seventeenth-century reforms as they are to Peter's own skill and determination.

Like Ivan IV, Peter increased mobilizational pressure on his subjects by tightening pressure on the elite. But unlike Ivan IV, Peter never lost his grip on political and economic realities, despite the colossal strains under which the system labored. The container held, increasing the mobilizational pressure that the system could exert on its own population and on rival states. Peter's reforms transformed the army, the elite, the fiscal system, and Russian culture, and turned Russia into a military superpower. The basic structures they created would survive for almost two centuries.

PETER'S MILITARY REFORMS

Peter I was born in 1672, the son of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich by his second wife, Natalia Naryshkina. He became Tsar in his own right in 1696 when his brother, Ivan, died. As a child Peter was fascinated by warfare and by European technology and culture. As a prince, he played war games with real regiments, the Semenovskoe and Preobrazhenskoe. Created by Peter in the 1680s, they would become elite Guards units in the Russian army. But at first they formed a sort of personal following and bodyguard. Like Chinggis Khan's keshig, they would provide many of the ruler's closest friends and allies. Peter's fascination with naval and military matters brought him close to foreign military experts such as the Scottish general Patrick Gordon and the French general François Lefort, and these friendships persuaded him of the importance of foreign learning. In 1697, Peter became the first ruler of Muscovy to visit Europe. There, he devoted his time to acquiring militarily useful European knowledge. Briefly, he worked in the Amsterdam shipyards, where he tried, in vain, to remain anonymous.

He returned in 1698, after learning of a rebellion by the strel'tsy. He suppressed the rebellion with great brutality, perhaps in part because of terrifying childhood memories of a strel'tsy rebellion in 1682 when he had nearly been killed. There began a period of frenetic military reform, during which he gathered around himself a loyal and hard-working group of friends and dependents, some from the boyar class, but many from lower levels of society. Some came from the Guards regiments, some from the foreign quarter. All were capable, energetic, and practical, and shared Peter's appetite for military reform. After Sweden defeated his armies at Narva, in 1700, Peter committed himself wholeheartedly to reform. That defeat increased Peter's confidence in his own reform ideas, because his Guards regiments were the only units to perform creditably at Narva.

Peter's reforms are best seen as a massive, high-pressure mobilizational effort, driven by a disciplined and unified elite of the kind we have seen many times in the history of Inner Eurasia. For the most part, scale mattered more than efficiency in Peter's early campaigns. They would not have been possible without the innovations of the seventeenth century or Peter's driving energy.84

The first step was to recruit more soldiers. Recruitment of peasants had become more common in the seventeenth century, but Peter recruited more systematically after taking a new census of the population. He demanded one recruit from every 20 households, selected either by serfowners or by peasant communes. After 1705, recruits had to serve not just for a single campaign, but for life. Lifelong commitment to the army, and the consequent severing of ties with the civilian world, would become one of the keys to Russian military discipline until the 1870s. During his reign, Peter mobilized almost 300,000 soldiers, of whom half would die of disease or on the battlefield. He also recruited mercenaries and irregular units of Cossacks, Tatars, and Kalmyk, which added another 100,000 troops. Infantry recruits were trained in European military techniques, often by captured Swedish officers.

In 1703, Peter finally secured an outlet on the Baltic, when Russian troops occupied land at the eastern tip of the Gulf of Finland. Here Peter founded a new city, St. Petersburg. In 1711, it became the empire's new capital. That shift reflected the government's conviction that its most dangerous enemies, and its most important teachers, now lay to the west. In 1709, at the battle of Poltava in Ukraine, Peter's armies defeated those of Charles XII of Sweden. This was a major turning point in the Northern Wars that had begun in 1558.⁸⁵ By 1721, at the treaty of Nystadt, Russia had emerged as the dominant power in northern and eastern Europe. Russia gained Karelia and Ingria with St. Petersburg, as well as the Baltic provinces of Estonia and Livonia. Peter had achieved all the goals of Ivan IV's Livonian wars, which had started more than a century and a half earlier.

FISCAL REFORMS

Peter's mobilizational effort transformed the Russian economy and affected all levels of society.

