The Origins of Autocracy

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

6. Before the Assault

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

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

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.