Russia A History Read online

  RUSSIA’S sixteenth century, like that of the Mediterranean in Fernand Braudel’s eyes, was a ‘long sixteenth century’. The hundred and fifty years from 1450 to the death of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich in 1598 was a cohesive era shaped by the tension between the interventionist policies of a state desperate to control its people and the nagging realities of geography, limited resources, and cultural diversity.

  It was long-term geographical, institutional, and cultural realities that shaped Muscovy’s drive to mobilize its human and natural resources. So we will try to see the realm as Moscow’s rulers saw it, again evoking Braudel with a focus on long-term sources of change (geography, climate, settlement patterns, trade routes, and other aspects of Braudel’s ‘la longue durée’) and middle-level ones (social and religious structures, ideational systems, etc.) in preference to individuals, wars, and events. But we need to start briefly with Braudel’s ‘histoire événementielle’ to define the constantly expanding territory with which we will be concerned.

  ‘Russia’ constituted the realm of the grand princes (after 1547, the tsars) of Moscow, the Daniilovich line of the Riurikid dynasty that traced its descent to the rulers of Kievan Rus. Moscow amassed regional power starting in the fourteenth century; by 1450, after a decisive dynastic war, it embarked on expansion that continued unabated into the nineteenth century. Although much has been made of Moscow’s relentless expansion, it was hardly unusual for the time. In Europe the Habsburgs and Jagiellonians were building empires, while England, France, and the Dutch were expanding overseas. They may have justified their expansion by the theory of mercantilism while Muscovy claimed to be restoring the ‘patrimony’ of Kievan Rus, but the motives—pursuit of resources, wealth, power—were the same.

  Muscovy’s expansion easily equalled that of other sixteenth-century empires. Russia expanded along lucrative trade routes, towards the Baltic, along the Volga, and into fertile steppe or the fur-bearing north and Siberia. Despite pious claims, much of what Muscovy won had not been part of Kievan Rus and Muscovy’s expansionist zeal never turned to the Ukrainian heartland in the sixteenth century. Under Ivan III Moscow acquired, through marriage, inheritance, coercion, or conquest, contiguous territories that had once been sovereign principalities: Riazan, 1456–1521; Iaroslavl, 1463; Rostov, 1463, 1474; Tver, 1485. With the conquest in 1478 of the Baltic trading city of Novgorod came a rich hinterland stretching to the Urals. Since the conquest of Novgorod and of Pskov in 1510 under Vasilii III put Muscovy face to face with the grand duchy of Lithuania and Sweden, much of the sixteenth century was consumed with wars on the western border, including the draining and fruitless war for Livonia (1558–82). Under Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) and Fedor Ivanovich Muscovy moved on several fronts, conquering Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan at the Caspian Sea in 1556, thereby assuring Russian control of the Volga river route. The steppe on either side became the next target of expansion in the second half of the century. Simultaneously, from the 1580s Muscovy was asserting political control into western Siberia, seeking the treasure of furs.

  The only significant diversion that Moscow’s rulers faced from these foreign policy goals was the era of the oprichnina (1564–72), a murky episode in which about half the tsardom (almost all the lucrative trading areas north and northwest of Moscow, stretching to the White Sea, plus several major towns in the centre) was designated as Ivan IVs personal realm. Parallel élites, armies, and bureaucracies were formed, with attendant confiscations of land and purges of individuals, clans, institutions, and regions deemed hostile to Ivan IV. The oprichnina might have been intended to consolidate central power, as some have argued, but more likely was the fruit of Ivan IVs own personal devils. Some, such as V. O. Kliuchevskii and S. B. Veselovskii, have argued that Ivan was insane or paranoid; Edward L. Keenan suggests that a debilitating spinal illness made Ivan create the oprichnina in an attempt to abdicate power, an argument made all the more persuasive by Ivan’s later year-long abdication (1574/5) and by his erratic behaviour (he married several times, throwing clan-based court politics into disarray; even after 1572 he patronized a parallel élite of low-born families called the court [dvor]). Certainly some explanation in the psychological realm is required, since evidence shows that the oprichnina had no positive social or political consequences, devastating much of the centre of the realm and disrupting social and institutional structures.