In the seventeenth century, military expenditures often consumed 60 percent of government expenditure. Under Peter they may have consumed 70 or 80 percent.86 In addition to recruiting soldiers, Peter drafted hundreds of thousands to work on public projects such as the building of St. Petersburg. The population felt the increased fiscal burden as much through recruitment and corvée labor as through cash taxes. But cash taxes also increased, perhaps by as much as 200 or 300 percent during his reign. So desperate was Peter for cash that in the early part of his reign he created a special office whose only task was to dream up new taxes. Their innovations included taxes on bathhouses, on windows, and even on beards, as many of Peter's male subjects refused on religious grounds to adopt the clean-shaven European look that Peter now favored.

Between 1719 and 1724, Peter consolidated most new taxes into a single “poll tax,” levied on all non-noble males or “souls.” The poll tax would survive until the 1880s. Its introduction was preceded by a new census in 1721, and the tax began to be collected in 1724 at a rate of 74 kopecks per soul. As it cost 28.5 rubles to maintain an infantryman for a year, and c.34.5 to maintain a cavalryman, this meant that it took about 47 souls to maintain one infantryman and 57 to maintain a single cavalryman.⁸⁷ In effect, these reforms turned all state peasants (peasants not under the direct control of landlords) into serfs of the state, because now even state serfs were banned from resettling without permission. But in practice the burden of the new poll or soul tax may have been lower than that of the multifarious taxes introduced early in Peter's reign.⁸⁸

Nevertheless, Peter's reforms were burdensome and, like the huge mobilization drive under Ivan IV, they created dangerous new stresses. Peasants began to flee, particularly in the overpopulated central provinces, and Peter faced several large-scale revolts in border regions where disgruntled peasants enjoyed the support of Cossacks or non-Russian peoples also suffering under Peter's heavy hand. There were rebellions in Astrakhan, and in the Bashkir lands. In 1707–1708, a Don Cossack Hetman, Bulavin, led 100,000 serfs, slaves, Cossacks, Tatars, and religious dissidents northwards, promising to abolish serfdom and return to the Old Belief.

The borderlands themselves became part of the mobilizational process, for it was during Peter's reign that the government began for the first time to plan systematically for colonization of the steppes. As Peter's adviser, Ivan Pososhkov, reminded him, “an empty place produces no revenue.”⁸⁹ By 1750, two centuries of building fortified lines had effectively incorporated the forest-steppe regions along Muscovy's southern borders, encouraging a massive southwards migration of peasants from Muscovy's heartlands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a quarter of Russia's population lived in the central Black Earth region, an increase due not just to migration but also to the high fertility rates typical in newly colonized lands.⁹⁰ These peasant migrations may have been the largest such movements within Europe between 1500 and 1800, and they accounted for much of the population increase that buoyed Muscovy's economy and armies.⁹¹

REFORMS OF THE GOVERNMENT AND ELITE

Peter also reformed the Russian nobility and government. In 1717, he replaced Muscovy's traditional prikazy with “colleges,” modeled on Swedish examples. The Russian heartland was divided into provinces, many of which have survived to the present day. And, like Chinggis Khan and Timur, he created a nobility willing and able to serve an autocratic ruler, and as bureaucratized as Moscow's officials and merchants. In 1700, the Russian nobility was still small. No more than 15,000 males were entitled to own serfs in a population of 11 to 15 million.92 Peter returned from Europe determined to Europeanize the nobility by making them wear European dress, acquire an education, and even take part in social events with their wives, at so-called “assemblies.” By the end of his reign, most nobles looked different from their serfs, and some were beginning to speak differently. Peter strictly enforced the requirement that all nobles serve in return for land. Officials kept lists of nobles and summoned individuals to St. Petersburg as soon as they were old enough to serve. Peter also tried to educate the Russian ruling elite. He founded the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724 and recruited large numbers of foreign scholars and scientists, laying the foundations for what would eventually become a rich Russian tradition of scientific scholarship.

