Muscovite military power, near exhaustion by the end of the Thirteen Years War, had revived very quickly and grown to impressive new proportions. The number of effectives for field army service reached 164,600 men in 1680 (55 per cent of these were in the foreign formation infantry and cavalry).[78]Thousands more performed garrison duty on the Belgorod Line and the new Iziuma Line. The two Chyhyryn operations, the great defensive deployment of 1679, and Golitsyn's Perekop expeditions demonstrated Muscovite ability to mobilise and maintain campaign armies of extraordinary size.[79] The campaigns of the i670s-i680s also show more authority for command-and-control being moved out of the Military Chancellery at Moscow and closer to the front. The Chyhyryn campaigns also show the foreign formation infantry finally fulfilling its tactical potential, especially in their 26 August i677 night descent across the Sula River and their 3 August 1678 assault on Strel'nikov Hill.[80]
During or immediately after the Russo-Turkish war there were a number of important reforms further addressing the needs of the army. In 1678 the Military Chancellery issued revised standards for assignment to the traditional and foreign formation cavalry units in the Belgorod corps, limiting eligibility for service in these units to those holding a certain minimum number ofpeas- ant households, that is to men prosperous enough to maintain themselves in cavalry service from their pomest'ia alone. This made it possible to eliminate the need to pay cash allowances to cavalrymen and reassign less prosperous servicemen from cavalry units to the infantry regiments. Over the next two years the infantry regiments were further expanded through a drive to enrol thousands of vagrants, pardoned shirkers, impoverished deti boiarskie and cossacks and musketeers. By i68i these measures had succeeded in increasing the relative weight of foreign formation troops in the field army and establishing a ratio of infantry to cavalry of nearly 2:1. The strel'tsy were not abolished but their units were restructured along the lines of the foreign formation infantry, reformed into companies under captains and regiments under colonels, so that they could be put to drilling in foreign formation infantry evolutions. The centuries of traditional cavalry were likewise reorganised as companies.[81]
To raise more revenue for paying the expanded foreign formation infantry a major reform of state finances was undertaken in 1677-81. A new general cadastral survey was undertaken; a number of minor direct taxes were amalgamated into one army maintenance cash tax (streletskie den'gi, 'musketeers' money'); this cash tax, along with the army grain tax, was now assessed by household (no longer by sokha, i.e. by area and productive capacity of cultivated land); and authority over direct taxation was further centralised in the Grand Treasury to reduce collection costs and facilitate budgeting.
Command-and-control was strengthened in two ways. The razriad principle of territorial army group command and administration was extended across the rest of European Russia by creating five new territorial army groups, for a total of nine, and assigning to them all troops in field army service, either in traditional or foreign formation units. This had the effect of simplifying muster procedures (each army group had two or more permanent designated muster points), devolving more authority for logistics to the territorial level, and reinforcing the tendency to use army groups as large corps in operations. The abolition of mestnichestvo in 1682 was in part motivated by the need to improve command-and-control; the tasks of modernising force structure (reorganising traditional cavalry and strel'tsy units into companies and regiments) and mounting more complex operations (by territorial corps, and by multiple corps together) made it necessary to eliminate precedence suits and discourage quarrels over precedence honour that might undermine such efforts.
These reforms constituted a foundation for Peter I's programme of military modernisation just as the expansion of diplomatic activity paved the way for Peter's efforts to make Russia a leading player in the concert of European nations.
Non-Russian subjects
MICHAEL KHODARKOYSKY
From 1598 to 1613 Muscovy experienced the most severe crises known as the Time of Troubles. Despite the ravages of civil war and foreign interventions which marked the Time of Troubles, some in the Muscovite government continued to attend dutifully to their daily routines and obligations. The local voevodas on the frontiers proceeded to govern their forts and towns and construct new ones. The Foreign Office in Moscow continued to receive and dispatch envoys to the peoples on the distant frontiers and churn out reports about them. The pace of Russian colonisation might have been slowed down but it did not stop. The ascension to the Russian throne of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 put an end to the Time of Troubles. Russia emerged from the Time of Troubles with a rediscovered sense of national identity and a newly found confidence in its incessant territorial expansion.
Throughout the seventeenth century the Russian government expended great resources and energy on consolidating its hold over annexed territories and moving into new ones. By the end of the century, Moscow could boast of enduring success in expanding further east, where the Russians reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and south and south-east, where the newly built forts and towns pushed the imperial boundaries further into the steppe. The seventeenth century also marked the beginning of Russia's expansion in the west, where Moscow's acquisition of territories in Ukraine added a new dimension to the Russian imperial foundation. No longer did Moscow expand into lands populated by non-Christians: Muslims, animists, and Buddhists. In its western borderlands, Russia had come to acquire a large population of Orthodox Christians who were non-Russian. The ever-growing number of Russia's subjects now included non-Christians in the east and non-Russians in the west.
The steppe
Russia's steppe frontier remained ambiguous and ill defined. To the extent that this frontier was defined, it represented a boundary between Russia and those who were deemed hostile to it. A peace treaty (shert') prepared in 1604 by the government officials for the ruler ofthe Greater Nogai Horde, beg Ishterek, gave a clear indication ofwhere Moscowbelieved its southern frontierto lie. Ishterek was expected to have no contacts with the Ottoman sultan, the Crimean khan, the Persian shah, the Bukharan khan, Tashkent, Urgench, the Kazakh Horde, the Kumyk shamkhal or the Circassians. In other words, Moscow roughly delineated its southern boundaries stretching from the Crimea to the North Caucasus to Central Asia.[82]
By the early seventeenth century, Russia's policies in the steppe, which were meant to encourage the Nogais' dependence on Russia and to weaken them by promoting the factional struggle among their leaders, proved to have the desired effect. Once a powerful confederation of Turkic nomads, the Nogais' significance had been greatly reduced by the debilitating internal struggle. In the early seventeenth century, the Nogais of the Greater Horde were no longer capable of mounting any serious challenge to the Russian state in the south and instead grew desperately dependent on Russia's economic and military aid.
82
Akty vremeni Lzhedmitriia 1-go (1603-1606), Nogaiskie dela', ed. N. V Rozhdestvenskii,