The Origins of Autocracy

Faced with the choice between two irreconcilable "vyskazyvaniia," the majority of Soviet historians have preferred Engels. "This idea of Marx and Engels," Avrekh testifies, "serves as the basis of all studies of absolutism, whatever country is being discussed. All facts and phe­nomena are included under it and explained by it, whatever the order to which they belong.'"²

As we see, the fearless Avrekh issues a challenge to the second clas­sical writer. For if the trouble with Lenin's "vyskazyvanie" is that it does not permit the study of absolutism, then the trouble with the "vyskazy­vanie'" by Engels is that it does not fit Russian history, which two gen­erations of experts have passionately searched for such "equilib­rium." But neither in the seventeenth, nor in the eighteenth, nor even in the first half of the nineteenth century, let alone in the period of Ivan the Terrible, have they succeeded in finding it. One has to assume that this is because it is just not there—as Avrekh phrases it, their failure is conditioned by the "complete absence of proof of the existence of equilibrium."¹³

It is true that there are yet other "vyskazyvaniia" deep in the re­serve—one might say in the subconscious—of Soviet historiography. For example: "It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slav­ery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emanci­pated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master ... to whom Genghiz Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth."¹⁴ This treacherous stab in the back to genuine science was delivered not by some bourgeois miscreant who can be rejected with contempt, but by classical author No. 1 himself. And who was it who said that Russian autocracy "is supported ... by means of an Asiatic despotism and a degree of arbitrary rule of which we in the West cannot even have any conception"?'⁵ Classical author No. 2.

But these are precisely the "vyskazyvaniia" which are not only not permitted to be used, but about which Soviet historiography pas­sionately wishes to forget and to pretend that they never existed. Marx's work which I have just quoted has never been translated into Russian in the more than sixty years of the Soviet regime. Humili- atingly and inexplicably for Soviet historiography, it appears that the majority of the officially deified classical writers (two out of three) hated Russia, viewed it as the heir of Tatar barbarism and Asiatic des­potism, and called on Europe to mount a crusade against this mon­ster. A person who thought in Freudian terms might even suspect that the tormented rejection of the concept of Asiatic despotism by gen­uine science is dictated by the unconscious hatred which it harbors— despite its loud avowals of love and loyalty—for the founding fathers.

Ibid., p. 85.

Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of the XVIII Century, p. 121.

Karl Marx, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 537. (This "vyskazyvanie" uttered by Engels appeared for some reason in Marx's book).

Thus, Soviet historians find themselves orphaned in a Kaf kaesque world of "vyskazyvaniia" which slide away under their feet—one not applicable to Russian history, another unacceptable to historians, and a third simply offensive to their best feelings. It is clear why the jour­nal Istoriia SSSR needed four years of debate on the nature of Rus­sian absolutism, and why Avrekh opens it with an admission appar­ently unthinkable in the mouth of a possessor of absolute truth: "Absolutism is not only an important theme but also a treacherous one . . . the more successful the concrete historical study of it, the more confused and vague its essence becomes.""¹

Certainly, even before this discussion, Soviet historians had noted that "equilibrium" had slipped out from under their feet, and made desperate attempts to find a decent replacement for it. Why, in fact, must there necessarily be equilibrium between the nobility and the bourgeoisie? Why not "balance," say (as Likhachev did), the most re­actionary strata of boyardom against the progressive class of the ser­vice nobility? However, even if we forget that the service nobility were, in fact, the "new class," the janissaries of serf-holding reaction, will this extraordinary gambit solve the problem? Avrekh thinks not. "In recent times," he writes,

it has been suggested that we consider . . . the balancing struggle be­tween boyardom and the nobles to be the linchpin of Russian absolut­ism. ... It is not hard to see that this is a complete capitulation. It is, strictly speaking, no longer the substance but the word which is saved. After all, the entire essence ... of the statements of Marx and Engels is reduced to the idea that absolutism is the product of an equilibrium of forces between fundamentally different classes—the bearers of dif­ferent modes of production—and the result of bourgeois development of the country."

But what if we envision an "equilibrium" between the service no­bility and the peasantry? Then we might succeed in preserving both "equilibrium" and the class struggle, the more so since, according to Lenin, "Class struggle—the struggle of the exploited part of the peo­ple against the exploiting part—lies at the basis of political transfor­mations, and in the final analysis decides the fate of these transforma­tions."[47] B. F. Porshnev bases his conception of absolutism on this, asserting that precisely "the threat of peasant uprisings made neces­sary the centralization of the state, and this threat, by increasing, compelled centralization constantly to be intensified, and finally to reach the stage of absolutism."¹⁹

This thesis was defended in the debate we are considering by An­drei Sakharov—a double namesake of the famous dissident, and perhaps for this reason especially fierce in his demonstrations of loyalty—who, it is true, does not cite Porshnev, and thereby gives out this author's views as his own: "The struggle between the peasant­ry and the class of feudal lords during the period of origin of bour­geois relationships in the country was the basic factor in the forma­tion of Russian absolutism from the second half of the seventeenth century."²⁰

In the first place, however, can we seriously speak of an equi­librium between the enserfed and downtrodden peasantry, which precisely in the seventeenth century became "legally dead" and politi­cally nonexistent, and the mighty "new new class," which was really able to influence the regime? Equilibrium by definition presupposes equality of power between the contending classes. In the second place, why would this struggle between the governed and the governors (or, what is the same thing, between the exploited and the exploiters) nec­essarily have led to absolutism, and not to despotism? By reducing the structure of Russian society to two polar classes, Sakharov makes the identification of absolutism with despotism irresistible. The logic of his thought (or more accurately, of Porshnev's thought, which he "borrowed") erases any difference between these two political struc­tures. And the task of the debate consists precisely in establishing this difference.

We can now understand why, for example, A. Chistozvonov is com­pelled to note that "a careful analysis of the statements of the found­ers of Marxism-Leninism about absolutism in various countries and of the concrete historical material shows that these complex phe­nomena cannot be fitted into the models which are currently in cir­culation among us."²¹ This also explains why Avrekh, in initiating the discussion, hastily crosses out both artificial alternative replacements of the "equilibrium," and embarks on a venture extremely rare even for the era of pseudoabsolutism—that of suggesting his own defini­tion of absolutism.

Of course, Avrekh masks his impudence with a battery of "vyska- zyvaniia" from Lenin. Of course, after quoting Lenin, he humbly

B. F. Porshnev, Feodatism, i narodnye massy, p. 354.

A. N. Sakharov, "Istoricheskie faktory obrazovaniia russkogo absoliutizma," p. 123.

A. N. Chistozvonov, "Nekotorye aspekty problemy genezisa absoliutizma," p. 49.

asks: "What does all this lead to?" Innocently attempting to give out his own definition as a logical extension of these "vyskazyvaniia," he makes a deep bow to classical authority: "It seems to us that precisely this thought is contained in the words of V. I. Lenin which we have cited, only it is expressed in an indirect form." However, he still does not succeed in fooling such experienced witch-hunters as A. Sakharov or S. Pokrovskii, and they will in time demonstrate this to him convinc­ingly. But now, in a moment of desperate boldness, Avrekh offers a definition: "Absolutism is a kind of feudal monarchy which by virtue of its internal nature is capable of evolving and being transformed into a bourgeois monarchy."[48] He continues:

What basic features separate the absolutist state from, let us say, the feudal state of the Muscovite tsars? The major difference consists in the fact that it ceases to be despotism—or more accurately, to be only despo­tism. By the latter we understand a form of unlimited autocratic power, under which the despot's will is the only law—a regime of arbitrary per­sonal rule which does not take account of legal process or of laws, cus­tomary or written. Absolutism consciously acts against this order of things.²⁹

The weakness of this definition is obvious. Even by defining despo­tism as a regime of arbitrary personal rule (which corresponds to the Aristotelian definition of tyranny) we come out with a paradox: pre­automatic Russia, with its hereditary aristocracy, Boyar Duma, and Assemblies of the Land, Russia with its free peasantry, proto-bour- geoisie in process of formation, and growing cities, experiencing an economic boom, is declared a despotism ("incapable of evolving"); and autocratic Russia, which has eliminated the proto-bourgeoisie and the limitations of power, the Boyar Duma, and the Assemblies of the Land, which has enserfed the peasantry and halted the urbaniza­tion of the country, and is therefore politically stagnating, is declared an absolutism ("capable of evolving"). Nevertheless, Avrekh's sugges­tion implies the following conclusions as to the nature of Russian absolutism:

It excluded (for unspecified reasons) a regime of arbitrary per­sonal power and tended toward some form of due process;

It determined (apparently for the same unspecified reasons) the

capacity of the Russian political structure for evolution toward bourgeois monarchy;

It was the embodiment of the negation of the despotism of the Muscovite tsardom;

Contrary to all that is known to us, the tyranny of Peter I, Paul I, and Nicholas I was compatible with due process and embodied political progress;

The existence of the category of political progress is confirmed, albeit indirectly.[49]

In other words, for the first time in Russian historiography, an at­tempt has been made to reconcile the two poles of the traditional bi­polar model, at least in a chronological sense: the Russian political process is declared both despotic (in the period of the Muscovite tsar­dom) and absolutist (in the period of the St. Petersburg empire).

For all the poverty and contradictoriness of Avrekh's definition, for all its involvement in the war of quotations about "the relation­ship between feudal and bourgeois elements," his attempt differs sharply from the vulgar logical clowning to which, as we have seen, genuine science usually resorts in difficult situations. On the contrary, he essentially rebelled against serflike dependence on the sacred "vyskazyvaniia," and attempted to think independently about the his­tory and the fate of his country. The discussion could have developed further in either of two directions: it could continue to move toward freedom, or the attempt at rebellion could be suppressed. In 1968, before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, it seemed that the dis­cussion might take the first direction; in 1969 it swiftly began to be reminiscent of a punitive expedition.

3. Under the Ice of "Genuine Science"

In a publication which followed directly upon Avrekh's, M. Pavlova- Sil'vanskaia recognizes that "his viewpoint . . . that until the be­ginning of the eighteenth century, the autocracy was only despo­tism, shows promise." Moreover, Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia improves upon Avrekh's position, noting that, "according to Avrekh, despotism con­stitutes a regime of naked power, about the socioeconomic base of which we know nothing whatever," while "G. V. Plekhanov . . . who equated tsarism with Oriental despotism . . . relying partly on Marx and Engels, supported his viewpoint by arguing for the peculiarities of the agrarian structure of Russia."" Consequently, she concludes that:

Unlimited monarchy in Russia developed in the guise of Asiatic forms of administration—despotism—and centralized unlimited monarchy, formed in the struggle with the Mongol empire and its successors on the basis of the subsistence economy and the communal organization of the countryside, and later strengthened in the process of creation of the system of land tenure, the enserfment of the peasantry, and the transi­tion to external expansion. This is the starting point of the evolution.²'¹

Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia thus agrees both with Plekhanov and with Avrekh: with the former, that despotism was based "on the pecu­liarities of the agrarian structure of Russia," and not on a "regime of naked power"—that is, on the "base" and not on the "superstruc­ture"; and with the latter, that this despotism evolved, being trans­formed in the eighteenth century into absolutism, and later in the di­rection of a bourgeois monarchy.

Such a mechanical joining of Plekhanov with Avrekh appears, on the one hand, to make Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's position more orthodox, but on the other only intensifies the theoretical difficulties which face Avrekh's thesis. After all, if the despotic superstructure rested on the peculiarities of the agrarian base, then how and by virtue of what fac­tors did it suddenly begin to evolve, while the base remained un­changed? I am not speaking of the fact, which Avrekh also accepts, that despotism is incapable of evolving toward bourgeois monarchy by virtue of the peculiarities of its superstructure, which blocks the evo­lution of the base. Even Marx equated despotism with stagnation.[50]In other words, the very fact of the evolution of tsarist autocracy con­tradicts the idea that it was a despotism.

But on the other hand, was it absolutism? Did it actually evolve in the direction of a bourgeois monarchy? This question was answered by history. Sometimes it did. But it could not, for some reason, become bourgeois monarchy. On the contrary, it became Russian and then So­viet autocracy. In other words, in evolving, it bore within itself—in spite of all reforms and revolutions—some kind of essential nucleus, which resisted transformation into a bourgeois monarchy.

As we see, Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's attempt to insert a solid Marxist "base" under Avrekh's "superstructural" conception in fact only re­vealed its contradictions. Furthermore, she incautiously woke up the sleeping lion by putting into circulation the battery of Asiatic-despotic "vyskazyvaniia" which, as we already know, are not talked about in genuine science, as one does not talk about rope in a hanged man's house.

However, the bold attempt to think independently proved to be in­fectious. Avrekh's next opponent, A. Shapiro, cast doubt on the very premise that Russian despotism existed. In fact, he says, "The Boyar Duma (of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) performed ad­ministrative and judicial functions with the prince, not only helping him, but also limiting his power (in fact, not juridically)."[51] More than this, the scope of these "de facto limitations" was not decreased but increased in the first half of the sixteenth century:

The major peculiarity of the political structure of Russia ... in the late 1540s and early 1550s . . . consisted in the establishment of a central institution, and the general dissemination of local institutions repre­senting the estates. . . . And it was precisely at this time that the Assem­blies of the Land originated in Rus' . . . the form of political structure for this period is more correctly characterized as a division of power between the tsar and the Boyar Duma ... in Russia there was a non- autocratic monarchy, with a Boyar Duma and institutions representing estates.

Further, Shapiro points to the role of the Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible in the liquidation of this "nonautocratic monarchy." He speaks of the functions of terror in this revolution, and of how,

out of the members of the Duma who received Duma titles before . . . 1563, at the end of the Oprichnina only individual persons sur­vived. Both they and new members of the Duma were terrorized to such an extent that they did not dare to criticize the manifestations of the personal rule of Ivan the Terrible . . . neither the Boyar Duma nor the Assemblies of the Land any longer exercised an influence on the Oprichnina policy, which must be considered an autocratic policy.

Shapiro even speculates that "the Oprichnina was rather a state above the state than a state within a state."²⁹ He understands that subsequent to the phase of pseudodespotism (which he calls "spasmodic autoc­racy") "there took place a certain weakening of the autocracy"³⁰—that is, in my language, a phase of pseudoabsolutism. He also sees the res­toration of the Oprichnina in the time of Peter I: "The reign of Peter was marked by the complete liquidation of the Boyar Duma and the Assemblies of the Land and the complete victory of the autocratic- absolutist system." In other words, in his conception, the dynamic of the Russian political structure is no longer a flat, unilinear process of evolution "from barbarism to civilization," in the terms of Solov'ev, or "from despotism to bourgeois monarchy," in Avrekh's terms. It pul­sates. It hardens, then relaxes, then again hardens. It lives its own complex and peculiar life, separate from European absolutism. Fi­nally, Shapiro sees at least one of the roots of the difference of Rus­sian autocracy from European absolutism: "Nowhere in Europe were absolutism and bureaucracy able to stamp out the estate institutions completely ... in Russia both the Assemblies of the Land and the re­gional elected institutions were destroyed by absolutism."³¹

None of these mysterious eccentricities of the Russian historical process escaped Shapiro's penetrating gaze. But somehow they do not compose an autonomous conception of autocracy. On the con­trary, as we see, he uses "autocratic-absolutist" with a hyphen, as syn­onyms—as though something held him on a leash, not permitting him to go beyond precise but transitory observations. What is it that does this? The "vyskazyvaniia"? But Shapiro, although he pays them abundant tribute, does so very much in the way that the Muscovite princes paid tribute to the Tatars, thereby securing their own auton­omy. The foundation of his conclusions is not so much the "vyskazy­vaniia" as the studies of modern historians—A. Zimin, R. Skrynnikov, N. Nosov, L. Cherepnin, S. Shmidt. What, then, compels Shapiro to consider Russian autocracy only a variant of Western absolutism?

It seems to me that here we see plainly how beneath the stratum of the sacred writings, which hinder the development of thought in So­viet historiography, there appears another and more profound hin­drance: namely, the logic of the bipolar model. If Avrekh is wrong, and there was no Russian despotism, then consequently there was Russian absolutism: for what else could there be?

Shapiro sees that the category of despotism does not describe Rus­sian political reality. He also sees that the category of absolutism in

29. Ibid., p. 72, 73. 30. Ibid., p. 74. 31. Ibid., p. 82.

some strange way stumbles over it, since "the chief and defining fea­ture is its [absolutism's] attitude toward serfdom." The economies of the classical absolutist monarchies were incompatible with serf­dom. The Russian economy was compatible with it. Nevertheless, the thought that it could be some third thing—that is, neither despotism nor absolutism—does not even enter his head.

Nonetheless, the ice was broken. Though this was still a timid, almost subterranean movement of thought, synchronous with the Prague Spring, it showed that deep under the ice of haughty and fruitless "genuine science," reformist potential had been preserved. It might perish again. But it might develop too.

4. The Punitive Expedition

But this was not to be its destiny. The signal for the beginning of the witch-hunt had already been given. The military enforcers were pre­paring a punitive expedition to Prague. And the literary enforcers— knights of the "class struggle" and mercenaries of the "vyskazy­vaniia"—had already saddled their horses.

At the very beginning of 1969, A. Davidovich and S. Pokrovskii let loose a devastating salvo against Avrekh, accusing him of "an attempt to counterpose the historical process in the West . . . and in Russia."[52]In point of fact, they asserted, there is no "fundamental difference between Russian absolutism and the classical type."[53] For every sort of absolutism is the product of the struggle of exploited classes against exploiters. "The rebellions in the cities in the mid-seventeenth cen­tury and the peasant war of 1670-71 showed the ruling class of feu­dal lords the need to sacrifice some of their medieval privileges in favor of the unlimited power of the tsar for a successful struggle with a mutinous people."³⁴

In the fury of the hunt, the rout of Avrekh seemed inevitable; whole pages of "vyskazyvaniia" whistled around his head. But the hunters somehow failed to notice that they had fallen into their own trap. In fact, they say, "Lenin defined Russian absolutism as 'the land­lord state' [Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 309], 'the serf-owning autocracy' [ibid., p. 310], 'the dictatorship of the serf-owning landlords' [ibid., p. 325], 'the land-owner government of the autocratic tsar' [ibid., vol. 20, p. 329]." "So what?" the unsophisticated reader may ask. So, "in the light of all these statements by the classical authors of Marxism- Leninism, it is abundantly clear that the conclusions of A. Avrekh concerning absolutism . . . are an obvious distortion of historical re­ality." (As we see, it is not historical reality which verifies the "vyska­zyvaniia," but the "vyskazyvaniia" which verify historical reality.) It follows indisputably, the hunters think, that "absolutism [the autoc­racy] ... is the personification of the dictatorship of the serf-owning service nobility."³⁵ Here the trap shuts. For what do we do then with classical French or British absolutism, where there is no trace of a "serf-owning service nobility"? How did a nonexistent class carry out its dictatorship there? And if it did not carry it out, then what be­comes of absolutism?

Having barely indicted Avrekh for a terrible heresy and solemnly declared that "it is incorrect to counterpose Russian absolutism to Western European,"³⁶ the hunters thus immediately fell into a still more terrible heresy, making it ultimately impossible to compare Western absolutism and Russian autocracy in any way.

