Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

doing he was free at last to extirpate the large pockets of boyar votchina left over from the appanage period. Individual Moscow streets, small towns, or market places and particularly large votchiny, upon being designated by tsarist order as part of the oprichnina, became the personal property of the tsar, and as such were turned over to a special corps of oprichniki. This crew of native and foreign riffraff were permitted with impunity to abuse or kill the inhabitants of areas under their control and to loot their properties. Boyars fortunate enough to survive the terror, received, as compensation for their votchiny, pomestia in other parts of the country. The method used was basically not different from that first employed by Ivan m on the territory of conquered Novgorod, only this time it was applied to the ancient homeland of the Muscovite state and its earliest territorial acquisitions. Researches by S.Platonov have shown that the areas taken under the oprichnina were located primarily in the central regions of the state, whereas zemshchina was concentrated on the periphery conquered by Ivan m and Basil III.

The oprichnina was officially abolished in 1572 and the two hales merged once again. After that date it was forbidden to mention the once-dreaded word under the penalty of death. Some oprichniki were punished; here and there tracts of confiscated land were returned to their rightful owners. But the job was done. The centre of boyar power was destroyed. For at least another century, and in some respects for a few decades beyond it, the boyars belonging to the pedigreed clans continued to exert powerful influence at the court. Indeed, mestnichestvo blossomed most luxuriantly in the seventeenth century, that is after the reign of Ivan iv. Still, most of their economic power and their local roots had been undercut. The future belonged not to the boyars but to the dvoriane. At the end of the sixteenth century, after the oprichnina had been lifted, this once-despised class of low-grade servitors began to take precedence at court ceremonies over ordinary boyars, yielding only to representatives of the most eminent clans.

After the oprichnina, private property in land no longer played any significant role in Muscovite Russia; with the elimination of the patrimonial nests of the old families, votchina became fief held at moreadvan-tageous terms than pomestie, but it was still only a fief.*

Gosudarcvy sluzhilye liudi - the Sovereign's Serving People - received their main compensation in the form of votchiny and pomestia. But offices and salaries were also used for this purpose. Distinguished soldiers and civil servants had opportunities to amass

* One of the by-products of the massive expropriations carried out between 1477 and 1572 was the virtual disappearance of privately-owned cities in Russia. In appanage and early Muscovite Russia, many towns - essentially market-places - were built on private votchiny and belonged to boyars. They too were now confiscated on behalf of the crown.