VOYEVODA
S. B. Veselovskii cites some cases from the 1580s, when the authorities ordered the confiscation of both pomestia (pl.) and votchiny (pl.) of those servicemen who had ignored the military summons.
But some difference between the two forms of landed property remained: In the eyes of landowners, votchina preserved its significance as the preferable right to one’s land. As O. A. Shvatchenko put it, votchiny formed the material basis of the Russian aristocracy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In spite of governmental regulations and limitations and severe blows of the Oprichnina, the votchina system survived the sixteenth century, and after the Time of Troubles experienced new growth. Beginning with Vasily Shuisky (1610), the tsars began to remunerate their supporters by granting them the right to turn part of their po- mestie estates into votchiny. Thus, new types of votchina appeared in the seventeenth century. The Law Code of 1649 also stipulated the possibility of exchanging pomestie for votchina, or vice versa. Finally, pomestie and votchina merged during the reforms of Peter the Great: specifically, in the 1714 decree on majorats. See also: GRAND PRINCE; IVAN III; LAW CODE OF 1649; OPRICHNINA; PETER I; POMESTIE
MIKHAIL M. KROM
VOTIAKS See UDMURTS.
VOYEVODA
In texts from the era of Kievan Rus, the term voyevoda designated the commander of a military host of any significant size, be it an entire field army, a division, or a regiment. It might also be used to refer to the administrator or governor of some territory. Researchers therefore frequently encounter the term as a translation of the Greek ar-chon and satrapis as well as strategos.
By the 1530s, the practice of annually stationing regimental commanders (godovye voyevody) on the Oka River defense line to protect Moscow from Tatar raids had begun to blur the distinction between the military command responsibilities of the regimental commanders and the administrative reENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY sponsibility of the vicegerents and fortifications stewards of the towns: first siege defense, then fortifications labor and fiscal administration were gradually shifted to the former. By the 1560s and 1570s, general fiscal and judicial as well as military authority in certain southern and western frontier districts was entirely in the hands of these godovye voyevody; the vicegerents and fortifications stewards were eliminated or subordinated to them. Godovye voyevody had evolved into town governors (gorodovye voyevody). During the Time of Troubles, the breakdown of central chancellery authority left responsibility for mobilizing military resources and coordinating the struggle against the Pretenders and foreign interventionists largely up to the town governors of the upper Volga and North. The town governor system of local administration was therefore universalized after the liberation of Moscow and the foundation of the new Romanov dynasty. By the 1620s most districts were under a town governor, usually appointed for two to three years from the lower ranks of the upper service class (stolniki, Moscow dvoryane) and given a working order (nakaz) from the appropriate chancellery.
The town governors had broad responsibilities: They commanded district garrison forces and defended their districts from attack; they helped mobilize district military manpower into the regiments of the field army; they supervised fortifications corvee; they policed and combated banditry; they investigated and adjudicated civil and criminal cases and registered deeds; they searched out, tried, and remanded fugitive peasants; they conducted reviews determining service entitlement awards, paid out cash and grain service subsidies, and implemented chancellery instructions to assign pomestie allotments; they helped surveying and cadastral inventorying; and they supervised repartitions of communal property to reapportion tax burdens. The quality of their administrative service was often deficient, however, as they were not administrative specialists but notables appointed to governorships most often as a respite from their command responsibilities in the field army or their ceremonial duty at court; governorships were less likely to give them rank promotions than field army duty or court duty. They received no special additional salary for service as governors (even raises to their regular service subsidies, in recognition of meritorious service, were rare), and they therefore sought out their compensation on their own by soliciting bribes and arranging for community feeding prestations (kormlenie).
1651
Moscow did develop practices and institutions to reinforce central chancellery control over the town governors. The compulsory service ethos and the precedence (mestnichestvo) system had some restraining influence on them; they were usually removed from their posts after their third year, unless the community petitioned for their retention; their working orders were made increasingly specific and comprehensive; and it was general practice to reduce the range of decisions left to their discretion so that most of their actions required explicit preliminary authorization from the chancelleries. Over the course of the seventeenth century, additional control procedures were developed: the multiplication and refinement of record forms; the introduction of end-of- term audits; and the organization of special investigative commissions to respond to community complaints of abuses of authority. See also: FRONTIER FORTIFICATIONS; KORMLENIE; LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davies, Brian L. (1987). “The Town Governors in the Reign of Ivan IV.” Russian History/Histoire Russe 14 (1 -4):77-143.
(1903-1950), Soviet economic official who for many years was close to Stalin.
Born into a foreman’s family near Tula on December 1, 1903, Nikolai Alexeyevich Voznesensky was appointed chief of Gosplan, the USSR State Planning Commission, in January 1938. He subsequently became first deputy prime minister, a member of Stalin’s war cabinet, and a Politburo member, and until his arrest in March 1949 remained at the center of Soviet politics and economics.
Voznesensky advanced in the Soviet hierarchy because of his aptitude for economic administration, his undeviating loyalty to the party line, the patronage of Leningrad party chief Andrei Zhdanov, and good luck. He sponsored several measures designed to improve the economic outcome of the command system, including new monitoring systems to identify and manage the most acute short1652 ages, the realignment of industrial prices with production costs, and detailed long-term plans. As a party loyalist he expertly rationalized each new turn in official thinking about the economic principles of socialism and capitalism. While many competent and loyal officials were repressed, Voznesensky benefited from Zhdanov’s protection and had the good fortune to gain high office just as Stalin’s purges were beginning to taper off.
Voznesensky’s first task was to revive the Soviet economy, which had been stagnating since 1937. He was still trying when World War II broke out in 1941. The war exposed the inadequacy of prewar plans for a war economy, and for a while the planners lost control. While war production soared, the civilian sector neared collapse. The victory at Stalingrad in 1942 and Allied aid made it possible to restore economic balance in 1943 and 1944. Voznesensky was involved in every aspect of this story of failure and success.
By the end of the war Voznesensky had become one of Stalin’s favorites. Stalin relied on his competence, frankness, and personal loyalty. The same attributes led Voznesensky to fall out with others, in particular Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria. The rivalry was personal; there is no serious evidence of differences between them on political or economic philosophy. After Zhdanov’s death in September 1948, Voznesensky’s good luck ran out. Malenkov and Beria were soon able to destroy Stalin’s trust in him. He became ensnared in accusations relating to false economic reports and secret papers that ended in his dismissal, arrest, trial, and execution. Voznesensky was not the only prominent figure with connections to Zhdanov to disappear at this time in what was later known as the Leningrad affair. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; LENINGRAD AFFAIR; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
