The Origins of Autocracy

It began its work excellently, achieving the desired stabilization. But, after a while, it suddenly began to appear that its policy of com­promise was simply too broad to be effective. Stabilization was not an end in itself, but merely a condition for the fulfillment of the strategic task of transforming the country. Compromise at all costs made this transformation unthinkable. Within the broad political base to which the government stubbornly clung, there gradually emerged compet­ing and irreconcilable blocs of interests. Representing both of them became a sheer political impossibility. The time came to make a choice between the peasant-Non-Acquirer absolutist coalition, which the boyars could support, since it was directed against their enemies, and the service gentry-Josephite autocratic coalition, supported by the bu­reaucratic apparatus.[117]

Metropolitan Makarii, the head of the hierarchy, was the tsar's ideological tutor, and he understood quite well that, as long as Sil'vestr played the leading role in the government, there would be no respite for the church landholdings. He impressed on the tsar the ideas of the previous generation of Josephites. These, it will be remembered, in­cluded the tempting concept of the Muscovite tsar as the heir of the Byzantine autocrators, before whom all others were slaves. Even more indicative was the wide distribution in Moscow at that time (in what can quite appropriately be called "samizdat" in modern terms) of the pam­phlets of Ivan Peresvetov, who proposed to the tsar, among other things, a program of autocratic "revolution from above." Contrary to the official version in the chronicles, which attributed the fall of Byzan­tium to heresy, Peresvetov boldly preached that it had fallen because the emperor had put too much trust in his high nobles, his "advisors" (read: the Government of Compromise). The conquerer of Byzan­tium, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed, had not trusted his "advisors," and this was why he had won. Having discovered the malfeasance of his viceroys, for example, Mehmed did not substitute local self-rule, as had the rotten liberal "advisors" of the Russian tsar. He did not even bother to try them.

He merely skinned them alive and spoke thus: if they grow flesh again their guilt will be forgiven. And he ordered their skins to be taken off and stuffed with paper and ordered iron nails to be driven into them and the following to be written on their skins: "Without such terror [groza\ it is impossible to introduce justice into the kingdom. ... As an unbridled horse beneath the tsar, so is a kingdom without terror."¹⁶

In addition to this apology for terror as the guaranty of the welfare of the state, Peresvetov also proposed copying the tool of this terror from the Turkish janissary corps, in terms so reminiscent of the later Oprichnina that many scholars have even doubted whether Peresve- tov's pamphlets were written before the introduction of the Oprich­nina or afterwards. "If the Christian faith had been joined with Turk­ish law, the angels could have talked with him [the Sultan]," Peresvetov declared, handing the Orthodox tsar an interesting brief."

This sharp increase in the activity of the Russian right most proba­bly meant that, despite all of the government's mistakes, the tide was running against the autocratic bloc. The code of laws that repealed the immunities and introduced the norms of bourgeois law was con­firmed by the Assembly of the Land. Local self-rule opened up enor­mous opportunities for the enrichment of the proto-bourgeoisie, and for the increase of its social and, in the final analysis, political weight. Peasant differentiation and the economic boom worked in the same direction. The modernization of the army could not be permanently delayed. Ivan Ill's strategy had brought the Europeanization of Rus­sia to a decisive point: if it were not stopped now it would perhaps be futile to try to stop it in the future. The advance of "money" was inex­orable unless some drastic action were taken to turn back this eco-

V F. Rzhiga, I. S. Peresvetov—publitsist XVI veka, p.

72.

Ibid., p. 78.

nomic and social process, unless the chief opponents of the autocratic bloc, the proto-bourgeoisie and the Non-Acquirers, along with their patrons, the boyars, who represented the political side of this absolut­ist triangle, were disarmed and ultimately crushed.[118]