  The Span of the Russian Empire

  We will begin by surveying the regions that made up Russia in the sixteenth century. There were three large divisions: the north, the centre, and the frontier, primarily a steppe frontier but also including the western border with the grand duchy of Lithuania. The north stretched from the Gulf of Finland in the west to beyond the Urals in the east and from the White Sea south to about 60° L. The north is a land of taiga, a largely coniferous forest turning into tundra and permafrost as one goes north; in addition to the taiga’s acidic and leached soil, its marshiness and the brevity of the growing season (only three to four months, sufficient for only one crop) make it inhospitable to agriculture. This was an area of forest exploitation and trade.

  The regions of the north from west to east included Karelia, centred around Lakes Onega and Ladoga and stretching north to the Kola peninsula; the Northern Dvina and Sukhona river basins (Pomore); the Mezen and Pechora river basins (home of the Komi-Zyriane); and the Perm and Viatka lands (key inland fur-trapping regions north-east of Moscow focused on the upper Viatka, Vychegda, and Kama rivers, also home to the Komi-Permians). The indigenous population here was Finno-Ugric speakers of the Uralic language family. Sparse Russian settlement hugged the rivers and shoreline, barely touching the far-eastern Viatka and Perm lands until late in the sixteenth century. Christianity came with Russian settlement but made few inroads among non-East Slavs throughout this time. In the tundra band lived nomadic reindeer herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters: the Finno-Ugric Lapps in Karelia and east of them the Nentsy (called in Russian Samoedy) who speak a Samoedic Uralic language. From the 1580s Muscovite expansion drove across the Urals, moving quickly up the Ob and Irtysh rivers and into the Enisei basin. Garrisons were founded at Tobolsk on the upper Irtysh river in 1587 and at Tomsk on the upper Ob in 1604. But Russian settlement in Siberia remained sparse indeed, save for the garrisons of musketeers and Cossacks mustered from local populace or imported from the north, supported in turn by grain requisitions from Viatka, Perm, and other parts of the north. These garrisons collected tribute from the native peoples: farthest to the north were the Nentsy (Samoedy) living east of the Ob; south of them lived the Ostiaki (the Khanty in Russian) and inland to the west between the Permians and the Ob river lived the Voguly (Mansy to the Russians), also Finno-Ugric speakers.

  Since Novgorodian times the dominant social and political organization among East Slavs and the Finno-Ugric population in the taiga lands from Karelia to Perm was the commune (mir, volost), composed of what contemporary sources call the ‘black’ or taxed peasants who were subject to the tsar directly and not subordinate to landlords as well. (Among native peoples of the Urals and western Siberia, however, Russia did not impose communal organization.) Northern communes differed from the nineteenth-century Russian peasant commune where land and labour were collectively shared. These were fiscal entities, territorial groupings of Slavs or non-Slavs for purposes of local administration and taxation. Nor is the term ‘peasant’ particularly appropriate for this populace. Members of communes were not primarily farmers, even the East Slavs among them, but were fishers, bee-keepers, traders, hunters, trappers, and artisans.

  Straddling the border between the north and the centre were the Novgorod and Pskov lands to the north-west and the Beloozero and Vologda area north of Moscow. The north-west, including Novgorod and its five contiguous ‘fifths’ (piatiny), and Pskov and its environs, remained a centre of Baltic trade in the sixteenth century, and also supported at least a subsistence level of agriculture and relatively dense population. The Beloozero and Vologda areas lay on active
trade routes to the White Sea and were productive centres for fish, salt, and furs. In these various lands the Russian population outnumbered Finno-Ugric speakers by the end of the century. Novgorod and Pskov had long been centres of Christianity and the Beloozero and Vologda areas became, from the mid-fifteenth century, magnets of energetic monastic colonization. Monasteries such as the St Cyril and Ferapontov monasteries near Beloozero, the Spaso-Prilutskii in Vologda, and the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea—expanded by taking over settled peasant lands and in the course of the sixteenth century became major local political and economic powers.

  Although part of the Muscovite realm from the late 1400s, the north and north-west remained distinct as regions. When Moscow adopted at mid-century a new tax unit for arable land (the large sokha), for example, these areas retained the smaller, Novgorodian unit of measure. Similarly, surviving coin hoards from the second half of the century show a distinct split in the circulation of coinage between a north-west arena and a Moscow central one. Finally, gentry in the north-west were called upon to serve only within that region.

