Recruitment and the related burden of billeting troops in communities were not major issues in Muscovite centuries, since the army was composed primarily of gentry cavalrymen settled on conditional land tenure and supported by peasant labor. Some conscription began in the 1630s on the Belgorod Line when Moscow assembled "new model" infantry and dragoon corps by recruiting into light cavalry and dragoons impoverished gentry, Tatars, Cossacks, and taxpayers. In the 1640s conscription of state peasants and serfs by household was introduced, but it was not a standing army; "one year's muster returned home after a season's service to be replaced by a new muster the next season," as Carol Stevens notes. In the last years of the Thirteen Years War (1654-67) peasant conscription became normalized into a regular national recruitment, reaching almost 100,000 infantry conscripts, but service remained seasonal. The burden of recruitment—one man per twenty-five households in 1658—certainly exacerbated peasants' burdens and contributed to peasant flight, but it did not require large-scale coercive enforcement. With seasonal service, billeting of the army was not the oppressive burden it became on the population in the next century.
Charles Maier points out that "decisive military force" in the early modern age consisted of cohesion founded in good training and discipline and the maintenance of "networks of frontier fortifications and provisioning sites" allowing the center to "project power far from the capital." In the seventeenth century, Russia began to build such capacity, creating a logistics network to supply the army along the fortified steppe frontier or on the move. In the sixteenth century, Muscovy's radius of expansion was relatively smalclass="underline" most campaigns extended relatively small distances west, or east to Kazan, and could be held to a month or two in the summer. The army of about 35,000 landed gentry carried their own supplies or sent them ahead to staging areas. But while on campaign non-landed military units—artillery, engineers, musketeers—required grain or cash to purchase it, or both, presenting major challenges. The territory Russian armies were moving into, even to the west, was not heavily populated and the state could not count on requisitioning or purchasing from local communities while on campaign, let alone putting supply in the hands of private contractors as their counterparts in more populous and prosperous early modern Europe could do. Steppe lands in particular lacked everything but forage.
Thus, the Military Service Chancery took provisioning on itself. In the sixteenth century supply regiments led by high ranking officials accompanied the army; storage granaries in fortresses (Smolensk, Pskov, Kazan, and Astrakhan) and new territories (Voronezh, Sebezh, Sviazhsk, Kolomna, Pronsk) were created. Into the seventeenth century Russia built major river shipbuilding centers at Vologda,
Ustiuzhna-Zheleznopol'skaia, Astrakhan, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, and Kaluga. A river voyage from Moscow to Astrakhan could be done in 45-60 days. Russia supplied new fortresses on the Volga as best it could. Towns including Samara (1586), Tsaritsyn (1588), and Saratov (1590) were initially provisioned from the center, lacking local farmers, but as fortified lines pushed south, the state provided population instead.
Steppe expansion and military reform in the seventeenth century challenged logistics. New model army units and garrison towns demanded tons of grain supplies, as did steppe vassals (Don Cossacks, Kalmyks) who were pacified or co-opted with annual "gifts" in grain and cash. New taxes for grain were introduced early in the seventeenth century; the "musketeer grain" tax by mid-century had been monetized and it, as well as other taxes directed for "grain," were serving all units. As the new model army was assembled between the Smolensk (1632-4) and Thirteen Years Wars (1654-67) in tandem with the creation of fortified lines, the issue of food supply for army and frontier garrisons came into sharp focus. To provide food and forage to the army during the spring-summer fighting season, the Military Service Chancery decentralized collection, creating military regions on the west and south that organized their own requisitioning. At the same time it centralized grain collection in the heartland under a national Grain Chancery (1663-83) and expanded a network of granaries in Belgorod, Korotiak, Sevsk, and Briansk. Special levies in cash or in kind (1650s, 1660s) supplemented these stocks; changes in the tax basis to households and consolidation of taxes in the 1640s and 1670s-80s were intended to yield more income for military reform and provisioning.
Some areas in the center won exceptions from requisitions for the army: in the strategic borderlands of Novgorod and Kazan, grain and cash collected in the "musketeer tax" was retained there; probably for reasons of dearth, grain levies were not collected in the south itself. After the Thirteen Years War, Russia's attention turned to supplying Russian troops stationed in Kyiv, Nezhin, Pereiaslav, and elsewhere in the Left Bank; special levies of "Kyiv grain" were declared across the realm from 1668 onward to feed the 3,000-5,000 Russians in Ukraine. As Alessandro Stanziani has stressed, Russia also developed a second provisioning strategy in the seventeenth century: the state awarded land to garrison regiments (musketeers, Cossacks, even some new model infantry) and garrison guards from nearby peasant villages. All these groups became semi-agrarian frontier forces, a self- supporting residential military presence on the frontier, parallel to the mobile army.
Despite their efforts, Moscow's military administration was insufficient to prevent the debacle of Prince V. V. Golitsyn's two campaigns against Crimea in the 1680s. Moving into the unpopulated steppe, all food, firewood, water, and other essential supplies had to be carried with the army. Taking a force of 112,000 with at least 20,000 accompanying staff in the first campaign (1686-7) required a supply train so huge that it slowed forward progress to a crawl, even after as much had been sent to forward depots as possible. When the army neared Konskaia Voda and discovered that the Tatars had burned the steppe ahead of them, destroying forage grasses needed for the army's thousands of horses and pack animals, it was forced to turn back. In the second campaign in 1689, better planning (leaving earlier in the season, strategic advance work) allowed Golitsyn's army to reach Perekop north of the Crimean Peninsula. But, facing an impenetrable fortress and running short on supplies, his army again turned back ignominiously. Moscow's dilemma was not unique to it; several times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ottoman army turned back from campaigns into the Don and Hungary when it reached the limit of its supply networks.
From the 1580s Russia provisioned its expansion into Siberia by forcibly requisitioning grain from towns in the Northern Dvina basin; it also began to forcibly move peasants from the Russian north into Siberia. A key responsibility of Siberian governors was to identify arable land and to recruit peasants (exiles, runaway serfs) to farm it. It took until late in the seventeenth century for western Siberia to become self-sufficient in grain for its network of garrisons, and its villages were then forced to provide grain for villages further east, in a progressive eastward advance of grain requisitions.
Conversely, taking care of the civilian population was not an important focus of state policy through the seventeenth century; this burden fell on communities themselves. Urban and rural households individually or communes collectively kept reserve stores of grain; in times of famine, as at the end of the sixteenth century, the state distributed what stores it had, and landlords were expected to help their peasants in times of dearth. In the seventeenth century the state did establish some official warehouses of grain on the southern frontier for emergency civilian relief, but such social welfare was not a focus of overall state policy until much later.