Musketeers and Other Traditional Forces 6Smusketeers' behaviour in 1648 evidently made the government more efficiency-
conscious in their regard. More and more of them were obliged to earn th~r
own Jiving by trade or handicrafts, and as a rule only the privileged Moscow
stre/'tsy actually received the annual grain allocation. At the same time the
authors of the new law code, anxious to appease the civilian townspeople,
removed certain fiscal concessions which lower-grade servitors had previously
enjoyed.
It is probably going too far to say, as Hellie implies, that the authorities
made a conscious decision to down-grade the corps on account of its doubtful
political reliability and military effectiveness, for if so they would scarcely
have enlarged its size. In 1663 there were about 29,000 and in 1681 some
55,000 musketeers, over two and a half times as many as there had been a cen-
tury earlier.^44 Admittedly the increase was largely due to natural reproduction
within this closed caste, and so not wholly attributable to official policy, but
on at least three occasions after 1649 peasants and townsmen were drafted into
the corps; had the government wished to reduce it, it could have abstained
from such a practice and acted more frequently than it did in transferring
musketeers to the new-model forces. It is worth noting that the increase took
place among the elite Moscow contingents rather than the provincial men,
whose numbers remained more or less constant.^4 s The former were no longer
necessarily stationed in the capital but were posted to the provinces, where one
of their tasks was presumably to exercise surveillance over the local men.^46
During the long war with Poland-Lithuania, in which strertsy units played
a relatively modest part, these troops' morale appears to have declined. In July
1662 elements<* the Moscow populace rose up in protest at the government's
deliberate devaluation of the coinage. Thirty-three stre/'tsy were implicated,
half of them from a single detachment (I. Monastyrev's prikaz). This was only
a fraction of the number of men from the new-model forces (366 soldaty and
98 reytary) who were involved, but one of the leading activists, Kuz'ma
Nagayev, was a musketeer.^47 After his arrest Nagayev was given fourteen
lashes of the knout and 'burned with fire, but under this torture repeated his
earlier evidence', as the investigation record states; nevertheless he was found
guilty and sentenced, along with a civilian, L. Zhitkiy, to have his left hand
and both feet cut off and his tongue torn out. Remarkably, Zhitkiy survived
this fearsome punishment, from which his musketeer comrade died.^48 Gen-
trymen and soldiers from the new-model forces who were involved in the rising
were spared torture and were sent into exile instead.(^44) Veselovsky, 'Smeta', pp. 26 ff. (our calculation; the Razryad clerks made it 29,244: Stashev·
sky, 'Smeta', p. 61); Chernov, Voor. sily, p. 162.
4' In 1663 there were 15,900 and in 1681 22,500 Moscow stre/'tsy. Chernov, loc. cit.; Hellie,
Enserfment, p. 202.
(^46) For a survey of their geographical distribution: Brix, Geschichte, pp. 259-65.
(^47) Buganov, 'O sots. sostave', p. 314; id., Mosk. vosstaniye 1662 g., pp. 40-3, 183-4; id.
(comp.), Vosstaniye 1662 g .... : sb. dok., pp. 43, 48-50, 76; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 364.
(^48) Buganov, Mosk. vosstaniye 1661 g., pp. 185, 209, 266.