The Origins of Autocracy

5. The Reformation Against the Reconquista

Though there have been at least a dozen biographies of the grandson (the latest, by R. G. Skrynnikov, was published quite recently in the USSR, and another, by Edward Keenan, is now being written in the United States), a biography of the grandfather does not yet exist.[84]The heads of many generations of school children in Russia are stuffed full of the "exploits" of Ivan the Terrible. But who, other than the specialists, knows anything about Ivan III—a figure whose vague outlines melt into the mists of centuries? Nonetheless, Ivan III was one of the three Russian tsars whom posterity has called great, and the tracks which he left in Russian history are no less deep and signifi­cant than those of his grandson.

The war for the restoration of the ancient otchina of Kievan Rus' was the first of the two imperatives which governed Ivan Ill's strategy after Muscovite Rus' had been "gathered in." Recovery of the third of the land in the country seized by the church under Tatar auspices, a kind of Reconquista of internal policy, was the second. Unlike Ivan's external opponents, the church continued to gather strength. It was the most active entrepreneur and the richest usurer in the country. Landowners bequeathed their lands to the church in memory of their souls, so that it might pray for them forevermore. It seized, bought, obtained by lawsuit, and took for debt more land, "whitening" it through its immunities, and effectively removing it from the state. The votchiny of the Troitse-Sergievskii monastery, B. D. Grekov writes, "grew up on the bones of the boyars."[85] A. I. Kopanev notes of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery: "The votchiny

of the temporal feudal lords, which in the fifteenth century were extensive, had almost com­pletely disappeared at the end of the sixteenth. The largest feudal lord of the district—the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery—had taken the bulk of the votchina lands into its hands."[86] The power of the church was spreading through the country as swiftly as a forest fire.

Church reformation was, in this sense, a logical continuation of the annexation of Tver' and Riazan' and the expeditions against Novgorod. With its own administration, holding court and dispens­ing retribution in its territories as an actual sovereign, not paying taxes, and ruining the city dwellers by the competition of its artisans, the church was a true state within a state, and a focus of separatism. Ivan III could scarcely tolerate such a competitor, growing stronger with each year.

But here a strategic dilemma lay in wait for him, for any move against the church weakened his position as the leader of the Recon- quista. The Lithuanian empire held the Ukraine and Belorussia, which according to the "old ways" belonged to Kievan Rus'. Without partitioning Lithuania, there could be no thought of reestablishing the otchina. The way to Kiev—the road of the Reconquista—lay, fig­uratively speaking, through Vil'no. For Ivan III, the political strategy of the Reconquista therefore consisted in raising the gigantic Russian Orthodox mass of the Lithuanian empire against its Catholic govern­ment. Orthodoxy was the sole banner under which Lithuania could be dismembered, and the church, as the guardian of the faith, had to be promoted, not humiliated. The path of primitive plundering of the church on which Ivan the Terrible embarked was excluded for his grandfather. For him the problem may have seemed insoluble. Nev­ertheless, he solved it. The solution was simple—to split the church, just as he intended to split Lithuania.

The grand prince did not have time to impose this solution, how­ever: his first reformist campaign did not break the resistance of the powerful church hierarchy, just as the first campaign against Lithu­ania did not succeed in dismembering it. Ivan was accustomed, as we have seen, to do everything in two stages. But now fate did not leave him time for a second attempt: in the heat of the campaign, he was stricken with paralysis. He had proceeded on the assumption that his descendants would follow his star and complete that which he had not had time to finish, just as he had completed the work of Ivan Ka­lita and Dimitrii Donskoi. But, in the otchina which he had created, matters were more complex than in the Muscovite clan votchina

of his ancestors. And he could not have foreseen Ivan the Terrible.

CHAPTER V

JOSEPHITES AND NON-ACQUIRERS

1. Money Versus Corvee