The Origins of Autocracy

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.