ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION During the reign of Ivan IV Muscovy was a “predator-state and prey-nation”—a paradoxical entity in which the state was strong enough to terrorise society, but too weak to provide protection from external threats.1 Muscovy entered the seventeenth century as a ‘failed state’, subject to Polish and Swedish territorial conquests during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). By the first quarter of the eighteenth century Russia was victorious in the Great Northern War (1700-21), and risen to a European Great Power status. Although the “Petrine revolution” had its roots in the seventeenth century, it is remarkable that the military-and in particular-the strel’tsy regiments-proved to be obstacles to modernization. In the absence of nationalism as a modernising force, etatism and imperialism became the motors of modernization. Within this context the inability or unwillingness of the state to reform what should have been a key pillar and bastion-the Russian military-was remarkable. Rather than embark on the root and branch reform of the military, the Romanov tsars of the seventeenth century drifted into a policy-driven more by default than design-of creating parallel mercenary-led military structures within the state. This “strategy” was to prove decisive in 1698 when a strel’tsy revolt with the potential to unseat Peter I and so disrupt if not overturn further overt western influences within Muscovy, was suppressed by a mercenary-led and pro-Petrine military force.
