The word "nobility" is difficult to apply to the ruling elite of early modern Russia, inasmuch as in common usage it conjures images of European grandees whose rights to property and political participation were legally protected by charters and acted out in parliaments and other political institutions. In the thirteenth century the English nobility won such guarantees in the Magna Carta (1215), followed soon thereafter by an equally sweeping charter for the Hungarian nobility (1222);
from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries the Polish and Bohemian elites won such legal guarantees as well. In each of these cases, nobles over time transformed the European tradition of kings consulting with their men into institutionalized parliaments with real political power.
By contrast, Muscovy's elites had no legal protections of their privileges and no formalized, estate-based institutions for exercising political power or defending their rights. But even without legal protections, Muscovy certainly had an enduring elite, a sliver of the population that enjoyed social privileges, status, access to office, and wealth and political influence. Jonathan Powis uses the term "aristocracy" to describe elites like these who endure over time without legally defined charters of rights. Even more significant in creating and maintaining aristocracies over time, Powis argues, were social and political practices: corporate self-consciousness engendered by a common myth; corporate solidarity, enforced by land or genealogical records that helped to restrict membership in the elite; marriage within the group; monopolies on office holding or productive resources such as land or serfs; exclusive occupations such as military service; distinguishing lifestyle (education, dress, language, culture, avocations such as English fox hunting); and the ability to adapt to changing political landscapes. Even in the period before Peter I, Russia's ruling elite wielded such social and political strategies to maintain itself throughout the early modern centuries.
Not all did so. The semi-privileged military groups (provincial Cossacks, musketeers, garrison troops) struggled to keep their privileges and status during the relentless military reforms of the seventeenth century, and many, most notably the musketeers, impoverished gentry and odnodvortsy, fell in status, transformed into soldiers in the new model army or taxed state peasants. But serf-owners coalesced into a lasting elite. Families in the conciliar ranks, the Moscow lists, and provincial gentry were marked by cavalry military service, ownership of land and serfs, and exemption from taxes. As their mode of warfare became outdated, they maintained utility to the state and their privileges. Anticipating Powis's categories, they formed group cohesion by marriage within the group and by cultivating strong, affinitive factions based on marriage and clientage. They monopolized the highest, most lucrative military and civil offices. In the seventeenth century corporate myths, distinctive clothing, education, and lifestyle were poorly developed, but numerous groups of provincial gentry were self-conscious enough to submit collective petitions for rights and protections. They endured as an elite, when they might have been demoted into the salaried new model army in the mid-seventeenth century, by their access to power and their ability to shape reforms that maintained their privileges even as their roles became transformed.
On the concept of aristocracy, see Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). On concentric circles of society and an influential interpretation of court politics: Edward L. Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (1986): 115-81. On military growth and land policy, see Vincent E. Hammond, State Service in Sixteenth Century Novgorod: The First Century of the Pomestie System (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 2009); Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Carol Belkin Stevens, Russia's Wars of Emergence, 1460-1730 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007); John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Alessandro Stanziani, Batisseurs d'empires: Russie, Chine etInde a la croisee des mondes, XVe-XIXe siecle (Paris: Raisons d'Agir, 2012).
On the boyar elite in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see my Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Sergei Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and his Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000). For the seventeenth century: Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613-1689 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and his "The Origins of the Noble Officiaclass="underline" The Boyar Elite, 1613-1689," in Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 46-75; Marshall Poe, O. E. Kosheleva, Russell Martin, and B. N. Morozov, The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century (Helsinki: FASL, 2004). On precedence, see my By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 4. On Muscovite tsars' marriages: Russell Martin, A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012).
On the seventeenth-century gentry: Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996) and her "The Devil Stole his Mind: The Tsar and the 1648 Moscow Uprising," American Historical Review 98 (1993): 733-56; Andre Berelo- witch, La Hierarchie des egaux: la noblesse russe d'ancien regime (XVIe-XVIIe siecles) (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001). On the army below the landed military classes: Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Stevens, Russia's Wars of Emergence.
On seventeenth-century political structure: Marshall Poe, "The Central Government and its Institutions," and Brian Davies, "Local Government and Administration," in Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On kormlenie and the risk of corruption, see my Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 4 and 8.
On social origins of bureaucrats: Borivoj Plavsic, "Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and their Staffs," in Pintner and Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom, 19-45; Peter B. Brown, "The Service Land Chancellery Clerks of Seventeenth-Century Russia: Their Regime, Salaries and Economic Survival," JahrbUcherfur Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004): 33-69. Fundamental studies in Russian include N. F. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia v Rossii XVII v. i ee rol' v formirovanii absoliutizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1987) and L. F. Pisar'kova, Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie Rossii s kontsaXVII do Kontsa XVIII veka: evoliutsiia biurokra- ticheskoi sistemy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007).
Rural Taxpayers
Peasants and Beyond
The majority of the Russian empire's population was taxpayers, mostly agrarian, but also including townsmen and native peoples practicing a variety of economies from nomadism to trapping and forest exploitation. Taxpayers were a steady source ofincome and labor services for the state, and much ofthe story ofempire is the tale of their control, primarily control of their mobility. At the same time that the state exerted impressive surveillance, maintaining taxation records, collecting taxation, and enforcing enserfment, taxpayers lived lives often well removed from tsarist authority, governing themselves in all but the most serious issues. Here, too, the state made "deals" with subject peoples, balancing exploitation with autonomies.