on them, had come to life (S. F. Platonov, "Problema russkogo Severa v noveishei istoriografii," pp. 112-13).
It is important to note that the North became the most flourishing part of the country precisely after Ivan Ill's expedition, when
the Muscovite regime transformed the boyar votchiny which it had confiscated . . . into peasant communities and, having freed their population from dependence on private persons, introduced in them the communal organization and self-government which prevailed in peasant communities generally. As the final result of this, the entire North took on the character of a peasant country (ibid., p. 107).
7. The mir is the traditional designation for the Russian peasant commune and its governing body, the assembly of shareholding, and originally arms-bearing, males. It should be noted that the mir was not necessarily coextensive with the village; some villages included two mirs, the members of which held land on different bases.
10. In Istoriia srednihh vekov, vol. 2, we read: "The lands of the clergy [in Denmark] passed to the king, and subsequently, by gift and sale, from the king to the feudal nobility . . . the service gentry received complete police power over the holders; [they] seized the commune lands, drove off some of the peasants from the allotment land, and increased the corvee, [as a consequence of which] there was a corresponding increase in serf dependence" (pp. 354-55). "Soon after the Reformation, the Swedish kings, like the Danish, resumed the distribution ... of land to the nobility . . . the land distributions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the characteristics of naturally guaranteeing state service by the nobility, which became like the Russian service gentry. . . . Correspondingly, corvee obligations began to grow" (pp. 361-62). Though undoubtedly belonging geographically to the region east of the Elbe, i.e., to Eastern Europe, Denmark and Sweden are for some reason excluded from consideration by historians of the region. This is a pity, since in certain circumstances it dooms the historian to the same kind of bipolar view of European history which did so much harm to Wittfogel's interpretation on a global scale. A good example is Immanuel Wallerstein's model of "world-wide division of labor" designed to explain the emergence of serfdom in sixteenth-century Eastern Europe by the fatal influence of rising Western capitalism. True, there is not much evidence presented for such a model in his book The Modern World-System. In fact some experts come to quite opposite conclusions. Perry Anderson, for one, argues that "while the corn trade undoubtedly intensified servile exploitation in Eastern Germany or Poland, it did not inaugurate it in either country, and played no role at all in the parallel development of Bohemia or Russia" (Lineages of the Absolutist
State, pp. 196-97). But even if Wallerstein is correct in relation to some parts of Eastern Europe, his model still fails to explain why in its other parts (Denmark and Sweden) serfdom did not prevail at all. Indeed, the sixteenth-century boom in the Baltic grain trade intensified not one but two different patterns of sociopolitical development, which we may arbitrarily call Polish and Swedish. This again certifies that the choice between Polish and Swedish patterns was still open for sixteenth-century Muscovy. And, having in mind that its political structure was much closer to Sweden than to Poland, one may say that the chance of avoiding serfdom was rather high for Muscovy before the Oprichnina.
11. M. N. Pokrovskii, Ocherk .... p. 218.
13. A. S. Pavlov, Istoricheskii ocherk sekuliarizatsii tserkovnykh zemel' v Rossii, p. 113.
14. I am compelled to admit that my point of view about the conflict between the Non-Acquirers and the Josephites (and about the fundamental role of this conflict in Russian political history) is not shared either by the "despotists" or by the "absolutists." The position of the despotists is at least consistent: what serious ideological struggle, what talk of reformation or counter-reformation can there be in a "totalitarian" or "service" state? The absolutists are in worse shape, since, asserting categorically, as is required by genuine science, that "Soviet scholars first posed the question of the social role of Nil and his followers," they contradict themselves so desperately that they get mixed up and lead their readers into complete confusion. "One need only throw open the monastic robes of any of the Non-Acquirers," wrote Academician B. A. Rybakov, "in order to see the brocade of a boyar's kaftan. Trying to ward off the looming spectre of the Oprichnina, the boyar pointed the way to the patrimonial estates of the 'un- buried dead' [the monks]." (Quoted from Lur'e, p. 293.) Rybakov unfortunately does not explain what is bad about trying to ward off "the looming spectre of the Oprichnina"—that is, national ruin and humiliation. Nevertheless, the authors of practically all the general textbooks of Russian literature and history agree with him. In Istoriia russhoi literatury, published by the USSR Academy of Science, we read that "the ideas of Nil Sorskii were a cover for the reactionary struggle of the great patrimonial boyar- dom ... a struggle against the strong grand prince's regime, which was emerging victorious." We read the same thing in Ocherkipo istorii SSSR: "Under the religious integument of the doctrine of Nil Sorskii there was hidden an intraclass struggle, directed particularly against the power of the grand prince, which was growing stronger" (quoted in ibid., p. 293;
16. The secularization of church land in Switzerland began in 1523. In 1525, the grand master of the Teutonic Order resigned his holy office and converted his holdings into a secular dukedom. In 1527, Gustavus Vasa secularized church lands in Sweden; in 1536, secularization began in Denmark, Norway, England, and Scotland, and in 1539 in Iceland.
17. Pavlov, p. 29.
18. S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, Bk. 3, p. 185.
21. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, p. 190. The doctrine of the Russian heretics in its organizational aspect can be reduced to the denial of the church establishment with its hierarchy, churches, rituals, and so forth. Its theological aspect consisted in the denial of the canonical Trinity (and, consequently, in denial of the divinity of Christ). There is nothing original in all of this: anyone at all familiar with the history of European heresy will recognize its twin in Russian heresy. It is considerably more interesting to look at how the representatives of the Russian right, as early as the fifteenth century, explained the origin of heresy. In Iosif's opinion, heresy was brought to Novgorod in 1470 by Jews coming from Kiev. In the opinion of Gennadii of Novgorod, on the other hand, "this evil came from those places through which Kuritsyn traveled from the Ugrian [i.e., Hungarian] lands" (quoted from I. U. Budovnits, Russkaia publitsistika XVI veka, p. 51). These two explanations—the one Jewish (kikeish) and the other European—both propose a foreign, non-Russian provenance for the dissident movement. Over the course of the half millennium which has elapsed since that time, the Russian right has not changed its mind.