The Origins of Autocracy

Provided the runaway had not caused any harm—that is, had not fled from criminal prosecution—he was, for Muscovy, a respectable political emigre, and not a traitor. Muscovy insisted, as a matter of principle, on the right of personal political choice, using the strongest legal argument possible in medieval political disputes—appeal to the "old ways." As Ivan III wrote in his answer to the Lithuanian king, "before this, under us and under our ancestors and under their an­cestors, people travelled without hindrance in both directions."[71]

Is Ivan not insisting that the king's subjects (like his own) are by no means slaves belonging to their suzerain, but free people? Of course, one can say that his declarations were hypocritical. They definitely were. But even in that case, the "patrimonial mentality," which ac­cording to Pipes prevailed in the Muscovite garrison state, looks at least dubious. Is it thinkable that even hypocritically, the Brezhnev gov­ernment, for example, would undertake to defend the tradition of free emigration out of the country? Even hypocrisy, obviously, has its political limits.

Of course, I do not mean to say by this that Moscow was more lib­eral, or freer, or more concerned about civil rights than was Vil'no. The Middle Ages were the Middle Ages. Both governments were equally cruel and authoritarian. What I am talking about is something entirely different: for some reason, it was advantageous

for people in Lithuania to flee to Muscovy and for the Muscovite government to defend the right to emigrate. This was pointed out as far back as 1889 by the well-known Russian historian Mikhail D'akonov. "This dif­ference of opinion between the governments," he wrote, "could have had only one basis: at the time in question Lithuania was losing a good many more of its servants than it was gaining, while Muscovy, on the contrary, was significantly increasing its service population at the expense of Lithuania.""

And here the crucial and inexplicable question arises, at least for those experts whose works I know: why would so many powerful, proud and, what is in this case most important, free (of course, in the medieval sense) people choose to flee to a repressive garrison state? Well, some explanations downplaying this phenomenon can, of course, be thought up. Perhaps these were simply the Orthodox peo­ple who left Catholic Lithuania for Orthodox Muscovy. Or it may be that Ivan III offered them irresistible conditions if they became his courtiers. Or else, Muscovy being the winning side in the struggle for the border regions where these people lived, they preferred to join the victor. Or the Muscovite army forced some border nobles to change allegiance. In fact, this is what some experts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kremlin affairs, thoroughly researching and high­lighting personal and family connections and conflicts in the Mus­covite aristocratic elite, say. In the absence of new generalizations about Russian history, there has developed a kind of medieval Krem- linology, allowing Muscovy to be considered a "service state" even in the fifteenth century. Gustav Alef, for example, the most prominent representative of this school of thought, in a penetrating recent essay

6. Ibid., p. 192.

goes even further, suggesting that "the service state was a product of need for both the monarch and his servants."[72]

This is quite a respectable theory. The only thing it cannot explain is why it was that from the time of the Oprichnina revolution on, and for an entire century to come, when Muscovy was really turned into a service state, the arrow of migration suddenly swung around 180 de­grees, as though by magic. After the Oprichnina, Muscovy was still Orthodox, and Lithuania still Catholic. Moreover, Muscovy was still sometimes the winning side in the struggle for the border regions. And its army might still have forced border nobles to change alle­giance. But this time Orthodox lords fled from Orthodox Muscovy to Catholic Lithuania. And in the eyes of Vil'no such refugees all of a sudden became not "turncoats," but respectable political emigres, while Muscovy boiled with rage against them, and proclaimed that "in the whole universe he who takes in a runaway lives in unrighteous­ness together with him." The Lithuanian king, suddenly filled with liberalism and humane feelings, condescendingly explained to Ivan the Terrible that "people who leave their fatherland to save their necks from bondage and bloodshed" must be pitied and not be sur­rendered to a tyrant; it is unworthy of a Christian ruler to hand over "those whom God has saved from death."