Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689

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The initiative was nipped in the bud by government troops, but sporadic dis-

turbances occurred in a number of south-western districts in 1682–3.

The social composition of the rebels

What was the nature of these revolts, and how much did theyhave in common?

Soviet historians drew a distinction between the Razin revolt, on the one hand,

which was characterised as a ‘peasant war’ (more speciﬁcally, as the ‘second

peasant war’, following that of Bolotnikov in 1606–7), and the urban revolts,

such as those of 1648–50, on the other. In practice this distinction is somewhat

artiﬁcial. The term ‘peasant war’ is just as problematic in its application to

the Razin revolt as it is to the Bolotnikov episode.

Not only was the main

leadership provided by cossacks, but the rebellion also involved uprisings in

the lower Volga towns, from Astrakhan’ to Tsaritsyn, whose participants were

similar to those of the urban revolts in 1648–50, 1662 and 1682. But if the

‘peasant war’ of 1669–71 included urban participants, some of the urban risings

of 1648–50 spilled over into the surrounding countryside and involved peasants

in neighbouring villages.

Let us look ﬁrst at the uprisings in the capital. The initial impulse for the

revolt in Moscow in 1648 was provided by the ordinary townspeople (arti-

sans and tradesmen) whose petition was rejected by the tsar; the strel’tsy also

became involved at an early stage. The gentry took advantage of the unrest

to present their own petitions, and they ended up as the main beneﬁciaries

when the government made a major concession to them (the convening of

the Assembly of the Land which approved the Ulozhenie of 1649) in order to

split the opposition. The social composition of the revolt was therefore fairly

heterogeneous, including representatives of relatively privileged groups, such

as the gentry and merchants. The main participants in the 1662 ‘copper riot’

were artisans and tradesmen, and petty military servitors; the strel’tsy played

only a minor role. The 1682 uprising, by contrast, was largely dominated by the

strel’tsy. For both the 1648 and 1682 revolts, there is some evidence that these

were not purely spontaneous outbursts of protest by the lower classes, but

that various individuals from the ruling elites incited or inﬂuenced the course

of events. In 1648 the popular protests about Morozov beneﬁted his enemies,

N. I. Romanov and Prince Ia. K. Cherkasskii; in 1682 Tsarevich Ivan’s kins-

men, the Miloslavskiis, were thought to have encouraged the protests of the

15 Buganov, Moskovskie vosstaniia,pp.318–47.

16 Khodarkovsky, ‘The Stepan Razin Uprising’.

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strel’tsy against Peter’s election as tsar, while the subsequent conﬂict between

Tsarevna Sophia and Prince I. A. Khovanskii affected the outcome of the

affair.

The role of the bond-slaves in the Moscow revolts was a somewhat ambigu-

ous one. In terms of their social position, the bondsmen themselves ranged

from impoverished domestic servants to the relatively privileged military

slaves. The latter were likely to support their masters against the insurgents,

while the house-slaves, even if they sympathised with the poorer sections of

the townspeople, were often too dependent on their lords to risk participating

in any challenges to their authority. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of

the involvement of slaves in the revolts. One source indicates that runaway

slaves participated in the looting which followed the ﬁres in Moscow in early

June 1648, and another claims that on 27 June the boyars’ slaves in the capi-

tal demanded their freedom, as a result of which six of them were executed

and seventy-two were imprisoned.

In 1662 there were relatively few slaves

among the insurgents, while some actively participated in the suppression of

the revolt.

In 1682 the ‘boyars’ people’ (slaves) presented a petition to the two

tsars on 26 May, asking for freedom, but they received little support from the

strel’tsy, whose grievances had been largely assuaged by the election of Ivan

as ‘ﬁrst tsar’.

The composition of the participants in the urban revolts in the provinces

in 1648–50 reﬂected the varied social structures of the towns affected. The

frontier towns in the south and in Siberia were primarily fortresses, and here

the main role in the uprisings was played by the petty servicemen ‘by con-

tract’, such as the strel’tsy and urban cossacks. Many of these servicemen were

engaged in crafts and trades, and even in peasant-style agriculture, in order

to supplement the inadequate monetary payments they received from the

state. Their interests and grievances were therefore very similar to those of

the taxpaying townspeople in other regions. The northern towns of Ustiug

and Sol’vychegodsk, where unrest occurred in 1648, were important manu-

facturing and trading centres. Here the main participants in the disturbances

were the poorer townspeople, such as artisans and traders, and their actions

were directed primarily against local ofﬁcials responsible for tax collection,

and against those merchants who were regarded as the closest allies of the

17 Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors. The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 82–97.

