The Origins of Autocracy

During the years of the boyar government [as Skrynnikov calls the Gov­ernment of Compromise] the Novgorod peasants paid a small tribute in money ... to the state. With the beginning of the Kazan' and particu­larly the Livonian wars, the state increased the money obligations for peasants manyfold. The increase in the tax burden and the exploitation by the landlords placed the small-scale peasant farms under extremely unfavorable conditions. But it was not only the taxes which were the cause of the ruin which began in the country in the 1570s and 1580s. The catastrophe was provoked by

natural calamities of enormous scale. . . . Unfavorable weather conditions ruined the harvest twice—in 1568 and 1569. As a result, the price of grain increased by factors of five and ten. Death by famine reduced the population of cities and villages. During the Oprichnina pogrom in Novgorod, starving citizens during the dark winter nights stole the bodies of the victims and ate them. . . . After the famine, a plague brought from the West began in the country. . . . The three-year famine and the epidemic brought death to hundreds of thousands of people. The calamities were completed by the destructive incursion

of the Tatars.⁷¹

What with taxes, famine, the plague, the Tatars, the Oprichnina be­comes almost invisible!

11. Grounds for Optimism

The evolution of Ivaniana during the 1960s nevertheless suggests hope. The foundations of the gray consensus are being irreversibly eroded. Admittedly, the radical revision proposed by Zimin did not bring results. But this in itself, after all, is an ill omen for the con­sensus. The contradiction between premises and conclusions in Skryn- nikov's work is too obvious. How long can the consensus swing from Solov'ev to Platonov and back again, while continuing to pass itself off as Marxism? In essence it is clear that the consensus is in a cul-de-sac, from which it is impossible to escape without fundamentally new ideas. The following quotations—drawn from D. P. Makovskii (1960), S. M. Kashtanov (1963), S. O. Shmidt (1968), and N. E. Nosov (1969) respectively—suggest that these new ideas are beginning to show on the surface.

In the middle of the sixteenth century in the Russian state, capitalist relationships came into being in both industry and agriculture, and the necessary economic conditions for their development were prepared. . . . But in 1570—90, an active intervention by the superstructure (the massive forces of the state) in economic relationships in the interest of the service landholders took place. . . . This intervention not only hin­dered the development of capitalist relationships and undermined the condition of the productive forces in the country but also called forth regressive phenomena in the economy.[241]

Considering the Oprichnina in its social aspect, we can persuade our­selves that its main characteristic was its class tendency, which consisted