Public or Private?

Okay, so here's a factoid: 8 March 1627 (according to one source, see below) Mikhail Fedorovich issues a decree, roughly by status (po stepeni sana), of which people can have how many supports (wagons = podvody) when traveling through a iam.

The list as reproduced in this source is not surprising: top clergy and boyars at the top, huntsmen and cossacks at the bottom.

What I find surprising, however, is the way the whole system of ranking usage by status plays with common conceptions of the iam as an institution. Namely, most histories describe it as a system used strictly for official purposes. And yet here resources are allocated not by purpose (i.e. military loads get 20 wagons, pickle barrels get 1), but rather by status rankings.

Now admittedly, what could still be going on here is simply the clause that when a boyar travels for official purposes, say, he is entitled to X number of horses.

But this still tends to suggest that the system is being used simultaneously as a mechanism of governance (that is, a courier system for official communications) and as a way of making distinctions between the populace, that is, as a form of privilege.

It would also seem a natural step from this idea that "when traveling for official purposes a boyar is entitled to 20 wagons" to "a boyar is entitled to 20 wagons". I'd like to see the iamshchik who succeeds in upholding the strictly official use of the iam in this environment.

What's the bottom line here? Could be, we're foolish to imagine this system as "purely" official until a later liberalization allows "private" subjects to use it. On the contrary, it would seem possible that it is a public good distributed according to customary status distinctions, with the proviso, perhaps forgotten in practice, that it was to be used for service only.


By the way, this event is one of the first I've worked into a running timeline I'm creating, on an experimental basis, describing the iam. Check it out here.


This information taken from according to I. P. Khrushchov, Ocherki iamskikh i pochtovykh uchrezhdenii (1884), 11 and 82. On the whole, this isn't the most reliable source, by any means, but that's what I have for now. Any thoughts where I can get access to Muscovite decrees to run this down?