The next disputant, S. Troitskii, as we might expect, struck at Avrekh from another angle, accusing him of separating the "super­structure" from the "base," and of "trying to explain the origin of ab­solutism in Russia without connecting it with the genesis of bourgeois relationships."³⁷ Following this, by all the rules for an accusation of political unreliability, comes a long passage about the suspicious close­ness of Avrekh's views (and likewise those of A. Chistozvonov) to the view taken by the bourgeois historian P. N. Miliukov. No, Troitskii personally does not see any particular problem in the fact that "here there is an echo of the views of a bourgeois historian." But still, any normal person will understand that "in the works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism [and not in any clouded bourgeois source], there are valuable indications which help us to clear up what historical causes called for the transition to absolute monarchy in Russia."³⁸

We see at once what these "valuable indications" help Troitskii to clear up. Here is his line of reasoning. "The Russian bourgeoisie was in fact weak and few in number at the initial stage of its develop­ment."³⁹ But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was also weak

Ibid., pp. 60-61.

Ibid., p. 62.

S. M. Troitskii, "O nekotorykh spornykh voprosakh istorii absoliutizma v Rossii," p. 135.

Ibid., p. 139.

Ibid., p. 142.

in France and Holland. "And since this was so, it needed the support of the royal power."⁴" And the royal power helped it, just as the royal power did in Russia. Thus, carefully avoiding the "equilibrium" com­promised by Avrekh, Troitskii still tries to create the impression that absolutism in Russia was nevertheless formed under the influence of the "demands of the bourgeoisie," and that the bourgeoisie "strug­gled for their implementation against the ruling class of feudal lords."[54] Having driven the long-suffering "equilibrium" out of the door, he attempts to drag it back through the window. Unfortunately, the "valuable indications" once again work against their adept. For in speaking of an equilibrium, Engels had in mind by no means the weakness of the bourgeoisie and the help given it by the state, but precisely the reverse—the weakness of the nobility, which made pos­sible the independence of the state from both of these social groups. And the nobility in Russia, as distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not grow weak, but rather grew strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we are to believe the allies of Troitskii, Davidovich, and Pokrovskii, this nobility was even implementing a serf-holding dic­tatorship in Russia at this time. How, then, does the dictatorship of the serf-owners mesh with the independence of the absolutist state?

In conclusion, Troitskii goes after Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's concept of despotism as the starting-point of the Russian political process. And, to tell the truth, the destruction of this concept presents no great dif­ficulties, since it is based not so much on concrete analysis, as on those same "vyskazyvaniia." But this is precisely what annoys Troitskii. How are we to drive back this genie, incautiously released from the bottle? How are we to neutralize the unequivocal sound of Lenin's "vyskazy­vaniia"—for example, about the "Asiatic virginity of Russian despo­tism"?[55] And here in a desperate attempt to combine reality with "vyskazyvaniia," Troitskii ventures on an extraordinary action: he turns Avrekh's conception upside-down, and proposes his own "re­versed" periodization of Russian history.

According to this periodization, the epoch of the estate-representa­tive monarchy lasted in Russia from the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century (would not Troitskii's head be taken off by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina for such a heresy!); from the middle of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century there was the epoch of absolu­tism (here Troitskii would have to answer to the Oprichniki of Peter and Paul); the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (of course, before 1917) were the epoch of the gradual formation of despotism (!):

The intensification of the features of despotism and of the "Asiatic style" in the internal and foreign policies of Russian absolutism took place at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, when, as a result of the victory of bourgeois revolutions, capitalism, the parliamentary system, and bourgeois freedoms had taken hold in a con­siderable number of Western European states. In Russia, on the other hand, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the serf order was pre­served, reaction was intensified in internal policy, and tsarism became the main force of the "Holy Alliance" and the suppressor of freedom. It is precisely of this period, in our opinion, that we may speak of the growth of features of "despotism" and "Asiatic style" in the policy of Russian absolutism. V. I. Lenin in 1905 wrote about "the Russian autoc­racy, which lags behind history by a whole century."^1:1

This is how Troitskii turns Avrekh's conception upside-down: it was not, in his opinion, despotism which grew into absolutism, but absolutism which grew into despotism. However, what is the category of "despotism" supposed to mean in this context? "The suppression of freedom"—when preliminary censorship was abolished, the peas­antry was liberated, urban self-government was introduced, and the rapid economic modernization of the country was begun? That is, despotism is supposed to have increased precisely at the time when the outlines of what Shapiro would call "de facto limitations" on power began to emerge most clearly for the first time after the Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible?

The "valuable indications" have thus actually helped Troitskii, in complete agreement with Lenin, to erase any difference whatever between "absolutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited power." Avrekh began his attack with the rejection of Lenin's "vyskazyvanie." The punitive expedition of the witch-hunters, attempting to save Russian absolutism at any price, has returned to the starting-point of the dis­cussion without even suspecting that all its efforts have been spent in confirming this offensive and unpatriotic "vyskazyvanie" of classical author No. 3.

When the chief "hunter," A. Sakharov, finally appeared on the scene with the job of, as it were, giving marks to the participants in the discussion, all that remained for him was to rubber stamp this re­sult. Avrekh gets a D + (the plus is for having, at any rate, noted the "combination of feudal and bourgeois elements in the nature and policies of absolutism").[56] Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia gets a D — (the minus is for having heretically, "following Avrekh, discovered the fertile ground in which a typical Oriental despotism grew, which had been born somewhere in the period of formation of the Russian central­ized state"). Shapiro gets a D for considering "serfdom the major and decisive feature for the evaluation of Russian absolutism."⁴' On the other hand, Troitskii, who "unlike the authors just mentioned, sees the basic socioeconomic tendency which brought Russia to absolutism in the birth of bourgeois relationships in the feudal base," gets an A. Davidovich and Pokrovskii, who see "a significant influence on the en­tire policy of the feudal state" in "the action of the class struggle of the working people,"^{4 get an A + .}

Sakharov himself goes further than all the other witch-hunters. He is not allowed to maintain a shamefaced silence about the terror of Ivan the Terrible, in speaking of the epoch of "the estate-representa­tive monarchy," as Troitskii does. Nor is he, like Shapiro, going to dis­tract the reader's attention by such insignificant details of the Russian political process as serfdom or the eradication of all representative institutions. He intends not to defend, but to attack—by making a devastating critique of the Oriental despotism of Western Europe. For this purpose, of course, one cannot make do with "vyskazyvaniia" alone. Here there is required the strong tradition, developed to a virtuoso level by generations of housewives raised in the communal apart­ments of Moscow, who have fought for their place in the kitchen un­der the age-old slogan "You damn idiot!"

Do the opponents criticize the Assemblies of the Land? But after all, "such a system is very reminiscent of the alliance of the Tudor re­gime with Parliament, [which] was assembled only in order to sanc­tion the acts of an unconscionable tyranny." Is this not "Oriental des­potism in its English variant?" Sakharov asks triumphantly. Do the opponents see despotism in the actions of Ivan IV? But why do they not also see it in the actions of Elizabeth I of England?

Between the "Oriental despotism" of Ivan IV and the equally "Oriental despotism" of Elizabeth I of England, the difference is not all that great. . . . Between these two forms of "autocracy" with all their "East­ern" accompaniments, in the form of secret police, brutal suppression of the mutinous nobility in England and Scotland, the colonial plunder­ing of Ireland, the bloody legislation of Henry VII and Edward VI, by which tens of thousands of people were hanged and enslaved, with the approximately identical functions of the estate-representative system, there was no fundamental difference. The centralization of the state in France, particularly under Louis XI, was also marked by features of "Or­iental despotism." The merciless executions carried out by Louis XI, the severe persecution of separatists, the destruction of the estate- representative institutions under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Frangois I, the establishment of an extremely brutal punitive impressment, the plundering of the peasantry, the beginning of a broad expansion in terms of foreign policy—all this fits very well into the framework which our authors have outlined for the "Asiatic form of administration" in its autocratic phase. The centralizing French monarchs, Elizabeth I of En­gland, and Ivan IV solved approximately the same historical tasks in the interests of the feudal class, and the methods of solution of these tasks were approximately identical. The Western European feudal monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had not gone very far in the direction of democracy, relative to the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. . . . The chambers of the Bastille and the Tower of London were just as strong as the cells of the Schliisselburg and the Alekseevskii fortress, the beheadings on the Place de Greve were no less merciful [лгс] than those on the battlements of the Petropavlovskii fortress or on the Execution Square in Moscow. . . . The absolutist monarchs of Eu­rope, who were ahead of Russian absolutism in point of time, taught the Russian autocrats impressive lessons as to how to struggle with one's own people. These lessons had everything—police terror, barbaric methods of extracting goods from the people, cruelty, medieval repres­sions: in a word, all that "Asiatic style," which for some reason is stub­bornly attached only to Russian absolutism."

All of the arguments of the Soviet "absolutists" are concentrated in this quotation, as in a lens. But doesn't the reader get the impression that, as Shakespeare has it, "the lady doth protest too much"? Cer­tainly, if all the evil, all the cruelty and injustice visited on humanity by authoritarian regimes is to be attributed to absolutism, as Sakharov does, then Russian "absolutists" are no worse than others; in this

47. A. N. Sakharov, pp. 114, 115, 119. This argument on the part of the most ag­gressive Russian Marxist is followed without deviation by the most aggressive Russian anti-Marxist. Cf.: "There are two names which are repeated from book to book and article to article with a mindless persistence by all the scholars and essayists of this [anti- Russian] tendency: Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, to whom—implicitly or ex­plicitly—they reduce the whole sense of Russian history. But one could just as easily find two or three kings no whit less cruel in the histories of England, France or Spain, or indeed of any country, and yet no one thinks of reducing the complexity of historical meaning to such figures alone" (A. Solzhenitsyn, "Misconceptions about Russia Are Threat to America," p. 802). For both A. N. Sakharov and A. I. Solzhenitsyn, the argu­ment seems to begin and end with the personal cruelty of tyrants, never entering the field of political analysis.

abysmal authoritarian darkness, all cats are gray. Even there, how­ever, we were gray in a somewhat different way. For there is no avoid­ing it, the countries of classical absolutism did not, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, know the fundamental facts of serfdom and universal service, which Sakharov carefully avoids when he so heart- rendingly describes the horrors of Asiatic despotism in Europe; nor did they experience recurring restorations of the ancien regime, again and again bringing terror—sometimes total—directed neither against those who struggled with the king nor against aliens or here­tics, but against everyone who was merely fated to be born in that time and in that country. There is no more mournful reading than the description of the devastation wrought by the Oprichnina, in the official documents of Ivan the Terrible's time, which continue to re­volve mechanically like millstones, describing what no longer exists. "In the village of Kiuleksha," we read in one of these documents,

the farm of Ignatka Luk'ianov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, slaughtered his cattle, and he himself died; his children ran off to an unknown place . . . the farm of Eremeika Afanasov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, and killed him, and he has no children . . . the farm of Melen- teika was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods and slaughtered his cattle, and he ran off to an unknown place.'"

They go on and on, endlessly, like Russia herself—miles upon pa­per miles of this census of human suffering. Once again, a farm is laid waste; once again, goods are stolen; once again, the man has disap­peared. And these are not at all "mutinous nobles," or Huguenots, or "separatists," but simple, peaceful peasants, who have made no at­tempt against the sovereign's power, and whose entire fault lay in the fact that they had goods which could be plundered, wives and daugh­ters who could be raped, land which could be taken away. In England at that time, peasants were also driven from the land, and the vio­lence practiced against them become proverbial ("The sheep ate the people"). But whereas in England the violence was committed by in­dividual landlords, in Russia it was practiced on a massive, total state­wide scale by the government itself and its terrorist police, before which the nation was entirely defenseless. Whereas in England this violence was the work of a strong, rising class of new landowners, which at its next step would stretch out its hands for power and carry

48. I. I. Smirnov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 99.

out a political revolution, in Russia it was directed toward the liquida­tion of the proto-bourgeoisie, and thus toward the establishment of brutal autocracy. Whereas in England this violence was the instru­ment by which feudalism was destroyed, opening up the path of prog­ress, in Russia it shut it off like a blank wall. England paid this terrible price for its historical development, and Russia for its enserfment.

Theoretically, Sakharov proposed criteria for the description of absolutism which come down essentially to the practice of violence by the government against the people (or, in my terms, to divergence be­tween the goals of the administration and those of the system). Ac­cording to Sakharov, the regimes of Elizabeth in England, Ivan the Terrible in Moscow, Shah Abbas in Persia, and Sultan Mekhmet in Turkey, all equally "do not go very far in the direction of democracy," for all of them committed violence against the people. But does this help us to separate out the category of "absolutism" from the general mass of "unlimited monarchies"? Does it help to explain why Montes­quieu regards the sliding of "moderate government" toward despo­tism as a historical catastrophe? Does Sakharov's criterion help to explain the "vyskazyvaniia" of his own classical writers? Why, for ex­ample, does Engels assert that the Russian autocracy is supported by an Asiatic despotism of which we in the West cannot even have any con­ception? Why did Lenin call Russian autocracy "Asiatically savage" {Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 10), "Asiatically virgin" (ibid., vol. 9, p. 381), "saturated with Asiatic barbarism" (ibid., vol. 20, p. 387)?

Thus, the more deeply we penetrate the laboratory of "genuine science," the more convinced we become that, behind the facade of haughty pretensions to absolute truth, there lies hidden a heap of paradoxes, confusion, and helplessness, a chaos of definitions. In it, absolutism grows out of despotism, as Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia would have it, and despotism out of absolutism, as Troitskii says. We dis­cover from Likhachev that the "progressive class" brings serfdom with it, while the "most monstrous form of despotism" turns out to be progressive according to Cherepnin. And so on and so forth—and there is no end to it.

Not only is "genuine science" incapable of adequately describing the nature of the Russian political process; it simply has nothing with which to do so—neither theoretical prerequisites, nor working hy­potheses, nor even accurate definitions. Any attempt to create so much as a preliminary conceptual base for the study of political struc­tures is suffocated, as we have just seen, at the embryonic stage.

The enserfed peasants of Russia waited three hundred years for the Great Reform of 1861 to liberate them. They rebelled against serfdom, and these rebellions did bring them freedom—at least for a while. The enserfed historians of Russia rebel, too, against their mis­erable medieval "science." Let us hope that these scholars will not have to wait another two hundred years for their 1861.

CHAPTER III

THE "DESPOTISTS": CAPTIVES OF THE BIPOLAR MODEL

1. The Three Faces of "Russian Despotism"

The nature and origin of the Russian political structure is obviously not the most urgent question in the Western literature on the philoso­phy of history. At least, it was difficult for me to find as representative a debate among the "despotists" as the one among the "absolutists" which I have just analyzed. For this reason, I prefer to take another route in this chapter. I have chosen three well-known names, which from my point of view symbolize three main tendencies in the inter­pretation of "Russian despotism"—the "Tatar," the "Byzantine," and the "Patrimonial." They are, respectively, Karl Wittfogel, Arnold Toynbee, and Richard Pipes (I consider Tibor Szamuely's book The Russian Tradition here only as a supplementary argument to Witt- fogel's "Tatar" interpretation).

I am proceeding from the assumption that these authors represent more or less fully the spectrum of arguments in the Western litera­ture dealing with the nature and origin of the Russian political struc­ture. I respect their hypotheses, although I cannot agree with them. As distinct from the "vyskazyvaniia'' which we considered in the last chapter, they are interesting to argue with, not to speak of the fact that this permits us to throw some additional light on the problem which concerns us. Nevertheless, I cannot help saying in advance that it was difficult for me to find in these fluently, and sometimes even brilliantly, expressed conceptions, very much of relevance to the ac­tual historical process in Russia. It may be that the reason for this (at least, this feeling never left me) is that the authors mentioned have reached their conclusions not so much as a result of studying its his­torical development as through an a priori resolve to prove that Rus­sia belongs to the despotic family of nations.

However this may be, in passing from the absolutists to the despo­tists, the unprejudiced reader will be easily persuaded that only the direction of the emotional thrust—only its sign (plus for minus)—is changed. The despotists are obviously not too friendly to Russia, but the picture remains the same: black-and-white. The spectrum of con­cepts is limited to the bipolar model, to the fateful contrast between "multicentered" and "single-centered" civilizations (Wittfogel), or "Western" and "totalitarian" (Toynbee), or "monarchy" and "patri­monial state" (Pipes). In short, we are dealing with the same absolut­ism and despotism, under different pseudonyms. This fact, to say the least, seriously complicates the analysis of the Russian historical process for our authors—to the degree that it proves difficult to ex­plain many aspects of this process, not to speak of its origin and na­ture, with the aid of their hypotheses. This is precisely what I will now try to show.

2. The "Tatar" Interpretation

It is obviously impossible to understand and evaluate Wittfogel's con­ception adequately without taking into account its basic quality: it is a model of militant scholarship. It is infinitely far from the coquettish "objectivity," the skeptical feeling that one's recommendations are not necessarily valid, the hint of play, and the sense of humor, which are characteristic of the style of many contemporary scholars in our hu­manistic field, which is suffering from an inferiority complex in this age of the triumph of natural science. In Wittfogel's work there is something deadly serious, rigorous, almost medieval—something between Puritan severity and the pathos of a crusader. This work breathes polemics and boils with passion. Like its author's native country, Germany, it fights on two fronts—the Eastern and the West­ern—and develops in four directions at once: on the level of abstract theory; on the historical level (or that of applied theory); on the meth­odological level; and on the political level. All this is terribly awkward to analyze, because it is tied up in such a tight knot that it is impossible either to reject or to accept it totally. It is this homogeneity or syn­thesis—I do not know how best to express it—which constitutes the second basic feature of Wittfogel's conception. Therefore, before ar­guing about it, it would perhaps be best to break it up into its compo­nent parts, and then to evaluate each one separately.

Certainly, it would be easiest to say that the conception of "Oriental despotism" was only the historical dimension of the political concept of totalitarianism which was fashionable during the years of the Cold War—that, to paraphrase Mikhail Pokrovskii, it was totalitarianism projected into the past. It is still easier to say, as S. N. Eisenstadt does, that "if one wants to write about communism and Stalin, the best way to do it is not necessarily through writing about Oriental despotism. Neither Oriental despotism nor modern communism get their due in this way."[57]

Such arguments are good for rejecting Wittfogel. For understand­ing him, they are useless. In the first place, history and politics are synthesized for him in a single and indivisible whole, like the root and branches of a tree: no aspect of politics can be understood without involving history in the analysis, and no part of history can be under­stood if we leave politics aside. In the second place, the interdisciplin­ary approach, according to Wittfogel, works only in the context of world history (of what he calls an "inter-area" approach). These are his postulates. One may not agree with them; one may regret that he does not always follow them; but one cannot argue with him con­structively without understanding them. A poet, as we know, is judged by the laws of his genre.

At any rate, on this methodological plane, Wittfogel struggled (quite unsuccessfully, to judge by many reviews of his work) on the Western front, so to speak, against his super-specialized colleagues from European and American academia, insisting on his right to syn­thesize history, politics, and theory. In all other dimensions, his strug­gle took place on the Eastern front.

