Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

arose of giving some of that land to dvoriane as fief, or, as it came to be known in the 1470s, pomest'e. After he had conquered Novgorod and massacred or deported its leading citizens, Ivan in carried out a major land reform there. He confiscated on his own behalf 817 per cent of the cultivated land. Of this, more than half he turned over to the royal household for direct exploitation; most of the remainder he distributed among dvoriane as pomestia.8 The Novgorod patricians whom he deported and resettled in the central regions of Muscovy he also gave their new estates as pomestia. Unlike a votchina, a pomestie was the legal property of the tsar. It was turned over to servitors for exploitation on the understanding that they and their descendants could retain it but only for as long as they continued to render satisfactory service.

In so far as from the reign of Ivan in onward a votchina could not be held either unless its owner served the tsar, the question arises what distinguished the two forms of land tenure.* First and foremost, votchina property could be divided among one's heirs or sold, whereas a pomestie could not. Secondly, the votchina of a servitor who died without sons remained within the clan; a pomestie reverted to the royal treasury. Thirdly, from the middle of the sixteenth century the clan had the right to repurchase within a forty-year period votchiny which its members had sold to outsiders. For these reasons, votchina was regarded as a superior type of conditional land tenure and preferred to pomestie. Well-to-do servitors usually had some of both.

The monarchy had different preferences. All the features which made votchiny attractive to servitors tainted them in its eyes. On the territories which they conquered, Ivan ill and Basil m carried out systematic confiscations of votchiny, the way it was first done in Novgorod, transferring title to themselves and distributing them wholly or in part as pomestie. From this policy, the quantity of votchina land steadily diminished. On the death of Basil in (1533) it still predominated in the central regions of Muscovy where the dynasty had its original home and where it had made acquisitions before pomestia were invented. On the periphery of the Muscovite homeland - in Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Riazan and other territories conquered after 1477 - the bulk of the service land was held as pomestie.

The imposition of service obligations on all holders of land had profound implications for the future course of Russian history. It meant nothing less than the elimination of private property in land; and since land was and remained the main source of wealth in Russia, the net result was that private property of the means of production became

* Without wishing to complicate the issue further we may add that in later Muscovy the term votchina covered not only properties inherited from one's father; there were also votchiny which one bought and those which one received for outstanding service.