The Origins of Autocracy

This separation of the producer from the means of production drove huge masses of people into the street. It was natural that the "poor peo­ple" became the easy prey of various predatory elements which had de­veloped in the depths of the feudal order. Among these predators the most numerous and bloodthirsty were the stratum of "best" or "good" peasants. These peasants not only owned large tracts of land (some ... up to forty to fifty desiatiny in Viaz'ma uezd), but were also en­trepreneurs, owning facilities of various kinds—salt ponds, gristmills, stores. . . . Among the wealthy peasants the entrepreneurial renting of land could frequently be observed, which went by the name of "hiring."⁶

Even if we share Makovskii's indignation over the exploitation of the "producer separated from the means of production," we are nev­ertheless not entitled to forget that (as the author himself shows in other sections of his book) the only alternative to it under the condi­tions of sixteenth-century Russia was corvee, which led to serfdom, under which the producer was attached by force to these very "means of production," and . . . became a slave.

Nosov shows how "as a result of the growing property differentia­tion within Dvina volost' ... it completely loses the features of the old rural commune . . . and is transformed into a territorial unit for pur-

Makovskii, p. 160.

Ibid., pp. 164-65.

poses of administration and taxation ... a black volost' mir,' which united the peasant freeholders

. . . and, what was most important, repre­sented their common interests vis-a-vis the state." But all this was true only for the "golden age" of the Russian peasantry, i.e., before the Oprich­nina revolution.

And again, as if by the same magic which determined the fate of emigration, everything suddenly swung around 180 degrees after

this revolution:

The disintegration of the volost', as a result of the spoliation and seizure of its lands and also of the fact that certain groups of inhabitants of the volost' fell into personal or economic dependence on neighboring feu­dal lords, undermined the foundations of the volost' peasant mir,

de­prived the local peasant magnates of their basic support, and thus closed the pathways leading toward bourgeoisification of the peasantry as a whole. [This "closing of the pathways"] took place in the central regions of northeastern Rus' in the sixteenth century, during and after the time of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, when the process of swallowing up of the black volost' lands by the service landholdings reached its apogee there.[90]

The fate of Russia thus became a question of who, in the final anal­ysis, would get the land belonging to the disintegrating communal mirs—the pomeshchiki living on corvee—that is, the service gentry—or the "best people" of the peasantry—that is, the proto-bourgeoisie.

2. Two Coalitions

The competing socioeconomic forces involved in the historical dis­pute between the pomeshchiki and the proto-bourgeoisie are hardly visible on the political stage in retrospect. Still less obvious is the ideo­logical struggle between the so-called Josephites and Non-Acquirers (see below). The observer sees, rather, a furious struggle between the boyardom and the church.