different on the forested steppe and steppe borderland, where the distance from the
center and better farming conditions attracted runaways. The state’s response was
to try to control mobility, a difficult task in early modern conditions. Like its
counterparts in Europe at the time, Russia did not require identity documents;
Natalie Zemon Davis has chronicled how a sixteenth-century French court strug-
gled to establish the identity of a man claiming to be“Martin Guerre.”Russian
subjects similarly had no standardized markers of identity; the state resorted to
branding capital criminals to identify them in exile (brands spelled out“robber”or
“thief”or their place of exile—“Tobolsk”). The state did require that anyone
traveling on trade or service assignment needed to carry a travel pass (proezzhii)
from their landlord or superior officer, although this procedure was hardly seamless.
Similarly, those using the coach system had to prove their business was“official”by
showing a pass (podorozhnaia gramota).
The state also made efforts to guard its borders, with an eye to movement in both
directions. Foreigners needed permission of governors at border crossings to enter
Russia, and at those crossings peasants were prevented from pushing into the steppe
while it was indefensible. When the Don Cossacks conquered Azov in 1637 and
offered it to Russia in 1642, for example, Russia refused, knowing that it could not
settle and control so distant a territory. Russia allowed Ukrainians to settle in
Sloboda Ukraine but forbade Russians to do so, as they would escape from Russian
taxation. In the late seventeenth century the Don Cossacks curried favor with
Moscow by agreeing to send runaway serfs back to the center, provoking rebellions
by Stepan Razin (1670–1) and Kondratii Bulavin (1707–8). Nevertheless, as we
have seen, peoplefled steadily towards the Black Sea to Bashkiria, joining Cossack
bands or their surrounding communities just out of reach of Russian control.
In the center the state worked to control such a mobile population in the form of
serfdom. Labor to support the landed gentry was in such short supply that the state
began in the late sixteenth century to institute legal limitations of the ability of peasants
to move to new masters; by 1649 the process of enserfment, discussed in detail in
Chapter 10, forbade all taxpayers, urban andrural, from leaving their place of residence.
Townsmen were required by law to report newcomers, visitors, and vagrants, on
penalty of corporal punishment. Keeping people in place required violence. As Evsey
Domar theorized, the more mobile the population could be, with endless stretches of
land available, the more controlling the state needed to be. Theflip side of the mobility
of the productive population was the autocracy of the state.
In principle, once the 1649 Lawcode abolished the statute of limitations for
reclaiming runaway peasants, the state was obliged to track down peasants, but that
duty stood constantly in tension with the needs of borderland governors to staff and
feed their garrisons. In the second half of the seventeenth century policy vacillated:
governors regularly accepted newcomers, no questions asked; the state declared in
1653 that garrisons on the crucial Belgorod line need not return fugitives to their
owners. By 1656, however, in deference to the landed gentry, the state reversed
itself: laws thundered penalties up to capital punishment for knowingly harboring
runaway peasants; between 1658 and 1663fifteen commissions were sent out to
reclaim runaways, followed by twenty-two more in the 1660s and similar numbers
The State Wields its Power 167