Russia (21 page)

Letters were also sent from Iaroslavl to Kazan, from Solvychegodsk to Perm, and between many other cities, urging that men be sent without delay, whether on horseback or on skis, and all sorts of people besides gentry were soon involved in the enterprise. Townsmen and peasants, local officials, humble servicemen, blacksmiths were all urged to raise soldiers, equip them, and march them to Moscow, where they were organized by a triumvirate consisting of Liapunov, Prince Dmitrii Trubetskoi and the Cossack leader Ivan Zarutskii. Russian patriots were soon on the march.

But even now the agony did not end. Swedish forces invaded, laid siege to Novgorod, and eventually took it. The Poles captured Smolensk, and Polish troops were still in Moscow. Hordes of predatory Russians were still battening on large areas and sucking them dry. And now other foreigners began to think that they could gain from Russia’s distress. The Pope wanted Russia for the access it would give his missionaries to reach all the heathens of Asia. King James I of England and Scotland wanted to gain control of Russia’s oriental trade.
³⁰
The Patriarch had been imprisoned by the Poles, yet a call to arms was issued in October 1611 by the abbot of the Trinity St Sergius Monastery at Zagorsk, and metropolitans, bishops and abbots across the land echoed his call. Even before that, scribes in towns throughout the realm wrote letters on behalf of the local governors and other notables, setting out the purpose of a mobilization, explaining the means, and trying to co-ordinate it: ‘We should take oaths ourselves, and get the Tatars and Ostiaks to swear their Muslim oath, so that … we make common cause
with them for our true and incorruptible Orthodox faith … against the enemies and destroyers of our Christian faith, against the Poles and Lithuanians.’ They also made it clear that the next tsar must ‘be chosen by the entire land of the Russian realm’ rather than arbitrarily - in other words, that an Assembly of the Land must endorse the choice of sovereign.
³¹

The movements headquarters were in Iaroslavl on the Volga, and, though Prince Trubetskoi was still associated with it, Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, commander of the local troops, now became its leading secular light, being elected by people of all ranks to command the army and the land. Also important was the elected representative of the great merchants
{gosti)
and other commercial interests, Kuzma Minin, a master butcher from Nizhnii-Novgorod. Pozharskii, in his appeals issued in the spring of 1612, blamed

the Devil … [for] creating disunity among Orthodox Christians, seducing many to join corrupt and sinful company, and [causing] rogues of every rank to band together and introduce internecine strife and bloodshed into Moscovy [so that] son rose against father, father against son, and brother against brother … and there was much shedding of Christian blood …

But now, gentlemen, we have exchanged messages with the entire land, vowed to God … and pledged our souls … to stand firmly … against the enemies and depredators
of
the Christian faith … We must choose a sovereign by common agreement, whomever God may grant us … lest the Muscovite state be utterly destroyed.
³²

Rousing appeals, a good religious cause and patriotism were not enough, however. There had to be sanctions to force the recalcitrant into line, and those who responded had to be fed and rewarded. Documents surviving from the first attempt at a national mobilization show how this was organized. Servicemen who failed to answer the call to arms and present themselves at the appointed place by the appointed date were to forfeit their service estates, though those who pleaded poverty could petition for their return. On the other hand, those who served well would be allotted estates and money pay.
³³
These provisions had presupposed functioning state ministries — particularly the department of service estates and the financial departments, including the office that ran the crown estates -and as yet the movement had no control of these. Nevertheless, it did redistribute some land on this basis of its promises. But its first need must have been for money.

We know it commanded sizeable sums, because it was able to mint coins
and pay the troops it recruited. Since the normal means of raising state income had broken down, one may assume that initially at least the Church was the chief source of funds. Very little is known about the finances of the Russian Church, but both the high profile of the Church in the revival and the fact that it commanded a major proportion of the country’s resources, including approximately a third of all cultivated land, strongly suggest that the Church filled the critical financial gap.
³⁴
And so in 1612 events at last moved towards a resolution.

In August 1612 the army - over 10,000 strong, but not particularly well equipped — arrived outside Moscow. It soon engaged the Polish forces of Hetman Chodkiewicz, forcing them into retreat. It also halted King Sigismund when he approached with an army to take control of the situation. Realizing that their prospects now seemed poor, in October the Russian power-brokers who had sponsored Prince Wladyslaw withdrew from the Kremlin, and on the following day the Polish garrison, now down to 1,500 hungry men, surrendered.

