The Origins of Autocracy

The Tatars burned the entire posad of Moscow to the ground, and . . . seventeen years later it had not yet been entirely rebuilt. A whole series of cities suffered the same fate. According to the stories told at the time, as many as 800,000 persons perished in Moscow and its environs alone, and another 150,000 were taken away as captives. The total loss of pop­ulation must have exceeded one million, and the kingdom of Ivan Vasil'evich hardly contained more than ten million inhabitants. In addi­tion, it was the long established and most cultured regions which were laid waste: it was not accident that the people in Moscow for a long pe­riod reckoned time from the ruination by the Tatars, just as in the nine­teenth century they for a long time reckoned from the year 1812 [that is, Napoleon's invasion]. A good part of the almost instantaneous deso­lation which scholars note in the central

uezdy, beginning precisely in the 1570s, must be laid at the door of the Tatar ruination. [This] is the chronological point of departure for the desolation of most of the uezdy of the central region of Muscovy.

. . . The faint beginnings of a population ex­odus which were observed in the 1550s and 1560s were now trans­formed into an intensive and extremely pronounced flight of peasants from the central regions.[119]

If we remember that Soviet historians usually use this "instantane­ous desolation of the center of Muscovy" to explain the beginning of the enserfment of the peasantry (although without mentioning the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy as a cause of this phenome­non),[120] the consequences of the Tatar attack of 1571 for the whole course of Russian history begin to look truly sinister. The more so since a second attack was scheduled for the following year. In 1572, in the words of Heinrich Staden,

The cities and uezdy

of the Russian land were already divided up and distributed among the lords (murzas) who were with the Crimean tsar, as to who should hold what land. The Crimean tsar also had with him a number of noble Turks, who were to supervise this matter: they had been sent by the Turkish emperor. . . . The Crimean tsar bragged be­fore the Turkish emperor that he would take all of the Russian land in the course of the year, and would bring the grand prince as a prisoner to the Crimea and with his murzas occupy the Russian land. . . . He gave his merchants and many others papers to the effect that they should go with their wares to Kazan and Astrakhan and trade there without paying duty, since he was the emperor and lord of all Rus'.[121]

Even so passionate an apologist for Ivan the Terrible as R. Iu. Vipper does not dare to ignore this testimony. "Staden," he writes, "teaches us to properly evaluate . . . the epoch of the Crimean danger."[122]