from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries the Polish and Bohemian elites
won such legal guarantees as well. In each of these cases, nobles over time
transformed the European tradition of kings consulting with their men into
institutionalized parliaments with real political power.
By contrast, Muscovy’s elites had no legal protections of their privileges and no
formalized, estate-based institutions for exercising political power or defending
their rights. But even without legal protections, Muscovy certainly had an enduring
elite, a sliver of the population that enjoyed social privileges, status, access to office,
and wealth and political influence. Jonathan Powis uses the term“aristocracy”to
describe elites like these who endure over time without legally defined charters of
rights. Even more significant in creating and maintaining aristocracies over time,
Powis argues, were social and political practices: corporate self-consciousness en-
gendered by a common myth; corporate solidarity, enforced by land or genealogical
records that helped to restrict membership in the elite; marriage within the group;
monopolies on office holding or productive resources such as land or serfs; exclusive
occupations such as military service; distinguishing lifestyle (education, dress,
language, culture, avocations such as English fox hunting); and the ability to
adapt to changing political landscapes. Even in the period before Peter I, Russia’s
ruling elite wielded such social and political strategies to maintain itself throughout
the early modern centuries.
Not all did so. The semi-privileged military groups (provincial Cossacks, mus-
keteers, garrison troops) struggled to keep their privileges and status during the
relentless military reforms of the seventeenth century, and many, most notably the
musketeers, impoverished gentry andodnodvortsy, fell in status, transformed into
soldiers in the new model army or taxed state peasants. But serf-owners coalesced
into a lasting elite. Families in the conciliar ranks, the Moscow lists, and provincial
gentry were marked by cavalry military service, ownership of land and serfs, and
exemption from taxes. As their mode of warfare became outdated, they maintained
utility to the state and their privileges. Anticipating Powis’s categories, they formed
group cohesion by marriage within the group and by cultivating strong, affinitive
factions based on marriage and clientage. They monopolized the highest, most
lucrative military and civil offices. In the seventeenth century corporate myths,
distinctive clothing, education, and lifestyle were poorly developed, but numerous
groups of provincial gentry were self-conscious enough to submit collective peti-
tions for rights and protections. They endured as an elite, when they might have
been demoted into the salaried new model army in the mid-seventeenth century, by
their access to power and their ability to shape reforms that maintained their
privileges even as their roles became transformed.
*****
On the concept of aristocracy, see Jonathan Powis,Aristocracy(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1984). On concentric circles of society and an influential interpretation of court politics:
Edward L. Keenan,“Muscovite Political Folkways,”Russian Review45 (1986): 115–81.
On military growth and land policy, see Vincent E. Hammond,State Service in Sixteenth
Century Novgorod: The First Century of the Pomestie System(Lanham, Md.: University220 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801