The Origins of Autocracy

But, as always, he did so only in order to try to gain his ends by an indirect route. As early as the i480s, he had turned his attention to the Non-Acquirers, and now he tried to place "his people" in the highest ranks of the church. Nil Sorskii's teacher, the humble hermit of Beloozero, Paisii Yaroslavov, was suddenly appointed to the post of abbot of the Troitsa Monastery. Elevated to the peak of the Orthodox hierarchy, the elder was inevitably caught up in a political campaign.

One after another, over the course of the pre-Oprichnina century, four generations of Non-Acquirers emerged into the political arena, until they were destroyed or implicated as heretics or fled the country under Ivan the Terrible. We will meet some of them later, and see them grow and mature before our eyes. What Ivan the Terrible did to them constitutes the first act in the drama of the Russian intelligentsia.

The post of abbot of the Troitsa was to be only the first step in the political career of the hermit of Beloozero, according to Ivan Ill's plan. As soon as Metropolitan Gerontii fell ill, Paisii was at once rec­ommended by the grand prince for the metropolitan's chair—that is, for the very helm of church policy.

The metropolitan recovered, however, and, worse, Paisii refused.^IB Ivan III had called on him to struggle against the entire hierarchy. But the Non-Acquirer generation of 1480 was obviously not pre­pared for this. It was necessary to turn to the heretics.

In 1480, while in Novgorod, Ivan had received denunciations of two heretical priests, Dionisii and Aleksei. Instead of punishing them, he took these seditious persons with him to Moscow, where both of them were suddenly raised to dizzying heights: they became the arch- priests of the Uspenskii and Arkhangel'skii cathedrals respectively. Then, after Gerontii died, the grand prince approved the appoint­ment to the metropolitan's chair of the Archimandrite Zosima, who was suspected—apparently not without reason—of being in sympa­thy with the heretics.

Iosif's comrade-in-arms was the ferocious Gennadii, archbishop of Novgorod, who literally every month discovered new nests of heretics in his archdiocese, and constantly called for an antiheretical cam­paign throughout Russia. The grand prince now forbade him to come to Moscow for the installation of the new metropolitan, who was himself—Gennadii did not doubt for a minute—a heretic. This was an open scandal. Could Gennadii keep silent, when in his letter to the church assembly of 1490 he had declared that it was criminal even to argue about the faith with heretics? ("One has only to convene the assembly in order to execute them, by burning or hanging," he wrote.)[94] Inspired by the example of Spanish Catholicism, Gennadii had praised the way the Catholics had "cleansed their earth."[95] Could Iosif himself be silent, for that matter, after writing to the bishop of Suzdal' that,

From the time when the sun of Orthodoxy rose over our land, we have never had so much heresy: in houses, on the streets, in the mar­ketplace, everyone—both monks and laymen—is dubiously discussing the faith, basing themselves not on the doctrine of the prophets, the apostles, and the Holy Fathers, but on the words of heretics, apostates from Christianity; they make friends with them, learn Jewishness from them. And the heretics never leave the metropolitan's house, and even sleep there.²'

New ideas were advanced, disputed, rejected, and advanced again—and not only within closed circles of scholars or government officials. None of the conflicting factions were officially embraced by the government. An open struggle of ideas permeated the air of Mus­covy. To me this picture alone certifies beyond any doubt that the gov­ernment of Ivan III recognized ideological limitations on power.

Well, one might argue that the state did not persecute the heretics because heresy was to its advantage. This is true. But neither did it persecute their opponents. Just after the first confiscations in Novgo­rod, Gennadii, on his own initiative, included in the ritual of the church a special anathema on those who "offend against the sacred things of the church.'"[96] Everyone understood perfectly whom Novgo­rod's priests were cursing from the pulpits of the churches. And nothing happened: Gennadii was not ousted, and the anathema was not even forbidden. In the 1480s, Gennadii's cothinkers published a tract with a title six lines long, which for some reason is known in the literature as "A Short Word in Defense of Monastery Property." The authors of the "Short Word" by no means briefly, and quite openly, took to task tsars who "allowed violations of the law."[97] And the cir­culation of the tract was not prohibited. Iosif fearlessly pronounced anathema on the grand prince in numerous letters and pamphlets, stating that "if he who wears the crown begins to follow the same sins . . . may he be cursed in this age and in the future one."[98]

Does this boiling Muscovite Athens sound like the voiceless desert of the "service state" ?

With the memories of the Tatar heritage still fresh, and national feelings high, Russia argued, harangued, denounced, and preached. There was no official monologue by the state; there was open, fero­cious ideological dialogue. And all this was, moreover, on the thresh­old of the expected end of the world. In a few years, according to the Orthodox calendar, the seventh millennium since the creation would come to an end, and at its conclusion the Messiah was supposed to appear anew before the eyes of an amazed humanity. Passions were heated to the boiling point; the hierarchy was in open revolt. Ivan III did not let matters come to an explosion, however. Once again, he was the first to retreat, turning over to Gennadii several heretics from Novgorod who had fled under his protection to Moscow.

But an antiheretical campaign throughout the nation did not fol­low. This gambit of the grand prince's was intended, no doubt, to buy off the hierarchy—to let some steam out of the boiling kettle of Jose- phite passions, and at this price to preserve Kuritsyn, Elena Stefa- novna, and his grandson and heir Dimitrii. But it seems, too, that un­der the influence of the events in Novgorod, the grand prince evolved the treacherous and cynical political scenario which was played out a few years later at the church assembly of 1504—a plan to trade heresy for the church lands.

7. The First Assault

A letter sent by Iosif to the Archimandrite Mitrofan, the grand prince's personal chaplain, relates an unexpected scene, in which Ivan III invited Iosif, who had until quite recently been a disgraced monk, to visit him, and held a long conversation with him about church affairs. In the course of this, the sovereign suddenly revealed "to what heresy the archpriest Aleksei adhered and to what heresy Fedor Kuritsyn adhered," and even denounced his daughter-in-law, Elena, admitting that "he knew about their heresies" and asking for­giveness. What could be the meaning of this abandonment of friends and advisors whom he had supported for many years, this humble request for pardon on the part of a mighty ruler, addressed to a mo­rose and implacable nonconformist who pursued goals which were extremely dubious from the grand prince's point of view? What, if not an offer of a political deal? Apparently, however, Iosif remained unmoved. It is true that the grand prince did not hasten to fulfill his pledge to carry out the national campaign which Gennadii and Iosif had been seeking for more than a quarter of a century and "hunt out and uproot the heretics." A year after the meeting, Iosif complained bitterly in the same letter to Mitrofan of Ivan's failure to dispatch the promised witch-hunters: "I hoped that the sovereign would send them immediately, but it is already more than a year since that great day, and he, the sovereign, has not sent them.'"[99]

Instead of an antiheretical campaign, in fact, the grand prince pre­pared an unexpected blow at the hierarchy. It came in 1503, at what was perhaps the most dramatic church assembly in the history of Rus­sian Orthodoxy. The assembly had been called to consider a purely practical question—whether widowers were to be permitted to serve in the priesthood. The prelates assembled, spoke, adopted a decision to forbid widowed priests. Matters of third-rate importance remained to be dealt with. Suddenly, in the half-empty hall, the grand prince himself appeared. His speech was entirely unambiguous. As one of the documents describing this dramatic event has it: "The Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich wished to take from the metropolitan and the other church dignitaries, and from the monasteries, their villages, and unite them with his own, and to give all the metropolitan and other dignitaries money from his treasury and grain from his gra­naries."^2e In other words, he wanted to transfer the ecclesiastical busi­nessmen to the state service and put them on salary. The matter did not end there. The sovereign was followed onto the podium by his sons, Vasilii and Dimitrii, then by the Tver' boyar, Vasilii Borisov, then by the high secretaries, the heads of the Muscovite government departments, and, finally—and this was certainly the nucleus of the plan—by the dissidents, led by the leader of the second generation of Non-Acquirers, Nil Sorskii. This time they were not timid, as Paisii had been. They attacked the hierarchy in heated speeches, denounc­ing monastery landholding as a deviation from Christ's law, a sin, and an injustice. Note that until now the "accusers" (of the grand prince, the metropolitan, and the heretics) had been exclusively Josephites. To use modern language, this had been a critique from the right: the hierarchy attacked the state for deviating from the norms of piety. Now the attack came from the left. The church was finally split. The state now appeared in the role of guardian of the purity of Ortho­doxy—the situation for which Ivan III had waited so long in the mat­ter of Novgorod, in the struggle against Lithuania, and in the war with the hierarchy. According to some sources, the Non-Acquirers de­manded the secularization not of all the church lands, but merely of those of the monasteries. If this is true (and the attempt to divide the opposition was certainly in the spirit of Ivan III), then this was pre­cisely the compromise path which the English state took three dec­ades later in its struggle with the church. Along with all the other facts, it indicates a well-prepared and organized assault on the for­tress of the church.

For the first time the state acted in direct concert with the intel­ligentsia. (The second time was long delayed: not until 350 years later, in the 1850s, at the time of the Great Reforms, was this alliance renewed.) Nevertheless, the position of the grand prince had one serious flaw—the immaturity of the second generation of Non-Ac­quirers, who should have more accurately appraised the resistance of the hierarchy and foreseen its arguments. They were responsible for the intellectual side of the operation, so to speak, and they suffered a defeat.[100]

Attacked from all sides, the metropolitan and the assembly nev­ertheless did not despair, but took counsel and decided to refuse the grand prince's request. A long epistle, replete with quotations from the Bible and the Levitical Books, from the Holy Fathers and the Tatar yarlyks, was written and sent to the grand prince by the secretary Levash. Ivan rejected this: neither the Levitical Books nor the Tatar yarlyks sufficed to convince him. The assembly again took counsel, prepared a second reply, adding further quotations from the Bible, and went in a body to read it to the sovereign. The Biblical texts once again left the grand prince cold. A. S. Pavlov, the author of a study of the secularization of church lands published in Odessa in 1881, which is in my opinion still unsurpassed, conjectures as to why it was neces­sary for the assembly to prepare a third response, and why this third reply worked, compelling Ivan to retreat. "Probably the grand prince requested certain additional clarifications; at any rate, the assembly once again sent the secretary Levash to him with a new report literally confirming the content of the first," Pavlov writes. Contradicting him­self, he adds that the third version "only gives a considerably more detailed discussion of the Russian princes who gave the church dis­tricts and villages."[101]

This was precisely the gist of the matter: the "old ways." The lam­entations and accusations of Nil Sorskii could not compete with the iron canons of tradition. And the second generation of the Non- Acquirers had nothing more to offer the grand prince: warriors and politicians they were not, merely moralists. Here is what was said in that fateful addition to the assembly's reply, by which the hierarchy with great inventiveness—one must admit—turned back the first sec­ularizing assault:

Thus, in our Russian lands, under thy forefathers, the grand princes— under Grand Prince Vladimir and his son Grand Prince Iaroslav, and after them, under Grand Prince Vsevolod and Grand Prince Ivan, the grandson of the blessed Aleksandr . . . the prelates and the monasteries held cities, regions, settlements, and villages, and received tribute for the church.[102]

A decade later, a third branch of the Non-Acquirer movement arose, and the caustic, tocsinlike preaching of Nil Sorskii's famous pupil, Vassian Patrikeev, with which not even Iosif himself could cope, thundered out over Muscovy. It contained precisely what was needed for a new assault on the fortress of the church. Vassian was a cothinker of the grand prince and a consistent conservative. "Think and reflect," he preached,

who, of those who radiated sanctity and built monasteries, took care to acquire villages? Who entreated the tsars and the grand princes for privileges for themselves, and for offense to surrounding peasants? Who brought suit against another person in a dispute over property lines, or tormented human bodies with whips or placed them in chains, or took away estates from their brothers ... as do those who now give themselves out as wonder-workers? Neither Pakhomii or Evfimii or Gerasim or Afanasii of Athos—not one of them lived by such rules, or taught his disciples anything of the kind.

There followed a detailed enumeration of "our Russian . . . found­ers of monastic life and wonder-workers, Antonii and Feodosii Pe- cherskii, Varlaam of Novgorod, Sergius of Radonezh, and Dimitrii Prilutskii," who "lived in extreme need so that they often did not even have their daily bread; but the monasteries did not fall into ruin from poverty but grew and flourished in all things, being filled with monks who worked with their own hands and earned their bread in the sweat of their brows.'""'

As for Iosif's dialectical mysticism relating to the individual and the collective, Maxim the Greek replied to it devastatingly: "What you say is ridiculous—being no different than if many persons were living in sin with one harlot, and being found out in this, each of them would say: 'I have committed no sin whatever, for she belongs to all of us equally."""

The arguments advanced by Vassian and Maxim depicted the con­temporary disorders in the church as divine punishment for betrayal of the ancient traditions and desecration of "our Russian old ways." Yes, Ivan III could have answered the Josephite majority in the as­sembly, had he had Vassian Patrikeev at his back, our pious ancestors, the grand princes of Muscovy, did donate "cities, regions, settle­ments, and villages" to the monasteries. We do not deny this. But

what use can it be to the pious princes who offered all this to God, if you use the offerings unjustly and extortionately, completely contrary to their pious intention? You live in abounding wealth, and eat more than a monk needs, and your peasant brothers, who work for you in your villages, live in dire poverty. . . . How well you repay the devout princes for their pious gifts! . . . They offered their property to God in order that his devotees . . . should practice prayer and silence, unhindered, and spend the excess from their yearly income with love in supporting the poor and the pilgrims. . . . You either turn it into money to lend out in interest, or else keep it in storehouses, in order later to sell it at a high price during times of famine.[103]

We have quoted above Ivan IV's questions to the assembly of 1551, written for him by the fourth generation of Non-Acquirers—the pupils of Vassian Patrikeev and Maxim the Greek, who had by then come to exercise a direct influence on the government of Russia. The Non-Acquirers had grown from hermits and moralists into political fighters and statesmen (and, incidentally, magnificent pamphleteers, with whom neither Herzen nor Dostoevsky would have been ashamed to associate). From the timid Paisii Iaroslavov, who was frightened by the monks of the Troitsa, to Vassian Patrikeev, to whom even Iosif gave in, to Artemii, the tsar's counsellor during the assembly of 1551, Ivan III had summoned into being an intelligentsia capable of inter­preting the history of the country as he himself could not. This could have proved to be the beginning of a European course for Russia. But fate decreed otherwise. On July 28, 1503, Ivan III was almost inca­pacitated by a stroke which "took from him a leg, a hand, and an eye."

Half-paralyzed, he tried to carry on the struggle. At the assembly of 1504, a large group of heretics was handed over to the Josephites, and many of them were burned. But there immediately followed an unexpected event, not yet understood by historians: Archbishop Gen- nadii, the Russian grand inquisitor, who had reached the summit of his power and had just returned from the assembly as a triumphant victor, was suddenly deposed. How are we to explain this?

The grand prince seems to have been preparing a counterblow. In the 1490s, when a group of heretics was also turned over to the in­quisitors, there followed not the expected antiheretical campaign throughout the nation, but the first secularization campaign of 1503.

Might one not anticipate a second such assault after the second hand­ing over of heretics? In other words, the assemblies of 1503 and 1504 may be seen not as the end of the secularization campaign, as the ex­perts have said and continue to say, but as the beginning of a new phase of it. Hardly anyone will dispute that the military campaign of 1500-1503 was only the first round of the assault on Lithuania in the eyes of the grand prince. But no one has ever viewed the seculariza­tion campaign of 1503-4 as a first assault on church landholdings.

The campaign against Lithuania ended in the same year of 1503 not with a peace but with a truce. Despite having routed the Lithua­nian armies and received by the terms of the truce nineteen cities, seventy volosts, twenty-two fortresses, and nineteen villages—that is, having achieved the most brilliant military success, after the Ugra and the overthrow of the Tatar yoke, of his reign—the grand prince flatly refused to consider the matter closed. (On the contrary, the Mus­covite ambassadors were ordered to tell the khan of the Crimea, Men- gli-Girei, that "the grand prince has no firm peace with the Lithua­nian [king] . . . the grand prince wishes to have his country back from him, and all the Russian lands; but he has made a truce with him now, so as to let the people rest and to attach to himself the cities which have been taken.")[104] Can the sensational ouster of Gennadii, fresh from his triumph, not be interpreted as a sign that with the church, just as with Lithuania, a truce had been concluded in 1503, not a peace?

"The collapse of the plans for secularization put forward by Ivan III was historically predictable. The economic prerequisites for liqui­dation of feudal ownership of land by the monasteries and churches had not yet matured in the Russian state of the sixteenth century," writes the well-known Soviet historian S. M. Kashtanov.[105] What eco­nomic prerequisites were necessary? And why had they matured even in Iceland, but not in Muscovy? It is unknown. Another Soviet histo­rian, Iu. K. Begunov, tells us that

the events of 1503 showed the presence of a certain equilibrium of forces between the contending sides—the state and the church. . . . Under such conditions a compromise between the office of the priest and the office of the tsar on mutually advantageous conditions was in­evitable: the blood of the heretics and new grants of land to the church in exchange for concrete ideological support—prayers for the tsar and the proclamation of the status of the Russian sovereign as the sole de­fender of Orthodoxy.[106]

This argument is rather confusing, since if in his struggle against the hierarchy, the grand prince needed "concrete ideological support," it could only be the support of the hierarchy's adversaries, which he al­ready had. And, what is more, he needed this support not for giving the hierarchy "new grants of land" but, on the contrary, for taking its lands away, which was, after all, one of the two greatest imperatives of his entire political life-strategy.

G. V. Plekhanov, writing more than sixty years ago, articulated the point of view which prevails even today:

The dispute about monastery landholdings, which pushed the thought of the Muscovite writers in the same direction in which the thought of the Western clerical king-fighters had proceeded so early and so boldly, very soon ended with a negotiated peace. Ivan III abandoned the thought of secularizing the monastery lands, even agreed to the cruel persecution of the "Judaizers," whom the Orthodox clergy hated, and whom he had so recently and so unambiguously supported.^w

In all of these interpretations—in which, incidentally, it is quite clear that the absolutists, despite all their righteous indignation in theory, are fully agreed in practice with their opponents the despo­tists—the struggle of the state with the church in the pre-Oprichnina century appears as a transient episode in Russian history, which came, went, and left no trace behind it. But in fact this struggle was an en­tirely logical continuation of the internal policy of the developing ab­solutist state. Everywhere in Europe, this process was connected with the formation of the proto-bourgeoisie, the rise of Protestantism, and the breaking up of autonomous feudal corporations competing with centralized authority. So it was in Russia too. One after another, Ro­stov, Novgorod, and Tver' had fallen. There remained the church— the mightiest feudal corporation of medieval Rus'. Ivan's campaign against the Josephites was fundamentally an extension of the battles of Kulikovo Pole, of the Ugra, and of the Novgorod expedition.

This epochal struggle of the state and the Non-Acquirer movement against the Josephite hierarchy left behind it the tradition of the Rus­sian intelligentsia and of the Russian political opposition: the tradition of sympathy for the oppressed little man (all the so-called "peasant- ophilism" of Russian literature comes from the Non-Acquirers—Vas- sian Patrikeev was the first peasantophile); the tradition of tolerance for the heterodox minority (no one in Muscovy except the Non-Ac­quirers struggled against the death sentences passed on the heretics, and no one else dared to polemicize against the bloodthirsty Jose­phites); the tradition of dissidence (and the courage to speak against a frightening majority); the tradition of European rationality, and the belief in reason as the highest force given to man—reason counter- posed to external discipline, to the passions, and to blind obedience. Even in a purely political sense, it was the Non-Acquirer literature which in the sixteenth century advanced the idea of a universal coun­cil to which "men of all the people" should be called. In other words they were the first in Russian history to call for a national assembly, which clearly meant turning the dispute between the state and the church (where the state proved the weaker party) into a dispute between the church and the nation. Only a few decades later, after Ivan Ill's death, when the government fell once again for a short time into the hands of the absolutists and was under the influence of the Non-Ac­quirers, the Assembly of the Land was in fact called. Ivan IV's ques­tions to the church assembly of 1551 (i.e., a decade before his coup d'etat) were saturated with the spirit that the Non-Acquirers had breathed into Russian political life.