The thrust of his conception, on the level of abstract theory, con­sists in the denial of the Marxist postulate as to the unilinear nature of the historical process. This theme is painful for him, as for any de­frocked Marxist, and he returns many times to the assertion of what he calls the "multilinear theory of social development." This is a highly respectable point of view. The only trouble is that, having tri­umphantly declared it, Wittfogel is unfortunately by no means in a position to adhere to it. In fact, his central thesis asserts that despo­tism has one historical starting-point—the need to construct gigantic irrigation facilities in Oriental agrarian societies, leading to the for­mation of a managerial-bureaucratic class which enslaves society. This is why Wittfogel prefers to call despotism a "hydraulic" or "ag- romanagerial" civilization. However, at this point he encounters a strange phenomenon: some civilizations, which correspond to his de­scription of despotism, turn out to be located outside the "hydraulic" sphere. A historian who has asserted the "multilinear theory of social development" should not be bothered by this circumstance. On the contrary, it should only serve as the starting-point for the analysis of other parallel "lines." However, for some reason, Wittfogel declines to follow the logic of the theory he is defending. Instead, he suddenly starts to erect a highly complex hierarchy of despotisms, intended to free politics from hydraulics and to permit him to extend his con­ception to the predominant portion of the "nonhydraulic" world. In addition to the "dense" or "nuclear" despotisms, this hierarchy in­cludes "marginal" or even "semimarginal" despotisms, which no longer have even the remotest relation to artificial irrigation of crops. Thus, the entire world—beyond the confines of Western Europe and Japan—regardless of the amount of precipitation, is drawn into the pit of hydraulic despotism, and gradually marshalled in one uniform "line." At this point, Wittfogel's conception suddenly begins to take on, obviously and with frightening clarity, those same features of uni- versalism which he so hates in Marxism. Only, in place of the unilinear gospel according to Karl Marx, we get the bilinear (obviously Man- ichaean) gospel according to Karl Wittfogel. And by this detour, we again return to the same old bipolar model. This is in turn directly connected to the problem of Russia as a "semimarginal despotism."

In the early articles of the 1950s and in his book, Wittfogel does not seem to harbor the slightest doubts as to Russia's membership in the despotic family. However, in answering his opponents Nicholas Riasanovsky and Berthold Spuler during a 1963 debate in Slavic Re­view, he seems a bit more careful. Here is his final formulation:

The two Oriental nations that especially affected the history of Russia prior to recent times were Byzantium and the Mongols of the Golden Horde. It is generally agreed that during the Kievan period, when By­zantine influence was very great, Russian society was pluralistic ("multi- centered") . . . whereas, at the end of the Mongol (Tatar) period there emerged in Muscovite Russia a single-centered society dominated by an autocratic state that exerted great power. This historical evidence sug­gests that this state fulfilled a number of managerial functions which in this form—and/or dimension—were not fulfilled by the states of late feudal and post-feudal Europe. It suggests on the other hand that in the Orient many states fulfilled such functions.[58]

Let us assume for a moment that this is precisely how it was: the Muscovite state fulfilled certain functions not carried out by the abso­lutist states, which at the same time were carried out by the despotic states. However, as we already know, there were also a large number of features, functions, and peculiarities in the Russian social, eco­nomic and political process—in the very institutional dynamics of it—which were characteristic not of despotism but of absolutism. What is the logical consequence of this? That Russia belonged to the despotic family, or that it belonged completely neither to despotism nor to absolutism? For a historian who believes in the "multilinearity of social development," this, it would seem, should serve as a stimulus for the analysis of a new "line."

Alas, the same theoretical contradiction from which Wittfogel's conception suffers on the abstract level continues to haunt him on the historical level. He again neglects the logic of the theory he is de­fending. It is true that whereas in the 1950s he emphasized only the similarities between Russia and "Oriental despotism," in the 1960s he noticed the differences. But, having encountered resistance in the historical material, Wittfogel reacts to it, not as a phenomenon requir­ing new insight, but merely as an annoying hindrance which must be overcome, in order that one may, in spite of it, prove the thesis set up in advance. Let us see how he sets about doing this.

Where does Wittfogel see the difficulties in interpreting Russia as a "nonhydraulic subtype" of hydraulic despotism? In the first place, the Tatars, who, it is assumed, "infected" Russia with the organizational and fiscal methods of despotism, by no means occupied it. They did not live on Russian territory, or mix with the local population, or edu­cate it, so to speak, by personal example and shared experience. In­stead, they exercised what Wittfogel calls "remote control" over Rus­sia. This naturally made more difficult so total a degree of "inf ection" as his hypothesis requires.

In the second place, when the youthful Muscovite state threw off the Tatar yoke in the process of its Reconquista, it did not turn out by any means to be fashioned on the Tatar pattern. A whole century was needed before it began to take on those f eatures which gave Wittf ogel a basis for considering it a despotism, even though "semimarginal." This strange disjunction in time, which G. Vernadsky has defined by a kind of metaphor ("influence through delayed action"), requires explanation. In fact, if in the first case we have to do with "remote control" in the spatial dimension, here we get the same oddity in the temporal dimension.

The third peculiarity of "Russian despotism" was the influence ex­erted on it by the "European commercial and industrial revolution," an influence which gave it an entirely unique character. Answering the challenge of Europe, it behaved as a "hydraulic structure" should under no circumstances behave—even one of semimarginal status. It developed; it underwent institutional modernization.

Finally, the fourth peculiarity consists in the fact that, as distinct from despotism, the Muscovite state lacked absolute sovereignty over the persons and property of its subjects. Having tried to assert such sovereignty in the seventeenth century, it mysteriously lost it again in the eighteenth. Half of the arable land again became inalienable pri­vate property, as it had been after the overthrow of the Tatar yoke.

These are the peculiarities of the Russian historical process (or the hindrances to the classification of Russia as a despotist state) which are registered by Wittfogel himself. As to the first, Wittfogel has nothing concrete to say, confining himself to remarking that "The Mongol's remote control over Russia poses many problems that re­quire further investigation."[59] Let's give him this one. Regarding the second, he has an explanation (true, again a metaphorical, not to say eccentric, one). Let us cite it in full:

In Russia the slowness of the transformation [into despotism] was due to . . . the Mongol policy of remote control. . . . Whether the centrifu­gal political order of Kievan Russia—which at best possessed some quasi-feudal aspects—accelerated or retarded the process is a moot question. There is no doubt, however, that the Mongol conquerors of Russia weakened the forces that until 1237 had limited the power of the princes, that they employed Oriental methods of government to keep Russia prostrated and exploited, and that they did not intend to create a strong—and politically challenging—agrodespotic state. Hence the germs of the system of total power they planted could bear fruit only after the end of the Mongol period. . . . [I]t may be said that an institu­tional time bomb exploded when the Mongol control collapsed.¹

What the metaphor of the "institutional time bomb" (no less para­doxical than Vernadsky's formula) is supposed to mean, the reader is left to guess. Reviewers queried this, but as far as I know, Wittfogel never explained it. It is all the more unclear why the "explosion" of this bomb took place so slowly. (Whether there are slow explosions at all is a question which, it seems, should be asked of sappers.) One thing is clear: this whole explosion of metaphors would perhaps sound good in a poem, but even in a fantastic novel it would seem dubious. As a description of an actual historical process, it sounds fantastic, the more so since in historical reality there is no basis for it whatever. For example, the Tatars not only took no action against the seigneurial property of the Russian aristocracy as an institution limit­ing the power of the princes, or against the policy of grants of immu­nity, i.e., the removal of seigneurial holdings from the competence of the organs of state power, but precisely the contrary—at least judg­ing by their policy in regard to the Orthodox church, which greatly strengthened it.[60] What then, we wonder, is the meaning of Wittfogel's declaration that "the Mongol conquerors weakened the forces that until 1237 had limited the power of the princes"?

But this is not the main point. The chief question is why, having arisen out of Tatar obscurity with an untouched aristocratic tradition (and more than this, having evolved, as we saw in chapter one, in the direction of re-Europeanization in many aspects of institutional de­velopment), Muscovy suddenly after a century turned sharply toward a recrudescence of Tatardom, and began to lay waste its own aristoc­racy? "[Wittfogel's] explanation in fact only creates a problem," says one of his closest cothinkers, Tibor Szamuely, on this point.

For a system of government, however, that was so utterly alien from all earlier Russian tradition, to have taken root and flourished with such intensity, the force of example, the mere accessibility of the tools, could not have been sufficient. After all, Hungary and the Balkan countries remained under Turkish rule for periods, in some cases, far exceeding the duration of the Tatar yoke, yet none of them emerged from thral­dom as Oriental despotisms. This will not do—as in murder investi­gations, not only opportunity and method, but motive also has to be es­tablished. There had to exist in Russia a particular concatenation of circumstances which required, necessitated or called for the introduc­tion of this socio-political system, and that ensured the rationality and success of its operation—or to use the Toynbeean terms, there had to have existed a "challenge" which evoked an appropriate "response.'"'

As for the third peculiarity of "Russian despotism," here Witt­fogel's situation is still more complex. In fact, if his entire explana­tion of Russia's capacity for modernization consists only in the fact that it is situated closer to Europe than the other "agrodespotisms," then the question immediately arises: what about Turkey, which was still closer? Why did the Ottoman Empire prove immune to the Euro­pean industrial revolution and incapable of modernization, as an ordinary despotism is supposed to be, in spite of its geographical ad­vantages? Why did it have to be destroyed to the foundations in a world war and transformed into an ordinary national state before it could embark on the path of modernization? Wittfogel, to do him jus­tice, sees this difficulty himself. Unfortunately, the explanation which he suggests is still more unclear than in the case of the "institutional time bomb." "In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," he writes, "Ottoman Turkey was faced with just this question [modernization], but internal disintegration and external encroachment prevented a successful industrial and military adjustment. Russia, however, was sufficiently independent to meet the new threat."⁷

What Wittfogel means by this in concrete terms again remains obscure. That at the beginning of the eighteenth century (when Rus­sia, according to Wittfogel, began its march toward modernization) Turkey was "insufficiently independent" for an analogous action? But in that case, on whom did it depend? And whose intrusion prevented it from modernizing itself? In fact, the Ottoman Empire at this time was a great and mighty power. More than this, as the Russo-Turkish War of 1711 demonstrates, it was stronger than Russia—and more independent, if only because Turkey did not require either Dutch sea captains or Scottish generals, of whom Russia stood in such need pre­cisely because she was modernizing. It turns out that the whole situa­tion was exactly the reverse. The Ottoman Empire was more inde­pendent than Russia because of its incapacity for modernization.

Concerning the fourth peculiarity of "Russian despotism," Witt­fogel comments as follows:

The conversion of service land into privately-owned land in 1762 re­moved one important managerial task from the government roster. But . . . before this occurred the regime had taken on another—the running or supervising of the new (particularly the heavy) industry. By the end of the eighteenth century, state enterprises employed almost two-thirds of all industrial labor. And although in the nineteenth cen­tury the private sector expanded conspicuously, until the Emancipation large numbers of laborers continued to work in state enterprises. . . . By 1900 the government still controlled either directly or by means of licensing about 45% of all large modern enterprises of industrial pro­duction and communication.¹¹

This reasoning again creates a problem—or even several prob­lems. In the first place, what Wittfogel takes as a starting point itself requires explanation. Why is it that so drastic a "conversion," un­heard of in any despotic state, all of a sudden took place in Russia?

Let us remember, for that matter, the fundamental position of Marx, on which Wittfogel himself relies: "The state [in Asia] is the supreme owner of the land. Sovereignty here is ownership of land, concen­trated on a national scale. ... In this case no private ownership of land exists, although both private and communal tenure and use of land do exist."[61] Again, Russia does not fit into Wittfogel's metaphorical con­ception. And if she constitutes a unique case, an exception, then oughtn't this to be explained?

In the second place, the total sovereignty of the state over all of the national product, which is characteristic of despotism, is one thing, and state control over a definite portion of the industrial enterprises is quite another. And the difference here is not only one of degree, but primarily one of the quality of control. For that part of the indus­trial sector which was in private hands was—there is no getting out of it—private property, just like the land belonging to the nobility in the second half of the eighteenth century (or like the boyar lands before the second half of the sixteenth century).

In the third place, even according to Wittfogel, it was not the state, but precisely this private sector which proved capable of expansion, and increasingly displaced state ownership, gradually transforming itself into not only a social, but also a political force. In short, this was by no means the "weak private property" characteristic of despotism, incapable (by Wittfogel's definition) of having any political influence and unable to defend itself from the arbitrary action of the regime. On the contrary, this was "strong private property" and—what was still more important—capable of becoming stronger yet.

I have dealt specially only with those peculiarities of the Russian political structure which are noted by Wittfogel himself, without even touching on the decisive fact—its capacity for institutional and social development, unthinkable for despotism. Moreover, right up to the twentieth century, there has never been the kind of managerial class in Russia which, as Wittfogel was convinced, properly comprises the soul of despotism.

3. Opportunity, Means, and Motive

Wittfogel's follower and cothinker, Tibor Szamuely, also, as we have seen, finds his arguments insufficiently convincing. Szamuely believes that "the opportunity and the means" for despotism, supplied to

Muscovy by the Tatars, cannot sufficiently explain the explosion of Wittfogel's "institutional time bomb." A motive was also needed, and Szamuely finds one—or even two motives. The first consists in the enormous dimensions of the country, which in themselves, merely by virtue of the need for effective administration, required a despotic form of rule. "But the exigency which called forth the Muscovite vari­ety of Oriental despotism was more pressing than the mere demand for effective administration," he adds.

The socio-political system of the great Asian empires had been created by the paramount need for building and maintaining the waterworks upon which the very lives of their peoples depended. Russia knew nothing of this, yet for centuries she too had been confronted by a task which, though different in nature, was for her just as much a matter of life and death: national survival depended upon the permanent mobi­lization and organization of all her meager resources for defense, war and colonization, on a scale beyond the European comprehension. Des­potic government with all its implications was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency. The ideas may have been brought in from the outside, but the necessity was terrifyingly real.'⁰

Szamuely's first "motive" does not stand up to even the slightest contact with the chronology. Russia became the gigantic power which the world now knows only long after the detonation of the institu­tional time bomb. Consequently, its current dimensions simply can­not have anything to do with the explosion in question."

The second "motive" is considerably more serious—if only be­cause such prominent scholars as Kliuchevskii, Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, and Plekhanov paid some degree of tribute to it, as a result of which it found its way into the majority of popular surveys of Russian histo­ry. The geopolitical position of Muscovy—so runs the stereotype— placed it in essentially the same position in which climatic conditions placed the great Asiatic empires. Finding itself for centuries in the position of a besieged fortress, Muscovy had to defend itself by any and every means. Thus, it was geography (represented in this case by the location of the country) which gave rise to the "Muscovite variety of Asiatic despotism," to use Szamuely's words, just as (in the form of the absence of rain) it had conditioned the ancient Egyptian or Chi­nese variants. In both cases, national survival depended on geogra­phy, which left the respective governments no other choice than to establish a despotism. In this interpretation, despotism was Russia's predestined fate.

We will speak in detail of this stereotype in the concrete historical analysis of Russia's absolutist century immediately preceding the "ex­plosion." But in general terms we must touch upon it here. Sur­rounded on the West by Lithuania, Poland, Livonia, and Sweden, and on the South and the East by the Tatars, Moscow really did produce the impression of a besieged fortress. And wars did in fact consume a huge part of its resources and energy. Sigismund Herberstein, ambas­sador of the German emperor, who visited Moscow twice during the reign of Vasilii III, received the impression that, for Muscovy, peace was an accident. During the course of the sixteenth century, it waged ten wars to the West, which took up about fifty years. But the situa­tion in the Tatar South and East was considerably more difficult: from here, if we can believe Fletcher, Muscovy was attacked every year, and sometimes twice a year. Hundreds of thousands of people, and par­ticularly children, who were especially sought after by the Tatar raid­ers, were driven off into slavery. They were sold in the bazaars of Asia and Africa in such numbers that, Iurii Krizhanich relates, Russian slaves in the Crimea, seeing their fellow countrymen as new pris­oners, asked each other whether there were still people in Muscovy or whether they had already all been sold into slavery. This frightening picture, which so struck many Russian historians, requires a closer look, however.

First of all, the wars which Muscovy waged in the West had nothing to do with defense, let alone national survival. Beginning at least in the 1480s, Muscovy was permanently on the offensive against its west­ern neighbors, obtaining western Rus' from Poland-Lithuania, and Kareliia and the Baltic shore from the Swedes and Livonia. Thus, its political "encirclement" was a myth, and its wars in the West were the result of strategic and political choice, and by no means a geograph­ical inevitability.

As for the Tatars, in this direction as well Moscow was so strong under Ivan III that in the East it placed its own candidates as khans on the throne of Kazan', and was at the same time clever enough to channel the Crimean raids into southern Lithuania. If Sigismund Herberstein had visited Moscow under Vasilii Ill's father, he would probably have gotten an entirely different impression. For the wars which Russia waged during this period (Ivan III reigned for forty- three years) were none of them defensive. Not only were Ivan Ill's wars all offensive, they were rare for that time. After him, Muscovy passed over to direct attacks on the Tatars. Conquest of the Volga khanates eliminated the threat from the East, and a war was begun against the Crimea which could have eradicated the nest of slave raid­ers in the South (or, at least, have made it as uncomfortable for them to raid Muscovy as it had been during Ivan Ill's reign), if Ivan the Ter­rible had not suddenly "turned on the Germans."

This miscalculation cost Muscovy very dear, and not only in terms of human and material resources: it changed Russia's entire history. As I am trying to show, it actually did face the country with the prob­lem of national survival. But this was a strategic error, and not a "frighteningly real necessity" following inevitably from the geopoliti­cal position of Russia, as Szamuely tries to persuade us.

On the contrary, in the middle of the sixteenth century (that is, at the moment of the "explosion") Russia's geopolitical position was un­usually favorable. It is not impossible that, if she had left the West, from which no one threatened her, in peace, and had concentrated on the liquidation of the threat from the Crimea, she could have es­tablished herself on the shores of the Black Sea within two or three generations, and put an end once and for all to Tatar control over her fertile South, and to the predatory raids of the slavers. These are not my speculations. This was the conviction, reflected in documents, of the leaders of the Muscovite government of that time, who, we must assume, knew at least as well what they were talking about as subse­quent historians.

It may be objected that war is war, whether it is aggressive or de­fensive, and that it strains a nation to the limit, and in any case does not exert a favorable influence on its political structure. And this is true. But if wars in and of themselves can be the cause of the estab­lishment of despotism, then the Hundred Years' War between En­gland and France, which consumed four generations of the young people of those countries, should have given rise in the heart of Eu­rope to despotic rigors of which not even Shah Abbas would have dreamed. At the worst, such wars produced tyranny—as was even­tually the case in England and France—but not despotism.

Like China's influence on Japan, it did not seriously alter the conditions of power, class, and property. Ottoman Turkey's influence on 16th cen­tury Russia stimulated a regime that was already Orientally despotic, but it did not bring it into being. Tatar rule alone among the three ma­jor Oriental influences affecting Russia was decisive both in destroying the non-Oriental Kievan society and in laying the foundations for the despotic state of Muscovite and post-Muscovite Russia.¹'²

Though Wittfogel proved unable to demonstrate this thesis, I see nothing illegitimate, let alone offensive, in it. Nonetheless, it seems to be this which, for some reason, annoys the experts most. In any case, in arguing with him, they emphasize primarily that Russia was cer­tainly formed, for the most part, precisely under Byzantine (that is, non-Tatar) influence. Wittfogel himself felt this annoyance. "Let us for the sake of argument assume that the political institutions of tsar­ist Russia not only resembled those of Byzantium but were actually derived from them," he responded.

