The Origins of Autocracy

On the other hand, Blum realizes that this was "also official recog­nition of the peasant's time-honored right of departure [from the landlord] protecting him against seignioral attempts to take that priv­ilege from him. If the landlord tried to hold him against his will the peasant could turn to governmental authority to enforce recognition of his freedom to leave at the [legally] appointed time."[78] Blum fur­ther sees that "in the light of these guarantees it would seem plausible to assume that the peasant-renter had complete freedom of movement providing he met the not unreasonable conditions set by the laws."

St. George's Day was November 26 and not 25, and only two pages earlier what are now described as "not unreasonable conditions," were for some reason called a "heavy fee." But let us let the details go and continue the quotation: "From this juristic point of view B. N. Chicherin, one of the first historians of the Russian peasantry, was right when he wrote in 1858 that 'the free movement of the peasantry was a universal phenomenon of old Russia until the end of the six­teenth century.'"[79]

The contradiction is all too evident: on the one hand, it is recog­nized that freedom of movement was "complete"; on the other, it is asserted that it was "curtailed." Trying to reconcile this paradox, Blum writes that Chicherin "and others who agreed with him, con­fused legislative fiat with historical fact."[80] In reality, it turns out that in spite of the laws which protected freedom of movement, "the peas­ant-renter found it increasingly difficult to leave his landlord when he wanted, for the seignior was able to employ a number of devices, both legal and illegal, to keep him from going."²⁴

Thus, the all-powerful (according to Pipes) "patrimonial state" was (according to Blum) pow­erless to compel the Russian landlord to respect its wishes.

But let us leave the two historians to argue between themselves on this point. We are interested in quite another problem: namely that in introducing the St. George's Day legislation under Ivan III, the state, as even Blum recognizes, was trying to defend the peasants' right to complete freedom of movement, while by introducing the "forbid­den years" under Ivan the Terrible, i.e., abolishing St. George's Day, it was trying to

destroy this freedom, thereby commencing the somber history of serfdom.

This is not to say, of course, that Ivan III was a passionate de­fender of freedom as such, simply that, unlike his grandson, he was not interested in transforming his subjects into slaves. We have seen how sharply the attitude of the Muscovite government toward the problem of emigration changed over the course of a century—from principled defense of the right to freedom of movement across

state borders to "imprisonment [of people] as if in a hellish dungeon." In the difference between St. George's Day and the "forbidden years," we see an identical transformation in its policy on movement within the borders of the state.

So, is the reversed stereotype accurate? Is it not obvious that the expropriation of peasant farms by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina and the abolition of St. George's Day under conditions of terror repre­sented, just as in the case of emigration, not a continuation but a re­jection of the policies of Ivan III? Continuing to ignore the dif­ference between absolutism and autocracy, how are we supposed to explain this fateful change in the policies of the Muscovite state?

Let us go further, however. Was there a regular feudalization of the structure of Russian society from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, and was peasant self-government uniformly destroyed dur­ing this period? The pre-Oprichnina century of Russia was a time, in fact, of intensive movement in the reverse direction, i.e., not toward liquidation, but toward expansion of local, and particularly peasant, self-government. The legislation of Ivan III prepared the great re­form introduced several decades later on a national scale, which, at least in intention, was supposed to represent the transition of power in the localities into the hands of the "best people"—the representa­tives of the properous peasantry and the rising merchant class. This was, in a sense, the creation of a "third estate" in Russian political life. Article 38 of the law code of 1497 forbids the local rulers to hold court "without the elders and without the best people."[81] We can only guess what the actual role of the "elders" in the courts was. But it is obvious that it could have been the beginning of a form of control by the population over judicial procedure. And, as history shows, it was just that.