The Origins of Autocracy

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