However, it may be objected, the second campaign of seculariza­tion, even if projected by Ivan III, never took place. The countertra- dition of the Non-Acquirers never worked, and the calling of the As­sembly of the Land did not lead to reform of the church. This is true. The Non-Acquirers were defeated. To Russia's cost and their own, the Josephites suffered a crushing victory. But was this victory of theirs inevitable? This is the question, decisive for Russia's past—and for its future—which my opponents try to avoid with the help of vague reflections about "economic prerequisites" and the absence of "ideological support." I cannot, of course, know what Ivan Ill's real plans were. But neither can my opponents. With what justification, for example, does Plekhanov assert that "Ivan III abandoned the idea of secularizing the monastery lands" ?

The hypothesis suggested here may be debatable, but at least it leaves open the question of why Russia, having gone much further than other European countries along the path of church reform, proved incapable of carrying it out.

8. The Pyrrhic Victory of the Josephites

Ivan Ill's successor, Vasilii III, should have been born long before his father. He was an assiduous "gatherer," a boring and obedient son of the church, entirely without political imagination. For him the plans and achievements of his father did not differ in the least from the achievements of the long and monotonous line of his Muscovite an­cestors. The most that he was capable of was copying his father in de­tails. Thus, he did with Pskov the same thing which his father had done with Novgorod. However, having expelled the families of po­tential rebels from Pskov, he did not—unlike his father—lay a finger on the monastery villages. Having taken Smolensk from the Lithua­nians in 1514, he first of all promised to preserve inviolate the rights of the local church. Just as his father had maintained heretics close to him in order to frighten the hierarchy, Vasilii for some time kept Non-Acquirers for this purpose, bringing Vassian Patrikeev into his entourage and acting as patron to Maxim the Greek. But he did not attack the church, he merely defended himself against it. In 1511, when Varlaam, who sympathized with the Non-Acquirers, became metropolitan, "the government of Vasilii III somehow," Kashtanov writes, "succeeded in interrupting the growth of monastery landhold- ings."[107] The government carried out a partial review of the immu­nities on church holdings and abolished some of them. But all this was merely a vague shadow of his father's strategy. Meanwhile, the situation changed swiftly—both in European politics and in the life of the country.

What previously could have been regarded as the secondary level of Muscovite strategy emerged into the foreground. The Crimean king succeeded in placing his brother, Saip-Girei, on the throne of Kazan'. Muscovy was taken by surprise by this union of its two sworn enemies in the South and East, which had been long in maturing. It awoke only when both brothers suddenly appeared below its walls in 1521, forcing Vasilii to take refuge in flight. And although even the united forces of the Crimea and Kazan' were unable to take Moscow, its inhabitants were compelled to give the Tatars a humiliating prom­ise to pay them tribute, as in the old days—as though there had been no Ugra. The Tatars took away with them many thousands of pris­oners, according to rumors current at the time. It became clear that, beyond the southern horizon, formidable forces were gathering which could again call into question Muscovy's existence as a state. Ivan III had provided the Russian land with a respite from the Tatars for many decades, but not forever.

Moreover, it was no longer possible to split Lithuania, as Ivan III had hoped to do, by taking advantage of the antagonisms between its Russian Orthodox and Catholic subjects. The Reformation which was raging in Europe had brought about universal ideological changes, as a result of which the Russian Orthodox magnates of Lithuania were now thinking of an alliance not so much with Muscovy as with their Catholic colleagues—an alliance against their common enemy, Prot­estantism, which was spreading like an epidemic through urban cir­cles and among the educated young people of Lithuania and Poland. Matters were tending toward the formation of a united common­wealth of the two countries. The moment for a campaign against Lithuania had been irretrievably lost by Vasilii, just as he had lost the moment for a second campaign of secularization. The colossal mili­tary, diplomatic, and intellectual efforts consumed in preparing the strategy of Ivan III, decades of labor and struggle, were reduced to nothing. Within a single generation, Muscovy might find itself caught between the united Tatar khanates (behind which loomed Turkey) in the East, and united Lithuania and Poland (behind which loomed the Papacy) in the West. The hour of decision had struck. To avoid isola­tion (which could lead to irreversible changes in the political struc­ture of the country itself) it was necessary to decide with whom and against whom Muscovy would stand, who its allies were and who its enemies.

Under these conditions, the anti-Turkish entente called for by Western diplomats ceased to be a pious hope and became an urgent necessity. The situation demanded a repetition of the Ugra. The cut­ting edge of Muscovite strategy had to be turned from the West to the East and South, where the Tatars were forging an alliance capable of putting a hundred thousand men into the saddle.'⁸ But a new Ugra required a new Ivan III—and he was not available. Even the Tatar attack of 1521 taught Muscovy nothing.

Within the country, church landholding continued to spread. And there was now no question of an entente against the Orthodox estab­lishment between the state and the intelligentsia, such as had been taking shape at the beginning of the century. Left to itself, the Non- Acquirer movement exhausted itself in struggles against a "right wing" offensive which was taking on an increasingly clear nationalist and isolationist character. The monk Filofei of Pskov proposed the tempting theory of "the Third Rome" to the grand prince Vasilii— that is, of Muscovy as the guardian of the true faith, counterposed to the West and the East and destined to play a unique role in the pres­ervation of Christianity until the Second Coming of Christ ("thou art the only Christian king under Heaven"). Iosif, who had been de­feated in an open ideological skirmish with the Non-Acquirers, per­formed one more political maneuver. He no longer gave himself over to meditations on tsars and tyrants, but proposed the still more tempting idea of the theocratic power of the Orthodox sovereign, de­claring him "the ruler of all," and the viceroy of God on earth.[108](Though in so doing he did not abandon his fundamental thesis that "the church's acquisitions are God's acquisitions.")[109]

Thus, the Josephite hierarchy offered the state peace with the church, agreeing to recognize the Russian tsar as an autocrator—the head of a new Byzantine empire and the supreme leader of Ortho­dox (i.e., true Christian) humanity. For this, Vasilii would have to pay not only with new lands but also with the heads of further heretics and Non-Acquirers. He would have to sacrifice not only the radicals, but also the liberals, liquidating the ideological limitations on power— the most precious heritage left to Russia by his father. Taken together, nationalism, isolationism, messianism, and the liquidation of the ideological struggle foretold the end of Russian absolutism even in the 1520s.

But the tradition of Ivan III was strong. If Vasilii lacked the capac­ity to continue the policy of his father, he also lacked the capacity to change it radically. He drifted with the current. True, he gave up to the Josephites two of their chief enemies—the two most brilliant fig­ures of the Muscovite intellectual world of that time. The assembly of 1525 condemned Maxim the Greek, and that of 1531 condemned Vassian Patrikeev.⁴' They left the scene, and were exiled to Josephite monasteries for life. But this did not mean that an end was put to the Non-Acquirer movement as a current of thought. It was beheaded but not yet destroyed. The aristocracy was still firmly in the saddle, and as long as the social limitations on power had not been done away with, the economic limitations prospered under their protection. The law remained the law, although the political life of the country stag­nated. Consequently, the proto-bourgeoisie became more numerous, the cities grew, and the obligations of the peasants were increasingly rendered in money. (Half a century later, the "Government of Com­promise" would convert the obligations to the state of whole regions into money terms, modernizing the system of taxation.) It seemed that Russian absolutism was destined to survive the rule of Vasilii.

No one yet knew which of the two tendencies would be victori­ous—feudal or peasant differentiation, corvee or money, the service landholders or the proto-bourgeoisie.

The fourth generation of the Non-Acquirers was still to come. The elder Artemii, from whom the tsar would respectfully take counsel, was to be elevated to the post of abbot of the Troitsa, like his ideologi­cal forebear Paisii. Still other bishops and abbots would emerge, de­spite the Josephite Metropolitan Daniil's intrigues, from the school of Nil Sorskii and Maxim the Greek. The assembly of 1551, with its fa­mous royal questions, was also still to come.

But this assembly would not be a victory for the Non-Acquirers. It would be turned into their ultimate defeat. True, it would adopt im­portant anti-Josephite decisions to return the land confiscated by churchmen for debt to the original owners, and to take away the ser­vice estates and regions given to churchmen during the sovereign's nonage. However, a terrible price would be exacted by the Josephites for these purely tactical concessions. Whereas Ivan III turned over the heretics to the Josephites in order to save the Non-Acquirers, Ivan the Terrible turned the Non-Acquirers over to them in order to de­stroy both victors and vanquished.

A mere two years after the assembly of 1551, the Josephite Metro­politan Makarii, a member of the "Government of Compromise," using the heresy of Matvei Bashkin as a pretext, impugned Artemii for cooperating with heretics, and another Non-Acquirer, Abbot Feo- dorit, for cooperating with Artemii. Their cothinker Bishop Kassian of Riazan' was deprived of his office. All of them were condemned and exiled and the Non-Acquirer movement itself was declared a heresy. This was a catastrophe, and not only for the Non-Acquirers. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the movement already had much more of a political than a religious character. This was perhaps the first time in Russian history that political dissent was condemned as heresy, and the first real political trial in Moscow. The most sinister portent was that the "Government of Compromise," of which Sil'­vestr, who was the patron of the Non-Acquirers, and the Josephite Makarii were equally members, was unable to avert it.

The government had just conquered Kazan', thereby destroying forever the plan of uniting the two Tatar khanates and reviving the Golden Horde. It had just called the Assembly of the Land, at which there was an attempt to reconcile all the competing political forces in the country. It had succeeded in creating a broad ruling coalition. On the wings of success, it had conceived a broad program for moderniz­ing the country—administratively, fiscally, and politically. It was car­rying out this program effectively, reforming the obsolete institu­tions, and building an absolutist state. And it apparently did not consider the sacrifice of the intelligentsia too great a price to pay. In any case, the fact that the "right" Josephites were part of the com­promise coalition which formed the base of its power and the "left" Non-Acquirers were excluded from it after 1553 did not particularly disturb the government. And this was a fatal mistake. In fact, the elimination of the ideological limitations on power could not help but sooner or later bring with it the elimination of the social and eco­nomic limitations. As history shows, it is impossible to extract the component parts of an organic, absolutist complex with impunity. And the collapse of one of these presaged the collapse of the rest. Thus, we can say that it was not the famous coup d'etat of Ivan the Terrible in 1560 and the "revolution from above" in 1565 which were the beginning of the end of Russian absolutism, but rather a small event, almost unnoticed by historians—the condemnation of the Non-Acquirers in 1553. Many successes were still ahead for the "Gov­ernment of Compromise," but it no longer had a future. And its doom came from within the ruling coalition—from the triumphant Josephites, who thought that having rid themselves at last of their op­ponents they had secured their own interests permanently.

Did they have a foreboding that their victory was the beginning of their defeat? Quite soon Ivan the Terrible would suppress them, rob them, sack their monasteries to the last thread, without any laws or assemblies whatever and without asking anyone's agreement. He would appoint and depose metropolitans at will, and kill them when he liked. The humble Metropolitan Filipp, pushed to the limit, dared finally to throw in the face of the tsar, who had come to him in the Uspenskii Cathedral in half-joking Oprichnina costume, the bitter words: "I do not recognize the tsar in that costume. I do not recognize him in the affairs of the kingdom either. Fear the judgment of God. We here bring a bloodless sacrifice and behind the altar flows the blood of the innocent."[110] He was deposed, and then strangled. So, too, in their time, had fallen the Archpriest Sil'vestr; the head of the "Government of Compromise," Adashev; Cheliadnin-Fedorov, the head of the Zemshchina; and Viskovatyi, who had directed the for­eign policy of Muscovy—as did all, without distinction of rank or ti­tle, who dared to raise their voices against the will of the autocrator who had now become the sole law of Muscovy, its sole church, and its sole faith.

The Josephites would pay dearly for their naive Catholic illusions and the senseless extermination of their political opponents, which left them face to face with the fearsome and unpredictable monster of autocracy that they themselves had created. For an opposition is not a luxury, but a necessity for a normally functioning political sys­tem. It is a mechanism for correcting mistakes, an institutionalized alternative—no more, but also no less. These are the basic rules of the political game. Ivan III apparently understood them. In any case, he was not the one to break the rules. The Josephites broke them.

Their gross miscalculation probably lay in the fact that they mod­elled their political behavior on the absolutist Muscovy of Ivan III, where it was possible to contradict the tsar, to be in opposition to him (as they themselves had been for decades), and in general to be mis­taken without risking one's head. It apparently seemed to them that, having achieved the predominant influence on the sovereign, and having even declared him autocrator, they would be able to hold him in their hands.

But there was another possibility, not foreseen either by them or by Ivan III: given a choice between West and East, Russia might reject both orientations, and respond to the historical challenge facing it with an isolationist tyranny—autocracy. Given a choice between the reformist, secularizing ("Protestant") tendencies of the liberal intel­ligentsia and the conservative, theocratic ambitions of the church hi­erarchy, the autocrator might respond with the creation of a "new class" capable of ruining both.

How could this happen—unexpected and undesired, as it seems, by any significant force in the Russian establishment? One segment of the establishment, let me anachronistically call it the "Russian right," appeared powerful enough not only to end the debate about the fu­ture of the country and silence its opponents, but also to exterminate them. Faced with this challenge, the moderate "centrist" segment of the establishment, instead of joining forces with the "left" spokesmen of the reforms, chose to sacrifice them. At this price the moderates apparently hoped to save what it was still possible to save. They were mistaken. With the extermination of the "left," the entire reformist process came to a halt. This resulted in political stagnation, which in turn led to a "revolution from above."

Thus, this chain of events turned out to be a chain of fateful mis­takes, in which every segment of the then Russian establishment was destined to lose, and eventually to perish. The moderates succeeded the "left-wingers" as victims of the Oprichnina, and the "right-wing­ers" succeeded the moderates. Civil society was conquered by the state and virtually destroyed.

What is even more mysterious about this chain of mistakes is that it has—in different ways and in different circumstances—been re­peated in all of Russia's major crises: in the 1680s, before Peter I; in the 1780s, before Paul; in the 1820s, before Nicholas I; and so on, to this very day, when it is repeating itself before our eyes. Once again, the powerful "right-wingers" have broken the rules of the game and stopped the process of reform. Once again, the "centrists" have be­trayed the spokesmen of this reform. Once again, the nation has en­tered the zone of political stagnation, setting the stage for a restora­tion of the ancien regime.

What is the reason for these fatal repetitions? Is the Russian estab­lishment uniquely incapable of learning from history? Or have the historians of Russia, perhaps, failed to educate this establishment in the mistakes of the past? Have they, instead of using history to shape the future, merely justified the past, putting all the blame for Russia's misfortunes on obsolete stereotypes? "One cannot accuse Russian his­toriography of lack of hard work; it labored much, but I would not be sinning against the truth in saying that it does not know itself what to do with its subject matter," V. O. Kliuchevskii wrote bitterly, and I am afraid that this seems all too true. It is thus that, even in our own day, a modern American expert once again repeats the stereotype of the "state school":

Unquestionably, the civil society in Russia (that is, social groups and in­stitutions with their own structure and autonomous functions) ap­peared comparatively late and was quite weak at the beginning of our century. It is important to note the paradox of Russian history: the civil society was in part a creation of the state (the reforms of Peter I and Alexander II) and therefore its development was partly artificial and slow.¹³

We have already seen, and will see further, that the Russian aristoc­racy grew hand in hand with the Russian state, that the peasant com­mune was much older than the state, and that the Orthodox church was stronger than the state (at least in the time of Ivan III, i.e., cen­turies before Peter I and Alexander II). Thus, the artificial creation of Russian civil society by the state seems more than questionable. Speaking in the crude terms of the stereotype, it would seem that the state rather destroyed civil society in the course of Ivan the Terrible's "revolution from above." Moreover, it demolished this society again and again in the course of almost each new autocratic revolution.

But to say only this is still to say very little. The real question is how the state achieved these spectacular results. And here, instead of dolefully masticating obsolete wisdom, we are compelled to note the fateful role of the Russian right of the sixteenth century, the Jose­phites. They were the ones who succeeded in halting reform. They provided the messianic theory of the Third Rome. They supplied all the ideological ammunition for the autocratic dream of Ivan the Ter­rible, thus initiating the process leading to his "revolution from above." This is, moreover, what their spiritual descendants have been doing ever since. For centuries the Russian right has been virtually collaborating in the destruction of civil society. This has been the ulti­mate result of its ideas, its intolerance and hatred, its insistence on the extermination of its opponents. The Josephites deserved their pun­ishment. What was unfair was that along with them the entire nation had to go to its Golgotha.

But if this is where the Pyrrhic victories of the Russian right have invariably brought the nation, should it not be one of the basic lessons which the Russian establishment—again and again faced with the same choice between West and East, between reform and stagna­tion—needs to learn from the historians? Is it not here that their part in the historical drama begins—especially inasmuch as the spiritual descendants and intellectual heirs of the Josephites are once again trying to push the nation in the same direction?⁴⁴

44. See, in this respect, Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right.

CHAPTER VI

THE END OF RUSSIAN ABSOLUTISM

1. The Heritage of the Absolutist Century

The age of Russian absolutism was short, its end tragic. But did it in fact disappear without a trace? Was it simply an accidental episode in Russian history—a liberal intermezzo in the autocratic symphony, a vague dream, dissipated forever?

Let us assume that the Great Reform of the 1550s—the legislative introduction of local self-government on a national scale, accom­panied by trial by jury and income tax—was not rescinded "in the stormy years of Ivan the Terrible's long wars ... by the voevodal form of vicegerency."[111] Let us assume that the Assembly of the Land called in 1549 was able to transform itself into a representative body, and the Boyar Duma into the House of Lords (or Senate) of this Russian parliament. Let us assume that Article 98 of the law code of 1550, stating that all new enactments (that is to say, those not provided for in the law code itself) were to be adopted only "on the report of the sovereign and by the verdict of all the boyars," actually played its in­tended role as a constitutional limitation on power.[112] Let us assume that the church lands were secularized at the assembly in 1551. Let us assume that the replacement of the amateur cavalry made up of land­owners by a regular army (the creation of which began in 1550) was not dragged out for a whole century more, and that the military mo­nopoly of service landholders was therefore undermined as early as the sixteenth century. Let us assume, arising out of this, that the total expropriation of peasant lands was avoided. Let us assume that ser­vice did not become universal in the Russian state. (It may perhaps be that the quarter-century Livonian War, which was doomed to end in defeat, and led to a national catastrophe, would not have taken place given such a turn of events.)

