Bureaucrats working in central chanceries and local offices were almost the entire repository of secular literacy in the realm. Artisans and merchants were as literate as they needed to be for trade, and clergy were versed in Slavonic-based liturgical languages and texts. But there were no lawyers or formal notaries, as in contemporary Europe, China, or the Ottoman empire. The only notarial exceptions were scribes on large estates (lay and ecclesiastical) and small unions of scribes working for fees in towns who were knowledgeable of official document format, formulae, and administrative procedure. These men were the only sources of legal advice available to the general public, save for moonlighting chancery scribes.
Secretaries working in central chancelleries could amass great expertise in their chosen field, such as the law, international relations and foreign languages, and fiscal administration, but in the seventeenth century they faced the challenge of social rank. Power and prestige accrued only to military men with landed estates— boyars and provincial gentry. Bureaucrats served them, but even the highest secretaries were considered inferior to the military elite. This was enforced symbolically as well as economically. Until 1680, secretaries could not use the patronymic, an honorific allowed to the military elite; in audiences in chanceries, secretaries stood while military governors sat. Bureaucrats were excluded from the clan-based system of precedence (mestnichestvo); gentry and boyar families did not intermarry with scribal clans. Through the seventeenth century, military men began to develop into "noble officials," in Robert Crummey's term, intruding on the most prestigious, influential, and lucrative chancery leadership roles, but that did not raise the status of civil service in Muscovy.
One important strategy that kept this bureaucracy an effective institution of empire-wide control was that the state, unlike its Ottoman and French counterparts in the eighteenth century, never farmed out local offices, and thus never lost its grip on local control. All areas, from center to periphery, were under the authority of a centrally appointed governor, however lightly his authority was imposed on daily life. All were subject to the tsar's taxes, his criminal law, his bureaucratic procedures. This was reflected in the consistency of bureaucratic paper: documents of the same genre separated by decades and produced as far apart as Belgorod in the west and Irkutsk in Siberia use the same format and language, bespeaking a centralized and professional bureaucracy. This persistent achievement of centralized, highly focused control gave the Muscovite state a purchase on local power.
COMMUNICATIONS: CADASTERS AND MAPS
Historical sociologists see "surveillance" at the heart of the early modern state project, by which they mean the systematic gathering of information about the resources of one's realm. Through the seventeenth century, Muscovy focused intently on resources, human and material. To identify and mobilize resources, it developed censuses, cadasters, and tax registers that focused on people, borrowing from Mongol practice familiar to Moscow's princes as tax collectors for the Horde. Adopting Chinese practice, throughout their conquered territories Mongols had carried out counts of households in the Rus' territories in the 1250s and 1270s. Their surveys introduced terminology of divisions of village and town populations into "hundreds," "fifties," and other numerical units, used in Muscovy into the seventeenth century. Muscovite rulers' first censuses surveyed populated land in newly conquered territories in the late fifteenth century—Novgorod, Iaroslavl', Beloozero—in preparation for their being assigned as service-tenure grants to expand the cavalry. Populated land was categorized into good, medium, and poor quality and assignments were adjusted accordingly. Thereafter Muscovy regularly compiled cadasters of populated, taxable arable land and urban properties not only in newly conquered territories but also in the center to assess taxes and to regulate service land. In the sixteenth century the use of cadasters accelerated the unification of the currency (reforms of the 1530s and 1590s) and speeded a shift from tax payment in kind to cash. Cadasters promoted enserfment: starting in the 1580s and 1590s, urban and rural taxpayers were forbidden to move from their place of registration. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles through the 1620s, cadastral surveys assessed the loss of population and cultivated land in the northwest and center where devastation had been great, and pinned people to their place of registration for ease of taxation.
New systems of taxation generated new kinds of censuses. In 1646, some special taxes shifted from land to household based, resulting in a household census; the household replaced land as the basis of direct taxation in 1679, based on new cadasters ordered in 1676; regular surveys of rural and urban taxpaying households continued into the early eighteenth century. These are not surveys of the entire population; not only were non-taxpaying individuals not included (military, church), but also groups such as iasak-paying natives and other non-Russians who were listed in taxation records specific to them. Land and population surveys were done in this century for other purposes as well, such as the 1649-52 survey of untaxed neighborhoods in towns, in order to eliminate their immunities according to the 1649 Lawcode; in the 1680s an ambitious and contentious survey of gentry land was launched, but never completed.
Military intelligence, particularly on the borders, was a particular concern. A primary role of governors on border posts from the west to Siberia was to monitor border crossings, capture and interrogate suspected spies; on the southern border the Don Cossacks played this role of intelligence gatherers for Muscovy. Peter Perdue notes that expansionist efforts of the great Eurasian empires in the seventeenth century resulted in the first demarcations of fixed territorial borders: the Ottoman empire demarcated borders with the Safavids (1639) and Habsburgs (1699), while Muscovy defined borders in its progression into the steppe with the Kalmyks, Tatars, Don Cossacks, and Ottomans. By treaties of 1689 and 1727 Russia defined a territorial border with China centering on the Amur which endured for more than a century.
Russia systematically gathered information on the Qing empire. Diplomats, border governors, ambassadors, and merchants wrote reports and smuggled out Chinese books and maps. Several wrote travelogues, often pastiches of their own and previous diplomatic records. All this information found an eager audience in Moscow and European capitals, audiences anxious to forge an overland route to China and to learn more about the new Manchu empire (1644). Ambassadors Nikolai Spafarii (1674) and Isbrandt Ides (1692-5), for example, penned reports and created maps that were widely circulated in manuscript (Spafarii) and print (Ides) across Europe. Nicholas Witsen epitomizes Moscow's lively exchange of knowledge with Europe: resident in Moscow 1664-5, for the rest of his career in Amsterdam he compiled and published ethnographic accounts, illustrations, and maps of the Russian empire and steppe borderlands in what he called North and East Tatary (1692).
For expanding empires, maps were crucial to the process of conquest and control. As Valerie Kivelson reminds us, mapping of large political entities arose "from England to Japan" in eras of political centralization, notably the fifteenth century for the leading states ofwestern Europe. But before the eighteenth century Muscovy, in Willard Sunderland's phrase, "did not have a coherent state ideology that valued territory as an intrinsic good." Rather, it focused most cartographic energy on land as taxable resource: new possessions were mapped for taxation potential and trade routes, maps were drawn for military planning, sketches were made for land disputes, but the state did not invest in developing native cartographic expertise on the level of contemporary Netherlands, England, and France. Rather, it leaned on imported sources. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Kremlin court collected western maps and atlases of Russian territories; European geographical works were dominant among books translated into Russian in the seventeenth century. Foreign travelers (Isaac Massa, Jan Struys, Guillaume de Beauplan, and others) published maps in their accounts, sometimes producing them with Russian informants, otherwise working from their scientific investigation, as in Adam Olearius' first accurate mapping of the Caspian Sea in the 1640s.