The Origins of Autocracy

Until the end of the fifteenth century, the Russian peasantry lived for the most part in communes, working land belonging either to the state or to the feudal corporation of the church, or to private individ­uals, and paying for this chiefly in kind, or in the form of various obli­gations. The economic advance which began after Muscovy attained independence created previously unheard-of opportunities for rapid enrichment through agriculture.' However, contrary to what the pro-

1. Academician S. G. Strumilin, a major Soviet authority on economic history, is in­clined to agree with D. P. Makovskii's opinion that this economic upturn made the Rus­sian economy of the first half of the sixteenth century comparable in scale to the econo­mies of Western European countries contemporary with it. In his preface to the second edition of Makovskii's book, he says:

This is indirectly confirmed by the large figures for Russian exports; by the pres­ence of many thousands of merchants within Russia; by the fact that these Rus­sian merchants extended credits of millions of rubles to English merchants, and not vice versa; by the large trade flotilla of vessels, for the serving of which there were required on the Volga alone—figuring 500 vessels with 40 people each— 20,000 hired workers; by the presence of a considerable circle of manufacturing plants with work forces of 30 to 200 persons or more; by the presence of such large-scale entrepreneurs as the Stroganov family of salt merchants, who em­ployed 10,000 hired workers; and by many other indicative facts. (D. P. Makov- skii [2nd ed.], pp. ii-iii).

The word "manufacture" is used here in a specialized Marxist sense, referring to as­sembly-line production by large groups of workers without the use of machines, as oc­curred in the large weaving-shops in Italy and the Low Countries during the fifteenth century. Makovskii himself, incidentally, confirms his contention not only with figures but with a Weberian argument (surprising in the mouth of a Soviet historian) about the rise at this time of a kind of bourgeois ethic in Russia: "The thirst for gain, for enrich­ment, for accumulation . . . took hold of . . . Russia," he writes.

Russian merchants and industrialists seek roads to the East, to Siberia, to Central Asia. Afanasii Nikitin set off "beyond the three seas"; dozens and hundreds of Russian merchants penetrate into many Oriental markets—into the Crimea,