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

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New-Model Army and Questions of Cost


4 service Cossacks
5 new-model forces: infantry
6 new-model forces: cavalry

14,991
78,994
32,498
190,938

89

No figures are offered here for artillerymen, oriental natives, or recruits and
dependants brought along by provincial gentrymen; those for musketeers and
service Cossacks are clearly understated. On the other hand the totals given for
all the Moscow strertsy units and some others are clearly formal 'establish-
ment figures' which exaggerated actual strength. Hellie puts the total comple-
ment at 214,600, which is as good a guess as any.5 1
Turning to the individual components, Chernov's estimate of a mere 16,000
for the privileged servitors certainly undetstates their strength: the total
number of dvoryane (both sexes, all ages) in 1678 has recently been put at circa
80,0005^2 and in the heavily militarized Belgorod region in the late 1690s no less

than 54,000 men were on the lists, mostly future 'single-householders'. (^53) The
stre/'tsy, as we have seen, were around the 50,000 mark and the other tradi-
tional forces approximately 20-30,000; altogether we may say that they com-
prised about half the total men under arms. The new-model forces will have
numbered about 80,000-90,000, two-thirds infantry and one-third cavalry.'4
This represented a larger proportion of total population than at the end of
the sixteenth century. Urlanis, in an educated guess, put this total at 11.5
million persons in 1678,^55 but was probably over-optimistic. The present-day
demographer Vodarsky, whose work is more thorough, reckons that there
were no more than 9 million individuals living in Muscovy when the census-
takers came _round in 1677/8.^56 The military participation ratio among males
will thus have Seen of the order of 4.4 per cent.
Not too much should be made of these arithmetical exercises, in view of the
scarcity and unreliability of the data. What is clear is that war-like activities
absorbed a large proportion of the nation's effort, drained its slender human
Chernov, Voor. sily, p. 168; Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 226, 269; and by Milyukov, Gos. khoz.
Rossii, p. 38, who points out that it represents a 2 Yi-fold increase on the figure of 90,000 in
1625-31.
SJ Hellie, Enserfment, p. 269 (based on numerous sources but not Ivanov).
s2 Vodarsky, Nase/eniye, p. 64 n.; cf. id., 'Sluzh. dvoryanstvo', p. 237, where the figure of
30,000 must refer to males only.
SJ Vazhinsky, Zemlev/adeniye, p. 65; Chernov, Voor. sily, p. 171. Chernov's estimate is
presumably derived from the 15,825 gentrymen listed by the Razryad as serving in the Belgorod
area in 1678 (DAI ix. 106); but their 35,000 kinsmen of military age should have been added. AJ
noted in ch. 2, only some 8,000-11,000 privileged servitors took part in the Crimean campaigns of
1687 and 1689.
S4 Yepifanov, Ocherki iz isl. armii, p. 9; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, p. 45; Filippov,
Uchebnik, p. 438.
55 Urlanis, Rost, p. 193.
56 Vodarsky, 'Chislennost", p. 227; cf. id., Naseleniye, p. 192, where the figure of 5.6 million
must refer to males only.

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