The call went out for delegates to come to Moscow to choose a tsar, and by January 1613 hundreds were arriving. Wladyslaw, the Polish candidate, was now ruled out, and the Swedish contender, Prince Karl Filip, had little more support. Trubetskoi’s candidature was blocked by Pozharskii, and both of them opposed the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, who was hardly an impressive candidate and had been associated with the Polish occupiers. However, the Romanovs were rich, and they spent money to promote their man. The Cossack delegates were eventually won over — or bought — and on 21 February Michael was chosen.
³⁵
His father, Filaret Romanov, was installed as patriarch, and Michael himself was crowned in July 1612. Though the Cossack leader Zarutskii, Marina and her four-year-old son (known as the ‘little brigand’) were not to be caught and dealt with until the summer of 1614, at last the work of reconstruction could get under way

The Time of Troubles left in its wake both a damaged economy and damaged institutions. It also established a tradition by which governments were to be challenged by pretenders who denied the tsar’s legitimacy. Such claimants sprang up from various parts of the country with increasing regularity over the next two centuries, threatening to destabilize government in Russia.
³⁶
Yet there was a positive legacy too. The trauma impressed on most Russians a sense that even oppressive, autocratic government was preferable to the mayhem of anarchy, and the regime took care to remind them of it.

Events had also demonstrated that even in the early 1600s Russians were coming to share a common national consciousness. It has been argued that the imperial nature of the ethnically diverse Russian state inhibited the development of Russian nationalism, but a strong sense of patriotism — perhaps as strong as that manifested in Elizabethan England - was shared by Russians from the north and south, east and west. Russians knew who they were, and it was not only their Orthodox religion, contrasting with the Catholic, Protestant and Muslim faiths of their neighbours, that defined them; nor their language, which, except for the Old Church Slavonic used for religious purposes, was not yet a standard or literary one; nor their customs, which varied to some extent from region to region — though all these elements contributed. They shared a sense of community associated with the land, and, as the letters sent out to mobilize a national army demonstrate, even strangers among them, such as Muslim Tatars, were not excluded. They too were accepted as part of the Russian political community.
³⁷

And, though the Troubles had shorn Russia of much of its empire, there were some areas where the process
of
empire-building had hardly been interrupted.

E
ARLY IN
1613 several groups of officials and clerks, with small retinues of servants carrying bales of sable-skins, live falcons and other valuables, were to be seen leaving Moscow by sledge or boat. These wise men bearing gifts were embassies bound for the courts of the Habsburg Emperor, the King of Poland, the Turkish Sultan, Denmark, England and several lesser powers. Later that year and the year that followed, others left — for Persia, France and Holland. Their purpose was to announce that Tsar Michael Romanov (together with his father, Patriarch Filaret) now guided Russia’s destiny; that the Time of Troubles was over. But their brave show masked the sad condition of the country. The economy was shattered, the currency debased, the government bankrupt, administration in disarray, the population reduced and exhausted. And Russia was still pursuing unaffordable wars with Sweden and with Poland. The only foreign-policy options now were defensive; the only possible economic policy was retrenchment.

Despite its desperate need for revenue, the government had to suspend tax collection in some stricken regions for a time to allow them to recover, and the ambassadors were in effect sent out with begging bowls in hand. With Poland they were to negotiate a treaty of ‘eternal peace’, even at the cost of ceding rich tracts of territory and important towns including the great fortress city of Smolensk. Other powers were to be asked for military and financial aid.
¹
But the brave show
of
formal ceremony which the ambassadors maintained, and their cautious, hard-headed, approach in negotiations, could hardly disguise the fact that Russia’s aspirations to great-power status had become laughable.

Yet within forty years Russia’s wasted muscles were bulging once again. By the 1670s roles had been reversed: proud Poland was much reduced; Russia had supplanted it as the strongest power in eastern Europe. How is the extraordinary turnaround to be explained? By what mysterious means was the pitiable Russia of 1613 transformed into a new Goliath? And how was it able to ward off a series of internal troubles that threatened to undermine its new stability: an open rift between tsar and patriarch; an
irreparable split among Russian Christians; the appearance of yet more pretenders; and repeated rebellions, both urban and rural, some of massive scale?
²

Imperial growth hinged on military power, but this in turn depended on size of population and the generation of wealth, both of which are difficult to measure for an age for which there are no census data, official statistics or economic indicators. Informed estimates suggest that the population grew from as little as 8 million in 1600 to 11 million or more by 1678,
³
but the increase was due to several factors other than natural increase: the acquisition of eastern Ukraine along with Smolensk in 1666 gave a big boost to population, and the conquest of Siberia added as many as half a million more. On the other hand the great plague of 1654 sharply reduced the population of Moscow, and war casualties — notably those sustained in the Polish war of 1654—67 — decimated the male population. These losses were offset to some extent by the government’s practice of transporting civilians, especially those with skills, to Moscow from the western territories it occupied, and by the importation of foreign professional soldiers and technological experts. Even so the rate of natural increase must have been high, and the most obvious reason for this was improvement in diet since the Time of Troubles. There were fewer interruptions to the production and transportation of food; fewer famines, less disruption; and in the last three decades of the century Russia shared in the upsurge of prosperity and optimism enjoyed by most of Europe.

