The Muscovite period in Russian history was a time of expanding territory and government power. The kingdom grew from an estimated 300,000 square miles when Ivan III took the throne in 1462 to 5.6 million when Peter I was crowned in 1682.1 Governing this extensive territory required the rulers to enlarge the rudimentary bureaucracies they had inherited from the Appanage princes. Their government, small by today’s standards, grew sufficiently to achieve the tsars’ goals—expanding and defending the realm, maintaining the monarch in power, keeping the peace, collecting taxes, paying bills, and making money from trade. Few European governments of the time attempted more.
The tsars’ servitors consisted of nobles, who staffed the military and advised the crown, and civil servants drawn from the clergy and merchantry. To keep these men working effectively together, the monarchs had to cultivate the support of the great boyar families while also attending to the needs of the minor nobility, the church, and the richer townsfolk. “Politics was the personal interplay of elite men, women, and families,” Nancy Kollmann has written, “and was shaped by factors such as self-interest, personal charisma, respect for tradition, loyalty to family, and the obligations of honor and dependency.”2 It was a complicated game played by everyone with power, female and male.
From the 1460s to the 1560s, the tsars managed the game quite well. Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) and his son Vasili III (ruled 1505–33) brought under Moscow’s control much of the land that had been in the Kievan confederation. They also prevailed in power struggles with their own siblings, in the process instituting primogeniture to regulate succession to the throne. The economy grew at a healthy pace, particularly in the 1490s. A bloody power struggle marked the childhood of Vasili’s son Ivan IV, but when the young tsar began to rule in the late 1540s, he proved to be an intelligent, hard-working reformer.
Unfortunately Ivan spoiled many of his own accomplishments after 1560, when he earned the sobriquet “the Terrible” by turning rapacious and paranoid. His attacks on real and imagined enemies, domestic and foreign, decimated the ruling class, severely weakened the economy, and ushered in decades of political instability. The tsar even killed his heir apparent, an act that resulted in the crown’s passing, on Ivan’s death in 1584, to a mentally incompetent son, Fedor. A de facto regency ensued under the able boyar Boris Godunov, but when, after the death of Fedor in 1598, Godunov made himself tsar, the social bonds that held together Muscovy’s diverse peoples frayed. From 1598 to 1613, a period known as “the Time of Troubles,” the poor rose up against the rich, factions of the rich attacked one another, and the Polish king Zygmunt, eager to take advantage of Muscovy’s weakness, sent troops supporting pretenders to the throne. Peace finally came when an assembly of nobles, merchants, Cossacks, and a few peasants elected a new tsar, Michael Romanov, the first link in a dynastic chain that would stretch into the twentieth century.3
Michael (ruled 1613–45) and his son Alexis (ruled 1645–76) strengthened government, modernized the military, increased trade with the rest of Europe, resumed territorial expansion, and completed the legalization of serfdom. From the late fifteenth century onward, the government had tried to limit the peasants’ right to leave the service of their landlords, in order to guarantee the nobles a stable labor force. It issued laws requiring that people pay their debts before moving away, then restricted the time of year that people could move. Still the peasants fled, sometimes to newly conquered territories, sometimes to the land of a noble who had made them a better offer than their current overlord. The government’s efforts to tie the peasants down culminated in the Ulozhenie of 1649, a law code that included provisions binding peasants to the estates on which they resided for the rest of their lives. Their descendants were to inherit this bondage. Limitations were also put on the peasants’ property rights and access to the court system. Monarchs across Eastern Europe were following the same course in the seventeenth century, decreeing serfdom at the behest of their nobilities even as the institution was fading away in Western Europe. Because the Ulozhenie ratified an enserfment that already existed de facto for most peasants, it did little to change their everyday lives. That would happen in the eighteenth century, when the landlords began to assert greater control over the people who worked their lands.
The Lives of Poor Women
Before and after the legalization of serfdom, peasant women in Muscovy lived much as their ancestors had. Girls did chores and took care of younger children. After marrying in their teens, they moved into wooden cabins with their husbands or, more often by the 1680s, into their in-laws’ homes. Extended families living together lessened the taxes, which were assessed on households. Women did the lighter gardening work, tended small livestock, prepared and preserved food, and made clothes from linen and wool they grew themselves. Younger ones did all this work while pregnant or nursing, for the babies came along regularly every few years so long as the mothers’ health held out.
The patriarchal values according to which peasant women lived were very similar to those described by the author of The Domostroi. Senior men and women in peasant families were authoritative figures, who had the lifelong right to command the junior members of their families. Wives were supposed to submit to their husbands, fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, and other senior women and men in the village, and men were encouraged to beat wives to keep them compliant. “A wife isn’t a jug,” the peasants said. “She won’t crack if you hit her a few.”4
Russian proverbs, some of which date back to Rus times and most of which probably originated among the peasants, also suggest that wives did not always conform to the patriarchal ideal. “It’s easier to manage a sack full of fleas than one woman,” one complained. Another observed that “the wife rules the husband not with a stick, but with a temper.” An awful fate awaited those who succumbed to wifely domination: “A crab is not a fish; a bat is not a bird; and a hen-pecked husband is not a man.”
There are enough such laments over the difficulties of controlling women to indicate that those difficulties were not uncommon. And there are also a few proverbs that comment on marriage from a woman’s point of view, thereby suggesting that women had their own opinions of husbands’ power. “A wife is not an instrument you can hang on the wall when you’re tired of playing on it,” one asserted. Another observed, slyly, “Even a foolish wife won’t tell her husband the truth.” A third commented on men’s complaints about women: “If only one evil woman lived on earth, every man would claim she was his wife.”
Peasant women did more than toil, obey, and talk back. They brightened their lives by singing lullabies to their children and telling them stories about clever boys, good girls, and wicked things that lurked in wild places. They embroidered blouses and icon cloths in the winter, when the fields were frozen. On holidays, they celebrated with feasting, drinking, songs, and dancing. Older women policed the behavior of younger ones and helped them birth their babies. All women, under the tutelage of the old ones, tended the sick and taught each other spells to attract a husband, cure diseases, foretell the future, and ward off the demons that they believed to be lying in wait to harm them. When someone died, women gathered to wash and dress the body, and then sat up all night to mark the passing. Many of the dead were children, especially when epidemics swept through the countryside. At such times women comforted one another with the reminder that their babies had gone on to a better place in heaven. Life on this earth, they believed with good reason, was all too often grueling, uncertain, even cruel.