The Origins of Autocracy

Ivan III carried out his centralizing task with great political tact and a minimum of spilt blood—or, at any rate, with greater tact and less blood than his French contemporary, Louis XI. The grand prince rather resembled his English contemporary, Henry VII. Both were parsimonious, dry, unprejudiced, farseeing men. Like Henry VII, Ivan thought that a bad peace was better than a good quarrel, and wherever a matter could be settled without a fight, he took that road with no hesitation, even at the price of significant concessions. He was not a coward like his grandson, but knew how to flatter without qualms when this was necessary. He disliked risking everything, and respected his adversary if the latter was deserving of respect, trying not to drive him to extremes, and leaving him the possibility of an honorable exit from the game. Over all else, he set "the old ways," the strongest argument of medieval political logic.

How—a well-known American historian once asked me indig­nantly—can we permit ourselves such a description of a man who did not leave behind a single document written in his own hand? But Ivan III did leave a record. And it was not only the great power he created, but also the very process by which it was created—maneu­vers, campaigns, intrigues, embassies, marriages, and negotiations. From this chaotic mosaic, there emerges a profound strategy, thought out far into the future, reflecting the character and style of a great political architect.

Ivan III, it seems to me, was distinguished from all subsequent Russian tsars by an astonishing feeling for strategy. There was no sin­gle political step, no matter how insignificant in itself, which would not in time, perhaps many years afterwards, prove to be a stage on the way to the goal which he had set for himself.

Who could have said in 1477, for example, that the confiscation of monastery lands in Novgorod, a measure lost in the mass of other confiscations, resettlements, and banishments connected with annex­ation of the northern "patrimony," would many years later prove to be essential in reforming the church? Who could have said in advance that the destructive raids on the Lithuanian lands beyond the Oka during the "unofficial war" of the 1480s, conducted mainly by the princely defectors from Lithuania, were by no means unsystematic freebooting, as it seemed to contemporaries, but part of a colossal plan for dismembering Lithuania by splitting it along ethnic and re­ligious lines? Who could have said that the sentimental interest of a decidedly unsentimental grand prince in the modest sect of "Trans- Volga Elders"—people not of this world, monks who had left their monasteries and lived in lonely forest hermitages—was, in fact, a de­tail in a broad plan for the creation of a strong political party of "Non-Acquirers," which was destined to become the brains trust of the future church reformation?

And so on for everything he did. Ivan III was decidedly unpredict­able to his contemporaries. A cynical pragmatist, a realist, known for his persistence and practical turn of mind, he seemed at the same time to live in some other dimension, incomprehensible to them. In the second part of his life (or of his strategy), when the gathering in of the "patrimony" was completed and the family star followed by ten generations of Muscovite grand princes had finally set, when Rus' (which is to say what remained of the ancient Kievan state) had been united, Ivan immediately and without interruption undertook to for­mulate new goals, creating a new mission—in which, he may have thought, his grandsons and great-grandsons would compete with him, as he had competed with his grandfathers and great-grand­fathers in the mission to "gather in" Rus'. He was not in a hurry. The entire political experience of Muscovy had taught him that affairs of state are not concluded in one generation, that "Moscow is not built in one day," as they say in Russia. He had only to lay the foundation, and, by completing the work of Ivan Kalita, become a new Ivan Kalita.

Fated to live two lives in two different worlds—first in the petty, quarrelsome world of disputes between princes and appanages, and then in the world of high politics, international intrigues, and na­tional tasks—Ivan felt himself at home in both. During his first "life," he prepared the staging areas and starting points for his second, when he would no longer be a provincial Muscovite grand prince but sovereign of a European power.