half of Russia’s East Slavic peasants over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But the same processes that made peasants serfs also bound all taxpaying people to
their registered residences. State building in Muscovy demanded control over
peasant and urban populations as taxpayers, as providers of food to provision
the army and cities and as serfs for the gentry officer corps. These processes
started in earnest in the latefifteenth century, when the state started granting
populated villages in service-based tenure (pomest’e)tocavalrymeninlieuof
salaries, obtaining such lands by conquest and confiscation of free villages. So
thorough was the state’s patrimonial distribution of“black”peasant villages that
by the end of the sixteenth century the only non-landlord peasants left were on
lands claimed by the ruling family (crown peasants) or in the northern border-
landswhereitwasdifficult to support a landlord in addition to a peasant
household (state peasants).
The social disruptions of state building, of which thepomest’esystem was only
one element, exerted constant pressure on the taxpaying population. Urban and
rural alike, taxpayers owed fees and services to the state, services and goods to any
landlords, and support for clergy and Church. It was a time of almost constant
warfare and violence in various corners of the realm—Kazan and Volga campaigns
of the 1550s, Livonian War (1558–82), Oprichnina (1564–72)—followed in the
early seventeenth century by the foreign invasion, social rebellion ,and political
crisis of the Time of Troubles (1605–13). Crippling taxation exacerbated the
burden on populations. Cannon and weaponry had to be produced or purchased,
experts hired, armies fed, roads improved, diplomacy paid for, local administration
set up, bureaucracies and criminal court systems maintained. Even though
Muscovy depended upon local labor services wherever possible, it still needed cash.
As we saw in Chapter 8, taxes rose without regard for the population’s ability to pay.
One result was a marked abandonment of settled lands by the end of
the sixteenth century; while some of this might be normal abandonment in
the slash/burn method, much wasflight from social disruption. Peasantsfled to
the better conditions of wealthier landlords or to the frontier to be on their own.
In the mid-1580s in the northwest 83 percent of settlements were deserted.
Towns suffered disproportionately: while the populations of urban communes
(posad) had risen in thefirst half of the sixteenth century, they fell by 61 percent
in the 1550s–80s, and then another 45 percent from the 1580s to the 1610s. In
Novgorod in 1582, for example, a census recorded only 122 occupied urban
households, with over 1,300 abandoned for reasons of death in the family and
impoverishment.
Many peasants fell into debt to their landlords, and some have argued that
enserfment was essentially an economic process of inescapable indebtedness.
Certainly debt was a contributing problem. Short-term indenture (zakladnichestvo)
spiked in the last decades of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century;
the state sought to curtail it by forbidding gentry from deserting their military roles
and townsmen from deserting their tax obligations by this device. Other forms of
indenture often resulted in de facto slavery (kholopstvo). Individuals indentured
themselves in debt servitude (kabala) for varying lengths of service in return for
Rural Taxpayers 223