Ustiuzhna-Zheleznopol’skaia, Astrakhan, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, and Kaluga.
A river voyage from Moscow to Astrakhan could be done in 45–60 days. Russia
supplied new fortresses on the Volga as best it could. Towns including Samara
(1586), Tsaritsyn (1588), and Saratov (1590) were initially provisioned from the
center, lacking local farmers, but as fortified lines pushed south, the state provided
population instead.
Steppe expansion and military reform in the seventeenth century challenged
logistics. New model army units and garrison towns demanded tons of grain
supplies, as did steppe vassals (Don Cossacks, Kalmyks) who were pacified or
co-opted with annual“gifts”in grain and cash. New taxes for grain were introduced
early in the seventeenth century; the“musketeer grain”tax by mid-century had
been monetized and it, as well as other taxes directed for“grain,”were serving all
units. As the new model army was assembled between the Smolensk (1632–4) and
Thirteen Years Wars (1654–67) in tandem with the creation of fortified lines, the
issue of food supply for army and frontier garrisons came into sharp focus. To
provide food and forage to the army during the spring–summerfighting season, the
Military Service Chancery decentralized collection, creating military regions on the
west and south that organized their own requisitioning. At the same time it
centralized grain collection in the heartland under a national Grain Chancery
(1663–83) and expanded a network of granaries in Belgorod, Korotiak, Sevsk,
and Briansk. Special levies in cash or in kind (1650s, 1660s) supplemented these
stocks; changes in the tax basis to households and consolidation of taxes in the
1640s and 1670s–80s were intended to yield more income for military reform and
provisioning.
Some areas in the center won exceptions from requisitions for the army: in the
strategic borderlands of Novgorod and Kazan, grain and cash collected in the
“musketeer tax”was retained there; probably for reasons of dearth, grain levies
were not collected in the south itself. After the Thirteen Years War, Russia’s
attention turned to supplying Russian troops stationed in Kyiv, Nezhin, Pereiaslav,
and elsewhere in the Left Bank; special levies of“Kyiv grain”were declared across
the realm from 1668 onward to feed the 3,000–5,000 Russians in Ukraine. As
Alessandro Stanziani has stressed, Russia also developed a second provisioning
strategy in the seventeenth century: the state awarded land to garrison regiments
(musketeers, Cossacks, even some new model infantry) and garrison guards from
nearby peasant villages. All these groups became semi-agrarian frontier forces, a self-
supporting residential military presence on the frontier, parallel to the mobile army.
Despite their efforts, Moscow’s military administration was insufficient to
prevent the debacle of Prince V. V. Golitsyn’s two campaigns against Crimea in
the 1680s. Moving into the unpopulated steppe, all food,firewood, water, and
other essential supplies had to be carried with the army. Taking a force of 112,000
with at least 20,000 accompanying staff in thefirst campaign (1686–7) required a
supply train so huge that it slowed forward progress to a crawl, even after as much
had been sent to forward depots as possible. When the army neared Konskaia Voda
and discovered that the Tatars had burned the steppe ahead of them, destroying
forage grasses needed for the army’s thousands of horses and pack animals, it was
The State Wields its Power 165