The insurgents therefore distinguished between 'good' and 'bad' members of the ruling elite, so that the revolts were not simply indiscriminate attacks on all 'feudal' lords, as some of the cruder Soviet Marxist class-struggle interpretations implied, but were directed only against those who were most detested by the ordinary people. In some cases the rebels invited the crowd to pass judgement on their proposed victims. Razin asked the people of Astrakhan' to decide who should be put to death; and in Moscow in 1682 the strel'tsy called for the crowd's approval before killing their enemies.[268]
The cruelty of the insurgents' punishment and killing of their victims is a common theme in contemporary accounts of these revolts. The 'traitors' were sometimes literally torn apart in an explosion of mob violence; after death their bodies were frequently defiled and abused. The looting of the victims' property may be seen as a crude form of redistribution of wealth; its burning and destruction was a more symbolic form of popular rejection of privilege. For all the understandable indignation expressed in elite sources about the violence involved in the rebels' reprisals against their victims, the forms assumed by popular retribution often resembled those of official punishments, especially the torturing and execution of'traitor-boyars' during Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina.[269] And it should be borne in mind that the tsarist government's repression of the revolts - especially the Razin uprising - involved much greater and more extensive cruelty than that practised by the rebels themselves.
In order to legitimise their attacks on their chosen victims, the rebels regularly accused them of treason. They commonly alleged that the 'traitor- boyars' exploited and oppressed the peasants and townsfolk. The complaints of the insurgents in Moscow in 1648, for example, focused on abuses and maladministration by the power holders.[270] Exploitation of the ordinary people was frequently associated with harm to the interests of the state, as the Russian historian N. N. Pokrovskii has noted in his detailed study of the uprising of i648-9 in Tomsk, where the petitioners accused the town governor, Prince O. I. Shcherbatyi, of reducing the tsar's revenue through his impoverishment of the peasants and indigenous peoples of the district.[271]
Other types of treason were also alleged - although often these allegations had little or no foundation. Claims of plots against the life of the tsar and other members of the royal family were very common. In 1648-50 rumours spread to provincial towns that the boyars had tried to kill Tsar Alexis. Razin blamed the boyars for the recent deaths of Tsaritsa Mariia Il'inichna and the tsareviches Aleksei and Simeon Alekseevich. In 1682 the rebel Muscovites accused the 'traitors' of having murdered Tsar Fedor and Tsarevich Ivan, in order to clear the way for Peter's succession to the throne.[272]
Finally, the insurgents' adversaries were regularly accused of 'external' treason, that is, of secret dealings with Russia's foreign enemies. In Pskov and Novgorod in i650 the dispatch of grain and money to Sweden led to suspicions that the city governors and local merchants were Swedish agents, and that the conspiracy also involved some of the boyars in Moscow, including B. I. Morozov. In 1662 the boyars were accused of corresponding with the Polish king and planning to surrender Muscovy to the Poles; and rumours circulated that officials in the Musketeer Chancellery had substituted sand for gunpowder in supplies of ammunition sent to the army at the front. In 1682 the boyar Prince G. G. Romodanovskii was said to have sympathised with the Turkish sultan and the Crimean khan in the recent Chyhyryn campaign.[273] In their choice of allegations against their enemies, as well as in the forms of cruel punishment they inflicted upon them, the seventeenth-century insurgents may have modelled themselves on state terror directed against 'traitors': in the period of the oprichnina, Tsar Ivan IV had made accusations of both 'internal' and 'external' treason against the boyars, and their 'internal' treason was said to have involved oppression of the people as well as harm to the prosperity of the state.[274] More broadly, protestors often made use of the same type of rhetoric against corruption as was employed in official statements by the Moscow government.
