Paradoxically, however, Golovkin, Solov'ev, and Pogodin seem to have been both right and wrong in characterizing pre-Petrine Russia as obscure and poverty-stricken. For where Chancellor in 1553 had found wonderfully populated villages, his compatriot Fletcher a quarter of a century later discovered a desert. In the census books of 1573-78, 93 to 96 percent of the villages of the Moscow region are listed as uninhabited.[9] In the Mozhaisk region, up to 86 percent of the villages were empty; in Pereiaslavl'-Zalesskii, 70 percent. Uglich, Dimitrov, and Novgorod had been put to the torch and stood deserted. In Mozhaisk, 89 percent of the houses were vacant; in Kolomna, 92 percent. And this was the case everywhere in the country.
It seems as if before starting its ascent from obscurity to greatness as the stereotype proclaims, the country had made a terrible descent in the opposite direction—from greatness to obscurity.
The economic and social forces developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, which had seemed to promise normal progress of the European type for Russia, suddenly disappeared as if they had never been. The prominent peasant proto-bourgeoisie vanished. The progressive three-field (short-term fallow) system of tillage was abandoned. Large-scale production ceased. The urbanization of the country gave way to deurbanization. And, what was most important, the rapid transformation of the kholops (slaves) into freemen gave way to an equally swift reverse process.'7 Henceforth, the free laborer gradually disappeared from the face of the Russian earth, and became a serf belonging either to other men or to the state. And this is how it would be for centuries to come. Even today Russia has not fully recovered from this terrible transformation. Serfdom to the state and its enterprises was a fact of life for all Russian workers up to 1956, and for the rural population it has still not ended—at least not as a rule.
And here we approach the basic question of this book: why? Why was it that Russia, which in the sixteenth century could claim a primary role in European politics, was in the eighteenth glad even of the status of a second-class power? Why was a brilliant future predicted for it in the sixteenth century, while in the eighteenth "we were not considered human beings"? What was the political basis for the economic and military catastrophes which plunged the country into the "nonexistence" of which Russian politicians and historians speak so glibly?
17. "In the sixteenth century, until the 1580s, forced labor—that is, either as serfs or as slaves—could not play any appreciable role. Serf peasants (former slaves now settled on the land) until the 1580s were very few, and slave labor in industry, beginning with the first half of the fourteenth century, was rapidly crowded out and replaced with free hired labor. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we see a reverse picture, in which the labor of free hired persons was replaced by compulsory labor—that is, by serf people, who came more and more to resemble slaves. The proportion of free hiring both in industry and in agriculture in the sixteenth century was certainly far, far higher than in the eighteenth century" (Makovskii, p. 192). After this we can hardly be surprised at the author's conclusion that "capitalist relationships came into being in the middle of the sixteenth century in the Russian state both in industry and in agriculture, and the necessary economic conditions for their development were prepared. . . . But in the period from the 1570s, active intervention by the state in economic relationships occurred. . . . This intervention not only hindered the development of capitalist relationships and undermined the condition of productive forces in the country, but also called forth regressive phenomena in the economy" (ibid., p. 212). Thus, the prerequisites for the capitalist relationships usual in Europe originated in Russia in the sixteenth century, according to an authoritative Soviet historian. Originated and . . . disappeared. Furthermore, they disappeared so thoroughly that according to another even more authoritative historian, Academician N. M. Druzhinin, these prerequisites could not be discovered even in the epoch of Peter—that is, a century and a half later. "The state representing nobility," Druzhinin wrote, "was at the zenith of its power and might: the transformations wrought by Peter . . . strengthened the feudal monarchy, and were neither objective nor subjective signs of the decay of the feudal-serf social order. . . . Therefore one cannot agree with В. V Iakovlev and other historians that the origins of the capitalist economic system date from the first half of the eighteenth century [emphasis added]" (N. M. Druzhinin, "O periodizatsii istorii capitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v Rossii," p. 71).
2. The Alternatives
In the middle of the thirteenth century, an apparently irresistible wave of cavalry from the Mongolian steppes inundated Russia on its way westward. On the Hungarian plain, which is the end of the gigantic wedge of steppe running from Siberia into Europe, this wave halted and turned back. But the entire eastern part of what had once been known as Kievan Rus' remained for centuries to come a remote European province of what was, in effect, the gigantic colonial empire of the Golden Horde. During all this time, the Russian land did not live, merely survived, while its surplus product was almost entirely confiscated—or so it was intended—by the Tatars, its cities stood deserted, its economic development was artificially stopped, and a collaborationist administration held sway. "There can be scarcely any doubt. . . that domination by a foreign power . . . had a very debilitating effect on the political climate of Russia," Richard Pipes observes.18
Ten generations were required before Muscovy—in the course of what may, on the analogy of the expulsion of the Moors from Iberia, be termed the Russian Reconquista—coalesced into a state again, and, in the middle of the fifteenth century, attained its independence by force. In 1480 the last khan of the Golden Horde, Akhmat, encountered a Russian army on the Ugra River, at the distant approaches to the capital, and, unwilling to risk open battle, retreated. The retreat turned into a rout. Akhmat lost his head on the Nogai steppe to Tatar swords. The Golden Horde ceased to exist, and on the crest of a movement of national liberation, Russia came into being. The Ugra, site of the battle which did not take place, became a symbol of its independence.
Three generations after this beginning, Muscovy was no longer on the defensive, but constantly on the attack. Moreover, in retrospect one can perhaps discern something reminiscent of a national purpose, toward which the country seemed stubbornly to be working. Formulated most loosely, this was the resurrection of Kievan Rus' after two centuries as a Tatar colony. Externally, it consisted in completing the Reconquista—that is, in recovering all the territory which had once belonged to Kiev. Internally, it consisted in correcting the economic and sociopolitical deformities brought about by generations of feudal disintegration and colonial existence.
Few historians doubt that Kievan Rus' belonged to the European family of nations. In this sense, we can say that if the national pur-
18. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, p. 57.
pose of Muscovy consisted in the resurrection of the Kievan state, this meant not only the reconstitution of its territorial integrity, but also its re-Europeanization.
Under fifteenth-century conditions, the socioeconomic aspect of the process of re-Europeanization was relatively simple: economic expansion (more or less equivalent to that of the neighboring countries to the West) and the concomitant social evolution (differentiation of the peasantry, migration into the cities, and urbanization) logically resulting, as everywhere in Europe, in the formation of a strong middle class. As we have seen, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovy was capable of this: its cities were growing rapidly and the differentiation of its peasantry into economic strata was underway. This peasant differentiation, leading to the development of a proto-bourgeoisie, which will be discussed in detail in chapter six, was a highly important sign of the capacity of the Russia of that time to generate the process of re-Europeanization.