18 Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia,pp.88–90.

19 Buganov, Moskovskoe vosstanie 1662 g.,pp.41–2.

20 Buganov, Moskovskie vosstaniia,pp.198–9.

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town authorities. Pskov and Novgorod were the two largest commercial cities

of the north-west. In both cases in 1650 the townspeople as a whole, together

with the musketeers from the garrison, rose up against the city governors

and rich merchants who were implicated in the sale of grain to Sweden. In

Pskov, where the uprising continued for six months, sharp divisions developed

between the richer merchants and hereditary servicemen, on the one hand,

and the poorer townspeople and strel’tsy, on the other, concerning the terms

on which they would surrender to the besieging government forces. During

the siege of Pskov the peasants in some neighbouring villages joined raiding

parties of insurgent townspeople in attacking Khovanskii’s troops and looting

landlords’ estates.

The Razin revolt was the most heterogeneous of all the later seventeenth-

century uprisings. Its main leadership was provided by cossacks. For Soviet

historians, this was not inconsistent with their designation of the rebellion

as a ‘peasant war’, since many cossacks were of peasant origin. But, as other

scholars have recognised, cossacks had a very different identity from peas-

ants. The Don cossacks who spearheaded the Razin revolt were independent

mercenary cavalrymen who voluntarily offered their services to the tsar in

return for the supplies they received from his government. Razin himself

belonged to the more prosperous section of the cossacks, but most of his

followers came from the poorer strata. Many of these destitute cossacks had

only recently come to the Don, and settled in its upper reaches. In the sum-

mer of 1670, as Razin conquered the lower Volga, his cossacks were joined

by strel’tsy, soldiers and other petty servicemen from the garrisons of the

occupied towns, together with some sailors from the ports, and townspeo-

ple who had taken part in the urban uprisings which were triggered by

the rebels’ approach. Non-Russians from the mid-Volga – Chuvash, Mordva,

Mari and Tatars – gave the rebellion a distinctively multi-ethnic character.

Russian peasants played a part only in the latter stages of the insurrection, as

the rebels moved into the mid-Volga region with its gentry estates farmed by

serf labour. One of the few recorded examples of female involvement in these

seventeenth-century revolts is the case of Alena, a nun of peasant origin from

the town of Arzamas, who commanded a detachment of 7,000 men before

being captured and burned alive on the orders of the tsar’s general, Prince

Iu. A. Dolgorukii.

21 Tikhomirov, Klassovaia bor’ba,pp.93–8.

22 Zapiski inostrantsev o vosstanii Stepana Razina, ed. A. G. Man’kov (Leningrad: Nauka,

1968), pp. 99, 124.

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Soviet historians sometimes deﬁned ‘peasant wars’ as ‘civil wars of the

feudal period’,

but in comparison to the Time of Troubles (and even to the

Bolotnikov episode within it) the geographical scope of the Razin revolt was

relatively limited, focusing on the river basins of the Volga and Don. Thus it

is more appropriate to describe it as a ‘frontier rebellion’ rather than a ‘civil

war’: in that respect – and in its social composition – it is more similar to

the Pugachev revolt of 1773–5 than to the Time of Troubles. Like Pugachev’s,

Razin’suprising had professional military leadership, provided by the cossacks,

and the insurgents formed large armies which engaged in open conﬂict with

government troops. To that extent it constituted a more signiﬁcant threat to

political stability than the urban insurrections; and it was met with a much

harsher and less conciliatory response from the authorities.

Finally, it is worth noting that religious issues played a part in some revolts.

The non-Russian peoples of the mid-Volga who supported Razin were mostly

Muslims, and their grievances against the Russian government’s policy of

forcibly converting them to Christianity had fuelled the constant series of

rebellions which they had staged since Muscovy’s annexation of the Volga

khanates in the mid-sixteenth century. Razin made a bid for their support, and

one of his appeals to the Kazan’ Tatars invoked the Prophet Mohammed.

After the schism in the Orthodox Church, Old Belief became an issue in some

of the uprisings. There is evidence that Razin had contacts in the Old-Believer

stronghold of Solovki, the island monastery in the White Sea which held out

against a siege by government forces for eight years, from 1668 to 1676. But

Razin’sreligious appeal was somewhat inconsistent: not only did he invoke the

Prophet, but he also presented himself as a champion of Nikon, who had been

deposed as patriarch in 1666 and imprisoned in the Ferapontov monastery. The

rebels claimed that Nikon accompanied them on their voyage up the Volga.