What, in fact, is fantastic in these assumptions? Even under the conditions of autocracy, all of this, without exception, was eventually carried out (or revived) for a longer or shorter period of time, as a re­sult of reforms or revolutions. A regular army was created (at the be­ginning of the eighteenth century). Service ceased to be universal in the Russian state (in the second half of the eighteenth century). The church lands were secularized (at the same time). The institution of local self-government, with trial by jury and income tax, was reborn (in the second half of the nineteenth century). The Assemblies of the Land did become a form of national representative body (under the name of the State Duma) beginning in May 1906. The first attempt to realize Article 98 was undertaken as early as half a century after the publication of the code of laws, during the first Russian Time of Troubles, when Vasilii Shuiskii was elevated to the throne on May 17, 1606. As Kliuchevskii says:

The elevation of Prince Vasilii to the throne marked an epoch in our political history. On ascending the throne, he limited his power, and set forth the conditions of this limitation officially in a document which he sent out to the provinces, and for which he kissed the Cross on ascend­ing the throne.[113]

The next attempt was made four years later, on February 4, 1610, in the so-called constitution of Mikhail Saltykov. Kliuchevskii thinks that "this is a fundamental law for a constitutional monarchy, establishing both the structure of the supreme power and the basic rights of the subjects."[114] And even so venomous a critic of the Russian political heritage as B. N. Chicherin (whom all of the "despotists" put together might have envied) is compelled to admit that this document "con­tains significant limitations on the power of the tsar; if it had been put into effect, the Russian state would have taken on an entirely dif­ferent form."[115] One more attempt to realize Article 98 was under­taken by the supreme privy council in the so-called constitution of Di- mitrii Golitsyn (January 23, 1730). Finally, this article was once again "put into effect," 356 years after its adoption and 300 years after the first attempt to realize it, on May 6, 1906—only to be once more vio­lated by the tsar the very next year, and finally abolished on October 25, 1917. But even after the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik autocracy was compelled, although temporarily, to give back to the peasantry the land taken from it by the first Oprichnina revolution in the six­teenth century.

It is true that the autocracy distorted and mystified all of these de­velopments, and deprived them of the integrated absolutist character in which they were conceived in the sixteenth century. It dragged out their implementation for hundreds of years, tried to use them in its own interests, and, when this proved impossible, destroyed them again. But does this change the simple fact that even the autocracy proved unable to ignore them, and was sooner or later compelled to return to them in one form or another? This apparently means that we are dealing not with something accidental or ephemeral which has disappeared once and for all from Russia's political heritage, but, on the contrary, with something fundamental and organic, which could not be destroyed even by total terror, and which, when driven out of the door, stubbornly returned through the window. In brief, we are dealing with an absolutist tradition, and with an absolutist alternative to autocracy.

The struggle for this alternative did not end when the founding father of the Russian absolutist tradition, Ivan III, ended his days on earth in 1505. On the contrary, its decisive battles were still ahead. At the beginning of the 1550s, when the so-called "Government of Com­promise"[116] took the helm, it may even have seemed that the scales were inclined in favor of the continuers of Ivan Ill's cause—in favor of the reformers, the Non-Acquirers, and what may, in general, be called the coalition of hope.

2. The Great Reform

In order for the reader more easily to imagine the scope and ten­dency of the reforms of the Government of Compromise, it is nec­essary to remember how the Russian land had been administered previous to it. It was divided into regions called uezdy. Within each uezd there were two kinds of holdings, administered in completely different ways. The holdings of great landlords—the church and the boyars—were administered as everywhere in medieval Europe: by the holders themselves (they held immunities, called tarkhany). The central regime was essentially powerless to control them, for by tradi­tion its agents "took no part in anything"—that is, did not have the right to interfere either in the courts or in the administration of the landlords. What ruled here was not so much the written law as cus­tomary law, the "old ways." On the other category of lands—those be­longing to peasants and to service gentry—judicial and administra­tive functions were carried out by the agents of the central power, the namestniki (vicegerents). Sent out from Moscow, usually for a year or two, they kept order and collected taxes with the help of the servants whom they took with them from uezd to uezd. They were called kormlenshchiki ("people whom it is necessary to feed") because they also had to collect their food (korm)—that is, maintenance—them­selves; the government paid them nothing. It is not surprising that the most eminent families competed fiercely with each other for these assignments; in a year or two, if they landed in a rich uezd, they could

Bakhrushin revised this list in 1954, identifying the "Chosen Rada" with the "Close Duma" of the tsar ("Izbrannaia Rada Ivana Groznogo"). I. I. Smirnov threw doubt on the existence of the "Chosen Rada" as an institution and identified this term with the "political friends" of Kurbskii—that is, with those whom he considered the boyar party (Ocherhi politicheskoi istorii russkogo gosudarstva 30—50kh gg. XVI veka). Finally, in 1969, the American historian A. Grobovsky, in a brilliant and detailed critical analysis, showed the unfounded nature of all these hypotheses (The "Chosen Council" of Ivan IV: A Reinterpretation). Most Soviet historians continue to employ this debatable term. Nev­ertheless, the following facts seem indisputable: (1) throughout the 1550s, the country was ruled by a government at the head of which stood Adashev and Sil'vestr; (2) Kurbskii was in sympathy with this government and reflected its viewpoint; (3) in addi­tion to Kurbskii's testimony, the existence of this government is confirmed by its acts, which are considered in this chapter. Following S. V. Bakhrushin and S. O. Shmidt, I use the term "Government of Compromise." make a fortune—not so much from "maintenance," which was lim­ited from above, as from malfeasance in judicial and administrative functions. Civil cases in the uezd were usually won by those who could offer the largest bribe. The most unscrupulous of the vicegerents be­haved even worse—for example, throwing a corpse into the court­yard of a rich peasant and then later ruining him with court costs. A few fabricated cases yielded them more income than their official maintenance allowance. The victims of such extortion, of course, were those who had something which could be taken away, the "best people" of the Russian countryside, its maturing proto-bourgeoisie, particularly since the legal competence of these vicegerents included surveillance of local trade and tariff rules. Naturally, the peasants did not keep silent. Hardly had the vicegerents "left with the mainte­nance" (that is, returned to home base with what they had collected) than they were followed to Moscow by swarms of complainants. The Moscow courts were crammed with suits against the collectors. Since the time of Ivan III, the government had tried to ensure redress by requiring the participation in court proceedings of elected "jurors," but this was apparently not much help. In any case, as the chronicle tells us: "Many cities and volosts were laid waste by the vicegerents . . . who had for many years despised the fear of God and the enactments of the sovereign and performed many evil deeds there; they were not pastors and teachers . . . but persecutors and sowers of ruin."⁷

With the formation of a centralized state in Russia and the emer­gence of the country into the arena of European politics, expendi­tures increased: the metropolitan establishment expanded, the for­mation of a regular army began, and artillery became an inseparable part of it. The country was experiencing swift economic growth, and could pay more taxes, but the government was practically deprived of the opportunity to take advantage of this. One half of the land was " tarkhanized," and consequently paid no taxes, while the other was "laid waste" by the vicegerents. Everyone was agreed that the admin­istration required a radical overhaul.

The Government of Compromise, which had just come to power, had two options. The first, on the same level as the conception of the Muscovite "service state," was to replace the amateur and temporary administration of the vicegerents with professional administration by permanent governors (or voevody, as they were called in seventeenth- century Russia), who would get their "maintenance" from the state treasury. Such a police-bureaucratic reform could have served as an

7. Cited in N. E. Nosov, Soslmmo-predstavitel'nye . . ., p. 377.

excellent fuse for exploding the "institutional time bomb" (if such a thing existed).

The second possibility was the diametrical opposite of the first. It consisted in not only continuing but logically developing the abso­lutist tradition of Ivan III, transforming elected jurors from simple "sworn officers" in the courts of the vicegerents into judges them­selves, and, furthermore, into the local "landed" (that is to say, elect­ed) officers of government, and entrusting to them the entire admin­istration in the uezdy, including the collection of taxes for the state. Had it gone along these lines, the administrative reform would, I think, have fully deserved the title of Great Reform. In any case (un­der the conditions of the sixteenth century, when the peasantry was still free), it would have deserved it no less than the reform of the 1860s, which the historians actually do call great. For the essence of the reform of the 1860s consisted, in addition to the emancipation of the peasants and the abolition of preliminary censorship, precisely in the introduction of local self-government and trial by jury. Like its famous analog in the nineteenth, the administrative reform of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly a step in the direction of the de­feudalization of the Russian state—a step toward its transformation into a bourgeois monarchy. For the chief social stratum which stood to gain from such reforms would have been the same "best people" of the Russian countryside and cities who chiefly suffered the vicege­rents' administration. The reform would have given them the oppor­tunity to rationalize the administration in the interests of capital accu­mulation and increase their social and political weight.

The "Government of Compromise" followed precisely this path. The Oprichnina government which replaced it returned to the sys­tem of unpaid vicegerents, who were gradually turned into voevody, first in the outlying regions of the state and then over its entire extent.⁸

And again we face a formidable question: what was reflected by this tortuous change in the administrative policies of the two govern­ments (formally headed by the same person, Ivan IV), which was no less significant than the changes in their emigration and peasant pol­icies? It seems to me that, apart from everything else, it reflected the

8. "The form of [local] government administered by the voevody was born in the stormy years of the long wars of Ivan the Terrible. . . . For example, in 1578 the city of Nevel' was given to I. Karamyshev as maintenance. In the same year Karamyshev was named in one decree as vicegerent, and in another as vicegerent and as voevoda. In 1570 voevody governed in Vasil', in 1571 in Kurmysh, in 1577 in Korel'" (Zimin, Re­fer my, p. 435).

different constituencies on which the two governments rested. Just as the secularization campaign was the first attempt of the government to collaborate with the intelligentsia of the nation in Russian history, the Great Reform was an attempt to collaborate with its proto-bour­geoisie. And both were ruined by the "revolution from above."

In fact, the natural question which arises in connection with the Great Reform of the 1550s (and which, as far as I know, no one has yet asked) is why and under the influence of what forces the Musco­vite government showed a preference for local self-government over voevodal administration. The single reference to "the stormy years of the long wars of Ivan the Terrible," to which Zimin resorts, is of no help here. The point is that the administrative reform (like the aboli­tion of the tarkhany) was proclaimed precisely at the height of a war with Kazan', which lasted at least four years (1547-52). This war, be­fore ending in a brilliant victory, twice led to severe defeats, after which the tsar returned home "with many tears." Nevertheless, the government took a firm course toward local self-rule. Why?

Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the first decrees assign­ing power in the individual uezdy to elected organs were only answers to the numerous requests, complaints, and demands of the "best peo­ple." The government was not contemplating a national reform of lo­cal administration. It adopted it under the pressure of public opin­ion, if we may so express ourselves in relation to medieval society. This was the pressure of particular interest groups in that society, but opposed interest groups also existed. This means that there was something more important moving the government along this liberal path. And that something was money. The decree of reform issued in September 1557 to the Dvina uezd states that the grand prince

ordered his Dvina vicegerents . . . not to give judgment and not to take their maintenance or any income, and his tax collectors and judicial of­ficials not to go to those communities; and instead of the taxes and du­ties taken by the vicegerents, he ordered the people to pay a quitrent which they should bring to the treasury in Moscow, to our secretary Putilo Nechaev in the amount of twenty rubles from each unit of tax­able land [sokha], and in addition a tariff of six kopeks for each ruble.'¹

There is nothing remarkable in this formula, until one compares it with the dimensions of the "maintenance" which the uezdy paid to the vicegerents before the reform, which amounted to only one ruble and thirteen kopeks per Muscovite sokha (and to less than two rubles when taken together with all other duties). In other words, it was not at all a matter of the government granting self-government to the Russian land. Self-government was sold to it—and at a price ten times higher than it paid before the reform!

One might expect such a monstrous rise in the tax rate to have provoked, if not open resistance, then at least a burst of indignation in the uezdy. Nothing of the kind is to be noted. There is no trace of peasant complaints about the reform. On the contrary, it was received with a sigh of relief. This, incidentally, is not surprising if we remem­ber that such peasant families as the Makarovs, Shul'gins, Poplevins, or Rodionovs—and all of these were in only one uezd—were suffi­ciently rich and powerful to pay the taxes for the entire uezd. It is hard not to agree with N. E. Nosov's conclusion:

The peasants of the Dvina region "bought off" the feudal state and its organs, receiving broad judicial and administrative autonomy. The price was high . . . but what did the "buying off of the vicegerents" mean to the rich people of the Dvina, if the Kologrivov family alone could, if it liked, have paid the taxes for the entire Dvina uezd? And what an advantage this gave them in developing their commercial and industrial activity, released at last from the mercenary tutelage of the feudal vicegerents—and, more important, in the exploitation not only of the entire wealth of the North, but of the poor people of the Dvina! And was this not a step (and a substantial one) toward the development of new bourgeois relationships for the Dvina?

Thus, the uezdy bought themselves the right to have the agents of the central power "not go" to them, and to be able to "do justice among themselves," and to have the peasants divide the rent "among themselves . . . according to their livings and occupations"—that is, according to the incomes of individual families. Thus, the creation of the institution of self-rule was accompanied by the introduction of an entirely bourgeois income tax. (This was the fundamental difference between the new institution and the old peasant commune, oriented toward the equality of its members). Does not this mean that the gov­ernment thereby recognized legislatively the differentiation of the peasantry (and among city people) and the existence of the proto- bourgeoisie? Doesn't it mean that, for the first time in Russian history, the government recognized that a new stratum of taxpayers had ap­peared—a kind of "middle class"—whom it was more profitable to exploit in a rational way than to rob by turning them over to the arbi­trary action of the vicegerents? This goose could lay golden eggs. And

the absolutist government naturally was smart enough not to waste them, which just as naturally was not the case with its Oprichnina successor.

The Great Reform of the 1550s was drowned in the blood and dirt of an autocratic revolution. But its doom was by no means the auto­matic result of some process developing fatally and inexorably in Muscovy since 1450, as Richard Hellie thinks," or any other year. Rather, the facts cited compel us to assume something quite different: namely, that the doom of the Great Reform was the result of a crush­ing defeat of the Government of Compromise and the absolutist co­alition which stood behind it.

3. At the Crossroads

One of the basic failures of the Government of Compromise was that it was not able to implement the testament of Ivan III and organize a victorious secularization campaign. This, of course, neither means that it did not understand the need for such a campaign nor that it did not try to implement one. "There is every reason to consider Sil'vestr the author of the tsar's questions [to the church assembly in 1551]," writes A. A. Zimin. "An analysis of the ideological content ... of the questions shows the indubitable closeness of their com­pilers to the Non-Acquirers, whose de facto head in the mid-sixteenth century was Sil'vestr."¹² Sil'vestr was hardly the head of the Non- Acquirers, but no one disputes the fact that, as one of the most influ­ential people in the Government of Compromise, he was a convinced adherent of secularization. In 1551, precisely for this reason, "a con­frontation developed between the government of Adashev and Sil'­vestr, which strove to use the self-interest of the boyars and service landholders in liquidating the landed wealth of the church, and the Josephite leadership of the church, led by Makarii.'"³

Literally on the eve of the church assembly, Kassian, bishop of Riazan', who proved to be the only opponent of the Joesphites among the ten participants, was inducted into the highest ranks of the church hierarchy. This lineup of forces sufficed to ensure the defeat of the Non-Acquirer program of the government, despite all the sharpness of the tsar's questions. The weakness of the organizational preparation of the second secularization campaign is obvious, if only

Richard Hellie, "The Muscovite Provincial Service Elite in Comparative Per­spective."

Zimin, Reformy, p. 379.

Ibid., p. 378.

from the fact that the restructuring of the hierarchy did not begin until after the assembly. Ivan III had deposed the chief Josephite in­quisitor, Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod, after the assembly of 1504; Feodosii, also archbishop of Novgorod, who was just as implac­able as Gennadii, was similarly deposed by the government in 1551, three months after the fateful vote, but only in November 1552 was the Non-Acquirer Pimen appointed to replace him. In May 1551 (that is, also after the vote) Trifon, archbishop of Suzdal', was deposed, and the ideologist of the Non-Acquirer movement, Artemii, was simul­taneously appointed abbot of the Troitsa monastery, while his com­rade-in-arms Feodorit became abbot of the monastery of St. Efim in Suzdal'. This shakeup would have been meaningful if the govern­ment had indeed been energetically preparing a third secularization campaign, but it was not doing so. In any case, it was unable to pre­vent Makarii from organizing the inquisitorial trial of heretics in 1553 in which he skillfully involved both Artemii and Feodorit, as well as Bishop Kassian, and obtained their removal and banishment. (Ar­temii, incidentally, escaped from the Solovetskii monastery where he had been exiled and fled to Lithuania, where he shared with Prince Kurbskii the mournful fate of the political emigre.)

But the root of the failure of the Government of Compromise lay not so much in this organizational incompetence as in its lack of polit­ical skill. It finally had in its hands the tool which Ivan III had not had—a national representative body, the Assembly of the Land. It had at its disposal, too, something even more important, which Ivan III also lacked—the European experience of secularization. Had not the Ricksdag (the Swedish equivalent of the Assembly of the Land) afforded Gustav Vasa support for his secularization campaign in 1527? Had not the Reform Parliament proclaimed the king the head of the church in England in 1534, and were not all the monasteries in England closed by law and their property and lands confiscated by the state? Foreign experience had thus shown that secularization could be carried out only by openly setting the nation against the hi­erarchy on the strength of Non-Acquirer reformist ideology, and not with the help of appeals to the hierarchy or even by restructuring it, as Ivan III had thought. The Government of Compromise neither of­ficially adopted the Non-Acquirer ideology nor appealed to the na­tion, so it lost the fateful battle for secularization.

Furthermore, the government had serious difficulties even in im­plementing the laws adopted by the Assembly of the Land. Nosov's study shows that the administrative reform was in practice intro­duced in two stages, in 1551-52 and in 1555-56. In the interim, a reverse movement appears to have taken place. Over a period of sev­eral years, the fate of the Great Reform hung by a thread. In this case, the government's efforts were crowned by success. In the question of the abolition of the immunities, where the immediate interests of the church were at stake, it appeared unable, however, to force the re­treat of the Josephite hierarchy, despite the fact that the hierarchy it­self had voted for the new code of laws in the Assembly of the Land. This vote showed with remarkable clarity that only in the context of the Assembly of the Land was it possible to break the resistance of the hierarchy, but the government did not go back to the Assembly of the Land on this question, and thus lost its battle for the abolition of the immunities.

The government committed a no less serious error in regard to the pace of modernization of the army. This problem had arisen in con­nection with the Kazan' war and the administrative reform. The ama­teur cavalry of the service gentry, which received its "maintenance" in the form of land with the peasants living on it, had by the middle of the sixteenth century, as the first battles of the Kazan' war demon­strated, shown itself to be as antiquated an institution as the "mainte­nance" administration of the vicegerents. And, like the latter, it should have been replaced—by an army having as its core professional infan­try, equipped with firearms and paid in cash. The bottleneck in a mili­tary reform of this kind was apparently money. But this was precisely what could be obtained by the government through sale of the in­stitution of self-rule. That the government was not unaware of this problem is shown by the introduction into the Muscovite army of a core of 6,000 infantry in 1550, when the administrative reform was being prepared. One need only read the chapter on the storming of Kazan' in the History of Ivan IV, written by Kurbskii in exile, in order to understand the decisive role played by the infantry (along with ar­tillery) in the great victory over the Tatars. Without the infantry and the artillery, victory would never have been achieved. Just as local self-rule was a competitor of the voevody, so the infantry could have been a competitor of the service gentry—and an effective one.

