Extending into the great distances of Siberia was a difficult challenge: the earliest coach stations (built 1598-1601) were staffed with men recruited from towns of the Russian north and Kazan. Coach stations extended through Verkhotur'e (the main customs gate until 1763) to Tobolsk by the 1630s, but for many decades to points farther east the state relied on local communities for horses and carts on demand, unable to staff enough coach stations. Relying on community support for official transports, early modern Russia had a skeletal but effective communications network among the towns and frontier posts that mattered most to it.
Other networks of communication occasionally supplemented the system of coachmen and fixed stations, again involving forcible population movements. One was what Americans might call a pony express, that is, a network for urgent communications between Moscow and its provincial governors and commanders. This developed in the second half of the seventeenth century as Muscovy expanded its fortified lines into the steppe, became engaged in war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and won the suzerainty of the Left Bank Cossack Hetmanate. The Military Service Chancery created a system of express couriers, assigned from musketeers, artillery men, and even gentry who were moved to the frontier where they served a year-long term, living in groups of four to six men at existing coach stations or newly created ones. Passing the mail pouch from rider to rider without stop, they could transport documents from Tula to Moscow in twenty hours, from Kyiv to Moscow in 114 hours; they went daily in high campaign season (spring into summer), less often through autumn and winter. With the Cossack alliance in 1654 and the outbreak of the Thirteen Years War (1654-67), an express courier network was created to Ukraine. Less urgent correspondence, as well as individuals and goods, were to go by the coach system where it could be established on the turbulent frontier, or otherwise by requisitioning horses from communities. Speedy courier services existed only as long as they were needed; as Peter I turned his military attention from the south to the Baltic arena in the first decades of the eighteenth century, express service was ended to Ukraine and developed in the Baltic theater.
A commercial mail network was developed in the late seventeenth century, growing out of the state's importation of European newspapers and the increasing pace of diplomatic communications through Baltic ports. Monopolies for regular mail service (diplomatic, official, and private) between Moscow and Vilnius and Riga were awarded to foreigners in the 1660s, but the routes did not flourish until A. A. Vinius in the 1670s and 1680s took over the project. He established a regular postal service between Moscow and Baltic ports, points in Ukraine, the southern frontier, Smolensk, Arkhangelsk, even as far as Tobolsk in Siberia. Although mail was carried by couriers wearing white uniforms to distinguish them from coachmen's green, Vinius' mail service was based on coach stations, where dedicated horses and riders stood at the ready. When it worked well, the mail could travel very quickly: in the summer in the 1690s mail between Moscow and Arkhangelsk took eight to nine days, Moscow and Tobolsk two months.
One should not, however, exaggerate this communication network. The state created it for military and diplomatic purposes, with little attempt to serve the population at large. Towns and villages were responsible for construction of their own roads and bridges. This was a skeletal network that reflected the state's pragmatic definition of its role.
PUBLIC HYGIENE
A final demonstration of the state's ability to assert its power came in the fight against infectious diseases. We saw in Chapter 1 that Russia suffered in the common European and Eurasian transfer of diseases. The infectious nature of epidemics was somewhat known to folk medicine and the state imposed some basic prohibitive measures when disease broke out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly for plague. There is reference already in 1552 to guards posted on the roads between Novgorod and Pskov to Moscow, prohibiting communication in time of epidemic, and of quarantines of infected houses and streets within cities, as in Novgorod in 1570-2. Punishment was severe for those crossing such boundaries. Guards were routinely placed at borders, governors were queried for information on epidemics abroad, foreigners were questioned about plague in the areas they had come from, diplomats could be turned back or quarantined. In 1636, for example, word had it that plague (associated with outbreaks slightly earlier in Italy and in this same year in Holland) had broken out in Crimea. Quarantines were placed in Livny and Oskol, two key routes connecting to the
Crimea, and ambassadors from the Crimea were forbidden to enter Moscow. At times in the early seventeenth century the government forbade the import of grain from infected areas, and burials of the infected dead were supposed to be confined to specially designated repositories. The plague epidemic that hit Moscow in August 1654 and endured in the vicinity until 1657 presented a particular challenge: the royal family fled the city and guards were placed on all roads from Moscow to prevent the contagion from spreading to the Russian army encamped at Smolensk.
In the 1640s a complete line of guard stations against disease was built between Moscow and Vladimir, guarding the Vladimir highway and nine smaller crossings to the west and south. Local populations bore an onerous burden of building and manning them, as well as quarantining suspected carriers and maintaining quarantine if disease broke out in their border town. There were established routines for disinfecting infected homes and for burning property directly associated with the infected. These efforts, however, were only as good as local administrations, which chronically suffered from lack of manpower and resources. Particularly interesting were measures to protect that government's rulers: in the seventeenth century government documentation sent from infected areas was carefully watched so as not to bring infection to Moscow. Documents were to be passed through the smoke of a juniper or sagebrush fire, thought to be disinfecting, and anything destined for the Kremlin chanceries or Tsar had to be copied multiple times on new sheets of clean paper before the final copy would be sent on to the capital. These good efforts depended upon available manpower and density of network to be effective.
All in all, through the seventeenth century the Muscovite state showed itself capable of exerting force to accomplish its goals. It used coercive force to conquer and suppress resistance; like its European counterparts it imbedded violence in criminal procedure and punishments. It oversaw the realm with a skeletal but highly professional bureaucracy; it surveyed its resources with cadasters and maps. It forcibly mobilized human and material resources to build roads, provide coach service, fill granaries, settle border areas. Much of this effort supported Russia's military aims. Another arena in which the state used its power was in organizing and profiting from the international and domestic economies, to which we turn in Chapter 8.
Evsey Domar theory on serfdom: "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 18-32. For further bibliography on Russian peasants and enserfment, see Chapters 10 and 17. On epidemics in Russia, see bibliography cited in Chapter 1. Theoretical perspectives on empire by Barkey, Burbank, and Cooper, see bibliography in Introduction. On the practice of the criminal law, see my Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), "Ritual and Social Drama at the Muscovite Court," Slavic Review 45 (1986): 486-502, and By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Valerie A. Kivelson explores procedure, including torture, in suits on land and witchcraft in Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). On exile, see my Crime and Punishment and Andrew A. Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).