The cossacks believed that Nikon, whom they described as their ‘father’, had

been removed from ofﬁce by the boyars. They cursed his successor Ioasaf, and

planned to restore Nikon to the patriarchate.

In 1682 Khovanskii appealed

to Old-Believer sympathies among the strel’tsy when he organised the debate

with the schismatics; and Old Belief among the Don cossacks was an inﬂuence

on their unrest in 1682–3.

23 See e.g. V. Nazarov, ‘The Peasant Wars in Russia and their Place in the History of the

Class Struggle in Europe’, in The Comparative Historical Method in Soviet Mediaeval Studies

(Problems of the Contemporary World, no. 79) (Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences,

1979), pp. 115–16.

24 Khodarkovsky, ‘The Stepan Razin Uprising’, pp. 13, 15–16.

25 Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. ii.i, no. 22,p.31;no.29,p.44.

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‘Rebellions in the name of the tsar’

All of these revolts, to a greater or lesser extent, assumed the formof ‘rebellions

in the name of the tsar’: that is, they were directed primarily against the

‘traitor-boyars’rather than againstthereigningtsar. In thisrespecttheydiffered

signiﬁcantly from most of the rebellions during the Time of Troubles, which

were aimed against rulers, such as Boris Godunovor Vasilii Shuiskii, who were

identiﬁed as usurpers; the insurgents sought to replace them with pretenders

whom they claimed to be the ‘true’ tsar, treacherously removed from the

throne or from the succession (the ﬁrst two False Dmitriis).

In the revolts which took place under the ﬁrst Romanovs, the rebels com-

monly described their main targets as ‘traitor-boyars’. These were not exclu-

sively ‘boyars’ in the narrow sense of the tsar’s highest-ranking counsellors;

rather, they belonged to a category sometimes identiﬁed as ‘the strong men’.

In addition to boyars and okol’nichie, this group included high chancellery

ofﬁcials, rich merchants and provincial governors. In Moscow in 1648 the

chief ‘traitors’ whose deaths the crowds demanded were the boyar Boris

Morozov, the okol’nichie Petr Trakhaniotov, the conciliar secretary (dumnyi

d’iak) Nazarii Chistyi and the judge Leontii Pleshcheev.

In 1662 the eight

‘traitors’ listed in the insurgents’ proclamation were the boyars I. D. and

I. M. Miloslavskii, the okol’nichie F. M. Rtishchev and B. M. Khitrovo, the

secretary D. M. Bashmakov and the merchants V. G. and B. V. Shorin and

S. Zadorin.

Sten’ka Razin called on his cossacks ‘to go to Rus’ against the

sovereign’s enemiesandtraitorsand toeradicatethetraitorboyarsandcounsel-

lors from the Muscovite state, and the governors and ofﬁcials in the towns’.

The seventeen victims of the revolt of 15–17 May 1682 included ﬁve boyars

(the Princes Iu. A. and M. Iu. Dolgorukii, Prince G. G. Romodanovskii, A. S.

Matveev and I. K. Naryshkin); and the conciliar secretaries L. I. Ivanov and

A. S. Kirillov.

Notallboyarswereregardedastraitors,however.On3 June1648 theMoscow

crowd cried out that N. I. Romanov should rule them alongside the tsar, in

place of B. I. Morozov; and in Pskov, in 1650, Romanov was identiﬁed as a boyar

who ‘cared about the land’.

Prince I. A. Khovanskii was described as a ‘good’

person by the Moscow insurgents of 1662; and in 1682 the strel’tsy referred to

26 Gorodskie vosstaniia,pp.54, 56–7, 61, 75.

27 Buganov, Moskovskoe vosstanie 1662 g., pp. 44–7.

28 Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. i,no.171,p.235.

29 Buganov, Moskovskie vosstaniia,p.151.

30 Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia,pp.69– 70; Tikhomirov, Klassovaia bor’ba,p.70.

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him as their ‘father’.

In his address to the cossack circle at Panshin Gorodok

in May 1670, Razin described some boyars as ‘good’, because they provided

the cossacks with food and drink when they visited Moscow.

