The Origins of Autocracy

The government committed a no less serious error in regard to the pace of modernization of the army. This problem had arisen in con­nection with the Kazan' war and the administrative reform. The ama­teur cavalry of the service gentry, which received its "maintenance" in the form of land with the peasants living on it, had by the middle of the sixteenth century, as the first battles of the Kazan' war demon­strated, shown itself to be as antiquated an institution as the "mainte­nance" administration of the vicegerents. And, like the latter, it should have been replaced—by an army having as its core professional infan­try, equipped with firearms and paid in cash. The bottleneck in a mili­tary reform of this kind was apparently money. But this was precisely what could be obtained by the government through sale of the in­stitution of self-rule. That the government was not unaware of this problem is shown by the introduction into the Muscovite army of a core of 6,000 infantry in 1550, when the administrative reform was being prepared. One need only read the chapter on the storming of Kazan' in the History of Ivan

IV, written by Kurbskii in exile, in order to understand the decisive role played by the infantry (along with ar­tillery) in the great victory over the Tatars. Without the infantry and the artillery, victory would never have been achieved. Just as local self-rule was a competitor of the voevody,

so the infantry could have been a competitor of the service gentry—and an effective one.

But here the problem of military modernization passed over into the problem of political modernization. For the formation of a per­manent professional army automatically deprived the service gentry of the military monopoly which was the only thing on which their so­cial and political claims could rest. Certainly, it was not a question of the immediate exclusion of the service nobility from the army (as an officer corps and as a cavalry force they would be retained for a long time). It was a matter only of the pace and direction of moderniza­tion, capable of creating a normal European balance between infan­try and cavalry.'⁴

The sum of 140 rubles, which the Dvina uezd, say, had paid into the treasury before the reform, represented the "maintenance" of a sin­gle vicegerent. For 1400 rubles, which the treasury now received di­rectly, bypassing the vicegerents, the government could maintain ei­ther a cavalry force, staffed by service gentry, for the whole Smolensk county, or a regiment of infantry. The government chose cavalry. The logical result of this mistake was the statute on military service of 1556, which for the first time in Russian history made this service obligatory in a legislative sense. Hardly anyone in the government understood the fateful significance of this act. From that moment, service in the Russian state became universal.

And now, it seems to me, we can already recognize the political pat­tern which predetermined all the mistakes of the Government of Compromise. Wherever the national interest contradicted the inter­ests of the numerous factions represented in the government, in the army, and in the Assembly of the Land, the government hesitated, and usually compromised, which increasingly weakened its position as arbiter. The church hierarchy did not wish to yield its land, and did not even wish to yield to any significant degree in the question of the immunities; the service nobility was not at all eager for the moderni­zation of the army, but instead wanted land and money; and the gov­ernment was not prepared for severe pressure, but tried at all costs to maintain the atmosphere of "reconciliation" of all political forces within the country, on which, so it assumed, its power was based.

In order to better understand the nature of its failure, let us briefly review the situation in which the Government of Compromise came to power, or more precisely the "mandate" with which it came to power, following a stormy and fruitless decade of so-called "boyar government." Vasilii had died when his heir, the future Ivan the Ter­rible, was three years old. When the boy reached the age of seven, his mother also died. The throne became a bone of contention for nu­merous cliques of the tsar's relatives and prominent clans, who in the course of a permanent quarrel completely lost sight of the national interest. This Muscovite equivalent of the Wars of the Roses did not lead to civil war, but nevertheless sowed chaos and confusion in the land. By the end of the 1540s, the situation had deteriorated into mass riots in the cities. A terrible fire and open mutiny broke out in Moscow itself. It was on this wave of general bitterness and animosity of all against all that the Government of Compromise came to power at the first "assembly of reconciliation."