The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Manning fortress lines and settling new frontier areas often required forcible
population movement of servitors and of peasants to support them. As we have
seen, the Middle Volga witnessed turbulent population movement. From the late
sixteenth century onward, Russian and Middle Volga peoples moved steadily from
Kazan through the Middle Volga region south and towards the Urals into Bash-
kiria. Already in the 1570s gentry from Tula and Kashira were resettled on the
frontier at Venev and Epifan; as the Belgorod line was being constructed in the
mid-seventeenth century, gentry were settled in the Voronezh area as border
guards. By the eighteenth century they had coalesced into a self-conscious group
called the single-holders (odnodvortsy), discussed in Chapter 17, who resisted being
turned into taxpaying peasants. In the Urals, Polish noblemen from Polotsk
captured in war were transferred in 1668 to the Trans-Kama Line and given land
and peasants; by the 1690s, they numbered several hundred households in north-
western Bashkiria.
Forcible movement of peasants occurred on an even larger scale. When the
Belgorod line was being built, over a thousand people were forcibly sent to create
the town of Tsarev Alekseev in 1647, and smaller towns experienced similar forced
population movement. Forcibly moved people were often joined by peasants
transferred by church and private landlords, as well as by runaway serfs and local
steppe peoples recruited into Russian service. Such movement was not always
successful: of a group of more than 1,000 state peasants sent to the Voronezh
lands (Bitiug valley) in the late seventeenth century, 69 percent had died and
23 percent hadfled within two years. Similarly Peter I’s attempt to build and settle
a new harbor town on the Sea of Azov between 1696 and 1711 was a huge failure,
resulting in the death orflight of thousands of laborers and their families. And as
Brian Boeck observed, at this same time the state worked assiduously to contain
population as well as to move it. Knowing it could not protect or control settlement
beyond fortress lines, the state actively destroyed voluntary settlements that had
moved too deep into the steppe and returned the pioneers to border settlements.
Fortress lines were intended not only to keep nomads out, but peasants in.
The Church also moved peasants from the center to new lands: by the end of the
1550s there were approximately twenty new Orthodox churches in the Kazan area
and many monasteries. From there monasteries pushed up the Kama, often
bringing with them serfdom. Seeing the Church as a helpful partner in settling
new lands, the state granted lands to church institutions well into the eighteenth
century, even while it was restricting church landholding (from the 1560s) and
confiscating monasteries and convents (in the eighteenth century). All in all,
Muscovy did not hesitate to move and manipulate its populations to subdue and
manage its conquests.


MILITARY PROVISIONING


One of the most fundamental acts of state power is the requisitioning of resources
in various forms of taxation. Collecting furs from Siberian natives often took place


The State Wields its Power 163
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