For Muscovy’s gentry, accustomed to traditional warfare and tradition-al hierarchies, the new-style regiments were an affront to their honor and place in society. Despite the new units’ respectable performance, they were dissolved after the war, and foreign mercenaries were sent home.
The shortsightedness of this policy became clear in 1637 when new-style regiments were recreated, only to be disbanded again shortly thereafter.
The units were permanently established only in the 1640s, as the end of the Thirty Years’ War created a glut of underemployed mercenaries capa-ble of training Muscovites in new tactics. Under the next tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, the new-style regiments grew steadily, reaching nearly 100,000 soldiers by the reign of Aleksei’s son Fyodor. Despite the influx
of foreign officers and instructors to train and command these units, and the steady import of European technology and techniques, Muscovy’s army remained distinct in one key respect from other European armies:
it was almost entirely a national army, with the rank and file all Russian, despite its international officer corps. Other European armies, by contrast, were largely made up of mercenaries with no connection of birth, faith, or ethnicity with the country they served.
Tsar Mikhail died in 1645 and was succeeded by his son Aleksei Mikhailovich. Pious and dutiful, Aleksei continued the patient work of rebuilding Muscovite finances and military power. Both Mikhail and Aleksei maintained Godunov’s precedent of defending the status of the gentry against economic pressure. Mikhail allowed the wives and chil-dren of gentry cavalrymen killed or imprisoned to keep their estates.
Aleksei in turn codified and systematized Muscovite law, making Godunov’s improvised serfdom into a permanent legal principle of Muscovite society and, by implication, guaranteeing a livelihood to his nobility.
Aleksei Mikhailovich’s opportunity to win back Smolensk and to seize Kiev, reclaiming the full heritage of Kievan Rus, came through an explo-sive cossack uprising. The cossacks that had proven so dangerous to Mus-covy during the Time of Troubles now threatened Poland. The empty lands south of Poland and Muscovy had been steadily colonized over the late 1500s and early 1600s; the land along the Dnepr River, under Pol-ish rule, was deeply riven between wealthy Catholic, PolPol-ish magnates and poorer but more numerous Orthodox, Ukrainian cossacks. In 1648, Bog-dan Khmelnitskii led a revolt against Polish rule, setting off a massive uprising throughout Polish Ukraine. Khmelnitskii had been a cossack in Polish service, provoked to revolt by a feud with a Polish landowner.
Khmelnitskii united cossacks, peasants, and townspeople in a war against Polish domination, a war that slaughtered many of Ukraine’s Jews, despised as agents of Polish authority. Poland’s registered cossacks, those officially enrolled in Polish service, defected to Khmelnitskii. This left Poland with almost no forces to bring Ukraine back under control, espe-cially after Khmelnitskii destroyed a Polish army in September 1648.
Though Poland’s prospects of forcing Khmelnitskii to submit looked bleak, full independence for Ukraine was not an option. Poland’s decen-tralized political system, with a weak king and powerful nobles, now showed signs of serious strain. Poland’s structure had worked effectively through the 1500s and the first half of the 1600s. Now, the relative weak-ness of the Polish monarchy and the lack of a standing army made it hard to bring Ukraine back. On the other hand, Khmelnitskii’s Ukraine was riv-en by internal fissures and lacked the resources to exist as an indepriv-endriv-ent power. His cossacks had little in common with townspeople and peasants besides opposition to Polish Catholic cultural influences. As a result, his
aim was not an independent state, but the defense of cossack rights and autonomy against Polish infringement. He settled with Poland in August 1649. Though Khmelnitskii won substantial concessions for the cossacks, underlying tensions were not resolved. Cossacks still resented their nom-inal Polish overlords, while deeply split themselves between the wealthy cossack elite and the poorer rank and file.
