[76] Ibid., p. 46.
[77] S. O. Shmidt, Stamwlenie Moskovskogo samoderzhavstvA, p. 309.
[78] Ibid., p. 247.
[79] Ibid., p. 249. Emphasis added.
[80] Ibid. Incidentally, it was not only the lawyer Chicherin who recognized that peasants had freedom of movement in Russia up to the last decade of the sixteenth century. M. A. D'akonov and B. D. Grekov were very prominent, if not the most prominent, specialists in the history of the Russiian peasantry. They disagreed about everything except one point. Both of them (contrary to Blum's assertion) thought that despite all the "traps" set by the landlords, St. George's Day worked in a very real way for almost a century after the issuance of Ivan Ill's law code. D'akonov says that until the second half of the sixteenth century, the peasants took advantage of the right of movement (see M. A. D'akonov, Ocherki po istorii sel'skogo naseleniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI—XVII vekov). Grekov, citing the extant books of the St. Joseph monastery of Volokolamsk, gives concrete figures for peasant movement by years. Incidentally, Blum knew this just as well as I do: at least, he cites figures from Grekov's work on pages 250-51 of his book. We also have the testimony of an eyewitness. Heinrich Staden, an Oprichnik of Ivan the Terrible's who fled abroad before the introduction of the "forbidden years," categorically asserts: "All the peasants in the country had the free right to leave on St. George's Day" (see H. Staden, О Moskve Ivana Groznogo, p. 123). Staden can hardly be suspected of idealizing Muscovite ways (he was a fierce enemy of Russia's) or of being insufficiently informed (he was himself a landowner and knew the force of St. George's Day from personal experience).
[81] Pamiatniki russhogo prava, vol. 3, p. 366.
[82] Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 3, p. 359. The same is true of Article 46 (ibid., p. 369).
[83] Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 4, p. 238.
[84] Both of the large-scale works on the period of Ivan III—Fennel's Ivan the Great of Moscow and К. V. Bazilevich's Vneshniaia politika ritsskogo tsentralizovannogo gosudar- stva—are devoted almost exclusively to foreign policy.
[85] B. D. Grekov, Krest'ane na Rusi s drevneishikh vremen do XVII veka, p. 604.
[86] A. I. Kopanev, Istoriia zemlevladeniia Belozerskogo kraia v XV—XVI vekakh, p. 181.
[87] The North in the sixteenth century not only represented half of all the territory of Russia, but had also, as S. F. Platonov writes,
from a remote backwater of the state become one of its liveliest regions. The entire country, in its relation with the cultural world, had, so to speak, turned its face northward. The commercial and working population . . . streamed toward the northern ports. . . . Not only the routes along which moved the traffic provoked by trade, but entire regions, which served these routes or were dependent
[88] Ivan III confiscated only the church lands and the lands of the "great" boyars, while the middling and petty boyar families, the so-called svoezemtsy (small landowners), underwent "peasantization"—that is to say, defeudalization. "The lands of the svoezemtsy," Kopanev writes, "were first strictly separated from those of the peasants and of the grand prince, then apparently merged with them, and then disappeared, and the svoezemtsy came to be on the same footing with the peasants, [which] basically changed the social relationships here" (see A. I. Kopanev, "K voprosu о strukture zemlevlad- eniia na Dvine v XV-XVI vv.," pp. 450-51). In a brilliant genealogical study of one boyar family, the Amosovs, N. E. Nosov has clearly traced all the details of the "rapid and intensive adaptation of the Amosovs' economy, and that of the peasantized boyars like them, to the new economic conditions" (N. E. Nosov, Stanovlenie soslovno-predsta- vitel'nykh uchrezhdenii v Rossii, pp. 270-71, 274).
[89] One of Kopanev's most important conclusions is that "the active mobilization of peasant lands shown in the Dvina documents of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had as a result the concentration of great resources of land in the hands of some peasants, and land shortage for others." It was not just a matter of a few more scraps of land coming into the hands of rich peasants; they bought entire villages: "The Dvina documents show that villages [and] parts of villages become the objects of purchase and sale, with no limitations whatever." And "the land passes from one holder to another . . . 'forever'"—that is, as property, as an allodium, having lost all traces of feudal tenure (Kopanev, "K voprosu о strukture," pp. 452-53; emphasis added).
[90] Nosov, Stanovlenie, pp. 283—84. Emphasis added.
[91] Ibid., p. 11.
[92] Ia. S. Lur'e, Ideologicheskaia bor'ba v russkoi publitsystihe kontsa XV-nachala XVI w., pp. 183, 185. Admitting that "Fedor Kuritsyn stood at the head of this 'heretical' circle," Lur'e finds it necessary to add that the Russian heresies at the end of the fifteenth century were, like the urban heresies of the West, one of the forms of 'revolutionary opposition to feudalism.'" Inasmuch as Kuritsyn is spoken of in one document of the chronicles as "a person who is listened to by the sovereign in all things," it seems that it was the sovereign himself who headed the "revolutionary opposition to f eudalism."
emphasis added). One small question still remains: how are we to reconcile the struggle of the Non-Acquirers against the grand prince with the fact that the Non-Acquirer movement was itself the handiwork of the grand prince? The authors cited above cannot help knowing this. They have at least read in Kliuchevskii that "behind Nil and his Non-Acquirers there stood Ivan III himself, who needed monastery lands" (V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (1st ed.), vol. 2, pp. 303-4). Even Lur'e declares that "Nil Sorskii's action was staged by Ivan III; Nil spoke as a sort of theoretician of the policy of the grand prince on this question" (Lur'e, p. 281). So there is no need whatever to offend modesty by parting the monastic robes of the elders in order to establish the real political meaning of their actions. But, after all, in Lur'e's work we have already seen Ivan III in the role of leader of the "revolutionary opposition" directed against himself. Why, then, shouldn't the grand prince at the same time head the "reactionary opposition," also directed against himself?
15. Pavlov, p. 97.
[94] N. A. Kazakova and la. S. Lur'e, Antideodal'nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XlV—nachala XVI veka, p. 381.
[95] Ibid., p. 378.
[96] Pavlov, p. 50.
[97] Slovo kratko v zashchitu monastyrskikh imushchestv, p. 25.
[98] V. Malinin, Starets Eleazarova monastyria Filofei i ego poslanie, p. 129.
[99] Kazakova and Lur'e, p. 438.
[100] The assembly of 1503 is described by at least seven different sources, some Josephite, others Non-Acquirer. Naturally, they contradict one another. In regard to one of them, investigators hold diametrically opposed opinions: A. A. Zimin ("O po- liticheskoi doktrine Iosifa Volotskogo") assumes that this document is of Non-Acquirer origin, and Lur'e (p. 414), and G. N. Moiseeva (Valaamskaia beseda—pamiatnik russkoi publitsistiki XVI v., pp. 22-3) think that it was written by Josephites. The version set forth here is based essentially on Pavlov's classic work, with minor corrections based on an eighth source found by Iu. K. Begunov in the library at Perm' in the 1960s.