In 1691, on 15 April, the boyars Lev Kirillovich Naryshkin,Prince Grigorii Afanasevich Kozlbvskii... Fedor Timofeevich Zykov, and... Emelian Ignatovich Ukraintsev were told to dine with the Patriarch Adrian. Prince Kozlovskii, for some reasons connected with mestnichestvo reckonings, deemed it improper to attend this dinner and refused on grounds of sickness. But at the court, in the tsar's entourage, they probably knew the reason for Kozlovskii's refusal, and messengers were sent to him to tell him that if he was ill he should, without fail, come in a carriage. Kozlovskii still would not come. Orders were given to inform him that if he did not come in a carriage he would be brought to the palace by force in a cart. Even after this threat, Kozlovskii did not appear. He was then forcibly brought in a cart to the
* This is the reason why the practice of the deliberate lowering of a boyar's service record, used by Moscow to discourage boyar departure, was such an effective deterrent.
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Beautiful Stair. As he would not step out of the cart, he was forcibly carried to the Patriarch's Chamber and placed behind the table. Kozlovskii intentionally fell to the floor and lay there a long time. Orders were then given to place him at the table against his will; but as he would not sit up but constantly fell to the side, clerks were ordered to support him. After dinner, on the square of the Beautiful Stair Kozlovskii was informed of a decree that 'for his disobedience he was deprived of honour and the boyar title, and inscribed on the rolls of the city Serpeisk, so that, from this example, others would not find it advantageous to act in a similar manner'.6 Special boyar committees were set up to adjudicate mestnichestvo disputes. They usually decided against petitioners, and to discourage others often ordered them to be subjected to beating by the knout or some form of humiliation.
Now clearly mestnichestvo was never strictly enforced; had it been, Muscovite government would have had to grind to a halt. It was essentially a nuisance and an irritant, which served to remind the monarch that he was not full master in his house. Although strong tsars managed to keep the boyars in hand, whenever the monarchy was in difficulty -in times of regency or during interregna, for example - conflicts among the boyar clans threatened to destroy the unity of the state. All these considerations impelled the monarchy to build up alongside the ancient clans another body of servitors, less clannish, more dependent and pliable, a class which had never known free departure or ownership of votchiny.
It will be recalled (pp. 44-5) that appanage princes employed domestic servitors called dvoriane who performed on their domains all kinds of administrative responsibilities. Most of these people were slaves; but even freemen among them were constrained from leaving. These people closely resembled the ministeriales of feudal Germany and Austria. Their ranks were steadily swollen by the accretion of'boyars' sons' who lacked land and therefore liked to attach themselves to the prince's household to serve for whatever remuneration they could get. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Moscow had at its disposal a sizeable reservoir of such low-grade servitors. Because of their total dependence on him, they were well suited to serve the tsar as a counterbalance to the pedigreed families and clans.
A basic difference between boyars and dvoriane was that the former owned votchiny whereas the latter did not. It was the ownership of votchina land which determined whether a servitor enjoyed - even if in theory only - the right to free departure. With the expansion of Moscow, the land reserves of the tsar increased greatly, but so did the need for servitors because there were not enough boyars to man the garrison cities constructed to defend the country's long frontier. The idea therefore
THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME
arose of giving some of that land to dvoriane as fief, or, as it came to be known in the 1470s, pomest'e. After he had conquered Novgorod and massacred or deported its leading citizens, Ivan in carried out a major land reform there. He confiscated on his own behalf 817 per cent of the cultivated land. Of this, more than half he turned over to the royal household for direct exploitation; most of the remainder he distributed among dvoriane as pomestia.8 The Novgorod patricians whom he deported and resettled in the central regions of Muscovy he also gave their new estates as pomestia. Unlike a votchina, a pomestie was the legal property of the tsar. It was turned over to servitors for exploitation on the understanding that they and their descendants could retain it but only for as long as they continued to render satisfactory service.
In so far as from the reign of Ivan in onward a votchina could not be held either unless its owner served the tsar, the question arises what distinguished the two forms of land tenure.* First and foremost, votchina property could be divided among one's heirs or sold, whereas a pomestie could not. Secondly, the votchina of a servitor who died without sons remained within the clan; a pomestie reverted to the royal treasury. Thirdly, from the middle of the sixteenth century the clan had the right to repurchase within a forty-year period votchiny which its members had sold to outsiders. For these reasons, votchina was regarded as a superior type of conditional land tenure and preferred to pomestie. Well-to-do servitors usually had some of both.
The monarchy had different preferences. All the features which made votchiny attractive to servitors tainted them in its eyes. On the territories which they conquered, Ivan ill and Basil m carried out systematic confiscations of votchiny, the way it was first done in Novgorod, transferring title to themselves and distributing them wholly or in part as pomestie. From this policy, the quantity of votchina land steadily diminished. On the death of Basil in (1533) it still predominated in the central regions of Muscovy where the dynasty had its original home and where it had made acquisitions before pomestia were invented. On the periphery of the Muscovite homeland - in Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Riazan and other territories conquered after 1477 - the bulk of the service land was held as pomestie.
The imposition of service obligations on all holders of land had profound implications for the future course of Russian history. It meant nothing less than the elimination of private property in land; and since land was and remained the main source of wealth in Russia, the net result was that private property of the means of production became
* Without wishing to complicate the issue further we may add that in later Muscovy the term votchina covered not only properties inherited from one's father; there were also votchiny which one bought and those which one received for outstanding service.
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virtually extinct. This occurred at the very time when western Europe was moving in the opposite direction. With the decline of vassalage after 1300, western fiefs passed into outright ownership, while the development of trade and manufacture produced an additional source of wealth in the form of capital. In the early modern west, the bulk of the wealth gradually accumulated in the hands of society, giving it powerful leverage against the crown; in Russia, it is the crown that, as it were, expropriated society. It was the combination of absolute political power with nearly complete control of the country's productive resources that made the Muscovite monarchy so formidable an institution.