Village into Garrison: The Militarized Peasant Communities of Southern Muscovy

Abstract

Crimean Tatars and Nogais frequently attacked Russian peasant communities along Muscovy's southern in the first half of the seventeenth century. They burned houses and grain, drove off herds, and killed or captured villagers, forcing the survivors to resettle in other districts. The clerks of the Military Chancellery counted 15,115 Russians killed or captured in Kursk district alone in the years 1633-1646.1 But the legal status and community life of peasants on the southern were also dramatically transformed by the Muscovite government's response to such raids. For example, in 1647 the government confiscated several villages in eastern Lebedian' and western Kozlov from their boyar and monastery owners and put their peasant inhabitants in new formation dragoon service to help defend against Tatar attack. This removed them from private seigniorial jurisdiction and gave them juridical freedom and exemption from taxes. Over the next decades, however, dragoon duty introduced them to new forms of economic differentiation and service obligations that came to be as onerous as the obligations they had borne as serfs. The fate of the peasant dragoons suggests how ephemeral the Belgorod Line was as a social frontier offering its colonists juridical and economic freedom. Several Soviet historians have noted that the dragoon militarization of these communities set an important precedent for the revival of units of foreign formation (inozemnyi stroi) under tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich.2 But they have not examined