Russia. A History

All this spelled disaster for peasants and petty gentry, especially in the northwest and centre. Thousands fled to new landlords in the centre or to the relative freedom of the Volga and Kama basins, the Dvina lands, or the southern border. Depopulation was acute: in the mid-1580s only 17 per cent of the land in the Moscow environs was being cultivated, while in the northwest 83 per cent of settlements were deserted. Towns suffered disproportionately: while the populations of urban communes had risen in the first half of the century, posad

populations fell by 61 per cent in the 1550s-80s, and then another 45 per cent from the 1580s to the 1610s. In Novgorod in 1582, for example, a census recorded only 122 urban households as occupied and over 1,300 abandoned for such reasons as death of the family (in 76 per cent of the cases) and impoverishment (18 per cent). The economic situation stabilized in the late 1580s, but Russia was plunged again into turmoil by the turn of the century: not only foreign invasion, but crop failure and pestilence accompanied the end of the dynasty in 1598.

Having no other way to support its cavalry, and unwilling to transform this privileged estate into less prestigious contract servitors, the state endeavoured to secure peasant labour for landlords. In 1580 it forbade some peasants to change landlords and in 1592–3 made the ban universal, capping a legislative process that had commenced with restrictions on the peasant’s right to move in the law codes of 1497 and 1550. These ‘forbidden years’ were perceived as temporary but, with the exception of 1601–2, endured thereafter. This incremental enserfment affected most directly the peasants of landlords in the centre, northwest, and steppe frontier, but it also had an impact in the north and Siberia. Cadastres compiled throughout the realm in the 1580s and 1590s served as the basis for registering peasants in communes; they were then forbidden to leave, whether or not they were subject to landlords as well.

Sixteenth-century peasants faced with economic disaster and enserfment had two options. One was to flee to the frontier. Despite decrees beginning in the 1590s that steadily extended the statute of limitations on the recovery of runaway peasants, peasants with the means still had an opportunity to move. For most, however, the older option in hard times—debt slavery—was far more viable. Increasingly in the sixteenth century individuals sold themselves into a limited ‘service-contract’ (kabal’noe

) slavery. Slavery offered them not only a loan but also refuge of a lord and freedom from the taxes and services due the state. Understandably, over the course of the sixteenth century, the government sought to regulate hereditary slavery and manumission, to forbid servitors to assume this status (1550), and to limit its duration (1586, 1597).

Mechanisms of Social Integration

The grand princes’ primary goals in the sixteenth century may have been expanding their territory and extracting resources from it, but to do so they needed a minimal degree of social cohesion in the realm as a whole to ensure stability. Their major strategy in this regard, as we have suggested, was to tolerate diversity. Even in contemporaneous Europe, where national realms were small and often ethnically cohesive and where dynasties worked assiduously to create a national unity, the reality was that stability was based not on the ruler’s coercive power but on social traditions of deference to authority and loyalty to community and region. All the more so for Muscovite rulers. They had limited tools of integration and used them judiciously. As in other states, however, they relied on coercion and meted out harsh punishment to disloyal servitors, tax cheats, and rebellious subjects. They were particularly inclined to declare boyars to be in ‘disgrace’ (opala) for brief periods (often a few days) to chasten them and keep them in line. Frequently they tempered the punishments with last-minute reprieves, bestowing their benevolent ‘mercy’ and ‘favour’. They also made abundant use of such harsh punishments as confiscation of property demotion in rank, exile, imprisonment, and execution whenever their authority was challenged. But given the limits of central power in an early modern state, Muscovite tsars relied upon rewards, symbols, and ideas to inculcate loyalty and to disseminate an image of a unified realm. And they put most of their energies into appealing to the élite since its loyalty was crucial to the state’s goals.