In order to bring the process of expropriation to its conclusion it was still necessary to uproot boyars holding large votchina estates in the central regions of Muscovy. This was done by Ivan iv. This tsar undoubtedly suffered from mental derangement, and it would be a mistake to assign to all his policies rational aims. He killed and tortured to exorcise the spirits tormenting him, not to change the course of his country's history. But it so happened that the people who stood in his way, those who most frustrated his will and sent him into fits of blind rage, belonged to the pedigreed clans holding votchiny in and around Moscow. By destroying so many of them, Ivan inadvertently altered the balance of forces in Russian society and profoundly influenced its future.
In 1550, Ivan took the unprecedented step of allotting pomestia in the vicinity of Moscow to 1,064 'boyars' sons', the majority of them impoverished dvoriane and not a few descendants of slaves. By this act, he bestowed upon these parvenus the respected title of'Moscow Dvoriane', previously reserved for the pedigreed boyars. This was a clear warning to the great clans. In the years that followed, Ivan was too preoccupied with administrative reforms and foreign policy to dare challenge the boyars. But once he decided to do so, it was with a ferocity and sadism that can only be compared with that displayed by Stalin in the 1930s.
In 1564, Ivan split the country in two parts. One half, called zemsh-china, 'the land', constituted the kingdom proper, the public part as it were. The other, which he took under his personal management, he designated oprichnina. The virtual absence of records from the time when Russia was subjected to this formalized dyarchy (1564-72) makes it very difficult to know exactly what had happened. But the political implications of the oprichnina are reasonably clear. Ivan temporarily reversed the procedure used by his ancestors, who appear to have attempted too much too quickly. He withdrew from the realm at large those areas in which royal power still had to contend with powerful entrenched interests, where the process of 'domainialization' had not yet been successfully carried out. These areas he now assigned directly to his personal household; that is, he incorporated them in his private domain. By so
THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME
doing he was free at last to extirpate the large pockets of boyar votchina left over from the appanage period. Individual Moscow streets, small towns, or market places and particularly large votchiny, upon being designated by tsarist order as part of the oprichnina, became the personal property of the tsar, and as such were turned over to a special corps of oprichniki. This crew of native and foreign riffraff were permitted with impunity to abuse or kill the inhabitants of areas under their control and to loot their properties. Boyars fortunate enough to survive the terror, received, as compensation for their votchiny, pomestia in other parts of the country. The method used was basically not different from that first employed by Ivan m on the territory of conquered Novgorod, only this time it was applied to the ancient homeland of the Muscovite state and its earliest territorial acquisitions. Researches by S.Platonov have shown that the areas taken under the oprichnina were located primarily in the central regions of the state, whereas zemshchina was concentrated on the periphery conquered by Ivan m and Basil III.
The oprichnina was officially abolished in 1572 and the two hales merged once again. After that date it was forbidden to mention the once-dreaded word under the penalty of death. Some oprichniki were punished; here and there tracts of confiscated land were returned to their rightful owners. But the job was done. The centre of boyar power was destroyed. For at least another century, and in some respects for a few decades beyond it, the boyars belonging to the pedigreed clans continued to exert powerful influence at the court. Indeed, mestnichestvo blossomed most luxuriantly in the seventeenth century, that is after the reign of Ivan iv. Still, most of their economic power and their local roots had been undercut. The future belonged not to the boyars but to the dvoriane. At the end of the sixteenth century, after the oprichnina had been lifted, this once-despised class of low-grade servitors began to take precedence at court ceremonies over ordinary boyars, yielding only to representatives of the most eminent clans.
After the oprichnina, private property in land no longer played any significant role in Muscovite Russia; with the elimination of the patrimonial nests of the old families, votchina became fief held at moreadvan-tageous terms than pomestie, but it was still only a fief.*
Gosudarcvy sluzhilye liudi - the Sovereign's Serving People - received their main compensation in the form of votchiny and pomestia. But offices and salaries were also used for this purpose. Distinguished soldiers and civil servants had opportunities to amass
* One of the by-products of the massive expropriations carried out between 1477 and 1572 was the virtual disappearance of privately-owned cities in Russia. In appanage and early Muscovite Russia, many towns - essentially market-places - were built on private votchiny and belonged to boyars. They too were now confiscated on behalf of the crown.
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fortunes by securing appointments to provincial posts. As noted, in Muscovy the costs of local administration and justice were borne by the population, and took the form of 'feeding' (kormleniia). Resourcefully exploited, such appointments could enrich in no time. The principal Muscovite provincial officer, voevoda, was a kind of satrap who combined administrative, fiscal, military and judiciary functions, each of which enabled him to extort money. The monarchy was not concerned what uses a voevoda made of his powers, as long as he maintained order and accurately delivered his quotas of servitors and taxes - an attitude essentially not different from that once adopted by the Mongols towards conquered Russia. Unlike the Mongols, however, Moscow was very careful not to allow any voevoda to ensconce himself in power. Offices were assigned on a strictly temporary basis, one year being the norm, one and a half years a sign of exceptional favour, and two the utmost limit. Voevody were never assigned to localities where they owned estates. The political implications of this practice did not escape Giles Fletcher who noted in 1591 that the 'dukes and diaks [secretaries] are... changed ordinarily at every year's end... They are men of themselves of no credit nor favour with the people where they govern, being neither born nor brought up among them, nor yet having inheritance of their own there or elsewhere.''
High civil servants employed in the city of Moscow were paid regular salaries. Heads of prikazy received as much as one thousand rubles a year (the equivalent of $30,000-840,000 in US currency of 1900). Secretaries and scribes received proportionately less. At the opposite end of the spectrum, ordinary dvoriane were given at most a few rubles on the eve of important campaigns to help defray the costs of a horse and weapons, and even for that sura they had to petition.
Service for holders of votchiny and pomestia began at the age of fifteen. It was lifelong, terminating only with physical disability or old age. The great majority served in the cavalry. Military servitors usually spent the winter months on their estates, and reported for duty in the spring. In 1555 or 1556 an attempt was made to set precise norms for service obligations: each 125 acres of cultivated land was to supply one fully equipped horseman, and each additional 125 acres one armed retainer. Apparently this system proved impossible to enforce, because in the seventeenth century it was abandoned and new norms were set based on the number of peasant households which the servitor had in his possession. Adolescents served from their father's land; if this was inadequate, they received a pomestie of their own. Competition over pomestia which had fallen vacant occupied a great deal of the time of dvoriane, who were for ever petitioning for supplementary allotments. Service also could take civilian forms, especially for the pedigreed