What Was the Streltsy?
The Streltsy were a semi-professional infantry corps in the Muscovite state, established by Tsar Ivan IV in the 1550s as the first regular infantry force in Russian history. They were armed with arquebuses and later muskets, organised into regiments of 500 to 1,000 men, paid in cash and granted land in and around Moscow, and exempt from most taxes in return for hereditary military service. The corps lasted until 1698, when Peter the Great disbanded it in the wake of the four regiments’ mutiny earlier that year (see Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 2002, on the Muscovite military system).
Origins of the Streltsy
Ivan IV created the Streltsy in the 1550s, when the long-standing cavalry forces of the Muscovite state, the pomestnaya konnitsa of noble servicemen, proved unequal to the task of fighting the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates. The Streltsy were recruited from free men and the sons of free men in Moscow and the regional cities; they combined garrison duty in the capital with active campaigning. The first major test came with the conquest of Kazan in 1552, where Streltsy arquebusiers supported the sappers and artillery in the final assault on the khanate’s capital.
By the time of Ivan’s death in 1584, the corps numbered about 12,000 men in Moscow and a further 7,000 in provincial towns. They were not a standing force in the modern sense: Streltsy lived at home, pursued trades, and reported for duty in time of war. Their Moscow regiments, however, had a special status. Quartered in the city, paid directly from the treasury, and armed with firearms, they were the closest thing the Muscovite state had to a professional soldiery, and the regimental sloboda (settlement) became a feature of the Moscow map.
The Streltsy in 17th-century politics
The corps’ political weight grew with its size. Fourteen Streltsy regiments, about 8,000 men, played a decisive role in the Time of Troubles, fighting at different times for the False Dmitry, for Vasily Shuisky, for the Polish-Lithuanian garrison in Moscow, and for the Second Volunteer Army that took the city in 1612. The corps’ divisions, its dependence on commanders’ patronage, and its proximity to the Kremlin made it a kingmaker in the period’s succession crises.
The Streltsy Uprising of 1682 was the most famous of these interventions. On 15 May 1682, a week after the death of Tsar Feodor III, four Streltsy regiments marched into the Kremlin and demanded that Peter I’s elder half-brother Ivan be made tsar with Sophia Alekseyevna as regent. Sophia, who had been trying to keep the throne for herself, capitalised on the unrest and the rumour that the Naryshkin faction had strangled Ivan; for the next seven years she ruled Russia through her favourite, Vasily Golitsyn, while Peter grew up in the Preobrazhensky village. Peter did not forget the humiliation, and he referred to Sophia bitterly for the rest of his life (Massie, Peter the Great, 1980).
The mutiny of 1698 and the abolition of the corps
By 1698, when Peter was returning from the Grand Embassy, the Streltsy were deeply unhappy. The Azov campaigns of 1695-1696 had been costly, and several regiments had been posted to the western frontier rather than being allowed home to Moscow. Four regiments mutinied in March 1698 and began the long march back, intending to install Sophia on the throne; the rebellion was broken at the monastery of Voskresensky on the Irtysh, and the surviving mutineers were brought back to Moscow in chains. Peter, who had hurried back from Vienna, presided over an investigation that lasted until February 1699: about 1,200 Streltsy were executed, and a further 600 were sent to monasteries or into exile.
The survivors were absorbed into the new regular regiments Peter was building to fight Sweden. The Streltsy as a distinct body ceased to exist, and the disbandment closed the chapter on the Muscovite military system that had preceded the imperial one (Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 1998).
The Streltsy in Russian memory
The Streltsy remained a subject of Russian historical writing and art well into the imperial period. The painter Vasily Surikov’s Morning of the Streltsy Execution (1881) and Menshikov in Berezov (1883) brought the corps’ last days into the national iconography. The writer Aleksey Tolstoy, in his unfinished novel Peter the First, gave the Streltsy a major role, and the Soviet historical school treated the corps as a transitional institution between feudal levies and the modern Russian army.