The Origins of Autocracy

Two opposed proposals to resolve the dilemma were in circulation in the middle years of the century. Ivan Peresvetov called for the com­plete removal of boyardom from power. Conversely, an anonymous pamphlet originating among the Non-Acquirers, the famous Con­versation of the Miracle Workers of Valaam,

proposed the summoning of a "universal assembly" of all estates from all the cities and regions of Russia, which would remain in session permanently, thus giving the tsar the opportunity to "question them well as to every kind of secular matter."¹¹

Moscow of the 1550s was in transition toward the unknown. The traditional order of things was falling apart, changing its outline, dis­appearing before one's eyes. Kliuchevskii himself affirms this, when he says that "in the society of the time of [Ivan] the Terrible, the thought was abroad that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land a leader in the . .. cause of reforming . . . the administration."[137]Who, ten or twenty years before, whether under Vasilii or under the "boyar government," could have imagined that such ideas would spring up in Muscovite society? Not a quarter century had passed since the last visit of the imperial ambassador Sigismund Herberstein, who noted of Muscovy's sovereign:

He has power over both secular and clerical individuals and freely, ac­cording to his will, disposes of the life and property of all. Among the counselors whom he has, none enjoy such importance that they would dare to contradict him in anything or be of another opinion. ... It is unknown whether the rudeness of the people requires such a tyrannical sovereign, or whether the tyranny of the prince made the people thus rude and cruel.[138]

Herberstein had not witnessed the short-lived flowering of the "Muscovite Athens" of the 1480s and 90s, and did not know that the tyrannical atmosphere of the court of Vasilii was the result of a politi­cal struggle which ended in the routing of the Non-Acquirers and the political trials of Bersen', of Maxim the Greek, and of Vassian Pa- trikeev. (All of whom had, inter alia, contradicted the sovereign—which was why they were convicted.) But if the political life of Muscovy could in such a short interval have risen to the idea of a national rep­resentative assembly, it could mean only that the existing order was changing swiftly. Not only did both sides in the dispute between Kurbskii and the tsar feel this change, but the fate of each of the so­cial groups making up Muscovite society depended on it. The severity of the conflict is explained not by some elusive difference in "political mood," as Kliuchevskii thinks, but by the fact that the most profound and fundamental interests of the country were at stake.