The insurgents therefore distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ members

of the ruling elite, so that the revolts were not simply indiscriminate attacks on

all ‘feudal’ lords, as some of the cruder Soviet Marxist class-struggle interpre-

tations implied, but were directed only against those who were most detested

by the ordinary people. In some cases the rebels invited the crowd to pass

judgement on their proposed victims. Razin asked the people of Astrakhan’ to

decide who should be put to death; and in Moscow in 1682 the strel’tsy called

for the crowd’s approval before killing their enemies.

The cruelty of the insurgents’ punishment and killing of their victims is

a common theme in contemporary accounts of these revolts. The ‘traitors’

were sometimes literally torn apart in an explosion of mob violence; after

death their bodies were frequently deﬁled and abused. The looting of the

victims’ property may be seen as a crude form of redistribution of wealth;

its burning and destruction was a more symbolic form of popular rejection

of privilege. For all the understandable indignation expressed in elite sources

about the violence involved in the rebels’ reprisals against their victims, the

forms assumed by popular retribution often resembled those of ofﬁcial pun-

ishments, especially the torturing and executionof ‘traitor-boyars’ during Ivan

the Terrible’s oprichnina.

And it should be borne in mind that the tsarist gov-

ernment’s repression of the revolts – especially the Razin uprising – involved

much greater and more extensive cruelty than that practised by the rebels

themselves.

In order to legitimise their attacks on their chosen victims, the rebels reg-

ularly accused them of treason. They commonly alleged that the ‘traitor-

boyars’ exploited and oppressed the peasants and townsfolk. The com-

plaints of the insurgents in Moscow in 1648, for example, focused on abuses

and maladministration by the power holders.

Exploitation of the ordi-

nary people was frequently associated with harm to the interests of the

state, as the Russian historian N. N. Pokrovskii has noted in his detailed

31 Grigorij Koto

sixin, O Rossii v carstvovanie Alekseja Mixajlovi

ca. Text and commentary, ed.

A. E. Pennington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 115;Buganov,Moskovskie vosstaniia,

p. 251.

32 Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. i,no.171,pp.235–6.

33 Stepanov, Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. ii.i, p. 89;Buganov,Moskovskie vosstaniia,pp.113, 152–3.

34 S. K. Rosovetskii, ‘Ustnaia proza XVI–XVII vv. ob Ivane Groznom – pravitele’, Russkii

fol’klor 20 (1981): 90–92.

35 Gorodskie vosstaniia,pp.35, 46–7.

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study of the uprising of 1648–9 in Tomsk, where the petitioners accused

the town governor, Prince O. I. Shcherbatyi, of reducing the tsar’s revenue

through his impoverishment of the peasants and indigenous peoples of the

district.

Other types of treason were also alleged – although often these allegations

had little or no foundation. Claims of plots against the life of the tsar and other

members of the royal family were very common. In 1648–50 rumours spread to

provincial towns that the boyars had tried to kill Tsar Alexis. Razin blamed the

boyars for the recent deaths of Tsaritsa Mariia Il’inichna and the tsareviches

Aleksei and Simeon Alekseevich. In 1682 the rebel Muscovites accused the

‘traitors’ of having murdered Tsar Fedor and Tsarevich Ivan, in order to clear

the way for Peter’s succession to the throne.

Finally, the insurgents’ adversaries were regularly accused of ‘external’ trea-

son, that is, of secret dealings with Russia’s foreign enemies. In Pskov and

Novgorod in 1650 the dispatch of grain and money to Sweden led to suspi-

cions that the city governors and local merchants were Swedish agents, and

that the conspiracy also involved some of the boyars in Moscow, including

B. I. Morozov. In 1662 the boyars were accused of corresponding with the

Polish king and planning to surrender Muscovy to the Poles; and rumours

circulated that ofﬁcials in the Musketeer Chancellery had substituted sand for

gunpowder in supplies of ammunition sent to the army at the front. In 1682

the boyar Prince G. G. Romodanovskii was said to have sympathised with the

Turkish sultan and the Crimean khan in the recent Chyhyryn campaign.

their choice of allegations against their enemies, as well as in the forms of

cruel punishment they inﬂicted upon them, the seventeenth-century insur-

gents may have modelled themselves on state terror directed against ‘traitors’:

in the period of the oprichnina, Tsar Ivan IV had made accusations of both

‘internal’ and ‘external’ treason against the boyars, and their ‘internal’ treason

was said to have involved oppression of the people as well as harm to the

prosperity of the state.

More broadly, protestors often made use of the same

type of rhetoric against corruption as was employed in ofﬁcial statements by

the Moscow government.

