The community's attitude towards bribery in the governor's office may have been ambivalent. Much of the time, when bribery worked against their own interests, they would have had cause to decry it; but, as with feeding, there would also have been opportunities to exploit it. Whether bribery damaged or served community interests depended on the structure of the local market for bribe-subornable government services. If the governor and his staff set cheap enough rates for their own subornment and bribes could be tendered at low risk, the bribe economy underwent some democratisation and those of modest means and status could purchase some ofthe favours connected elites enjoyed as a matter of course. Where the risk of bribe-giving was greater and bribe prices were higher, only the wealthier strong men of the community were likely to be able to purchase services - which they might use to prey upon their weaker neighbours. Under some circumstances the community could counter the bribes tendered by local strong men by increasing the value of the community's own collective prestations of kormlenie; otherwise the community's only resort was to petition the central chancelleries for an investigation.
Travel to Moscow to present a petition in person was generally restricted to those given travel passes by the governor; some chancelleries held audiences for petitioners only at Christmas time; and after 1649 it was illegal to bypass the chancelleries by trying to petition the tsar directly. But the centre could not afford to deny its subjects altogether the right to petition against local strong men or malfeasant officials. The tsar owed his subjects some defence against official malfeasance. This was not seen as limiting his autocratic power, but rather as strengthening it, for by eliminating malfeasance by officials who defied his will he reinforced and re-legitimated his power as autocrat and ultimate source of all justice and bounty. This was another indication of the transitional character of the Muscovite state in this period: when techniques of bureaucratic centralisation failed it, it freely reverted to traditional centralisation techniques invoking the personal patriarchal authority of the tsar. Therefore the sovereign's vouchsafe invited subjects to voice complaints against their outgoing governor; governors caught quashing petitions against themselves could be prosecuted for crimes against the tsar; and petitioners charging their governor or his staff with abuses betraying the sovereign's interest (gosudarevo delo) could circumvent their governor and come to Moscow without his pass to petition the chancelleries in person.
Muscovy at war and peace
BRIAN DAYIES
At the end of the sixteenth century Muscovite territory covered about 5.4 million square kilometres and carried a population of about seven million inhabitants. During the Troubles its territory and population probably contracted significantly, for much of the north-west and west fell under Swedish or Polish occupation and Moscow's control over much of the south was contested by rebel cossack bands and the Tatars. But by 1678 Muscovite territory had tripled and its population had recovered and expanded to about 10.5 million
souls.[52]
Much of this territorial expansion had occurred east of the Urals, on land that was sparsely populated and unable to mount much resistance. The real demonstration of revived Muscovite imperial power had been made on the southern steppe frontier and in the south-west and west. Through protracted war, military colonisation and more adroit diplomacy the government of the early Romanov tsars had recovered the lost provinces of Smolensk and Seversk, placed Kiev and eastern Ukraine under protectorate and moved the realm's southern frontier from the forest-steppe zone into the depths of the steppe. In the process two traditional enemies of Muscovite imperial power, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Crimean khanate, found their own military and diplomatic power considerably reduced. Two more powerful challengers, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, had also been fought, but for relatively brief periods and with mixed results (failure to wrest control of the Livonian coast, but success at deterring Ottoman attack on left-bank Ukraine). Recognition that Muscovy was becoming a great power in northern and eastern Europe was apparent in Swedish and Ottoman efforts in the i62os-i63os to enlist her in coalition against the Commonwealth and German Empire and in Polish and Austrian efforts in the 1680s to bring her into the Holy League.
Muscovy's recovery from the humiliating foreign occupations of the Troubles and her emergence as a great power owed a great deal to her ability to learn the art of patience: her greatest gains were won through readiness to wait until the opportune geopolitical moment to exploit her rivals' weaknesses and readiness to devote long-term attention to working out ways to overcome friction in the mobilisation and use of military power.
Recovery and revanche, 1613-34
The first task facing the government of Tsar Michael was to assure its survival. The Swedes still occupied Novgorod and King Gustav II Adolf was bent on occupying north-west Muscovy from Narva down to Pskov, holding Karelia, conquering the White Sea coast as far as Archangel, and placing his brother Karl Filip on the Moscow throne. Cossack insurgencies remained a threat: although Zarutskii's cossack army was destroyed on the lower Volga in 1614, a new cossack army under Balovnia had just appeared in Pomor'e. The Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth still presented a mortal danger; Sigismund III held to his plan of driving on Moscow to place his son Wladyslaw on the throne, and a Polish army under Chodkiewicz and Wladyslaw stood ready for this purpose at Smolensk. Lisowski's force of cossacks and Polish and foreign mercenary freebooters engaged Muscovite armies at Orel and Kaluga.
Fortunately Gustav Adolf's long siege of Pskov had failed by early 1616 and with the encouragement of Dutch and English diplomats he began to shift his attention to a project for war against the Commonwealth that would assist the Protestant cause of weakening Habsburg power in Central Europe. Peace talks mediated by John Merrick finally produced a Russo-Swedish peace treaty at Stolbovo in February 1617. By its terms Gustav Adolf abandoned Novgorod and restored it and Staraia Rusa, Porkhov and Sumersk canton to the tsar; in return the tsar ceded him Korela, Kopor'e, Oreshek, Iam and Ivangorod, thereby surrendering direct trade access to the Baltic. Sweden now controlled the Baltic coast from Livonia to Finland.[53]
In the early autumn of 1618 the Poles made their assault upon Moscow. The army of Chodkiewicz and Wladyslaw advanced upon Moscow from Mozhaisk while a second army of Ukrainian cossacks under Sahaidachnyi moved up from the south. They were beaten back from the gates of Moscow in September, but fears that they would attack again brought Tsar Michael's government to sue for truce. In December 1618 a fourteen-year armistice was signed at Deulino. This treaty's terms were even harsher for Muscovy: the western Rus' territories of Smolensk, Chernigov and most of Seversk - holding about thirty towns in all - were ceded to the Commonwealth, bringing its frontier as far east as Viaz'ma, Rzhev and Kaluga (Russia's western borders in 1618 are shown in Map 21.1). Wladyslaw also maintained his claim to the Muscovite throne.[54]
The Stolbovo and Deulino treaties at least bought Muscovy time for reconstruction and rearmament. Muscovy's reconstruction occurred in two stages. In the first stage (1613-18) the boyar duma worked with the Assembly of the Land to restore basic order by re-establishing chancellery control over the town governors, appointing town governors to districts which had not had them before, suppressing banditry in the provinces, co-opting cossack bands, pressuring communities to resubmit to taxation and militia levies and imposing extraordinary taxes to raise revenue for further reconstruction. The second phase (1619-30) proceeded under the leadership of the young tsar's powerful father Patriarch Filaret (F. N. Romanov), newly returned from nine years' captivity in Poland; it devoted further effort to these tasks while also attempting to repair and improve resource mobilisation for war. Filaret's administration gave priority to repopulating state lands and posad communes with taxpayers, updating cadastres and restoring accounting for arrears and future regular taxes, issuing commercial privileges to European merchants and restoring chancellery control over the distribution of service lands and service salaries. In both stages there were also unsuccessful attempts to secure large loans from England, the Netherlands, Denmark and Persia in exchange for free transit trade rights.
52
Ia. E. Vodarskii,
53
G. A. Sanin et al. (eds.),