The Origins of Autocracy

The Novgorod North was the treasure house of Russia, spared by the Tatar invasion, and closely connected with the Hanseatic com­mercial republics, which were related to it by their political structure. Novgorod controlled the roads to the White Sea, to the Baltic, and to the vast territories beyond the Urals. Its incorporation was, therefore, absolutely vital for the development of Muscovy as a state, and hence only a matter of time.

The senate of Novgorod had for decades been deeply split into hostile factions. The sympathies of the veche,

or popular assembly, were chiefly with the pro-Lithuanian faction (most probably because Lithuania was farther away and posed a lesser danger to the auton­omy of the republic). The representatives of the grand prince were publicly humiliated; regions of the republic ceded to Moscow in the past were taken back by force; payment of taxes was refused; the position of head of the army was ostentatiously off ered to the son of Dimitri Shemiaka, who had blinded the father of the grand prince; negotiations with Kazimir of Lithuania were the order of the day and, to top it all, the archbishop of Novgorod also entered into nego­tiations with the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev (an appointee of the pope's and probably also of Kazimir's). "Throughout the sixties ten­sion grew," writes John Fennell:

The split in Novgorod between the pro-Muscovite faction and the pro- Lithuanian party . . . became more sharply defined and led to disor­ders within the city. Although few people could have foreseen any other fate for Novgorod than her ultimate annexation by Moscow, the pro- Lithuanian faction grew in strength and boldness. It was as though they were attempting to provoke Ivan into a final act of reprisal. ... In vain Ivan sent his ambassadors to reason with his insubordinate patrimony; Novgorod refused to listen to his complaints. Mere insolence and minor boundary conflicts could hardly be used as a pretext for a major expedi­tion to crush what was after all a Russian and an Orthodox state."

For one who knows the history of Ivan the Terrible s Novgorod ex­pedition, which turned the same Russian and Orthodox city into a desert without any pretext whatever (except, of course, for the suspi­cion of "treason" which was the standard fabrication in the Oprich­nina period when it was necessary to rob someone), this explanation may seem improbable. But between grandfather and grandson there was a great gulf: even when the treachery of Novgorod, both political and religious, was demonstrated beyond doubt, Ivan III punished it not immediately or hastily, but with caution, in two stages. The Nov- goroders played a clumsy political game, and were always falling into the traps laid by the grand prince. The challenge he faced lay rather in the powerful authority of the "old ways" embodied in the liberties of Novgorod. Simply to violate them as his grandson would have done, and did, was something of which Ivan III was, it seems, incapa­ble. His mind worked in a fundamentally different way. He had in his hands a tool which tyrants never have: time. Let the republic be the first to violate the "old ways." Then he would act, in the role not of a violator but of a preserver of national and religious tradition.