Moscow's Men on Horseback 27
that 'no litigant, however firm he believed his precedence claims to be, could
ever be ctrtain of the outcome of his complaint ... from the sovereign's point
of view led to a desirable lack of security among the elite. '^46 The endemic
quarrels and mutual suspicions among Muscovy's leading families help to
explain why they offered no sustained opposition tn Ivan !V's reign of terror.
Those tempted to seek safety by fleeing abroad knew that they would be
treated as traitors, and that the reprisals would affect not only their immediate
kin but generations yet unborn, since their entire clan would fall several
degrees in precedence ranking and might even be excluded from it altogether.^47
When mestnichestvo was officially abolished in 1682, as many records as
possible were solemnly destroyed. We shall therefore never know for certain
how many pleas were filed in different periods or how they were settled. There
must have been a diminution during the Troubles, when normal government
business was interrupted and even well-born nobles had a hard struggle to sur-
vive. Under the first Romanovs the practice resumed. A study of the tsar's
council between 1613 and 1689 shows that its total of 427 members engaged in
no less than 294 known precedence disputes; the frequency of such cases
declined after mid-century and very few are recorded after 1667.^48
The practice will have been less prevalent among provincial cavalrymen, but
the very fact that it spread to lower echelons of the elite made it less attractive
to their social superiors. Its abolition was but a question of time. The govern-
ment was no longer so beholden to its privileged servitors and had a rudi-
mentary bureaucratic apparatus to do its bidding; and so the damage could be
contained more easily than before. The 1550 decree was explicitly reaffirmed
in 1620. Many official assignments, particularly military ones, were declared
'without places' (bez mest), that is, exempt from considerations of precedence.
A blanket order of this kind was issued at the outset of the Thirteen Years War
in 1654. Again it was not universally adhered to, but the disputes as a rule did
not affect commanders in the field.^49 There was an important exception in
1659, when two generals failed to reinforce another, so allowing an enemy
army to escape; but indiscipline of this kind was a problem that extended
beyond that of precedence ranking. Nineteenth-century historians, writing in
an age of 'rational' military organization, tended to exaggerate the negative
impact of mestnichestvo, which, it is now clear, 'should take only a small share
of the blame for the inconsistent performance of the Russian army in the
seventeenth century'.^5 ° Far more serious was the fact that few senior Russian
officers were professionals, and that the armed forces were dependent on
foreigners for so much of their technical expertise.
(^46) Kleimola, 'Up Through Servitude', p. 215; cf. id., 'Changing Face', p. 486.
(^47) Shmidt, 'Mestnichestvo i absolyutizm', p. 280.
(^48) Crummey, 'Reflections', pp. 270-1.
(^49) Markevich, !st. mestnichestva, p. 527; Crummey, 'Reflections', pp. 275-6; cf. Kleimola, 'Up
Through Servicude', pp. 226-7.
so Crummey, 'Reflections', p. 279.