The Origins of Autocracy

The peasants of the Dvina region "bought off" the feudal state and its organs, receiving broad judicial and administrative autonomy. The price was high . . . but what did the "buying off of the vicegerents" mean to the rich people of the Dvina, if the Kologrivov family alone could, if it liked, have paid the taxes for the entire Dvina uezd? And what an advantage this gave them in developing their commercial and industrial activity, released at last from the mercenary tutelage of the feudal vicegerents—and, more important, in the exploitation not only of the entire wealth of the North, but of the poor people of the Dvina! And was this not a step (and a substantial one) toward the development of new bourgeois relationships for the Dvina?

Thus, the uezdy

bought themselves the right to have the agents of the central power "not go" to them, and to be able to "do justice among themselves," and to have the peasants divide the rent "among themselves . . . according to their livings and occupations"—that is, according to the incomes of individual families. Thus, the creation of the institution of self-rule was accompanied by the introduction of an entirely bourgeois income tax. (This was the fundamental difference between the new institution and the old peasant commune, oriented toward the equality of its members). Does not this mean that the gov­ernment thereby recognized legislatively the differentiation of the peasantry (and among city people) and the existence of the proto- bourgeoisie? Doesn't it mean that, for the first time in Russian history, the government recognized that a new stratum of taxpayers had ap­peared—a kind of "middle class"—whom it was more profitable to exploit in a rational way than to rob by turning them over to the arbi­trary action of the vicegerents? This goose could lay golden eggs. And

the absolutist government naturally was smart enough not to waste them, which just as naturally was not the case with its Oprichnina successor.

The Great Reform of the 1550s was drowned in the blood and dirt of an autocratic revolution. But its doom was by no means the auto­matic result of some process developing fatally and inexorably in Muscovy since 1450, as Richard Hellie thinks," or any other year. Rather, the facts cited compel us to assume something quite different: namely, that the doom of the Great Reform was the result of a crush­ing defeat of the Government of Compromise and the absolutist co­alition which stood behind it.

3. At the Crossroads

One of the basic failures of the Government of Compromise was that it was not able to implement the testament of Ivan III and organize a victorious secularization campaign. This, of course, neither means that it did not understand the need for such a campaign nor that it did not try to implement one. "There is every reason to consider Sil'vestr the author of the tsar's questions [to the church assembly in 1551]," writes A. A. Zimin. "An analysis of the ideological content ... of the questions shows the indubitable closeness of their com­pilers to the Non-Acquirers, whose de facto head in the mid-sixteenth century was Sil'vestr."¹²

Sil'vestr was hardly the head of the Non- Acquirers, but no one disputes the fact that, as one of the most influ­ential people in the Government of Compromise, he was a convinced adherent of secularization. In 1551, precisely for this reason, "a con­frontation developed between the government of Adashev and Sil'­vestr, which strove to use the self-interest of the boyars and service landholders in liquidating the landed wealth of the church, and the Josephite leadership of the church, led by Makarii.'"³

Literally on the eve of the church assembly, Kassian, bishop of Riazan', who proved to be the only

opponent of the Joesphites among the ten participants, was inducted into the highest ranks of the church hierarchy. This lineup of forces sufficed to ensure the defeat of the Non-Acquirer program of the government, despite all the sharpness of the tsar's questions. The weakness of the organizational preparation of the second secularization campaign is obvious, if only

Richard Hellie, "The Muscovite Provincial Service Elite in Comparative Per­spective."

Zimin, Reformy, p. 379.