The economic recovery was quicker than the demographic. The leading American economic historian
of
Russia, Richard Hellie of Chicago, concludes that normal economic activity’ had been restored by 1630. But Russia’s ability to break through the ramparts that separated her from the West depended on more than this — indeed, on something like an economic miracle. Hellie argues that the absence of guilds, which had inhibited economic development in western Europe, was one advantage. The government created another in 1649, when it removed previously existing restrictions on urban craftsmen and traders, and limited the economic privileges of the Church. Furthermore, the state maintained a stable currency, enforced standard weights and measures, reduced the number of internal toll charges, and kept communications relatively safe from bandits for most of the time. All this helped to promote the economy. On the other hand the final imposition of serfdom, according to Hellie, was bad for the country’s development, because it confined the peasant labour force to the
Volga—Oka region around Moscow, where soils were relatively poor, hampering agricultural development in the more productive Black Earth zones of the south and east.
⁴

Yet the maintenance of a large labour force around Moscow was essential if the state, which protected the economy, was to function. A free labour market would not have guaranteed that. Nor would a free market necessarily have promoted faster economic development. The problem arose not so much from the state and the autocracy squeezing initiative out of society (as some historians argue) as from the conservatism of most Russian merchants, who showed much less initiative than their Western counterparts. They viewed their privileges merely as monopolies to be exploited.
⁵
At the same time wealthy magnates, so far from investing productively, tended to stockpile wealth and acquire luxuries, otherwise engaging with the market as little as possible. They continued to produce the bulk of their needs in their own households on their own estates, as in bygone times. Rather than the Russian state restricting economic growth through its interference in economic life, it could be argued that the taxes it imposed stimulated production and that it filled some of the gaps which unenterprising Russians of means had neglected.
⁶

Siberia was to be a major factor in Russia’s recovery. Ivan IV’s backing for the Stroganov venture (see Chapter 5) continued to pay handsome dividends, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the vast potential of Siberia had not yet been recognized. Its huge expanses remained almost entirely
terra incognita,
its population, chiefly native peoples, small. Although the disruption of the Time of Troubles had displaced many Russians and encouraged migration to the periphery of the Empire, most migrants preferred to move south rather than east; and although the laws required the return of runaway serfs to their landlords, those who benefited from their labour were reluctant to surrender them. So population movement into Siberia remained a trickle. Trappers and traders went there, but they lacked the resources, the capability and perhaps even the inclination to organize the exploitation of the territory in any thoroughgoing manner, and so the task fell to the state.
⁷

Concern to secure the biggest possible tax income led it to build forts at distant trading stations and to devise settlement programmes. In 1601 the Godunov regime had mounted an expedition to a winter trading station called Mangazeia on the Yenisei river deep in the icy tundra at the very edge of the Arctic Circle. The purpose was to build a log fort and
administration centre, where traders would gather and taxes could be collected. Although the dismal area was a hunting ground of the feared Samoyeds, who were reputed to eat their own children, they could be forced to pay tribute to the benefit of the state. Mangazeia was to become an important base for the penetration of Siberia as far as the Pacific.

At the same time, since all virgin land was regarded as crown property, the state was anxious to make cultivable parts of Siberia productive. It therefore encouraged peasants not already in the tax net to settle around new log forts, providing them with food and seedcorn, and sometimes much more, to get them started.
⁸
Such opportunities were to be announced in the market places of appropriate towns. ‘Whoever is willing to go to the Taborinsk area …’ ran one such proclamation, ‘will be given a plot of arable land and money from our Treasury for horses and farm buildings … and tax exemption for one year or more depending on the condition of the land they settle, and one ruble or two for transportation depending on the size of the family.’
⁹

The river Yenisei, Russia’s eastern limit in 1601, also marked the eastern limit
of
cultivable land in Siberia, so the lure
of
free farms for would-be homesteaders did not work beyond that point. Nevertheless, within half a century Russians and the Russian state had reached the Pacific. Yakutsk, where there are frosts for nine months of the year, was founded in 1637; Lake Baikal was reached in 1647, the Bering Strait in 1648.