Peter militarized the nobility by tying rank more closely than ever before to service rather than lineage. The “Table of Ranks,” introduced in 1722, was a list of ranks that applied not just to the army, but to the entire noble class. In theory, rank now depended on service to the government rather than on birth, and noble status could be achieved simply by attaining the requisite rank in the army or civil service. According to the new act:

All state officials, Russian or foreign, who now belong, or have formerly belonged, to the first eight classes, and their legitimate children and descendants in perpetuity, must be considered equal in all dignities and advantages to the best and oldest nobility, even if they are of humble origin … Any military man who is not [himself a hereditary] noble and who attains the rank of a company-grade officer becomes a nobleman; all his children born after the promotion are also nobles.⁹³

Peter mobilized merchants as well as peasants and nobles. He ordered merchants to establish the textile and metal factories needed to clothe, arm, and equip his rapidly growing armies. By the end of his reign, Russia was a major iron producer (with most of its iron works in the Urals), a major weapons producer (on the basis of the industries established in Tula in the early seventeenth century), and the city of Moscow had become a major textiles producer (relying to a considerable extent on cotton imported from Central Asia by Tatar merchants). The 20 or so factories in Russia at the beginning of Peter's reign had increased to about 200 by its end. Militarily, Russia was now largely self-sufficient. It could produce most of the weapons that armed its soldiers, and most of the textiles that clothed them.

The powerful, high-pressure system that Peter built would survive for a century and a half, even under the rule of Tsars less powerful and energetic, and less politically astute than himself. But Peter had also opened a culturally insulated elite to new international influences. Increased trade with the west through the Baltic would connect the Russian economy with the world economy; while increased openness to the ideas, the styles, and even the architecture, cuisine, and languages of Europe would eventually Europeanize an elite class that had largely been protected from alien influences.

How robust the Petrine system was became clear in the years after his death, when it survived under monarchs of less certain legitimacy than Peter and certainly of less talent and drive. Peter's wife Catherine I (r. 1725–1727) succeeded him, to be followed by Peter's grandson by his first wife, Peter II (r. 1727–1730), then by Peter I's niece, Anna of Courland (r. 1730–1740), then by a great-nephew, Ivan VI (r. 1740–1741). Peter I's daughter, Elizabeth I (r. 1741–1762), ruled for over 20 years, and was succeeded by a grandson of Peter I, Peter III (1762). Peter III did not last long. He was murdered by Guards officers who were allies of his wife, the young German princess who would become Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796).

The system survived this period of instability, though the power of the nobility increased relative to that of the autocrats. As the nobility became more westernized, they shrugged off some of the more extreme demands Peter had placed on them. They even showed an ability and willingness to manage autocracy by removing incompetent monarchs when necessary. In the eighteenth century there were at least eight separate coups or attempted coups, usually with the involvement of the elite Guards regiments. Several coups led to the deaths of monarchs or candidates for the monarchy; Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I (r. 1796–1801) all died in this way.⁹⁴ But the autocracy survived, along with the traditions of elite cohesion that sustained its power, and the Russian Empire retained the Great Power status it had achieved under Peter the Great.

EXPANSION IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Petrine reforms provided the mobilizational muscle needed for further expansion in the early eighteenth century. By 1678 Muscovy ruled almost 16 million sq. kilometers.95 By 1750 the Russian Empire ruled over 22 million sq. kilometers.⁹⁶ Expansion beyond the Urals will be described in the next chapter; but it was expansion to the west and south that provided the crucial tests of Russia's increasing mobilizational and military power.

In the early eighteenth century, the Russian Empire tightened its grip on both Ukraine and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the battle of Poltava in 1709, during which the Ukrainian Hetman, Mazeppa, made the fatal mistake of allying with Peter's enemy, Charles XII of Sweden, Peter I began attaching Russian viceroys to the Ukrainian Hetman. But Ukraine was not finally incorporated into the Russian Empire until 1781, with the abolition of the “Little Russian College.”⁹⁷ Meanwhile, Russia's influence increased over Polish monarchs and the Polish Sejm. Under Peter I, Russia began to meddle in the election of Polish kings, and Poland itself began to look like a Russian protectorate. As early as 1721, King Augustus, who had been elected under strong Russian pressure, proposed a partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that would leave Russia in control of much of Lithuania.

Increasing Russian control over Ukraine guaranteed conflict with the Ottoman Empire, as did Peter's ambitious plans for expansion into the Black Sea and in Central Asia. In 1696, Russia briefly secured control of Azov. Despite being defeated by Ottoman armies on the Pruth river in 1711, Russia's armies would demonstrate their superiority in several eighteenth-century conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, in 1736–1739, 1768–1774, and 1787–1792. The treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, after the war of 1768–1774, effectively gave the Russian Empire control over the entire Pontic steppe, including most of right-bank as well as left-bank Ukraine.