What follows with regard to the overall interpretation of Russia? If the Byzantine Empire was a variant of a multicentered society of the medi­eval Western type, then, of course, this would be very basic to our argu­ment—but also very puzzling, since tsarist Russia, in contrast to the West, constituted (as generally agreed) a single-centered society. And if the Byzantine Empire was a variant of an Oriental despotism (as com­parative institutional analysis suggests), then the establishment of By­zantium as Muscovy's "high model" only replaces an ugly Tatar picture by a culturally attractive picture of an Orientally despotic ancestor.¹⁴

Indeed, does our conception of the Russian political process change in essence if we dress up its origins in a Byzantine brocade coat rather than a Tatar beshmet? Is it easier for us to explain the rid­dles of Russian history if we replace Wittfogel's arguments with those of Toynbee? Let us see. In his essay "Russia's Byzantine Heritage," Toynbee writes:

For nearly a thousand years past, the Russians have . . . been members, not of our Western civilization, but of the Byzantine. ... In thus as­suming the Byzantine heritage deliberately and self-consciously, the Russians were taking over . . . the traditional Byzantine attitude to­wards the West; and this has had a profound effect on Russia's own atti­tude towards the West, not only before the Revolution of 1917 but after it. . . . In this long and grim struggle to preserve their independence [from the West], the Russians have sought salvation in the political in­stitution that was the bane of the medieval Byzantine world. Feeling that their one hope of survival lay in a ruthless concentration of politi­cal power, they worked out for themselves a Russian version of the By­zantine totalitarian state. . . . This Muscovite political edifice has twice been given a new facade—first by Peter the Great, and then again by Lenin—but the essence of the structure has remained unaltered, and the Soviet Union of today, like the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the four­teenth century, reproduces the salient features of the medieval East Ro­man Empire. . . . Under the Hammer and Sickle, as under the Cross, Russia is still "Holy Russia," and Moscow still "The Third Rome."¹¹

Toynbee despises such workaday topics as irrigation facilities. You will not find in his work mention of the managerial class as a dis­tinguishing feature of despotism. He does not even mention the term "despotism." He is a historian, not of material, but of spiritual cul­ture. And it is natural that he is chiefly interested in such aspects of this history as the millennial hostility between the Romans and the Greeks, each of whom considered themselves a chosen people; as the fortunate failure of Charlemagne to restore the Western empire, and the fatal success of Leo the Syrian in restoring the empire of the East; as the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity, which was only the material embodiment of the same old Greco-Roman cultural hostility; and other similar topics. Even by the word "totalitarianism," he means essentially only the subordination of the church to the state[62]—that is, in terms of our conception, the denial of ideological limitations on power, of which Montesquieu had written some two centuries before him. In other words, for Toynbee, as for Solzheni­tsyn thirty years later, economic peculiarities, social differences, and political structures are by-products of ideology, which—as a cultural tradition—is all-powerful and stands alone in determining the direc­tion of the historical process.

But this quite legitimate attempt (even though it is no more valid than Wittfogel's) to explain the Russian political process on the basis of an implacable hatred between Greeks and Romans has its vulnerable points. Toynbee asserts that "In this Byzantine totalitarian State, the church may be Christian or Marxian, so long as it submits to being the secular government's tool.'"⁶ But by no means every specialist will agree with him that the "Marxian church" is merely a department of the Soviet state; others might assert the precise opposite—namely that the Soviet state is, as yet, a department of the Marxian church. At any rate, which is subordinate to which is not obvious, as it appears to Toynbee, but on the contrary a difficult and debatable point. For ex­ample, the followers of Solzhenitsyn in the Russian dissident move­ment are struggling, it seems, not so much for the separation of the church from the state, as for the separation of the state from the church.

In the second place, "Why did Byzantine Constantinople go down to ruin? And why, on the other hand, did Byzantine Moscow sur­vive?" Again Toynbee himself asks a question which is fatal to his the­sis. "The key to both these historical riddles is the Byzantine institu­tion of the totalitarian State,'"⁷ he triumphantly declares, but this does not seem any more convincing than "the class struggle" of the Soviet absolutists as a solution. Even from a purely methodological point of view, we can predict that Toynbee is exulting a bit premature­ly at the beginning of his essay. He will not be able to keep his promise to open two different locks with the same key. Just as the absolutists, in trying to explain Russia's backwardness, appealed for help to the Tatars, so Toynbee must, like his debunked opponent, Wittfogel, in the end appeal to geography for help. Russia, he writes, "owed her survival in the early middle ages [according to the thesis, this sentence should end 'to the Byzantine institution of the totalitarian state'] to a happy geographical accident.'"⁸ Now we've got it again.

In the third place, and most importantly, how does the cultural hostility of Greeks and Romans help us to explain certain events in Russian history? For example, the enserfment of the peasants? And then their liberation? The Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terri­ble? And the Time of Troubles which followed it? The "new classes" bringing periodic catastrophe on the Russian aristocracy? And its equally periodic rebirth? The Russian political opposition? The Sta­linist Gulag? And the attempts to de-Stalinize the country which followed it? The reader will agree that these events, and others like them, are the keys to Russian history. And a hypothesis which tries to derive them from the conflicts between John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia, or between Pope Silverius and the Emperor Justin­ian, would hardly seem any more convincing than Wittfogel's attempt to explain them by the influence of the Tatars.

Notwithstanding that Toynbee's essay displays to the full his awe­some erudition in regard to the conflicts between popes and em­perors, it appears considerably less well-founded than Wittfogel's ar­gument, and I frankly do not see any adequate basis for the haughty criticism to which Toynbee subjects his opponent. Rather, both of them give the impression of being helpless prisoners of the fatal bipo­lar model, which has deprived them of the possibility of following the concrete processes of Russian history, and of answering its concrete questions. They were simply more interested in global constructions than in the urgent problems of any particular national history. As a result, however, this particular national history has proved to be beyond the limits of the global models which they have constructed.

5. The "Patrimonial" Interpretation

Until recently, the lively competition between the "Tatar" and "By­zantine" interpretations has, for the most part, dominated philosoph­ical-historical thinking about Russia in the West. However, with the appearance of Richard Pipes's book, Russia Under the Old Regime, which has apparently proved unusually popular,¹'' this thinking has taken on a new dimension. A fundamentally new conception has emerged, rejecting from the outset the very thought of Russia as an "Oriental despotism."²⁰ Instead, Russia is defined as a "patrimonial monarchy"—that is, a polity "where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguish­able;"²' or, more precisely, a political structure run by its tsars much as

When, at the University of California at Berkeley, I recommended that my stu­dents read Pipes's book, it turned out that all 12 (!) copies available in the libraries were in use. I did not hear anything like this about any other book which I recommended.

Pipes writes that while "one might have expected Russia to develop early in its history something akin to the bureaucratic regime of the 'despotic' or 'Asiatic' kind . . . for a variety of reasons its political development took a somewhat different route. . . . [I]t knew nothing of central economic management until the imposition of War Communism in 1918. But even if such management had been required, the country's natural conditions would have prevented its introduction. One need only consider the difficulties of transport and communication in Russia before the advent of railroads and telegraphs to realize that the kind of control and surveillance essential to an 'Orien­tal Despotism' was entirely out of the question here" (Russia under the Old Regime, p. 20).

Ibid., pp. 22-23. Amazingly, Pipes's definition almost literally corresponds with another one already known to the reader. Only Marx had in mind precisely what Pipes is rejecting: "Oriental despotism." the primitive family is run by the paterfamilias. More than that, the very definition of despotism is subjected to revision. It is treated not as a distinct political structure, but as a "deviation" from normal mon­archy, based not on tradition, but on force. The "patrimonial state," on the other hand, is said to be based on tradition ("the primitive family").

Here conflicts between sovereignty and property do not and cannot arise because . . . they are one and the same thing. A despot violates his sub­jects' property rights; a patrimonial ruler does not even acknowledge their existence. By inference, under a patrimonial system there can be no clear distinction between state and society in so far as such a distinc­tion postulates the right of persons other than the sovereign to exercise control over things and (where there is slavery) over persons.. . . Classi­cal examples of patrimonial regimes are to be found among the Hellenis­tic states which emerged from the dissolution of the empire of Alex­ander the Great, such as Egypt of the Ptolemies (305—30 вс) and the Attalid state in Pergamum (c. 283-133 вс).[63]

Let us leave it to experts to judge the equivalence of the political structures of Ptolemaic Egypt and Attalid Pergamum (I'm afraid that they will hardly agree on this) and return, as Rabelais says, to our rams. First of all, let us state with relief that both Wittfogel's Tatars and Toynbee's Byzantines have, in Pipes's interpretation, ceased to be a "high model" (Wittfogel's term) for the Russian political structure. It is true that the reasons for which Pipes has demoted them are somewhat exotic. Neither the Tatars nor the Byzantines can boast of the patriarchal peace which, according to Pipes, must have reigned in the "primitive family" of the Russian patrimonial state. In neither case could matters have gone as smoothly and as naturally as they must have gone there. There was no one in Russia to throw down the challenge to the supreme property rights of the "father of the Rus­sian family." Everyone was content with his family position. No won­der that "[t]he Muscovite service class, from which, in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of imperial Russia and the com­munist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represents a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions."²³ In a society saturated with the "patrimonial mentality,"²⁴ the notion that property could belong to anyone other than the sovereign could never even enter anyone's head, it seems. Even the Hellenistic states have ceased, within a mat­ter of some fifty pages, to serve as a "high model" for this unique phenomenon.

The very "idea of state was absent in Russia until the middle of the seventeenth century. . . . And since there was no notion of state, its corollary, society, was also unknown," Pipes asserts.²³ Moreover, ac­cording to him, "[bjecause there was no free market, social classes in the customary sense of the word could not arise."[64] It was all the more impossible that there should be political opposition in that primitive family. After all, what cause was there for opposition to arise, if the basic area of social conflicts—the struggle for property—was ex­cluded in the nature of things?

In this patriarchal picture there is, of course, no room for Oprich­nina revolutions and Stalinizations, for "Times of Troubles," de-Stalin- izations, and analogous political dramas. Sons, it is true, do not al­ways obey their parents, but they don't try to change the structure of their family. They do not introduce local self-government or trial by jury; they do not call Assemblies of the Land; they do not try to carry out major reforms, and—what is most important—they do not make claims on the property naturally belonging to the head of the family. It is not surprising, therefore, that the entire Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is accommodated in Pipes's book in two paragraphs and has the character rather of an epic family chronicle than of a "revolution from above." In any case, it is noted that "[t]he method used [by Ivan the Terrible] was basically not different from that first employed by Ivan III on the territory of conquered Novgorod."²⁷

In fact, as soon as we and the author pass from the free flight of abstract theory to earthly reality, we immediately enter a world which is precisely the opposite of what has just been described, a world boil­ing with ferocious struggle and competition—all of it over property, which, according to Pipes, was indistinguishable from sovereignty. And the author himself knows this. "The transformation of Russia into its ruler's patrimony required two centuries to accomplish. The process began in the middle of the fifteenth century and was com­pleted by the middle of the seventeenth," he writes. (In the middle of the seventeenth century, therefore, "the idea of the state" might be supposed to have disappeared from the face of the Russian earth; in­stead, for some reason it arose precisely at this point, by Pipes's own account.) "Between these dates lies an age of civil turbulence unprece­dented even for Russia, when state and society engaged in ceaseless con­flict, as the former sought to impose its will and the latter made des­perate attempts to elude it."²⁸

The meaning of this unending conflict consisted precisely in the fact that "in order to fashion their empire on the model of an ap­panage domain—to make all Russia their votchina . . . the tsars had to . . . put an end to the traditional right of the free population to circulate: all landowners had to be compelled to serve the ruler of Moscow, which meant converting their votchiny into fiefs." In Pipes's interpretation, "Outright property in land . . . was to give way to ten­ure conditional on royal favour."[65] Here is indistinguishability of sov­ereignty from ownership for you, when in practice it took two cen­turies of "civil tumult" and finally "a social revolution imposed from above" to take the property away from its owners.

The author agrees, thus, that there was no such thing as a "pat­rimonial state" in Russia before the seventeenth century. On the con­trary, it turns out that from the beginning of the existence of Russia as a state, in the centuries which Pipes calls "the time of civil tumult," before "the crown . . . expropriated society,"[66] "ownership of land and rendering of service" were "traditionally separated in Russia." Furthermore, in it there existed a strong and proud aristocracy who "took great pride in their ancestry and consciously separated them­selves from upstart service families."³¹ And even the state itself "had to honour the system or risk the united opposition of the leading houses of the realm."⁹²

Thus, for Pipes the "time bomb" explodes a century later than for Wittfogel. It is not only a matter of chronology, however, but one of the character of the "explosion" and of what stood behind it. For Wittfogel, as we know, the fuse to this bomb was laid by the Tatars, who brought Chinese models of Oriental despotism to Russia, and thus Sinicized the country. According to Pipes, it was a conspiracy of the "patrimonial state," on a national scale, against society. It is true that, as he says, this state did not exist before the middle of the seven­teenth century, but this did not prevent it from intriguing and con­spiring as long ago as the middle of the fifteenth century. This treach­erous state "neither grew out of society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swal­lowed it,"³³ until it brought "the process of expropriation [of society] to its conclusion."³⁴ Just as Mikhail Katkov, the famous right-wing publicist of the 1860s, saw "Polish intrigue" in Russia's every misfor­tune, so Pipes seems to detect a sort of "patrimonial intrigue" behind her woes.

This intrigue, as we know, consisted in transforming the whole country into a gigantic royal domain, so that no patrimonies, no priv­ileges, and no courts other than the tsar's could exist in it. Everything had to belong to the tsar. Everyone had to serve him directly, as his household servants and serfs did. "They are all slaves and just slaves, and no one is more than a slave," as V. O. Kliuchevskii tersely summed up the contents of Ivan the Terrible's revolutionary manifesto—his first letter to Prince Kurbskii.

There is no doubt that Ivan the Terrible thirsted after this. That in the name of this he made Russia dance with his Oprichnina revolu­tion is undisputed. But the history of the Russian state is not reduc­ible to Ivan the Terrible. There was a time before him and a time after him—a time to gather stones, as the Preacher says, and a time to cast them away.

The fact remains that, during the absolutist century of the Mus­covite state, the so-called Government of Compromise suddenly in­troduced local self-government and trial by jury in Russia, and, in ad­dition, called something like a national parliament—the Assembly of the Land. It not only did not try to destroy the privileges of the bo- yars, or attempt to stop the process of peasant differentiation leading directly to the formation of a bourgeoisie (such was Lenin's opinion, and in this department, after all, he is undeniably an authority), it in fact furthered this process.

In the 1760s, the Russian government, in the "Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility," guaranteed to the latter the privileges of a corporation, one of which was the privilege of not serving that govern­ment. In the 1780s, the government guaranteed the nobility the in­alienability of its property. In the 1860s, it again returned to the old, just forgotten experiment of the Government of Compromise, and again, as in the sixteenth century, introduced local self-government and trial by jury. It is true that the final step was not taken at this time. The Assembly of the Land was not called, and Russia was in a fever for another half-century, until in 1906 it was summoned in the shape of the State Duma. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia thus again returned to the position from which Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution had toppled it in the middle of the sixteenth. Unfortunately, it was not for long. A new Oprichnina revolution, this time under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin, again locked it up in the prison of autocracy. Such were the essential facts of this stormy, con­tradictory, and tragic history.

But let us forget all of this for the moment. Let us agree with Pipes that "during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Moscow mon­archy succeeded in eliminating alodial holdings and making secular land tenure a form of possession conditional on state service."³⁷' We then have before us a Russia which no longer knows an aristocracy, alodial tenure, and private patrimonial property, and is fully trans­formed into a "patrimonial state" in which sovereignty and ownership are indistinguishable. "The system we have described was so immune from pressures from below that, in theory at least, it should have per­petuated itself ad infinitum," Pipes writes. "The great patrimonial states of the Hellenistic world with which the Muscovite state had much in common collapsed not from internal causes but as a result of conquest. The same held true of the related regimes of the 'oriental despotic' type in Asia and Central America."^3B

With the paterfamilias finally heading his "primitive family," we might expect that "civil tumult" would come to an end forever in Rus­sia, and that an orderly and sedate family life would begin. But after its victory, the "patrimonial state" begins to conduct itself in a highly mysterious manner. "It is only in 1785 under Catherine II when Rus­sian landholders secured clear legal title to their estates that private property in land came once again into being in Russia," Pipes ob­serves.³⁷ Let us make an elementary calculation: if alodial tenure, pri­vate patrimonial property, and aristocracy, which had just ceased to exist in the second half of the seventeenth century, arise again in the second half of the following century, then for how many years—even fully agreeing with Pipes's conception—do we still have the "pat­rimonial state"? It turns out all of a sudden that what is being spoken of is not at all "Russia under the old regime," as the title of Pipes's book suggests, but only one piece of its history.

This is but the beginning of the confusion, however. For the time set aside for Pipes's "old regime" in Russian history will inevitably, like Balzac's peau de chagrin, get smaller and smaller, until finally it disap­pears altogether. "In the second half of the seventeenth century, of the 888,000 households subject to tiaglo [tax] in Russia, 67 per cent stood on land held by boyars and dvoriane [nobility] . . . and 13.3 per cent on that held by the church," Pipes says.

In other words, 80.3 per cent of the tiaglo households were under pri­vate control. The crown owned outright only 9.3 per cent. . . . For all practical purposes then, by the end of the seventeenth century four out of every five Russians had ceased to be subjects of the state, in the sense that the state had relinquished to their landlords nearly all authority over them/'"

Let us continue with our arithmetic. If by the end of the seven­teenth century, four out of five of the children of the paterfamilias had escaped from his control, how many years of the "patrimonial state" are left? Fifty? Alas, its situation is even worse than this. For, contrary to Pipes's assertions, the Muscovite state never succeeded completely in eliminating alodial property. It is true that the tradi­tional clan patrimony perished under the assault of the Oprichnina revolution and the autocracy established by it, partly being replaced by fiefs (pomest'ia). But, simultaneously with the abolition of the tradi­tional patrimonial estate and its replacement by pomest'e, evolution of the pomest'ia into the new patrimonial estates of the service gentry took place. In his last work, the late A. M. Sakharov describes the process as follows:

The pomest'e gradually became more and more adapted to the interests of its holder, and revealed more and more elements of patrimonial ten­ure. With time, there arose the so-called "earned patrimonies." This concept, it seems, was first used in a ukase of 1572, where the clan pat­rimony was contrasted to the "patrimony given by the sovereign." The beginning of the sale of vacant pomest'ia as patrimonies, with the sole condition that the buyer had no right to transfer them to a monastery, dates from the same period. The practice of selling pomest'ia as pat­rimonies subsequently became widespread in the first half of the seven­teenth century, along with the granting of pomest'ia as patrimonies as a reward for service. Furthermore, after the "Time of Troubles" [that is, at the beginning of the seventeenth century], a definite norm was es­tablished: an "earned" patrimony was one-fifth of the regular size of a pomest'e. The treasury's need for money and the effort to gain a firmer base of support in the nobility were the causes of the transformation of pomest'ia into patrimonies, which constantly increased over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. '⁴

Russian history is left with not a single decade for the "patrimonial state." There is simply nowhere left to stick it. And, along with it, the "patrimonial-conspiratorial" model of the Russian historical process falls into oblivion. Out of this fundamental contradiction between theory and reality there apparently flows such a massive series of fac­tual contradictions by the author with himself that, in analyzing Pipes's book, my students asked me whether the author himself had read over his own text before sending it to press. I will cite only a few examples. On page 86 we read: "The extension of the domainial order on the country at large was nothing short of a social revolution imposed from above. The resistance was commensurate." On page 173: "Sovereignty in Russia had been built on the ruins of private property, by a ruthless destruction of appanages and other votchiny." And, between these two passages, on page 172: "The Russian state grew and took shape without having to contend with entrenched landed in­terests—an absolutely fundamental factor in its historic evolution" (my emphasis).

