cash to pay for the army prompted afinal expedient that made the Muscovite army
overall quite distinctive.
Alongside the growing new model standing army, Muscovy also created in the
seventeenth century a settled garrison defense force on the steppe lines. Garrison
troops came from all social backgrounds: runaway serfs, gentry from the center
seeking more land, gentry forcibly moved by the state, retired gentry, Cossacks. On
the frontier they were awarded relatively small plots of land that they farmed
themselves, reflecting the dearth of local serf labor, even though the gentry
among them had the right to own serfs. A particularly cohesive group of the latter
were descended from troops who had manned frontier fortresses in the black earth
provinces of Kursk, Orel, Tambov, and Voronezh and had been moved south with
the frontier over time. They jealously protected their past gentry status, even
though they owned few if any serfs and themselves worked the land. They came
to be called generically theodnodvortsy(literally, single householders), discussed in
more detail in Chapter 17. Garrison troops, including the once gentryodnodvortsy,
were humiliatingly demoted to the status of taxed state peasants in 1679. But into
the eighteenth century they fought for recognition of their special status: the term
odnodvoretsbecame a legal category protecting their theoretical right to own serfs
and buy or sell their lands, even if they could rarely exercise that right. As
Alessandro Stanziani remarks, frontier garrisons were a unique solution to the
problem of state support (they supported themselves), and they constituted a
flexible border guard trained in tactics more appropriate for the steppe frontier
than the massed new model infantry and cavalry army being developed for the
European front lines.
Thus, Muscovy evolved a continuum of privileged statuses to serve the tsar in
ways that the state could afford. All of them were, in essence, on the cheap. The
most privileged strata were the serf-owners, ranging from greatly endowed landed
clans to modest provincial gentry. Bureaucrats were paid salaries and fees for
service, but the state imposed on communities to provide their upkeep. Non-
landed but tax-free military groups such as musketeers, Cossacks, and garrison
troops collectively farmedfields that the state awarded them (to the detriment of
their military readiness). For the new model troops, the state struggled to pay
salaries, and was unable to maintain the army on a year-round basis. Nevertheless,
people in these ranks enjoyed more economic opportunity, physical mobility, and
even the chance at some upward social mobility.
A NOBILITY?
The word“nobility”is difficult to apply to the ruling elite of early modern Russia,
inasmuch as in common usage it conjures images of European grandees whose
rights to property and political participation were legally protected by charters and
acted out in parliaments and other political institutions. In the thirteenth century
the English nobility won such guarantees in theMagna Carta(1215), followed
soon thereafter by an equally sweeping charter for the Hungarian nobility (1222);
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 219