3
MUSKETEERS AND OTHER
TRADITIONAL FORCES
\THE principal task of the underprivileged segments of the population was to
provide the financial means with which the state met its heavy military com-
mitments. In addition to this fiscal effort more and more ordinary Muscovites
were called on to bear arms. It is with this service that we shall be concerned
here, returning later to the question of human and financial costs.
Although Russia did not have an integrated standing army until the reign of
Peter the Great, major steps were taken under earlier rulers towards creating
such a force. In this they kept pace with other European monarchs, who from
the late fifteenth century onwards were busily setting up 'royal militias' of
various kinds.^1 This process was closely bound up with advances in military
technology, especially the growing role of firearms. Militias differed from
feudal levies in that they consisted of infantry (and artillery) rather than
cavalry, depended on the Crown for most of their equipment, received regular
remuneration, and were less impermanent. In some ways Russia was ahead of
western European states in this development, a matter which has given
satisfaction to historians of a nationalist persuasion, both pre-revolutionary
and Soviet. Whether this advance deserves to be labelled 'progressive' must
remain a matter of opinion: for whatever may be thought of the achievements
of Russia's absolute monarchy ('the centralized multi-national Russian state',
in Marxist-Leninist parlance), there is no doubt that the burdens of empire fell
very heavily on those least able to bear them. The implication-in much of the
historical literature is that the sacrifices borne by the masses were ultimately
justified by raison d'etat-a claim of questionable validity where defensive
action (especially on the steppe frontier) gave way to unalloyed expansionism.
Leaving aside such questions of interpretation, Soviet scholars deserve credit
for clarifying the contribution which the lower classes made to the country's
military efforts. Pre-revolutionary historians often gave the misleading impres-
sion that the privileged servitors alone mattered-partly from class bias, per-
haps, but also because source material on the common soldiers is much scarcer.
At the base of the military establishment stood some all but forgotten men
whose history bridges the centuries. In the autonomous principalities of Rus'
in the Tatar era, as in Kievan times, it was taken for granted that ordinary folk
1 Corvisier, Armees et societes, p. 60; cf. K. J. V. Jespersen, 'Social Chanae and Military
Revolution in Early Modern Europe ... ', Historical Journal 26 (1983), pp. 1-13.