In Central Asia, Peter's expansionist ambitions were less successful. He dreamed of an empire that could reach India and match the commercial power of the European Asian empires. In 1717, he sent an army of 300 men to conquer Khiva, but it was defeated by Khivan armies, demonstrating, once again, how hard it was for agrarian polities to send armies through the arid steppes and deserts of Inner Eurasia.⁹⁸ In 1722, he attempted to invade the southern Caucasus through the Caspian, but again, the military difficulties proved insurmountable, and his forces retreated.

His most spectacular successes were to the immediate west of Russia. Here, the great prize since the time of Ivan IV had been access to the Baltic Sea, and the rich and expanding markets of a Europe that now traded with the entire world. In the first 25 years of the eighteenth century, Peter I seized control of Estonia, the northern parts of modern Latvia, and the region around St. Petersburg, completing the expansionist project Ivan IV had begun in 1558. Russia's crushing defeat of Sweden at the battle of Poltava in 1709 was the turning point. Sweden, with a population of about 2 million, and cash revenues that came largely from the tolls on trade through Riga, could no longer match the immense resources available to Peter's armies.⁹⁹ By the end of 1710, Russia controlled the entire region from Riga to Vyborg. With control over the Baltic coast, Peter also gained significant influence over Sweden.

The treaty of Nystadt in 1721 marked Russia's emergence as the dominant power in eastern Europe and the Baltic, and this is also when Peter the Great first began to refer to a Russian “Empire.” In 1733, Russian armies would impose a candidate of their own choice on the Polish Diet (King Augustus III), and in 1744 Russian troops would land near Stockholm to defend the Swedish capital against the threat of Danish invasion. The new Russian Empire had achieved military domination over its most powerful western enemies.

NOTES

1 Richards, The Unending Frontier, 59, 61; and see Brooke, Climate Change, 258 (Fig. III.10).

² Cho, “The Little Ice Age”; and Brooke, Climate Change, 396 (Fig. IV.1).

³ Brooke, Climate Change, 257.

⁴ Parker, Global Crisis, 178.

⁵ Parker, Global Crisis, is now the definitive account of the Seventeenth-Century Crisis.

⁶ Richards, The Unending Frontier, and Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories.

⁷ Marks, “‘Exhausting the Earth’,” 32; Marks's essay is a good summary of the process of increasingly intense global exploitation of resources.

⁸ McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History, 158.

⁹ Mironov with Eklof, Social History, 2.

¹⁰ The classic study of the Time of Troubles is Platonov, Time of Troubles; the most recent study is Dunning, Russia's First Civil War.

¹¹ Conte, Les grandes dates, 63, gives the high figure; Parker, Global Crisis, 152, gives a 25 percent decline.

¹² Pavlov, “Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov,” 272.

¹³1601 was one of the coldest years in several centuries, in part because of the massive Huaynaputina volcanic eruption; Richards, The Unending Frontier, 67.

¹⁴ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 160–161.

¹⁵ Kollmann, “Muscovite Russia,” 62.

¹⁶ Vernadsky et al., Source Book, 1: 206–207, from Pozharskii's appeal to Sol'vychegodsk.

¹⁷ On the peasant revolts and their ideologies, see Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism.

¹⁸ Collins, The Present State of Russia, 66, cited from Poe, “A People Born to Slavery,” 107.

¹⁹ Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613, 226.

²⁰ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 161.

²¹ Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 402–411.

²² Fuller, “The Imperial Army,” 530.

²³ Stevens, Russia's Wars of Emergence, 7.

²⁴ Fuller, Strategy and Power, 161–162.

²⁵ Fuller, Strategy and Power, 166.

²⁶ Fuller, Strategy and Power, 67.

²⁷ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 164.

²⁸ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 165.

²⁹ Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, 7; Crummey, Formation of Muscovy, 237.

³⁰ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 167.

³¹ Kotilaine, “In Defense of the Realm,” on how the Russian army was supplied in this period with modern weaponry, gunpowder, and supplies.

³² Fuller, Strategy and Power, 108.

