Akty služilich zemlevladel’cev XV – načala XVII vekov. Tom 4 [Akten der Dienstgutbesitzer vom 15. bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts]. Sost. Anton V. Antonov. Moskva: Drevlechranilišče, 2008. ISBN: 978-5-93646-123-1; Oleg A. Švatčenko Votčinnoe zemlevladenie v Rossii v konce XVI veka [Erblicher Grundbesitz in Russland gegen Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts]. Moskva: Institut Rossijskoj Istorii RAN, 2008. ISBN: 978-5-8055-0198-3

Akty služilich zemlevladel’cev XV – načala XVII vekov. [Akten der Dienstgutbesitzer vom 15. bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts]. Tom 4. Sost. Anton V. Antonov. Moskva: Drevlechranilišče, 2008. 632 S. ISBN: 978-5-93646-123-1.

Oleg A. Švatčenko Votčinnoe zemlevladenie v Rossii v konce XVI veka [Erblicher Grundbesitz in Russland gegen Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts]. Moskva: Institut Rossijskoj Istorii RAN, 2008. 191 S. ISBN: 978-5-8055-0198-3.

The 4th volume of „Akty sluzilykh zemlevladeltsev“ concludes a publication which began in 1997, editing the remaining fragments that can qualify as private archives of the service nobility (sluzhilie liudi). As the editor explains, these documents offer a unique glimpse on the “life and habits of the privileged class.” In fact, most of the early archives (14th to 15th centuries) preserved in Russia are either official documents written within a narrow ruling circle (testaments and treaties of the princes, epistles from metropolitan and bishops), or monastic cartulars. Private archives as such (family documents, correspondence, diaries …) are much more recent (17th and most of all 18th century). Thus the limited bunch of charters relating to service nobility and its domains in late medieval and early modern Muscovy are of considerable value. They do not represent the written heritage of noble families, but are copies of official documents granting a piece of land or a revenue to a noble servitor of the monarch, answering claims and demands, ordering a measuring and so on. Following the practices of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian historians, the texts have a partially modernized spelling and abbreviations are solved, which is a blessing for current reading, but handicaps linguists wishing to use these documents for historical studies of the Russian language and its orthography. Three indices complete the edition: chronological, personal and geographical.

The volume contains 548 documents, About 300 of them witness to the activity of the Palace of genealogical affairs (Palata rodoslovnykh del) in the 1680s. All of them were already published in A. I. Iushko’s Akty XIII – XVII vv., predstavlennye v Razriadnyi prikaz predstaviteliami sluzhilykh familii posle otmeny mestnichestva. Moskva 1898. However, the 4th volume of “Akty sluzhilykh zemlevladeltsev” is not a mere reprint, but provides us with improved editing: better copies of some documents have been found, more accurate datations are proposed, many place names are properly located, forgeries are discussed. A second group of some 90 documents have been originally compiled by Muscovite scribes in Novgorod during the 1570s and deposited in the archive of the Domains Chancery (Pomestnyi prikaz). Most of them were published in D. Ia. Samokvasov’s Arkhivnyi material, t. 1, Moskva 1905. Nevertheless, the corpus is completed in the new edition and some errors or omissions are corrected. The 50 remaining documents were published much more recently by K. V. Baranov in issues number 5 (1999) and 7 (2001) of “Russkii diplomatarii.” These charters were also part of the Domains Chancery or the Ranks Chancery (Razriadnyi prikaz) archives. As such, they complete very well the other materials.

Chronologically the charters range from the years 1390–1401 to 1647. The earliest period from Vasilii 1st (1389–1425 = 2 documents) to Vasilii III (1505–1533 = 87) witnesses a steady rise in the production or, more precisely, the conservation of acts, parallel to what we know in monastic archives, yet on a humbler scale. Dating from the reign of Ivan The Terrible (1533–1584) are 198 charters. What is interesting is that the rhythm of production is at its most rapid during the so-called “period of reforms” (1547–1564 = 66 documents), and during the terror period of the oprichnina regime (1565–1572 = 72) when Ivan reallots domains between his noblemen. It is also to be noted that charter number 470, although issued on January 17th, 1547, that is the day after Ivan was crowned tsar, is still written in the name of grand-prince (kniaz’ velikii) Ivan Vasil’evich. The editor gives us 76 documents form the reign of Fedor (1584–1598), son and successor of Ivan, who seems to have carefully tended to the needs of his noblemen. But the most frantic producer is, understandably, tsar Vasilii Shuiskii (1606–1610 = 47 charters), whose authority, never recognized nationwide, depended upon the support of the service nobility. 25 charters date from the interregnum (1610–1613) and only 28 from Mikhail Romanov’s reign (1613–1645). The limit of these calculations is we do not know when and for what reason the collection of documents ends.

The same can be said regarding the prosopography of noble clans, although the charters are classified according to family names (with an appendix of 47 texts simply put in chronological order). Only a few names conjure more than ten documents: 18 for the Verderevskie, 15 for the Sunbulovy, 13 for the Kobiakovy, 12 for the Nazimovy, 11 for the Bezobrazovy and the Karamyshevy. This bears no relation to the rank of the family, as more famous names produce a lesser quantity of texts: 1 for the Godunovy, 3 for the princely Golitsyn family, for example. This apparently random sample leaves the reader with a slight sense of frustration and perplexity. We can certainly use this material as sources for the administrative treatment of Russian service nobility, but they give us only tiny pieces of the puzzle if we try to understand local history or to study any given family.

O.A. Shvatchenko’s book, on the contrary, is an attempt to write a concise history of the landowning class during the 1572–1604 period. The question behind this project is: did the oprichnina period dramatically change the pattern of land ownership (zemlevladenie) and its distribution among the Russian nobility ? To answer it, Shvatchenko tries to use every remaining Muscovite cadastral survey (the so-called pistsovye knigi) and the documents from the Chanceries (prikazy) compiled between the 1550s and 1624–1627. His study, divided into four chapters, is sharp and stimulating. Chapter one draws a general picture of the Russian territory in the years 1572–1604 in order to assess how much of the land was in the hands of nobility, under the two possible forms of ownership, that is the hereditary property (votchina) and the land-for-service grant, or conditional landholding (pomestie). Then he goes down the social ladder, examining first the “Titled families” (titulovannye familii) and the “Old Muscovite families” (staromoskovskie) whose members have access to the Boiar Council, and, finally, the other families incorporated into the Muscovite Court. In the appendix, a list of names locates the possessions of each family and a geographical list shows the families possessing land in each district (uezd). Shvantchenko’s conclusion is that Russian nobility as a whole was, indeed, strongly affected by the oprichnina terror and lost a lot of land (no less than a third of its possessions) to the monasteries in the 1560–1570s. Yet it remained fundamentally a landowning class. The old system of hereditary property did not disappear, and remained strong and very stable around Moscow and in Central Muscovy. One can count 1307 big villages in the hands of Boiars and Courtiers after the oprichnina period. The total is almost the same – 1291, in 1714, when Peter the Great issues his decree on majorat to prevent the dispersion of noble ownership. On the contrary, provincial nobility, especially in the Novgorod, Pskov and Smolensk western regions, was essentially living on the pomestie system.

Pierre Gonneau, Paris-Sorbonne