But here the problem of military modernization passed over into the problem of political modernization. For the formation of a per­manent professional army automatically deprived the service gentry of the military monopoly which was the only thing on which their so­cial and political claims could rest. Certainly, it was not a question of the immediate exclusion of the service nobility from the army (as an officer corps and as a cavalry force they would be retained for a long time). It was a matter only of the pace and direction of moderniza­tion, capable of creating a normal European balance between infan­try and cavalry.'⁴

The sum of 140 rubles, which the Dvina uezd, say, had paid into the treasury before the reform, represented the "maintenance" of a sin­gle vicegerent. For 1400 rubles, which the treasury now received di­rectly, bypassing the vicegerents, the government could maintain ei­ther a cavalry force, staffed by service gentry, for the whole Smolensk county, or a regiment of infantry. The government chose cavalry. The logical result of this mistake was the statute on military service of 1556, which for the first time in Russian history made this service obligatory in a legislative sense. Hardly anyone in the government understood the fateful significance of this act. From that moment, service in the Russian state became universal.

And now, it seems to me, we can already recognize the political pat­tern which predetermined all the mistakes of the Government of Compromise. Wherever the national interest contradicted the inter­ests of the numerous factions represented in the government, in the army, and in the Assembly of the Land, the government hesitated, and usually compromised, which increasingly weakened its position as arbiter. The church hierarchy did not wish to yield its land, and did not even wish to yield to any significant degree in the question of the immunities; the service nobility was not at all eager for the moderni­zation of the army, but instead wanted land and money; and the gov­ernment was not prepared for severe pressure, but tried at all costs to maintain the atmosphere of "reconciliation" of all political forces within the country, on which, so it assumed, its power was based.

In order to better understand the nature of its failure, let us briefly review the situation in which the Government of Compromise came to power, or more precisely the "mandate" with which it came to power, following a stormy and fruitless decade of so-called "boyar government." Vasilii had died when his heir, the future Ivan the Ter­rible, was three years old. When the boy reached the age of seven, his mother also died. The throne became a bone of contention for nu­merous cliques of the tsar's relatives and prominent clans, who in the course of a permanent quarrel completely lost sight of the national interest. This Muscovite equivalent of the Wars of the Roses did not lead to civil war, but nevertheless sowed chaos and confusion in the land. By the end of the 1540s, the situation had deteriorated into mass riots in the cities. A terrible fire and open mutiny broke out in Moscow itself. It was on this wave of general bitterness and animosity of all against all that the Government of Compromise came to power at the first "assembly of reconciliation."

It began its work excellently, achieving the desired stabilization. But, after a while, it suddenly began to appear that its policy of com­promise was simply too broad to be effective. Stabilization was not an end in itself, but merely a condition for the fulfillment of the strategic task of transforming the country. Compromise at all costs made this transformation unthinkable. Within the broad political base to which the government stubbornly clung, there gradually emerged compet­ing and irreconcilable blocs of interests. Representing both of them became a sheer political impossibility. The time came to make a choice between the peasant-Non-Acquirer absolutist coalition, which the boyars could support, since it was directed against their enemies, and the service gentry-Josephite autocratic coalition, supported by the bu­reaucratic apparatus.[117]

Metropolitan Makarii, the head of the hierarchy, was the tsar's ideological tutor, and he understood quite well that, as long as Sil'vestr played the leading role in the government, there would be no respite for the church landholdings. He impressed on the tsar the ideas of the previous generation of Josephites. These, it will be remembered, in­cluded the tempting concept of the Muscovite tsar as the heir of the Byzantine autocrators, before whom all others were slaves. Even more indicative was the wide distribution in Moscow at that time (in what can quite appropriately be called "samizdat" in modern terms) of the pam­phlets of Ivan Peresvetov, who proposed to the tsar, among other things, a program of autocratic "revolution from above." Contrary to the official version in the chronicles, which attributed the fall of Byzan­tium to heresy, Peresvetov boldly preached that it had fallen because the emperor had put too much trust in his high nobles, his "advisors" (read: the Government of Compromise). The conquerer of Byzan­tium, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed, had not trusted his "advisors," and this was why he had won. Having discovered the malfeasance of his viceroys, for example, Mehmed did not substitute local self-rule, as had the rotten liberal "advisors" of the Russian tsar. He did not even bother to try them.

He merely skinned them alive and spoke thus: if they grow flesh again their guilt will be forgiven. And he ordered their skins to be taken off and stuffed with paper and ordered iron nails to be driven into them and the following to be written on their skins: "Without such terror [groza\ it is impossible to introduce justice into the kingdom. ... As an unbridled horse beneath the tsar, so is a kingdom without terror."¹⁶

In addition to this apology for terror as the guaranty of the welfare of the state, Peresvetov also proposed copying the tool of this terror from the Turkish janissary corps, in terms so reminiscent of the later Oprichnina that many scholars have even doubted whether Peresve- tov's pamphlets were written before the introduction of the Oprich­nina or afterwards. "If the Christian faith had been joined with Turk­ish law, the angels could have talked with him [the Sultan]," Peresvetov declared, handing the Orthodox tsar an interesting brief."

This sharp increase in the activity of the Russian right most proba­bly meant that, despite all of the government's mistakes, the tide was running against the autocratic bloc. The code of laws that repealed the immunities and introduced the norms of bourgeois law was con­firmed by the Assembly of the Land. Local self-rule opened up enor­mous opportunities for the enrichment of the proto-bourgeoisie, and for the increase of its social and, in the final analysis, political weight. Peasant differentiation and the economic boom worked in the same direction. The modernization of the army could not be permanently delayed. Ivan Ill's strategy had brought the Europeanization of Rus­sia to a decisive point: if it were not stopped now it would perhaps be futile to try to stop it in the future. The advance of "money" was inex­orable unless some drastic action were taken to turn back this eco-

V F. Rzhiga, I. S. Peresvetov—publitsist XVI veka, p. 72.

Ibid., p. 78.

nomic and social process, unless the chief opponents of the autocratic bloc, the proto-bourgeoisie and the Non-Acquirers, along with their patrons, the boyars, who represented the political side of this absolut­ist triangle, were disarmed and ultimately crushed.[118]

The autocratic reaction required three things for the success of its counterattack—a strong leader, a strategic plan, and a pretext with which to put the tsar at odds with the Government of Compromise. All these three things were combined in the Livonian War.

4. The Anti-Tatar Strategy

As early as the 1520s, after the first Tatar invasion of Muscovy since the time of the Ugra, Maxim the Greek suggested a general reorien­tation of Muscovite foreign policy. Unfortunately, there was at that time no one to listen to him. Instead, in the course of the general po­grom against the Non-Acquirers, Grand Prince Vasilii accused Maxim of spying on behalf of the Turks. Less than two decades later, Saip- Girei stood before Moscow with his army. With him were soldiers of the Turkish sultan, with their cannons and arquebuses, and the No- gai, Kafa, Astrakhan', Azov, and Belgorod Hordes as well. It seemed that the ancient nightmare of Muscovy had again come to life, and that the whole might of the Tatars was moving against it, as under the lead­ers of the Golden Horde of evil memory—Tokhtamysh, Edigei, and Akhmat.

Saip Girei and his allies were driven back from Moscow, and from the end of the 1540s Muscovite policy turned decisively against the Tatars, resulting in the conquest and annexation of the trans-Volga khanates of Kazan' and Astrakhan' in the 1550s. This could not be regarded by the Government of Compromise as the finale of the anti- Tatar strategy, however. The Crimea, after all, remained; and behind the Crimea stood Turkey.

Moreover, the conquest of Kazan' did not improve the interna­tional position of Muscovy, and certainly complicated it. Kazan' was a Tatar kingdom only in name. In fact, it was a multinational state. Five tongues, as Kurbskii expressed it, sat there under the Tatars: the Mordvas, the Cheremises, the Chuvashes, the Votyaks, and the Bash­kirs. Muscovy had become an empire, whereas the Reconquista rested on the principle of the national and religious homogeneity of the Russian state. It was on this principle that Ivan III had constructed his strategy of dismembering the heterogeneous Lithuanian state. Now Muscovy had become heterogeneous in its turn.

The Tatars constructed their own strategies along similar lines. As early as 1520, the khan of the Crimea had called Kazan' "our yurt," which in Tatar meant what "otchina" meant for Ivan III, that is, fa­therland. From here it was only a step to the sultan himself declaring Kazan' his yurt, and claiming a legitimate right to seek the dismem­berment of Muscovy. Unless Tatar claims were disposed of once and for all, the Damoclean sword of a new attack would hang over Mus­covy for decades, and perhaps centuries. The Ugra, it suddenly turned out, had been merely a symbolic liberation from Tatar rule, complete liquidation of which was a historical prerequisite of the Re­conquista. The very status of Muscovy as a great power now de­pended on this. How could Russia enter the European family of na­tions as a full member if the shadow of Tatar domination still hung over it?

But, besides all these abstract considerations, the Crimea not only kept under its control extremely rich sections of the Russian land, it constantly threatened to destabilize economic life within Muscovy. Even if it could not conquer the country, it was capable of provoking a national crisis at any time. Thus historians have, for example, attrib­uted the economic catastrophe which shook Muscovy in the 1570s to the attack by Devlet Girei in 1571. To cite M. N. Pokrovskii:

The Tatars burned the entire posad of Moscow to the ground, and . . . seventeen years later it had not yet been entirely rebuilt. A whole series of cities suffered the same fate. According to the stories told at the time, as many as 800,000 persons perished in Moscow and its environs alone, and another 150,000 were taken away as captives. The total loss of pop­ulation must have exceeded one million, and the kingdom of Ivan Vasil'evich hardly contained more than ten million inhabitants. In addi­tion, it was the long established and most cultured regions which were laid waste: it was not accident that the people in Moscow for a long pe­riod reckoned time from the ruination by the Tatars, just as in the nine­teenth century they for a long time reckoned from the year 1812 [that is, Napoleon's invasion]. A good part of the almost instantaneous deso­lation which scholars note in the central uezdy, beginning precisely in the 1570s, must be laid at the door of the Tatar ruination. [This] is the chronological point of departure for the desolation of most of the uezdy of the central region of Muscovy. . . . The faint beginnings of a population ex­odus which were observed in the 1550s and 1560s were now trans­formed into an intensive and extremely pronounced flight of peasants from the central regions.[119]

If we remember that Soviet historians usually use this "instantane­ous desolation of the center of Muscovy" to explain the beginning of the enserfment of the peasantry (although without mentioning the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy as a cause of this phenome­non),[120] the consequences of the Tatar attack of 1571 for the whole course of Russian history begin to look truly sinister. The more so since a second attack was scheduled for the following year. In 1572, in the words of Heinrich Staden,

The cities and uezdy of the Russian land were already divided up and distributed among the lords (murzas) who were with the Crimean tsar, as to who should hold what land. The Crimean tsar also had with him a number of noble Turks, who were to supervise this matter: they had been sent by the Turkish emperor. . . . The Crimean tsar bragged be­fore the Turkish emperor that he would take all of the Russian land in the course of the year, and would bring the grand prince as a prisoner to the Crimea and with his murzas occupy the Russian land. . . . He gave his merchants and many others papers to the effect that they should go with their wares to Kazan and Astrakhan and trade there without paying duty, since he was the emperor and lord of all Rus'.[121]

Even so passionate an apologist for Ivan the Terrible as R. Iu. Vipper does not dare to ignore this testimony. "Staden," he writes, "teaches us to properly evaluate . . . the epoch of the Crimean danger."[122]

Devlet Girei did not succeed in carrying out his intentions, but their very dimensions and the fact that his troops included not only Tatars, but also all the previous allies of Muscovy—the Nogais, and even the Kabardinian Prince Temriuk, Ivan the Terrible's father-in- law, who had swiftly abandoned the sinking ship of Muscovy—indi­cate how real this danger was. There can hardly be any serious doubt that if the Turks had been able to help Devlet Girei in 1572, as they had helped him previously, Muscovy would have been brought to the brink of collapse. The country was desolated and demoralized, its best military cadres had been exterminated by the Oprichnina, and its capacity for resistance catastrophically reduced. Fortunately, the complete defeat of the Turkish fleet by Don Juan of Austria at Le- panto in 1571 tied the hands of Turkey, and compelled it for the time being to pass from the offensive to the defensive. Thus, it was Europe which helped Muscovy, albeit involuntarily, in this, its most terrible hour. And how did Ivan the Terrible repay it for this help? Imme­diately after Lepanto, he suggested to the Turkish Sultan Selim II a plan for an anti-European coalition, a Russo-Turkish alliance "against the Roman emperor and the Polish king and the Czech king and the French king and other kings and against all the Italian princes."²³

The sultan scorned this proposal, however, thereby confirming that the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy inevitably condemned Russia to complete isolation in European politics, which led not only to irrevers­ible changes in its internal political structure, but to the necessity of paying tribute to the Tatars for another whole century.

In the first half of the seventeenth century alone, up to a million rubles went to the Tatars in "gifts," as they were shamefully called by the Muscovite ambassadors, or in "tribute," as they were frankly in­terpreted in the Crimea. This was the very time when the tsar was humbly begging King James of England for a subsidy of 120,000 ru­bles. Furthermore, this tribute did not prevent the Tatars from carry­ing away into captivity and selling as slaves 200,000 Russians. One cannot read without sadness Iurii Krizhanich's secret memorandum that,

On all of the Turkish warships, almost no oarsmen except Russians are to be seen, and in the cities and towns in all of Greece, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia—that is, in all of the Turkish kingdom—there is such a multitude of Russian slaves that they usually ask their fellow countrymen, newly arrived, whether anyone is still left in Rus'.'²¹

Thus, in the 1560s the "turn against the Tatars" was a strategic im­perative for Muscovy. The "turn against the Germans," war on Livon­ia and consequently on Europe, proposed at that time by the Russian right as an alternative to the anti-Tatar strategy, inevitably led to isola­tion and ruin. And indeed it brought both. Russia simply ceased to be either a European power or a great one. In the words of a modern historian,

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia had remained scarcely more than a name to the West, where it was thought to be an amorphous geographical area occupied by barbarous schismatics owing a vague allegiance to a priest-king. It was thought of little importance to Europe save as a source of raw materials and a pasture for impover­ished German Baltic barons.²⁵

However, this was the deceptive weakness of a no-man's-land situ­ated between several strong predators, all of whom coveted its ports, its wealthy cities, and its first-class fortresses; all waiting for one of the others—the stupidest—to take the initiative. For the very fragmenta­tion and decentralization of Livonia were, paradoxically, its main strength. It had no one nerve center at which to strike. Each fortress had to be conquered separately, and there were hundreds of for­tresses. A war could not be brought to an end either by a swift attack or by a pitched battle; Livonia was a hopeless quagmire, capable of absorbing the bones of a whole generation of would-be conquerors. The one who struck first not only risked losing prestige by openly tak­ing on the aggressor's role, but would also unite against himself a strong coalition of other predators, who would reap the spoils at the expense of the first under the guise of justice. This was why to act against the Livonians was equivalent to acting against Europe—Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, the Hanseatic cities, and the emperor who stood behind them. Under the conditions of the sixteenth cen­tury, this signified a world war.

Ivan III would rather have left to someone else the dubious plea­sure of beating his head against the impregnable walls of Riga and Revel', and then taken the choicest morsel from the paws of the ex­hausted victor. He prepared for his descendants territorial positions suitable for just such a strategy. The only Livonian prize that really interested Muscovy was the first-class port of Narva, situated at the mouth of the Narva River, on the other bank of which Ivan III had providently built a Russian city named for himself (Ivangorod), and the taking of Narva was a question of one good bombardment, of one frontal attack (as happened on May 11, 1558). It was not necessary to challenge all of Europe and involve oneself in a twenty-five-year war—the more so since Muscovy was absolutely unprepared for such a war.

"Among the . . . Lithuanians, not to speak of the Swedes, it was easy to note a greater degree of military skill than among the troops and generals of Muscovy ... in almost all of the major confronta­tions with Western opponents on an open field, the Muscovite troops lost. . . . Tsar Ivan understood this excellently, if not better than any­one else," admits S. M. Solov'ev.[123] "The feudal militia of the Mus­covite tsar could not hold their own in hand-to-hand combat against the regular armies of Europe. It was necessary to seek an enemy on their own level, such as the Crimean and Kazan Tatars," M. N. Po- krovskii confirms.[124] More surprisingly, R. Iu. Vipper, too, says the same thing: "In the conquest of the Volga region, the Muscovite mounted armies were engaged in battle with troops like themselves, and used extremely simple strategy and tactics. It was quite another matter to fight a Western war, where they had to confront the com­plex military art of the commanders of European mercenary armies: the Russian troops were almost always defeated on the open field."[125]Even S. V. Bakhrushin, who composed a no less triumphant hymn to Ivan the Terrible and the Livonian War than Vipper, admits with a sigh that "Russia in the sixteenth century was not yet prepared for a solution of the Baltic problem."

In the light of this unanimity, the conclusions which the fans of Ivan the Terrible draw from their premises seem quite insane. "One is therefore the more struck," Bakhrushin exclaims, for example, "by the penetration with which Ivan IV perceived the basic vital task of Russian foreign policy, and concentrated on it all the powers of his state."[126] Evidently the tsar consciously threw "the greatest empire in the world" into an obviously doomed adventure—or, as Vipper ex­presses it, "into the abyss of extermination"—merely in order to dem­onstrate his perspicacity to posterity. By involving the country in a na­tional catastrophe, it seems, he demonstrated his statesmanship, and, Bakhrushin asserts, "anticipated Peter, and showed considerably more political penetration than [his opponents]."

6. The Last Compromise

"And again and again we importuned the tsar and counselled him ei­ther to endeavor to march himself or to send a great army at that time against the horde [i.e., the Crimea]," writes Andrei Kurbskii. "But he did not listen to us, for his flatterers, those good and trusty comrades of the table and the cups, his friends in various amusements, ham­pered us while helping him; and in the same way, he sharpened the edge of the sword for his kinsmen and fellows more than for the heathen."[127]

The Government of Compromise understood that its life was at stake. For if even later historians knew that "in almost all of the major confrontations with Western opponents on an open field the Mus­covite troops lost," this must have been all the more striking to the participants in these confrontations. And they could by no means be consoled by abstract considerations to the effect that their tsar was preparing to demonstrate his penetrating genius to posterity. For them the "turn on the Germans" meant, quite simply, disaster. And there is a reason to think that the tsar, too, understood this perfectly. Even in the years of the Oprichnina, he exclaimed in a letter to Kurb­skii: "How can I not remember the endless objections of the priest Sil'­vestr, of Aleksei [Adashev], and of all of you to the campaign against the German cities. . . . How many reproachful words we heard . . . from you, there is no need to recount in detail!" Further on, the tsar frankly admits: "Whatever bad thing happened to us, it was all became of the Germans" (he is speaking of the bitter conflict and confrontation which had arisen in the government over his decision to "turn against the Germans").

Apparently the government was trying to present the tsar with a fait accompli: it began a war in the South as early as 1556 with the Crimean expedition of the d'iak (civil servant, secretary) general Rzhevskii, who traveled down the Dnieper all the way to Ochakov, defeated the Tatars, seized their cattle and horses, and got away safely. The effect was electric. For the first time, the Tatars had been paid back in their own coin. Devlet Girei, who had been preparing to move against Moscow, immediately beat a retreat, and even agreed to release the Muscovite prisoners taken in the previous year's cam­paign. It was now that the tsar was "importuned and counselled . . . again and again" that the time had come for a new Ugra. But Ivan IV wanted to make war on Europe and not on the Tatars. And appar­ently he found strong allies in the Muscovite establishment, and per­haps in the government itself. At the begining of 1558, Adashev seems to have decided on a compromise: he tried to make war on two fronts. Despite the fact that, contrary to the traditional methods of Ivan III, no diplomatic or political preparations had been made for a war on Livonia, troops were dispatched against both Livonia and the Crimea.

