necessary to pursue their goals. Despite the challenges of size and dearth of personnel, early modern empires deployed their power empire-wide where needed. In so doing, they exerted a range of coercion from conquest and forcible population movement to the building of empire-wide institutions of communication, law, and bureaucracy.
COERCED MOBILITY
Stable at the center, tsars and the political elite wielded coercion to create and control their empire. States, however, need to use violence wisely; violence cannot be the primary means of governance, particularly in early modern conditions. Empires as large and sparsely populated as Russia had neither resources for a dense police presence nor a concept of total control. Rather, they conquered with force and left in place credible threats ofviolence. Where possible, Moscow did not destroy productive resources in conquering, as in razing towns and villages. But they did not hesitate to kill if need be. In conquering Novgorod in 1478, the city's leadership was decimated: several were executed. As Russian troops moved across Siberia, they brutally killed natives and destroyed their villages. Opposition was brutally put down, as we saw with the regular uprisings of Tatars of the Middle
Volga and Bashkiria; when organized rebellion broke out, as in the Stepan Razin (1670-1) and Emelian Pugachev (1773-5) uprisings, rebel leaders were executed by the hundreds, their bodies left swinging from gallows to deter others. In conquered territories, Russia stationed a governor with a garrison of musketeers or Cossacks to enforce control.
One potent tool of control—namely forcible resettlement of peoples—Muscovy borrowed from the Mongols, who moved artisans and merchants to their urban centers (for the Qipchaq khanate, to Sarai) and enslaved others. In times of conquest Muscovy moved populations to replace potentially rebellious communities, capitalizing on expertise where possible. Examples begin already in the fifteenth century. Within ten years of the conquest of Novgorod in 1478, hundreds of Novgorodian merchants had been expelled to towns such as Vladimir, Pereia- slavl', and even Moscow in the center. They were replaced with merchants from Moscow, who formed their own neighborhoods and maintained their identification with Moscow so much so that a century later, when Ivan IV expelled more than 100 Novgorodian merchants to Moscow, many of them identified as descendants of those who had been moved to Novgorod in 1478. Not just merchants, but gentry were transported: over 80 percent of landholdings in the Novgorodian countryside were confiscated around 1478, their owners imprisoned or forcibly transferred to become provincial gentry in the center. Their landholdings were turned into the new category of "service tenure" (pomest'e) lands and settled with at least 1,300 families loyal to Moscow, some transferred from the center, some promoted from lower social status.
Subsequent conquests followed the same pattern: Tver' merchants were moved to Moscow after that town's subjugation in 1485. After the conquest of Pskov in 1510, more than 1,000 servitors imported from the center took the estates of the richest Pskov landowners, who were exiled away from the border. Pskov merchants were moved to Moscow, where they settled together in a specific quarter. Similarly, after Smolensk was conquered in 1514, its merchants were moved to Moscow, where they became so successful, probably specializing in trade to the Grand Duchy and Poland, that they were given their own privileged status as a group within the Moscow merchants. Riazan' merchants and gentry were made to exchange places with counterparts from the center when that city was taken over in 1521.
Through the sixteenth century population transfers from border towns and the center continued: periodically Moscow kept Novgorod in check by moving merchants to the center, as in 1546 and during the Oprichnina. During the Livonian War (1560s-70s), merchants from Pskov, Pereiaslavl', Viaz'ma, and the old Novgorodian hinterland were moved inland. The bloody conquest of Kazan was followed by expulsions of Tatar elites, merchants, and population, replaced by traders and military men from Moscow, Ustiug, Vologda, Kostroma, Vladimir, Pereiaslavl', and Iaroslavl'. Those moved from Pskov in 1555 took up a whole city street as they had in Moscow. In 1565 eminent princely families, expropriated in the Oprichnina, were moved to Kazan province. Although amnesty followed within a year, many did not receive their original lands back and were simply moved back closer to Moscow.
Manning fortress lines and settling new frontier areas often required forcible population movement of servitors and of peasants to support them. As we have seen, the Middle Volga witnessed turbulent population movement. From the late sixteenth century onward, Russian and Middle Volga peoples moved steadily from Kazan through the Middle Volga region south and towards the Urals into Bashkiria. Already in the 1570s gentry from Tula and Kashira were resettled on the frontier at Venev and Epifan; as the Belgorod line was being constructed in the mid-seventeenth century, gentry were settled in the Voronezh area as border guards. By the eighteenth century they had coalesced into a self-conscious group called the single-holders (odnodvortsy), discussed in Chapter 17, who resisted being turned into taxpaying peasants. In the Urals, Polish noblemen from Polotsk captured in war were transferred in 1668 to the Trans-Kama Line and given land and peasants; by the 1690s, they numbered several hundred households in northwestern Bashkiria.
Forcible movement of peasants occurred on an even larger scale. When the Belgorod line was being built, over a thousand people were forcibly sent to create the town ofTsarev Alekseev in 1647, and smaller towns experienced similar forced population movement. Forcibly moved people were often joined by peasants transferred by church and private landlords, as well as by runaway serfs and local steppe peoples recruited into Russian service. Such movement was not always successfuclass="underline" of a group of more than 1,000 state peasants sent to the Voronezh lands (Bitiug valley) in the late seventeenth century, 69 percent had died and 23 percent had fled within two years. Similarly Peter I's attempt to build and settle a new harbor town on the Sea of Azov between 1696 and 1711 was a huge failure, resulting in the death or flight of thousands of laborers and their families. And as Brian Boeck observed, at this same time the state worked assiduously to contain population as well as to move it. Knowing it could not protect or control settlement beyond fortress lines, the state actively destroyed voluntary settlements that had moved too deep into the steppe and returned the pioneers to border settlements. Fortress lines were intended not only to keep nomads out, but peasants in.
The Church also moved peasants from the center to new lands: by the end of the 1550s there were approximately twenty new Orthodox churches in the Kazan area and many monasteries. From there monasteries pushed up the Kama, often bringing with them serfdom. Seeing the Church as a helpful partner in settling new lands, the state granted lands to church institutions well into the eighteenth century, even while it was restricting church landholding (from the 1560s) and confiscating monasteries and convents (in the eighteenth century). All in all, Muscovy did not hesitate to move and manipulate its populations to subdue and manage its conquests.
MILITARY PROVISIONING
One of the most fundamental acts of state power is the requisitioning of resources in various forms of taxation. Collecting furs from Siberian natives often took place at the point of a gun; in the center, where peasants and townsmen had been paying taxes for centuries, the actual collection was not a highly coercive moment, since peasant and urban communes assumed collective responsibility, dividing the tax burden among families according to ability to pay. Elders could of course manipulate the process, burdening their rivals and favoring their friends. Another category of taxation, however, put the coercive power of the state directly in the face of the population. That was in assembling and feeding the army.