This government, a mixture of Slavic,
Norse, Byzantine and Tartar influences, recognised nothing
beyond the interest of the state. To defend this state, it
needed an army. To gather the taxes, which were necessary
to pay the soldiers, it needed civil servants. To pay these many
officials it needed land. In the vast wilderness on the east
and west there was a sufficient supply of this commodity. But
land without a few labourers to till the fields and tend the
cattle, has no value. Therefore the old nomadic peasants
were robbed of one privilege after the other, until finally, during
the first year of the sixteenth century, they were formally
made a part of the soil upon which they lived. The Russian
peasants ceased to be free men. They became serfs or slaves
and they remained serfs until the year 1861, when their fate
had become so terrible that they were beginning to die out.
In the seventeenth century, this new state with its growing
territory which was spreading quickly into Siberia, had become
a force with which the rest of Europe was obliged to
reckon. In 1618, after the death of Boris Godunow, the
Russian nobles had elected one of their own number to be
Tsar. He was Michael, the son of Feodor, of the Moscow family
of Romanow who lived in a little house just outside the
Kremlin.
In the year 1672 his great-grandson, Peter, the son of another
Feodor, was born.
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