The Origins of Autocracy

Kliuchevskii's vast knowledge of the administrative structure of me­dieval Muscovy remains unsurpassed to this day.[139] It did not prevent him, however, from making contradictory statements. For example, he asserts that "neither the governing role of the Council of Boyars nor the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the administration was an ideal at that time nor could it be a political dream."[140] On the other hand, he tells us that "in practice the Assembly of the Land of the sixteenth century did not prove to be either universal [that is, repre­senting all the estates] or a permanent gathering, convoked every year, and

did not take into its hands the supervision of the administra­tion."[141] The Assembly of the Land not only did not take supervision over the administration into its hands but—as can be seen both from Kurbskii's letter and from the behavior of the Government of Com­promise—no one even had any real idea of how, concretely, this was to be done. The government was feeling its way in the dark. It did not even try to bring before the Assembly of the Land such fundamental conflicts as the secularization of church landholdings, or even the conflict over the immunities in which the decision of the assembly it­self was violated by the church hierarchy. It did not try to address it­self to the assembly in the decisive debate over foreign policy. In sum, it did not try to institutionalize the assembly as the supreme arbiter in its dispute with the tsar. This is why the only thing that Kliuchevskii can say in the government's defense is that the thought was abroad

in the society that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land leader in the cause of correcting the administration. But can one se­riously call this "wandering thought" a political fact—the more so since even in Kurbskii's letters it still "wanders," without ever growing into a precise formulation? No political mechanism designed to se­cure the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the adminis­tration was even envisaged. And this is why it remained a political dream.

Such was the extraordinary complexity of the Kurbskii-tsar corre­spondence which Vasilii Kliuchevskii found so difficult to analyze and Edward Keenan failed to notice.

4. The First Attack of the "Historiographic Nightmare"

Until the publication of volume 9 of Karamzin's History of the Rus­sian State

, declared the Russian historian N. Ustrialov,

Ivan was recognized among us as a great sovereign: he was seen as the conqueror of three kingdoms, and even more as a wise and solicitous legislator; it was known that he was hardhearted, but only by obscure traditions; and he was partly excused in many matters for having estab­lished a brilliant autocratic regime. Peter the Great himself wished to justify him. . . . This opinion was shaken by Karamzin, who solemnly declared that in the last years of his reign, Ivan did not run second ei­ther to Louis XI or to Caligula, but that until the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, he was the model of a pious, wise monarch, zeal­ous for the glory and happiness of the state.[142]

Ustrialov is both right and wrong. As early as 1564, Kurbskii quite clearly divided the reign of Ivan the Terrible into the same two peri­ods. Karamzin follows this division to the letter. More than this, fol­lowing Kurbskii, he even divides his description into two volumes. Volume 8, devoted to the "blue" period, ends thus: "This is the end of the happy days of Ivan and of Russia: for he lost not only his wife but his virtue."[143] Volume 9, devoted to the "black" period, opens with this declaration: "We are approaching the description of terrible changes in the soul of the tsar and in the fate of the kingdom."[144]