back-breaking coaches without springs, lazy or venal coachmen, or lame horses
slowed things down.
In the mid-sixteenth century the state imposed on communities a different
format of coach service. The community was to provide not horses but“volun-
teers,”individuals who would maintain a stable of horses at a way station. Com-
munities supported these coachmen with subventions for them and their horses
and were also obliged to provide food and escorts for official messengers and
travelers. Communities joined coachmen in various public services, such as main-
taining local roads and providing additional horses and carriages when major parties
traveled through (embassies, supply trains in war). These permanent coachmen
provided officials with fresh horses, food, feed, and occasionally drivers, escorts, and
carts; travelers required official letters of passage (podorozhnye). Stations ranged in
size from ten or so families to up to seventy. In addition to a residential enclave,
coach stations included stables, hayfields, grazingfields, and strings of horses which
were branded (coachmen had a system for returning horses to their home stations).
The largest stations constituted independent suburbs on the edges of towns;
Moscow had six coachmen’s suburbs already at the end of the sixteenth century,
at the gates to highways to Smolensk, Tver-Novgorod, Dmitrov, Iaroslavl’, Vladimir,
and Kolomna-Riazan. In such settings, coachmen could do well for themselves:
with many hands to share the work, they could devote some time to lucrative side
work in trade, artisan work, or private shipping. But the work could be onerous,
particularly in small, isolated settings where the state struggled to maintain staffing
as coachmenfled to the easier life of townsmen.
Extending into the great distances of Siberia was a difficult challenge: the earliest
coach stations (built 1598–1601) were staffed with men recruited from towns of
the Russian north and Kazan. Coach stations extended through Verkhotur’e (the
main customs gate until 1763) to Tobolsk by the 1630s, but for many decades to
points farther east the state relied on local communities for horses and carts on
demand, unable to staff enough coach stations. Relying on community support for
official transports, early modern Russia had a skeletal but effective communications
network among the towns and frontier posts that mattered most to it.
Other networks of communication occasionally supplemented the system of
coachmen andfixed stations, again involving forcible population movements.
One was what Americans might call a pony express, that is, a network for urgent
communications between Moscow and its provincial governors and commanders.
This developed in the second half of the seventeenth century as Muscovy expanded
its fortified lines into the steppe, became engaged in war with the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and won the suzerainty of the Left Bank Cossack Hetmanate. The
Military Service Chancery created a system of express couriers, assigned from
musketeers, artillery men, and even gentry who were moved to the frontier where
they served a year-long term, living in groups of four to six men at existing coach
stations or newly created ones. Passing the mail pouch from rider to rider without
stop, they could transport documents from Tula to Moscow in twenty hours, from
Kyiv to Moscow in 114 hours; they went daily in high campaign season (spring into
summer), less often through autumn and winter. With the Cossack alliance in
The State Wields its Power 181