The Razin revolt was the most heterogeneous of all the later seventeenth- century uprisings. Its main leadership was provided by cossacks. For Soviet historians, this was not inconsistent with their designation of the rebellion as a 'peasant war', since many cossacks were of peasant origin. But, as other scholars have recognised, cossacks had a very different identity from peasants. The Don cossacks who spearheaded the Razin revolt were independent mercenary cavalrymen who voluntarily offered their services to the tsar in return for the supplies they received from his government. Razin himself belonged to the more prosperous section of the cossacks, but most of his followers came from the poorer strata. Many of these destitute cossacks had only recently come to the Don, and settled in its upper reaches. In the summer of 1670, as Razin conquered the lower Volga, his cossacks were joined by strel'tsy, soldiers and other petty servicemen from the garrisons of the occupied towns, together with some sailors from the ports, and townspeople who had taken part in the urban uprisings which were triggered by the rebels' approach. Non-Russians from the mid-Volga - Chuvash, Mordva, Mari and Tatars - gave the rebellion a distinctively multi-ethnic character. Russian peasants played a part only in the latter stages of the insurrection, as the rebels moved into the mid-Volga region with its gentry estates farmed by serf labour. One of the few recorded examples of female involvement in these seventeenth-century revolts is the case of Alena, a nun of peasant origin from the town of Arzamas, who commanded a detachment of 7,000 men before being captured and burned alive on the orders of the tsar's general, Prince Iu. A. Dolgorukii.[257]
Soviet historians sometimes defined 'peasant wars' as 'civil wars of the feudal period',[258] but in comparison to the Time of Troubles (and even to the Bolotnikov episode within it) the geographical scope of the Razin revolt was relatively limited, focusing on the river basins of the Volga and Don. Thus it is more appropriate to describe it as a 'frontier rebellion' rather than a 'civil war': in that respect - and in its social composition - it is more similar to the Pugachev revolt of 1773-5 than to the Time of Troubles. Like Pugachev's, Razin's uprising had professional military leadership, provided by the cossacks, and the insurgents formed large armies which engaged in open conflict with government troops. To that extent it constituted a more significant threat to political stability than the urban insurrections; and it was met with a much harsher and less conciliatory response from the authorities.
Finally, it is worth noting that religious issues played a part in some revolts. The non-Russian peoples of the mid-Volga who supported Razin were mostly Muslims, and their grievances against the Russian government's policy of forcibly converting them to Christianity had fuelled the constant series of rebellions which they had staged since Muscovy's annexation of the Volga khanates in the mid-sixteenth century. Razin made a bid for their support, and one of his appeals to the Kazan' Tatars invoked the Prophet Mohammed.[259]After the schism in the Orthodox Church, Old Beliefbecame an issue in some ofthe uprisings. There is evidence that Razin had contacts in the Old-Believer stronghold of Solovki, the island monastery in the White Sea which held out against a siege by government forces for eight years, from 1668 to 1676. But Razin's religious appeal was somewhat inconsistent: not only did he invoke the Prophet, but he also presented himself as a champion of Nikon, who had been deposed as patriarch in 1666 and imprisoned in the Ferapontov monastery. The rebels claimed that Nikon accompanied them on their voyage up the Volga. The cossacks believed that Nikon, whom they described as their 'father', had been removed from office by the boyars. They cursed his successor Ioasaf, and planned to restore Nikon to the patriarchate.[260] In 1682 Khovanskii appealed to Old-Believer sympathies among the strel'tsy when he organised the debate with the schismatics; and Old Belief among the Don cossacks was an influence on their unrest in 1682-3.
'Rebellions in the name of the tsar'
All of these revolts, to a greater or lesser extent, assumed the form of'rebellions in the name of the tsar': that is, they were directed primarily against the 'traitor-boyars' rather than against the reigningtsar. In this respect they differed significantly from most ofthe rebellions during the Time of Troubles, which were aimed against rulers, such as Boris Godunov or Vasilii Shuiskii, who were identified as usurpers; the insurgents sought to replace them with pretenders whom they claimed to be the 'true' tsar, treacherously removed from the throne or from the succession (the first two False Dmitriis).
In the revolts which took place under the first Romanovs, the rebels commonly described their main targets as 'traitor-boyars'. These were not exclusively 'boyars' in the narrow sense of the tsar's highest-ranking counsellors; rather, they belonged to a category sometimes identified as 'the strong men'. In addition to boyars and okol'nichie, this group included high chancellery officials, rich merchants and provincial governors. In Moscow in 1648 the chief 'traitors' whose deaths the crowds demanded were the boyar Boris Morozov, the okol'nichie Petr Trakhaniotov, the conciliar secretary (dumnyi d'iak) Nazarii Chistyi and the judge Leontii Pleshcheev.[261] In 1662 the eight 'traitors' listed in the insurgents' proclamation were the boyars I. D. and I. M. Miloslavskii, the okol'nichie F. M. Rtishchev and B. M. Khitrovo, the secretary D. M. Bashmakov and the merchants V. G. and B. V. Shorin and S. Zadorin.[262] Sten'ka Razin called on his cossacks 'to go to Rus' against the sovereign's enemies and traitors and to eradicate the traitor boyars and counsellors from the Muscovite state, and the governors and officials in the towns'.[263]The seventeen victims of the revolt of 15-17 May 1682 included five boyars (the Princes Iu. A. and M. Iu. Dolgorukii, Prince G. G. Romodanovskii, A. S. Matveev and I. K. Naryshkin); and the conciliar secretaries L. I. Ivanov and A. S. Kirillov.[264]
Not allboyars were regarded as traitors, however. On3 June 1648 the Moscow crowd cried out that N. I. Romanov should rule them alongside the tsar, in place of B. I. Morozov; and in Pskov, in 1650, Romanov was identified as a boyar who 'cared about the land'.[265] Prince I. A. Khovanskii was described as a 'good' person by the Moscow insurgents of 1662; and in 1682 the strel'tsy referred to him as their 'father'.[266] In his address to the cossack circle at Panshin Gorodok in May 1670, Razin described some boyars as 'good', because they provided the cossacks with food and drink when they visited Moscow.[267]
257
i968), pp. 99, i24.
258
See e.g. V Nazarov, 'The Peasant Wars in Russia and their Place in the History of the Class Struggle in Europe', in
266
GrigorijKotosixin,