Russia. A History

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.

As diverse and dynamic as the centre was, even more volatile was the frontier on the west and south. In some ways calling this area the ‘frontier’ to the exclusion of the others is inaccurate. The north and centre were also riddled with ‘frontiers’—between Slavs and non-Slavs, Orthodox and non-Christians, farmers and trappers, Muslims and ‘pagans’. All these social interfaces generated tensions, synergies, and cross-cultural fertilization. But in the west and the south the classic meaning of ‘frontier’ as outposts of defence and conquest applies. In climate, precipitation, soil quality, and other key measures of agrarian fertility, these lands were far superior to those north of them and thus were coveted. On the west the frontier began with the Novgorod and Pskov lands south of the Gulf of Finland and extended south to the Smolensk area and south again to the upper Oka river region. This relatively narrow north-south strip, located between the sixtieth and fiftieth latitudes, moved from taiga at the Novgorod end through deciduous-coniferous mixed forest, approaching steppe in the south. These lands flanked the grand duchy of Lithuania and were hotly contested throughout the century; between 1491 and 1595 Muscovy spent a total of fifty years at war on the western front. After the rout of the Livonian War (1558–82) and the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) Muscovy yielded lands from Karelia to beyond Smolensk to Sweden (Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617) and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (Treaty of Deulino, 1618).

On the western frontier, as in the centre, Moscow tolerated administrative and social diversity. For example, when Smolensk was annexed in 1514, Vasilii III affirmed by charter the landholding and judicial rights historically granted to the region by the grand dukes of Lithuania. Similarly as we have seen, princes from the upper Oka area retained autonomies as ‘service princes’ in Muscovy well into the sixteenth century.

On the south the frontier ran just south of the middle, west–east stretch of the Oka river, from around Tula across the Riazan lands to the border with the Kazan khanate in the east. Moving south from this forested zone one quickly encounters steppe (a prairie rich in grey and black soils), a line that moves roughly diagonally, south-west to north-east, from Kiev to Kazan. This south flank was exposed to raids and warfare: in the sixteenth century the Crimean Tatars made forty-three major attacks on the Muscovite lands, and the Kazan khanate forty. After Moscow conquered Kazan in 1552, the Nogai Horde of the lower Volga took its place as Moscow’s steppe adversary. Already in the 1530s Muscovy fortified a line south of the Oka and at mid-century it conquered Kazan and Astrakhan (1552, 1556). A generally east-west line of fortifications pushed steadily southward from the 1550s; Muscovy also constructed a network of fortresses to fortify the Kazan heartland and Kama basin. In the 1580s Muscovy began to subjugate the Bashkirs, a Tatar nomadic people, on a southern tributary of the Kama, constructing a fort at Ufa in 1586; most of the Bashkirs remained subjects of the Siberian khan until Muscovy’s final defeat of the khan in the late 1590s. A final stage of southern frontier fortification witnessed bold extensions of fortresses down the land and river routes used by the Nogais and Crimeans: Elets (1592), Belgorod, and Tsarev Borisov on the Donets river (1593, 1600).