1654 and the outbreak of the Thirteen Years War (1654–67), an express courier
network was created to Ukraine. Less urgent correspondence, as well as individuals
and goods, were to go by the coach system where it could be established on the
turbulent frontier, or otherwise by requisitioning horses from communities. Speedy
courier services existed only as long as they were needed; as Peter I turned his
military attention from the south to the Baltic arena in thefirst decades of the
eighteenth century, express service was ended to Ukraine and developed in the
Baltic theater.
A commercial mail network was developed in the late seventeenth century,
growing out of the state’s importation of European newspapers and the increasing
pace of diplomatic communications through Baltic ports. Monopolies for regular
mail service (diplomatic, official, and private) between Moscow and Vilnius and
Riga were awarded to foreigners in the 1660s, but the routes did notflourish until
A. A. Vinius in the 1670s and 1680s took over the project. He established a regular
postal service between Moscow and Baltic ports, points in Ukraine, the southern
frontier, Smolensk, Arkhangelsk, even as far as Tobolsk in Siberia. Although mail
was carried by couriers wearing white uniforms to distinguish them from coach-
men’s green, Vinius’mail service was based on coach stations, where dedicated
horses and riders stood at the ready. When it worked well, the mail could travel very
quickly: in the summer in the 1690s mail between Moscow and Arkhangelsk took
eight to nine days, Moscow and Tobolsk two months.
One should not, however, exaggerate this communication network. The state
created it for military and diplomatic purposes, with little attempt to serve the
population at large. Towns and villages were responsible for construction of their
own roads and bridges. This was a skeletal network that reflected the state’s
pragmatic definition of its role.
PUBLIC HYGIENE
Afinal demonstration of the state’s ability to assert its power came in thefight
against infectious diseases. We saw in Chapter 1 that Russia suffered in the
common European and Eurasian transfer of diseases. The infectious nature of
epidemics was somewhat known to folk medicine and the state imposed some
basic prohibitive measures when disease broke out in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, particularly for plague. There is reference already in 1552 to guards
posted on the roads between Novgorod and Pskov to Moscow, prohibiting com-
munication in time of epidemic, and of quarantines of infected houses and streets
within cities, as in Novgorod in 1570–2. Punishment was severe for those crossing
such boundaries. Guards were routinely placed at borders, governors were queried
for information on epidemics abroad, foreigners were questioned about plague in
the areas they had come from, diplomats could be turned back or quarantined. In
1636, for example, word had it that plague (associated with outbreaks slightly
earlier in Italy and in this same year in Holland) had broken out in Crimea.
Quarantines were placed in Livny and Oskol, two key routes connecting to the
182 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801