ABSTRACT
This essay concerns the role of the state in Muscovy, late medieval and early modern Russia between 1450 and 1700. Before we begin, we must define several key concepts. First, what do I mean by the “state” here? As used in this essay, “the state” consisted of those organs in Moscow that could issue decrees in the name of the grand prince and/or tsar and had the authority to try to effect them, to make them binding on the rest of society. The state consisted of those organs which could collect taxes and exercise legal violence. A second question might be “who was the state?” In brief, it was the sovereign and his elite servitors, the boyars and other members of the upper upper service class, including some leading chancellery figures. They were the policy-making “power elite” of Muscovy. Numerically, they were perhaps thirty men in 1500, perhaps a couple of hundred or so two centuries later, out of a population that was perhaps 2 million at the former date and 10 million at the latter. To them one might add some of the members of the middle upper service class, the stol’niki and striapchie, another 1,300 men in the mid-seventeenth century, some of whose number were irrelevant to our consideration because of their youth.1 I doubt that anyone would want to extend a personnel-cadre definition of “the state” much beyond that. Additional people worked for the state, of course: bureaucrats in Moscow and functionaries in the provinces, members of the lower upper service class, the middle service class, the lower service class, at times some of the merchants, but those people almost never made laws and they almost as infrequently made policy.
