The Moscow-based sovereign’s court became increasingly high born in the aftermath of the oprichnina and Ivan IVs death when the many low-born families that Ivan IV had patronized in the dvor were relegated to provincial service, while the highborn families who had served in the oprichnina or the regular government (zemshchina) remained in Moscow. Socially, the impact of sixteenth-century policy was not to destroy a ‘feudal’ élite or raise up ‘new men’, as has been often held, but rather to consolidate the landed military élite in the centre into Moscow-based and regional ‘corporations’, divided by status, wealth, and duties.
One reason that the grand princes assiduously cultivated regional solidarities is that they came to use such communities for local administration. Traditionally, Muscovy had ruled through governors (namestniki) in the larger centres and local officials (volosteli) in smaller communities who collected taxes and administered the lands and, in return, received kormlenie (‘feeding’, i.e. material support) from the local populace. Starting in Ivan III’s time, however, the state began to create specialized officers to collect specific taxes and duties—for example, officials to collect taxes for urban fortifications. In the late 1530s the state gave authority over local law and order to ‘brigandage elders’, who were elected by local communities; in the mid-1550s it gave tax-collection authority to boards of taxpayers—peasants or townsmen—elected by their communes. In the centre governors were in effect abolished. The result was not only better local government and higher revenues but also the strengthening of community solidarities in many parts of the realm. In the centre and northwest, landlords became a pillar of the tsar’s administration. They ran the brigandage system and oversaw tax-collection by peasant communes. In the north communal organization was the beneficiary; communes took on all these roles in the absence of gentry to do brigandage work. The work of overseeing was provided by chancery offices in Moscow. The oprichnina and other economic and political dislocations of the 1560s-80s, however, dealt a harsh blow to gentry and to peasant communes in the centre and north-west, and going into the seventeenth century the principle of local representation in governance, except in the north, was severely compromised. A system of governors returned, but the social solidarity of regional gentry communities endured into the seventeenth century.
Many places in the realm, however, stayed outside these administrative reforms and their attendant social impact. As we saw in the Smolensk lands, for example, the indigenous élite retained privileges and social structures of the grand duchy of Lithuania. In non-East Slav areas—western Siberia, the middle Volga, the tundra reaches of the Lapps and Nentsy—the Russians maintained a traditional tribute system (iasak), paid in furs, other goods, and some services and collected by local élites and communities. Where local forces were lacking, Moscow sent specially appointed officials (danshchiki) to collect the annual payment and otherwise left the status quo untouched. (The iasak was phased out as the basis of taxation in Siberia only between 1822 and 1917.) Similarly in major cities on strategic borders (Novgorod, Pskov, Kazan, Astrakhan, Tomsk) governors exercised overall authority, since there was little social basis here for local fiscal or criminal administration. At the same time numerous servitor units stationed here, such as Cossacks, Streltsy (musketeers), and ‘privileged hetman’ (belomestnye atamany), enjoyed autonomies and communal landholdings as regimental units and ran their own affairs collectively.
Not surprisingly, Muscovy did not constitute a uniform legal community. Many legal codes served these various communities. Ecclesiastical law codes came to the Rus lands from Byzantium. The most significant compendium, known as the ‘Rudder’ (kormchaia kniga), was a collection of Byzantine secular and ecclesiastical codes. For day-to-day affairs communes and landlords apparently used the Russkaia pravda, a compendium of customary law from the Kievan era that still circulated in Muscovite lands (a new redaction was even compiled in the early seventeenth century). The grand princes and boyar council promulgated three law codes (1497, 1550, 1589) as procedural handbooks for judges. The 1589 edition was suited to the social structure and economic patterns of the north; contemporary sources also refer to separate law codes in use for the Perm lands (zyrianskii sudebnik).
Such administrative eclecticism strengthened the state, creating quasi-bureaucratic organs that freed grand princes to concentrate on those few issues they considered their own: supreme judicial authority, foreign policy, the army and defence, and above all the mobilization and exploitation of resources. It was a minimalist state, run by the ruler, his counsellors, and a household-based bureaucracy reminiscent of the Carolingian court. Until the mid-sixteenth century the work of the fisc, foreign policy, and the mustering of troops constituted the provenance of two general offices, the treasury, and the court (in the sense of household, not judiciary). By the 1560s, the term prikaz (chancery) was used to denote the many new offices that were being established to meet new needs (the Brigandange, Slavery, and Streltsy Chanceries, for example) or to separate out specific functions (Military Service, Service Land, Foreign Affairs, Postal System Chanceries). By the end of the century there were approximately twenty-four chanceries, a system that was efficient but eclectic and irrational by modern, Weberian standards. No single principle governed the organization and jurisdiction of chanceries. Some had responsibility for a particular social group (the military élite, foreigners); others exercised one function over the entire realm (Fortifications, Slavery, Criminal Chanceries), or had total authority over a particular territory (the Kazan Chancery). Initially led by secretaries, from the time of Boris Godunov boyars ran more and more chanceries, presaging the transformation of the military élite into the ‘noble official’ class that has been chronicled for the seventeenth century.
No less important to the sixteenth-century state than the expansion of the army was the mobilization of wealth. That impelled a new fiscal strategy in 1551—elimination of the tax immunities traditionally enjoyed by lay and ecclesiastical landholders. But the government was inconsistent, issuing new immunities in times of political turbulence (1530s-40s, 1560s-70s, 1590s). At mid-century the state commuted taxes from payment in kind and services to cash, changed the tax assessment unit in the centre, raised existing taxes (especially for the postal system), and introduced new ones. The tribute-bearing peoples of Siberia and the middle Volga also filled Moscow’s coffers, as did a tax on any furs brought to market from Siberia by Russian traders. Income from the tsar’s monopolies such as salt and alcohol production (analogous to medieval European kings’ monopolies or regalia) was also significant and the state aggressively patronized entrepreneurs, whether Russian (the Stroganovs) or foreign (the English Muscovy company received a charter of trade privileges c .1555). Trade through the White Sea with the British and Dutch grew to great proportions in the second half of the century.
But the government’s drive to mobilize eventually blew up in its face. Taxes rose precipitously in the sixteenth century, exceeding the parallel inflationary rise of the century. It has been calculated that taxes rose 55 per cent from 1536 to 1545, another 286 per cent (with commutations to cash) from 1552 to 1556, another 60 per cent in the 1560s, and another 41 per cent in the 1570s before they began a steady decrease in the face of economic distress. At the same time in the 1560s and 1570s the north-west and centre experienced great disruptions from the oprichnina, Livonian War, and natural disasters that included plague, crop failure, and famine. Petty landlords responded by squeezing their peasants for more income, while larger landholders lured peasants to their lands with loans and tax breaks. They also began to consolidate their holdings into demesnes and to extract labour services, two to three days per week by the end of the century on much secular land. Trying to shelter the landed élite, the state ended taxation on landlord’s demesne in the 1580s, shifting the tax burden all the more to peasants. In response the average peasant plot decreased: at the beginning of the century many peasant holdings were the equivalent of a man-sus (in Russian, vyt, that is, the unit of land considered sufficient to support a peasant family). But from the 1570s most holdings ranged between just one-half to one-eighth of a vyt.