In most popular revolts, the 'evil' traitor-boyars were contrasted with the 'good' tsar. In 1648-50, however, there is some evidence that the rebels criticised the ruler himself. In Moscow, Alexis was described as 'young and foolish', and even as a 'traitor'; similar 'unseemly words' were recorded in Pskov and Novgorod. Rumours had circulated in Tsar Michael's reign that Alexis and his younger brother, Tsarevich Ivan, were changelings, non-royal boys substituted for baby daughters born to Tsaritsa Evdokiia. But the tsar's critics in 1648-50 do not appear to have questioned his legitimacy as ruler, or to have rejected the monarchy as an institution: rather, Alexis was depicted as a tool of the traitor- boyars, and pressure was exerted on him to replace them with 'wise advisers'.[275]Young and inexperienced tsars were evidently seen as particularly susceptible to the influence of'wicked counsellors': in 1682 the strel'tsy expressed fears that the nine-year-old Peter's election as tsar would mean that unjust and corrupt boyars would be the real rulers.[276]
Doubts about the legitimacy of the new dynasty had been expressed in the reign of Tsar Michael, when the authorities reported numerous cases of 'sovereign's word and deed' (slovo i delo gosudarevy, lese-majeste) allegations criticising the Romanovs. Rumours even spread that 'Tsar Dmitrii' was still alive. In spite of these concerns, royal impostors (samozvantsy), who had played such a prominent part in the Time of Troubles, were much less evident in Russia in subsequent decades. Pretenders claiming to be Tsarevich Ivan Dmitrievich, Marina Mniszech's son by the Second False Dmitrii, were reported in Poland and the Crimea in the 1640s; and false Shuiskiis (including the notorious Timoshka Ankudinov, who claimed various royal identities) appeared in Poland and Moldavia - but none of these had any connection with the popular revolts within Muscovy itself.[277] Some cases were recorded of Russians calling themselves tsars or tsareviches; but, according to a recent study, this 'popular pretence' was more of a cultural than a political phenomenon: a reflection of the notion that to be a tsar meant the possession of exceptional superiority over ordinary people.[278] The apparently non-political nature of many of these claims to royal status did not, however, mean that the tsarist government considered them to be innocuous: on the contrary, they were rigorously prosecuted as political crimes.
The first evidence ofpretence associated with popular revolt is found in the Razin uprising. Although the revolt had begun in May 1670 as a classic 'rebellion in the name of the tsar' against the 'traitor-boyars', by the late summer, as the cossacks moved up the Volga, Razin was spreading rumours that they were accompanied by Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich (who had died in 1670) as well as by the deposed patriarch Nikon. It is not clear whether there was an actual pretender-tsarevich in Razin's flotilla, or whether the cossacks were simply using his name in order to justify their actions. Certainly there is no evidence that the rebels planned to overthrow Tsar Alexis and replace him with his 'son' - rather, it seems that they were claiming that the tsarevich would lead them to Moscow to attack the 'traitor-boyars' who had supposedly plotted to kill him. In 1673 a false Tsarevich Simeon Alekseevich appeared in Zaporozh'e (the real Simeon had died in 1669 at the age of four): he too seemed to be hostile to the boyars rather than to his 'father', Tsar Alexis. These pretender-tsareviches were not counterposed to the reigning tsar, but served to provide legitimacy for popular revolts against the 'traitor-boyars'.[279]
268
Stepanov
269
S. K. Rosovetskii, 'Ustnaia proza XVI-XVII vv. ob Ivane Groznom - pravitele',
271
Pokrovskii, Tomsk,pp. 97-8,107-8. See also Davies,
272
Bakhrushin, 'Moskovskoe vosstanie i648g.', p. 79; Tikhomirov,
273
Tikhomirov
274
M. Perri, 'V chem sostoiala "izmena" zhertv narodnykh vosstanii XVII veka?', in
275
Maureen Perrie, 'Indecent, Unseemly and Inappropriate Words: Popular Criticisms of the Tsar, 1648-50',
276
Sil'vestr Medvedev,
277
Maureen Perrie,
278
P. V Lukin,
279
C. S. Ingerflom, 'Entrelemythe et la parole: l'action. Naissancede la conception politique du pouvoir en Russie',