The Origins of Autocracy

The autocratic reaction required three things for the success of its counterattack—a strong leader, a strategic plan, and a pretext with which to put the tsar at odds with the Government of Compromise. All these three things were combined in the Livonian War.

4. The Anti-Tatar Strategy

As early as the 1520s, after the first Tatar invasion of Muscovy since the time of the Ugra, Maxim the Greek suggested a general reorien­tation of Muscovite foreign policy. Unfortunately, there was at that time no one to listen to him. Instead, in the course of the general po­grom against the Non-Acquirers, Grand Prince Vasilii accused Maxim of spying on behalf of the Turks. Less than two decades later, Saip- Girei stood before Moscow with his army. With him were soldiers of the Turkish sultan, with their cannons and arquebuses, and the No- gai, Kafa, Astrakhan', Azov, and Belgorod Hordes as well. It seemed that the ancient nightmare of Muscovy had again come to life, and that the whole might of the Tatars was moving against it, as under the lead­ers of the Golden Horde of evil memory—Tokhtamysh, Edigei, and Akhmat.

Saip Girei and his allies were driven back from Moscow, and from the end of the 1540s Muscovite policy turned decisively against the Tatars, resulting in the conquest and annexation of the trans-Volga khanates of Kazan' and Astrakhan' in the 1550s. This could not be regarded by the Government of Compromise as the finale of the anti- Tatar strategy, however. The Crimea, after all, remained; and behind the Crimea stood Turkey.

Moreover, the conquest of Kazan' did not improve the interna­tional position of Muscovy, and certainly complicated it. Kazan' was a Tatar kingdom only in name. In fact, it was a multinational state. Five tongues, as Kurbskii expressed it, sat there under the Tatars: the Mordvas, the Cheremises, the Chuvashes, the Votyaks, and the Bash­kirs. Muscovy had become an empire, whereas the Reconquista rested on the principle of the national and religious homogeneity of the Russian state. It was on this principle that Ivan III had constructed his strategy of dismembering the heterogeneous Lithuanian state. Now Muscovy had become heterogeneous in its turn.

The Tatars constructed their own strategies along similar lines. As early as 1520, the khan of the Crimea had called Kazan' "our yurt," which in Tatar meant what "otchina

" meant for Ivan III, that is, fa­therland. From here it was only a step to the sultan himself declaring Kazan' his yurt, and claiming a legitimate right to seek the dismem­berment of Muscovy. Unless Tatar claims were disposed of once and for all, the Damoclean sword of a new attack would hang over Mus­covy for decades, and perhaps centuries. The Ugra, it suddenly turned out, had been merely a symbolic liberation from Tatar rule, complete liquidation of which was a historical prerequisite of the Re­conquista. The very status of Muscovy as a great power now de­pended on this. How could Russia enter the European family of na­tions as a full member if the shadow of Tatar domination still hung over it?

But, besides all these abstract considerations, the Crimea not only kept under its control extremely rich sections of the Russian land, it constantly threatened to destabilize economic life within Muscovy. Even if it could not conquer the country, it was capable of provoking a national crisis at any time. Thus historians have, for example, attrib­uted the economic catastrophe which shook Muscovy in the 1570s to the attack by Devlet Girei in 1571. To cite M. N. Pokrovskii: