The Origins of Autocracy

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.