Russia under the Old regime

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virtually extinct. This occurred at the very time when western Europe was moving in the opposite direction. With the decline of vassalage after 1300, western fiefs passed into outright ownership, while the development of trade and manufacture produced an additional source of wealth in the form of capital. In the early modern west, the bulk of the wealth gradually accumulated in the hands of society, giving it powerful leverage against the crown; in Russia, it is the crown that, as it were, expropriated society. It was the combination of absolute political power with nearly complete control of the country's productive resources that made the Muscovite monarchy so formidable an institution.

In order to bring the process of expropriation to its conclusion it was still necessary to uproot boyars holding large votchina estates in the central regions of Muscovy. This was done by Ivan iv. This tsar undoubtedly suffered from mental derangement, and it would be a mistake to assign to all his policies rational aims. He killed and tortured to exorcise the spirits tormenting him, not to change the course of his country's history. But it so happened that the people who stood in his way, those who most frustrated his will and sent him into fits of blind rage, belonged to the pedigreed clans holding votchiny in and around Moscow. By destroying so many of them, Ivan inadvertently altered the balance of forces in Russian society and profoundly influenced its future.

In 1550, Ivan took the unprecedented step of allotting pomestia in the vicinity of Moscow to 1,064 'boyars' sons', the majority of them impoverished dvoriane and not a few descendants of slaves. By this act, he bestowed upon these parvenus the respected title of'Moscow Dvoriane', previously reserved for the pedigreed boyars. This was a clear warning to the great clans. In the years that followed, Ivan was too preoccupied with administrative reforms and foreign policy to dare challenge the boyars. But once he decided to do so, it was with a ferocity and sadism that can only be compared with that displayed by Stalin in the 1930s.

In 1564, Ivan split the country in two parts. One half, called zemsh-china, 'the land', constituted the kingdom proper, the public part as it were. The other, which he took under his personal management, he designated oprichnina. The virtual absence of records from the time when Russia was subjected to this formalized dyarchy (1564-72) makes it very difficult to know exactly what had happened. But the political implications of the oprichnina are reasonably clear. Ivan temporarily reversed the procedure used by his ancestors, who appear to have attempted too much too quickly. He withdrew from the realm at large those areas in which royal power still had to contend with powerful entrenched interests, where the process of 'domainialization' had not yet been successfully carried out. These areas he now assigned directly to his personal household; that is, he incorporated them in his private domain. By so