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.
All this spelled disaster for peasants and petty gentry, especially in the northwest and centre. Thousands fled to new landlords in the centre or to the relative freedom of the Volga and Kama basins, the Dvina lands, or the southern border. Depopulation was acute: in the mid-1580s only 17 per cent of the land in the Moscow environs was being cultivated, while in the northwest 83 per cent of settlements were deserted. Towns suffered disproportionately: while the populations of urban communes had risen in the first half of the century, posad populations fell by 61 per cent in the 1550s-80s, and then another 45 per cent from the 1580s to the 1610s. In Novgorod in 1582, for example, a census recorded only 122 urban households as occupied and over 1,300 abandoned for such reasons as death of the family (in 76 per cent of the cases) and impoverishment (18 per cent). The economic situation stabilized in the late 1580s, but Russia was plunged again into turmoil by the turn of the century: not only foreign invasion, but crop failure and pestilence accompanied the end of the dynasty in 1598.
Having no other way to support its cavalry, and unwilling to transform this privileged estate into less prestigious contract servitors, the state endeavoured to secure peasant labour for landlords. In 1580 it forbade some peasants to change landlords and in 1592–3 made the ban universal, capping a legislative process that had commenced with restrictions on the peasant’s right to move in the law codes of 1497 and 1550. These ‘forbidden years’ were perceived as temporary but, with the exception of 1601–2, endured thereafter. This incremental enserfment affected most directly the peasants of landlords in the centre, northwest, and steppe frontier, but it also had an impact in the north and Siberia. Cadastres compiled throughout the realm in the 1580s and 1590s served as the basis for registering peasants in communes; they were then forbidden to leave, whether or not they were subject to landlords as well.
Sixteenth-century peasants faced with economic disaster and enserfment had two options. One was to flee to the frontier. Despite decrees beginning in the 1590s that steadily extended the statute of limitations on the recovery of runaway peasants, peasants with the means still had an opportunity to move. For most, however, the older option in hard times—debt slavery—was far more viable. Increasingly in the sixteenth century individuals sold themselves into a limited ‘service-contract’ (kabal’noe) slavery. Slavery offered them not only a loan but also refuge of a lord and freedom from the taxes and services due the state. Understandably, over the course of the sixteenth century, the government sought to regulate hereditary slavery and manumission, to forbid servitors to assume this status (1550), and to limit its duration (1586, 1597).
Mechanisms of Social Integration
The grand princes’ primary goals in the sixteenth century may have been expanding their territory and extracting resources from it, but to do so they needed a minimal degree of social cohesion in the realm as a whole to ensure stability. Their major strategy in this regard, as we have suggested, was to tolerate diversity. Even in contemporaneous Europe, where national realms were small and often ethnically cohesive and where dynasties worked assiduously to create a national unity, the reality was that stability was based not on the ruler’s coercive power but on social traditions of deference to authority and loyalty to community and region. All the more so for Muscovite rulers. They had limited tools of integration and used them judiciously. As in other states, however, they relied on coercion and meted out harsh punishment to disloyal servitors, tax cheats, and rebellious subjects. They were particularly inclined to declare boyars to be in ‘disgrace’ (opala) for brief periods (often a few days) to chasten them and keep them in line. Frequently they tempered the punishments with last-minute reprieves, bestowing their benevolent ‘mercy’ and ‘favour’. They also made abundant use of such harsh punishments as confiscation of property demotion in rank, exile, imprisonment, and execution whenever their authority was challenged. But given the limits of central power in an early modern state, Muscovite tsars relied upon rewards, symbols, and ideas to inculcate loyalty and to disseminate an image of a unified realm. And they put most of their energies into appealing to the élite since its loyalty was crucial to the state’s goals.
Active techniques of integration that touched all society seem to have focused on the Orthodox population. The non-Orthodox (called ‘tribute’ people) generally were neither integrated into the élite (except for the highest clans among them) nor addressed by many of the less tangible institutions of integration. The Church was one of few institutions whose rituals and symbolism reached across the realm; conveniently its teachings legitimated the secular government as appointed by God. The Church and state recognized local holy men as saints on the national or local levels and thus worked to integrate disparate parts of the realm into a putative Orthodox community. Rulers used ritual moments, such as pilgrimages and processions, to demonstrate the ruler’s power, piety, and relationship to his men and people; such moments were often accompanied by the distribution of alms, the founding of new monasteries and chapels, and other overtures to the local community. Ivan IV participated almost incessantly in annual pilgrimages that traversed the centre of the realm; rulers’ ceremonial entrances into conquered cities (see examples in chronicles sub anno 1478, 1552, and 1562) show the tsar both as humble penitent and powerful leader.