None of these developments were visible in the years immediately after 1613 at the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael (1613–1645). Michael resumed appointments to the duma and other offices following the precedence system, as did his predecessors. The court was not quite the same, for the experience of the Time of Troubles seems to have taught the boyars the need for consensus, and for sixty years the court intrigues lost the desperate and murderous quality that had marked the previous century. Michael’s father Filaret returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and was immediately named Patriarch of the church. Within a few years he was the de facto regent of Russia, co-sovereign with his son. Patriarch Filaret’s main goal was to exact revenge on Poland, a goal that the boyars did not share. At his urging in 1632 Russia tried to retake Smolensk by relying on mercenary regiments hired in Western Europe. The war was a disaster and in 1633 Filaret died, allowing the tsar and the boyars to end the war. Tsar Michael, now ruling without his father’s supervision, turned to other matters.
The restoration of order and peace allowed the countryside to recover, and by Michael’s death, most of the damage from the Troubles had been repaired. The great accomplishment of the reign was the construction of several lines of forts at the main river fords and on the hills along the southern frontier. In the woods between the forts, workmen felled trees and left them in a tangle to keep out the Tatar cavalry. The defenses were a huge undertaking running over a thousand miles from the Polish border to the Urals. The purpose was to keep out the Tatar raiders, and it worked well enough to allow the peasantry and gentry to move south, for the first time farming the rich black earth of the steppe in large numbers. The tsar gave land to the settler-soldiers to maintain the line of fortifications. A whole society of petty gentry and peasant-soldiers grew up along the line of forts, and beyond the new line, out in the steppe facing the Tatars, were the Cossacks along the southern rivers, the Don, the Volga, and the Iaik farther east. A hundred years after Ivan the Terrible’s conquests, the southern steppe finally began to add to Russia’s wealth and power.
The seventeenth century was also the first full century of serfdom, yet Russia’s agriculture and population rapidly recovered from the Troubles and trade boomed. The resettlement of areas devastated by the Troubles brought agriculture back to feed an expanding population, and over the century, in spite of a general European rise in prices and growing demand, food prices in Russia remained virtually static. We know little about the life of the Russian peasant in this century beyond these larger facts, but it seems that the village community known from later times had taken final form by the end of the century. The peasants held the land from their lords as a village, and themselves managed the distribution of land among households. Craft production grew and spread, not only in the towns but even in the villages, and at the end of the century men who were peasant serfs in legal status began to enter the ranks of the merchants and entrepreneurs. Siberia came under as effective Russian control as it ever would, and its border with China was defined by treaty in 1689 to run along the Amur river. Every year a caravan of Chinese goods that was modest in extent came to Moscow, but over the years the annual trade brought profit to merchants and tsars alike.
The growth of population, commerce, and the state meant that Moscow swiftly became a major city. By the middle of the seventeenth century it contained within its walls perhaps one hundred thousand inhabitants. Half of these Muscovites were part of the army or the palace complex: the soldiers of the elite regiments of musketeers (some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) and their families, and the servants and dependents of the tsar’s household. These palace servants formed whole neighborhoods that supplied the tsar with cloth and silverware, took care of his hundreds of horses, and cooked the food for his giant banquets. Several thousand Muscovites were the bond servants of the great aristocrats, the richest of whom by 1650 had several hundred in their Moscow houses. The other half of the city’s population were the true urban population, the great merchants and innumerable artisans of all types, along with clergy, wage laborers, beggars, and all the variety of folk that peopled a great city. All of them lived on narrow winding streets lined with wooden houses that made the city vulnerable to frequent fires. Only the more important churches were stone, and only boyars and a few great officials or merchants built houses of stone or brick. These larger houses were set deep in courtyards surrounded by high wooden fences and jammed with stables and storehouses filled with food and drink brought from the country by the master’s serfs. Boyars built their houses according to traditional Russian form, not European architectural norms, and divided them into separate women’s and men’s quarters.
Outside the city walls to the northeast was a whole settlement of foreigners, the “German suburb” that was composed of merchants, mercenary officers, and the many others who supplied their needs. Established in 1652 on the initiative of the church, which feared foreign corruption, the German suburb was a small replica of northern Europe, with a brick Lutheran church with a pointed spire and regular streets with brick houses, taverns, and a school. The “Germans” (who included also Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Scots) were the most numerous of the foreigners, ultimately to be the most important, but Moscow was a rather cosmopolitan city. Ukrainian monks and priests found homes in Moscow’s churches and monasteries, bringing a new variant of Orthodoxy to Russia. The Greeks also had their own monastery, and Greek merchants mixed with Armenians and Georgians from the Caucasus. More exotic peoples came from the southern borders and farther east: Circassians serving the tsar, Kalmuks and Bashkirs bringing huge masses of horses every year to sell, Tatars of all sorts, and even “Tadzhiks,” the merchants from Khiva and Bukhara in far-off Central Asia.
Economic prosperity went hand in hand with the recovery and development of the state. By the end of the century several hundred clerks now staffed dozens of offices that tried to administer the vast Russian land. They had developed complex procedures and practices, keeping records of the tsar’s decrees that defined their actions and recording their own decisions on innumerable rolls of paper housed in their archives. Like most early modern states, Russian administration concentrated on the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, and (when needed) on military recruitment. In Russian conditions these were daunting tasks. In order to collect taxes from the peasants, Moscow attempted to discover and record how much land each peasant household had and how good it was. The central authorities had the resources to survey the population for tax purposes every fifteen or twenty years at best, and then not in the most efficient of ways. Given the paucity of local administrators, Moscow sent its officials to a few district centers and relied on the gentry and village elders to provide them with information about each village and household. Obviously everyone, landholder and peasant alike, had an interest in underreporting assets, and the officials could check on them only in the most obvious cases of evasion. Again it was the village elders who actually brought in the taxes, many of which were still paid in kind. The only sure source of revenue was the sales tax and the tsar’s monopoly on the sale of vodka and other alcoholic drinks, sure because it was collected in towns and markets and was often farmed out to merchants and other entrepreneurs.
The attempts to administer justice were no easier. Russia before Peter was not a lawless land of arbitrary rule as later liberals often portrayed it. Indeed the officials of the Moscow offices who administered justice erred as much or more by legal pedantry than arbitrariness. They followed the Law Code of 1649, and indeed the Code circulated in the provinces as well, among officials and gentry alike. The greatest problem was that the Moscow offices (and then the tsar) were the only real courts for most cases, with provincial governors and officials often acting more as investigators than judges. The life of these governors was not easy, and in the investigation of criminal cases they and their few subordinates relied largely on polling the neighbors of the accused and the victim, in order to find evidence. Provincial governors were required to rule areas the size of small European countries with a handful of assistants and no effective armed force. Only on the distant borders did Moscow send out enough men and soldiers to run things effectively and maintain order. Local governors and central offices tried to provide a court of first instance for disputes over land ownership and decisions regarding major crimes, but the lack of officials outside of Moscow and a few provincial capitals on the borders forced the government to rely on the cooperation of local inhabitants, which lead to mixed results. Even with extra manpower, the far borders were still difficult to control, often with disastrous consequences.