36 Pokrovskii, Tomsk ,pp.97–8, 107–8. See also Davies, State Power and Community,pp.215–16.

37 Bakhrushin, ‘Moskovskoe vosstanie 1648g.’, p. 79; Tikhomirov, Klassovaia bor’ba,p.379;

Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. i,no.171,p.235;Buganov,Moskovskie vosstaniia,p.156.

38 Tikhomirov, Klassovaia bor’ba,pp.254, 362;Buganov,Moskovskoe vosstanie 1 662 g.,pp.44–6;

Buganov, Moskovskie vosstaniia,pp.154–5.

39 M. Perri, ‘V chem sostoiala “izmena” zhertv narodnykh vosstanii XVII veka?’, in

Rossiia XV–XVIII stoletii. Sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. I. O. Tiumentsev (Volgograd and

St Petersburg: Volgogradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2001), p. 217.

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In most popular revolts, the ‘evil’ traitor-boyars were contrasted with the

‘good’tsar. In 1648–50, however, thereissome evidencethat therebelscriticised

the ruler himself. In Moscow, Alexis was described as ‘young and foolish’,

and even as a ‘traitor’; similar ‘unseemly words’ were recorded in Pskov and

Novgorod. Rumours had circulated in Tsar Michael’s reign that Alexis and his

younger brother, Tsarevich Ivan, were changelings, non-royal boys substituted

for baby daughters born to Tsaritsa Evdokiia. But the tsar’s critics in 1648–50

do not appear to have questioned his legitimacy as ruler, or to have rejected the

monarchy as an institution: rather, Alexis was depicted as a tool of the traitor-

boyars, and pressurewas exertedon him to replace them with ‘wise advisers’.

Young and inexperienced tsars were evidently seen as particularly susceptible

to the inﬂuence of ‘wicked counsellors’: in 1682 the strel’tsy expressed fears that

the nine-year-old Peter’s election as tsar would mean that unjust and corrupt

boyars would be the real rulers.

Doubts about the legitimacy of the new dynasty had been expressed in

the reign of Tsar Michael, when the authorities reported numerous cases

of ‘sovereign’s word and deed’ (slovo i delo gosudarevy, l

ese-majest

e) allega-

tions criticising the Romanovs. Rumours even spread that ‘Tsar Dmitrii’

was still alive. In spite of these concerns, royal impostors (samozvantsy),

who had played such a prominent part in the Time of Troubles, were

much less evident in Russia in subsequent decades. Pretenders claiming to

be Tsarevich Ivan Dmitrievich, Marina Mniszech’s son by the Second False

Dmitrii, were reported in Poland and the Crimea in the 1640s; and false

Shuiskiis (including the notorious Timoshka Ankudinov, who claimed vari-

ous royal identities) appeared in Poland and Moldavia – but none of these

had any connection with the popular revolts within Muscovy itself.

Some

cases were recorded of Russians calling themselves tsars or tsareviches; but,

according to a recent study, this ‘popular pretence’ was more of a cul-

tural than a political phenomenon: a reﬂection of the notion that to be

a tsar meant the possession of exceptional superiority over ordinary peo-

ple.

The apparently non-political nature of many of these claims to royal

status did not, however, mean that the tsarist government considered them

40 Maureen Perrie, ‘Indecent, Unseemly and Inappropriate Words: Popular Criticisms of

the Tsar, 1648–50’, FOG 58 (2001): 143–9.

41 Sil’vestr Medvedev, Sozertsanie kratkoe let 7190–92 (Kiev: Tipograﬁia Imperatorskogo

Universiteta Sv. Vladimira, 1895), p. 44.

42 Maureen Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars

of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 229–36.

43 P. V. Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia o gosudarstvennoi vlasti v Rossii XVII veka (Moscow:

Nauka, 2000), pp. 103–69.

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maureen perrie

to be innocuous: on the contrary, they were rigorously prosecuted as political

crimes.

The ﬁrst evidence of pretence associated with popular revolt is found in the

Razin uprising. Although the revolt hadbegunin May1670 as a classic ‘rebellion

in the name of the tsar’ against the ‘traitor-boyars’, by the late summer, as the

cossacks moved up the Volga, Razin was spreading rumours that they were

accompanied by Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich (who had died in 1670)aswell

as by the deposed patriarch Nikon. It is not clear whether there was an actual

pretender-tsarevich in Razin’s ﬂotilla, or whether the cossacks were simply

using his name in order to justify their actions. Certainly there is no evidence

thattherebelsplannedtooverthrowTsar Alexisandreplacehim withhis‘son’–

rather, it seems that they were claiming that the tsarevich would lead them to

Moscow to attack the ‘traitor-boyars’ who had supposedly plotted to kill him.

