If in the west Moscow had managed to stabilise the situation, then in the east and south its policy was more active and aggressive. One of Russia's main foreign-policy successes under Boris Godunov was the final consolidation of its control over Siberia. After the death of Ermak Siberia had again come under the power of the local khans. At the beginning of 1586 government forces headed by the commander V B. Sukin were sent beyond the Urals. The Russian generals did not engage solely in military actions and organised the construction of a whole network of fortified towns in Siberia. In 1588 the Siberian khan Seid-Akhmat was taken prisoner, and ten years later the Russian generals routed the horde of Khan Kuchum. At the end of the sixteenth century the vast and wealthy territory of Siberia became an integral part of the Russian state (see Map 11.1).
Russia's position on the Volga was considerably strengthened. In the 1580s and 1590s a number of new towns were built - Ufa, Samara, Tsaritsyn, Saratov and others. The consolidation of Russian influence on the Volga led the khans of the Great Nogai Horde to recognise the power of the Muscovite sovereigns. An entire system of fortified towns (Voronezh, Livny, Elets, Kursk, Belgorod, Kromy, Oskol, Valuiki and Tsarev Borisov) was also built on the 'Crimean frontier'. The borders ofthe state were extended much further south. The international situation was favourable for Russia's southward expansion. The Crimean Horde had been drawn into numerous wars on the side of Turkey against Persia, the Habsburgs and the Rzeczpospolita, and it did not have
sufficient forces to undertake any major campaign against Rus'. Only on one occasion in the combined period of Godunov's regency and reign did the Crimeans manage to penetrate far into the Russian interior. In the summer of 1591 Khan Kazy-Girey came as far as Moscow with a large army. But having encountered a substantial Russian force blocking his advance, he decided not to risk the main body of his troops in battle, and was obliged to retreat.
The period of Boris Godunov's regency marked an important stage in the development of cultural contacts with the countries of Western Europe. Godunov was keen to recruit foreign specialists into Russian service. Seventeenth-century Russian writers even accused him of excessive fondness for foreigners. Boris himself had not had the opportunity to receive a systematic 'book-learning' education in his youth, but he gave his son Fedor a good education. Endowed with a lively and practical mind, Boris Godunov was no stranger to European enlightenment and he cherished plans to introduce European-style schools into Russia. In order to train up an educated elite, he sent groups of young people - the sons of noblemen and officials - to be educated abroad.
Overcoming the economic collapse and the acute social crisis was a task of primary importance and complexity. The central problem of internal policy at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries was to satisfy the economic interests of the noble servicemen (at that time the cavalry, comprising the service-tenure nobility, constituted the fighting core of the Russian army). In the first year of the reign of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (on 20 July 1584) the government got the Church councilto approve a resolution which confirmed a previous decision of 1580 forbidding land bequests to monasteries, and introduced an important new point abolishing the tax privileges (tarkhany) of large-scale ecclesiastical and secular landowners.[16] Encountering opposition from the Church authorities, however, Boris Godunov's government chose not to go for the complete abolition of the tarkhany and restricted itself to the adoption of Ivan Groznyi's practice of the 1580s of collecting extraordinary taxes from 'tax-exempt' lands. The act of 1584 legalised this practice. The council's resolution forbidding land bequests to monasteries was also put into practice in an inconsistent way. In the sources we find numerous cases of the violation of this law.[17] The measures of the 1580s and 1590s did not halt the growth of monastery landownership and did not fundamentally eliminate the tax privileges of the large landowners. They did not really guarantee either the uniformity of taxation or the creation of a supplementary fund of land for allocation as service estates. Moreover, the government continued to make extensive land grants to monasteries and to prominent boyars. Not wanting to quarrel with the influential clergy, Godunov's government tried to minimise its concessions to the nobility at the expense of the monasteries.
The most important measure designed to satisfy the interests of the nobility was the issuing and implementation of laws about the enserfment of the peasants. Boris Godunov's government at first continued the practice of the so-called 'forbidden years', which had been introduced in Ivan Groznyi's reign at the beginning of the 1580s ('forbidden years' were years in which peasants were deprived of their traditional right to leave their landlords on St George's Day). In the 1580s and 1590s a district land census was undertaken. However, the land census of the end of the sixteenth century did not have such a comprehensive character as is usually assumed. The absence of complete up-to-date surveys of many regions delayed the process of peasant enserfment. The practice of 'forbidden years' was not in itself sufficiently effective to retain the peasant population in place. It contained a number of contradictions. On the one hand, the landowner had the right to search for his peasants throughout the entire period of operation of the 'forbidden years', and the duration of the search period was not stipulated; on the other, the regime of 'forbidden years' was regarded as a temporary measure - 'until the sovereign's decree'. In addition, the 'forbidden years' were not introduced simultaneously across the whole territory of the country, and this introduced further confusion into judicial transactions. After 1592 the term, 'forbidden years', disappears from the sources. V I. Koretskii expressed the opinion that in 1592/3 a single all-Russian law forbidding peasant movement was introduced.[18] But other scholars have expressed serious doubts as to whether such a major law of enserfment existed.[19] Great interest has been aroused by documents discovered by Koretskii which contain information about the introduction at the beginning of the 1590s of a five-year limit on the presentation of petitions about abducted peasants. By establishing a definite five-year limit for the return of peasants the government was trying to introduce some kind of order into the extremely confused relationships among landowners in the issue of peasant ownership. The new practice annulled the old system of 'forbidden years' and negated the significance of the district land-survey, which remained incomplete in the 1580s and early 1590s, although it had arisen out of the recognition of the fact of the prohibition of peasant transfers. The policies of the early 1590s described above were developed further in a decree of 24 November 1597, which is the earliest surviving law on peasant enserfment. According to this decree, in the course of a five-year period fugitive and abducted peasants were subject to search and return to their former owners, but after the expiry of these five 'fixed' years they were bound to their new owners. The introduction of the norm of a five-year search period for peasants was advantageous primarily for the large-scale and privileged landowners, who had greater opportunities to lure peasants and to conceal them on their estates.
Alongside these measures relating to the enserfment of the peasants, legislation was enacted at the end of the sixteenth century concerning slaves. The most important law on slavery was the code (Ulozhenie) of 1 February 1597 which required the compulsory registration of the names of slaves in special bondage books. According to the code of 1597 debt-slaves (kabal'nye liudi) were deprived of the right to obtain their freedom by paying off their debt, and were obliged to remain in a situation of dependency until the death of their master. The law prescribed that deeds of servitude (sluzhilye kabaly) should be taken from 'free people' who served their master for more than six months, thereby turning them into bond-slaves. Thus slave-owners acquired the possibility of enslaving a significant number of'voluntary servants', and thereby compensating significantly for the labour shortage.
17
S. B. Veselovskii,
18
VI. Koretskii,
19
V M. Paneiakh, 'Zakreposhchenie krest'ian v XVI v.: novye materialy, kontseptsii, per- spektivy izucheniia (po povoduknigi V I. Koretskogo)',
99-I29.