The Origins of Autocracy

The boyars of the council of an appanage prince participated in political decisions mainly by taking advantage of the right of "free de­parture." In other words, their role in the formation of policy was at that time purely negative. Now, having lost the right of free travel be­tween principalities, they had acquired in return something consider­ably greater: the privilege of participating in the adoption of political decisions, not only in a negative sense, as previously, but also posi­tively. Thus, the Russian aristocracy was not an obsolete phenome­non, as the textbooks would have it, but a phenomenon which was developing and gathering strength. As early as the fourteenth cen­tury, the first conquerer of the Tatars, Dimitrii Donskoi, said on his deathbed to his boyars: "I was born in your presence, grew up among you, ruled as prince with you, made war with you in many countries and overthrew the heathen." He left this behest to his sons: "Listen to the boyars, and do nothing without their consent."²⁹ From here it was a long road to Article 98 of the law code of 1550, which juridically obliged the sovereign not to adopt any laws without the agreement of the boyars. In the course of two centuries, Russian boyardom was transformed from a body offree retainers into a governmental class. It com­pelled the regime to recognize its aristocratic organization. It learned to coexist with a new apparatus of executive power—

prikazy (minis­tries) and secretaries (ministers), who were actually the heirs of the serf administrators in the appanage votchiny. In his doctoral disserta­tion, Kliuchevskii himself examined the mechanism of this coexis­tence in detail:

The Duma supervised all new and extraordinary measures, but as the latter became customary through repetition, they passed over into the domain of the central bureaus. . . . The central bureaus were formed, so to speak, out of the administrative deposits gradually laid down from the legislative activities of the Duma having to do with extraordinary matters, which then passed into the order of clerical work."¹

"

Thus, the Muscovite political machine in the mid-sixteenth century combined single-handed leadership in the sphere of executive power (which corresponded to the autocratic tradition) with limited leadership in the sphere of legislative power (which corresponded to the absolutist tradition).

In 1549, a new element was introduced—the Assembly of the Land, which potentially might have meant the institutionalization of broad-based legislative power (inasmuch as the Boyar Duma and the sacred synod of church hierarchs formed part of it). This third ele­ment was not an accidental phenomenon. The experience of the first half of the sixteenth century showed a need to correct an imbalance in the existing political machine.

In the absence of a law determining the mode of succession to the throne, the leadership was unstable. So was the relationship between the executive and legislative functions, which involved combining both unlimited and limited mandates in the person of the tsar. The reign of Vasilii (1505-33) had demonstrated that if the tsar aimed for a dictatorship, the Boyar Duma was an inadequate restraining factor. Vasilii had tried to concentrate the administration in the hands of the executive power he headed. In 1520 the boyar Bersen' Beklemishev openly accused Vasilii of violating the rules of the political game and deviating from the "conciliar methods" of Ivan III toward the adop-

E. A. Belov,

Ob istoricheskom znachenii russkogo boiarstva, p. 29.

V. O. Kliuchevskii, Boiarskaia duma . . . , p. 162.

tion of decisions in camera with his secretaries. On the other hand, the epoch of "boyar rule" (1537-47) demonstrated that without a sin­gle leader the machine simply could not function: successive oli­garchies practically paralyzed the political process.