Russian border.”
Through the fall and winter of 1634, the Boyar Duma debated. And talks with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went nowhere. In the winter of 1634, Patriarch Filaret became ill and much of the heart went out of the faction that advocated an attack on Poland. Meanwhile more factories came on line. most of them using forced peasant labor. This upset the peasants because winter was their traditional light time. It also upset the great families because they couldn’t hire the peasants without their landlords’ permission.
Since the Ring of Fire, the anti-serfdom movement in Russia had slowly grown from two directions, top down and bottom up, with the service nobility caught in the middle. The top down part was a mix of morality and self- interest. It was fairly small, because the top of the Russian pyramid was small. There were fourteen to twenty great families, depending on how you counted, and a similar number of really large monasteries. A few hundred people in the great families and no more than a few thousand in the monasteries. Still, they were the most powerful people in Russia.
On the other hand, there were over thirty thousand members of the service, or bureaucratic, nobility-people whose livelihood depended on serf labor. And they were the people holding down the vital mid-level military and civilian posts. They were the tax collectors, the construction supervisors and the managers. In the Russian army, they were the captains and the colonels, but rarely the generals. It was the service nobility, bureaucrats and soldiers alike, that had kept Russia from collapsing into chaos during the Time of Troubles. They had stayed on the job and mostly out of politics, serving whichever czar was in power, and kept the wheels from coming completely off. They were generally nonpolitical, but threatening to take away their serfs would change that in a hurry. As had been shown in 1605, the last year when peasants leaving the land hadn’t been forbidden.
Then there were the serfs themselves, by far the largest proportion of the Russian population. While many, perhaps most, resented their status as serfs, few of them objected to the institution as such. It wasn’t that they found the social order objectionable-just their place in it. They ran to the wild east, they ran south to the Cossack lands, they even ran west into Poland, hoping for a better deal. What they didn’t do was stand where they were and say “This is wrong!”
It was a subtle but important distinction. There was no Harriet Tubman sneaking back into the Moscow province to smuggle other serfs out to the Cossack territories where they could be free. No Russian Frederick Douglass standing proudly and articulately to decry not just his serfdom, but all serfdom. At least, they hadn’t done so before the Ring of Fire.
The Ring of Fire was changing all that, though it took a while for the change to take root. But… but not that long a while. Rumors fly on the wings of eagles, they say. They fly even faster on wings made of mimeographed paper, and the more radically inclined of the boyar class could afford lots of paper. Russia might not have had its own Tom Paine, at least at first. But the writings of the original made their way into Russia and into Russian. And they resonated. Resonated like jungle drums, like liberty bells. Soon enough, Committees of Correspondence sprang up in a number of the larger cities and towns. Small ones, true, but they were able to begin articulating the rebellious thoughts and anger of Russian serfs.
Russia was still not a country anyone would describe as a powder keg. The population was mostly illiterate and mostly rural-and diffuse, at that. And while some elements of the upper classes were becoming radicalized, no one wanted a return to the Time of Troubles. No one wanted Polish troops flooding into Moscow again.
Then there was Rzhev. In military terms, Rzhev wasn’t very significant at all. But in emotional terms it was. In Rzhev Russia defeated the Poles. And the army that did it had a good number of serfs in it, with a lot of them involved in the fighting. In Rzhev, the Russians showed themselves to be technologically superior to the Poles. Rzhev brought a new feeling of confidence to Russia, and a great deal of political capital to the czar.
Patriarch Filaret wanted to spend that capital invading Poland and retaking Smolensk. But Czar Mikhail Fedorovich was beginning to consider other ideas. He’d now had three years to read about the history of what would become the Russia of the Romanov dynasty in another universe. Three fairly easy years, too. Despite his formal prestige, no one really demanded much of the czar, not even his father, so he had plenty of time to think about what he’d learned.
By the end of the year 1634, he’d come to accept the condemnation spoken so many times and so harshly in the speeches of Mike Stearns, the USE’s prime minister. Serfdom had to go. Or, sooner or later, just as it had in another world, it would bring down the Romanov dynasty. Czar Mikhail had no desire to see himself-or even one of his descendants a century or two from now-being shot along with his whole family in a cellar somewhere.
In that other universe, one of his descendants-Czar Alexander II-had attempted to reform serfdom. Had even succeeded, to a degree. Not enough and certainly not soon enough-but that was no excuse for inaction on Mikhail’s part. Alexander’s attempt had happened in 1861, almost a quarter of a millennium in the future.
Two centuries and twenty-seven years was a long time. Still, it was best to get started. Not even Mikhail Romanov was that much of a procrastinator.
Part Five
Chapter 63
February 1635
Fedor read the newsletter again, his jaws tight.
In an unprecedented move, today Czar Mikhail decreed that “Forbidden Years” are now limited, with some qualifications. Anyone who wants to buy out and leave his current lord may do so, provided he is willing to move to Siberia and look for gold or other metals and resources that are now known to exist.
Treasure Maps For Sale Here! Up-time sources used! Mine for GOLD, SILVER, COPPER! Find OIL!
Angrily, he shoved the paper back at Stepen. “And what are we going to use for labor now, Stepen? The czar has betrayed us!”
“Shhh!” Stepen hissed. “You want to get us killed!”
“I’m as loyal as any man,” Fedor insisted, though more quietly. “But that doesn’t get the crops in. Without our serfs my family will starve… and so will yours.”
Stepen thought that was overstating the case, but it was true that members of the service nobility like himself and Fedor, needed their serfs. There was never enough labor. “They claim that the new machines will take care of the labor problem,” Stepen said, still trying to calm his friend.
“They claim! If we could get them. You know how long the waiting list is and you know the boyars will all have them before we even see one. Which is probably a good thing, because who knows if they will work?”
Stepen considered bringing up the increase in pay, but he was very much afraid that Fedor would start yelling again. Fedor had already made his opinions on the new paper money quite clear, many times. And honestly, Stepen tended to agree with him. How could a piece of paper with printing on it have value? It just didn’t make sense. Whenever he could, Stepen spent the paper as quickly as he could and saved the silver. He wasn’t the only one. By this time a silver ruble, which nominally had the same value as a paper ruble, was buying three times as much. It didn’t occur to Stepen that the new paper rubles were worth three-quarters as much as the silver rubles had been before the paper rubles were introduced. Silver rubles were disappearing into holes and hidden compartments all over Russia, in a classic example of Gresham’s Law.
Stepen and Fedor had recently been transferred to Moscow to appointments within the Bureau of Roads, because the Bureau of Roads was expanding with the introduction of the Dacha scrapers. They had both gotten raises, but those raises hadn’t been in the form of more lands as had been usual. The raise had been more of the new paper money.
They didn’t see Pavel Borisovich sitting in the next cubical with a friend.
