The Origins of Autocracy

The analogy may similarly be applied to the struggle between monetary rent and corvee. With the great expansion of monetary rent in the first half of the sixteenth century, it seemed as though all Europe was on the threshold of bourgeoisification (so, too, it ap­peared in retrospect in the case of Russia to historians such as Makov­skii and Nosov). Then, however, in many countries there followed a time of reaction, when corvee appeared to be on the winning side. Only after many decades did monetary rent triumph there over its rival.

This, at least, was how analogous conflicts turned out in the other states of the northeastern corner of Europe. Take, for example, Den­mark and Sweden—also northerly and rather backward countries, whose fate, like that of Russia, was determined in the dispute between the service gentry and the proto-bourgeoisie. Both of these countries, like Russia, came to know the taste of corvee and feudal reaction (in Denmark's case, even the enserfment of the peasantry), and fell into the power of paranoid tyrants like Ivan the Terrible. They stood at the very edge of the precipice of autocracy. But they stood firm there. Why?

The decisive reason seems to have been precisely the secularization of church landholdings. As distinct from Russia, both of these coun­tries slaked the land hunger of the feudal service gentry not at the expense of land belonging to the great lords and the peasantry, but from the church's land fund; thus, they succeeded both in preserving the power of the aristocracy and sustaining peasant differentiation. When King Christian III of Denmark arrested the bishops and took away their lands and privileges in 1536, as a result of which royal landholdings were increased by a factor of three, it meant, in plain terms, that the land hunger of the Danish service gentry was satisfied at the expense of the church. Corvee and serfdom thus triumphed only in one sector of the national economy, and did not spread over the entire country or become state policy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, a time of reaction all over Europe, when the Russian peasantry was already hopelessly enserfed, not more than 20 percent of the peasantry in Denmark was burdened with corvee, and the sale of peasants without land did not become widespread. The history of Sweden provides still clearer indication of the decisive sig­nificance of the secularization of church lands. Though this led to the concentration of more than half of Sweden's land in the hands of the gentry, fears of "Livonian slavery"—that is, the total enserfment of the peasants—remained no more than that.'" Thus, in both cases, sec­ularization served as the basis for an absolutist compromise between the various factions and institutions of feudal society, permitting Denmark and Sweden to retain the "equilibrium" of social forces for which Soviet historians now long in vain. The social limitations on power therefore remained untouched in Denmark and Sweden, as distinct from the case in Russia.

In the second place, secularization prevented the eradication of peasant differentiation on lands belonging to the state and the aris­tocracy, thereby preserving a sector of the country's land fund on which the proto-bourgeoisie could develop. In my terms, this means that, as distinct from what happened in Russia, the economic limita­tions on power were not destroyed.

And, last but not least, secularization separated the church, and with it the intellectual potential of the country, from the defense of private economic interests. In so doing, it transformed the now land­less church into the custodian of the only treasure which remained to it—the ideological limitations on power.

Secularization could not prevent corvee and the depredations of the service gentry, the tyranny of monarchs, or the enserfment of the peasantry. But it could prevent these depredations, this tyranny, this enserfment from becoming total. By furthering the retention of la­tent limitations on power, it prevented an Oprichnina "revolution from above," Russian-style.

4. The Preparation for the Assault

How did it happen that this "revolution from above" was not pre­vented in Russia? Why was it that secularization of church lands did not occur there, too, in the key century in which the fate of the coun­try was decided?