The Origins of Autocracy

Ibid., p. 378.

from the fact that the restructuring of the hierarchy did not begin until after

the assembly. Ivan III had deposed the chief Josephite in­quisitor, Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod, after the assembly of 1504; Feodosii, also archbishop of Novgorod, who was just as implac­able as Gennadii, was similarly deposed by the government in 1551, three months after the fateful vote, but only in November 1552 was the Non-Acquirer Pimen appointed to replace him. In May 1551 (that is, also after the vote) Trifon, archbishop of Suzdal', was deposed, and the ideologist of the Non-Acquirer movement, Artemii, was simul­taneously appointed abbot of the Troitsa monastery, while his com­rade-in-arms Feodorit became abbot of the monastery of St. Efim in Suzdal'. This shakeup would have been meaningful if the govern­ment had indeed been energetically preparing a third secularization campaign, but it was not doing so. In any case, it was unable to pre­vent Makarii from organizing the inquisitorial trial of heretics in 1553 in which he skillfully involved both Artemii and Feodorit, as well as Bishop Kassian, and obtained their removal and banishment. (Ar­temii, incidentally, escaped from the Solovetskii monastery where he had been exiled and fled to Lithuania, where he shared with Prince Kurbskii the mournful fate of the political emigre.)

But the root of the failure of the Government of Compromise lay not so much in this organizational incompetence as in its lack of polit­ical skill. It finally had in its hands the tool which Ivan III had not had—a national representative body, the Assembly of the Land. It had at its disposal, too, something even more important, which Ivan III also lacked—the European experience of secularization. Had not the Ricksdag (the Swedish equivalent of the Assembly of the Land) afforded Gustav Vasa support for his secularization campaign in 1527? Had not the Reform Parliament proclaimed the king the head of the church in England in 1534, and were not all the monasteries in England closed by law and their property and lands confiscated by the state? Foreign experience had thus shown that secularization could be carried out only by openly setting the nation against the hi­erarchy on the strength of Non-Acquirer reformist ideology, and not with the help of appeals to the hierarchy or even by restructuring it, as Ivan III had thought. The Government of Compromise neither of­ficially adopted the Non-Acquirer ideology nor appealed to the na­tion, so it lost the fateful battle for secularization.

Furthermore, the government had serious difficulties even in im­plementing the laws adopted by the Assembly of the Land. Nosov's study shows that the administrative reform was in practice intro­duced in two stages, in 1551-52 and in 1555-56. In the interim, a reverse movement appears to have taken place. Over a period of sev­eral years, the fate of the Great Reform hung by a thread. In this case, the government's efforts were crowned by success. In the question of the abolition of the immunities, where the immediate interests of the church were at stake, it appeared unable, however, to force the re­treat of the Josephite hierarchy, despite the fact that the hierarchy it­self had voted for the new code of laws in the Assembly of the Land. This vote showed with remarkable clarity that only in the context of the Assembly of the Land was it possible to break the resistance of the hierarchy, but the government did not go back to the Assembly of the Land on this question, and thus lost its battle for the abolition of the immunities.