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

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Musketeers and Other Traditional Forces 59
vitor of Bryansk, tried to flee to Poland-Lithuania; he was caught, tortured,
and hanged.^13 Such an individual was a mere chattel, whose accidental death,
ii caused by the siave ot another, entitled his owner to compensation in the
form of one of the culprit's owner's slaves. The 1632 register of moskovskiye
dvoryane shows that they were often diffident about bringing their men to ser-
vice when summoned. The zealous I. V. Birkin promised 9 men, 6 of them for
combat duty, although he admitted to possessing only 12 peasant households
on his vast domain of 1,436 quarters; but T. Bezobrazov, who was similarly
endowed (and said he had over twice as many peasants) would bring only
3 men, 2 of them for the baggage train.^14 Hellie offers some elaborate
statistical computations based on this list,^15 but their value is limited by the
fact that we do not know whether the statements were verified or whether these
individuals were actually sent. But he is undoubtedly correct in assuming that
the numerical decline compared with sixteenth-century data reflects a fear
among owners, shared by the authorities, that an abundance of armed slaves
might prove dangerous: they had shown in the Troubles their potential for
rebellious conduct.^16 Yet those who were sent into combat fought well, or so at
least we are told by Olearius.^17 Servitors' fears of mutiny were allayed by the
new disciplinary methods that could be enforced, especially in the new-model
forces, and so the decline in the number of hangers-on was not dramatic. In
1681 the metropolitan nobles listed as assigned to the various razryady, who
were 14,625 strong, had in their retinue 21,830 lyudi (men), an average of 1.67
per head-proportionately more than the Kolomna servitors a century
earlier.^18
Recruits now ivcreasingly went to war as substitutes for their masters.
Sixteenth-century practice had been more exigent: they were permitted only in
exceptional circumstances, when servitors were too old or ill to do duty in person
and had no sons to send in their stead.^19 Substitution became more common
during the Troubles, when the levy system all but broke down. In 1608-9 the
northern town of Ustyug raised five detachments of sokha men to support
Tsar Vasiliy Shuysky against the Second Pretender; nearby Soligalich collected
50 to 100 men per sokha and, when these were defeated, instituted another levy
of 20 men which had better success.^20 Under the early Romanovs the provision
of substitutes was closely controlled by the Razryad. In 1648 A. Baskakin, a
privileged servitor for 50 years, was allowed to retire on condition that he sup-
plied three datochnye lyudi in lieu.^21 Only one such recruit was demanded from
14 Stashevsky, Zemlevladeniye, pp. 40 ff., nos. 19, 27.
15 Hellie, 'Muse. Mil. Slavery', p. 3A.
16 Hellie, Slavery, pp. 467-74.
17 Olearius, Travels, p. 152.
18 Ivanov, Opisaniye, pp. 71-92 (our calculation); there is some doubt about this figure, since
servants are mentioned only for those metropolitan nobles in the Moscow razryad; if they alone
owned such men, the ratio is four to one-and there were another 10,000 datochnye!
19 Beskrovnyy, Khrestomatiya, p. 64 (late 1550s?); the order was repeated in 1604: Chernov,
Voor. sily, p. 125; Hellie, Enserfmenl, p. 48.
20 Al ii. 177; Platonov, Ocherki, p. 302. 21 AMG ii. 304.

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