After taking Narva, however, the Russian generals in Livonia halted their advance. "I had to send letters to you more than seven times before you finally took a small number of people and only after many reminders captured more than fifteen cities," Ivan the Terrible com­plained indignantly afterwards. "Is this a sign of your diligence, that you take cities after our letters and reminders, and not on your own initiative?"[128] At the first opportunity, when the king of Denmark of­fered to act as intermediary, Adashev petitioned for a truce with Livonia and got it.³³

In the South, reminders and letters from the tsar were unneces­sary. The war developed spontaneously there, and new allies joined in unasked—the Cossacks, refugees from Central Russia who wan­dered over the endless "Wild Field" and spent their energies and en­terprise in banditry. Not only the Don Cossacks were involved. Hear­ing of the unexpected new prospects, the "chief of the Ukraine" and leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, Prince Dimitrii Ivanovich Vishnevet- skii made an appeal to the tsar, declaring that he would be willing to repudiate his oath to Lithuania and enter Ivan's service if he were al­lowed to lead the Crimean campaign. A chain reaction developed. Not even waiting for the tsar's approval (he would never receive it), Vishnevetskii took the Tatar city of Islam-Kermen' by storm, and car­ried off its cannons to the camp which he had built on the island of Khortitsa in the Dnieper. Two Circassian princes in the service of Muscovy took two more Tatar cities, and the khan proved powerless to recover them. His attempt to storm Khortitsa ended, in S. M. Solov'ev's words, with his "being forced to retreat with great shame and loss."³⁴ In the spring of 1559, at the very moment of the truce with Livonia, Danilo Adashev, Aleksei's brother, seized two Turkish ships at the mouth of the Dnieper, made a landing in the Crimea, laid waste the settlements, and freed the Russian prisoners—and again the khan was unable to do anything about it.³⁵

But the Crimea could not be conquered—put an end to, as an end had been put to Kazan'—by such raids. It was a matter of a difficult and long-drawn-out war, which might last for many years. The Cri­mea was hundreds of miles from Moscow. Kazan', which was much closer, had not fallen in a day—first, under Vasilii, the fortress of Vasil'sursk had had to be built at the halfway mark; then, under the Government of Compromise, Sviiazhsk had been erected opposite it on the other bank of the Volga to consolidate Muscovy's hold there. In the case of the Crimea, dozens of fortresses had to be built, a chain

Ibid., p. 603.

Solov'ev, htoriia Rossii, bk. 3, p. 493.

In Karamzin's opinion, only the military help of the Turks saved the Tatars. "Devlet Girei trembled," he writes, "and thought that Rzhevskii, Vishnevetskii, and the Circassian princes were only the forward division of our troops. He was expecting Ivan himself, and petitioned him for peace, and wrote in desperation to the sultan that all was lost if he did not save the Crimea." The sultan saved it: "We . . . did not follow the indications of the finger of God, and gave the infidels time to recover. Vishnevetskii did not hold out at Khortitsa when numerous detachments of Turks and Wallachians, sent to Devlet Girei by the sultan, appeared" (N. M. Karamzin, pp. 253-54).

of cities stubbornly moving further and further into the southern steppe each year, conquering the land from the Tatars mile by mile, one frontier after another. The whole life of the country had to be subordinated to this "open frontier" strategy. The economic boom had to supply it with materials, and reforms and secularization of church lands had to yield financial resources; a modernized infantry had to balance cavalry manned by service gentry, since only new tac­tics and European technology could assure the Muscovite armies of decisive superiority over the Tatars.[129] For this struggle Muscovy needed to utilize European experience of military organization, as well as European trade and diplomatic ties—not the war with Europe for which the tsar had thirsted, but alliance. In modern language, detente.

7. The Autocrator's Complex

The great secretary Viskovatyi, the head of the Foreign Office, was a personal enemy of Sil'vestr. He may have impressed on the tsar the enormous difficulties involved in the anti-Tatar strategy. Metropoli­tan Makarii may have supported Viskovatyi (it is hard to believe that he would have missed such an opportunity to topple his mighty en­emy from power). They may have introduced the tsar to the pam­phlets of Peresvetov, which were circulating in Moscow, arguing the fatal danger of taking political decisions under the influence of "advisors."

We shall never know what the role of this whole complex network of personal conflicts and ideological influences was in the formation of the Oprichnina alternative to the Great Reform, in the victory of terror over compromise, of the Livonian War over the anti-Tatar strategy. But we do know what Viskovatyi and the Josephite hierarchs could not know—that they themselves were to be victims of the coup d'etat to which they had egged on Ivan IV They paid for their victory with their heads. The terror which they had helped to unleash had its own logic. In telling the tsar that all of his troubles came from "ad­visors," and that in relation to the autocrator all men were slaves, did they expect that, having rejected the advice of Sil'vestr and Adashev, he would be willing to be advised by Viskovatyi and the hierarchs? Were they not also the same kind of slaves as Kurliat'ev and Kurbskii? Why should they not also be skinned alive?

And, furthermore, in encouraging the tsar to believe that he was the only Orthodox (that is, true Christian) sovereign in the world, that he was descended in a direct line from the Roman emperor Au­gustus, and carried on the work of the Byzantine autocrators, how could they expect patience in international affairs and respect for the other European governments and monarchs from him? What diplo­matic calculations could be required from the only genuine viceroy of God on earth?

The tsar was in the eye of the Russian political storm; his character therefore acquires enormous significance. Such was the opinion of classical historiography. According to the latest historiographic fash­ion, however, it is mistaken.

The most vivid and articulate proponent of this view of the matter is perhaps Edward L. Keenan, Jr., earlier famous for asserting that the cornerstone of the Russian political literature of the sixteenth century, the Ivan the Terrible-Kurbskii correspondence, is a forgery. To judge by his short essay in the Harvard Magazine in 1978, Keenan's suspicions are increasing swiftly. Now not only the correspondence of Ivan the Terrible, but even Ivan the Terrible himself, seems to him in a certain sense a forgery:

A consideration of Ivan's medical record raises the question of whether he could even have been a functioning czar, let alone the volcanically energetic and Machiavellian prince of historical literature. ... In my opinion, for most of his life he was not. ... It seems impossible that he had any large role in the important events of his reign. ... A tradi­tional political system ruled by an oligarchy of royal in-laws and an ad­ministration run by professional bureaucrats required little interven­tion by the czar. . . . Nevertheless, the boyars and the bureaucrats did require that the czar be dynastically legitimate, capable of performing certain ceremonial functions and serviceable as the symbol and source of their own unquestioned power. Ivan—caring little for the hard work of politics and administration . . . —was for the most part quite suita­ble for his officials' purposes. Possibly they spread stories of his "ter- ribleness" abroad to increase their own clout."

Thus Keenan cuts the Gordian knot over which chroniclers and historians, dissertation writers and poets, have despaired for cen­turies. True, his account contradicts the testimony of numerous eye­witnesses—but this may also turn out to be forged, and the subject of a subsequent expose. Unfortunately, however, it is not readily under­standable why the all-powerful (according to Keenan) oligarchy of royal relatives and professional bureaucrats needed to unleash the train of events which resulted in their own ruin. Nor is it clear why the reign of this unfortunate invalid, who served only as a screen for the oligarchy, differs so strikingly from the epoch of "boyar rule" (during which the oligarchy was indeed powerful, and the child- sovereign was by definition a screen), which did not bring in its train either great reforms or revolution, and which was in general one of the most barren in Russian history. In fact, Keenan's thesis looks rather like a paraphrase of that submitted fifteen years previously by one of the most honest and bold (but, alas, not one of the most pro­found) of Soviet historians, D. R Makovskii:

It is not necessary to seek in the actions of Ivan IV any particular logic or consistency. Ivan IV—a mentally ill person—was always under the influence or suggestion of someone. The savage reprisals during the time of the Oprichnina were called forth, as contemporary sources note, by various adventurers (Basmanov, the Griaznyes, Skuratov, etc.) stimulating an unhealthy imagination and sadistic inclinations in Ivan, who did this in order to steal more goods and to enrich themselves.[130]

Keenan and Makovskii fail to notice the revolutionary character of the Oprichnina, which was not an extension of the previous structure of power, but its complete reversal. Or, rather, it was a triumph of the autocratic political tradition and at the same time a complete debacle for the absolutist tradition—a debacle which decisively changed the historical course of the nation.

Ivan the Terrible was unarguably mentally unbalanced, and the longer he lived, the more severe his illness became. But there was also something discernibly political to this illness which Keenan ignores. Just as in the case of Paul, Peter, or Stalin (who were no less indisput­ably ill), madness not only did not hinder the tsar from having his own personal political goals, but actually helped him to subordinate the strategy of the state to them.

The character and personal political goals of Ivan the Terrible were manifested vividly in the international relations of the Russia of that time, when the question of whether the country would adopt a European or an isolationist orientation was decided. Toward the end of the 1550s, R. Iu. Vipper notes,

The haughtiness and caprices of [Ivan] the Terrible began to be re­flected in the official diplomatic notes sent to foreign powers as soon as he himself began to direct policy. In the diplomatic correspondence with Denmark, the appearance of Ivan IV at the head of affairs was marked by a striking incident. Since the time of Ivan III, the Muscovite tsars had called the king of Denmark their brother, and suddenly in 1558 Shuiskii and the boyars found it necessary to reproach the king for the fact that he called "such an Orthodox tsar as the autocrat of all Rus' his brother; and previously there was no such reference.". . . The boyars are obviously telling an untruth. Certainly, nothing had been forgotten in Moscow and there had been no mistake, but the tsar had simply decided to change his tone with Denmark and behave more haughtily/¹"

In the 1560s, at the height of the Livonian campaign, when the efforts of Muscovy should logically have been concentrated on pre­venting Sweden from becoming involved in the war, Ivan the Terrible suddenly began a mortal quarrel with the Swedish king, too, because the latter was seized by an impious desire to call Ivan his brother in diplomatic papers. "The [Holy] Roman emperor and other great sov­ereigns are our brothers, but it is impossible to call you a brother be­cause the Swedish land is lower in honor than those states," the tsar declared.[131]

Here, at least, it is hinted that there are other "great sovereigns," in addition to the emperor, who are permitted to call him brother. Dur­ing the arguments of the 1570s, it becomes clear that these "other great ones" are a fiction. The number of candidates for brotherhood is reduced to two—the emperor and the Turkish sultan, who "are the preeminent sovereigns in all kingdoms."

In 1572, when the question of the candidacy of Tsarevich Fedor for the Polish throne arose, a hint was dropped in the tsar's letter to the Poles which showed that he was not against expelling the emperor himself from the narrow circle of the "preeminent":

We know that the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France have sent to you: but this is not an example for us, because other than us and the Turkish sultan there is in no state a sovereign whose house has ruled for two hundred years without interruption . . . [we are] the sov­ereign of the state starting from Augustus Caesar, from the beginning of time, and all people know this.

Who was the Holy Roman Emperor but a mere elected official—a "functionary" for his own vassals? And, if it came to that, who was the Turkish sultan, a Mohammedan who had no claims to the heritage of Augustus Caesar? And what price the rest of the crowned rabble— the Polish king Stefan Batory, who until recently had been a misera­ble voevoda\ the English queen Elizabeth, a "common maiden"; Gus- tav of Sweden, who, when the merchants came with goods to trade, personally put on gloves and measured out lard and wax "like the common people"; and all the other "functionaries," whether Hungar­ian, Danish, or French? This was the way Muscovite diplomats talked at the end of Ivan's life in the 1580s, on the brink of the catastrophe: "Even if old Rome and the new Rome, the ruling city of Byzantium, were compared to our sovereign, his Muscovite state would yield to none."

The crueller the blows which fate inflicted upon Ivan the Terrible's self-esteem, the paler his phantasmal star became, the more arrogant he grew. On his very deathbed he asserted that "by the mercy of God no state was higher than ours."⁴¹ He was like one of the Fates—blind, unstoppable, and inhuman. In his own city of Novgorod, he behaved like a foreign conqueror; he treated foreign sovereigns like his own boyars: all are slaves, and nothing but slaves.

This was not simply the ridiculous bragging of a paranoid head of state; it was the logical behavior of an autocrator. Liberated from all limitations on power within the country, intoxicated by his own wild freedom, he came logically and inevitably to the thought of liberation from all limitations on earth. Such was, it seems, the pure politi­cal core of the tsar's mental illness, the method, one may say, of his madness.

Ivan the Terrible was the first of the Muscovite princes (unless we count the Tsarevich Dimitrii, who never ruled) to be crowned as tsar—that is, caesar. But it did not suffice merely to call himself this. In the official hierarchy of European sovereigns, he remained the prince of Muscovy—not even a king, let alone caesar. Such leaps on one's own initiative were not permitted. They had to be bought by first-class, generally recognized victories. Ivan learned from his tutors and intimates that he was "the great tsar of the greatest empire on earth" (and if he can hear after death, he has undoubtedly rejoiced to

41. Ibid., p. 156.

hear the same thing from both classical Russian and Soviet historians, the tutors and intimates of other autocrators). But he did not hear this from his peers, the "other great sovereigns." And he developed a kind of royal inferiority complex.

Peter ended the Northern War as an emperor. Ivan the Terrible was named tsar before the Livonian War, and even before the war with Kazan'. He wanted his own Northern War. The anti-Tatar strategy, perhaps requiring generations of painstaking effort, did not suffice. He needed the immediate and sensational rout of a European state, Livonia, in order to be considered a "preeminent sovereign." The ar­guments of the Government of Compromise for a sound national strategy, and a blow at the Crimea as the logical completion of the Ka­zan' campaign, finally routing the Tatars and freeing their Christian slaves, must have seemed to him naive and boring. His personal goals seemed to him infinitely more important. Rather, as to every patri­monial feudal lord, it must have seemed to him that the state simply could have no other goals than his own; by subordinating the country to these goals, he threw it "into the abyss of extermination."

Having conquered the kingdoms of the Volga in the middle of the century, supplied with Caspian silk and furs from the Urals (which were no less valuable than the treasures of India), swiftly urbanizing and expanding its wealth, trying to liberate itself by the Great Reform from the Tatar heritage, the young Muscovite state emerged onto the broad expanse of world politics, from the very beginning claiming a primary role in it. A quarter of a century later, sunk in an endless and fruitless war, unable even to protect its own capital from the assault of the Crimeans, Russia had been thrown back into the ranks of third- class powers, into the darkness of "nonexistence."

The dream of "preeminent rule"—to implement which it was found necessary to lop off all the heads in Moscow capable of thought—led, in complete accordance with the historical logic of autocracy, to the opposite result. It was obvious, even to a foreign observer, only four years after the death of Ivan the Terrible (the tsar died in 1584) that something terrible lay in store for this country. "And this wicked pol­icy and tyrannous practice, though now it be ceased, hath so troubled that country and filled it so full of grudge and mortal hatred ever since that it will not be quenched, as it seemeth now, till it burn again into a civil flame," prophesied Giles Fletcher.[132] Thus ended the unfor­tunate, forgotten, and by now almost unbelievable, absolutist century in Russia.

CHAPTER VII

THE DAWN

1. Methodological Problems

Intellectual history has its stereotypes. When we begin an analysis of the evolution of ideas, we are primarily seeking forms of classification by which we can most comfortably locate the proponents and oppo­nents of various historical stratagems. For exarnple, it is convenient to divide them into "right-wingers" and "left-wingers," or into "con­servatives" and "liberals," or into "ideologists" and "scholars." The special and unprecedented difficulty of Ivaniana consists in the fact that in this case not one of these conventional classifications works. The Decembrist Ryleev, a "left-wing" dissident of the early nine­teenth century, and the historian Pogodin, a "right-wing" reactionary, fight on the same side of the barricades of Ivaniana; Ilovaiskii, a member of the "Union of the Russian People," or Black Hundreds, and Ravelin, a liberal of the first water, offer their hands to each other across the decades; Bestuzhev-Riumin and Belov, declared in all the Soviet texts on the subject to be representatives of "reactionary bour- geois-and-nobility historiography," merrily run in tandem with the au­thors of the very works in which they are denounced, Bakhrushin and Smirnov. How are we to explain these incongruities? Historians often tried to avoid this difficulty by simply declaring the writing of their predecessors, both of the left and of the right, to be unscientific. In some cases this has meant that the opinions of the predecessors were dictated more by emotions and prejudice than by analysis of primary sources. In others, so the pious Marxists think, the predecessors were infected with the ideology of obsolete classes, and therefore by defini­tion incapable of having any communion with "genuine science."

Nowadays it is impossible, for example, to read K. D. Ravelin's re­view of M. P. Pogodin's article "On the Character of Ivan the Terri­ble" without smiling. Ravelin haughtily, not to say abusively, eluci­dates the "unscientific nature" of the writings of his predecessor:

Anyone who is at all acquainted with the course of our historical litera­ture knows how much material has now been printed which was un­known and unavailable at that time [that is, in 1825, when Pogodin's article was written; Ravelin's review was published in 1846]. There were incomparably more prejudices. ... In addition, at that time Karam- zin's authority was still unlimited; he, for all his great and never-to-be- forgotten services to Russian historical scholarship, introduced into it completely unnatural views.'

From this it followed, naturally, that the more "material" was printed, and the fewer "prejudices" there were, and the faster "unnatural views" were replaced by "natural" ones, the closer we would be to the truth. An analogous point of view was held by Ravelin's contempo­rary and cothinker, S. M. Solov'ev, who explained the disagreements among historians in terms of the "immaturity of historical scholar­ship, and the common failure to pay attention to the correlation and sequence of phenomena. Ivan IV was not understood because he was separated from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather." A half century later N. K. Mikhailovskii sarcastically noted that: "So­lov'ev carried out this task, and connected the activity oflvan with the activity of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and pur­sued this connection even further into the depths of time, but the dis­agreements have not been terminated."²

After another half century, perhaps the most brilliant of the Soviet historians, S. B. Veselovskii, lamented: "The maturing of historical scholarship is proceeding so slowly that it may shake our faith in the strength of human reasoning altogether, and not only in the question of Tsar Ivan and his time."³

In the interim between these two pessimistic statements, all this did not, however, by any means prevent S. F. Platonov from present­ing Ivaniana in 1923 as a triumph of "the maturing of historical scholarship":

In order to survey in detail everything which has been written about [Ivan] the Terrible by historians and poets, one would need an entire book. From the History of Russia of Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1789) to R. Iu. Vipper's work Ivan the Terrible (1922), the understanding of Ivan the Terrible and his time has passed through a number of phases, and has attained significant success. It can be said that this success is one of the most brilliant stages in the history of our science—one of the most decisive victories of scientific method.[133]

However, after Platonov died in exile, and the "appearance and dissemination of Marxism"—in the words of A. A. Zimin—"created a revolution in historical science,"⁵ and "guided by the brilliant works of the founders of scientific socialism, Soviet historians received the broadest opportunities to make a new approach to the solution of basic questions of the history of Russia,"⁶ everything became decid­edly cloudy and got into a condition of even greater "immaturity" than was the case before Solov'ev. Whereas the latter had looked on Karamzin as a naive representative of "unnatural views" and a slave of idealistic "prejudices," the first leader of Soviet historiography thought even worse of Solov'ev than Solov'ev did of Karamzin: "So- lov'ev's views were those of an idealist-historian,⁷ who looks on the historical process from above, on the side of the ruling classes, and not from below, the side of the oppressed."⁸

Whereas Solov'ev, looking at the historical process from above, dis­covered that Ivan the Terrible "was indisputably the most gifted sov­ereign whom Russian history offers us before Peter the Great, and the most brilliant personality of all the Riurikids,"⁹ for Pokrovskii, ex­amining it from below, Ivan the Terrible represented a type of "hys­terical and tyrannical person, who understood only his ego and did not wish to know anything except this precious ego—no political principles or societal obligations."¹⁰

But what happened later could not have been foreseen either by Solov'ev or by Pokrovskii: these mutually exclusive views were sud­denly amalgamated, forming a monstrous explosive mixture, which haughtily continued to call itself "genuine science."

