The Origins of Autocracy

In fact, the "right of departure," which in the fourteenth century had still been a precious guarantee for boyardom against the tyranny of princes, had long since lost its significance by the time of Ivan IV. The boyardom at that time was concerned with quite other problems. It was the peasantry for whom the right of departure had truly fate­ful significance in the mid-sixteenth century. Ivan Ill's St. George's Day, which was the legislative guarantee of this right, was now at stake. And for this reason its abolition, which Solov'ev depicts as a ne­cessity of state, signified in plain language the enserfment of the peas­ants. And although Solov'ev does not say a word about the peasantry, he understands very well that it was by no means accidental that the "old society" was "obsessed with the right of departure." "Ivan IV," he says, "was not arming himself only against the boyars, for it was not only the boyars who were infected with the long-standing disease of old Russian society—the passion for movement and departure."³⁽¹

And Kavelin raises no fundamental objection to this. In other words, sympathy with the "necessity of state" proved so great in their liberal hearts that before it all other considerations, including hatred for slavery and revulsion against tyranny, retreated into second place. For Solov'ev, Kurbskii is, of course, the "advocate ... of the ancient claims of the retainers, brought by them from ancient Rus'—[claims] to the custom of counselorship and to the right of free departure"— while Ivan the Terrible, full of "bright thoughts of state" and "clarity of political vision," displays "the great mind of a tsar . . . indefatigable activity . . . and judgment." [176]

For all that, Solov'ev was a historian. In his dissertation, he dis­cussed the time of Tsar Ivan only in a concluding chapter, a kind of appendix, essentially unconnected to the basic theme, and he spoke of it on the basis primarily of the tsar's correspondence with Kurbskii. He still had to familiarize himself with the sources. And this was a terrible trial, which not even such principled adherents of autocracy as Karamzin and Pogodin were able to withstand. When, many years after Solov'ev, the remarkable Russian poet Aleksei Tolstoi famil­iarized himself with the sources, he admitted that as he read them the pen fell from his hand—not only because, as he wrote, such a mon­ster as Ivan the Terrible could exist on Russian soil, but also because there could exist a society that could gaze upon him without indigna­tion. Even so passionate an advocate of Ivan the Terrible as the well- known late-nineteenth-century reactionary from Khar'kov, Professor K. Iarosh, was compelled to admit, in reading the Sinodik

—that is, the memorial to the victims of the Oprichnina, compiled at the order of the tsar himself—that,

Blood spurted everywhere in fountains, and Russian cities and villages gave voice to groans. . . . With a trembling hand we turn the pages of the famous Sinodik, and pause with a particularly heavy feeling at the short and eloquent notations: let the Lord remember the soul of thy slave So-and-so—"with his mother, and his wife, and his son, and his daughter."[177]

S. B. Veselovskii, apparently a religious man, was shaken for his en­tire life by another aspect of the matter: