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The scene is a tavern near the market place of Riga seven years later. Three Scots mercenary officers — Alexander Daniels, Walter Ert and Patrick Gordon — are sitting at a table, sharing a flagon of wine and discussing their employment prospects. Gordon, who recorded the scene, has quit the King of Poland’s service. He has been contemplating a move to the service of the Habsburg Emperor, who might be engaging people for war against the Turks, but is also toying with the idea of Russia. His companions have served in the King of Sweden’s army, but the King has run out of money and they have been paid off. The focus of the conversation moves to Russia. The Tsar is in the seventh year of a war with Poland, and they have heard that his agents are recruiting experienced officers like them. The pay is not much, but at least it is paid reasonably promptly, people say. Besides, there are good prospects of quick promotion to high rank in Russian service — and of good company to boot.

For Gordon the conversation was decisive. He signed up with Russia as a service officer, and his decision proved sound: he was to rise to the rank of general. ¹⁹ Many others had preceded him, and, since this tsar made a practice of inviting foreigners he had engaged to special levees at the Kremlin or at his summer palace at Kolomenskoe, many of their names are recorded in the court diaries. In June 1657, for example, a colonel of dragoons called Junkmann was graciously received by His Imperial Majesty, along with lieutenant-colonels Skyger, Serwin, van Strobel and Trauernich and many other officers. In October 1661 (to cite one of several other examples) the Austrian Colonel Gottlieb von Schalk was received, along with the thirty-seven officers, NCOs and trumpeters he had engaged for the Tsar’s service, as was Colonel Henryk van Egerat, who had brought a contingent of 150 soldiers from Denmark. Most were sent to fight on the western front, but some went south to train the musketeer regiment at Astrakhan, ²⁰ and from then on the policy priority was to train Russian conscripts in the new way, in ‘regiments of new formation’ under Russian officers.

At the same time, special military equipment (like trench telescopes) was imported, and efforts were made to modernize weaponry and expand Russian arms production. The tax register for the long-established small-arms manufacturing centre of Tula, south of Moscow, which was to become the Russian Birmingham or Sheffield, shows that in 1625 the town boasted only 250 households liable to tax, besides 34 others and 21 empty workshops. Its inhabitants already included foreigners - presumably technical experts, musketeers and gunners to advise on and test-fire the guns produced. ²¹ But in 1632 the government commissioned a Dutchman, Andrew Vinius, to build a foundry using hydraulic power. Dozens of craftsmen were recruited abroad to teach Russians how to make guns, locks and swords to modern designs, and by the early eighteenth century Tula was to boast well over 1,000 gunsmiths producing 15,000 muskets a year as well as other weaponry. Nor was Tula the only arms-manufacturing centre, even in the mid seventeenth century. In 1648 a state musket factory was established near Moscow, and by 1653 26,000 flintlock muskets had been produced there, as well as numbers of the less efficient matchlocks. Even so, arms orders had to be placed abroad to bring Russia’s small-arms stocks to a level for war. ²²At the same time mineral-prospecting was encouraged, and specialist metallurgists were hired from abroad. Strategic materials like iron were also imported in increased quantities, for, although successful efforts were made to find and exploit deposits of copper, good-quality iron was not to be found west of the Urals, and the deposits in the Urals were too difficult of access. Even so it could be said that the origins of Russia’s modern metallurgical industry as well as its arms industry date from this time. And the development of both the army and the arms industry was further stimulated by the Thirteen Years War, in which Russia at last gained the upper hand against its rival Poland.