To begin with, the Soviet historian I. I. Polosin, from the pre­scribed perspective of "the oppressed classes," discovered that the so­cial meaning of the Oprichnina consisted "in the enserfment of the peasants, in the enclosure of the communal lands characteristic of serfdom, and in the liquidation of St. George's Day."" But, not being able to resist the temptation of looking at matters "from the side of

A. A. Zimin, Reform)i . . . , p. 31.

A. A. Zimin, Oprichnina . . . , p. 33.

The word "idealist" carries in Marxist discourse the special pejorative sense of a viewpoint or theory based on the assumption of the primacy of ideas or nonmaterial elements, rather than material factors, in the historical process and the formation of reality generally.

M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia, bk. 3, p. 239.

S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 3, p. 707.

Pokrovskii, bk. 1, p. 256.

I. I. Polosin, Sotsial'no-politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVI-nachala XVII v., p. 20.

the ruling classes" (reflecting, in his own words, the "powerful influ­ence of contemporary reality"), Polosin all of a sudden discovered in that same Oprichnina "military-autocratic communism."'² In other words, he equated communism with serfdom. Polosin obviously de­served punishment from both above and below for his infantile sin­cerity and reversion to Solov'ev's rehabilitation of the Terrible Tsar. But it was the wrong time for Polosin's colleagues to punish him. The rehabilitation picked up speed. It was transformed into a competi­tion. One respected historian hastened to overtake the next. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Solov'ev, for all his bowing and scraping before the political achievements of the Terrible Tsar, had nevertheless condemned his depravity, crying out: "Let not the histo­rian say a word in justification of such a person!"[134] In the middle of the twentieth century, this seemed to have been forgotten. Now the "idealist-historian" Solov'ev seemed to be looking at things "from the side of the oppressed," while the Marxist historians looked at them "from the side of the ruling classes." More than this, precisely this view was declared the only scientific one. R. Iu. Vipper asserted (in the second edition of his book) that only "Soviet historical science has restored the true figure of Ivan the Terrible as the creator of a cen­tralized state and the major political figure of his time.'"⁴

This "historiographic nightmare" of the 1940s was evaluated by a participant, Veselovskii, in a book written during that time but pub­lished only many years after his death, in the 1960s:

In recent times everyone who had occasion to write about Ivan the Ter­rible and his time began to say with a single voice that finally Ivan as a historical personality had been rehabilitated from the calumnies and distortions of the old historiography, and had risen before us in his full stature and correctly interpreted. S. Borodin, in his comment on the Trilogy [Trilogiia] of V Kostylev, praised the author for having shown Ivan the Terrible as "a progressive statesman, who transformed the life of the country, firm in achieving his goals, farseeing and bold." S. Golu- bov in a critique of a new production of Aleksei Tolstoi's play at the Malyi Theater wrote that after many centuries of calumnies and slan­der by the enemies of Ivan the Terrible, "we see for the first time on the stage a true historical figure of a fighter for the 'bright kingdom,' a fiery patriot of his time, a mighty statesman." Academician N. Derzhavin ex­pressed himself to approximately the same effect. . . . "Only relatively recently have the events of the period of Ivan I V's reign received in our historical scholarship a correct and objective interpretation." Thus, the rehabilitation of the personality and political activity of Ivan IV is a novelty—the latest word in Soviet historical scholarship. But is this ac­curate? Can one believe that historians of the most varied tendencies, including Marxists, have been doing nothing for 200 years but con­fusing and distorting the history of their motherland?¹'

But why should we not believe this? Didn't Solov'ev and Ravelin say the same thing about Raramzin and Pogodin? And didn't Pokrov­skii and Polosin say the same thing about Solov'ev and Ravelin (and also about Raramzin and Pogodin)? In this sense, Vipper and Der- zhavin behaved in the traditional way, denying from the outset the "scholarly character" of Pokrovskii and Veselovskii (and at the same time of Solov'ev and Ravelin, and Raramzin and Pogodin).

Some of them had disclaimed their predecessors for neglecting the "factual material" and having "unnatural views." Others had attacked them for not looking at things from the angle at which a genuine sci­entist should. But why did the contemporaries of Veselovskii attack all of them?

In the first place, Veselovskii suggested, "the job of putting histo­rians on the true path . . . was taken over by belles-lettrists, play­wrights, dramatic critics, and film directors"—in a word, by laymen. But this was untrue. Academician Derzhavin, whom he had just fin­ished quoting, was not a layman, but a professional historian. Aca­demician Vipper, who four times, in the four editions of his Ivan the Terrible, sang a solemn hymn to the "major figure of a ruler of peoples and a great patriot," was likewise no layman. Professor Bakhrushin, who published three editions of his Ivan the Terrible, in which the ty­rant is depicted as a democratic monarch, beloved by his people, was also a leading historian, who wrote the relevant sections in textbooks for schools and universities. The same went—and still goes—for the highly esteemed specialist Professor Smirnov, also the author of an Ivan the Terrible, who in his apologetic ecstasy went so far as to openly contrast scholarly analysis to "the power of the wisdom of the people, which evaluated and firmly held in its consciousness the truly pro­gressive features of [Ivan] the Terrible. . . . The figure of the terrible tsar created by the people has stood the test of time."¹" Even Ra­ramzin had known enough to separate the intellect of the nation from its prejudices and, unlike the Marxist Smirnov, gave preference to the former.¹⁷ Derzhavin, Polosin, Vipper, Bakhrushin, Smirnov, the major professionals of current Russian historiography, were the ones who contrasted "the wisdom of the people" to scientific analysis. Specialists, and not laymen, exclaimed in enthusiasm that "official his­toriography was in sharp contradiction with the numerous popular traditions, songs, and tales" in which "the terrible tsar appears not only as a historical personage, but precisely as a hero, whose deeds are praised and glorified.'"⁸

The first of Veselovskii's theses is thus not confirmed by the facts. "But the main thing perhaps," he writes in advancing his second the­sis, "is the fact that scientific people, including historians, have long since lost the naive faith in miracles and know quite well that to say something new in historical science is not that easy, and that for this there is needed extensive and conscientious work on the primary sources, new factual material, and that inspiration is entirely insuffi­cient, even when it is of the most benevolent kind.'"⁹

But, after all, Solov'ev said the same thing a hundred years ago. And, alas, his sermons did not protect the public consciousness from the recurrence of the "historiographic nightmare." Veselovskii was a brilliant and genuine scholar. I sincerely sympathize with his con­fusion. The fact is, however, that he had encountered a national drama occurring again and again over a period of centuries, and tried to treat it as an accidental and temporary deviation from "sci­ence." Even his opponents suggested to him that things were not that simple. Polosin wrote that Veselovskii "studied the Oprichnina from the position of Prince Kurbskii—an unreliable position, and, to put it bluntly, rotten through and through."²" Veselovskii would never have

Karamzin ends volume 9 of his Istoriia gosidarstva Rossiishogo with these words: "Ivan's good reputation has outlived his bad reputation in the memory of the people; the groans fell silent; the victims rotted away; and the old traditions were over­shadowed by new ones; but the name of Ivan shone on the law code and reminded people of the acquisition of the three Mongol kingdoms. The documents proving the atrocities lay in the archives, and the people over the course of the centuries saw Ka­zan', Astrakhan', and Siberia as living monuments to the tsar-conqueror; they honored in him a famous proponent of the power of our state and of the formation of our social order; they rejected or forgot the name of Tormentor, which his contemporaries gave him, and from the obscure rumors of his cruelty, Ivan is now called only the Terrible, without distinguishing him from his grandfather, also so called in ancient Russian, more in praise than in reproach. History is more unforgiving than are the people" (p. 472).

Smirnov, p. 5.

Veselovskii, p. 37.

Polosin, p. 19.

agreed, but the criticism is valid, if you discard the abuse. Both Vese- lovskii and Kurbskii actually fought on one side of the barricades in the national debate on the nature of tyranny and its role in Russian history. They were both on the side of the intellect of the nation and against its prejudices in the historical battle taking place in the heart of one nation divided in two.

New apologias for Ivan the Terrible have arisen, and will continue to arise, independently of the "maturity" of historical scholarship in each new phase of pseudodespotism, each with a new Ivan the Terri­ble on the Russian throne. Society can outlive autocracy only in its his­torical experience. Historical scholarship, no matter how many new sources it discovers, is not capable of replacing this experience. But it can still do something: it can help or hinder a society in overcoming its autocratic tradition. Here we approach the real problem of Ivan- iana. The opponents of Ivan the Terrible have been dissidents rather than oppositionists. In other words, they have argued, exposed, cursed, and been indignant, and they have been just and strong in their criticism—as long as criticism by itself was sufficient. But they have not thought out a positive alternative to autocracy. They have not seen it either in terms of theory or in terms of history. They have worked without depending on the ancient and powerful Russian ab­solutist tradition—on the tradition which gave them birth, but which they were not able to make their tool. On the other hand, their oppo­nents—beginning with Ivan the Terrible himself, and ending with Ivan Smirnov—have based themselves on the equally ancient and mighty autocratic tradition, on the prejudices of a nation which lived through the Tatar yoke and the cultural revolution of the Oprich­nina, on the powerful striving to justify the strong regime of the Boss. And they have not only based themselves on this tradition; they have been able to make it their tool. The dissidents of Ivaniana have never dared to recognize openly and fearlessly the tremendous power of this slave tradition, which seems to come from underground, from the very roots of the national consciousness. And for this reason they have been helpless against it. What good were primary sources and new "factual material," what good was the moral indignation and the martyrology of the victims of the Oprichnina against the terrible power of cultural stereotypes? This was like trying to storm an im­pregnable fortress armed with goose quills. The tradition of slavery could be destroyed only by an alternative tradition, only by recogniz­ing its weaknesses, the mistakes which it made, and the reasons for its defeats. The dissidents of Ivaniana did not do this. For this reason they were defeated. I will try here to show how this happened.

2. At the Sources of Ivaniana

In 1564, Ivan IV's favorite, the boyar prince Andrei Kurbskii, a hero of the Kazan' and Livonian wars, fled to the protection of the king of Poland, leaving his wife and infant son in Derpt, where he had been governor. From Lithuania, Kurbskii wrote a sharp and reproachful letter to the tsar. The latter—himself a "master of rhetoric and writ­ten wisdom" in the eyes of contemporaries—replied with a lengthy epistle of self-justification. With the remarkable correspondence thus begun—which lasted, with long interruptions, from 1564 to 1579— commences what I call Ivaniana.²¹

The correspondence between Kurbskii and the tsar has been rein­terpreted many times in the past 400 years. For declaring it apoc­ryphal, Edward Keenan was given a distinguished prize not long ago.²² Nonetheless, V. O. Kliuchevskii first perceived in it the fatal dichotomy in Russian political culture.²³ Paying tribute to Kliuchev-

V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (2nd ed.), vol. 2, p. 164.

Keenan's The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha was awarded the first annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize. His point of view is based on a complex and inventive textological analy­sis, which a well-known emigre expert in the literature of this period has called "a fan­tastic pyramid of speculation" (N. Andreev, "Mnimaia tema," p. 270). A major Soviet expert comes to the conclusion that "the attentive reading of the sources promised by Keenan is reduced to an inaccurate and arbitrary interpretation of them, and the laws of probability serve as a bridge to unproved and fantastic speculations" (R. G. Skryn- nikov, Perepiska [Ivana] Groznogo i Kurbskogo. Paradoksy Edvarda Kinnona, p. 123). I am prepared, however, to explain this strange coincidence by the prejudice of both re­viewers. In any case, this is, as the saying is in Russia, after Pushkin, "a quarrel of Slavs among themselves"—a highly academic conflict between highly qualified textologists. What disturbs me is something else: as soon as Keenan goes beyond the limits of pure textology and addresses himself to the analysis of the content, his whole construction suddenly begins to sound somehow less than professional. Keenan is convinced, for ex­ample, that "Kurbskii . . . never really does make clear what he believes in, aside from his complaints against Ivan's personal tyranny, while Ivan, for the most part, is at pains to justify his own actions on personal and historical grounds, rather than by any consis­tent theoretical program" (p. 60). I would be prepared to agree with Keenan if he had said that Kurbskii did a poor job of defending his point of view. But unfortunately he does not analyze the political content of the correspondence at all. We shall see soon how complex, contradictory, and difficult to analyze this political content is. Keenan's refusal even to notice it rather compels me to agree with the conclusion of Professor Andreev: "What a pity Edward Keenan has thrown his enormous energy and tireless imagination into creation of an illusory theme" (p. 272). It is an even greater pity in­asmuch as there are still so many real and difficult problems in the Russian history of this period which demand all of the attention and imagination of the few people work­ing in the field. It is sad to contemplate a specialist playing with dolls, so to speak.

The classical stereotype has it that the dualism in Russian political life takes its origin from the "Westernist" modernization of Peter I (that is, from the second auto- skii's role as trailblazer—but also because he is a brilliant writer, the Pushkin of Russian historiography—I will as far as possible set forth the essence of the correspondence in his words. "Kurbskii's text con­tains . . . political judgments resembling principles or a theory," he wrote.

He considers as normal only a structure of the state which is based not on the personal will of the sovereign, but on the participation of a "col­lege"—a council of boyars—in the administration. . . . Furthermore the sovereign should share his royal concerns not only with highborn and just councillors: Prince Kurbskii also favors the participation of the people in the administration, and stands for the usefulness and ne­cessity of an Assembly of the Land. . . . "If the tsar is respected by the kingdom ... he must seek good and useful counsel not only from his councillors, but also from men of all the people, since the gift of the spirit is given not according to external wealth or according to power, but according to spiritual rectitude.". . . The prince stood for the gov­erning role of the Council of Boyars and for the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the administration of the state. But he is dreaming of yesterday. . . . Neither the governing role of the Council of Boyars nor the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the ad­ministration was an ideal at that time, nor could it be a political dream. [They] were at that time political facts. . . . Thus, Prince Kurbskii stands for existing facts; his political program does not go beyond the limits of the existing structure of the state . . . while sharply critical of the past of Muscovy, [he] cannot think of anything better than this past.[135]

The reader might well conclude from this, as dozens of the most experienced experts have concluded before him, that Kurbskii stood for the status quo, and even for the past, which implies that his oppo­nent, the tsar, was advancing something new, going "beyond the limits of the existing structure of the state." Logically this should be so. Oth­erwise, what would they have to argue about? But

let us look at the other side. The tsar . . . objects not to individual as­sertions of Kurbskii's but to the entire political mode of thought of boyardom, which Kurbskii has come forward to defend. "You," the tsar writes to him, "are always saying the same thing . . . turning this way and that your favorite thought, that slaves, not masters, should possess power"—although none of this is written in Kurbskii's letter. "Is it," the tsar continues, "contrary to reason not to wish to be possessed by one's own slaves? Is this glorious Orthodoxy—to be under the power of slaves?" All are slaves, and nothing but slaves. ... All of the political thinking of the tsar is reducible to one idea—to the idea of autocratic power. For Ivan, autocracy is not only the normal order established from on high, but also the original fact of our political life, proceeding out of the depths of time. . . . The entire philosophy of autocracy is reduced to one simple conclusion: "We are free to show mercy to our bondsmen, and we are also free to execute them." Such a formula requires no effort of thought at all. The appanage princes came to the same con­clusion without the help of an exalted theory of autocracy and even ex­pressed themselves in almost the same words: "I, Prince So-and-so, am free to show mercy and also to execute whomever I like.". . . Such is the political program of Tsar Ivan.²³

But if the appanage princes of two and three hundred years before Ivan the Terrible had already adhered to the same political philoso­phy, and even expressed it with the same words, then what, in es­sence, is new here? Nothing at all! says Kliuchevskii: "Both sides backed the existing order.'"²" You will agree that here there is some­thing inexplicable, or at least unexplained. Two irreconcilable en­emies fight for long years, and on their banners there is inscribed the same thing: I am for the existing order.

Kliuchevskii, of course, feels something incongruous in this, and tries to explain the incongruity: "One feels . . . that some misunder­standing divided the two disputants. This misunderstanding con­sisted in the fact that in their correspondence, it was not two political modes of thought which came into collision, but two political moods." What the term "political mood" is supposed to mean is not very clear to me—nor, I am afraid, to Kliuchevskii. On the same page on which he comes to the conclusion that "both sides stood for the existing order," he suddenly declares: "Both sides were dissatisfied . . . with the structure of the state in which they acted, and which they even led."[136] Unfortunately, I fail to see the logic of this conclusion, in which both sides went into battle for one and the same thing, while both were equally dissatisfied with it. I am afraid that Kliuchevskii failed too. Probably for this reason, he returns again and again to the topic which disturbs him, trying to explain his own thinking. In this, at least once, he succeeds superbly.

3. A Strange Conflict

"What in fact, was the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century?" Kliuchevskii asks.

It was an absolute monarchy, but with an aristocratic administration. There was no political legislation which could have defined the bound­aries of the supreme power, but there was a governmental class with an aristocratic organization, which the regime itself recognized. This re­gime grew together, simultaneously, and even hand in hand, with an­other political force, which limited it. Thus, the character of this regime did not correspond to the nature of the governmental tools through which it had to act. The boyars thought of themselves as powerful ad­visors of the sovereign of all Rus', while the same sovereign, remaining true to the views of an appanage prince, employed them according to ancient Russian law as his household servants, with the title of bonds­men of the sovereign.²"

But here it is, the answer to the riddle which tormented Kliuchev­skii and which he never solved. This answer consists in the fact that the political tradition of medieval Russia was dualistic—that it was a form of coexistence between two types of relationships between the "state" and the "land," which were not only different, but opposite. The first was the ancient relationship of an appanage prince to his household servants, who administered his votchina, and to the bonds­men who tilled the princely domain. This was a relationship of mas­ter to slave (precisely the relationship which Ivan the Terrible insisted on so fiercely in his letters). But the second relationship was no less ancient. This was the relationship of the prince as war leader and as defender of the land to his free retainers and the boyars of his coun­cil. It was just this relationship—which as a rule was contractual, but in any case was morally obligatory and fixed in the norms of custom­ary law—which Kurbskii was insisting on.

Kurbskii's tradition was rooted in the custom of "free departure" of the boyars from the prince—a custom which gave the boyar a quite definite and strong guarantee against arbitrary behavior on the part of his sovereign, for a prince of a tyrannical turn of mind would soon lose military and thus political power. Therefore he either showed himself willing to make concessions, or he perished. Tyrants simply did not survive in the cruel and permanent war between princes. The competitive standing of the prince was a reliable guarantee of the po­litical independence of his boyar councillors. Such were the historical roots of the absolutist tradition in Russia.

But it was not only that both these tendencies coexisted for many centuries; they also, Kliuchevskii observes, "grew hand in hand." This sharply contradicts the existing stereotype, according to which the ab­solutist tradition gradually but uninterruptedly weakened in Russia as the country was transformed from a conglomerate of princely do­mains into a unified state, and "if one left Muscovy, there was no­where to go, or it was inconvenient." As the unified state was created, the boyars not only were not turned into bondsmen of the tsar, but quite the contrary, became "a governmental class with an aristocratic organization which the regime itself recognized."

