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families and clans, whose senior representatives attended the tsar's Council {Duma). This body sat in permanent session at the Moscow Kremlin, and its members were expected to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Clerks holding executive positions also belonged to the service class, as did diplomats. As a rule, the top civil servants owned large landed properties.
To ensure that the service class did not shirk its duties, two offices were established in Moscow in the second half of the sixteenth century. One, the Razriad, has been mentioned already. It seems that at first the Razriad kept track of both personnel records and the estate holdings of servitors, but that later the second task was entrusted to a special Bureau of Pomestia (Pomestnyi Prikaz). Using data from the Razriad, this bureau made certain that all the land held by members of the service class yielded the proper quantity of state service. The efficiency of these establishments must have been of a very high order. It is estimated that in the 1560s, the Razriad maintained records of at least 22,000 servitors, scattered over an immense territory. Occasionally, as in the second half of Ivan iv's reign when control over it fell into the hands of one family (the brothers, Andrei and Vassilii Shchelkalov), the Razriad provided a unique personal power base within the bureaucracy.
Now that its ingredients have been enumerated, one can appreciate the complexity of the Muscovite service structure in the seventeenth century, when the system was fully formed. All appointments of any distinction required that account be taken of three disparate factors in the candidate's background: his pedigree (rodoslovnost'), his service rank (chinovnosf) and the previous posts he has held (razriadnost').s
In the mid-sixteenth century, Russia had an estimated 22,000-23,000 servitors. Of this number, 2,000 or 3,000 were inscribed in the service rolls of the city of Moscow, and composed the 61ite of the pedigreed. They held large properties, sometimes running into thousands of acres. The remainder, some 20,000 strong, were inscribed in the rolls of the provincial cities. The majority of these were exceedingly poor, with average holdings of 100-200 acres. At the end of the sixteenth century, there was one servitor for each 300 taxpayers and clergy. The ratio rose only slightly in the seventeenth century; in 1651, with an estimated population of 13 million, Russia had 39,000 servitors, or one per 333 inhabitants. Apparently this figure represented the maximum that the economy of the time could support.
The Muscovite service class, from which, in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of imperial Russia and the communist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represents a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions. No term borrowed from western history, such as 'nobility' or 'gentry' satisfactorily defines it. It was a pool of skilled
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manpower used by the state to perform any and all functions which it required: soldiering, administration, legislation, justice, diplomacy, commerce and manufacture. The fact that its living derived almost exclusively from the exploitation of land and (after the 1590s) bonded labour, was an accident of Russian history, namely the shortage of cash. Later on, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the civil branch of the service class was put on salary without its character or function being thereby significantly altered. The roots of this class were not in the land, as was the case with nobilities the world over, but in the royal service. In some respects, the Russian service class was a very modern institution, a kind of proto-meritocracy. Its members enjoyed superior status but by virtue of their usefulness to their employer. Whatever their advantages vis-a-vis the rest of the population, with regard to the crown their position was utterly precarious. So much for the service class. The 99-7 per cent of Russians who did not belong to it, unless they were men of the cloth, owed the state a variety of obligations in money and labour called collectively tiaglo. Like the French taille with which it has much in common, the term is of domainial origin. It derives from the verb tianut\ 'to pull'. In the appanage period villages were said to be 'pulled' towards the manor or town to which they owed taxes or rents. Later, the term acquired a generalized fiscal meaning. In Muscovite Russia, the non-service people were called tiagloe naselenie, 'the pulling population', and their burdens, tiaglo, 'the pull'. But as late as the nineteenth century, after it had ceased to be used by the state, tiaglo was still current on private domains to designate a unit of serf labour, normally consisting of a peasant and his wife and one horse. Taxes due under tiaglo were set in Moscow on the basis of registers {pistsovye knigi). In the rural areas, the taxable unit was sometimes an area of cultivated land, sometimes a household, sometimes a combination of the two. The trading and artisan population living in towns and settlements was taxed by households. The local authorities enjoyed the additional right of imposing various labour obligations as part of tiaglo. Responsibility for the distribution of moneys and services was placed on the tax-payers themselves. The bureaucracy in Moscow having determined the global sum required by the state, apportioned it among the various regions and tax-paying groups. It was then up to the provincial officials and landlords to see to it that the tiaglo-bearers distributed the burdens equitably among themselves. In the colourful phrase of Miliu-kov, the government 'largely left it up to the tax to locate the payer'.8 Implied in this system was collective responsibility. All tiaglo-bearers formed communities, whose members were jointly accountable for the moneys and services imposed on their group. The system inhibited the
THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME
development in Russia of individual farming and large-scale private business.
The quantity of moneys and services due under tiaglo was not fixed. The government adjusted taxes in accord with its needs and its estimate of what the population could pay. After foreign invasions or severe droughts, they were lowered; in times of prosperity, they were raised. The system was unpredictable in the extreme. Whenever the state required additional revenue, it devised a new tax to pile on top of the existing ones. Special taxes were imposed to redeem Russian prisoners from Tatar captivity, to equip newly-formed musketeer units (strel'tsji), to maintain the courier service. Moscow's tax practices give the impression that by skimming it at once with new imposts the government wanted to prevent any surplus from accumulating in the hands of the population.
A particularly arbitrary feature of tiaglo was the requisition of labour services on behalf of the state. Voevody could demand from the population help in construction of fortifications, on road and bridge repairs, and in the billeting and feeding of troops. Since it was not compensated, work performed in fulfilment of tiaglo represented a form of forced labour. When at the end of the seventeenth century the government needed workers for the manufactures and mines which it had licensed foreign entrepreneurs to open, it had little difficulty finding them; it simply impressed muzhiki unattached to any tiaglo community, or exempted a certain number of households in neighbouring villages from monetary payments and put their able-bodied men on full-time labour tiaglo. As will be seen (Chapter 8), the working class employed in the manufacturing and mining establishments founded by Peter 1 was assembled in the same manner. When early in the seventeenth century Moscow decided to form infantry regiments under western officers to supplement the regular army composed of cavalry of dvoriane, it had no need for novel recruiting measures. Already at the end of the fifteenth century thousands of conscripts served in the armed forces. In 1631 a decree was issued that lands which did not furnish servitors - i.e. possessions of the church, widows, minors, retired servitors and the 'black lands' of independent peasants - were to furnish regularly one foot soldier for each five hundred acres of arable. These datochnye liudi were the earliest regular recruits in Europe. Sometimes tiaglo-bearers living on state lands were transferred en masse to distant parts of the country; for example, in the seventeenth century entire villages of black peasants were shipped to Siberia to help feed garrisons staffed by dvoriane. In the institution of tiaglo the Muscovite government disposed of an infinitely flexible device for harnessing ordinary manpower, much as in compulsory state service it had a ready mechanism for recruiting higher skills.