INTRODUCTION
THIS is a study of the armed forces' role in sustaining autocratic government
and shaping social life in Russia. For about four hundred years the realm of
the tsars was a 'service state': that is to say, the most important element in the
experience of most of its inhabitants was the performance of duties designed to
bolster the country's external and internal security. Nowhere else in medieval
or early modern Europe was the principle of service to the Crown pressed so
far as it was in Russia, where there were no autonomous social estates (etats,
Stiinde) or other public bodies that could act as a countervailing force to the
claims of the monarchy. The Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century arbitrarily
truncated and distorted Russia's legal and institutional development. When
the principalities of the Volga-Oka basin came together two hundred years
later under the hegemony of the Grand Princes of Moscow, power rapidly
became concentrated in the autocratic ruler and his household or dvor. This
simple early system of administration soon gave way to a more bureaucratic
one, and by the seventeenth century we may legitimately say that Russia had a
state order. It was organized on principles that owed much to the credo that
Muscovy had inherited from the Byzantine empire the task of preserving and
extending the lands where the true religion, Orthodox Christianity, was prac-
tised. In the accomplishment of this mission a major role fell to the land
forces, as was only natural since until the early eighteenth century Russia was
all but cut off from the sea. Even after Peter the Great (1689-1725) had forced
an opening to the West, built a navy, reformed the army, and established his
new empire as one of the great powers of Europe, the political and social
pattern still owed much to the Muscovite legacy.
In that formative era laymen had by and large been classified as members of
one of two social categories: servitors (sluzhiliye) and taxpayers (tyaglye). The
duties and rewards of men in each group, and in the various sub-categories
which each of them comprised, were closely regulated, at least in intent, by the
central power-by the vlast", to use the expressive Russian term. Officials in
the capital and in the major provincial centres laboured hard to ensure that
each adult male performed his allotted obligations. Servitors were expected
above all to bear arms in the field against the tsar's foreign foes or rebellious
subjects; and even when they acted as civil administrators or landlords their
functions often had a martial flavour. The taxpayers' job was to provide the
wherewithal in cash and goods that made this service possible.
It was a system that in practice had many lacunae. Most notably, it did not
prevent the more favoured groups from turning it to their own advantage and
converting about half the peasants into their personal dependants (serfs), with
the authorities' tacit connivance. The actual relationship between the state