³³ Kotilaine, “In Defense of the Realm,” 67–69, 77, 84.

³⁴ Kotilaine, “In Defense of the Realm,” 91.

³⁵ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 166–167.

³⁶ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 188ff.

³⁷ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 188ff.

³⁸ Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii, 27.

³⁹ Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” 491; Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii, 29.

⁴⁰ Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” 493.

⁴¹ Moon, “Peasants and Agriculture,” 373.

⁴² Allen, Farm to Factory, 15.

⁴³ Vernadsky et al., Source Book, 1: 225–226.

⁴⁴ Cited in Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 108.

⁴⁵ Stevens, Russia's Wars of Emergence, 5.

⁴⁶ There's a small body of theory on the two contrasting pathways of tribute exaction and market-driven growth; see Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, on coercion- and capital-intensive states in Europe; and also Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence.

⁴⁷ Davies, “Local Government,” 470–471; the shift in the basic unit of assessment from the land to the household had begun in 1645; see Moon, “Peasants and Agriculture,” 371.

⁴⁸ Ananich, “Russian Economy and Banking System,” 394.

⁴⁹ Bushkovitch, Merchants of Moscow, 152.

⁵⁰ Christian, “Living Water,” Ch. 1, traces the growth of the state's ability to extract liquor revenues from the sixteenth century; and see Schrad, Vodka Politics.

⁵¹ Hellie, Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 537–540.

⁵² Bushkovitch, Merchants of Moscow, 38–39.

⁵³ Bushkovitch, Merchants of Moscow, 157, 167.

⁵⁴ Bushkovitch, Merchants of Moscow, 159.

⁵⁵ Bushkovitch, Merchants of Moscow, 1.

⁵⁶ Poe, “Central Government,” 454–455.

⁵⁷ Davies, “Local Government,” 469.

⁵⁸ Davies, “Local Government,” 467.

⁵⁹ Poe, “Central Government,” 446.

⁶⁰ Hellie, Enserfment, 139–140.

⁶¹ See the list of meetings conventionally reckoned to represent the Assembly of the Land or Zemskii Sobor in Poe, “Central Government,” 462.

⁶² On the role of Old Believers in the Don region see Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, Ch. 7.

⁶³ Hughes, “Cultural and Intellectual Life,” 641.

⁶⁴ Hughes, “Cultural and Intellectual Life,” 651, 661.

⁶⁵ Davies, “Muscovy at War and Peace,” 486.

⁶⁶ See Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, Ch. 10.

⁶⁷ Davies, “Muscovy at War and Peace,” 514; there is a map of Russian gains on 515.

⁶⁸Ágoston, “Ottoman Warfare,” 137–138.

⁶⁹ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 178, citation from 179–180.

⁷⁰ Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, 21, 43.

⁷¹ On fortification lines, see the summary in Shaw, “Southern Frontiers of Muscovy.”

⁷² Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 82ff.

⁷³ Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 132.

⁷⁴ For maps of Belgorod and Izium lines, see Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, xiii.

⁷⁵ Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, 62–63.

⁷⁶ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 91–92; and “Development of Russian Military Power,” 163.

⁷⁷ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 191.

⁷⁸ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 192.

⁷⁹ Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 137.

⁸⁰ Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, 20–24.

⁸¹ Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe, 169.

⁸² Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 31.

⁸³ Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 29.

⁸⁴ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 169–170.

⁸⁵ See Frost, The Northern Wars.

⁸⁶ Fuller, “The Imperial Army,” 536.

⁸⁷ Based on figures in Hughes, Peter the Great, 139.

⁸⁸ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 173.

⁸⁹ Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 42.

⁹⁰ Moon, “Peasant Migration,” 863–864.

⁹¹ See Lucassen and Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited,” 357–359.

⁹² Lieven, “The Elites,” 230.

⁹³ Vernadsky et al., Source Book, 2: 344.

⁹⁴ Fuller, Strategy and Power, 117–118.

⁹⁵ Davies, “Muscovy at War and Peace,” 486.

⁹⁶ Taagepera, “Overview of the Growth of the Russian Empire,” 3.

⁹⁷ For a Ukrainian perspective on the incorporation of Ukraine within Russia, see Horak, “Russian Expansion.”

⁹⁸ Donnelly, Conquest of Bashkiria, 40–41.

⁹⁹ Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” 492.

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