Fighting flared again in 1651, and temporary cossack successes did not alter the clear verdict that lasting victory against the Poles required out-side aid. Khmelnitskii’s delicate position as a middleman between the Polish state and Ukraine was simply not sustainable. The only real alter-native to Polish rule was the Muscovite tsar. A shared Orthodox faith and Muscovy’s antipathy toward Poland led Khmelnitskii to turn to Alek-sei Mikhailovich for aid. Though AlekAlek-sei had been cautious in response to Khmelnitskii’s appeals in 1648 and 1649, taking several years to prepare the country for war, he finally decided there was no better chance to win back what had been lost to Poland during the Time of Troubles. Muscovy declared war on Poland in autumn 1653. In January 1654 at Pereiaslavl Khmelnitskii signed an agreement with Aleksei’s representatives pro-viding for cooperation against Poland. The precise nature of this agreement—what the cossacks gave up and what Muscovy promised in return—has been a matter of dispute for 350 years. From Aleksei’s point of view, and that of subsequent Russian nationalist historians, Khmelnit-skii gave himself and his cossacks over to the tsar as loyal subjects.
Khmelnitskii, by contrast, clearly believed that he retained traditional cossack autonomy. The Crimean Tatars, apprehensive about Muscovy’s growing power, joined Poland against the cossacks.
The initial campaigns of the Thirteen Years’ War proved that Muscovy’s military capability had advanced far beyond that of the Time of Troubles or the Smolensk War. In keeping with the substantial growth in army size characteristic of the military revolution, 100,000 Muscovite soldiers, well equipped with firearms and artillery, carried out a multipronged invasion of Poland-Lithuania. Yet this Muscovite army was still a mixture of old and new. Aleksei Mikhailovich’s reign saw the steady growth of new-style regiments, but those served alongside increasingly obsolete gentry cavalry and strel’tsy. By contrast with 1632, when Shein commanded a sin-gle narrow thrust at Smolensk, Muscovy now launched a campaign of breathtaking scope. Since Aleksei Mikhailovich’s aim was not aiding the cossacks but winning territory, his main forces headed for Smolensk. To the north, 15,000 soldiers moved on Polotsk and Vitebsk, covering the right flank of the main attack; the main force of 40,000 attacked Smolensk;
to the south 15,000 protected the left flank of the main attack and moved toward Roslavl and a link with the Ukrainian cossacks. All three armies were intended to support the war ’s main goal: to cut off and seize Smolensk. For Khmelnitskii, by contrast, there was only a limited
Muscovite force to assist him, far less than what Aleksei threw against Smolensk.
Stretched to its limits by Khmelnitskii’s uprising and unable to match Muscovy’s manpower mobilization, Poland assembled only token forces to defend Smolensk. The Muscovites reached Smolensk in June 1654, with Aleksei personally participating in the siege. Though an initial attempt to storm the fortress failed, steady bombardment left the weakened garrison with little hope. After the defeat of a Polish relief column, the city surren-dered that fall, leaving Aleksei Mikhailovich in firm possession of Smolensk and its surroundings as campaigning ceased for the winter.
The next spring Aleksei prepared for an ambitious campaign beyond Smolensk into the Lithuanian half of the Polish state. The Muscovite main army pushed west toward Minsk before swinging north to Vilnius, seiz-ing it in summer 1655. For Poland, the war had turned from defeat into disaster. Already weakened by the bloody cossack revolt and full-scale war against the ever-growing power of Muscovy, Poland faced annihila-tion as Sweden invaded in summer 1655, taking advantage of Polish weakness to occupy Warsaw by September. Aleksei’s calculations changed as Poland disintegrated. A weakened Poland shorn of Smolensk and Ukraine was one thing; a Poland entirely conquered by Sweden was quite another. In late 1655 Aleksei eased his pressure on Poland in hopes of winning election to the Polish throne. In May 1656 he declared war on Sweden and invaded Swedish Livonia as Ivan the Terrible had done nearly a century earlier. As in that earlier campaign, Muscovite troops were unable to capture a major port. In a demonstration of how far Mus-covite military modernization still had to go, Aleksei’s troops besieged Riga but failed to conquer it either by bombardment or by storm. Aleksei returned home in autumn 1656 without Riga, but with significant other gains. Poland had managed to recover during its brief respite from Mus-covite pressure. Mindful of the growing expense of war, Aleksei aban-doned his campaign against Livonia, signed a truce with Sweden in 1658, and reopened his war with Poland.