On page 85, we read that "state and society engaged in ceaseless conflict" over the course of two centuries (from the middle of the fif­teenth to mid-seventeenth), this conflict being required for the de­struction of the boyars' patrimonies, and on page 172 that, "During the three centuries separating the reign of Ivan III from that of Catherine II the Russian equivalent of the nobility held its land on royal sufferance."

How can we reconcile the absence of entrenched landed interests with the "unending struggle" for their extirpation? Or the strong pat­rimonial boyardom, of which the author himself says that the Duma which it created was "in the fourteenth, fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century . . . pronouncedly aristocratic,"⁴" with tenure of land on royal sufferance? How, in a country where even the ideas of state and society could not exist, could the state and society wage a struggle to the death against each other over the course of centuries? Why did the "patrimonial state," which had for so many years con­spired against private property, suddenly begin to destroy the results of its entire intrigue? I was not able to answer these legitimate ques­tions for my students.

As the reader may have noticed, my role in criticizing Russia Under the Old Regime has been minimal: the author himself, without outside help, has destroyed his "conspiratorial-patrimonial" thesis by, to use his own expression, "swallowing it bit by bit."

Of course, Pipes is not obliged to follow the logic of Wittfogel, or Toynbee, or A. N. Sakharov, or anybody at all, but his own logic he must follow. And, as strange as it may seem after so much self-contra­diction, a logic can be discovered to which he still adheres. Alas, this is the familiar logic of the bipolar model, which he so decisively de­bunked in the theoretical introduction to his book. "The distinguish­able characteristic of la monarchie seigneuriale was that 'the prince has become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects,'" Pipes writes, quoting Jean Bodin, with whom he agrees that "in Europe there were only two such regimes, one in Turkey, the other in Muscovy, although they were common in Asia and Africa."⁴'

This is, once again, the black-and-white version of the political uni­verse: if Russian autocracy differed from European absolutism, then consequently it was . . . what? Certainly, Oriental despotism (Witt­fogel would say, in his harsh language, "of the nonhydraulic semi- marginal subtype," while Pipes expresses himself more mildly: "of the patrimonial type"). The designations may differ, but the essence is one and the same; the check list of despotic features is identical. There is the absolute sovereignty of the state over the national prod­uct of the country. There is the absence of alternatives, and con­sequently of political opposition ("one can see no way in which the Muscovite population could have altered the system had it wanted to"). There is, finally, the incapacity of the system for internal change.

And if, nevertheless, the system, as distinct from its Hellenistic and Oriental-despotic relatives, did change from within (and as a profes­sional historian of Russia, Pipes can't deny this), this is explained by . . . what would you think, reader, already being familiar with Witt­fogel and Szamuely? Well, of course, by geography: what else? It sim­ply turns out that "of all the regimes of the Hellenistic and Oriental- despotic type, Russia was geographically closest to Western Europe."[67]Paraphrasing a well-known saying, we can say that "the patrimonial state" of Richard Pipes is despotism, moderated by geography.

Thus, just as all roads lead to Rome, all the interpretations of Rus­sian history which we have considered—the "Tatar," the "Byzantine," and the "patrimonial"—lead inexorably and inevitably to despotism, and hence to the bipolar model of political development, effectively making it impossible to explain the Russian historical process.

CHAPTER IV

THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON

1. The Stereotype

In the work of the contemporary Western despotists, Muscovy is de­picted, at the dawn of its existence as a state, as a narrow horseshoe of land caught between the Lithuanian hammer and the Tatar anvil, locked into a miserable northern territory, without an outlet to the sea, where it is not even possible to grow grain in quantity. Having taken this stereotype as sound coin, Tibor Szamuely was sure, it will be remembered, that for Muscovy national survival played the same role that irrigation facilities played in the Asiatic empires.

Even so prominent a native despotist as Georgii Plekhanov was se­duced by this logic. One of Plekhanov's strongest arguments was the fact that Nikolai Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, the forefather of the native abso­lutists, himself conceded that "the external circumstances of the life of Muscovite Rus', its stubborn struggle against its eastern and west­ern neighbors for existence, demanded an extreme expenditure of effort by the people," as a result of which "there was developed in the society a consciousness that the first obligation of each subject was to serve the state to the limit of his ability and to sacrifice himself for the defense of the Russian land."'

The "stubborn struggle for existence," "the defense of the Russian land"—in a word, self-defense—is the root of the stereotype, which is already so venerable that it does not enter anyone's head to doubt its truth. But is it, after all, true—at least as applied to the time of Ivan III, which took up almost the entire latter half of the fifteenth cen­tury, when, according to Wittfogel, the "institutional time bomb" was getting ready to explode; when, according to Pipes, indescribable "civil tumult" was taking place; and when, according to Szamuely, the "Muscovite variety of Asiatic despotism" was being created? Here is how this period is described by one of the most authoritative experts, Sergei Solov'ev:

In regard to political and physical calamities, it must be noted that for the regions which Ivan inherited from his father, his reign was the calmest and happiest: the Tatar incursions involved only the border­lands; but these incursions were very few and the harm caused by them reasonable and quite insignificant; the uprising of the grand prince's brothers only frightened the people; and the other wars were offensive on the part of Muscovy: the enemy did not show himself within the bor­ders of the triumphant state.[68]

Whom are we to believe?

If, in fact, the Muscovy of this period was a garrison state strug­gling convulsively for its existence, as the stereotype has it, it is hard­ly likely that people from more favored and less militarized places would have emigrated there. The position of the Muscovite govern­ment in the matter of emigration is also indicative. After all, it is un­thinkable that the government of Brezhnevist Russia, for example, would issue loud declarations defending the rights of citizens to emi­grate. On the contrary, it declares emigres to be traitors to their coun­try, and regards any help to them as interference in its internal af­fairs. And there is nothing surprising in this: in our day, no one flees into Russia; they flee from it.

But there was a time when they fled into it. And this was precisely during the reign of Ivan III.

Ivan's Lithuanian neighbor, the Grand Prince Kazimir, was a great diplomat. By a series of profound and brilliantly thought out in­trigues, he managed matters so that after his death his sons, the Ka- zimirovichi, one after another took possession of the four Central European thrones—the Polish, the Czech, the Hungarian, and the Lithuanian, which was ascended by the future son-in-law of Ivan III and the future king of Poland, Aleksandr. This was the high point of Lithuanian history. Lithuania had its troubles—and who did not?— but in any case, no one would have dared to call it a garrison state, and its life and death did not rest upon the toss of a card.

Nevertheless, the current of migration for some reason ran clearly toward Muscovy. Who demanded the punishment of the emigres— the "runaways"—and branded them "traitors" or "scoundrels"? Who, by threats and entreaties, sought the conclusion of an agreement which would juridically specify the illegality of boyar "flight" ? The

Lithuanians. And who defended civil rights, and particularly the in­dividual's right to choose his country? The Muscovites.

The flower of the Russian aristocracy, the princes Vorotynskii, Viazemskii, Odoevskii, Bel'skii, Peremyshl'skii, Novosil'skii, Glinskii, Mezetskii—their names are legion—were all of them successful ref­ugees from Lithuania into Muscovy. There were also those who were not successful. In 1482 the great Lithuanian boyars Ol'shanskii, Olen- kovich, and Bel'skii prepared to flee to Muscovy. The king heard of it: "Ol'shanskii and Olenkovich were seized," and Fedor Bel'skii fled alone. In 1496 the Lithuanian ruler bitterly complained to the Mus­covite sovereign: "The princes Viazemskii and Mezetskii were our servants, and betrayed their oath to us, and slipped into your land, like evil people, and if they had fled to us, they would have gotten from us what such traitors deserve."[69] But they were not fleeing to him.

The Muscovite government, on the contrary, welcomed the royal "traitors," did not give them up to the Lithuanian king, and evidently saw no treason in their actions. For example, in 1504 Ostafei Dashko- vich defected to Muscovy with many nobles. Lithuania demanded their extradition, citing the treaty of 1503, which supposedly re­quired that "both sides not accept turncoats, runaways, and evil peo­ple." Muscovy craftily and mockingly replied that the text literally read, "a thief, a runaway, a bondsman, a slave, a debtor should be handed over to justice"—and could a great lord be a thief or a bonds­man or an evil person? On the contrary, "Ostafei Dashkovich was a person of note at the court and had been a general, and nothing evil had ever been heard about him, and he had great cities under his control, and he came to serve us voluntarily, without causing any harm."[70]

Provided the runaway had not caused any harm—that is, had not fled from criminal prosecution—he was, for Muscovy, a respectable political emigre, and not a traitor. Muscovy insisted, as a matter of principle, on the right of personal political choice, using the strongest legal argument possible in medieval political disputes—appeal to the "old ways." As Ivan III wrote in his answer to the Lithuanian king, "before this, under us and under our ancestors and under their an­cestors, people travelled without hindrance in both directions."[71]

Is Ivan not insisting that the king's subjects (like his own) are by no means slaves belonging to their suzerain, but free people? Of course, one can say that his declarations were hypocritical. They definitely were. But even in that case, the "patrimonial mentality," which ac­cording to Pipes prevailed in the Muscovite garrison state, looks at least dubious. Is it thinkable that even hypocritically, the Brezhnev gov­ernment, for example, would undertake to defend the tradition of free emigration out of the country? Even hypocrisy, obviously, has its political limits.

Of course, I do not mean to say by this that Moscow was more lib­eral, or freer, or more concerned about civil rights than was Vil'no. The Middle Ages were the Middle Ages. Both governments were equally cruel and authoritarian. What I am talking about is something entirely different: for some reason, it was advantageous for people in Lithuania to flee to Muscovy and for the Muscovite government to defend the right to emigrate. This was pointed out as far back as 1889 by the well-known Russian historian Mikhail D'akonov. "This dif­ference of opinion between the governments," he wrote, "could have had only one basis: at the time in question Lithuania was losing a good many more of its servants than it was gaining, while Muscovy, on the contrary, was significantly increasing its service population at the expense of Lithuania.""

And here the crucial and inexplicable question arises, at least for those experts whose works I know: why would so many powerful, proud and, what is in this case most important, free (of course, in the medieval sense) people choose to flee to a repressive garrison state? Well, some explanations downplaying this phenomenon can, of course, be thought up. Perhaps these were simply the Orthodox peo­ple who left Catholic Lithuania for Orthodox Muscovy. Or it may be that Ivan III offered them irresistible conditions if they became his courtiers. Or else, Muscovy being the winning side in the struggle for the border regions where these people lived, they preferred to join the victor. Or the Muscovite army forced some border nobles to change allegiance. In fact, this is what some experts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kremlin affairs, thoroughly researching and high­lighting personal and family connections and conflicts in the Mus­covite aristocratic elite, say. In the absence of new generalizations about Russian history, there has developed a kind of medieval Krem- linology, allowing Muscovy to be considered a "service state" even in the fifteenth century. Gustav Alef, for example, the most prominent representative of this school of thought, in a penetrating recent essay

6. Ibid., p. 192.

goes even further, suggesting that "the service state was a product of need for both the monarch and his servants."[72]

This is quite a respectable theory. The only thing it cannot explain is why it was that from the time of the Oprichnina revolution on, and for an entire century to come, when Muscovy was really turned into a service state, the arrow of migration suddenly swung around 180 de­grees, as though by magic. After the Oprichnina, Muscovy was still Orthodox, and Lithuania still Catholic. Moreover, Muscovy was still sometimes the winning side in the struggle for the border regions. And its army might still have forced border nobles to change alle­giance. But this time Orthodox lords fled from Orthodox Muscovy to Catholic Lithuania. And in the eyes of Vil'no such refugees all of a sudden became not "turncoats," but respectable political emigres, while Muscovy boiled with rage against them, and proclaimed that "in the whole universe he who takes in a runaway lives in unrighteous­ness together with him." The Lithuanian king, suddenly filled with liberalism and humane feelings, condescendingly explained to Ivan the Terrible that "people who leave their fatherland to save their necks from bondage and bloodshed" must be pitied and not be sur­rendered to a tyrant; it is unworthy of a Christian ruler to hand over "those whom God has saved from death."

And even when, a half century later, Boris Godunov sent eighteen young people to Europe to acquire learning and good sense there, seventeen of them became "nonreturners." As Prince Ivan Golitsyn once explained to Polish envoys: "We cannot permit Russian people to serve along with Poles because of temptation. One summer they serve—and the next we would not have a half of the best Russian people left."[73] In the works of Gregory Kotoshikhin, also a political emigre, who left us the first systematic description of Muscovite life in the mid-1600s, we read:

They do not send their children to other countries to learn science and good breeding, fearing that, having seen the faith and customs and blessed liberty of those countries, they would begin to change their own faith and then go over to another, and would no longer care or think about returning to their homes and to their relatives. And if a person, a prince or a boyar or anyone else, would go, or would send his son or his brother to another country without telling anyone, and without having taken leave of the sovereign, such a person, for such a deed, would be accused of treason. . . . And if someone went himself and left relatives behind him, they would be interrogated to learn whether they knew what their relatives had intended.[74]

What do we learn then from all this? If the medieval Kremlinolo- gists, along with the despotists, are right in suggesting that, even in the fifteenth century, Muscovy was a terrifying service state totally preoccupied with its "national survival," how are we to explain this monstrous change in the minds of its rulers and in the directions of emigration? I would be happy to tell the reader how these experts try to explain this mysterious fact so stubbornly contradicting their theo­ries. Unfortunately, I cannot: to the best of my knowledge they have not tried.[75]

2. "Patrimonies" Versus "Patrimony"

When, in March 1462, at the age of twenty-two, Ivan III ascended the throne, Muscovy could be called a unified state perhaps only in name. It was still formally a vassal and tributary of the Golden Horde. The princedoms of Tver', Riazan', Rostov, and Iaroslavl', which had been the most dangerous competitors of Muscovy in the past, still led a sep­arate existence, sometimes attempting to maneuver between Moscow and Lithuania. In the free cities of Novgorod, Pskov, and Khlynov (Viatka), the popular assemblies still made a stir, and their decisions were frequently anti-Muscovite in character. The northern empire of Novgorod, which occupied the maritime regions, was not subject to Moscow, and consequently the country had no access either to the White Sea or to the Baltic. The brothers of the grand prince, who held appanages, were still able to raise the sword against him, and to unleash civil war in the country. The memory was still alive of how, during the preceding civil war, Vasilii, called the Dark, father of the grand prince, had been blinded and exiled by his nephew Dimitri Shemiaka.

From this variegated and amorphous material, Ivan III had to build a unified state, completing the work of his ancestors, the "gatherers" of Muscovite Rus'. This is what the first part both of his life and his political strategy consisted in (in the case of Ivan III, they were one and the same, for he seems to have been moved by few passions other than political ones). He was of the clan of Ivan Kalita ("Moneybags"), "bloodthirsty from of old," as Kurbskii wrote, and renowned for in­trigues, treachery, and familial stubbornness; a clan in which each member knew how to follow the great-grandfather's lucky star without turning aside, as though a political compass were mounted inside him.

Ivan III carried out his centralizing task with great political tact and a minimum of spilt blood—or, at any rate, with greater tact and less blood than his French contemporary, Louis XI. The grand prince rather resembled his English contemporary, Henry VII. Both were parsimonious, dry, unprejudiced, farseeing men. Like Henry VII, Ivan thought that a bad peace was better than a good quarrel, and wherever a matter could be settled without a fight, he took that road with no hesitation, even at the price of significant concessions. He was not a coward like his grandson, but knew how to flatter without qualms when this was necessary. He disliked risking everything, and respected his adversary if the latter was deserving of respect, trying not to drive him to extremes, and leaving him the possibility of an honorable exit from the game. Over all else, he set "the old ways," the strongest argument of medieval political logic.

How—a well-known American historian once asked me indig­nantly—can we permit ourselves such a description of a man who did not leave behind a single document written in his own hand? But Ivan III did leave a record. And it was not only the great power he created, but also the very process by which it was created—maneu­vers, campaigns, intrigues, embassies, marriages, and negotiations. From this chaotic mosaic, there emerges a profound strategy, thought out far into the future, reflecting the character and style of a great political architect.

Ivan III, it seems to me, was distinguished from all subsequent Russian tsars by an astonishing feeling for strategy. There was no sin­gle political step, no matter how insignificant in itself, which would not in time, perhaps many years afterwards, prove to be a stage on the way to the goal which he had set for himself.

Who could have said in 1477, for example, that the confiscation of monastery lands in Novgorod, a measure lost in the mass of other confiscations, resettlements, and banishments connected with annex­ation of the northern "patrimony," would many years later prove to be essential in reforming the church? Who could have said in advance that the destructive raids on the Lithuanian lands beyond the Oka during the "unofficial war" of the 1480s, conducted mainly by the princely defectors from Lithuania, were by no means unsystematic freebooting, as it seemed to contemporaries, but part of a colossal plan for dismembering Lithuania by splitting it along ethnic and re­ligious lines? Who could have said that the sentimental interest of a decidedly unsentimental grand prince in the modest sect of "Trans- Volga Elders"—people not of this world, monks who had left their monasteries and lived in lonely forest hermitages—was, in fact, a de­tail in a broad plan for the creation of a strong political party of "Non-Acquirers," which was destined to become the brains trust of the future church reformation?

And so on for everything he did. Ivan III was decidedly unpredict­able to his contemporaries. A cynical pragmatist, a realist, known for his persistence and practical turn of mind, he seemed at the same time to live in some other dimension, incomprehensible to them. In the second part of his life (or of his strategy), when the gathering in of the "patrimony" was completed and the family star followed by ten generations of Muscovite grand princes had finally set, when Rus' (which is to say what remained of the ancient Kievan state) had been united, Ivan immediately and without interruption undertook to for­mulate new goals, creating a new mission—in which, he may have thought, his grandsons and great-grandsons would compete with him, as he had competed with his grandfathers and great-grand­fathers in the mission to "gather in" Rus'. He was not in a hurry. The entire political experience of Muscovy had taught him that affairs of state are not concluded in one generation, that "Moscow is not built in one day," as they say in Russia. He had only to lay the foundation, and, by completing the work of Ivan Kalita, become a new Ivan Kalita.

Fated to live two lives in two different worlds—first in the petty, quarrelsome world of disputes between princes and appanages, and then in the world of high politics, international intrigues, and na­tional tasks—Ivan felt himself at home in both. During his first "life," he prepared the staging areas and starting points for his second, when he would no longer be a provincial Muscovite grand prince but sovereign of a European power.

