On 13 April 1605, at the height of the war against the pretender, Tsar Boris Godunov died suddenly. His son, Tsarevich Fedor, was named as his successor. But in the inexperienced hands of Boris's young heir the wheel of government began to spin out of control. In the final days of his reign Boris Godunov placed great hopes on his talented and ambitious general P. F. Basmanov. But when drawing up the new service register after Boris's death, the influential courtier and boyar Semen Nikitich Godunov appointed his own son-in-law Prince A. A. Teliatevskii 'above' Basmanov, which provoked an angry protest from the latter and led him to betray the Godunovs. But it was not boyar treason, but the stance adopted by the numerous detachments of servicemen from the southern towns (Riazan', Tula, etc.) that had the decisive influence on the course of events. After the defection of the army at Kromy to the pretender in May 1605, the fate of the Godunov dynasty was sealed. On 1 June 1605 supporters of the False Dmitrii instigated an uprising in Moscow which led to the overthrow of the Godunovs. A few days later, on 10 June, the young Tsar Fedor Borisovich and Boris's widow, Tsaritsa Mariia Grigor'evna, were killed by a group of men, headed by Prince V V Golitsyn, who had been specially sent by the False Dmitrii; Boris's daughter, Tsarevna Kseniia, was confined in a convent. Thus the dynasty that Boris Godunov had founded came to a tragic end. The devastating and bloody Time of Troubles had begun.
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The tempestuous events of the Time of Troubles have to a considerable extent diverted the attention of historians from the significance of Boris Godunov's reformist activity. It is important to bear in mind that thanks to Godunov's efforts Russia enjoyed a twenty-year period of peace at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. In place of exhausting wars and the bacchanalia of the oprichnina there was a period of political stability and a partial economic boom. The country's international prestige was strengthened. The period also witnessed such significant events for the future of the country as the establishment of the patriarchate and the definitive annexation of Siberia. Boris Godunov's policy for consolidating the ruling elite of the service class around the throne had far-reaching consequences. It was under Boris Godunov that the future direction of Russia's political development was largely determined, and the specific features of the state structure were established, in which strong autocratic power coexisted and co-operated with the boyar service aristocracy. Yielding to the demands of the broad mass of the service class, Godunov continued the policy of enserfment of the peasantry. But his policy possessed little consistency. The dissatisfaction of the numerous lower classes and also of the petty servicemen, whose interests had had to be sacrificed by Boris Godunov's government, led in the end to civil war and a Time of Troubles in Russia.
Translated by Maureen Perrie
The peasantry
RICHARD HELLIE
Peasant farming and material culture
One way to focus sharply on this topic is to compare the situation of the Russian peasant with that of the American farmer. The American farmer was a completely free man who lived in his own house with his family on an isolated farmstead/homesteadthat belonged to him. The stove in his log cabin vented outside through a chimney and he owned everything in his cabin. Because land was free, he could farm as much land as his physical capacity permitted. His land was comparatively rich and harvests were relatively abundant. He was able to accumulate and store wealth in many forms: grain, cattle, material possessions and cash. Typically he had no landlord and was solely responsible for his own taxes. In contrast, by the end of this period the Russian peasant was for most practical purposes enserfed (see Chapters 16 and 23) and he lived in a village and farmed land that was not his own. Although he may have believed that the land was his, in fact the state believed that the land belonged to it and could be confiscated for a monastery, other Church institution or a private landholder/owner who was in full-time state military or civil service employ.[42]His hut was roughly the same size as the American's log cabin, and it was built in roughly the same way: notched logs stacked on top of one another and chinked with moss and/or clay. The Russian peasant's land, although abundant, was of poor quality and the crop yields were extraordinarily low. As will be described further below, the interior of the Russian peasant's hut was considerably different from that of his American counterpart. Russian livestock, work implements, and crops were significantly different from the
American. For climatological and socio-political reasons, the Russian peasant found it difficult to accumulate wealth, and the collective system of taxation made it dangerous for one peasant to appear more prosperous than another. Lastly, the dress of the Russian peasant was different from that of the American farmer.
During the time period covered by this chapter the area inhabited by the Russian peasant expanded enormously, as detailed in Chapters 9,10 and 11. In brief, in 1462 the Russian peasant inhabited the area between Pskov in the west and Nizhnii Novgorod in the east, the Oka River in the south and the Volga River in the north. By 1613 Russian habitation had moved well across the Volga and the Urals into Siberia in the east, down the Volga to Astrakhan' in the south and also some distance south of the Oka, and finally north of the Volga all the way to the White Sea. Most of this area provided crucial constraints on peasant agriculture and material life that could not be overcome. The frost- free period began around the middle of May and ended towards the end of September, which provided a short frost-free growing season of 120 days or so.2 Snow covered the ground nearly half the year.3 Not only was the growing season short, but the soil throughout most of the area was thin (7.5 cm thick), acidic podzol with very little (1 to 4 per cent) humus.4
These factors dictated that rye was by far the predominant cereal crop, whose yields were extraordinarily low: the Russians were lucky to harvest three seeds for each one sown. The yields for oats were even lower. In the West those were pre-Carolingian yields, which had risen to 6 :1 by the end of the fifteenth century. The low Russian yields were to a major extent the result of downward selection: instead of saving and sowing the biggest seeds, the Russians used those to pay rent and taxes, and planted either the smallest seeds or the middle- sized ones, and ate the others. As wheat was rarely grown in this period, winter rye was the most important grain crop because it escaped the limitations of the short growing season.5 (It was planted in the autumn, germinated before snowfall, and was harvested in the summer.) Oats were grown for human consumption, but primarily for the horses. Nearly as much land was devoted to cultivating oats as rye.6 Barley and wheat were also occasionally grown. The
2 I. A. Gol'tsberg (ed.), Agroklimaticheskii atlas mira (Moscow and Leningrad: Gidrome- teoizdat, 1972), pp. 41, 48, 55.
3 Ibid., p. 105.
4 V K. Mesiats (ed.), Sel'sko-khoziaistvennyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), p. 403; A. I. Tulupnikov (ed.), Atlas sel'skogo khoziaistva SSSR (Moscow: GUGK, 1960), p. 8.
5 V D. Kobylianskii (ed.), Rozh' (Leningrad: Agropromizdat, 1989), p. 259 etpassim.
6 A. L. Shapiro et al., Agrarnaia istoriiasevero-zapadaRossii. VtoraiapolovinaXV-nachalo XVI v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1971), pp. 39, 44, 249.
42
A. D. Gorskii,