POPULATION MOBILITY AND MOVEMENT
While the state was busily moving people, people were also energetically moving on their own accord. As we have noted in Chapter 3, Russian historians S. M. Solov'ev and V. O. Kliuchevskii created an enduring image of the Russian peasantry as constantly moving, depriving them of attachment to the land (and implicitly to the nation). While we cannot know how early modern peasants felt (anachronistically) about the nation, Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii are right about mobility: land surveys of the early sixteenth century suggest, as Boris Mironov has shown, that 70 percent of peasants had moved away from the birthplaces of their fathers, within or beyond their district even though these were not decades of particular economic stress. During the turbulence of war and Oprichnina (1560s-70s), peasants fled in droves. Up to 60 percent of Russian peasants in the center had fled their place of residence due to war, epidemic, and crushing taxation. Movement continued through the Muscovite period.
In Siberia, as we have seen, territorial expansion did not attract much Russian settlement in these centuries, since the main purpose was extraction of furs. Most voluntary Slavic settlers came to trap and moved with the furs. By the end of the seventeenth century, non-native population more or less equaled that of the natives (devastated demographically by conquest and epidemic). The situation was different on the forested steppe and steppe borderland, where the distance from the center and better farming conditions attracted runaways. The state's response was to try to control mobility, a difficult task in early modern conditions. Like its counterparts in Europe at the time, Russia did not require identity documents; Natalie Zemon Davis has chronicled how a sixteenth-century French court struggled to establish the identity of a man claiming to be "Martin Guerre." Russian subjects similarly had no standardized markers of identity; the state resorted to branding capital criminals to identify them in exile (brands spelled out "robber" or "thief' or their place of exile—"Tobolsk"). The state did require that anyone traveling on trade or service assignment needed to carry a travel pass (proezzhii) from their landlord or superior officer, although this procedure was hardly seamless. Similarly, those using the coach system had to prove their business was "official" by showing a pass (podorozhnaia gramota).
The state also made efforts to guard its borders, with an eye to movement in both directions. Foreigners needed permission of governors at border crossings to enter Russia, and at those crossings peasants were prevented from pushing into the steppe while it was indefensible. When the Don Cossacks conquered Azov in 1637 and offered it to Russia in 1642, for example, Russia refused, knowing that it could not settle and control so distant a territory. Russia allowed Ukrainians to settle in Sloboda Ukraine but forbade Russians to do so, as they would escape from Russian taxation. In the late seventeenth century the Don Cossacks curried favor with Moscow by agreeing to send runaway serfs back to the center, provoking rebellions by Stepan Razin (1670-1) and Kondratii Bulavin (1707-8). Nevertheless, as we have seen, people fled steadily towards the Black Sea to Bashkiria, joining Cossack bands or their surrounding communities just out of reach of Russian control.
In the center the state worked to control such a mobile population in the form of serfdom. Labor to support the landed gentry was in such short supply that the state began in the late sixteenth century to institute legal limitations of the ability of peasants to move to new masters; by 1649 the process of enserfment, discussed in detail in Chapter 10, forbade all taxpayers, urban and rural, from leaving their place of residence. Townsmen were required by law to report newcomers, visitors, and vagrants, on penalty of corporal punishment. Keeping people in place required violence. As Evsey Domar theorized, the more mobile the population could be, with endless stretches of land available, the more controlling the state needed to be. The flip side of the mobility of the productive population was the autocracy of the state.
In principle, once the 1649 Lawcode abolished the statute of limitations for reclaiming runaway peasants, the state was obliged to track down peasants, but that duty stood constantly in tension with the needs of borderland governors to staff and feed their garrisons. In the second half of the seventeenth century policy vacillated: governors regularly accepted newcomers, no questions asked; the state declared in 1653 that garrisons on the crucial Belgorod line need not return fugitives to their owners. By 1656, however, in deference to the landed gentry, the state reversed itself: laws thundered penalties up to capital punishment for knowingly harboring runaway peasants; between 1658 and 1663 fifteen commissions were sent out to reclaim runaways, followed by twenty-two more in the 1660s and similar numbers through the rest of the century. These efforts, however, pale in comparison to the size of the empire. The problem of runaways and these tensions persisted through the early modern era.
Serfdom could only be enforced by the threat of the landlord's knout and the tsar's posses tracking down runaways. Even so, coercion against serfs was most often wielded by the peasant commune itself. As Stephen Hoch and Tracy Dennison have shown, peasant communes preferred to keep landlords' agents at bay by self- disciplining. The council of elders exerted a tyranny of men over women, old over young, ordering whippings for petty crime, sending young men off to the army, disciplining uncooperative members. Village councils also, however, offered support for the aged, widowed, and anyone devastated by personal misfortune; they kept villages stable through self-regulation. In this way, the landlord estate and village commune were perhaps a microcosm of the state itself. Violence was a harsh reality, its threat was ever-present, but in day-to-day life leaders domesticated it into institutions such as the village commune, the bureaucracy and the judicial system.
MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE: THE CRIMINAL LAW
Max Weber famously called monopolization ofthe means ofviolence the marker of sovereignty. In many ways, this is the institutionalization of the sovereign's right to wield "sacred violence" for the stability of the state, a theory that post-dated Weber. Rulers can imbed their monopoly on violence in exclusive control over armed forces, outlawing private militias; they can imbed it in control over personal violence through the criminal law, punishing everything from duels to fisticuffs to murder. In order for sovereign violence to be legitimate, it needs to be perceived as fair, and the system needs to be perceived as responsive to the people, in terms appropriate to the setting (constitutional and legal remedies in some states, the sovereign's personal mercy and favor in others).
In Muscovy, the criminal law enforced the state's monopoly on violence. Only the tsar's courts had the right to prosecute felony, to torture, and to assign corporal or capital punishment. Landlords whose peasants committed a felony would be punished for torturing and punishing on their own; they were required to bring them to state courts. Similarly, one could kill in self-defense, but if a landowner caught someone in the act of crime, he was not to torture or punish, but was to turn the culprit over to the courts. People were forbidden to pursue vendettas over honor; they had to go to court. Legal scales of compensation for injured honor offered protection to everyone from slaves to witches to boyars, exempting only people who had broken their ties with the community, namely "thieves, criminals, arsonists and known evil men," according to a Lawcode of 1589.
Boyar clans did not settle their rivalries on the dueling field (unknown before European influence in the late seventeenth century, and forbidden for a good 100 years after that), but used an elaborate legal practice of suing for precedence (mestnichestvo). This occurred when a man felt a military assignment put him unjustly subordinate to another clan. The court then meticulously established the relative status ofthe two clans according to official records ofgenealogy and military service. Since virtually no challenger ever won a precedence suit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the practice functioned more as a face-saving and perhaps precedent-setting defense of clan and personal honor rather than as a limit on the tsar's autonomy to deploy his men. In the rare cases when an eminent man refused to accept a negative ruling, the tsar turned his "righteous anger" on him; Aleksei Mikhailovich's tongue-lashings to such recalcitrants were biting. In the last resort, for defying the tsar, such men were subjected to a public ritual of humiliation that functioned as a "social drama" in Victor Turner's terms, providing a liminal space in which both sides in the quarrel could claim a modicum of dignity, thus restoring equilibrium in the riven elite.