forced to turn back. In the second campaign in 1689, better planning (leaving
earlier in the season, strategic advance work) allowed Golitsyn’s army to reach
Perekop north of the Crimean Peninsula. But, facing an impenetrable fortress and
running short on supplies, his army again turned back ignominiously. Moscow’s
dilemma was not unique to it; several times in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the Ottoman army turned back from campaigns into the Don and
Hungary when it reached the limit of its supply networks.
From the 1580s Russia provisioned its expansion into Siberia by forcibly
requisitioning grain from towns in the Northern Dvina basin; it also began to
forcibly move peasants from the Russian north into Siberia. A key responsibility of
Siberian governors was to identify arable land and to recruit peasants (exiles,
runaway serfs) to farm it. It took until late in the seventeenth century for western
Siberia to become self-sufficient in grain for its network of garrisons, and its villages
were then forced to provide grain for villages further east, in a progressive eastward
advance of grain requisitions.
Conversely, taking care of the civilian population was not an important focus of
state policy through the seventeenth century; this burden fell on communities
themselves. Urban and rural households individually or communes collectively
kept reserve stores of grain; in times of famine, as at the end of the sixteenth century,
the state distributed what stores it had, and landlords were expected to help their
peasants in times of dearth. In the seventeenth century the state did establish some
official warehouses of grain on the southern frontier for emergency civilian relief, but
such social welfare was not a focus of overall state policy until much later.
POPULATION MOBILITY AND MOVEMENT
While the state was busily moving people, people were also energetically moving on
their own accord. As we have noted in Chapter 3, Russian historians S. M. Solov’ev
and V. O. Kliuchevskii created an enduring image of the Russian peasantry as
constantly moving, depriving them of attachment to the land (and implicitly to the
nation). While we cannot know how early modern peasants felt (anachronistically)
about the nation, Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii are right about mobility: land surveys
of the early sixteenth century suggest, as Boris Mironov has shown, that 70 percent
of peasants had moved away from the birthplaces of their fathers, within or beyond
their district even though these were not decades of particular economic stress.
During the turbulence of war and Oprichnina (1560s–70s), peasantsfled in droves.
Up to 60 percent of Russian peasants in the center hadfled their place of residence
due to war, epidemic, and crushing taxation. Movement continued through the
Muscovite period.
In Siberia, as we have seen, territorial expansion did not attract much Russian
settlement in these centuries, since the main purpose was extraction of furs. Most
voluntary Slavic settlers came to trap and moved with the furs. By the end of the
seventeenth century, non-native population more or less equaled that of the
natives (devastated demographically by conquest and epidemic). The situation was
166 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801