The quest had originally been for furs, then salt (the foundation
of
the Stroganovs’ fortune), iron, fish and walrus tusks. Siberia’s gold was as yet undiscovered, and its rich oilfields and natural gas and aluminium deposits — the bases of future wealth — were unknown and unneeded.

The pioneers were Cossacks, boatmen, trappers and traders. Their technology was simple, and they lacked navigational instruments. They sailed Arctic seas from estuary to estuary in boats they had built themselves; they traversed permafrost landscapes, and braved their ways across 4,000 miles of uncharted taiga to Chukhotka, Kamchatka and the frontiers of China. Many died in the process. Yet these Russian explorers found their way across the vast, inclement tracts of northern Asia amazingly quickly. Often they were oblivious of their achievement. One such was the Cossack Semeon Dezhnev, who found the straits separating Asia from America in 1648, eighty years before Vitus Bering.

Dezhnev was a Siberian serviceman who had been sent into the wilderness in search of ‘new people’ from whom the government could extract tribute. He set out with twenty-four other trappers, hunters and traders, most of them working on their own account. They went by sea and land -
whichever seemed more practical, given the topography and the season. Eventually they came to the river Anadyr. ‘We could catch no fish,’ he reported subsequently; ‘there was no forest, and so, because of hunger we poor men went separate ways … [Half the party] went up the Anadyr [overland] and journeyed for twenty days but saw no people, traces of reindeer sleds, or native trails,’ so they turned back.

Eventually the twelve survivors went by boat up the river, and at last came upon some Yukagirs.

We captured two of them in a fight [in which] I was badly wounded. We took tribute from them by name, recording in the tribute books what we took from each and what for the Sovereign [Tsar]’s tribute. I wanted to take more … but they said ‘We have no sables [for] we do not live in the forest. But the reindeer people visit us and when they come we shall buy sables from them and pay tribute to the Sovereign.’

The arrival of a rival tribute collector, however, sparked some violence and dried up the flow of tribute.

Dezhnev worked on in Siberia, and some fifteen years later we find him bombarding the Siberia Office with petitions:

I, your slave, supported myself on your … service on the new rivers with my own money and my own equipment, and I … received no official pay in money, grain and salt from 1642 to 1661 … because of the shortage of money and grain … I risked my head [in your service,] was severely wounded, shed my blood, suffered great cold and hunger, and all but died of starvation … I was impoverished by shipwreck, incurred heavy debts, and was finally ruined … Sovereign, have mercy, please.
¹⁰

Russian petitioners commonly expressed themselves in piteous as well as slavish terms, but Dezhnev’s plea has the ring of truth, and in due course the government authorized reasonable compensation to be paid to him — though one may assume that it corroborated his claim with its records first. The discovery of places and people continued apace, driven by the state’s unassuagable appetite for more assets and more income, whether in coin or kind. But there were limits. One day venturers came across tribesmen who, when accosted for tribute, asked why they should pay the Tsar of Russia when they already paid tribute to the Emperor of China. By the 1680s the two countries were engaged in a border war. The Russians built forts — Albasin and Argunsk — on the lower reaches of the Amur river. The Chinese brought up a small army with artillery, and proceeded to destroy them. Hostilities were tempered by a mutual interest in trade, which, since the Manchu government banned the export of bullion, had to be carried
on by barter, the Chinese paying in silk and tea for Russian furs and hides. A formal treaty between the two governments was concluded at Nerchinsk in 1689. The negotiation was conducted in Latin, Jesuits based in Beijing and a Romanian emigre to Moscow serving as interpreters, and, since at this point Chinese strength in the region was greater than Russia’s, the deal was struck largely on China’s terms.

The conquest of Siberia turned out to be a factor of critical importance to the development of a new Russian empire. It ensured a continuing supply of furs which soon accounted for as much as a quarter of the entire revenue of the tsar’s exchequer.
¹¹
In this way the ermine skins that trimmed the robes of English peers, the bearskins worn by European soldiers, and the sables prized by German burghers and by grandees at the imperial court of China contributed to Russia’s rise to world power. Siberia furnished other assets too: rare falcons, prized by hunters in Europe as well as Arabia; oil and grease from the blubber of the seals that frequented the coasts; narwhal tusks, which some alchemists and physicians mistook for magic unicorns’ horns; and the more common but still valuable walrus tusks. Siberia turned out to be rich in minerals, too — including gold — and its possession was to revolutionize Russia’s strategic position, providing access to China, the Pacific and North America.