In fact, as soon as the process of "gathering in" was completed, the Reconquista could continue only in the arena of European politics. The patrimony of Rus' was naturally transformed into something fundamentally different from a royal estate: a member nation of the European family of peoples. And, correspondingly, the "votchina" (patrimony) concept became anachronistic in the new "otchina" (which in Russian sounds rather like "otchizna" or "otechestvo"—fatherland). Both "otchina" and "votchina" are translated into English by a single word, "patrimony." Even in Russian they have the same root and differ only by one letter. In the political life of the country, however, these terms seem to stand not only for different but for opposite things.

Now, after the completion of the "gathering in," as the ideological basis for the Russian Reconquista, "otchina" came to be used mainly in the context of foreign policy. The term starina ("old times") un­derwent analogous transformation into a political slogan signifying the common past of all of the Russian lands, as "otchina" did their common future. Both were fused into a powerful ideological con­struct, symbolic of national unity and cemented together by the for­eign-policy strategy of Ivan III.

Votchina seems to have gradually undergone a similar transforma­tion, coming to stand mainly not for royal but for private hereditary property, thus laying a firm foundation for the Russian aristocracy. The private votchina was in itself the opposite of the idea of the coun­try as a royal votchina. In fact, the private votchina served as check and balance on the power of the medieval Russian state, imposing both social and economic limitations on it. More than that, maintenance of the private votchiny was an absolute political imperative for Ivan III: how could he, otherwise, in forming his aristocratic elite, have at­tracted to himself boyars and princes from Lithuania, from Tver', and from Riazan', who deserted to him along with their votchiny? Why should powerful aristocrats, who had traditionally been indisputable owners of their votchiny, have fled to a state in which their rights would be disputed? Had Ivan III actually considered his country a royal patrimony, aristocrats would have absconded from Muscovy rather than fled there. This is how the tradition of "patrimonies" as private estates worked to corrode and gradually destroy the tradition of royal "patrimony." Gathering about him in Moscow "the flower of

Russian aristocracy," as Gustav Alef has expressed it, Ivan III put the idea of royal "patrimony" in mortal danger. This explains why his grandson, Ivan the Terrible, needed to foment a revolution and re­sort to mass terror in a desperate attempt to save it.

Thus, the opposition between two almost identical terms, which does not even exist in English, conceals a cruel conflict between two cultural and political traditions, one which ended with catastrophe for the new-born Russian absolutism.

3. A Historical Experiment

The complexity of history sometimes makes it easier to argue. I do not know how I would now convince the reader of the difference be­tween the political behavior of the "otchinnik" (the absolutist king) and the "votchinnik" (the autocrator), and the decisive difference in their attitudes towards the country, were it not for the analogous actions to subdue Novgorod undertaken by the grandfather and the grandson, separated from each other by what I call Russia's absolutist century.

In the 1460s, when Ivan III mounted the throne, Novgorod was an autonomous political unit in the complex and loose conglomerate ar­bitrarily called Muscovy. It was, properly speaking, a republic—some­thing like a Russian Carthage. In formal terms, the popular assembly [veche] was considered to be the highest power, which annually elect­ed a mayor [posadnik] and a general [tysiatskii], who in turn supervised the administration, the military establishment, and the organs of jus­tice. In practice, the power of this elected representative body was limited by the senate (the council of boyars), which exercised the real power (in the sense that political decisions were initiated, and the strategy for the republic determined there). The connection of the republic with the Russian state (apart from the common language and cultural traditions) consisted chiefly in the fact that Novgorod paid tribute to Muscovy in return for noninterference in its internal affairs, that the princes who were invited to command the army were supposed by tradition to belong to the clan of Riurik (the semimythi- cal Norse founder of the Kievan state, and progenitor of its royal house), and that candidates for the post of archbishop of Novgorod were nominated by the metropolitan of Moscow.

The Novgorod North was the treasure house of Russia, spared by the Tatar invasion, and closely connected with the Hanseatic com­mercial republics, which were related to it by their political structure. Novgorod controlled the roads to the White Sea, to the Baltic, and to the vast territories beyond the Urals. Its incorporation was, therefore, absolutely vital for the development of Muscovy as a state, and hence only a matter of time.

The senate of Novgorod had for decades been deeply split into hostile factions. The sympathies of the veche, or popular assembly, were chiefly with the pro-Lithuanian faction (most probably because Lithuania was farther away and posed a lesser danger to the auton­omy of the republic). The representatives of the grand prince were publicly humiliated; regions of the republic ceded to Moscow in the past were taken back by force; payment of taxes was refused; the position of head of the army was ostentatiously off ered to the son of Dimitri Shemiaka, who had blinded the father of the grand prince; negotiations with Kazimir of Lithuania were the order of the day and, to top it all, the archbishop of Novgorod also entered into nego­tiations with the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev (an appointee of the pope's and probably also of Kazimir's). "Throughout the sixties ten­sion grew," writes John Fennell:

The split in Novgorod between the pro-Muscovite faction and the pro- Lithuanian party . . . became more sharply defined and led to disor­ders within the city. Although few people could have foreseen any other fate for Novgorod than her ultimate annexation by Moscow, the pro- Lithuanian faction grew in strength and boldness. It was as though they were attempting to provoke Ivan into a final act of reprisal. ... In vain Ivan sent his ambassadors to reason with his insubordinate patrimony; Novgorod refused to listen to his complaints. Mere insolence and minor boundary conflicts could hardly be used as a pretext for a major expedi­tion to crush what was after all a Russian and an Orthodox state."

For one who knows the history of Ivan the Terrible s Novgorod ex­pedition, which turned the same Russian and Orthodox city into a desert without any pretext whatever (except, of course, for the suspi­cion of "treason" which was the standard fabrication in the Oprich­nina period when it was necessary to rob someone), this explanation may seem improbable. But between grandfather and grandson there was a great gulf: even when the treachery of Novgorod, both political and religious, was demonstrated beyond doubt, Ivan III punished it not immediately or hastily, but with caution, in two stages. The Nov- goroders played a clumsy political game, and were always falling into the traps laid by the grand prince. The challenge he faced lay rather in the powerful authority of the "old ways" embodied in the liberties of Novgorod. Simply to violate them as his grandson would have done, and did, was something of which Ivan III was, it seems, incapa­ble. His mind worked in a fundamentally different way. He had in his hands a tool which tyrants never have: time. Let the republic be the first to violate the "old ways." Then he would act, in the role not of a violator but of a preserver of national and religious tradition.

He waited them out. The Novgoroders, in desperation, sought help from the traditional enemies of Rus'—the Livonian Order. Now the whole world could see who was defending the "old ways" and who was violating them. The grand prince marched against Novgorod and, on July 14, 1471, inflicted a crushing defeat on its army at the river Shelon'. The republic lay at his feet, disarmed and helpless. It seemed that the moment for which he had patiently waited for a whole decade had come. What now? Did he disarm Novgorod, de­stroy it politically, plunder it, kill its people? Did he at least annex its northern empire? Nothing of the sort. He entered into negotiations and agreed to a compromise. What was more, in the treaty, along with words confirming the fact that Novgorod was "our otchina," there was reference to "the free men [of Novgorod]." Fennell notes with mild astonishment: "Ivan showed remarkable clemency. . . . Why should the anomaly of an independent freedom-loving republic within the confines of what was becoming a centralized totalitarian state be toler­ated for another seven years?"[76] In fact Ivan III liquidated the grand princedom of Tver' in exactly the same way, in two stages, thirteen years later. Thus, too, he organized his pressure campaign against Lithuania—methodically, unhurriedly, and not all at once. He acted similarly in his struggle to secularize the church lands. This appears to have been the universal strategic method of the grand prince of compromise—the founding father of the absolutist tradition of Rus­sia. Fennell points out:

Of course, harsh methods at this stage would not make the task of gov­erning the city any easier; his undoubted unpopularity amongst certain members of the [Novgorod] community would be increased; leaders of the opposition would become martyrs in the eyes of the public; the merchants, whose support Ivan was only too anxious to court and maintain, might well become antagonistic to the cause of Moscow and thus disrupt its economic programme."

Not one of these considerations entered the mind of Ivan the Ter­rible at the time of his Novgorod expedition of 1570; he mercilessly robbed the Novgorod traders without any concern for the economic program of Muscovy, still less for his reputation "among certain members of the community" (these, and others about whom we are uncertain, were simply executed on a mass scale). Certainly, the thought that "harsh methods" would hardly ease the task of governing the city did not stop Ivan the Terrible. All strata of the population, boyars, clergy, rich merchants, poor townsmen, and even the pau­pers—who were driven out in the middle of a fierce winter, to be frozen alive beyond the city walls—were exterminated methodically, mercilessly, in whole families.

It is as though for the grandson the vertical (temporal) dimension of politics did not exist. Not even the future, let alone the past ("old ways"), had any meaning for him. He thought, one might say, hori­zontally, and worked outside of the context of time. And although he traced his descent in a direct line from the Roman emperor Augustus, the sacred "old ways" were for him merely a great abstract congeries, in which Moses and the Prophet Samuel and "our forefathers" all blended together—in no sense a living, vital tradition which created a moral imperative, or an authority to which policy had to be adapted.

Let us, however, return to Novgorod. It goes without saying that the anti-Muscovite party there was unreconciled to its defeat. Once more, it entered into negotiations with Lithuania, carrying the veche with it. Seven years later, Ivan III—armed, as always, with solid doc­umentary proofs of treachery—once again launched a campaign against the mutinous otchina and brought it to its knees. (Once again surprising Fennell: "One marvels at the patience with which Ivan conducted this [operation].") This time, Ivan settled scores with the opposition radically and cruelly: its leaders were exiled and some of them were executed; the historical autonomy of Novgorod was abol­ished, the bell of the veche removed, whole clans of potential traitors were resettled in the South and loyal people put in their place (for the decisive campaign against Lithuania, planned two decades earlier, Ivan needed the sympathy of the border population).

The grand prince then experimented with a mixture of past and future forms. In 1471 Novgorod was given a chance to try to incorpo­rate its local "old ways" into the national structure which was being created, but the compromise combination of otchina with "free men" did not work. Ivan recognized his defeat by getting rid of the "free men," but even then he settled scores with the opposition and not with Novgorod itself. The pro-Lithuanian party was definitely rout­ed, but the city survived and prospered as before. The point is that Ivan III felt himself responsible for Novgorod. This was part of his native land, his heritage, to be attached to Muscovy, but not reduced to ashes.

When Ivan the Terrible marched against Novgorod a century later, it was still Great Novgorod, the richest, most highly developed, most cultivated city in the land, the pearl of the Russian crown. But where the Oprichnina has passed, as the saying went, grass does not grow. Never again would there be Great Novgorod. Yet, in 1570, there had for a long time been no republic, no senate, no veche, no historical autonomy to be destroyed, no opposition to be decapitated. But we do not yet know the whole picture. In order to give the reader some idea of the bloody escapades of Ivan the grandson in Novgorod, let me quote a modern Soviet historian, R. G. Skrynnikov:

The Oprichnina judges conducted their investigations with the aid of the cruelest tortures. . . . The recalcitrant were burned at the stake . . . tied to sleighs by a long rope, dragged through the city to the river Volkhov and pushed under the ice. Not only those suspected of treason were killed, but also the members of their families. . . . The chronicler says that some Oprichniki threw women and children tied hand and foot into the Volkhov, while others went about the river in boats and with axes and spears drowned those who succeeded in floating to the surface.^H

Immediately after the trials and reprisals described above, "the sov­ereign with his men-at-arms began to ride around Great Novgorod to the monasteries," the chronicler relates. The results of this royal jaunt are also described by Skrynnikov: "The black clergy [monks] were robbed down to the last thread. The Oprichniki plundered St. So­phia's Cathedral, took the valuable church furniture and icons, and broke the ancient Korsunskii gates out of the altar."¹' That all of this had nothing to do with the "treason" of Novgorod is illustrated by the very fact that having finished with the monasteries of Novgorod, the expedition immediately went after those of Pskov. "The Oprichnina laid hands on the treasure of the Pskov monasteries," Skrynnikov continues. "The local monks were again robbed down to the last thread. Not only money, but also icons and crosses, valuable church furniture, and books were taken from them. The Oprichniki re­moved the bells of the cathedral and took them away.""⁵

But even this did not exhaust the sufferings of once great Novgo­rod. In the interval between the plundering of the Novgorod clergy and the Pskov pogrom, the Oprichniki, according to Skrynnikov,

conducted full-scale attacks against the city. They sacked the Novgorod market and divided the most valuable goods among themselves. The simple goods, such as lard, wax, and linen, they heaped into great piles and burned (that winter a terrible famine prevailed over the Russian North, and it was precisely for this reason that so many paupers accu­mulated in Novgorod). During the pogrom, large supplies of goods in­tended for trade with the West were destroyed. Not only the markets were robbed, but also the houses of the townsmen. The Oprichniki broke down the gates, removed the doors, and smashed windows. Cit­izens who tried to resist the bandits were killed on the spot."

Here we have the difference between the "otchina" and the "vot- china" mentalities, between absolutism and autocracy. Both reprisals against Novgorod were cruel; both were accompanied by executions, persecution, and confiscations; both were, in the final analysis, a question of foreign policy. But in the first case, the reprisal was dic­tated by political necessity; in the second, it was an act of mass terror to facilitate the plundering of an already frightened people. Ivan III tried as far as possible to preserve Novgorod, though compelling it to function as a part of the nation; his grandson barbarously destroyed it. Where his grandfather had aimed at the maximum rationalization of the national economy possible under medieval conditions, Ivan the Terrible attempted to secure the continuation of an irrational foreign-policy strategy at the price of expropriation and destruction of the national wealth.'⁸ How do the experts explain this monstrous difference between two analogous events in Russian history? Again I

Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 152.

There are many studies analyzing the economic results of both Novgorod expe­ditions, at least indirectly. Kareliia, for example, was subject to Novgorod before its an­nexation by Ivan III. Its inclusion into the Muscovite state, writes R. B. Miuller,

had a favorable influence on its entire population . . . the land on which the huge majority of the population lived ceased to be the property of the Novgorod boyars and became royal 'black' land. At the beginning, the state apparatus put only very insignificant pressure on the black peasants; the duties were very low, and the opportunity [for peasants] to control the land almost unlimited. . . . The basis for economic differentiation, and for the concentration of land in the hands of some [peasants] and the deprivation of others, appeared in the Karel- liian countryside.

In other words, what we may call a normal European process of intensification and rationalization of the economy was taking place, which the author sees as the origin of bourgeois relationships in the Karelliian countryside. The results of the Novgorod expe­dition of Ivan the Terrible are described by the same author as "an unheard-of devasta­tion and decline of Karelliia. . . . The village land parcels, commercial buildings, and workshops fell vacant. . . . The population was ruined." (R. B. Miuller, Ocherhipo istorii KareliiXVI-XVII vekov, pp. 90-91). I don't think that these facts need any commentary.

would be happy to report on their attempts. And again I have failed to find any.

But there is yet another possible interpretation of the reprisal of the Oprichniki against Novgorod, which has not, to my knowledge, been suggested previously. Just before the Novgorod expedition, Ivan the Terrible had inspected the new and impregnable fortress—a marvel of fortification for its time—being erected in the impassable forests of Vologda. English craftsmen built an entire fleet for him, ca­pable of carrying all the treasures of Muscovy to Solovki, and thence to England, where the tsar intended to emigrate in case he should be unable to sit out a siege behind the walls of the Vologda fortress. (Ne­gotiations with Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador, on the granting of political asylum in England to the tsar in case of need, were complete.) The location of Vologda in the northwestern part of the country was so remote that enemy invasion could not threaten it under any circumstances. There was no one to hide from, unless we count Ivan's own people. In view of these facts, the robbery of Novgo­rod and Pskov may have been dictated by his desire not to arrive in England empty-handed. To be sure, this is only a hypothesis. But whether it is true or not, it is quite obvious that in building the Volog­da fleet and applying for political asylum in England, the tsar was thinking least of all of the fate of Russia. It is difficult to imagine any­thing remotely similar when speaking of Ivan III.

By no means have I tried to draw a rosy picture of the latter here. There were quite a few bloody murders and cruel persecutions in his time. After all, he was no more than a medieval king. But while the medieval Kremlinologists may perhaps triumphantly point this out, what I am stressing is a totally different matter. Ivan III was not an autocrator. That is, however cruel and medieval he may have been, he never dared to violate the latent limitations on power. Indeed, as we shall soon see, he tried to strengthen them. For this reason, I think of him as an essentially European king.

4. The Reversed Stereotype

The stereotype which we encountered in chapter one asserted cate­gorically that Russia began its march from barbarism to civilization only with Peter the Great. Historians of socioeconomic relationships in pre-Petrine Russia are inclined, it seems, to an analogous stereo­type, but in reverse. They take it as a postulate that from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, in the process of feudalizing its economy and society and gradually enserfing its peasantry, Russia went from relatively free status (in medieval terms) to serfdom, which after Peter was transformed into literal slavery. Peasant self-government was gradually destroyed as the landlords seized the "black" lands—that is, those belonging formally to the state, but actually to the peasants. The peasants' freedom of movement was just as gradually limited in the course of the fifteenth century. Finally, in terms of Ivan Ill's law code of 1497, the so-called St. George's Day rule, which gave the peas­ants the choice of leaving their landlords only during two weeks in the year, became law. From here—so runs the stereotype—it was only one step to the complete "tying down" of the peasants, and to the in­troduction, at the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign, of the "forbidden years," eliminating any movement whatever on their part.

This picture of the triumphal progress of the "service" or "pat­rimonial" state well suits the despotists, with their "institutional time bomb." True, by the logic of things, it must annoy the Soviet absolut­ists, if only because it refutes the fundamental Marxist postulate that the movement of the superstructure is determined by the movement of the base. In the Russian case, superstructure and base turn out to move not only in different, but in diametrically opposite directions. The superstructure, as conceived by Soviet historians, moves con­stantly towards absolutism—that is, in a progressive direction. And the base moves towards slavery—that is, in a regressive direction.

This scandalous behavior of the base does not, however, reduce the optimistic tone of genuine science, which alertly masks its dismay, as we have seen, either by boldly attacking Oriental despotism in the West or by consoling itself with the unusually active class struggle in Russia. Even an honest, although supercautious, historian like S. O. Shmidt, for example, writes with pride that in Russia there existed "conditions for the beginning of mass scale uprisings of the 'muti­nous peasantry' cherishing a dream of a peasant state, which had no precedent in the other parts of Europe."[77] Here is how Jerome Blum describes the regularity of the process of disappearance of peasant self-government, in his classical work Lord and Peasants in Russia:

With the increase in privately held property resulting from royal dis­tribution of black land to seigniors, the "volost" form of organization began to disintegrate. Often the princes paid no heed to "volost" bound­aries in making their grants so that the organic unity of the commune was destroyed by its land being distributed among several proprietors. The most debilitating development, however, was the penetration of the landlord into the "volost" organization. First, agents of the seignior began to bypass the commune's own officials. Then the lord forbade the selection of these officials by the peasants. Instead he named them him­self, often selecting them from among his own unfree servants. The final stage was reached when the lord took away all the remaining powers of self-government from the "volost," and placed its entire ad­ministration in the hands of one of his employees or slaves. The grad­ual destruction of the power of the commune on privately-owned land, and the simultaneous disappearance of the black land in much of the state, ended the existence of the independent "volost" as a form of or­ganization so far as most of the peasantry were concerned.²"

Here you see how regularly and, one might say, organically the process of disintegration of peasant self-government proceeded, par­allel with an equally regular process of enserfment of the peasantry. "By the end of the fifteenth century," Blum maintains on this score, "the right of the peasant to free movement had already been cur­tailed. The Code of 1497 had fixed the two weeks at St. George's Day in autumn (25 November) as the only legal time at which the peasant renter could leave his landlord, and had fixed heavy fees that he had to pay before he could depart."

