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
The year 1635
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.
* * *
“Papa, have you heard about the new proclamation?” Pavel asked Boris. “I was having lunch with Petr Ivanovich over at the bureau of roads and a couple of the new hires were talking. They seemed pretty upset.”
“Yes. I imagine they were.”
“How bad is it?” Pavel asked.
“It probably won’t be too bad for us. We have new plows, a seeder, a reaper and a thresher. But it will ruin a lot of the lower nobility. How many are ruined depends on how many of the serfs can buy out and how many decide now is a good time to run.” Serfs running away had been a major problem for years. They were often aided and abetted by the boyars and the church, who always needed more labor.
Russia had had a well-developed bureaucracy for many years. What Russia hadn’t had when it was developing that bureaucracy, though, was the money to pay the bureaucrats. So whether it was a clerk in Nizhny Novgorodi, a manager in the bureau of roads, the Konyushenny Prikaz, or a cavalry trooper, most of the pay for his service was in the form of land granted on a semi-permanent basis by the czar.
Even at this late date the knots of law and custom that turned a free man into a serf weren’t quite absolute. If you could escape and stay gone for five years, you were free. And the government wouldn’t hunt you; that was up to the person who held the land you were tied to. Also, in theory, there were times when you could buy your way out of your chains. In theory. The last thirty or so years had been “Forbidden Years,” during which even if you could come up with the cash, you weren’t allowed to change your status.
Boris continued. “Politically, it’s hard to say. The czar may gain enough from the high families and with the general population to offset what he’s going to lose with the dvoryane and deti boyars.” Czar Mikhail had been, at least on the surface, quite clever in how he had implemented the new “Limited Year,” but Boris wasn’t at all sure he had been clever enough.