  The centre, or ‘Moscow region’ (Zamoskov’e) in contemporary sources, differed from the north and the southern borderlands by its relative ethnic homogeneity, the economic primacy of agriculture, and the social power of landlords. By the early sixteenth century, the centre stretched from Beloozero and Vologda in the north to the Oka river and Riazan lands in the south; its western bounds were the upper Volga Tver lands and its eastern ones lay just beyond the lower Oka and its confluence with the Volga at Nizhnii Novgorod. An extension of the European plain that begins at the Atlantic, the region has a mixed deciduous-coniferous forest. It shares with Europe a continental climate, but its northerly latitude and distance from warming ocean currents made for harsher conditions. The winters are long (five months of snow cover) and cold (January mean temperature is −10.3°C or 13.5°F) and the growing season commensurately short (four to five months); because the soil was not particularly fertile, save for a triangle of loess north-west of Vladimir, yields were at subsistence level. Animal husbandry was limited by the sparseness of yields and the length of the winter which made provisioning large herds prohibitive; as a result natural fertilizer was inadequate. The populace supplemented its diet with food from the forests (hunting, fishing, berries, nuts, mushrooms) and income from artisan work.

  The social structure in the centre was more complex than in the north. Settlement here was almost uniformly East Slavic, the indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples having been assimilated by the sixteenth century. Most of the populace, whether urban or rural, was taxed. Peasants lived in small hamlets (one to four households) and practised cultivation systems ranging from primitive slash-burn to three-field rotations depending upon population density, length of settlement in a region, and other factors. In 1450 most peasants were still free of landlord control, living in communes and paying taxes only to the tsar, but by the end of the sixteenth century virtually all of these ‘black’ peasants had been distributed to private landholders. Like the black peasants, artisans and petty merchants in towns were formed into urban communes (posad), which also paid taxes (here assessed not on arable land but as an annual rent or obrok), sales tax, customs, and other duties.

  The non-taxpaying landholding strata were either military or ecclesiastical. The clerical populace was divided into ‘black’ (monks, nuns, and hierarchs—all celibate) and ‘white’ clergy (married parish priests). Church landholding increased at a phenomenal rate after 1450; particularly in the turbulent 1560s–70s landholders donated land in large amounts to monasteries, despite repeated legislation prohibiting such gifts (1551, 1572, 1580, 1584). But the Church’s wealth was unevenly distributed: diocesan episcopates and a handful of major monasteries (for example, St Cyril-Beloozero, Simonov, Trinity-Sergius) had immense holdings by the end of the century, but one-fifth of the monasteries possessed no or fewer than five peasant households, and most parish churches possessed none at all.

  Secular landholders were all obliged to serve the Moscow grand prince as a part of a cavalry army. A few select families lived in Moscow and enjoyed hereditary privileges to be boyars, that is, counsellors of the grand prince. The rest of the élite ranged from wealthy, large landholders to rank-and-file cavalrymen (called ‘boyar’s children’ [deti boiarskie]). The landholding élite was not a corporate estate with juridical protection, but it did enjoy freedom from taxation, an almost exclusive claim to landownership and high status.

  Over the course of the sixteenth century other social groups developed, primarily in the centre. The tsar’s élite merchants (gosti) were first mentioned in the 1550s; by the 1590s two less prestigious associations of official merchants (the gostinnaia and sukonnaia hundreds) were recorded. Merchants managed the tsar’s monopolies (salt, fur, vodka, and the like) or served as tax farmers, customs collectors, and entrepreneurs. In return they enjoyed the right to hold service tenure and hereditary land and to use the tsar’s own courts instead of local governors’ courts. The highest ranks of the chancery secretaries (d’iaki) could also hold hereditary or service tenure lands and utilize the tsar’s courts. Most worked in Moscow, but a few were stationed in the provinces (in 1611 the relative numbers were 55 and 17). In the second half of the sixteenth century most secretaries came from the lesser cavalry ranks. Situated socially between the taxed and non-taxed populations were non-cavalry army units, and of course there were also people who did not fit in—those who refused to be caught in the webs of landlord’s control or urban taxation: vagrants (guliashchie liudi), minstrels (skomorokhi) so vilified by the Church, holy fools, unemployed sons of priests, defrocked clergy, isolated hermits—in sum, the flotsam characteristic of the social diversity of premodern societies.

  Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the centre was its juridical diversity. Much of this land was exempt from the grand prince’s government and taxation, a situation that rulers not only tolerated but used to their advantage. Grand princes countenanced areas that were virtually sovereign islands of political independence—the old apanage (udel) principalities, granted to members of the ruling dynasty and other notables. Apanages enjoyed autonomy from the grand prince’s taxation and judiciary and maintained small armies and boyar élites of their own. They were enjoined only against conducting independent foreign policy. From 1450 to 1550 apanages proliferated with the dynasty: Ivan III and Vasilii III each had four brothers, and Ivan IV, one as well as two adult sons. Each received lands with an apanage capital in towns such as Dmitrov, Volok, Uglich, Vologda, Kaluga, and Staritsa.

  Similar to dynastic apanages were the holdings of some high-ranking princely families, called ‘service princes’. The apanage rights of princes from the upper Oka basin—the Mosal’skie, Mezetskie, Belevskie, Novosil’skie and others—were extinguished in the early sixteenth century, but two such clans, the Vorotynskie and Odoevskie princes, retained autonomy until 1573. Similarly, descendants of the ruling dynasty of the grand duchy of Lithuania long kept their rights: the Bel’skie until 1571, the Mstislavskie until 1585. Descendants of the ruling lines of Suzdal, Rostov, and other principalities likewise kept some vestige of autonomous rights into the mid-sixteenth century. The grand princes also actively created islands of autonomies as a political strategy. In the mid-fifteenth century, for example, Vasilii II’s government created a quasi-independent Tatar principality at Kasimov, designed as a refuge for a dissident line of the Kazan ruling dynasty and their Tatar retinues and thus as a focal point of opposition to the khanate of Kazan. It was located on the Oka river below Riazan and endured until the mid-seventeenth century. In the mid-sixteenth century an analogous apanage for a line of the Nogai Horde was created at Romanov, which lasted until 1620. In the Urals the Stroganov family acquired quasi-autonomous authority over vast tracts of lands in return for its colonization and trade activities.

  Even more expansively the state accorded landlords judicial and administrative authority over their peasants except for major cri
mes. Ecclesiastical lands were particularly separate. By age-old statutes and tradition, the Orthodox Church had jurisdiction over all the Muscovite Orthodox populace in crimes declared church-related (such as heresy, sacrilege, inheritance, divorce, and adultery); it also exercised virtually total jurisdiction over the people living on its lands. Similarly, Muscovite towns, particularly in the centre, epitomized the patchwork quilt of administration and status that Russian society amounted to in the sixteenth century. Side by side with the taxpaying urban posad in most towns were privileged properties called ‘white places’ (i.e. untaxed), which competed with the trade of the posad. They could be enclaves of musketeers, postal workers, the tsar’s artisans, Europeans, or Tatars; they could be urban courts of monasteries, great boyars, and large landholders. Such communities enjoyed preferential treatment in taxes, tolls, customs, and immunities from the tsar’s judiciary and administration.

  It is important to recall, however, that the grand princes tolerated local autonomies as a quasi-bureaucratic convenience; they did not countenance political independence and they kept apanage princes and leading boyars and landholders on a tight rein. They often imposed surety bonds (poruchnye zapisi) on boyars or treaties on their kinsmen to guarantee their loyalty. The grand princes’ closest kin were particularly distrusted, a bitter legacy of the dynastic war of the mid-fifteenth century, when the principle of linear dynastic succession triumphed over collateral succession but at the cost of bitter internecine battles. In succeeding generations uncles and cousins who loomed as potential rivals were closely controlled, forbidden to marry, imprisoned, or even executed. Within ten years of Ivan III’s death in 1505 all collateral lines of the clan had died out, save the Staritsa line, which was finally extinguished in the oprichnina in 1569. The perils of this aggressive pruning of the family tree were exposed in 1598 when the dynasty itself died out, destabilizing the political system almost terminally.