Muscovite Military Change Revisited

Abstract

My book, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy, deals with the problem of the interaction between technological and social change. Unfortunately, Thomas Esper's review, in the April 1972 issue of Technology and Culture, contains many flaws and does not tell what the book is really about; hence this letter of elucidation. While it is obvious that the major issues (enserfment, changing military styles) of Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy have been studied for a long time, scholars other than Esper have observed something new and original in my explanation of the interaction of these developments and in my major thesis: the Russian peasants were finally unwillingly enserfed by the government in 1648-49 at a moment of political crisis to satisfy the status demands of the functionally obsolescent middle-service-class cavalry archers (not nobility, as Esper says) who had been technologically dispossessed by the gunpowder revolution. The enserfment was part of the price of the change to a mass infantry army commanded by foreign mercenary officers, for the middle service class, in exchange for the right to exploit the abased peasants, accepted its loss of social function and status while allowing the increasingly absolutist government to rule unchallenged. If Esper has seen this before, and it certainly is not the general thesis he seems to talk about, he should have favored Technology and Culture readers with the name of its originator and an analysis of it-old, as he implies that it is. The truth is that Esper obviously failed to recognize both the and its novelty. If Enserfment were simply the useful survey he claims, his remark about the irrelevancy of the footnotes would have been in order. However, Enserfment is one of the few original lengthy monographs about early modern Russia written in the West