Thus, one by one, Novgorod's liberties were whittled away and the families responsible for its greatness executed or scattered. In 1494, using as a pretext the murder of a Russian merchant in the Hanseatic city of Revel, Moscow shut down the Hansa's depot in Novgorod, arrested its members and confiscated their goods. This measure had a catastrophic effect not only on the prosperity of Novgorod but on that of the Hanseatic League as well.* So it went on, until 1570 when Ivan iv, in a spell of madness, had Novgorod razed to the ground; the massacre of its inhabitants went on for weeks on end. After this savage act, Novgorod was once and for all reduced to the status of a provincial town.
Graphic evidence of the absorption of Novgorod by Moscow is provided by the evolution of the city-state's seal. Originally, it showed a flight of steps, representing the veche tribune, and a long T-shaped pole, apparently symbolic of the city's sovereignty. In the hands of Muscovite designers, the steps gradually assumed the shape of the tsarist throne and the pole, shrunk and suitably embellished, turned into the tsarist sceptre
Ivan's successors kept on accumulating territories lying to the west and south-west of Muscovy, stopping only when they came up against the frontier of the formidable Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Between the accession of Ivan m in 1462 and the death of Basil in, his son, in 1533, the territory of Moscow multiplied more than sixfold (from 430,000 to 2,800,000 square kilometres). But the greatest conquests were still to come. In 1552, Ivan iv, assisted by German military engineers, captured Kazan and thereby eliminated the main barrier to Russian expansion eastward. From Ivan's accession (1533) to the end of the sixteenth century, the realm of Moscow doubled, increasing from 2-8 to 5-4 million square kilometres. In all the conquered territories massive land confiscations were carried out. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Russian fur trappers moved virtually unopposed across the whole length of Siberia, reaching in remarkably short time the borders of China and the shores of the Pacific. Government officials, following on their heels, claimed these territories on behalf of the tsar. In some fifty years Russia thus added another ten million square kilometres to its holdings.
Already by the middle of the seventeenth century the tsars of Russia ruled over the largest state in the world. Their possessions grew at a rate unparalleled in history. Suffice it to say that between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, Moscow acquired on the average 35,000 square kilometres - an area equivalent to modern Holland - every year for 150 consecutive years. In 1600, Muscovy was as large as the rest of Europe. Siberia, conquered in the first half of the seventeenth, was twice again Europe's size. The population of this immense realm was small even by standards of the time. In the most
* At a meeting of the Hanseatic League held in i6a8 it was said that all of its great European commercial establishments had been based on the trade with Novgorod: Ivan Andreevskii, O Dogovore Novagoroda s Nemetskimi gorodami i Gotlandom (St Petersburg 1855), p. 4.
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heavily populated areas - Novgorod, Pskov and the Volga-Oka region -the population density in the sixteenth century averaged at most three persons per square kilometre, and it may have been as low as one; in the west, the corresponding figure was twenty to thirty. Most of Russia was virgin forest, and large stretches of it were complete wilderness. Between the Urals and Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, over a distance of 750 kilometres, lived an estimated 10,000 inhabitants. Such low population density goes far to explain the poverty of the Muscovite state and its limited manoeuvrability.
But such considerations did not trouble the country's sovereigns. They were conscious of the unlimited power they held and pleased to learn from westerners that their patrimony exceeded in size the surface of the full moon. Having been eminently successful in acquiring power through the accumulation of real estate, they tended to identify political power with the growth of territory, and the growth of territory with absolute, domainial authority. The idea of an international state system with its corollary, balance of power, formulated in the west in the seventeenth century, remained foreign to their way of thinking. So did the idea of reciprocal relations between state and society. Success, as they then understood it, bred in the Muscovite government a remarkably conservative frame of mind.
CHAPTER 4
All the people consider themselves to be kholops, that is slaves of their Prince. Sigismund Herberstein, a sixteenth-century German traveller to Russia1 How was Moscow's extraordinary expansion achieved? The answer is best sought in the internal structure of the Moscow state and particularly in the tie connecting its sovereign with his 'land'. After prodigious effort and at great cost to all concerned, the tsars eventually succeeded in transforming Russia into a gigantic royal domain. The system of management which had once prevailed on their private properties was politicized and gradually imposed on the rest of the country, until it came to embrace the whole empire. In this spacious kingdom, the tsar became seigneur, the population his kholopy, the land and all else that yielded profit his property. The arrangement was not without serious shortcomings. But it did give the rulers of Moscow a mechanism for mobilizing manpower and resources which no government of Europe or Asia could duplicate.
The transformation of Russia into its ruler's patrimony required two centuries to accomplish. The process began in the middle of the fifteenth century and was completed by the middle of the seventeenth. Between these dates lies an age of civil turbulence unprecedented even for Russia, when state and society engaged in ceaseless conflict, as the former sought to impose its will and the latter made desperate efforts to elude it.
The domain of an appanage prince represented an arrangement for economic exploitation utilizing slave labour - this was its most characteristic feature. The population was assigned tasks; it worked not for itself but for its prince and owner. It was divided into two basic categories: slaves who did menial labour and slaves who administered and held other positions of trust. Outside the princely domain, the social structure was very different. Here the inhabitants were largely free: boyar and
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commoner could move anywhere they wished in search of better service conditions, virgin land or profitable promysly. For all practical purposes their obligations to the prince were limited to the payment of taxes.
Now in order to fashion their empire on the model of an appanage domain - to make all Russia their votchina in fact as well as in name -the tsars had to accomplish several tasks. They had to put an end to the traditional right of the free population to circulate: all landowners had to be compelled to serve the ruler of Moscow, which meant converting their votchiny into fiefs; all commoners had to be fixed to their places of work, i.e. enserfed. This done, the population had to be divided into occupational or functional groups, each with its stated obligations. An expanded administrative apparatus, modelled on the appanage dvor, had to be created to assure that the social estates in fact fulfilled their various duties. These tasks proved exceedingly difficult to carry out, so contrary were they to the country's habits and traditions. Where there had been unlimited freedom of movement in space and a certain amount of social mobility there was to be none of either. Outright property in land, whether obtained by inheritance or by the clearing of wilderness, was to give way to tenure conditional on royal favour. A country which had been virtually ungoverned, was to come under the watchful eye of a bureaucracy. The extension of the domainial order on the country at large was nothing short of a social revolution imposed from above. The resistance was commensurate.