The household of an "appanage prince" knew neither a govern­mental class nor an aristocratic organization: it contained either bondsmen or free retainers. Furthermore, the royal votchina was ad­ministered by bondsmen and not by retainers. Therefore, the aristo- cratization of the elite—that is, the transformation of free retainers into a governmental class—was a comparatively late phenomenon in Russia. The Russian aristocracy was thus formed precisely in connec­tion with, and in the course of, the formation of the unified state. Moreover, it was created by this very process.

The boyars of the council of an appanage prince participated in political decisions mainly by taking advantage of the right of "free de­parture." In other words, their role in the formation of policy was at that time purely negative. Now, having lost the right of free travel be­tween principalities, they had acquired in return something consider­ably greater: the privilege of participating in the adoption of political decisions, not only in a negative sense, as previously, but also posi­tively. Thus, the Russian aristocracy was not an obsolete phenome­non, as the textbooks would have it, but a phenomenon which was developing and gathering strength. As early as the fourteenth cen­tury, the first conquerer of the Tatars, Dimitrii Donskoi, said on his deathbed to his boyars: "I was born in your presence, grew up among you, ruled as prince with you, made war with you in many countries and overthrew the heathen." He left this behest to his sons: "Listen to the boyars, and do nothing without their consent."²⁹ From here it was a long road to Article 98 of the law code of 1550, which juridically obliged the sovereign not to adopt any laws without the agreement of the boyars. In the course of two centuries, Russian boyardom was transformed from a body offree retainers into a governmental class. It com­pelled the regime to recognize its aristocratic organization. It learned to coexist with a new apparatus of executive power—prikazy (minis­tries) and secretaries (ministers), who were actually the heirs of the serf administrators in the appanage votchiny. In his doctoral disserta­tion, Kliuchevskii himself examined the mechanism of this coexis­tence in detail:

The Duma supervised all new and extraordinary measures, but as the latter became customary through repetition, they passed over into the domain of the central bureaus. . . . The central bureaus were formed, so to speak, out of the administrative deposits gradually laid down from the legislative activities of the Duma having to do with extraordinary matters, which then passed into the order of clerical work."¹"

Thus, the Muscovite political machine in the mid-sixteenth century combined single-handed leadership in the sphere of executive power (which corresponded to the autocratic tradition) with limited leadership in the sphere of legislative power (which corresponded to the absolutist tradition).

In 1549, a new element was introduced—the Assembly of the Land, which potentially might have meant the institutionalization of broad-based legislative power (inasmuch as the Boyar Duma and the sacred synod of church hierarchs formed part of it). This third ele­ment was not an accidental phenomenon. The experience of the first half of the sixteenth century showed a need to correct an imbalance in the existing political machine.

In the absence of a law determining the mode of succession to the throne, the leadership was unstable. So was the relationship between the executive and legislative functions, which involved combining both unlimited and limited mandates in the person of the tsar. The reign of Vasilii (1505-33) had demonstrated that if the tsar aimed for a dictatorship, the Boyar Duma was an inadequate restraining factor. Vasilii had tried to concentrate the administration in the hands of the executive power he headed. In 1520 the boyar Bersen' Beklemishev openly accused Vasilii of violating the rules of the political game and deviating from the "conciliar methods" of Ivan III toward the adop-

E. A. Belov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii russkogo boiarstva, p. 29.

V. O. Kliuchevskii, Boiarskaia duma . . . , p. 162.

tion of decisions in camera with his secretaries. On the other hand, the epoch of "boyar rule" (1537-47) demonstrated that without a sin­gle leader the machine simply could not function: successive oli­garchies practically paralyzed the political process.

Two opposed proposals to resolve the dilemma were in circulation in the middle years of the century. Ivan Peresvetov called for the com­plete removal of boyardom from power. Conversely, an anonymous pamphlet originating among the Non-Acquirers, the famous Con­versation of the Miracle Workers of Valaam, proposed the summoning of a "universal assembly" of all estates from all the cities and regions of Russia, which would remain in session permanently, thus giving the tsar the opportunity to "question them well as to every kind of secular matter."¹¹

Moscow of the 1550s was in transition toward the unknown. The traditional order of things was falling apart, changing its outline, dis­appearing before one's eyes. Kliuchevskii himself affirms this, when he says that "in the society of the time of [Ivan] the Terrible, the thought was abroad that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land a leader in the . .. cause of reforming . . . the administration."[137]Who, ten or twenty years before, whether under Vasilii or under the "boyar government," could have imagined that such ideas would spring up in Muscovite society? Not a quarter century had passed since the last visit of the imperial ambassador Sigismund Herberstein, who noted of Muscovy's sovereign:

He has power over both secular and clerical individuals and freely, ac­cording to his will, disposes of the life and property of all. Among the counselors whom he has, none enjoy such importance that they would dare to contradict him in anything or be of another opinion. ... It is unknown whether the rudeness of the people requires such a tyrannical sovereign, or whether the tyranny of the prince made the people thus rude and cruel.[138]

Herberstein had not witnessed the short-lived flowering of the "Muscovite Athens" of the 1480s and 90s, and did not know that the tyrannical atmosphere of the court of Vasilii was the result of a politi­cal struggle which ended in the routing of the Non-Acquirers and the political trials of Bersen', of Maxim the Greek, and of Vassian Pa- trikeev. (All of whom had, inter alia, contradicted the sovereign—which was why they were convicted.) But if the political life of Muscovy could in such a short interval have risen to the idea of a national rep­resentative assembly, it could mean only that the existing order was changing swiftly. Not only did both sides in the dispute between Kurbskii and the tsar feel this change, but the fate of each of the so­cial groups making up Muscovite society depended on it. The severity of the conflict is explained not by some elusive difference in "political mood," as Kliuchevskii thinks, but by the fact that the most profound and fundamental interests of the country were at stake.

Kliuchevskii's vast knowledge of the administrative structure of me­dieval Muscovy remains unsurpassed to this day.[139] It did not prevent him, however, from making contradictory statements. For example, he asserts that "neither the governing role of the Council of Boyars nor the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the administration was an ideal at that time nor could it be a political dream."[140] On the other hand, he tells us that "in practice the Assembly of the Land of the sixteenth century did not prove to be either universal [that is, repre­senting all the estates] or a permanent gathering, convoked every year, and did not take into its hands the supervision of the administra­tion."[141] The Assembly of the Land not only did not take supervision over the administration into its hands but—as can be seen both from Kurbskii's letter and from the behavior of the Government of Com­promise—no one even had any real idea of how, concretely, this was to be done. The government was feeling its way in the dark. It did not even try to bring before the Assembly of the Land such fundamental conflicts as the secularization of church landholdings, or even the conflict over the immunities in which the decision of the assembly it­self was violated by the church hierarchy. It did not try to address it­self to the assembly in the decisive debate over foreign policy. In sum, it did not try to institutionalize the assembly as the supreme arbiter in its dispute with the tsar. This is why the only thing that Kliuchevskii can say in the government's defense is that the thought was abroad in the society that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land leader in the cause of correcting the administration. But can one se­riously call this "wandering thought" a political fact—the more so since even in Kurbskii's letters it still "wanders," without ever growing into a precise formulation? No political mechanism designed to se­cure the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the adminis­tration was even envisaged. And this is why it remained a political dream.

Such was the extraordinary complexity of the Kurbskii-tsar corre­spondence which Vasilii Kliuchevskii found so difficult to analyze and Edward Keenan failed to notice.

4. The First Attack of the "Historiographic Nightmare"

Until the publication of volume 9 of Karamzin's History of the Rus­sian State, declared the Russian historian N. Ustrialov,

Ivan was recognized among us as a great sovereign: he was seen as the conqueror of three kingdoms, and even more as a wise and solicitous legislator; it was known that he was hardhearted, but only by obscure traditions; and he was partly excused in many matters for having estab­lished a brilliant autocratic regime. Peter the Great himself wished to justify him. . . . This opinion was shaken by Karamzin, who solemnly declared that in the last years of his reign, Ivan did not run second ei­ther to Louis XI or to Caligula, but that until the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, he was the model of a pious, wise monarch, zeal­ous for the glory and happiness of the state.[142]

Ustrialov is both right and wrong. As early as 1564, Kurbskii quite clearly divided the reign of Ivan the Terrible into the same two peri­ods. Karamzin follows this division to the letter. More than this, fol­lowing Kurbskii, he even divides his description into two volumes. Volume 8, devoted to the "blue" period, ends thus: "This is the end of the happy days of Ivan and of Russia: for he lost not only his wife but his virtue."[143] Volume 9, devoted to the "black" period, opens with this declaration: "We are approaching the description of terrible changes in the soul of the tsar and in the fate of the kingdom."[144]

In Kliuchevskii's apt formula, "the tsar was split in two in the thought of his contemporaries."[145] At the beginning he was great and glorious, wrote one of them, "and then it was as if a terrible storm, coming from a distance, disturbed the peace of his good heart, and I do not know what upset his mind, great with wisdom, into a cruel dis­position, and he became a mutineer in his own state." Even more de­cisive hostility to the "double tsar" was expressed in 1626 by Prince Katyrev-Rostovskii, who described vividly how the tsar—"a man of marvelous mind, skilled at book learning and eloquent"—suddenly "was filled with wrath and fury" and "ruined a multitude of the peo­ple in his kingdom, both great and small." Finally, in the Chronicle of Ivan Timofeev, the description of Ivan's evil deeds is brought out in truly sculptural relief. It is true that as a motive for them only "poi­sonous fury" is cited, but it is said that the tsar suddenly "took a hatred to the cities of his land, and in wrath . . . divided all the land in his realm in two as though with a cleaver.'"" Iurii Krizhanich, with whom we are already familiar, in his Politics, written in the 1660s, pro­posed a special term "liudoderstvo"[146] to define autocracy. Krizhanich knew where this began in Rus':

Who was the Russian Jeroboam [i.e., the beginning of evil]? Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich, who introduced extremely hard and merciless laws in order to rob his subjects. . . . That is how matters have gone in this king­dom from the reign of Ivan Vasil'evich, who was the originator of this liudoderstvo

Thus, contemporaries and immediate descendants clearly under­stood that there was something terrible in the activity of Tsar Ivan— something which called forth a national disaster. For them, he was Ivan the Tormenter and "a mutineer in his own state." We hear from them no justifications of the tsar.

However, all these "dark legends" could not prevent the growth of the "historiographic nightmare" in the first half of the eighteenth century. The famous Russian scholar and poet Mikhail Lomonosov wrote an ode "On the Capture of Khotin," in which Peter I says to Ivan the Terrible, "Thy and my exploits are not in vain, that Russia should be feared by the whole world."[147] (In fact, after Ivan the Terri­ble, Russia by no means inspired the world with fear, but rather with contempt.) The historian Vasilii Tatishchev asserted that, "Ivan sub­jugated Kazan' and Astrakhan' to himself . . . and if the mutiny and treason of a few good-for-nothing boyars had not prevented it, it would certainly not have been hard for him to conquer Livonia and a good part of Lithuania.'"¹⁵ It was hard to blame Ivan's defeat on the Poles, the Germans, or the Jews (who would be blamed by Tati- shchev's descendants and followers for other misfortunes of Russia). He was therefore forced to seek an internal enemy. His formula was brief: the boyars are guilty. They conspired, they mutinied, they be­trayed. Thus even in the period of this first "historiographic night­mare," Kurbskii's view of the Oprichnina as a conflict between the tsar and the boyars was revealed as a stick with two ends.

The criterion used by Tatishchev and Lomonosov was the national power of Russia, understood exclusively as its potential for intimi­dation. All sacrifices were justified for the achievement of this result. To the credit of Russian historiography, it must be said, however, that the first "historiographic nightmare" did not last long. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, the most prestigious representative of the conservative opposition in the time of Catherine the Great, branded the epoch of Ivan the Terrible a time when "love for the fatherland died out, and in its place came baseness, servility, and a striving only for one's own property."[148] Unlike Lomonosov and Tatishchev, Shcherbatov con­nected the decline of morality within the country with the catastroph­ic fall of its prestige abroad. He damned Ivan because the latter "made his name hated in all the countries of the world." And unlike the contemporaries of the tsar, he saw the source of these calamities neither in the tsar's character nor in his "poisonous fury," but in his striving for unlimited power: "Thus the unrestricted power, which autocrats only desire, is a sword serving to punish by cutting off their own glory, even if nothing else happens."[149]

As we see, there was no lack of testimony to Ivan the Terrible's "baseness of heart," "poisonous fury," and striving for "unrestricted power" before Karamzin. But nevertheless, Ustrialov was partly right. For society remained deaf to this testimony. It did not hear it, did not wish to hear it, and having heard it, did not understand it. The curses in the chronicles and the investigations in the archives were one thing and the public consciousness was quite another. Lulled by dreams of the national might of Russia (as Catherine the Great's chancellor, Bezborodko, said, "Not a single cannon in Europe dare be fired with­out our permission"), it was inclined to believe Lomonosov rather than Shcherbatov. The truth could not become a fact of public con­sciousness until Karamzin's time; by then Russia had experienced a brief, but fearful, parody of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible un­der Emperor Paul, at the very end of the eighteenth century, when the frightful power of the state was again turned inward, against the society itself. And the latter, mortally frightened, "felt on its own skin" the immediate need to understand what the Russian Oprichnina really was.[150]

5. "Hero of Virtue" and "Insatiable Bloodsucker"

How to explain the contradictions in Ivan the Terrible's character? Shcherbatov reached the conclusion that "the inclinations of the heart [of Ivan the Terrible] were always the same," but that circum­stances prevented them from being manifested before the Oprich­nina. Precisely what these circumstances were, Shcherbatov does not exactly explain. He was inclined to think that it was primarily the gen­tleness of his first wife, Anastasia, which restrained the tsar.[151] But though we may accept this as an explanation of why Ivan did not com­mit crimes during his marriage to Anastasia, how is it that he accom­plished great reforms and "sacred tasks" during this period? Again under beneficial feminine influence? Cherchez la femme? Neither Shcherbatov nor Karamzin (who in practice shares his predecessor's viewpoint as to Anastasia's role) is prepared to venture so gallant an explanation.

Karamzin, who was an adherent of "enlightened autocracy" (tyr­anny without a tyrant, so to speak), offers a subtler explanation for the "doubling" of the figure of the tsar, which permits him both to be condemned as a human being and justified as a political figure. Ka­ramzin seeks to rehabilitate the autocracy by condemning the terror (in contemporary terms, he tried to do exactly what the Eurocom- munists and Solzhenitsyn are now doing: the former would like to separate communism from the GULAG, and the latter would like to separate communism from traditional Russian autocracy). Karamzin writes:

Despite all the speculative explanations, the character of Ivan—a hero

of virtue in his youth and an insatiable bloodsucker in the years of his

maturity and his old age—is a riddle to the mind, and we would doubt the truth of even the most reliable information about him, if the chron­icles of other peoples did not reveal to us equally surprising examples: that is to say, that if Caligula, the model sovereign and the monster, and Nero, the pupil of the wise Seneca, the object of love, and the object of loathing, had not ruled in Rome. They were pagans, but Louis XI was a Christian, who yielded to Ivan neither in ferocity nor in the outward piety with which they wished to smooth over their lawless acts: both were pious out of fear, both were bloodthirsty and lecherous like the Asiatic and Roman tormentors. Monsters outside the law, and outside all the rules and probabilities of reason; such horrible meteors, such wandering fires of unrestrained passions reveal to us across the extent of the centuries the abyss of possible human wickedness, seeing which, we tremble![152]

Karamzin goes even further, equating the reign of Ivan the Terri­ble with the Tatar yoke.[153] And still—despite all the sincerity of his moral indignation—something holds him back from unconditional condemnation of Ivan as a statesman. "But let us give even the tyrant his due," he suddenly declares, right after the comparison of the Oprichnina with the "yoke of Batu Khan."

Ivan, in the very extremes of evil, is, as it were, the ghost of a great monarch, zealous, tireless, frequently penetrating in his political ac­tivity; although ... he did not have even a shadow of courage in his soul, he remained a conqueror, and in foreign policy followed unde- viatingly the great intentions of his grandfather; he loved justice in the court . . . and is famous in history as a lawgiver and a shaper of the state.[154]

This unexpectedly conciliatory rider, after all Karamzin's curses, has usually been overlooked by later historians, who have chiefly quoted the famous phrase "a riddle to the mind." But in it there is already contained, as in a seed, all the later drama of the Ivaniana.

6. Pogodin's Conjecture

Karamzin's craftiness did not escape his contemporaries. "In his his­tory, refinement and simplicity show us, with no partiality at all, the necessity of autocracy and the beauties of the knout," wrote Push­kin.⁵³ Nevertheless, after Karamzin, the mysterious duality in the character of the tsar became one of the favorite topics of Russian lit­erature. "Whereas historians like Kostomarov transform themselves for the sake of [Ivan] the Terrible into men of letters, poets like Maikov transform themselves for his sake into historians," Mikhailov- skii observed.⁵⁴

Vissarion Belinskii asserted that Ivan was "a fallen angel, who even after his fall revealed at times both the strength of an iron character and the strength of an exalted mind."⁵⁵ The Decembrist Ryleev, on the other hand, naturally brandished thunder and lightning against "the tyrant of our precious fatherland."⁵⁶ Another brilliant Decem­brist, Mikhail Lunin, also unambiguously condemned tyrannical au­tocracy because "in its original form, it brought the Russians the mad tsar, who for twenty-four years bathed in the blood of his subjects."⁵⁷ In a great multitude of novels, plays, narrative poems, odes, and por­traits, there appeared, in place of the real tsar,

now a fallen angel, now merely a villain, now an exalted and penetrat­ing mind, now a pedestrian person, now an independent figure con­sciously and systematically following great aims, and now some kind of rotten boat without a tiller or sails; now a person standing unattainably high over Rus', and now a base nature, alien to the best strivings of his time.⁵⁸

The first voice to call a halt belonged to the well-known Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin. Pogodin was a rock-ribbed reactionary, even more convinced than Karamzin of the beneficial nature of the autocracy, but when it came to Ivaniana he was no less an iconoclast than Keenan is. Though even Kurbskii "praises Ivan for the middle years of his rule,"⁵⁹ Pogodin asserts that, "Ivan from 1547 onward be­came a completely passive figure and did not take any part in admin­istration whatever."⁶⁰ The "blue period" of the reign simply did not belong to Tsar Ivan. "Obviously these were actions by the new party at court, unlike all the preceding ones, and the credit for them be­longs to it, and to Sil'vestr, the founder and leader of it, and not to Ivan." Furthermore, Pogodin discovered an astonishing coincidence in the correspondence of the mortal enemies: Kurbskii attributed all of the "holy acts" of this period to the Chosen Rada (praising them, of course), and the tsar did the same (cursing them, of course). Ivan

N. K. Mikhailovskii, p. 130.

V G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 135.

K. F. Ryleev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, p. 155.

M. S. Lunin, Dekabrist Lunin, sochineniia i pis'ma, p. 80.

Mikhailovskii, p. 131.

