The Origins of Autocracy

Article 38 was certainly not so radical a measure as the one specified by the Pinega Charter of February 10,1552 (discovered a quarter cen­tury ago by A. I. Kopanev), where the tsar agrees to the complete re­moval of the governors from judicial and administrative functions and gives the local people themselves the right to elect "from the peasants of their own volosf the best people" or "favorite chiefs," who are to "administer justice in local matters according to our Code."²'

¹ But al­though the legislation of Ivan III did not yet go as far as this, it nev­ertheless signaled a new view of society on the legislator's part—a view which, we must assume, reflected social processes which can probably be called defeudalization. Thus, in Article 12 of the code of 1497, "good boyars' children" are equated, as witnesses in court, with "good, black peasant elected jurors."[82] D. P. Makovskii has noted a very impor­tant difference between the administrative charter for the Dvina land in the fourteenth century and the Belozerskii administrative charter of Ivan III (1488). This difference consists, among other things, in the fact that "in the Belozerskii Charter boyar privileges are no longer seen. Ivan III now addresses not the boyars as his grandfather did but 'the people of Belozersk—city dwellers, villagers and volost' people.'"²

" Makovskii also noted that "the law code of 1497 protects all property, including that of peasants. An end is put in this code to the feudal law of inheritance reflected in the Russkaia Pravda [a document dating from the Kievan or pre-Mongol period, setting forth the basic provi­sions of the Eastern Slavic code of law, according to which the property of a peasant who died without issue passed to the landlord]. . . . The boyars and men-at-arms—i.e., feudal lords—are not separated out in terms of right of inheritance into a privileged position, as is the case in the Russkaia Pravda."*'

These are, once more, only negative merits by comparison with the law code of 1550, in which an essentially different, and one might say antifeudal, principle of recompense for dishonor is established. Whereas, in the Russkaia Pravda of the twelfth century, the life and honor of a prince's man-at-arms were protected by an indemnity dou­ble that of other free people, in the legislation of the "Government of

Compromise" in the middle of the sixteenth century, the indemnity for dishonor was established "against income." This is already essen­tially, so to speak, the embryo of the bourgeois sense of justice. And this is the only thing which can explain the strange anomaly, for a me­dieval code, by which an offense to "trading people and townsmen and all of those in the middle [i.e., with medium incomes]" is indem­nified at the same rate (five rubles) as an offense to "a good boyar's man." As for "great guests"—i.e., wealthy merchants—the indemnity for offenses to them reaches fifty rubles, or ten times more than for offenses to boyars' men-at-arms.[83]

How are we to explain this gradation, which was revolutionary in terms of the medieval sense of justice? By the fact that Russia, as Makovskii thinks, was being transformed into a bourgeois country? This would, I am afraid, be too much of an exaggeration for boyar Russia, with its votchiny

the prevailing form of wealth. But if we aban­don the class point of view, which distorts our perspective on the past, it is explained quite simply by an elementary concern for the eco­nomic welfare of the country. The legislator is beginning to under­stand that "trading people and townsmen" and, in general, "all those in the middle" (i.e., the proto-bourgeoisie), have a value to the coun­try equal to that of soldiers. Rich merchants, from the legislator's point of view, not only represent the country in foreign trade, but as it were symbolize the flowering of the nation. The more of them there are, and the richer they are, the richer the country is. In this sense, they are more important than soldiers (the legislator has made a cal­culation and found that they are ten times more important). Thus, Ivan Ill's legislation untied the hands of his heirs and initiated a posi­tive view on the state's part, not only of peasants' freedom of move­ment but also of economic limitations on power and, in general, of the processes of defeudalization which took place in the pre-Oprich- nina century.

Neither peasant self-government, nor trial by jury, nor the eco­nomic limitations on power and rationalization of the economy re­flected in the legislation of the absolutist century survived the rabid counterattack of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, however. In the code of Tsar Aleksei (1649) there is no longer any mention of any of this. The peasant is again "legally dead"—if it can be so expressed, even "deader" than in the Russhaia Pravda of the twelfth century.