The Origins of Autocracy

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.