From: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies

March 1996

WALTER C. UHLER

Review Of:

Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia, By Carol Belkin Stevens

(Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. Pp.xii + 240, appendix, notes, glossary, biblio, index. $32. ISBN 0-87580-198-6.)

Carol Belkin Stevens has successfully transformed her doctoral dissertation on the politics of food supply in southern Russia into a book which concerns itself with the societal dislocations and new logistical demands brought on by the military revolution, especially during the Thirteen Years' War (1654-67), and Muscovy's assertive defensive expansionism to the south during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The military revolution prompted Muscovy to create and organize infantry forces armed with handguns and artillery into what were called "new formations" (novyi stroi). Russia's response to the gunpowder revolution was slow, but gathered momentum as it became apparent that her major threat was no longer the Tatar cavalry from the south but modern European regiments from the west.

To secure herself from Tatar raids Muscovy continued to construct fortified lines ever southward. The Belgorod line was completed during the 1650s and the Izium line was largely finished by 1682. In addition, payment was made to the Don Cossacks in return for their military support.

The costs of auxiliary forces, garrison troops, and infantry regiments on campaign were exceedingly difficult to sustain and severely burdened most Russians, especially those who had fled to the South. In addition, military reform threatened to undermine the elite status of the middle service class, who served as cavalrymen in return for landed estates.

Although Muscovy's population in the seventeenth century consisted of two basic groups: those who provided service to the Tsar (sluzhilye liudi) and those who paid taxes (tiaglye liudi) to support those services, the demographics of southern Russia were, to quote Stevens, "anomalous."

The region contained few members of the upper service class, but was over represented by the middle service class, whose members were provided with small estates (having few or no additional laborers) from which they were expected to extract the resources to equip and provision themselves for cavalry duty.

Russia's dire need to build and defend fortresses as well as recruit tens of thousands of new formation infantrymen prompted officials, in Moscow as well as in Belgorod and Sevsk, to overlook the phenomenon of tiaglye liudi moving into the ranks of the sluzhilye liudi, especially into those positions held by the lower service class. This breach of status especially upset the middle service class population residing closer to Moscow because it served to entice their serfs to flee to the south, the Law Code of 1649 notwithstanding.

The consequent slight decrease in taxpayers combined with large increase in military expenditures severely tested Muscovy's ability to finance her ambitious programs. The Musketeer's grain tax (streletskii khleb), an inadequate but long-lived method of national financing, was supplemented in the south by its version of the "arable tenth" (desiatinnaia pashnia) tax, which was used to create grain reserves for new towns.

Undersowing or failure to sow and harvest such arable tenths compelled regional leaders to institute the collection of "tenth-grain" (posopnyi, otsypnyi or desiatinnye khleb), which was assessed upon the entire province. These grain collections, as "dues" payments, assumed a distinct regional coloration.

In 1663 the Military Chancellery (razriad) ordered the regions to collect "eighth- grain" (chetverikovyi khleb) on an annual basis. Five garrison towns in the south became the distribution centers for such grain, which was disbursed as payments in kind to the region's new formation regiments as they were about to move into Ukraine and the Thirteen Year's War. Eighth-grain assessments were considered dues payable by hereditary servicemen, which, of course, became particularly onerous to the small landholders in the south.

Assessments hardly meant collections, let alone disbursements. As Stevens notes, "the amount of eighth-grain received [in 1663] was only 70 percent of the amount required for grain salaries for the rank and file" (p.74). Twenty years later, lower "quarter-grain" (poluosminyi khleb) assessments were to be made upon an even larger body of taxpayers. Again, this assessment especially burdened the southern serviceman who increasingly found himself providing both service (in a garrison, if not on campaign) and paying taxes. It should be added that "quarter-grain" did not displace musketeer's grain or, in some southern towns, tenth-grain. Finally, beginning in 1686, on-demand (zaprosnyi khleb) grain levies began to replace the less burdensome "quarter-grain."

The effect of such extractions in the south was to deplete, impoverish, and conflate the ranks of its service class. Having ably demonstrated this, Stevens then turns to assessing what Muscovy accomplished with her resources.

When examining how successfully both the garrison at Kiev during the late 1660s and Prince V.V. Golitsyn's 1687 Crimean campaign army of over 100,000 were supplied, Stevens is ambivalent. She concludes that "the effort to provision Kievan garrisons in 1668 and 1669 show a supply system stretched to the absolute limit" (p.110). She then adds, however, "over the long run the stretching of Muscovite supply to its limit no doubt helped the Russian field units sustain a more significant military presence than would otherwise have been possible" (idem).

When examining Golitsyn's failure to reach the isthmus at Perekop, it was not the absence of forward magazines or the failure to plan "alternate methods of supply" (p.112) which doomed the undertaking, but the burning of the steppe grasses which deprived Golitsyn's horses, numbering more than 100,000, of fodder. As she later admits, "by 1687 Muscovy could, by exerting extraordinary organizational effort, successfully gather more than enough food for that part of the 112,000-man army it chose to supply" (p.120).

To overcome her ambivalence about the success of Muscovy's provisioning efforts, Stevens might have profited by giving greater consideration to comparisons with armies elsewhere in Europe. True, she does note that European armies were better able to rely on local agriculture. But Martin van Creveld states it much more emphatically: "indeed the very aim of warfare during this period was to live at the enemy's expense" (Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Cambridge, 1977, p.23). Russia, however, quickly ceased being able to do this around Kiev after the Thirteen Year's War and Golitsyn's forces were totally unable to live at the expense of the enemy.

The very requirement to provision campaign forces largely through grain extractions from one's own countrymen (rather than live off enemy's grain) did obviate a fact of life which Russia's European counterparts had to contend with: "the need to obtain the 90 per cent of supplies that were not brought up from the rear must have done more to dictate the movement of armies than the ten per cent that were" (van Creveld, p.24). But at what cost?

At this point it might be useful to add that Stevens is quite aware of Brian M. Downing's recent work (The Military Revolution and Political Change: The Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe, Princeton, 1990), which, she writes, "argues that the ability to muster non-domestic resources for military reform in this period encouraged the persistence of constitutional government in western Europe" (p.175, note 7). In this context one needs to consider - more seriously than Stevens - whether Muscovy's domestic extractions, which caused such impoverishment and homogenization of classes (especially in the south), facilitated the autocratic behavior of Peter I.

Stevens' study has prompted her to question just how centralized the Russian state was during the seventeenth century. She adds that "the example of southern military change strongly suggests the need to re-examine the components and characteristics of the highly centralized state as usually depicted in Russian historiography" (pp.163-4). In light of the solid scholarship she has demonstrated in Soldiers on the Steppe, it is a suggestion worth serious consideration.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com