introduced. The Moscow elite survived these challenges by reliance on landed
wealth and by diversifying into high-level bureaucratic service, but provincial
gentry had fewer options. Although they numbered about 25,000 from mid-
sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, their weakness was already apparent in the
Smolensk campaign (1632–4), when only about 16,000 of the 100,000-strong
army were old-style cavalry; at least 10,000 provincial gentry were sent to local or
fortress defense, unable to equip themselves properly forfieldfighting. By the
Thirteen Years War (1654–67), provincial gentry were being folded into regiments
of light cavalry (reitary), where they were retrained. Their status was respected by
their being assigned to regiments composed solely of other gentry, and they were
allowed to retainpomest’eand serfs (as opposed to the billeting and salaries normal
reitaryreceived). In 1678 only the wealthiest of the old-style gentry militia in the
Moscow ranks (those with twenty-four or more serf households) were allowed to
muster as an old-style cavalry regiment. All the rest had been transitioned into the
light cavalry or even (for the poorest gentry) into the infantry (soldaty). This elite’s
raison d’être was being undermined.
What saved Muscovy’s landed elite, particularly the provincial gentry, from
extinction was its utility in local leadership and its importance as a bulwark of
autocracy. Locally, their authority over serfs provided a de facto administration,
saving the state from investing in a denser bureaucracy and police presence.
Politically, the state needed the gentry’s support in a polity that was constantly
scarce on population and manpower. They were gradually being integrated into a
modernized army, and they retained their markers of social status and power: tax
free status, exclusive ownership of serfs and land. In 1682 precedence—the system
of disputes (mestnichestvo) over relative rank in the highest elite that was discussed
in Chapter 7—was formally abolished (it had been irrelevant for decades), but in its
place an effort was made to compile genealogical books to identify the elite, afirst
step towards corporate,“noble”consciousness. In thefirst decade of the eighteenth
century, the remaining old-style militia units were transformed into light cavalry, and
separate regiments of gentry were discontinued. At the same time, the Muscovite
boyar elite and gentry had stayed intact, ready for Petrine reforms.
BUREAUCRATS AS ELITE
Muscovy’s scribes and secretaries were also co-opted to serve the state, although
with fewer privileges than the military elite. A few secretaries (d’iaki) worked their
way up to become state secretaries and share in the privileges of boyar status,
namely land and serf ownership. Most secretaries and undersecretaries, in Moscow
and the provinces, held a distinctive middle status. They did not pay direct tax, but
could not own land. Their work gave them access to fees and gifts. As a result, the
bureaucracy was socially quite diverse. Heredity within families provided most of
the workers in Moscow chanceries, but this was not a closed social stratum. As the
bureaucracy grew, literate people were tapped wherever they could be found. In the
seventeenth century in the central provinces priests’families and even provincial
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 215