at the point of a gun; in the center, where peasants and townsmen had been paying
taxes for centuries, the actual collection was not a highly coercive moment, since
peasant and urban communes assumed collective responsibility, dividing the tax
burden among families according to ability to pay. Elders could of course manipu-
late the process, burdening their rivals and favoring their friends. Another category
of taxation, however, put the coercive power of the state directly in the face of the
population. That was in assembling and feeding the army.
Recruitment and the related burden of billeting troops in communities were not
major issues in Muscovite centuries, since the army was composed primarily of
gentry cavalrymen settled on conditional land tenure and supported by peasant
labor. Some conscription began in the 1630s on the Belgorod Line when Moscow
assembled“new model”infantry and dragoon corps by recruiting into light cavalry
and dragoons impoverished gentry, Tatars, Cossacks, and taxpayers. In the 1640s
conscription of state peasants and serfs by household was introduced, but it was not
a standing army;“one year’s muster returned home after a season’s service to be
replaced by a new muster the next season,”as Carol Stevens notes. In the last years
of the Thirteen Years War (1654–67) peasant conscription became normalized into
a regular national recruitment, reaching almost 100,000 infantry conscripts, but
service remained seasonal. The burden of recruitment—one man per twenty-five
households in 1658—certainly exacerbated peasants’burdens and contributed to
peasantflight, but it did not require large-scale coercive enforcement. With
seasonal service, billeting of the army was not the oppressive burden it became
on the population in the next century.
Charles Maier points out that“decisive military force”in the early modern age
consisted of cohesion founded in good training and discipline and the maintenance
of“networks of frontier fortifications and provisioning sites”allowing the center to
“project power far from the capital.”In the seventeenth century, Russia began to
build such capacity, creating a logistics network to supply the army along the
fortified steppe frontier or on the move. In the sixteenth century, Muscovy’s radius
of expansion was relatively small: most campaigns extended relatively small dis-
tances west, or east to Kazan, and could be held to a month or two in the summer.
The army of about 35,000 landed gentry carried their own supplies or sent them
ahead to staging areas. But while on campaign non-landed military units—artillery,
engineers, musketeers—required grain or cash to purchase it, or both, presenting
major challenges. The territory Russian armies were moving into, even to the west,
was not heavily populated and the state could not count on requisitioning or
purchasing from local communities while on campaign, let alone putting supply
in the hands of private contractors as their counterparts in more populous and
prosperous early modern Europe could do. Steppe lands in particular lacked
everything but forage.
Thus, the Military Service Chancery took provisioning on itself. In the sixteenth
century supply regiments led by high ranking officials accompanied the army;
storage granaries in fortresses (Smolensk, Pskov, Kazan, and Astrakhan) and new
territories (Voronezh, Sebezh, Sviazhsk, Kolomna, Pronsk) were created. Into the
seventeenth century Russia built major river shipbuilding centers at Vologda,
164 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801