Religion provided a locus for dissent. Many Russian peasants joined the Old Belief when schism broke out in the Orthodox Church from the 1660s. Some found Old Belief religious practice more compatible with their beliefs and chose to live outside the mainstream; others saw it as an expedient way to rebel against the dominant society. Cossack communities, for example, ostentatiously adopted the Old Belief as a claim to separate status and age-old traditions. Such religious distancing was usually accompanied by physical movement: Old Believer communities fled to the borderlands, even outside of Russia, to create lives anew.
Peasants resisted on the job. They poached game and cut timber in landlords' forests; they underpaid their taxes and built up arrears; they bribed officials to avoid recruitment; they surreptitiously brewed illegal vodka. They also resisted change, even in the late eighteenth century when enlightened landlords with all the best intentions tried to introduce crop rotations and new foods that would have improved peasant well-being. It was simply too risky to innovate. Peasants also resisted more overtly. They fled their landlords, becoming Cossacks and garrison troops on the borders. Some blended into urban occupations, while others escaped even state control by fleeing so far into Siberia or the steppe that tsarist taxation, let alone landlords, did not follow, at least for a few generations. And some escaped tsarist control, albeit often briefly, by becoming highwaymen. Bands of robbers preyed on major roads and rivers where the distance between settlements made travel perilous. A scourge on communities, such robbers generated relatively little idealization in Russian folk tradition.
Rarely did peasants erupt in mass revolts, usually when grievances became too sharp and when outside leadership provided organization. In Eurasia catalyst and organizational ability for rebellion was usually provided by Cossacks—Ivan Bolotnikov (1606), Stepan Razin (1670-1), Emelian Pugachev (1773-5) were all Cossacks, each with travel experience that gave them greater political savvy. These rebellions generally followed a pattern: they erupted from the borderlands and gathered disparate social groups rebelling against increasing government control (enserfment, taxation) or loss of traditional Cossack or native autonomies. In the Time of Troubles, Bolotnikov's followers included peasants resenting encroaching serfdom; Stepan Razin mobilized not only lesser Don Cossacks, resentful of oppression by their own elite, but also natives in the middle and lower Volga, angry at Russian seizure of their lands or newly imposed taxation or enserfment. None of these rebellions was successful in changing fundamental structures, but both Razin and Pugachev engendered vibrant folk songs and tales evoking nostalgia for frontier freedoms that migrated into mainstream literature and art. Alexander Pushkin set his novella The Captain's Daughter (1836) in the time of Pugachev; the artist Vasilii Surikov immortalized Stepan Razin in defeat (1906). In the seventeenth century, the government punished such opposition with calculated steps. In the heat of battle, they strung rebel leaders up on gibbets for all to see, as discussed in Chapter 7; they staged an elaborate execution for Stepan Razin in Moscow. But for the mass of the rebels, the state moved cautiously, demanding oaths of loyalty and sending them home, following up with reforms to improve policing to prevent a recurrence.
OTHER TAXPAYERS
Landlords' serfs constituted about half of all the peasants in the realm; the rest were in direct relationship to the tsar as state and crown peasants or native communities. In lands north ofMoscow (the Dvina basin, Pomor'e), where landlord serfdom was untenable, state peasants had strong communal government. Villages were small, and organized in regional communes to handle common legal and economic issues and to represent their interests to the local governor. They regularly petitioned and won Moscow's cooperation on issues such as relief from taxation after natural disasters, onerous labor services, bands of highwaymen. They negotiated the best deal they could with the center, and they were good at it. Many who emigrated (forcibly or not) to Siberia brought these strong communal traditions to their isolated outposts, contributing to Siberians' reputation for independence.
Moscow's expanding empire grew to include many other taxpaying groups by the end of the seventeenth century, each with its own deal with the center. East Slavic peasants and serfs acquired in the Grand Duchy with westward expansion were treated like Russian peasants in tax and service obligations. Non-Slavic populations fared differently, primarily iasak payers who lived in territories of historic Chinggisid rule. Iasak payers were as varied as the empire's vast terrain. They included nomadic Bashkirs in the Urals and Iakuts in Siberia, reindeer herders and walrus hunters near the Arctic Circle, Tatars and Chuvash in the Middle Volga. They generally lived in tribes, sometimes organized at a larger level (the Buriats and Iakuts of eastern Siberia). Iasak was paid in kind and in cash depending on the setting—in furs in Siberia until they ran out. Iasak-paying peasants were not recruited into the new model army, but some were asked to perform labor services for local garrisons and other military needs.
Outside the tsar's direct taxation through the seventeenth century were several semi-autonomous areas—Don Cossack territory, the Hetmanate, semi-autonomous Sloboda Ukraine, nomadic Kalmyks. Muscovy dealt with each differently— providing grain subsidies and gifts to the Don Cossacks and Kalmyks, taking customs and other indirect taxes from Sloboda Ukraine, demanding that the
Hetmanate support Russian troops and pay some taxes. As discussed in Chapters 3-5, these areas each organized their own government, used their own laws and courts, collected and deployed their own taxes, and were not yet integrated into the judicial or fiscal systems of empire.
Paying direct taxes constituted one element of cohesion across the empire; another element in empire-wide cohesion was the tsar's criminal justice network. As noted in Chapter 7, in Muscovy all subjects of the tsar engaged in the legal system through the fiction of personally petitioning the tsar. All the tsar's subjects (save the highest criminals) were considered to have honor and could litigate to defend it in court; similarly, all social groups, regardless of social status, gender, religion, or ethnicity, could and did initiate cases, testify, put up surety, and otherwise participate in the law. Even indentured slaves (kholopy) used the legal system, even though as slaves they did not pay taxes.
To fulfill his theoretical obligation to protect his people from evil and pragmatically to maintain law and order, the tsar offered courts for highest crime—felonies, recidivist crime, treason, heresy—as well as courts for disputes over land and other productive resources. Like the Ottoman kadi courts, they were open to all subjects of the ruler individually and collectively. In a multi-ethnic empire, the tsar's courts—a governor's court in the provinces, chanceries at the center—provided venues for resolving inter-ethnic or inter-confessional group conflict, enforcing the tsar's monopoly on violence to prevent vendetta and private violence. Non-Slavic subjects did use the tsar's courts on equal footing with East Slavs. Ample surviving court records from the Middle Volga in the seventeenth century demonstrate that Tatars, Mordva, and other natives regularly sued Russians and non-Russians alike. For example, in 1674 a Russian man serving as a Cossack in the Kadom garrison was convicted of murdering a Tatar woman; in 1670 a group of Cherkass merchants sued a group of Russian peasants for assault and robbery. Russians worked with non-Russians in suits, as in 1680 when a Russian peasant listed Tatar and Mordva neighbors as witnesses in his suit. When judges ordered community inquests to seek out facts and reputation of accused parties, Russians and non- Russians were interviewed, the Russians taking an oath on the cross, the non- Christians swearing "by their own faith."