Russia’s geographical environment
with events which made life for Russians risky and more uncertain than it
might seem to have been when looked at only in a long-term perspective.
That Russia was a disordered and sometimes chaotic society has been noted
already. Part of this, as we have seen, was related to the difficulty of control-
ling space, to the problem of surveillance and pacification over such a huge,
sparsely populated territory. Another part related to the problem of securing
the frontiers of the state. All pre-modern states had difficulties in this regard,
butwherefrontiers were‘open’,astheywereacrossmuchof southern and east-
ern Russia during our period, those difficulties were particularly intractable.
The steppe frontier to the south was open to the raiding tactics of the nomads,
among whom the Crimean Tatars and their allies the Nogais proved especially
troublesome over the last two centuries of the period. Raiding for booty and
especially slaves was a constant menace, particularly in times when Russia
found itself in conflict with the Ottomans, allied perhaps with the Poles or
others. In 1571 and 1591, for example, the Tatars attacked Moscow itself. There
were serious problems during the Time of Troubles, and again in the 1630s
and 1640s. By this time the government had proceeded to the building of the
Belgorod defensive line which eventually helped to keep the Tatar raiding par-
ties at bay.
44
But serious raids along and to the south of the line continued, as at
Usman’ in 1652 and Voronezh district in 1659.
45
Losses of population (through
fighting and capture) and of property were considerable, but all estimates are
necessarily conjectural. To add to these problems were raids by the Kalmyks,
as in 1674,
46
and constant difficulties with cossack groups. The latter reached
their climax in the mass uprisings under Ivan Bolotnikov (1606–7) and Sten’ka
Razin (1667–71).
One of the many unfortunate by-products of social disorder was destruction
ofpeople andpropertybyfire,asatVoronezhin1590 whenagroup ofUkrainian
cossacks set fire to the wooden town with considerable loss of life.
47
Fire was
in fact a constant menace to virtually all Russian towns in view of their closely
packed, mainly wooden buildings. According to Sytin, for example, Moscow
suffered around thirty big fires between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries,
including fires in 1501, 1508, 1531, three times in 1547, 1560–2, 1564–5, 1571 and 1591
44 V. P. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta (Voronezh: Izdatel’stvo Voronezhskogo Gosu-
darstvennogo Universiteta, 1969).
45 L. B. Veinberg, Materialy po istorii Voronezhskoi i sosednikh gubernii. Drevnie akty XVII
stoletiia (16 vols., Voronezh, 1885–90), vol. i,no.54, vol. ii, nos. 23, 133, 144, 145.
46 M. De-Pule, Materialy po istorii Voronezhskoi i sosednikh gubernii. Orlovskie akty XVII–XVIII
stoletii (Voronezh, 1861), pp. 350–4.
47 V. P. Zagorovskii, Voronezh: istoricheskaia khronika (Voronezh: Tsentral’no-
Chernozemnoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1989), p. 16.
41
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008