Soldiers of the Tsar. Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874 - John L. Keep

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120 The Warrior Tsar, 1689-1725
stead'.^6 In this way the fear of some and the zeal of others would combine to
advance the interests of the army as a whole.
General inspections offered :he best n1cans uf wcc:<ling out the fit irom the
unfit. The principle was not new; the thoroughness, and the cl()se interest
taken by the sovereign, were. In 1704 Peter held a review of 8,000 nobles in
Moscow. After another such parade in 1708 lists were compiled 'of th~,ranks
and names of those fit to be officers and privates'. The tsarevich Aleksey was
told to seek out 300 to 500 high-ranking servitors (tsaredvortsy, roughly
equivalent to the old metropolitan nobility) and to choose some of them to be
officers. He replied dutifully: 'I am ordering the young ones to be trained and
making them privates, and afterwards shall send them as officers to the
regiments listed',^7 adding the pathetic plea: 'where shall I get food for those
poor servitors who have neither villages nor estates and say they have nothing
to eat?' Such mundane matters had a low priority, especially at this critical
moment.
Paradoxically, it was only after Poltava that Peter seriously attempted to
implement the principle of universal military service by male members of the
elite. He concentrated his efforts on adolescents (nedorosli). In March 1710 six
provincial governors were ordered to carry out 'extremely thorough' inspec-
tions of all gentry in their areas: 'list separately those fit for service and bring
them with you to Moscow next winter'. The governors would be held personfilly
responsible if any of the young men went into hiding.^8 The results were deemed
unsatisfactory, especially as war with Turkey was looming. When he set up the
Senate in March 1711, Peter instructed it to hunt down, with ,the aid of
delators, noble boys who had managed to conceal their existence; this was the
first occasion that he promised informers half the miscreant's property, the
Crown taking the other half.^9 Kurbatov, the governor of Archangel, was par-
ticularly zealous in tracking these individuals, who strictly speaking were not
deserters (beg/ye) but absentees (netchiki); but the means adopted were similar
in each case. The headhunt gained in poignancy from the youth of the prey:
even boys of 10 were required to register-although only so that they might be
sent to school until, at age 15, they were old enough to join the forces. A
celebrated edict of 1714 laid down that children of noblemen or clerks who did
not study mathematics should be prohibited from marrying,^10 but it is not
known how widely this was enforced.


6 Yepifanov, 'Voinskiy ustav', pp. 192-3, citing 'Uchrezhdeniye k boyu'.
7 PiB vii; 2139, 2146 (5, 27 Jan. 1708).
B PiB x. 3652 (30 Mar. 1710); for other gubernii 3991, 4046, 4175 (14 Sep!., 17 Oct., 26 Dec.
1710).
9 PiB ix. 4288, 4291; PSZ iv. 2337 (13 Mar. 1711); Voskresensky, Zak. akty, pp. 36-7. In his
journal (Zhurna/, p. 328) Peter gave, as the first motive for this action, his desire to purge the
officer corps of 'the large number who originated from the common people'; but this was not the
reason stated at the time and is probably a later rationalization.
10 PSZ v. 27711 (28 Feb. 1714).

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