The Origins of Autocracy

conducted full-scale attacks against the city. They sacked the Novgorod market and divided the most valuable goods among themselves. The simple goods, such as lard, wax, and linen, they heaped into great piles and burned (that winter a terrible famine prevailed over the Russian North, and it was precisely for this reason that so many paupers accu­mulated in Novgorod). During the pogrom, large supplies of goods in­tended for trade with the West were destroyed. Not only the markets were robbed, but also the houses of the townsmen. The Oprichniki broke down the gates, removed the doors, and smashed windows. Cit­izens who tried to resist the bandits were killed on the spot."

Here we have the difference between the "otchina" and the "vot- china"

mentalities, between absolutism and autocracy. Both reprisals against Novgorod were cruel; both were accompanied by executions, persecution, and confiscations; both were, in the final analysis, a question of foreign policy. But in the first case, the reprisal was dic­tated by political necessity; in the second, it was an act of mass terror to facilitate the plundering of an already frightened people. Ivan III tried as far as possible to preserve Novgorod, though compelling it to function as a part of the nation; his grandson barbarously destroyed it. Where his grandfather had aimed at the maximum rationalization of the national economy possible under medieval conditions, Ivan the Terrible attempted to secure the continuation of an irrational foreign-policy strategy at the price of expropriation and destruction of the national wealth.'⁸ How do the experts explain this monstrous difference between two analogous events in Russian history? Again I

Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 152.

There are many studies analyzing the economic results of both Novgorod expe­ditions, at least indirectly. Kareliia, for example, was subject to Novgorod before its an­nexation by Ivan III. Its inclusion into the Muscovite state, writes R. B. Miuller,

had a favorable influence on its entire population . . . the land on which the huge majority of the population lived ceased to be the property of the Novgorod boyars and became royal 'black' land. At the beginning, the state apparatus put only very insignificant pressure on the black peasants; the duties were very low, and the opportunity [for peasants] to control the land almost unlimited. . . . The basis for economic differentiation, and for the concentration of land in the hands of some [peasants] and the deprivation of others, appeared in the Karel- liian countryside.