Russian center were also moved in. At the same time a protective line was
constructed from Kozlov to the Volga at Simbirsk, extending the Belgorod line
across the fullflank of the“wildfield”steppes.
These new settlements were supported by grain shipments from the center until
settlers produced sufficient resources, which took decades. Fortresses were staffed
by Cossacks and anyone else available, including runaway serfs, which set up a
constant tension as enserfment in Russia was solidified in the seventeenth century.
Frontier governors welcomed any available labor, ignoring government directives to
send runaways back to their owners. Behind the line, peasants migrated in,
runaways settled, landlords moved serfs and the state forcibly moved gentry and
state peasants, turning some of the latter into border guards. Military units farmed
theirfields communally, creating over the seventeenth century a specific garrison
defense formation of semi-agricultural settled musketeers and Cossacks. All this
presaged social mobility; in the 1640s the“new model army”was organized by
recruiting local peasants to become dragoons, cavalry, and infantry and by 1658 a
Belgorod regiment had formed on this borderland.
SLOBODA UKRAINE
Since the 1630s Ukrainian-speaking or Ruthenian (this English term emerged from
the Latin root for“Rus’”) peasantsfleeing enserfment and peasants and Cossacks
fleeing the half-century of warfare sparked by the Khmelnytsky revolt (1648)
populated black earth lands east of Kyiv in an area that came to be called“Sloboda
Ukraine”(slobodameaning neighborhood). Belgorod Line fortresses cut across
these lands in the 1650s, providing protection that stimulated in-migration.
Some newcomers joined Muscovite garrison service, others farmed. Towns sprang
up: Sumy north of the line in 1654, Kharkiv south of it in 1656. By the end of the
seventeenth century Sloboda Ukraine’s population included 86,000 Ukrainian-
speaking males, 22,000 of them Cossacks.
Moscow asserted loose control over this restless borderland by granting broad
autonomies. Cossacks remained independent regiments that Russia deployed in
campaigns and border defense against Crimean Tatar raids. Moscow’s fortresses
were manned by military governors, but the region itself developed administration
and judicial systems patterned on Cossack regimental government elsewhere in the
Rus’lands. Cossack officers oversawfive districts using Cossack customary law.
Cossacks enjoyed autonomies unlike anything in the Russian center: rights to distill
liquor, hire labor, engage in free trade, own land, and elect office holders. Russia did
not institute serfdom or the service land tenure system; land was free for anyone to
settle. By the 1660s Muscovy embarked on the Izium Line south of the Belgorod
Line to protect Sloboda Ukraine and push towards the Black Sea. It stretched in a
hairpin along the southern Donets and Oskol rivers, extending south from
the Belgorod Line at Userd through Valuiki to the apex around Tsareborisov
and Izium.
68 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801