In 1673 a false Tsarevich Simeon Alekseevich appeared in Zaporozh’e (the real

Simeon had died in 1669 at the age of four): he too seemed to be hostile to

the boyars rather than to his ‘father’, Tsar Alexis. These pretender-tsareviches

were not counterposed to the reigning tsar, but served to provide legitimacy

for popular revolts against the ‘traitor-boyars’.

Other forms of ‘popular monarchism’ in this period involved rumours

about ofﬁcial documents. The disturbances in Voronezh and Ustiug Velikii

in 1648 were triggered by (unfounded) reports that ofﬁcial letters had been

received calling on the townspeople to follow the example of the Muscovites

and attack rich merchants: the alleged existence of such documents served to

legitimise attacks on the local elites. In other cases, for example in Tomsk in

1649 and in Novgorod and Pskov in 1650, when real documents condemning

the revolts arrived from Moscow, the rebels maintained that they had been

falsiﬁed by the boyars or ofﬁcials: these claims rationalised the insurgents’

refusal to obey orders instructing them to surrender to the authorities. Such

rumours reﬂected the popular belief that true justice would be sanctioned by

the tsar, and that letters in his name must embody such justice.

∗∗∗

44 C. S.Ingerﬂom,‘Entrele mythe et laparole:l’action.Naissancedela conception politique

du pouvoir en Russie’, Annales: histoire, sciences sociales 51 (1996): 733–57; Maureen Perrie,

‘Pretenders in the Name of the Tsar: Cossack “Tsareviches” in Seventeenth-Century

Russia’, FOG 56 (2000): 249–53.

45 Maureen Perrie, ‘Popular Monarchism in Mid-17th-Century Russia: the Politics of the

“Sovereign’s gramoty” ’, in Gyula Szv

ak (ed.), Muscovy: Peculiarities of its Development

(Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Int

ezet, 2003), pp. 135–42.

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Popular revolts

The evidence which we have considered in this chapter suggests that these

seventeenth-century revolts were directed primarily against individuals rather

than against institutions, and that their participants were mainly concerned

with the redress of speciﬁc grievances rather than with the advocacy of any

coherent programme of reform, let alone revolution. Only in the case of the

Razin revolt do we ﬁnd an indication of broader aims. In his speech to the

cossacks at Panshin Gorodok, Razin called on them all ‘to drive the traitors

out of the Muscovite state and to givethe common people freedom’.

Accord-

ing to a contemporary English account of his Volga campaign: ‘Every where

he promised Liberty, and a redemption from the Yoak (so he call’d it) of the

Bojars or Nobles; which he said were the oppressors of the Countrey...’.

The aim of ‘liberty’ and freedom from oppression is rather vague; but some

indication of what it meant in practice is provided by accounts of the rebels’

sojournin Astrakhan’,indicatingthattheydestroyedthedocumentswhichreg-

istered slaves, thereby granting the bondsmen their freedom. Similar actions

are recorded in the Moscow risings of 1648 and 1682.

In some towns which

were under the insurgents’ control, cossack-style ‘circles’ replaced the existing

authorities.

But it would be rash to conclude on the basis of this kind of

evidence that the rebels aimed to abolish slavery and serfdom as institutions,

or to introduce some type of grass-roots democracy.

In so far as there was a common factor in the very diverse popular revolts

which occurred under the ﬁrst Romanovs, it may be identiﬁed as protest

against the expansion of the state, against its infringement of the traditional

rights and freedoms of townspeople, peasants and cossacks, and against the

increased burden of taxation which it imposed upon them. These protests

took place in the name of good tsars with wise advisers, who would protect

their people against traitor-boyars and corrupt ofﬁcials (an idealised version

of the paternalistic monarchy of the sixteenth century); but they did little to

prevent the further growth of the bureaucratic state under Peter the Great and

his successors.

46 Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. i,no.171,p.235.

47 Zapiski inostrantsev,p.97.

48 Stepanov, Krest’ianskaia voina, vol. ii.i, p. 102; Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia,pp.72–3;

Buganov, Moskovskie vosstaniia,pp.158–61.

49 Chistiakova, Gorodskie vosstaniia,p.242.

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