into new model infantry, while those in Moscow and some major towns (Astra-
khan, Kazan) endured as urban policemen. Motivated by short-term grievances
over salaries and deep-seated apprehensions about the erosion of their status and
liberties, Moscow musketeers took the lead in two late seventeenth-century urban
riots (1682, 1698), after which Moscow musketeers were virtually disbanded. Some
units endured tofight in the Great Northern War, but after another musketeer-led
rebellion in Astrakhan in 1708, Peter I fully disbanded the musketeers, merging
them into the infantry or registering them as taxpaying townsmen by 1713.
In a similar position to musketeers were provincial Cossacks, not to be
confused with the independent Hosts of Don, Zaporozhian, and Left Bank
Cossacks or Urals Cossacks who were semi-autonomous vassals to Muscovy, as
discussed in Chapter 3. Serving the tsar directly, provincial Cossacks manned
garrisons in Siberia and across the southern frontier; they elected their leaders and
supported themselves by communally farming land granted to their communities.
As light, mobile cavalry in the mid-seventeenth century several regiments of such
Cossacks participated in thefield army, in units separate from the European-
trained troops.
The capacious status of untaxed but non-landed military servitor also absorbed
an important new military force in the seventeenth century. Fighting Poland-
Lithuania and Sweden during and after the Time of Troubles (1605–13) had
exposed Russia’s need for European-style infantry and light cavalry armed with
firearms and trained in disciplinedfield tactics. Even though Russia always main-
tained a greater emphasis on cavalry than its European peers (given its steppe
frontier), it adopted the European“new model”in the early seventeenth century
and imported hundreds of European officers to command and train it. Already in
the Smolensk War (1632–4), regiments of foot soldiers were being recruited from
urban and rural taxpayers; light cavalry and dragoons were recruited from impov-
erished gentry, Tatars, Cossacks, and taxpayers. Richard Hellie estimates that
between 1651 and 1663 the army went from about 7 percent new model formation
to 79 percent of the army. The overall size of the army grew as well, reflecting the
mass infantry approach of European armies,filling the ranks with conscription of
state peasants and serfs by household from the 1640s. As Carol Stevens showed, by
about 1663 the army had reached about 100,000, and aggressive reforms from
1678 through the 1680s completed its modernization. Most provincial gentry were
assigned to light cavalry (reitary) regiments; musketeers save for Moscow regiments
and Siberian Cossacks were blended into the infantry.
This was not yet a permanent, standing army. Peasant recruits often served
seasonally and returned to their villages in the winter months. While in camp or on
campaign they were supposed to be paid salary and food provisions, but paying for
them created a chronic shortage of cash throughout the century, with multiple
expedients introduced to pay for the army. The basis of direct taxation on peasants
and townsmen was shifted from land to households in 1679; from early in the
century extraordinary cash and grain levies were decreed for military units
and made permanent. In 1662 the government experimented with debasing the
currency, sparking the so-called“copper riots”in major cities. Chronic dearth of
218 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801