Voyevoda

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VOYEVODA

In texts from the era of Kievan Rus, the term voyevoda designated the commander of a military host of any significant size, be it an entire field army, a division, or a regiment. It might also be used to refer to the administrator or governor of some territory. Researchers therefore frequently encounter the term as a translation of the Greek archon and satrapis as well as strategos.

By the 1530s, the practice of annually stationing regimental commanders (godovye voyevody ) on the Oka River defense line to protect Moscow from Tatar raids had begun to blur the distinction between the military command responsibilities of the regimental commanders and the administrative responsibility of the vicegerents and fortifications stewards of the towns: first siege defense, then fortifications labor and fiscal administration were gradually shifted to the former. By the 1560s and 1570s, general fiscal and judicial as well as military authority in certain southern and western frontier districts was entirely in the hands of these godovye voyevody; the vicegerents and fortifications stewards were eliminated or subordinated to them. Godovye voyevody had evolved into town governors (gorodovye voyevody ). During the Time of Troubles, the breakdown of central chancellery authority left responsibility for mobilizing military resources and coordinating the struggle against the Pretenders and foreign interventionists largely up to the town governors of the upper Volga and North. The town governor system of local administration was therefore universalized after the liberation of Moscow and the foundation of the new Romanov dynasty. By the 1620s most districts were under a town governor, usually appointed for two to three years from the lower ranks of the upper service class (stolniki, Moscow dvoryane ) and given a working order (nakaz ) from the appropriate chancellery.

The town governors had broad responsibilities: They commanded district garrison forces and defended their districts from attack; they helped mobilize district military manpower into the regiments of the field army; they supervised fortifications corvee; they policed and combated banditry; they investigated and adjudicated civil and criminal cases and registered deeds; they searched out, tried, and remanded fugitive peasants; they conducted reviews determining service entitlement awards, paid out cash and grain service subsidies, and implemented chancellery instructions to assign pomestie allotments; they helped surveying and cadastral inventorying; and they supervised repartitions of communal property to reapportion tax burdens. The quality of their administrative service was often deficient, however, as they were not administrative specialists but notables appointed to governorships most often as a respite from their command responsibilities in the field army or their ceremonial duty at court; governorships were less likely to give them rank promotions than field army duty or court duty. They received no special additional salary for service as governors (even raises to their regular service subsidies, in recognition of meritorious service, were rare), and they therefore sought out their compensation on their own by soliciting bribes and arranging for community feeding prestations (kormlenie ).

Moscow did develop practices and institutions to reinforce central chancellery control over the town governors. The compulsory service ethos and the precedence (mestnichestvo ) system had some restraining influence on them; they were usually removed from their posts after their third year, unless the community petitioned for their retention; their working orders were made increasingly specific and comprehensive; and it was general practice to reduce the range of decisions left to their discretion so that most of their actions required explicit preliminary authorization from the chancelleries. Over the course of the seventeenth century, additional control procedures were developed: the multiplication and refinement of record forms; the introduction of end-of-term audits; and the organization of special investigative commissions to respond to community complaints of abuses of authority.

See also: frontier fortifications; kormlenie; local government and administration