Coachmen stood in status between gentry and taxpaying peasantry and townsmen; most other groups in this status were military. First to appear by the late fifteenth century were artillerymen and engineers, trained in cannon warfare and fortification by Italian masters. Both groups lived in towns in their own neighborhoods with small plots to support themselves, and did not pay tax, save on trade they might do on the side. Sappers and gunners, as well as gatekeepers, are also mentioned in this form of service not compensated with land and serfs.
By the 1540s and 1550s the gunpowder revolution had arrived, with regiments of musketeers recruited from non-taxpayers. By the end of the sixteenth century there were 20,000-25,000 musketeers around the realm. Over time the musketeers became a semi-closed caste, sons following fathers. Musketeers were infantrymen, trained in arquebuses, swords, and pikes. Initially they were paid cash salary and grain, supported by new "musketeer" taxes; in provincial garrisons or towns, regiments of musketeers lived in their own "suburbs" on lands that they farmed communally. By the end of the sixteenth century musketeers were also given the right to tax-free trade in artisan items they produced, and the right to brew beer, fixing their attachments to garden plot, community, and trade.
Musketeers provided mass firepower in battle and were assigned to year-round garrison duty in border towns between military campaigns; as they became bypassed militarily by new models of infantry at mid-seventeenth century, musketeers became garrison troops and in Moscow they became the Kremlin palace guards, city policemen, and a general military guard for the capital. In 1681, for example, Moscow had twenty-one musketeer regiments, of about 100 men each. By this time they had developed into a hereditary, closed social group, jealous of its privileges; their propensity to flock to the Old Belief accentuated their sense of distinctiveness. In the 1680s provincial musketeers were humiliatingly transformed into new model infantry, while those in Moscow and some major towns (Astrakhan, Kazan) endured as urban policemen. Motivated by short-term grievances over salaries and deep-seated apprehensions about the erosion of their status and liberties, Moscow musketeers took the lead in two late seventeenth-century urban riots (1682, 1698), after which Moscow musketeers were virtually disbanded. Some units endured to fight in the Great Northern War, but after another musketeer-led rebellion in Astrakhan in 1708, Peter I fully disbanded the musketeers, merging them into the infantry or registering them as taxpaying townsmen by 1713.
In a similar position to musketeers were provincial Cossacks, not to be confused with the independent Hosts of Don, Zaporozhian, and Left Bank Cossacks or Urals Cossacks who were semi-autonomous vassals to Muscovy, as discussed in Chapter 3. Serving the tsar directly, provincial Cossacks manned garrisons in Siberia and across the southern frontier; they elected their leaders and supported themselves by communally farming land granted to their communities. As light, mobile cavalry in the mid-seventeenth century several regiments of such Cossacks participated in the field army, in units separate from the European- trained troops.
The capacious status of untaxed but non-landed military servitor also absorbed an important new military force in the seventeenth century. Fighting Poland- Lithuania and Sweden during and after the Time of Troubles (1605-13) had exposed Russia's need for European-style infantry and light cavalry armed with firearms and trained in disciplined field tactics. Even though Russia always maintained a greater emphasis on cavalry than its European peers (given its steppe frontier), it adopted the European "new model" in the early seventeenth century and imported hundreds of European officers to command and train it. Already in the Smolensk War (1632-4), regiments of foot soldiers were being recruited from urban and rural taxpayers; light cavalry and dragoons were recruited from impoverished gentry, Tatars, Cossacks, and taxpayers. Richard Hellie estimates that between 1651 and 1663 the army went from about 7 percent new model formation to 79 percent of the army. The overall size of the army grew as well, reflecting the mass infantry approach of European armies, filling the ranks with conscription of state peasants and serfs by household from the 1640s. As Carol Stevens showed, by about 1663 the army had reached about 100,000, and aggressive reforms from 1678 through the 1680s completed its modernization. Most provincial gentry were assigned to light cavalry (reitary) regiments; musketeers save for Moscow regiments and Siberian Cossacks were blended into the infantry.
This was not yet a permanent, standing army. Peasant recruits often served seasonally and returned to their villages in the winter months. While in camp or on campaign they were supposed to be paid salary and food provisions, but paying for them created a chronic shortage of cash throughout the century, with multiple expedients introduced to pay for the army. The basis of direct taxation on peasants and townsmen was shifted from land to households in 1679; from early in the century extraordinary cash and grain levies were decreed for military units and made permanent. In 1662 the government experimented with debasing the currency, sparking the so-called "copper riots" in major cities. Chronic dearth of cash to pay for the army prompted a final expedient that made the Muscovite army overall quite distinctive.
Alongside the growing new model standing army, Muscovy also created in the seventeenth century a settled garrison defense force on the steppe lines. Garrison troops came from all social backgrounds: runaway serfs, gentry from the center seeking more land, gentry forcibly moved by the state, retired gentry, Cossacks. On the frontier they were awarded relatively small plots of land that they farmed themselves, reflecting the dearth of local serf labor, even though the gentry among them had the right to own serfs. A particularly cohesive group of the latter were descended from troops who had manned frontier fortresses in the black earth provinces of Kursk, Orel, Tambov, and Voronezh and had been moved south with the frontier over time. They jealously protected their past gentry status, even though they owned few if any serfs and themselves worked the land. They came to be called generically the odnodvortsy (literally, single householders), discussed in more detail in Chapter 17. Garrison troops, including the once gentry odnodvortsy, were humiliatingly demoted to the status of taxed state peasants in 1679. But into the eighteenth century they fought for recognition of their special status: the term odnodvorets became a legal category protecting their theoretical right to own serfs and buy or sell their lands, even if they could rarely exercise that right. As Alessandro Stanziani remarks, frontier garrisons were a unique solution to the problem of state support (they supported themselves), and they constituted a flexible border guard trained in tactics more appropriate for the steppe frontier than the massed new model infantry and cavalry army being developed for the European front lines.
Thus, Muscovy evolved a continuum of privileged statuses to serve the tsar in ways that the state could afford. All of them were, in essence, on the cheap. The most privileged strata were the serf-owners, ranging from greatly endowed landed clans to modest provincial gentry. Bureaucrats were paid salaries and fees for service, but the state imposed on communities to provide their upkeep. Non- landed but tax-free military groups such as musketeers, Cossacks, and garrison troops collectively farmed fields that the state awarded them (to the detriment of their military readiness). For the new model troops, the state struggled to pay salaries, and was unable to maintain the army on a year-round basis. Nevertheless, people in these ranks enjoyed more economic opportunity, physical mobility, and even the chance at some upward social mobility.
A NOBILITY?