ABSTRACT
In his renowned description of Russia, the Muscovite bureaucrat Grigorii Kotoshikhin described the boyar duma as royal council composed of the representatives of four groups of families, each of which possessed the hereditary right to place their sons in the body.1 At the pinnacle of power were families whose members served exclusively as boyars, the highest rank in the council. They were followed by lesser families whose sons served as okol’nichie and less often as boyars. Below them Kotoshikhin identified clans of middling status whose scions entered the duma as dumnye dvoriane and occasionally progressed to Familiar. Finally, Kotoshikhin pointed to the undistinguished families that provided the council with dumnye d’iaki, the fourth rank in the body. Kotoshikhin’s depiction, as we might expect given his many years in chancellery service, is quite accurate: a host of sources confirm that the duma had long been composed of four hereditary groups, each more distinguished than the next. However his account of the duma is deficient in one important respect: he offers only the slightest hint of the fundamental changes in the composition of the council that were occurring in the mid-seventeenth century. “Of the former great clans of princes and boyars,” he wrote laconically, “many have died out.”2 And indeed this was true, the old families were in slow decline. But the waning
* The author would like to thank the participants in the Historians’ Seminar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and particularly David Kerans, for useful commentary. All errors are my own. 1 Grigorii Kotoshikhin, O Rossii v tsarstvovanie Alekseia Mikhailovicha, text and commentary by Ann E.Pennington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 36-37. 2 Ibid., 36. 3 See, for example, Vasilii O.Kliuchevskii, “Istoriia soslovii v Rossii” [1886], in idem, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), vol. 6, 321-23 and especially 382; idem, Boiarskaia duma drevnei Rusi (Moscow: Tip. T.Malinskago i A.Ivanova, 1883), 387-92; Aleksei I.Markevich, Istoriia mestnicbestva v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XVXVII v. (Odessa: Tip. Odesskago vestnika, 1888), 559-60 and 582; Nikolai P.PavlovSil’vanskii, Gosudarevy sluzhilye liudi (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tip., 1898), 16364; Evgenii D.Stashevskii, “Sluzhiloe soslovie,” in Russkaia istoriia v ocherkakh i stat’iakh, ed. by Mitrofan V.Dovnar-Zapol’skii (Kiev, 1912), 32; V.N.Storozheva,
of the traditional elite was only half the story. The regime of Aleksei Mikhailovich had opened the duma to servitors of relatively undistinguished birth and, even as Kotoshikhin wrote in 1666, they were flooding the lower ranks of the once exclusive council. These “new men,” as I will call them, were transforming both the ancient culture of the duma and its social profile.
