On30 April, in response to a petition from the rank-and-file strel'tsy, Tsaritsa Natal'ia ordered that some of their most corrupt officers should be flogged. This did not satisfy the strel'tsy, and on 15-17 May they rioted, bursting into the Kremlin and brutally murdering members of the Naryshkin clan and their allies. A compromise solution to the dynastic crisis was provided by the novel arrangement that Ivan and Peter should rule jointly, but with Ivan as the 'first' tsar and his full sister Sophia as de facto regent. The strel'tsy continued to influence events throughout the summer. They insisted on being renamed 'court infantry', and on 6 June they erected a large column on Red Square on which they listed the victims of the uprising of 15-17 May and justified their 'execution' as traitors. Prince I. A. Khovanskii, who had become head of the Musketeer Chancellery (Streletskii prikaz) after the uprising, tried to use the situation to promote his own interests. In July he organised a debate between a deputation of Old Believers (who enjoyed considerable support among the strel'tsy) and representatives of the official Church, in the presence of Tsarevna Sophia and her sisters. Sophia, however, soon gained the upper hand. Khovanskii and his son Andrei were accused of treason and executed in September. In October the regent was able to muster regular troops to protect her, the strel'tsy submitted to her authority and she established control over the capital.
Unrest continued for some time on the Don and in other parts ofthe south. This had begun before the Moscow events, when the Peace of Bakhchisarai of 1681 with Turkey and the Crimea blocked the cossacks' access to the Black Sea. In the spring of 1682 some Don cossacks planned to follow Razin's example and attack the Russian heartland; news of the unrest in the capital subsequently encouraged them to go to the aid of the strel'tsy against the boyars.
The initiative was nipped in the bud by government troops, but sporadic disturbances occurred in a number of south-western districts in 1682-3.[250]
The social composition of the rebels
What was the nature of these revolts, and how much did they have in common? Soviet historians drew a distinction between the Razin revolt, on the one hand, which was characterised as a 'peasant war' (more specifically, as the 'second peasant war', following that of Bolotnikov in 1606-7), and the urban revolts, such as those of 1648-50, on the other. In practice this distinction is somewhat artificial. The term 'peasant war' is just as problematic in its application to the Razin revolt as it is to the Bolotnikov episode.[251] Not only was the main leadership provided by cossacks, but the rebellion also involved uprisings in the lower Volga towns, from Astrakhan' to Tsaritsyn, whose participants were similar to those of the urban revolts in 1648-50, 1662 and 1682. But if the 'peasant war' of 1669-71 included urban participants, some of the urban risings of 1648-50 spilled over into the surrounding countryside and involved peasants in neighbouring villages.
Let us look first at the uprisings in the capital. The initial impulse for the revolt in Moscow in 1648 was provided by the ordinary townspeople (artisans and tradesmen) whose petition was rejected by the tsar; the strel'tsy also became involved at an early stage. The gentry took advantage of the unrest to present their own petitions, and they ended up as the main beneficiaries when the government made a major concession to them (the convening of the Assembly of the Land which approved the Ulozhenie of 1649) in order to split the opposition. The social composition of the revolt was therefore fairly heterogeneous, including representatives of relatively privileged groups, such as the gentry and merchants. The main participants in the 1662 'copper riot' were artisans and tradesmen, and petty military servitors; the strel'tsy played only a minor role. The 1682 uprising, by contrast, was largely dominated by the strel'tsy. For both the 1648 and 1682 revolts, there is some evidence that these were not purely spontaneous outbursts of protest by the lower classes, but that various individuals from the ruling elites incited or influenced the course of events. In 1648 the popular protests about Morozov benefited his enemies, N. I. Romanov and Prince Ia. K. Cherkasskii; in 1682 Tsarevich Ivan's kinsmen, the Miloslavskiis, were thought to have encouraged the protests of the strel'tsy against Peter's election as tsar, while the subsequent conflict between Tsarevna Sophia and Prince I. A. Khovanskii affected the outcome of the affair.[252]
The role of the bond-slaves in the Moscow revolts was a somewhat ambiguous one. In terms of their social position, the bondsmen themselves ranged from impoverished domestic servants to the relatively privileged military slaves. The latter were likely to support their masters against the insurgents, while the house-slaves, even if they sympathised with the poorer sections of the townspeople, were often too dependent on their lords to risk participating in any challenges to their authority. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of the involvement of slaves in the revolts. One source indicates that runaway slaves participated in the looting which followed the fires in Moscow in early June 1648, and another claims that on 27 June the boyars' slaves in the capital demanded their freedom, as a result of which six of them were executed and seventy-two were imprisoned.[253] In 1662 there were relatively few slaves among the insurgents, while some actively participated in the suppression of the revolt.[254] In 1682 the 'boyars' people' (slaves) presented a petition to the two tsars on 26 May, asking for freedom, but they received little support from the strel'tsy, whose grievances had been largely assuaged by the election of Ivan as 'first tsar'.[255]
The composition of the participants in the urban revolts in the provinces in 1648-50 reflected the varied social structures of the towns affected. The frontier towns in the south and in Siberia were primarily fortresses, and here the main role in the uprisings was played by the petty servicemen 'by contract', such as the strel'tsy and urban cossacks. Many of these servicemen were engaged in crafts and trades, and even in peasant-style agriculture, in order to supplement the inadequate monetary payments they received from the state. Their interests and grievances were therefore very similar to those of the taxpaying townspeople in other regions. The northern towns of Ustiug and Sol'vychegodsk, where unrest occurred in 1648, were important manufacturing and trading centres. Here the main participants in the disturbances were the poorer townspeople, such as artisans and traders, and their actions were directed primarily against local officials responsible for tax collection, and against those merchants who were regarded as the closest allies of the town authorities. Pskov and Novgorod were the two largest commercial cities of the north-west. In both cases in 1650 the townspeople as a whole, together with the musketeers from the garrison, rose up against the city governors and rich merchants who were implicated in the sale of grain to Sweden. In Pskov, where the uprising continued for six months, sharp divisions developed between the richer merchants and hereditary servicemen, on the one hand, and the poorer townspeople and strel'tsy, on the other, concerning the terms on which they would surrender to the besieging government forces. During the siege of Pskov the peasants in some neighbouring villages joined raiding parties of insurgent townspeople in attacking Khovanskii's troops and looting landlords' estates.[256]
252
Robert O. Crummey,