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

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(^54) Muscovite Roots, 1462-1689
behind a fairly far-reaching 'reform programme' put forward during the reign
of the adolescent Theodore II (1676-82) by several high-ranking officials,
among them V. V. Golitsyn.^87 It covered military administration, central and
local government, and ecclesiastical affairs. The scheme oro'Vided for a new
ranking system based on the offices held by leading me~bers 'of the Duma.
There were to be 12 provincial lieutenants (namestniki: the old term for
governor, as distinct from military voivodes) and another IO com~anders of
military districts (razryady); the former, as civil functionaries, were to be
superior to the latter. The chief position should go to a kind of prime minister,
who would preside over a supreme tribunal (rasprovnoyo pa/ota), while the
leading military official would be the palace commandant.BB ,
The attention given by the reformers to the civilianization of Russian public
life is remarkable. Yet there was an aristocratic element in the plan as well: the
provincial chiefs were to hold their appointments for life. This encountered
strong opposition which doomed the entire project. Among its critics were the
patriarch and leading boyars who did not relish the prospect of honourable
relegation to the provinces; they were suspicious of the scheme's foreign (that
is, Polish) flavour, even though this was carefully camouflaged by the use of
Byzantine terminology; and above all they were jealous of the initiators for
devising it behind their backs.
Largely as a result of this opposition the plan was dropped and Golitsyn's
powers curbed. Appointed chief of a chancellery for military affairs
(November 1681), he arranged for a commission to be set up to which
representatives from various groups of servitors were summoned. It was this
body that suggested the abolition of mestnichestvo. The deputies approached
the matter indirectly, as an obstacle to a general reform of army organization.
Their recommendations were approved with unusual promptitude, and early
in 1682 the records of this practice-'hateful to God [and) created by the Foe',
as Patriarch Ioakhim put it-were ceremonially burned.^89
The metropolitan nobles who witnessed this historic scene must have felt
confident that their family honour now stood on a firmer foundation than
before. For they were expressly instructed to compile, with the aid of Razryad
officials, genealogies that were to be entered into a special register. But this
'Velvet Book', when it was eventually put together, turned out to possess purely
symbolic value and played no role in determining assignments. The reform
seriously weakened their position.^90 Nothing had been said about limiting, still
(^87) For a useful recent biography in English see L. A. J. Hughes, Russia and the West: the Life
of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer ... , Newionville, Mass .• 1984; also Danilov, 'Golicyn'.
gg Ostrogorsky, 'Projekl'.
89 PSZ ii. 904-5; Shmidt, 'Mestnichesivo i absolyu1izm', p. 301; Volkov, 'Ob otmene', offers a
valuable fresh interpretation of the political background.
90 Torke, 'Adel und Staal', p. 296. Some modern students of the Russian nobility (for example,
P. Brown, 'Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy', Ph.D. thesis, Chicago, 1978, p. .532) take a con-
trary view, pointing to the major role that aristocrats played in public life under Peter and later;
however, the crucial point is surely that they placed no limitations on the autocratic power. I am
grateful 10 Ann Kleimola for this reference.

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