What saved Muscovy's landed elite, particularly the provincial gentry, from extinction was its utility in local leadership and its importance as a bulwark of autocracy. Locally, their authority over serfs provided a de facto administration, saving the state from investing in a denser bureaucracy and police presence. Politically, the state needed the gentry's support in a polity that was constantly scarce on population and manpower. They were gradually being integrated into a modernized army, and they retained their markers of social status and power: tax free status, exclusive ownership of serfs and land. In 1682 precedence—the system of disputes (mestnichestvo) over relative rank in the highest elite that was discussed in Chapter 7—was formally abolished (it had been irrelevant for decades), but in its place an effort was made to compile genealogical books to identify the elite, a first step towards corporate, "noble" consciousness. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the remaining old-style militia units were transformed into light cavalry, and separate regiments of gentry were discontinued. At the same time, the Muscovite boyar elite and gentry had stayed intact, ready for Petrine reforms.
BUREAUCRATS AS ELITE
Muscovy's scribes and secretaries were also co-opted to serve the state, although with fewer privileges than the military elite. A few secretaries (d'iaki) worked their way up to become state secretaries and share in the privileges of boyar status, namely land and serf ownership. Most secretaries and undersecretaries, in Moscow and the provinces, held a distinctive middle status. They did not pay direct tax, but could not own land. Their work gave them access to fees and gifts. As a result, the bureaucracy was socially quite diverse. Heredity within families provided most of the workers in Moscow chanceries, but this was not a closed social stratum. As the bureaucracy grew, literate people were tapped wherever they could be found. In the seventeenth century in the central provinces priests' families and even provincial gentry joined bureaucratic work. In the north, state peasants staffed offices; on the frontiers, provincial gentry and contract servitors (Cossacks, musketeers) took these roles. A 1707 survey of undersecretaries in the Chancery of Land Affairs demonstrates this social mobility: 31 percent were from hereditary chancery families, 30 percent from clerical families, 14 percent from provincial gentry, 7 percent were slaves, 6 percent were taxed townsmen, 4 percent were from families of artisans employed at the court, 3 percent were contract servitors, and 2 percent were foreign prisoners of war.
As noted in Chapter 7, in addition to salary bureaucrats were supported by local communities with housing, fixed deliveries of food, and gifts (opening a slippery slope to corruption). Communities also supported other officials sent to serve in the provinces—governors, holders of salt and alcohol monopolies, short-term census takers, and the like—with similar upkeep, called feeding (kormlenie). This system endured through the eighteenth century, and marked another way in which the state supported army and administration on the cheap.
In many early modern states alongside military-based nobilities there developed a powerful and socially prestigious civil service elite composed of lawyers, notaries, and other educated professionals (as in the French noblesse de robe). This did not happen in Muscovy. Relatively few undersecretaries advanced to the rank of secretary (d'iak), and that social status never found equal footing with military men. Quite the contrary. Military men penetrated into chancery service at the center, taking leadership positions in most of the chanceries, except for those few that required such specialized knowledge—the Military Service and Foreign Affairs chanceries, as well as the tsar's Privy Chancery—that they continued to be led by trained bureaucrats. By the 1680s almost half of the di'aki in central offices came from the conciliar elite or Moscow list, and early in the eighteenth century the proportion rose to 60 percent. But men from these military backgrounds still disdained chancery service per se, shunned the lowly role of undersecretary, and played their roles as leaders, not bureaucratic experts. Civil service continued to be undervalued.
LESSER MILITARY SERVITORS
The state was constantly challenged to recruit men to fulfill new needs, but to do so in a way that did not dilute the status of the highest and that was affordable in a state with limited resources. There were simply not the resources to give grants of land and serfs to all the military men the state needed. As military reform created demand for different sorts of units (artillery, musketeers, garrison Cossacks, new model infantry), the state developed a status that fell between the landed elite and the taxpayers. Men in these ranks were free of tax, but they could not own serfs or land. They were compensated with cash salaries, grain requisitions, and weaponry. Some also received land awarded collectively to their community (musketeers, Cossacks) that they would farm on the side to support themselves; they were also allowed to trade in the petty retail market. This model was expedient and inexpensive for the state. Their economic position was superior to taxed peasants and townsmen, and to that degree they were co-opted into service to the state. A common English phrase for them—servitors by contract—is woefully inadequate; they were not hired laborers and their diversity was so great that it is hard to connote with one phrase.
Perhaps the earliest group in this status (Richard Hellie calls them the "lower service class," with the gentry as "middle") was the coachmen (iamshchiki), discussed in Chapter 7. These were the communities who maintained stations with horses, carts, provisions, and escorts for state messengers. Over the sixteenth century they became a hereditary social group separate from town and village taxpayers; decrees of 1556, 1580s, 1619, 1627, and 1631 awarded them a semi- privileged status. They were exempted from most taxes and labor obligations not related to road upkeep; they received an annual cash salary (in 1714 their salaries, as for bureaucrats, were rescinded and they lived off service and farming). Coachmen received homesteads for households and stables and plots of arable and grazing lands that they worked as a community. In addition to tax privileges, in their spare time coachmen could hire out for general hauling and delivery work. Communities of coachmen formed strong, self-governing communes, overseen in judicial affairs locally by their own local bailiffs and centrally by the Iamskoi chancery in Moscow.