M. P. Pogodin, Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki, p. 251.

Ibid., p. 246.

never claimed to be the author of the law code, of the decisions of the church assembly of 1551, or of the administrative reform. "If Ivan did anything noteworthy during that time," Pogodin concluded from this, "he surely would not have neglected to speak of it in his letters to Kurbskii, where he tried to brag to him of his exploits." The conquest of Kazan'? "Ivan participated in it to the same extent as in the com­pilation of the law code and in the church assembly.... In the taking of Astrakhan', as in Siberia later on, and in the establishment of trade with England, he took no part whatever. ... So what remains to Ivan in this so-called brilliant half of his reign?"⁶'

Pogodin explains the transition from the "blue" to the "black" pe­riod by the machinations of the relatives of the tsaritsa, the Zak- har'ins, who skillfully played on Ivan's wounded self-esteem. He even lets slip an utterly heretical thought (which was not developed): "Was not the war with the Germans in Livonia a clever stratagem of the op­posing party [i.e., the Zakhar'ins]?"[155] He refutes not only the opinions of Kurbskii and Karamzin, but also those of Tatishchev, who, it will be remembered, attributed the tsar's failures in his "black" period to the mutinies and treason of the villainous boyars. Pogodin replies that the measures undertaken by Ivan in the period of the Oprichnina had neither sound reasons of state behind them, nor even the most ele­mentary common sense—that the boyars were not fighting against the tsar, and that his terror was therefore purposeless and itself the cause of the "mutinies and treason." "A villain, a beast—a pedantic chatterbox, with the mind of a petty bureaucrat—and that is all. Must it be that such a creature, who had lost the aspect even of a human being, let alone the exalted image of a tsar, should find people to glorify him?"⁶³

Kurbskii, three centuries before, and Karamzin after him, had di­vided the tsar's reign into two periods. Pogodin—and this is his real merit—for the first time compelled historians to doubt the validity of such a division. Russian historiography was thus able to pass from the study of the character of the Terrible Tsar to analysis of the political crisis taking place in Muscovy of that time.

7. The Political Crisis

The logical extension of his hypothesis would scarcely have en­tered Pogodin's mind. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable breach in the traditional model of the Muscovite political system, which presup­posed that autocracy already existed in Russia in the mid-sixteenth cen­tury. For both the advocates and the accusers of Ivan IV, Russian his­tory presented itself as a drama with a single actor surrounded by extras. To Lomonosov and to Ryleev, to Tatishchev and to Karamzin equally, the tsar was, to use Aristotle's terms, the dynamic "form" creating history, the society around him being inert and amorphous "matter." Psychological conflicts and crises could occur in such a sys­tem, but not political ones. However, if Pogodin was right, and the tsar did not institute the reforms (if, moreover, he denounced them as the "evil schemes" of "that dog Aleksei [Adashev], your boss"),⁶⁴ then who did? In other words, who made history in mid-sixteenth- century Muscovy and where was the autocracy?

Pogodin had not asked these questions, but by focusing on the strange parallel between Kurbskii's position and that of the tsar, he became the first to call attention to the political content of the corre­spondence, in which we can, perhaps, discern the actual logic of Ivan the Terrible's thinking. The tsar wrote:

Woe to the city which is governed by many! . . . The rule of many, even if they are strong, brave, and intelligent, but do not have unified power, will be similar to the folly of women. . . . Just as a woman is not able to stick to one decision, but first decides one way and then another, so, if there are many rulers in the kingdom, one will wish one thing and an­other another. That is why the desires and plans of many people are similar to the folly of women.⁶⁵

Obviously the tsar simply sees no alternative to autocracy but "the rule of many." And oligarchy brings with it the ruin of the country. "Think," he adjures Kurbskii (and, in fact, everyone who was able to read in Muscovy at that time),⁶⁶ "what kind of power was established in those countries where the tsars have listened to clerics and ad­visors, and how those states have fallen into ruin."⁶⁷

Then where but in autocracy is the salvation of Russia? "What do you want," asks the tsar, repeating the thought of Ivan Peresvetov, "—the same thing that happened to the Greeks, who ruined their

Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, p. 307.

Ibid., p. 299.

"The tsar's epistle," la. S. Lur'e writes, "is in fact directed least of all to 'Prince Andrei.' This epistle, as we can now say with confidence, was not even formally addressed to 'Prince Andrei.' Its address was 'the entire Russian kingdom"' (ibid., pp. 470-71). In other words, it was an open letter.

Ibid., p. 298.

kingdom and were given over to the Turks?"⁶⁸ More than this, for the tsar the corrosion of autocracy means not only the ruination of the state, but the ruination of the faith as well—that is, of the hope of eternal life. "And what they do say of godless peoples! Among them, the kings do not own their kingdoms, and as their subjects tell them, so they rule."⁶⁹

One can, of course, look on all this as a clumsy attempt to justify the Oprichnina. But let us examine the political process which took place in the Kremlin in the 1550s, and, from the tsar's point of view, gradually transformed him into the chairman of the council of boy­ars. First, Adashev and Sil'vestr "began to take counsel with each other in secret from us." Then "Sil'vestr introduced into our council his cothinker, Prince Dimitrii Kurliat'ev . . . and they began ... to carry out their evil plans." What plans? First of all, according to the tsar, rearrangements of personnel, which led finally to their actually forming a government, "not leaving a single power to which they would not appoint their supporters."⁷⁰ In other words, the tsar was gradually deprived of all the key positions in the government, and all the levers of real political power, including even the ancient preroga­tive of determining the makeup of the supreme state hierarchy: "They deprived us ... of the right to distribute honors and positions among you, the boyars, and turned this matter to your desire and will." Little by little, Adashev, Sil'vestr, and Kurliat'ev "began to subject you, the boyars, to their will, and taught you to disobey us, and almost made us equal to you."⁷' Ivan was convinced that they were attempting to turn him into a nominal head of state: "You and the priest decided that I should be the sovereign only in words, and you in fact."⁷² Prohibiting the tsar from taking decisions single-handed was a usurpation of his power, and a sacrilegious violation of his "patrimonial" heritage: "You . . . took into your power the state which I had received from God and from my ancestors."⁷³

Now we can see how unjust Pogodin was in characterizing this man as a "pedantic chatterbox with the mind of a petty bureaucrat—and that is all." For all his paranoia, the tsar appears to be an intelligent man, not only deeply convinced of the Tightness of his position, but perfectly able to articulate it. For all we know, he describes the crisis in the Kremlin quite adequately. According to Kliuchevskii and Ser- geevich, the political meaning of the reforms was chiefly reducible to

68. Ibid., p. 294. 69. Ibid., p. 288.

Ibid., p. 307. In translation by Lur'e, this reads "not leaving a single place." However, the original says "not leaving a single power."

Ibid. 72. Ibid., p. 295. 73. Ibid., p. 288.

two propositions: (a) the Assembly of the Land was to take the lead in improving the administration, which would in fact deprive the tsar of his unlimited mandate in the executive field, and (b) Article 98 of the law code deprived him juridically of his unlimited mandate in the leg­islative field. In other words, the latent and informal limitations on power were growing into juridical and institutional ones. But this is precisely what the tsar was trying to express in plain Russian by say­ing that his power was being replaced by the "rule of many."

The logical extension of Pogodin's hypothesis, whether he would like it or not, is that a political crisis was in full swing in Muscovy at the time of the reforms. Moreover, if we believe the tsar (and I do not know why we should not, inasmuch as Kurbskii, himself a witness, did not object to the claims quoted above), the autocratic tradition faced a grave challenge—if it was not, indeed, losing the game.

Thus, according to the logic of his own hypothesis, Pogodin was wrong in asserting that Ivan's terror was senseless and purposeless. On the contrary, it looks as though terror was the only means by which the autocratic tradition in Russia could avert its ultimate col­lapse. Nevertheless, Pogodin's contribution to Ivaniana was signifi­cant. It could in the 1820s have yielded results to which Ivaniana came only after many tortuous decades. It could have—but it did not.

8. Prolegomena to the Second Epoch

In 1815, a Russian emperor succeeded in doing what had remained an unattainable dream for Ivan the Terrible. He rode into Paris on a white horse as the conqueror of Napoleon, and the Cossacks held their morning promenade on the Champs Elysees. Russia had finally become a world power. Two decades after this, Pogodin could permit himself rhetorical flourishes such as: "I ask you, can anyone contend with us, and whom do we not compel to obedience? Is not the political fate of Europe, and consequently of the world, in our hands, if only we wished to decide it?"[156] The man who was to curse the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible then lauded the autocracy which had brought "the Russian sovereign closer than Charles V or Napoleon to their dream of a universal empire."[157] Was this one reason why in the next phase of pseudodespotism, the Nikolaian, the paths of Ivaniana again grew tortuous?

The following generation of historians became involved in pas­sionate arguments between Westernizers and Slavophiles, in abstract disputes about the relations between the "state" and the "land" in Russian history. The second epoch of Ivaniana was destined to carry the dispute about Ivan the Terrible far from Pogodin's hypothesis. In this second epoch, the tsar would find defenders more prestigious than Lomonosov and Tatishchev—defenders who would need the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible to bring meaning and order into Russian history. These people would laugh at the bombast of Ka­ramzin and the naivete of Pogodin, supremely confident that where these antediluvian moralists had been defeated, they would succeed in turning history into a science. This epoch was marked by such ma­jor names in Russian history as Kavelin and Solov'ev, Aksakov and Khomiakov, Chicherin and Kliuchevskii, who await us in the follow­ing chapter.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HYPNOSIS OF "THE MYTH OF THE STATE"

1. Absolute and Relative Uniqueness

When Kavelin spoke of the "unnatural character of the views" intro­duced into Russian history by Karamzin he had in mind, among other things, the "impossible task of setting forth Russian history . . . from the point of view of Western European history.'" In the 1840s, the uniqueness of Russia was the last word in historical scholarship. For the ideologists of Nikolaian autocracy, this conviction seemed natu­ral: nationalism was the official ideology of the "gendarme of Eu­rope." It was also natural for the powerful clan of nationalist dissi­dents of that time—the Slavophiles. But Kavelin was not one of the Slavophiles: on the contrary, he was perhaps the most influential and prestigious of their opponents, the Westernizers, unless we count Herzen and Belinskii. Belinskii, incidentally, also did not doubt the uniqueness of Russia for a minute. "One of the greatest intellectual achievements of our time consists in the fact," he wrote, "that we have finally understood that Russia has had its own history, not at all simi­lar to the history of any other European state, and that it must be studied and be judged on the basis of itself, and not on the basis of the history of other European peoples which have nothing in com­mon with it."[158] True, Belinskii was not a historian. As the saying is, he ate out of Kavelin's hands. And Kavelin simply could not recall his naive predecessors without a smile: "They looked at the ancient his­tory of Russia from the point of view of the history of all kinds of western and eastern, northern and southern peoples, and no one un­derstood it because it was not in fact like any other history."

Slavophiles and Westernizers stood thus on one and the same ground, proceeded from the same postulate, fought with the same weapon. However, the position of the Slavophiles was stronger, not only because it is easier for nationalists to defend the uniqueness of a nation, but also because they, and only they, had at their disposal a fully worked-out theory of the uniqueness of Russia. The Slavophile theory was based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia lived in rural communes, and that the social structure of Russia was therefore based not on private property, as in the West, but on a kind of collective property. The Russian people, as they understood it, was primarily a nonstate people, something like a kin group, a family bound not by political ties, as were the European peoples, but by ties of blood and religion. On the intellectual level, the rationalism of the "Western spirit" was alien to the "Russian spirit." The latter was synthetic and integral in its nature, rather than analytical and one-sided, like its opposite. Accordingly, on the moral level, Russian life was not based on individualism and atheism, but on collectivism and Orthodox faith. The Russian people, the nation- commune, the "land" (as the Slavophiles called the society in contra­distinction to the state), was an independent and self-sufficient civi­lization. What was required of the state was not to interfere in the life of the land, not to violate its integral organic character, but to let it live by its own Russian laws and not by European ones. However, since Peter's time, the state had interfered. It had violated the struc­ture of folk life, corrupting the soul of the land. And since the land had offered resistance, the state had been transformed into a despo­tism, and had established its "yoke over the land." Under these condi­tions, the nonstate nature of the Russian people could be trans­formed into an antistate feeling, which threatened to destroy Russia.

Kavelin regarded this theory with alarm. It seemed to him that by too decisively separating Russia from Europe, the Slavophiles were depriving it of the capacity to develop, and thereby making it essen­tially indistinguishable from Asia. He insistently emphasizes that,

Our history exhibits a gradual change of forms, not a repetition of them, and consequently it embodies a development, not as in the East, where from the very beginning up to the present day there has been an almost complete repetition of the same thing. ... In this sense, we are a European people, capable of self-improvement, of development, which does not like ... to remain for innumerable centuries on the same spot.[159]

But in this case, in what sense are we a non-European people? In what does our uniqueness consist? "All of Russian history is primarily the history of the state, political history . . . the political and state ele­ment represents up to now the only living aspect of our history,"[160]Ravelin answers. In other words, if, as distinct from the East, we de­velop, then as distinct from the West, the moving agent and embodi­ment of this development among us is the state (and not the land, as the Slavophiles think). In the West society created the state, and in Russia the state created society. If we take the state away from Russia, it trans­forms itself into China. If we take away Ivan the Terrible and Peter, it "[will] stand for innumerable centuries on the same spot."

In challenging the Slavophiles on their own ground, Ravelin cre­ated the so-called "state school" of Russian historiography. Its origins are to be found in Hegelian theory, but in the debate with the Slav­ophiles Ravelin modernized and Russified this so radically that he should perhaps be called the Russian Hegel.

For Hegel, the development of mankind passes through three phases: the "familial" phase, in which the individual is completely swallowed up by the kin-collective; the phase of "civil society," in which the individual is liberated from the bonds of the family and does not recognize any authority other than himself; and the phase of the "state," in which a negation of the negative takes place, and the state establishes harmony between the individual and the collective. Accepting this triune scheme in principle, Ravelin changes the se­quence of phases in it, and also the phases themselves, as applied to Russia.

First of all, he describes not a model for the development of man­kind, but a model for the development of Russian state structure. This begins with a "clan" phase, in which the country belongs to a sin­gle princely clan, which provides it with political unity, but shuns the "element of the personality." It then passes into the "familial" (or "pa­trimonial") phase, destined to "destroy the political unity of Russia,"[161]though still, however, without—as distinct from the phase of "civil so­ciety" in Europe—liberating the individual from the bonds of the family. And, finally, this is replaced by the "state" phase, destined both to recreate the political unity of the country and to "create the personality."

Ravelin's theory aimed both at confirming the uniqueness of Rus­sia and refuting the Slavophile validation of this uniqueness. On the one hand, he attaches all of the negative elements in Russian history (including the disintegration of the state and the denial of the "ele­ment of the personality") to the "familial" phase, dear to the heart of the Slavophiles. On the other hand, the Hegelian phase of "civil so­ciety," which showed that in the West the personality existed before the state, is omitted from Russian development. Hence, in Russia, the personality was created by the state. The Western peoples "were des­tined to develop a historical personality which they had brought with them into a human personality; we were destined to create a person­ality. For us and for them, the question is posed so dissimilarly that comparison is impossible."[162] I understand how murky such language may seem to a contemporary reader, but this was how they talked at the time.

Both "over there" and "among us," however, it is precisely the state which is the crown of history, its magnificent finale. Neither Hegel nor Ravelin even touches on the question of the political nature of this finale. The state as such, in the abstract—with no political specifi­cations whatever—is for them both the goal of history and its demi­urge. Everything which furthers its growth is progressive, all the sac­rifices offered it are redeemed; all the crimes committed in its name are justified. The needs of the state (which coincide in some myste­rious and inexplicable way with the "element of the personality") be­come the password which resolves all mysteries, all moral doubts, all contradiction.

And if there were still some holes and inconsistencies in Ravelin's theory, such first-class intellectuals and experts as S. M. Solov'ev, B. N. Chicherin, A. D. Gradovskii, N. P. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, P. N. Mi­liukov, and G. V. Plekhanov came to the rescue. They thought up ex­planations for things which the Russian Hegel was unable to explain, resolved contradictions which he was unable to resolve. To non- specialists—and to specialists as well—their arguments seemed irre­sistibly convincing. "Stone," Solov'ev would say,

—for so mountains were called among us in the old days—stone split up Western Europe into many states. ... In stone the western men built their nests, and from stone they held possession of the peasants; stone gave them independence, but soon the peasants also began to sur­round themselves with stone and to gain freedom and independence; everything firm, everything definite is thanks to stone. . . . On the gi­gantic eastern plain there is no stone . . . and therefore, there is one state of unheard-of extent. Here men have no place to build themselves stone nests. . . . The cities consist of wooden cottages; one spark, and in their place—a pile of ashes. . . . Hence the ease with which the ancient Russian abandoned his house. . . . and hence the striving of the gov­ernment to catch and settle down and attach the people [to the land].[163]

"It is enough to look at its [Russia's] geographical position, at the huge areas over which the scanty population is scattered," Chicherin would say,

and anyone will understand that life here must develop not so much the element of rights ... as the element of power, which alone can fuse the inconceivable distances and the scattered population into a single politi­cal body. . . . The social structure which in the West was established of its own accord by the activity of the society ... in Russia received exis­tence from the state.[164]

"In studying the culture of any Western European state," Miliukov would say, "we have had to proceed from the economic system first to the social structure and only then to the organization of the state; rel­ative to Russia it will be more convenient to take the reverse order [since] among us the state had a huge influence on the organization of the society, whereas in the West social organization determined the structure of the state."[165]

"The basic element of the structure of Russian society during the Muscovite period was the complete subordination of the personality to the interests of the state," Pavlov-Sil'vanskii would say. "The exter­nal circumstances of the life of Muscovite Rus', its stubborn struggle for existence . . . demanded extreme exertion from the people. . . . All classes of the population were attached to service or to the tax rolls."[166]

"In order to defend its existence in the struggle with opponents, economically far superior to it," Plekhanov would write,

it [Russia] had to devote to the cause of self-defense ... a share of its strength which certainly was far greater than the share used for the same purpose by the population of the Eastern despotisms. [If we com­pare] the sociopolitical structure of the Muscovite state with the struc­ture of the Western European countries [and the Eastern despotisms], we will obtain the following result: this state differed from the Western ones by the fact that it enserfed to itself not only the lower agricultural, but also the upper service class, and from the Eastern ones, to whom it

was very similar in this regard, by the fact that it was compelled to place a far more severe yoke on its enserfed population."

All of these people argued fiercely among themselves. Some as­serted that in Russia there was no feudalism, and others that there was. Some said that stone and wood lay at the basis of the political dif­ference between Europe and Russia, and others denied this, pointing to the "woodenness" of medieval London and the "stoniness" of medi­eval Novgorod. Some said that Russia was "struggling for its existence" with its eastern neighbors, and others that it struggled with its western ones. However, despite their arguments, they all came out of Ravelin's school—in the sense that none of them had challenged his fundamen­tal thesis that the Russian state, in the form in which it developed his­torically (i.e., the serf-holding autocracy), was the sole possible form of the state under the given historical (geographical, demographic, ecological, or economic, depending on inclination) conditions.

A wooden country with sparse population, scattered over a rela­tively infertile plain; a poor country, which had dozed away its youth in the "familial" phase, and had not developed a "historical person­ality," and had been the "patrimony" of its princes; a country like a besieged fortress, surrounded on all sides by enemies, which strug­gled for its national survival unceasingly over the course of centuries. What kind of state could develop here, other than serf-holding autoc­racy? There was no alternative to this autocracy. And therefore—how­ever cruel and terrible it may have been—it embodied progress.

These writers did their job inventively and with brilliance. The conceptions they presented were remarkably well-ordered and artis­tically perfect. Only one reproach can be leveled at them: they were proving what was required to be proved by the assignment Ravelin had set for them in 1846, which was not to explain why serf-holding autocracy was the form of the Russian state structure, but why this autocracy was historically necessary.

2. A Symbol of Progress

It is not hard to guess that it was precisely at the fatal intersection between the "state" and the "familial" phases that Ivan the Terrible found his place in Ravelin's theory. It is also clear that boyardom occupied the negative pole of it (as the defender of obsolete "patri­monial" relationships), and the tsar the positive (as the first defender of the national state structure and of the "element of personality"). For