As the war dragged on, Aleksei’s relationship with his cossack allies worsened. For the cossacks, the war meant devastation. The right (west) bank of the Dnepr, main theater of fighting in the south, was essentially depopulated by the war. Poles and Jews fled northwest to Poland proper for safety, while cossacks and peasants crossed the Dnepr to relative security on the left (east) bank under Muscovy’s protection. Khmelnitskii and his cossacks became increasingly disillusioned with the tsar, who fought the war for conquests in Belorussia and Lithuania, not cossack autonomy in Ukraine. Khmelnitskii died in 1657, disgusted with Muscovy and the tsar. His death produced a civil war between the cossack elite, favoring renewed Polish ties, and the rank and file, sympathetic to Mus-covy. After the victory of the pro-Polish faction, Aleksei shifted his forces
south from the Belorussian-Lithuanian campaigns to bring the cossacks back under control in Ukraine.
By 1659 and 1660, the war that had begun promisingly for Aleksei turned sour. The economic and social burdens of warfare on a scale undreamt of earlier in Muscovite history took their toll. Aleksei had expanded the network of prikazy to handle his new army, but the system’s ad hoc nature showed signs of strain. To build and maintain his armies, Aleksei introduced regular conscription, mass levies from Muscovy’s peasant population. In the winter of 1658–1659, for example, Aleksei ordered every 100 households to produce six conscripts for the army. This principle of requiring peasants to select a quota of unfortunate draftees from among their number would persist for 200 years. The initial levy produced 18,000 men for Aleksei’s new-style regiments, but those regi-ments required competent officers to lead them, either from Russia’s gen-try or foreign recruits. Continuing losses to combat, disease, and desertion meant that Aleksei repeated his unpopular levies. Heavy casualties meant that the new-style regiments were increasingly manned by newly con-scripted and poorly trained peasants. The expense of war also forced Aleksei to debase his currency by the extensive minting of copper coins.
The resulting inflation and counterfeiting provoked riots in summer 1662 that threatened Aleksei’s personal safety, and which he crushed with brutal force.
The easy successes of the first years of the war were not repeated. At Konotop at the end of June 1659, a Muscovite army was nearly annihi-lated by cossacks. Poland, recovering rapidly from Swedish conquest, went on the offensive to win back some of the eastern territories it had lost, inflicting a major defeat on the Muscovites at Polonka in June 1660.
Later that year, yet another Muscovite army was caught by cossacks and Tatars in open country west of Kiev. Using a rolling fortress of linked wag-ons, the army tried to make its way east to the relative safety of the Dnepr River and the Muscovite garrison at Kiev, but was caught and forced to surrender; 10,000–20,000 soldiers went into Tatar captivity.
Muscovy and Poland were both reaching exhaustion, though the war would linger on for years before the final truce in 1667. As discussed in previous chapters, state capacity, though greater than in previous genera-tions, was still too limited to enable states to inflict clear and unequivocal defeat. The war reached a stalemate, with Poland and Muscovy each con-trolling their bank of the Dnepr River. Each could attack across the river, but not sustain campaigns to seize and hold ground. This provided the basis for a settlement. By early 1667, Polish and Muscovite negotiators at Andrusovo, near Smolensk, had reached a 13-1/2-year truce, preserving Moscow’s gains of Smolensk and large sections of Belorussia, and divid-ing Ukraine along the Dnepr River, with Muscovy controlldivid-ing the left bank and Poland the right. The city of Kiev, though on the right bank,
was awarded to Muscovy for a two-year term (upon the expiration of that term, Muscovy refused to surrender the city). Though Muscovy’s victory was limited, it was nevertheless substantial. It had pushed its frontiers west, regained the key border city of Smolensk, and established its domi-nance over left-bank Ukraine.