The Origins of Autocracy

And even when, a half century later, Boris Godunov sent eighteen young people to Europe to acquire learning and good sense there, seventeen of them became "nonreturners." As Prince Ivan Golitsyn once explained to Polish envoys: "We cannot permit Russian people to serve along with Poles because of temptation. One summer they serve—and the next we would not have a half of the best Russian people left."[73] In the works of Gregory Kotoshikhin, also a political emigre, who left us the first systematic description of Muscovite life in the mid-1600s, we read:

They do not send their children to other countries to learn science and good breeding, fearing that, having seen the faith and customs and blessed liberty of those countries, they would begin to change their own faith and then go over to another, and would no longer care or think about returning to their homes and to their relatives. And if a person, a prince or a boyar or anyone else, would go, or would send his son or his brother to another country without telling anyone, and without having taken leave of the sovereign, such a person, for such a deed, would be accused of treason. . . .

And if someone went himself and left relatives behind him, they would be interrogated to learn whether they knew what their relatives had intended.[74]

What do we learn then from all this? If the medieval Kremlinolo- gists, along with the despotists, are right in suggesting that, even in the fifteenth century, Muscovy was a terrifying service state totally preoccupied with its "national survival," how are we to explain this monstrous change in the minds of its rulers and in the directions of emigration? I would be happy to tell the reader how these experts try to explain this mysterious fact so stubbornly contradicting their theo­ries. Unfortunately, I cannot: to the best of my knowledge they have not tried.[75]

2. "Patrimonies" Versus "Patrimony"

When, in March 1462, at the age of twenty-two, Ivan III ascended the throne, Muscovy could be called a unified state perhaps only in name. It was still formally a vassal and tributary of the Golden Horde. The princedoms of Tver', Riazan', Rostov, and Iaroslavl', which had been the most dangerous competitors of Muscovy in the past, still led a sep­arate existence, sometimes attempting to maneuver between Moscow and Lithuania. In the free cities of Novgorod, Pskov, and Khlynov (Viatka), the popular assemblies still made a stir, and their decisions were frequently anti-Muscovite in character. The northern empire of Novgorod, which occupied the maritime regions, was not subject to Moscow, and consequently the country had no access either to the White Sea or to the Baltic. The brothers of the grand prince, who held appanages, were still able to raise the sword against him, and to unleash civil war in the country. The memory was still alive of how, during the preceding civil war, Vasilii, called the Dark, father of the grand prince, had been blinded and exiled by his nephew Dimitri Shemiaka.

From this variegated and amorphous material, Ivan III had to build a unified state, completing the work of his ancestors, the "gatherers" of Muscovite Rus'. This is what the first part both of his life and his political strategy consisted in (in the case of Ivan III, they were one and the same, for he seems to have been moved by few passions other than political ones). He was of the clan of Ivan Kalita ("Moneybags"), "bloodthirsty from of old," as Kurbskii wrote, and renowned for in­trigues, treachery, and familial stubbornness; a clan in which each member knew how to follow the great-grandfather's lucky star without turning aside, as though a political compass were mounted inside him.