Is Ivan not insisting that the king's subjects (like his own) are by no means slaves belonging to their suzerain, but free people? Of course, one can say that his declarations were hypocritical. They definitely were. But even in that case, the "patrimonial mentality," which according to Pipes prevailed in the Muscovite garrison state, looks at least dubious. Is it thinkable that even hypocritically, the Brezhnev government, for example, would undertake to defend the tradition of free emigration out of the country? Even hypocrisy, obviously, has its political limits.
Of course, I do not mean to say by this that Moscow was more liberal, or freer, or more concerned about civil rights than was Vil'no. The Middle Ages were the Middle Ages. Both governments were equally cruel and authoritarian. What I am talking about is something entirely different: for some reason, it was advantageous for people in Lithuania to flee to Muscovy and for the Muscovite government to defend the right to emigrate. This was pointed out as far back as 1889 by the well-known Russian historian Mikhail D'akonov. "This difference of opinion between the governments," he wrote, "could have had only one basis: at the time in question Lithuania was losing a good many more of its servants than it was gaining, while Muscovy, on the contrary, was significantly increasing its service population at the expense of Lithuania.""
And here the crucial and inexplicable question arises, at least for those experts whose works I know: why would so many powerful, proud and, what is in this case most important, free (of course, in the medieval sense) people choose to flee to a repressive garrison state? Well, some explanations downplaying this phenomenon can, of course, be thought up. Perhaps these were simply the Orthodox people who left Catholic Lithuania for Orthodox Muscovy. Or it may be that Ivan III offered them irresistible conditions if they became his courtiers. Or else, Muscovy being the winning side in the struggle for the border regions where these people lived, they preferred to join the victor. Or the Muscovite army forced some border nobles to change allegiance. In fact, this is what some experts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kremlin affairs, thoroughly researching and highlighting personal and family connections and conflicts in the Muscovite aristocratic elite, say. In the absence of new generalizations about Russian history, there has developed a kind of medieval Krem- linology, allowing Muscovy to be considered a "service state" even in the fifteenth century. Gustav Alef, for example, the most prominent representative of this school of thought, in a penetrating recent essay
6. Ibid., p. 192.
goes even further, suggesting that "the service state was a product of need for both the monarch and his servants."[72]
This is quite a respectable theory. The only thing it cannot explain is why it was that from the time of the Oprichnina revolution on, and for an entire century to come, when Muscovy was really turned into a service state, the arrow of migration suddenly swung around 180 degrees, as though by magic. After the Oprichnina, Muscovy was still Orthodox, and Lithuania still Catholic. Moreover, Muscovy was still sometimes the winning side in the struggle for the border regions. And its army might still have forced border nobles to change allegiance. But this time Orthodox lords fled from Orthodox Muscovy to Catholic Lithuania. And in the eyes of Vil'no such refugees all of a sudden became not "turncoats," but respectable political emigres, while Muscovy boiled with rage against them, and proclaimed that "in the whole universe he who takes in a runaway lives in unrighteousness together with him." The Lithuanian king, suddenly filled with liberalism and humane feelings, condescendingly explained to Ivan the Terrible that "people who leave their fatherland to save their necks from bondage and bloodshed" must be pitied and not be surrendered to a tyrant; it is unworthy of a Christian ruler to hand over "those whom God has saved from death."
And even when, a half century later, Boris Godunov sent eighteen young people to Europe to acquire learning and good sense there, seventeen of them became "nonreturners." As Prince Ivan Golitsyn once explained to Polish envoys: "We cannot permit Russian people to serve along with Poles because of temptation. One summer they serve—and the next we would not have a half of the best Russian people left."[73] In the works of Gregory Kotoshikhin, also a political emigre, who left us the first systematic description of Muscovite life in the mid-1600s, we read:
They do not send their children to other countries to learn science and good breeding, fearing that, having seen the faith and customs and blessed liberty of those countries, they would begin to change their own faith and then go over to another, and would no longer care or think about returning to their homes and to their relatives. And if a person, a prince or a boyar or anyone else, would go, or would send his son or his brother to another country without telling anyone, and without having taken leave of the sovereign, such a person, for such a deed, would be accused of treason. . . . And if someone went himself and left relatives behind him, they would be interrogated to learn whether they knew what their relatives had intended.[74]
What do we learn then from all this? If the medieval Kremlinolo- gists, along with the despotists, are right in suggesting that, even in the fifteenth century, Muscovy was a terrifying service state totally preoccupied with its "national survival," how are we to explain this monstrous change in the minds of its rulers and in the directions of emigration? I would be happy to tell the reader how these experts try to explain this mysterious fact so stubbornly contradicting their theories. Unfortunately, I cannot: to the best of my knowledge they have not tried.[75]
2. "Patrimonies" Versus "Patrimony"
When, in March 1462, at the age of twenty-two, Ivan III ascended the throne, Muscovy could be called a unified state perhaps only in name. It was still formally a vassal and tributary of the Golden Horde. The princedoms of Tver', Riazan', Rostov, and Iaroslavl', which had been the most dangerous competitors of Muscovy in the past, still led a separate existence, sometimes attempting to maneuver between Moscow and Lithuania. In the free cities of Novgorod, Pskov, and Khlynov (Viatka), the popular assemblies still made a stir, and their decisions were frequently anti-Muscovite in character. The northern empire of Novgorod, which occupied the maritime regions, was not subject to Moscow, and consequently the country had no access either to the White Sea or to the Baltic. The brothers of the grand prince, who held appanages, were still able to raise the sword against him, and to unleash civil war in the country. The memory was still alive of how, during the preceding civil war, Vasilii, called the Dark, father of the grand prince, had been blinded and exiled by his nephew Dimitri Shemiaka.
From this variegated and amorphous material, Ivan III had to build a unified state, completing the work of his ancestors, the "gatherers" of Muscovite Rus'. This is what the first part both of his life and his political strategy consisted in (in the case of Ivan III, they were one and the same, for he seems to have been moved by few passions other than political ones). He was of the clan of Ivan Kalita ("Moneybags"), "bloodthirsty from of old," as Kurbskii wrote, and renowned for intrigues, treachery, and familial stubbornness; a clan in which each member knew how to follow the great-grandfather's lucky star without turning aside, as though a political compass were mounted inside him.