On the other hand, Blum realizes that this was "also official recog­nition of the peasant's time-honored right of departure [from the landlord] protecting him against seignioral attempts to take that priv­ilege from him. If the landlord tried to hold him against his will the peasant could turn to governmental authority to enforce recognition of his freedom to leave at the [legally] appointed time."[78] Blum fur­ther sees that "in the light of these guarantees it would seem plausible to assume that the peasant-renter had complete freedom of movement providing he met the not unreasonable conditions set by the laws."

St. George's Day was November 26 and not 25, and only two pages earlier what are now described as "not unreasonable conditions," were for some reason called a "heavy fee." But let us let the details go and continue the quotation: "From this juristic point of view B. N. Chicherin, one of the first historians of the Russian peasantry, was right when he wrote in 1858 that 'the free movement of the peasantry was a universal phenomenon of old Russia until the end of the six­teenth century.'"[79]

The contradiction is all too evident: on the one hand, it is recog­nized that freedom of movement was "complete"; on the other, it is asserted that it was "curtailed." Trying to reconcile this paradox, Blum writes that Chicherin "and others who agreed with him, con­fused legislative fiat with historical fact."[80] In reality, it turns out that in spite of the laws which protected freedom of movement, "the peas­ant-renter found it increasingly difficult to leave his landlord when he wanted, for the seignior was able to employ a number of devices, both legal and illegal, to keep him from going."²⁴ Thus, the all-powerful (according to Pipes) "patrimonial state" was (according to Blum) pow­erless to compel the Russian landlord to respect its wishes.

But let us leave the two historians to argue between themselves on this point. We are interested in quite another problem: namely that in introducing the St. George's Day legislation under Ivan III, the state, as even Blum recognizes, was trying to defend the peasants' right to complete freedom of movement, while by introducing the "forbid­den years" under Ivan the Terrible, i.e., abolishing St. George's Day, it was trying to destroy this freedom, thereby commencing the somber history of serfdom.

This is not to say, of course, that Ivan III was a passionate de­fender of freedom as such, simply that, unlike his grandson, he was not interested in transforming his subjects into slaves. We have seen how sharply the attitude of the Muscovite government toward the problem of emigration changed over the course of a century—from principled defense of the right to freedom of movement across state borders to "imprisonment [of people] as if in a hellish dungeon." In the difference between St. George's Day and the "forbidden years," we see an identical transformation in its policy on movement within the borders of the state.

So, is the reversed stereotype accurate? Is it not obvious that the expropriation of peasant farms by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina and the abolition of St. George's Day under conditions of terror repre­sented, just as in the case of emigration, not a continuation but a re­jection of the policies of Ivan III? Continuing to ignore the dif­ference between absolutism and autocracy, how are we supposed to explain this fateful change in the policies of the Muscovite state?

Let us go further, however. Was there a regular feudalization of the structure of Russian society from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, and was peasant self-government uniformly destroyed dur­ing this period? The pre-Oprichnina century of Russia was a time, in fact, of intensive movement in the reverse direction, i.e., not toward liquidation, but toward expansion of local, and particularly peasant, self-government. The legislation of Ivan III prepared the great re­form introduced several decades later on a national scale, which, at least in intention, was supposed to represent the transition of power in the localities into the hands of the "best people"—the representa­tives of the properous peasantry and the rising merchant class. This was, in a sense, the creation of a "third estate" in Russian political life. Article 38 of the law code of 1497 forbids the local rulers to hold court "without the elders and without the best people."[81] We can only guess what the actual role of the "elders" in the courts was. But it is obvious that it could have been the beginning of a form of control by the population over judicial procedure. And, as history shows, it was just that.

Article 38 was certainly not so radical a measure as the one specified by the Pinega Charter of February 10,1552 (discovered a quarter cen­tury ago by A. I. Kopanev), where the tsar agrees to the complete re­moval of the governors from judicial and administrative functions and gives the local people themselves the right to elect "from the peasants of their own volosf the best people" or "favorite chiefs," who are to "administer justice in local matters according to our Code."²'¹ But al­though the legislation of Ivan III did not yet go as far as this, it nev­ertheless signaled a new view of society on the legislator's part—a view which, we must assume, reflected social processes which can probably be called defeudalization. Thus, in Article 12 of the code of 1497, "good boyars' children" are equated, as witnesses in court, with "good, black peasant elected jurors."[82] D. P. Makovskii has noted a very impor­tant difference between the administrative charter for the Dvina land in the fourteenth century and the Belozerskii administrative charter of Ivan III (1488). This difference consists, among other things, in the fact that "in the Belozerskii Charter boyar privileges are no longer seen. Ivan III now addresses not the boyars as his grandfather did but 'the people of Belozersk—city dwellers, villagers and volost' people.'"²" Makovskii also noted that "the law code of 1497 protects all property, including that of peasants. An end is put in this code to the feudal law of inheritance reflected in the Russkaia Pravda [a document dating from the Kievan or pre-Mongol period, setting forth the basic provi­sions of the Eastern Slavic code of law, according to which the property of a peasant who died without issue passed to the landlord]. . . . The boyars and men-at-arms—i.e., feudal lords—are not separated out in terms of right of inheritance into a privileged position, as is the case in the Russkaia Pravda."*'

These are, once more, only negative merits by comparison with the law code of 1550, in which an essentially different, and one might say antifeudal, principle of recompense for dishonor is established. Whereas, in the Russkaia Pravda of the twelfth century, the life and honor of a prince's man-at-arms were protected by an indemnity dou­ble that of other free people, in the legislation of the "Government of

Compromise" in the middle of the sixteenth century, the indemnity for dishonor was established "against income." This is already essen­tially, so to speak, the embryo of the bourgeois sense of justice. And this is the only thing which can explain the strange anomaly, for a me­dieval code, by which an offense to "trading people and townsmen and all of those in the middle [i.e., with medium incomes]" is indem­nified at the same rate (five rubles) as an offense to "a good boyar's man." As for "great guests"—i.e., wealthy merchants—the indemnity for offenses to them reaches fifty rubles, or ten times more than for offenses to boyars' men-at-arms.[83]

How are we to explain this gradation, which was revolutionary in terms of the medieval sense of justice? By the fact that Russia, as Makovskii thinks, was being transformed into a bourgeois country? This would, I am afraid, be too much of an exaggeration for boyar Russia, with its votchiny the prevailing form of wealth. But if we aban­don the class point of view, which distorts our perspective on the past, it is explained quite simply by an elementary concern for the eco­nomic welfare of the country. The legislator is beginning to under­stand that "trading people and townsmen" and, in general, "all those in the middle" (i.e., the proto-bourgeoisie), have a value to the coun­try equal to that of soldiers. Rich merchants, from the legislator's point of view, not only represent the country in foreign trade, but as it were symbolize the flowering of the nation. The more of them there are, and the richer they are, the richer the country is. In this sense, they are more important than soldiers (the legislator has made a cal­culation and found that they are ten times more important). Thus, Ivan Ill's legislation untied the hands of his heirs and initiated a posi­tive view on the state's part, not only of peasants' freedom of move­ment but also of economic limitations on power and, in general, of the processes of defeudalization which took place in the pre-Oprich- nina century.

Neither peasant self-government, nor trial by jury, nor the eco­nomic limitations on power and rationalization of the economy re­flected in the legislation of the absolutist century survived the rabid counterattack of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, however. In the code of Tsar Aleksei (1649) there is no longer any mention of any of this. The peasant is again "legally dead"—if it can be so expressed, even "deader" than in the Russhaia Pravda of the twelfth century.

5. The Reformation Against the Reconquista

Though there have been at least a dozen biographies of the grandson (the latest, by R. G. Skrynnikov, was published quite recently in the USSR, and another, by Edward Keenan, is now being written in the United States), a biography of the grandfather does not yet exist.[84]The heads of many generations of school children in Russia are stuffed full of the "exploits" of Ivan the Terrible. But who, other than the specialists, knows anything about Ivan III—a figure whose vague outlines melt into the mists of centuries? Nonetheless, Ivan III was one of the three Russian tsars whom posterity has called great, and the tracks which he left in Russian history are no less deep and signifi­cant than those of his grandson.

The war for the restoration of the ancient otchina of Kievan Rus' was the first of the two imperatives which governed Ivan Ill's strategy after Muscovite Rus' had been "gathered in." Recovery of the third of the land in the country seized by the church under Tatar auspices, a kind of Reconquista of internal policy, was the second. Unlike Ivan's external opponents, the church continued to gather strength. It was the most active entrepreneur and the richest usurer in the country. Landowners bequeathed their lands to the church in memory of their souls, so that it might pray for them forevermore. It seized, bought, obtained by lawsuit, and took for debt more land, "whitening" it through its immunities, and effectively removing it from the state. The votchiny of the Troitse-Sergievskii monastery, B. D. Grekov writes, "grew up on the bones of the boyars."[85] A. I. Kopanev notes of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery: "The votchiny of the temporal feudal lords, which in the fifteenth century were extensive, had almost com­pletely disappeared at the end of the sixteenth. The largest feudal lord of the district—the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery—had taken the bulk of the votchina lands into its hands."[86] The power of the church was spreading through the country as swiftly as a forest fire.

Church reformation was, in this sense, a logical continuation of the annexation of Tver' and Riazan' and the expeditions against Novgorod. With its own administration, holding court and dispens­ing retribution in its territories as an actual sovereign, not paying taxes, and ruining the city dwellers by the competition of its artisans, the church was a true state within a state, and a focus of separatism. Ivan III could scarcely tolerate such a competitor, growing stronger with each year.

But here a strategic dilemma lay in wait for him, for any move against the church weakened his position as the leader of the Recon- quista. The Lithuanian empire held the Ukraine and Belorussia, which according to the "old ways" belonged to Kievan Rus'. Without partitioning Lithuania, there could be no thought of reestablishing the otchina. The way to Kiev—the road of the Reconquista—lay, fig­uratively speaking, through Vil'no. For Ivan III, the political strategy of the Reconquista therefore consisted in raising the gigantic Russian Orthodox mass of the Lithuanian empire against its Catholic govern­ment. Orthodoxy was the sole banner under which Lithuania could be dismembered, and the church, as the guardian of the faith, had to be promoted, not humiliated. The path of primitive plundering of the church on which Ivan the Terrible embarked was excluded for his grandfather. For him the problem may have seemed insoluble. Nev­ertheless, he solved it. The solution was simple—to split the church, just as he intended to split Lithuania.

The grand prince did not have time to impose this solution, how­ever: his first reformist campaign did not break the resistance of the powerful church hierarchy, just as the first campaign against Lithu­ania did not succeed in dismembering it. Ivan was accustomed, as we have seen, to do everything in two stages. But now fate did not leave him time for a second attempt: in the heat of the campaign, he was stricken with paralysis. He had proceeded on the assumption that his descendants would follow his star and complete that which he had not had time to finish, just as he had completed the work of Ivan Ka­lita and Dimitrii Donskoi. But, in the otchina which he had created, matters were more complex than in the Muscovite clan votchina of his ancestors. And he could not have foreseen Ivan the Terrible.

CHAPTER V

JOSEPHITES AND NON-ACQUIRERS

1. Money Versus Corvee

Until the end of the fifteenth century, the Russian peasantry lived for the most part in communes, working land belonging either to the state or to the feudal corporation of the church, or to private individ­uals, and paying for this chiefly in kind, or in the form of various obli­gations. The economic advance which began after Muscovy attained independence created previously unheard-of opportunities for rapid enrichment through agriculture.' However, contrary to what the pro-

1. Academician S. G. Strumilin, a major Soviet authority on economic history, is in­clined to agree with D. P. Makovskii's opinion that this economic upturn made the Rus­sian economy of the first half of the sixteenth century comparable in scale to the econo­mies of Western European countries contemporary with it. In his preface to the second edition of Makovskii's book, he says:

This is indirectly confirmed by the large figures for Russian exports; by the pres­ence of many thousands of merchants within Russia; by the fact that these Rus­sian merchants extended credits of millions of rubles to English merchants, and not vice versa; by the large trade flotilla of vessels, for the serving of which there were required on the Volga alone—figuring 500 vessels with 40 people each— 20,000 hired workers; by the presence of a considerable circle of manufacturing plants with work forces of 30 to 200 persons or more; by the presence of such large-scale entrepreneurs as the Stroganov family of salt merchants, who em­ployed 10,000 hired workers; and by many other indicative facts. (D. P. Makov- skii [2nd ed.], pp. ii-iii).

The word "manufacture" is used here in a specialized Marxist sense, referring to as­sembly-line production by large groups of workers without the use of machines, as oc­curred in the large weaving-shops in Italy and the Low Countries during the fifteenth century. Makovskii himself, incidentally, confirms his contention not only with figures but with a Weberian argument (surprising in the mouth of a Soviet historian) about the rise at this time of a kind of bourgeois ethic in Russia: "The thirst for gain, for enrich­ment, for accumulation . . . took hold of . . . Russia," he writes.

Russian merchants and industrialists seek roads to the East, to Siberia, to Central Asia. Afanasii Nikitin set off "beyond the three seas"; dozens and hundreds of Russian merchants penetrate into many Oriental markets—into the Crimea,

ponents of the "service state" believe, these opportunities led not to a single, fatal line of development but to two opposite lines, correspond­ing to two opposite social processes taking place simultaneously in the country. It is true that the new service nobility—who had no concern either for the rational exploitation of the land, which they held for short periods, or for the fate of the peasants living on it—naturally strove to extract the maximum gain from peasant labor. The best method of doing so seemed to them to be to set up their own farming operations and to compel the peasants to work the landlord's land. This corvee labor logically led to expropriation by the landlords of the peasants' farms, reducing them to something like the household plots of modern collective farmers. And, inasmuch as the peasants naturally resisted any form of collective economy over which they had no control, the logical extension was enserfment and the destruc­tion of the independent volost'.

But the transfer of peasants from rent to corvee—which was ap­parently simply the economic dimension of the political tendency to­ward universal service—was by no means universal over the course of the pre-Oprichnina century. It was no more than a shadowy economic tendency, decidedly secondary both in importance and in scale to the process by which peasant rents became payable in money. This, in turn, gave rise to peasant differentiation, which led inevitably, at least in principle, to the opposite result—that is, not to the enserfment of the peasantry, or to its expropriation as a social group, but to the for­mation of a peasant proto-bourgeoisie capable of exercising political pressure on the government of the country.

In reality, the process of peasant differentiation in the pre-Oprich­nina century of Russian history took on such dimensions (especially in the region of highest economic development, the North)[87] that it was even able, in many cases, to bring about the defeudalization of these regions—dissolution of the feudal elements into a new stratum of farmers, entrepreneurs, and merchants of peasant origin.[88]

The vigor of this process is confirmed by the fact that it stimulated government policy in directions favorable to the peasant proto-bour- geoisie, in particular, the remaking of the entire administrative struc­ture of the country along the lines of local self-government (the Great Reform of 1551-56). Although in formal terms the black peasantry of the North cultivated land belonging to the state, practically speak­ing it was being transformed into private (allodial) property, while the peasantry itself became a class of freeholders.[89]

As a result of all this, there appeared peasants who were econom­ically stronger not only than most pomeshchiki, but also than many bo­yars—peasants who possessed plow land, truck gardens, hayfields, traplines, stockbarns, and even entire villages. But, what is even more important, they also owned fishing and fur enterprises, craft work­shops, and huge salt ponds. These were the peasants whose geneal­ogies N. E. Nosov was able to trace over the course of many genera­tions, just as S. B. Veselovskii traced the genealogies of the ancient boyar families.

Of course, the formation of this elite (the "best people") was accom­panied by the ruin of masses of other peasants. Russian documents of this period are strewn with the designations "cotters," "children," "Cossacks," "sharecroppers," "hirelings," which variously represent landless people who earned their bread as hired labor. As D. P. Makov- skii has demonstrated, in the twelve villages of Viaz'ma uezd (and bear in mind that this was not the North, but the West—the Smolensk coun­ty), of 3,139 existing peasant households, " 1,991 households or 45 per cent of the total were the victims of increasing exploitation, in a form especially severe for the minor peasantry—that of money."¹' In an­other passage, the author notes with appropriate anti-bourgeois indignation:

This separation of the producer from the means of production drove huge masses of people into the street. It was natural that the "poor peo­ple" became the easy prey of various predatory elements which had de­veloped in the depths of the feudal order. Among these predators the most numerous and bloodthirsty were the stratum of "best" or "good" peasants. These peasants not only owned large tracts of land (some ... up to forty to fifty desiatiny in Viaz'ma uezd), but were also en­trepreneurs, owning facilities of various kinds—salt ponds, gristmills, stores. . . . Among the wealthy peasants the entrepreneurial renting of land could frequently be observed, which went by the name of "hiring."⁶

Even if we share Makovskii's indignation over the exploitation of the "producer separated from the means of production," we are nev­ertheless not entitled to forget that (as the author himself shows in other sections of his book) the only alternative to it under the condi­tions of sixteenth-century Russia was corvee, which led to serfdom, under which the producer was attached by force to these very "means of production," and . . . became a slave.

Nosov shows how "as a result of the growing property differentia­tion within Dvina volost' ... it completely loses the features of the old rural commune . . . and is transformed into a territorial unit for pur-

Makovskii, p. 160.

Ibid., pp. 164-65.

poses of administration and taxation ... a black volost' mir,' which united the peasant freeholders . . . and, what was most important, repre­sented their common interests vis-a-vis the state." But all this was true only for the "golden age" of the Russian peasantry, i.e., before the Oprich­nina revolution.

And again, as if by the same magic which determined the fate of emigration, everything suddenly swung around 180 degrees after this revolution:

The disintegration of the volost', as a result of the spoliation and seizure of its lands and also of the fact that certain groups of inhabitants of the volost' fell into personal or economic dependence on neighboring feu­dal lords, undermined the foundations of the volost' peasant mir, de­prived the local peasant magnates of their basic support, and thus closed the pathways leading toward bourgeoisification of the peasantry as a whole. [This "closing of the pathways"] took place in the central regions of northeastern Rus' in the sixteenth century, during and after the time of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, when the process of swallowing up of the black volost' lands by the service landholdings reached its apogee there.[90]

The fate of Russia thus became a question of who, in the final anal­ysis, would get the land belonging to the disintegrating communal mirs—the pomeshchiki living on corvee—that is, the service gentry—or the "best people" of the peasantry—that is, the proto-bourgeoisie.

2. Two Coalitions

The competing socioeconomic forces involved in the historical dis­pute between the pomeshchiki and the proto-bourgeoisie are hardly visible on the political stage in retrospect. Still less obvious is the ideo­logical struggle between the so-called Josephites and Non-Acquirers (see below). The observer sees, rather, a furious struggle between the boyardom and the church.

