The Origins of Autocracy

ponents of the "service state" believe, these opportunities led not to a single, fatal line of development but to two opposite lines, correspond­ing to two opposite social processes taking place simultaneously in the country. It is true that the new service nobility—who had no concern either for the rational exploitation of the land, which they held for short periods, or for the fate of the peasants living on it—naturally strove to extract the maximum gain from peasant labor. The best method of doing so seemed to them to be to set up their own farming operations and to compel the peasants to work the landlord's land. This corvee labor logically led to expropriation by the landlords of the peasants' farms, reducing them to something like the household plots of modern collective farmers. And, inasmuch as the peasants naturally resisted any form of collective economy over which they had no control, the logical extension was enserfment and the destruc­tion of the independent

volost'.

But the transfer of peasants from rent to corvee—which was ap­parently simply the economic dimension of the political tendency to­ward universal service—was by no means universal over the course of the pre-Oprichnina century. It was no more than a shadowy economic tendency, decidedly secondary both in importance and in scale to the process by which peasant rents became payable in money. This, in turn, gave rise to peasant differentiation, which led inevitably, at least in principle, to the opposite result—that is, not to the enserfment of the peasantry, or to its expropriation as a social group, but to the for­mation of a peasant proto-bourgeoisie capable of exercising political pressure on the government of the country.

In reality, the process of peasant differentiation in the pre-Oprich­nina century of Russian history took on such dimensions (especially in the region of highest economic development, the North)[87] that it was even able, in many cases, to bring about the defeudalization of these regions—dissolution of the feudal elements into a new stratum of farmers, entrepreneurs, and merchants of peasant origin.[88]

The vigor of this process is confirmed by the fact that it stimulated government policy in directions favorable to the peasant proto-bour- geoisie, in particular, the remaking of the entire administrative struc­ture of the country along the lines of local self-government (the Great Reform of 1551-56). Although in formal terms the black peasantry of the North cultivated land belonging to the state, practically speak­ing it was being transformed into private (allodial) property, while the peasantry itself became a class of freeholders.[89]

As a result of all this, there appeared peasants who were econom­ically stronger not only than most pomeshchiki,

but also than many bo­yars—peasants who possessed plow land, truck gardens, hayfields, traplines, stockbarns, and even entire villages. But, what is even more important, they also owned fishing and fur enterprises, craft work­shops, and huge salt ponds. These were the peasants whose geneal­ogies N. E. Nosov was able to trace over the course of many genera­tions, just as S. B. Veselovskii traced the genealogies of the ancient boyar families.

Of course, the formation of this elite (the "best people") was accom­panied by the ruin of masses of other peasants. Russian documents of this period are strewn with the designations "cotters," "children," "Cossacks," "sharecroppers," "hirelings," which variously represent landless people who earned their bread as hired labor. As D. P. Makov- skii has demonstrated, in the twelve villages of Viaz'ma uezd (and bear in mind that this was not the North, but the West—the Smolensk coun­ty), of 3,139 existing peasant households, " 1,991 households or 45 per cent of the total were the victims of increasing exploitation, in a form especially severe for the minor peasantry—that of money."¹' In an­other passage, the author notes with appropriate anti-bourgeois indignation: