AHC/Question: Biggest plausible Russia?

[Elfwine]

Started out as less, ended up as more.

But to put things in perspective. The army took you in FOR LIFE (then 25 years, then 20). When you left, you were mourned as if dead.

Soldier duty was a terrible burden on Russia, and really hated, both by the Russian peasants who gave up their men forever, and the Ukrainian farmers who had to feed and quarter them. The Petrine-style army is probably THE institution most responsible for the rise in Ukrainian consciousness, I am not even joking.

So who would willingly go for 25 years into standing army (especially Russia's famously indomitable and hardy infantry that the army relied on and generals sacrificed freely?). Well, as it turns out, few people. Cossacks went home and owned land. Guards were well-off men to start with, and the soldiers at least got barracks in the cities. But Cossacks and Guards didn't win wars. Infantry did.

So the infantry was mostly conscripted from among the core central regions, with most men being serfs selected by their owners (troublemakers, not valuable enough, sheer spite, etc.). So yes, it relied on serfdom a fair bit.

It was a brutal system. The later cantonements that replaced it were a 19th c. system that relied on organization 18th c. could not achieve.

Sounds awful even by 18th century standards, and those were uniformly inhumane.

To be honest, neither am I completely sure of this thing. Russia's traditional historiography tends to blame the corrupt fat boyar rather than the hardy pomeschik who eats gruel with his three serfs on campaign, but:

1. There were MORE gentry than boyars, so paying them off or convincing them is HARDER.
2. They were MORE reliant on the serfs for livelihood, and they could NOT absorb even a year or two of financial losses. This is not a class that can develop industry or business, or lose their unpaid workforce.

After (and partly under) Alexei, great houses accumulated a lot more wealth and power, and some of the great men were pretty promising in their ideas. Peter made all the nobles dependent on the state for money (that or taking foreign pensions), and nationalized/re-instituted all strategic industries. His successors' nobles then spent THEIR money to get access to those state resources. Too much centralisation, not enough assets, in short. I really do suspect a bit of decentralization wouldn't have hurt, but there was never an opportunity for that to develop.

I've thought a fair bit about it, and these are powerful arguments. There's some nice statistics showing the % of ownership by great and small owners somewhere, and the small owners are pretty dominant, overall. That seems to me that they are the class that needs to be tackled first, not the great nobles.

This could be wrong, but, at the very least it's something to consider.

Indeed. The lack of assets seems to be the real problem (both for state and nobles) - and as far as the state goes, its own lack of assets will make it squeeze those who it can squeeze harder, which in turn means they have less to invest in anything. A vicious cycle.

In that if nothing else, Peter's policies seem decidedly worse - money and men were needed immediately, and the long term was (unintentionally, I think) pushed to one side.

Centralization is another issue, but it certainly seems to have had no good effect on the great majority of Russians.