But the interweaving of these three dimensions of the struggle— the socioeconomic, the political, and the ideological—constitutes the major complexity of this transitional epoch in my view. Who stood with whom? Who represented whom? What was the immanent con­nection between the various levels of this fateful drama? In order to untangle this bundle of conflicting interests, let us attempt to group the major actors on the Muscovite historical scene according to whether they were fighting for or against the latent limitations on power.

The interests of the Russian aristocracy—the boyardom—which by definition defended the social limitations on power (since these were a matter of life and death for it), did not contradict the interests of the peasant proto-bourgeoisie, which by definition defended the economic limitations on power (also a matter of life and death). N. E. Nosov even argues that,

objectively, by virtue of its economic position as an estate of large land­owners, it [the boyardom] was less interested in the mass scale seizure of state lands and in the enserfment of peasants by the state, than was the petty and middling dvorianstvo [the pomeshchiki], and consequently had less need of the strengthening of a military-bureaucratic autocratic sys­tem. In this respect, its interests could sometimes even coincide with those of the upper stratum of merchants.[91]

The connections between the boyardom and the Non-Acquirers, who defended the ideological limitations on power, have long been con­ceded in classical historiography. Even Soviet historians, who hate the boyardom, and therefore see the Non-Acquirers as a reactionary force, have never questioned this verdict.

Thus, on one side of the historical barricade, there appears a sort of latent absolutist political coalition—the Non-Acquirers, the boyars, and the proto-bourgeoisie. But what about the other side of this bar­ricade? Can an opposite, autocratic coalition be discerned there? Why, after all, should the service gentry, the pomeshchiki, oppose the Non- Acquirers? And why should the bureaucracy take up arms against the bourgeoisie?

If the basic problem which the Russian government faced at this time was actually reducible to deciding at whose expense it should sat­isfy the land hunger of the pomeshchiki who constituted its chief mili­tary force, the solution seems relatively clear. This hunger could be satisfied either by the lands belonging to the boyars and peasants (that is, the proto-bourgeoisie) or those belonging to the church. In the ab­sence of an anti-Tatar strategy, there simply was no other choice. Was this not enough to produce a mortal struggle, given that the church hierarchy, too, considered its landholdings a matter of life and death, and was ready to push every available political force, be it the service gentry, the bureaucracy, or even the tsar's personal ambitions, into the battle against its opponents, the great lords?

The lesser gentry and the bureaucracy struggled against the great lords everywhere in Europe. But nowhere else did this struggle reach the point of mortal confrontation which it did in Russia, because no­where else was there such a powerful coalition of forces opposed to Europeanization, inspired and led by so mighty an institution as the Russian Orthodox Church. And here is why, as I see it, the struggle of the Non-Acquirers for the secularization of the church landholdings assumes such a fateful significance. The Non-Acquirers were the ideological side of the absolutist triangle.

3. The Political Function of Secularization

History, unlike boxing, does not usually decide disputes by a knock­out. It awards the victory on points—and then only after a long inter­val, when the original protagonists have long since left the stage. After the Renaissance, for example, it seemed that the entire fabric of society was being swiftly secularized, and that matters would soon end in total separation of the culture from the church. Instead, there fol­lowed a period of religious wars—the epoch of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Only many centuries afterward would the cul­ture in fact be separated from the church.

The analogy may similarly be applied to the struggle between monetary rent and corvee. With the great expansion of monetary rent in the first half of the sixteenth century, it seemed as though all Europe was on the threshold of bourgeoisification (so, too, it ap­peared in retrospect in the case of Russia to historians such as Makov­skii and Nosov). Then, however, in many countries there followed a time of reaction, when corvee appeared to be on the winning side. Only after many decades did monetary rent triumph there over its rival.

This, at least, was how analogous conflicts turned out in the other states of the northeastern corner of Europe. Take, for example, Den­mark and Sweden—also northerly and rather backward countries, whose fate, like that of Russia, was determined in the dispute between the service gentry and the proto-bourgeoisie. Both of these countries, like Russia, came to know the taste of corvee and feudal reaction (in Denmark's case, even the enserfment of the peasantry), and fell into the power of paranoid tyrants like Ivan the Terrible. They stood at the very edge of the precipice of autocracy. But they stood firm there. Why?

The decisive reason seems to have been precisely the secularization of church landholdings. As distinct from Russia, both of these coun­tries slaked the land hunger of the feudal service gentry not at the expense of land belonging to the great lords and the peasantry, but from the church's land fund; thus, they succeeded both in preserving the power of the aristocracy and sustaining peasant differentiation. When King Christian III of Denmark arrested the bishops and took away their lands and privileges in 1536, as a result of which royal landholdings were increased by a factor of three, it meant, in plain terms, that the land hunger of the Danish service gentry was satisfied at the expense of the church. Corvee and serfdom thus triumphed only in one sector of the national economy, and did not spread over the entire country or become state policy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, a time of reaction all over Europe, when the Russian peasantry was already hopelessly enserfed, not more than 20 percent of the peasantry in Denmark was burdened with corvee, and the sale of peasants without land did not become widespread. The history of Sweden provides still clearer indication of the decisive sig­nificance of the secularization of church lands. Though this led to the concentration of more than half of Sweden's land in the hands of the gentry, fears of "Livonian slavery"—that is, the total enserfment of the peasants—remained no more than that.'" Thus, in both cases, sec­ularization served as the basis for an absolutist compromise between the various factions and institutions of feudal society, permitting Denmark and Sweden to retain the "equilibrium" of social forces for which Soviet historians now long in vain. The social limitations on power therefore remained untouched in Denmark and Sweden, as distinct from the case in Russia.

In the second place, secularization prevented the eradication of peasant differentiation on lands belonging to the state and the aris­tocracy, thereby preserving a sector of the country's land fund on which the proto-bourgeoisie could develop. In my terms, this means that, as distinct from what happened in Russia, the economic limita­tions on power were not destroyed.

And, last but not least, secularization separated the church, and with it the intellectual potential of the country, from the defense of private economic interests. In so doing, it transformed the now land­less church into the custodian of the only treasure which remained to it—the ideological limitations on power.

Secularization could not prevent corvee and the depredations of the service gentry, the tyranny of monarchs, or the enserfment of the peasantry. But it could prevent these depredations, this tyranny, this enserfment from becoming total. By furthering the retention of la­tent limitations on power, it prevented an Oprichnina "revolution from above," Russian-style.

4. The Preparation for the Assault

How did it happen that this "revolution from above" was not pre­vented in Russia? Why was it that secularization of church lands did not occur there, too, in the key century in which the fate of the coun­try was decided?

The Muscovite sovereigns did not have to defend their authority against the claims of a universal hierarchy. After the Union of Flor­ence in 1439, when the Patriarchate of Constantinople, seeking a last refuge from the Turkish onslaught, agreed in desperation to the pope's suzerainty, Greek Orthodoxy became in the eyes of Muscovites a dubious and almost seditious thing. Thus, from the middle of the fifteenth century onward, the state and the church stood opposite each other in Muscovy on the same national ground. But did this make the task of secularization easier? From the point of view of the current stereotypes, it unquestionably did. But, as we shall see shortly, the church was by no means defenseless in the face of the "total­itarian" (to use Toynbee's word) power of the omnipotent "service" state. The fact that the national ecclesiastical leadership could not be presented in Russia as the agents of a foreign hierarchy, as happened in Denmark, Sweden, or England, greatly complicated the state's dis­pute with the church. And the authority and ideological power of the state and the church were not equal in Russia. The church, contrary to the Toynbeean theory, was much stronger.

When Moscow was still only dreaming of the unification of Rus' and supremacy over it, the Russian church was already unified and rigidly centralized, and had achieved privileges and immunities more extensive perhaps than were enjoyed by any other church in Europe. It owed all of this not to Constantinople or Moscow, but to the Tatars, who were responsible for both its material might and its spiritual worthlessness. If we seek the roots of Tatar influence on Muscovy, then, paradoxical as it may seem, they should be sought primarily in the Orthodox Church. It was no accident that in defending their feu­dal perquisites as late as the sixteenth century, many years after the yoke had been thrown off, the Muscovite prelates still shamelessly re­ferred to the Tatar yarlyfo, or decrees issued by the khans of the Golden Horde. The yarlyks were, in fact, unbelievably generous. From the church—runs one document of the khans, which had the force of law—"no tribute, or turnover taxes, or tillage taxes, or land and water transport duties, or war taxes, or maintenance of officials are to be exacted; and no royal tax whatever is to be taken." And not only the church but all those under its protection are to be exempt from such impositions: "and the church's people, craftsmen, falcon­ers ... or men and women servants and any of their people—who­ever are hired either for work or as guards." In addition to the guarantee of church property and exemption from all taxes, duties, obligations, and charges, and in general from all the burdens of the "yoke," the church was also granted the supreme power over its peo­ple: "The Metropolitan is to give judgment and administer his people in all matters: in robbery and theft with material evidence the Metro­politan alone, or whoever he orders to do so, is to be the judge in all cases."" In a subjugated, plundered, and humiliated country, the church was an inviolate and untouched island, a fortress of prosperity.

But the Tatars were by no means philanthropists. They were pay­ing the church for its collaboration—for the spiritual sword which Orthodoxy placed at their feet. There is no need for us to explain here how relations between the Orthodox Church and its Muslim suzerains developed over the course of the centuries, and indeed there came a day when the church betrayed the Tatars. But for a long time they had no reason to regret their generosity to it. In any case, it was not the church which was obliged to Moscow for its power, but Moscow which was obliged to the church. In the fourteenth century, the church had helped the Horde to defeat an anti-Tatar uprising led by Tver'. Moscow was its favorite in the rivalry of the Russian prince­doms for leadership.

Ivan III, the first Russian sovereign to be aware of the danger of church landholdings, was nevertheless compelled to reckon with the "sacred old ways" which Orthodoxy embodied. There was also the need to split Lithuania by taking advantage of its Orthodox-Catholic antagonisms. Unlike Gustav Vasa in Sweden, or Henry VIII in En­gland, Ivan could not, therefore, simply confiscate the land of the monasteries. The confrontation with the church required deep strat­egy—and, moreover, in an area where he, as a pragmatist and profes­sional politician, had the least experience. For this confrontation called not so much for political as for ideological skills.

True, there was an ideological breach in the adversary's armor, the old debate about the limits of intervention by the state in the compe­tence of the church. Metropolitan Kiprian in the fourteenth century, as well as Metropolitan Fotii in the fifteenth, had asserted the com­plete independence of the church. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, the elder Akindin had argued for the right of the prince to sit in judgment on the metropolitan himself, if he proved guilty of violating a canon. Kirill of Belozersk, Metropolitan Iona, Iosif of Volokolamsk, Metropolitans Daniil and Makarii, the elder Filofei, and even the teachers of the schism held the same position. The debate was by no means scholastic but profoundly utilitarian. The Russian church, being occupied basically with earthly, secular, not to say economic matters, was never able to cope with heresy in open ideological battle. The sword of the grand prince was needed. The propagandists of the church called down administrative thunder upon the heretics, thereby revealing their own ideological weakness, and at the same time giving the state a legal pretext, recognized by the church itself, for interfering in its internal affairs.

A less perspicacious leader than Ivan III might have sought in heresy a means of reforming the church. Many people at his court did precisely this. Elena Stefanovna, his daughter-in-law and the mother of Crown Prince Dimitrii, headed an influential circle of her­etics. Heretics also held powerful positions in government. One of the men closest to Ivan, his most eminent diplomat, the high secretary Kuritsyn, was a heretic.[92] But though the grand prince might be the patron of heretics, he could not himself become one. He needed, rather, a moderate ideological doctrine which would imply that land- ownership by the church was harmful to Russian Orthodoxy, and hence itself heresy. Essentially, he needed Protestantism, whose exis­tence he didn't even suspect. He needed a strategy analogous to the one by whose aid he had split Novgorod and was preparing to split Lithuania: two contending factions within the church which he could manipulate. But where was he to get Russian Protestantism?

There existed, independently of the strategy of Ivan III, a modest sect of "Trans-Volga elders"—strict anchorites who had taken ref uge in the forests from the temptations of monastic greed, and preached "intelligent action" [umnoe delanie]. Teaching that "he who prays only with the mouth, and forgets about the mind, prays to the air: God is listening to the mind," the elders believed that true closeness to God was to be achieved not by fasting, deprivation, and disciplinary mea­sures, but by having "the mind keep watch over the heart" and con­trol sinful passions and thoughts deriving from the world and the flesh.

One can interpret this doctrine as a Russian proto-Protestantism, but in any case it was only a sprout which had not yet had time to put down roots, and so weak that it could easily be smothered (like its ana­log, the proto-bourgeoisie). All of Ivan Ill's persistence was needed simply in order to discover the meek elders, let alone to draw them into the political arena—the orbit of the furious human passions which were precisely what they were fleeing from. Yet they had to be transf ormed into something reminiscent of political party (later to be­come known as the Non-Acquirers).

Of course, Ivan III was not the only factor here. Ecclesiastic up­heaval was at that time common to all of Europe, and the Russian church was no exception. In the 1480s and 1490s, the crisis was in full swing: the church was shaken by heresy. But in order to create a se­rious renovationist movement, personnel were needed who were not available, not to speak of high consciousness of duty, of which the in­habitants of the monasteries of that time—pragmatists and men of affairs like their sovereign—were decidedly incapable. The social and the cultural functions of the church were not carried out. Greed con­sumed discipline; corruption, its spiritual goals. It was a successful usurer, entrepreneur, and landowner, but had ceased to be a pastor of the people and the intellectual leadership of the nation. Though spir­itually stagnant, it grew materially like a cancerous tumor, irresistibly spreading through the body of the country. This was clear to every­one—the heretics and the grand prince, the Non-Acquirers and their opponents alike.

In the well-known questions of the tsar to the assembly of the church of 1551, written for him by the Government of Compromise, the state of things is described as passionately and vividly as though the author were the main propagandist of the Non-Acquirer move­ment himself—the Russian Luther, the monk-prince Vassian Pa- trikeev, of whom we shall speak soon.

People go into monasteries not in order to save their souls, but in order to carouse all the time. Archimandrites and abbots buy their positions without knowing either the divine service or brotherhood . . . they buy villages for themselves and some are always asking me for land. Where are the profits, and who gains any advantage from them? . . . Such is the disorder and complete indifference to God's church and the struc­ture of the monasteries. . . . Who is responsible for all this sin? And how are the souls of laymen to gain advantage and to be turned away from all evil? If there [in the monasteries] everything is done not ac­cording to God, what good can our worldly flock expect from us? And who are we, to ask for God's mercy?^1:1

This is spoken not out of political calculation but by the troubled medieval conscience itself. Something has to be done about the church; otherwise there will be no forgiveness for us even in this world, let alone in the next.

Such was the challenge to which the Russian church responded with two opposed solutions, which we may arbitrarily call reforma­tion and counter-reformation. And this was also a response common to all the developing European nations.

5. The Arguments of the Counter-Reformation

To the Non-Acquirers, led by the famous monk and writer Nil Sor- skii, the secularization of church lands meant the liberation of the church to fulfill its natural function as the intellectual and spiritual staff of the nation. For the first time in centuries, Russian Orthodoxy was offered a chance to cleanse itself of the mire of the Tatar heritage. The Non-Acquirers were not, of course, concerned about the political necessity of secularization which preoccupied their royal patron, and still less about the economic need to protect the interests of the f ragile Russian proto-bourgeoisie. For them, the reformation began and ended with the reform of the church. They spoke against the execu­tion of heretics; they were outraged by the exploitation of peasants on monastery lands; they were, in general, proponents of, shall we say, "Orthodoxy with a human face," and as such defended all the ag­grieved and persecuted. But their ideas, particularly at the begin­ning, lacked any clear political articulation.'⁴ Their opponents, on the other hand, led by the head of the Volokamansk monastery, Iosif, were openly and clearly politicized from the outset.

As early as 1889, M. D'iakonov called attention to the fact that it was precisely Iosif who put forward the "revolutionary thesis" that it is necessary to resist the will of the sovereign if he deviates from the norms of piety. In the heat of the struggle against the secularizing plans of Ivan III, the Josephites advanced the doctrine of the legit­imacy of resistance to state power, as V. Val'denberg noted in 1916. Their arguments, the first such in Russian literature, were substantial and serious.

They by no means disputed that the church was in disarray, and they did not deny the need for reforms. They just claimed the role of genuine reformers for themselves. Yes, Iosif agreed, money grubbing is pernicious for monks as individuals subject to moral corruption— but not for monasteries as religious institutions. "It is true that monks sin, but the church of God and the monasteries commit no sin at all."[93] The monk retreats from the world and returns to it no longer as an individual, but as a part of the holy corporation, a tool of its collective will. Hence the reforms proposed by Iosif—the revival of the true norms of monastic life, the dissolution of individuality in the church, and fundamental purification of the monastic collective thereby. Just as the Non-Acquirer movement bore within itself ele­ments of proto-Protestantism, so the Josephite apologia for collectiv­ism had a pronounced Catholic tinge.

But Iosif not only spoke and wrote; he acted. This Muscovite Loy­ola was not only a brilliant ideologist, but a talented administrator. He transformed his Volokolamsk monastery into a model monastic estab­lishment, a preserve of ecclesiastical culture, and a political academy from which several generations of high Russian prelates came. Who could have known at the time that this monastery would remain an isolated ideal, owing its flourishing condition only to Iosif's charis­matic leadership? In any case, the Josephites were a serious and for­midable foe, and for this reason the Non-Acquirer movement became, for the grand prince, not merely a justification for secularization, but also a political ideology.

6. Before the Assault

Ivan prowled around the idea of secularization for a long time, and prepared for it slowly, as he did everything. Let us not forget that he did not have at his disposal the historical experience of secularization. The German, Scandinavian, and English reforms belonged to the fol­lowing generation."' In his time they were still only maturing in the minds of Europeans—minds to which Ivan III did not have access. He came to this idea independently; he invented it himself; it was dear to him, and he bequeathed it to his successors as the pearl of his political experience.

In 1476—78, in the course of the great confiscations in Novgorod, Ivan III took away from the Novgorod clergy a part of its lands, "since those lands from time immemorial belonged to the grand prince, and [the archbishop and the monasteries] had themselves seized them." Although the standard reference to the "old ways" is again present, as we see, this measure could be—and was—inter­preted as political repression. But twenty years later we suddenly read in the chronicle that again "the grand prince took over the pat­rimonial estates of the church in Novgorod and gave them out to the boyars' children as service estates . . . with the blessing of Metro­politan Simon.'"⁷ This time the "old ways" were not invoked, and the confiscation could not be interpreted as a political act: there was nothing for which the Novgorodian church should be punished. It was rather an attempted frontal attack, without any ideological provi­sioning. And although the grand prince made several such attempts (by limiting the expansion of the monastery of Saint Cyril at Be- loozero, by suggesting to the bishop of Perm' that he return "to the people, the land and forests and pastures which the prelate had taken from them," and by forbidding the thirty families of princes of Suz­dal' to bequeath their lands to the monasteries "for masses"), it soon became obvious that matters would not go forward this way. The hi­erarchy started worrying: attacks on the grand prince became open; the matter went so far that he began to be cursed from the pulpit and pamphlets began to be written against him. In short, the fortress of the church, Toynbee's categorical assertion notwithstanding, ap­peared not to be vulnerable to a frontal attack. Having found this out, Ivan III, as always, retreated.