Since Novgorodian times the dominant social and political organization among East Slavs and the Finno-Ugric population in the taiga lands from Karelia to Perm was the commune (mir, volost), composed of what contemporary sources call the ‘black’ or taxed peasants who were subject to the tsar directly and not subordinate to landlords as well. (Among native peoples of the Urals and western Siberia, however, Russia did not impose communal organization.) Northern communes differed from the nineteenth-century Russian peasant commune where land and labour were collectively shared. These were fiscal entities, territorial groupings of Slavs or non-Slavs for purposes of local administration and taxation. Nor is the term ‘peasant’ particularly appropriate for this populace. Members of communes were not primarily farmers, even the East Slavs among them, but were fishers, bee-keepers, traders, hunters, trappers, and artisans.
Straddling the border between the north and the centre were the Novgorod and Pskov lands to the north-west and the Beloozero and Vologda area north of Moscow. The north-west, including Novgorod and its five contiguous ‘fifths’ (piatiny), and Pskov and its environs, remained a centre of Baltic trade in the sixteenth century, and also supported at least a subsistence level of agriculture and relatively dense population. The Beloozero and Vologda areas lay on active trade routes to the White Sea and were productive centres for fish, salt, and furs. In these various lands the Russian population outnumbered Finno-Ugric speakers by the end of the century. Novgorod and Pskov had long been centres of Christianity and the Beloozero and Vologda areas became, from the mid-fifteenth century, magnets of energetic monastic colonization. Monasteries such as the St Cyril and Ferapontov monasteries near Beloozero, the Spaso-Prilutskii in Vologda, and the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea—expanded by taking over settled peasant lands and in the course of the sixteenth century became major local political and economic powers.
Although part of the Muscovite realm from the late 1400s, the north and north-west remained distinct as regions. When Moscow adopted at mid-century a new tax unit for arable land (the large sokha), for example, these areas retained the smaller, Novgorodian unit of measure. Similarly, surviving coin hoards from the second half of the century show a distinct split in the circulation of coinage between a north-west arena and a Moscow central one. Finally, gentry in the north-west were called upon to serve only within that region.
The centre, or ‘Moscow region’ (Zamoskov’e) in contemporary sources, differed from the north and the southern borderlands by its relative ethnic homogeneity, the economic primacy of agriculture, and the social power of landlords. By the early sixteenth century, the centre stretched from Beloozero and Vologda in the north to the Oka river and Riazan lands in the south; its western bounds were the upper Volga Tver lands and its eastern ones lay just beyond the lower Oka and its confluence with the Volga at Nizhnii Novgorod. An extension of the European plain that begins at the Atlantic, the region has a mixed deciduous-coniferous forest. It shares with Europe a continental climate, but its northerly latitude and distance from warming ocean currents made for harsher conditions. The winters are long (five months of snow cover) and cold (January mean temperature is −10.3°C or 13.5°F) and the growing season commensurately short (four to five months); because the soil was not particularly fertile, save for a triangle of loess north-west of Vladimir, yields were at subsistence level. Animal husbandry was limited by the sparseness of yields and the length of the winter which made provisioning large herds prohibitive; as a result natural fertilizer was inadequate. The populace supplemented its diet with food from the forests (hunting, fishing, berries, nuts, mushrooms) and income from artisan work.
The social structure in the centre was more complex than in the north. Settlement here was almost uniformly East Slavic, the indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples having been assimilated by the sixteenth century. Most of the populace, whether urban or rural, was taxed. Peasants lived in small hamlets (one to four households) and practised cultivation systems ranging from primitive slash-burn to three-field rotations depending upon population density, length of settlement in a region, and other factors. In 1450 most peasants were still free of landlord control, living in communes and paying taxes only to the tsar, but by the end of the sixteenth century virtually all of these ‘black’ peasants had been distributed to private landholders. Like the black peasants, artisans and petty merchants in towns were formed into urban communes (posad), which also paid taxes (here assessed not on arable land but as an annual rent or obrok), sales tax, customs, and other duties.
The non-taxpaying landholding strata were either military or ecclesiastical. The clerical populace was divided into ‘black’ (monks, nuns, and hierarchs—all celibate) and ‘white’ clergy (married parish priests). Church landholding increased at a phenomenal rate after 1450; particularly in the turbulent 1560s–70s landholders donated land in large amounts to monasteries, despite repeated legislation prohibiting such gifts (1551, 1572, 1580, 1584). But the Church’s wealth was unevenly distributed: diocesan episcopates and a handful of major monasteries (for example, St Cyril-Beloozero, Simonov, Trinity-Sergius) had immense holdings by the end of the century, but one-fifth of the monasteries possessed no or fewer than five peasant households, and most parish churches possessed none at all.
Secular landholders were all obliged to serve the Moscow grand prince as a part of a cavalry army. A few select families lived in Moscow and enjoyed hereditary privileges to be boyars, that is, counsellors of the grand prince. The rest of the élite ranged from wealthy, large landholders to rank-and-file cavalrymen (called ‘boyar’s children’ [deti boiarskie]). The landholding élite was not a corporate estate with juridical protection, but it did enjoy freedom from taxation, an almost exclusive claim to landownership and high status.
Over the course of the sixteenth century other social groups developed, primarily in the centre. The tsar’s élite merchants (gosti) were first mentioned in the 1550s; by the 1590s two less prestigious associations of official merchants (the gostinnaia and sukonnaia hundreds) were recorded. Merchants managed the tsar’s monopolies (salt, fur, vodka, and the like) or served as tax farmers, customs collectors, and entrepreneurs. In return they enjoyed the right to hold service tenure and hereditary land and to use the tsar’s own courts instead of local governors’ courts. The highest ranks of the chancery secretaries (d’iaki) could also hold hereditary or service tenure lands and utilize the tsar’s courts. Most worked in Moscow, but a few were stationed in the provinces (in 1611 the relative numbers were 55 and 17). In the second half of the sixteenth century most secretaries came from the lesser cavalry ranks. Situated socially between the taxed and non-taxed populations were non-cavalry army units, and of course there were also people who did not fit in—those who refused to be caught in the webs of landlord’s control or urban taxation: vagrants (guliashchie liudi), minstrels (skomorokhi) so vilified by the Church, holy fools, unemployed sons of priests, defrocked clergy, isolated hermits—in sum, the flotsam characteristic of the social diversity of premodern societies.