The seventeenth century saw more than one peasant uprising. A person of that time, born in the days when I. I. Bolotnikov's detachments were besieging Moscow, could witness major urban uprisings in adulthood, and in old age see S. T. Razin's detachments. No wonder that century was called "rebellious". Below we will talk about one little-studied peasant-Cossack performance of the early 1630s. It went down in history under the name "Balashovshchina" (named after one of its leaders, Ivan Balash).1In December 1618, in the village of Deulino, not far from the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, the Moscow ambassadors concluded a long-awaited truce with representatives of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russia got it at a high price. Many parts of the country were left desolate after the Polish-Swedish intervention. Severskaya Zemlya, as well as Smolensk, went to the Polish-Lithuanian state. However, Moscow did not abandon hopes for the return of the lost territories. These sentiments intensified in 1619, with the arrival of Patriarch Filaret - Fyodor Nikitich, the father of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, from Polish captivity. Having concentrated almost all power in his hands, Filaret changed the country's foreign policy, and the ruling circles began to prepare for a new war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian emissaries were sent to Germany, England, and Sweden to recruit men of war .2 At the same time, it was decided to form regiments of the "new system" - military formations based on the service of volunteers. The government initially recruited soldiers from the lower, non-local layers of the service nobility - the feed children of the boyars. But the latter avoided the difficult military service. I had to shout at the markets "biryucham not one day", calling on "free, walking people" to write in military service. Flattered by the king's salary, many agreed. As a result, out of 9 thousand Russian soldiers, about 5 thousand turned out to be "walking people"3 . The gover ... Читать далее