The provincial cavalrymen found this concession to be of little help, so in 1641 again petitioned for a repeal of the statute of limitations. The government responded by extending the statute of limitations from nine to fifteen years.[128] Here one must stop to examine the context of these petitions. After the conclusion of the Smolensk war, which ended in a 'draw' because the Poles surrendered their claim to the Russian throne but refused to return the great fortress of Smolensk to the Russians, the government turned its attention from the western front to the southern front. The Crimean Tatars were still a major threat to Muscovy; their annual slave raids had carried off tens of thousands of Russians into the slave markets of the Crimea, and their raids diverted the Russians during the Smolensk war from concentrating their full attention on Smolensk. So the Muscovites began to wall off the southern frontier by constructing what became known as the Belgorod fortified line in the years 1636-54. This moved the formal frontier of Muscovy hundreds of miles south of the Oka and added tens of thousands of hectares of some of the best agricultural land in the world to Muscovite control. Those directing the Belgorod Line operation wanted the region between the line and the Oka settled for strategic purposes. The new settlers could be recruited for military purposes for service on the fortified line if necessary, and as farmers added significantly to the GNP of Muscovy while providing ready food to the frontier forces. Peasants were delighted to oblige by migrating to the frontier because their incomes rose farming the rich chernozem vis-a-vis what they could get from the poor podzol soils north of the Oka; besides that, south of the Oka, they had no landlords to worry about or pay rent to. Government officials behind the Belgorod Line were reluctant to return fugitives to their places of origins north of the Oka.
Thus in the years after 1636 the middle service-class cavalry landholders north of the Oka came to know that every time they would report for their annual military service, their peasants would use their absence to move to a frontier region where they could not possibly locate them, both because of the distances involved and because of the hostility of the frontier officials should by some stroke of luck they manage to find their fugitives. Slaves registered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery were accurately enough described so that in a judicial contest for the return of a fugitive slave, the central records could be brought to the courtroom and a reasonable decision made whether the person being contested was the slave described in the government document. But in the case of peasant serfs, no such records existed.33 In a hostile frontier courtroom, a serf-hunter could claim that the contested person x was his fugitive serf Ivan son of Pavel, x could respond that he was Nikolai son of Aleksei, that this was a case of mistaken identity - and the judge almost certainly would throw out the plaintiff's claim for x. The provincial cavalrymen, who only had 5.6 peasant households apiece, were hardly wealthy to begin with. When their labour force began to vanish, they became desperate.
Fifteen years proved to be of no more use to the middle service class than had nine or five. So, in 1645 they submitted a third petition asking for the repeal of the statute of limitations. This time, the government, in transition from Tsar Michael to Tsar Alexis, caved in and promised to repeal the statute
33 A decree of 30 March 1688 tried to compensate for this inadequacy by requiring the registration of purchased and ceded/exchanged hereditary estate and service landholding serfs in the Service Landholding Chancellery (SLC) while loans and similar documents were to be registered in the Slavery Chancellery (SC). This measure could not be effective because the SLC was already overburdened with trying to keep track of the ownership and possession of much of the land in Russia, and could not possibly cope with keeping records on all the serfs as well. The SC's task was much more manageable. See RZ, 9 vols. (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1984-94), vol. iv: Zakonodatel'stvo perioda stanovleniia absoliutizma, ed. A. G. Man'kov (1986), pp. 102-3.
of limitations - once a new census had been taken.[129] The census was taken, in 1646-7, but the government was taken over (in the name of Alexis) by his tutor, Boris Ivanovich Morozov. Morozov was one of the most able men ever to head a Russian government, but also one of the most greedy and corrupt. Contemporaries reported that he had a 'thirst for gold as others thirst for water'. Morozov tried to rationalise and simplify the taxation system, which consisted of countless imposts on almost everything that moved or was stationary. Morozov got the idea of annulling many of them and consolidating them into a tax on salt. What Morozov forgot was that the demand for salt is elastic. With a dramatic rise in the price of salt because of the new tax, the consumption fell dramatically, and the reform collapsed. The rage against Morozov, however, did not collapse, but was only strengthened by many of his other activities. Of a rather minor if ancient Muscovite family, but not a noble, he began life with modest peasant holdings and ended it as the largest serf- holder in Muscovy. He enriched himselfboth with lands and peasants and with state property. He surrounded himself with a loyal cadre of equally rapacious individuals. Not only did he 'forget' the 1645 promise to repeal the statute of limitations, all the while he was luring away other landholders' peasants and dispatching them to distant properties he appropriated for himself on the Volga. He issued orders to his estate stewards to conceal fugitives even as his days in active government service were expiring in 1648.[130]
Morozov was so corrupt that the townsmen of Moscow could no longer endure it. They composed a petition to Alexis and tried to present it to him on 1 June 1648, as he rode through Moscow. That monumental document was translated into Swedish by a visitor at the time in Moscow and survives both in the original Middle Russian and in Swedish.[131] When the petitioners tried to present the document to Alexis, his accompanying musketeer guards tore it up and threw it into their faces. This touched off two days of rioting in Moscow in which a considerable portion of the city was burned, and two of Morozov's collaborators were torn to bits by the mob and their remains cast on some of the many dung heaps gracing the city's streets.[132] Morozov was saved from a similar fate only by the personal intervention of the tsar, who promised that Boris Ivanovich would never again serve in the Muscovite government.
In their petition the people of Moscow complained about the Morozov gang corruption and asked for the compilation of a new law code, with references to the Byzantine lawgivers Constantine and Justinian. The government, which was frightened out of its wits as the rioting spread to a dozen other towns, made several responses. First, Morozov and his cohort were permanently purged from the government and replaced with another group. Second, a commission of five men, headed by N. I. Odoevskii, was appointed to compile the laws. And third, calls were issued for the election of delegates to an Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), a proto-parliamentary body which originated in 1566 and was called at times when major national issues needed to be resolved, such as war and peace, dynastic succession and major legal issues. A full Assembly of the Land consisted of two chambers. The upper chamber contained members of the upper service class and the clergy. The lower chamber had elected delegates from the towns and the provincial middle service class. It is known that at least some of the 1648 delegate elections were vigorously contested.[133]
132
Richard Hellie, 'Patterns of Instability in Russian and Soviet History',
133
Hellie,