Ivan III carried out his centralizing task with great political tact and a minimum of spilt blood—or, at any rate, with greater tact and less blood than his French contemporary, Louis XI. The grand prince rather resembled his English contemporary, Henry VII. Both were parsimonious, dry, unprejudiced, farseeing men. Like Henry VII, Ivan thought that a bad peace was better than a good quarrel, and wherever a matter could be settled without a fight, he took that road with no hesitation, even at the price of significant concessions. He was not a coward like his grandson, but knew how to flatter without qualms when this was necessary. He disliked risking everything, and respected his adversary if the latter was deserving of respect, trying not to drive him to extremes, and leaving him the possibility of an honorable exit from the game. Over all else, he set "the old ways," the strongest argument of medieval political logic.
How—a well-known American historian once asked me indignantly—can we permit ourselves such a description of a man who did not leave behind a single document written in his own hand? But Ivan III did leave a record. And it was not only the great power he created, but also the very process by which it was created—maneuvers, campaigns, intrigues, embassies, marriages, and negotiations. From this chaotic mosaic, there emerges a profound strategy, thought out far into the future, reflecting the character and style of a great political architect.
Ivan III, it seems to me, was distinguished from all subsequent Russian tsars by an astonishing feeling for strategy. There was no single political step, no matter how insignificant in itself, which would not in time, perhaps many years afterwards, prove to be a stage on the way to the goal which he had set for himself.
Who could have said in 1477, for example, that the confiscation of monastery lands in Novgorod, a measure lost in the mass of other confiscations, resettlements, and banishments connected with annexation of the northern "patrimony," would many years later prove to be essential in reforming the church? Who could have said in advance that the destructive raids on the Lithuanian lands beyond the Oka during the "unofficial war" of the 1480s, conducted mainly by the princely defectors from Lithuania, were by no means unsystematic freebooting, as it seemed to contemporaries, but part of a colossal plan for dismembering Lithuania by splitting it along ethnic and religious lines? Who could have said that the sentimental interest of a decidedly unsentimental grand prince in the modest sect of "Trans- Volga Elders"—people not of this world, monks who had left their monasteries and lived in lonely forest hermitages—was, in fact, a detail in a broad plan for the creation of a strong political party of "Non-Acquirers," which was destined to become the brains trust of the future church reformation?
And so on for everything he did. Ivan III was decidedly unpredictable to his contemporaries. A cynical pragmatist, a realist, known for his persistence and practical turn of mind, he seemed at the same time to live in some other dimension, incomprehensible to them. In the second part of his life (or of his strategy), when the gathering in of the "patrimony" was completed and the family star followed by ten generations of Muscovite grand princes had finally set, when Rus' (which is to say what remained of the ancient Kievan state) had been united, Ivan immediately and without interruption undertook to formulate new goals, creating a new mission—in which, he may have thought, his grandsons and great-grandsons would compete with him, as he had competed with his grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the mission to "gather in" Rus'. He was not in a hurry. The entire political experience of Muscovy had taught him that affairs of state are not concluded in one generation, that "Moscow is not built in one day," as they say in Russia. He had only to lay the foundation, and, by completing the work of Ivan Kalita, become a new Ivan Kalita.
Fated to live two lives in two different worlds—first in the petty, quarrelsome world of disputes between princes and appanages, and then in the world of high politics, international intrigues, and national tasks—Ivan felt himself at home in both. During his first "life," he prepared the staging areas and starting points for his second, when he would no longer be a provincial Muscovite grand prince but sovereign of a European power.
In fact, as soon as the process of "gathering in" was completed, the Reconquista could continue only in the arena of European politics. The patrimony of Rus' was naturally transformed into something fundamentally different from a royal estate: a member nation of the European family of peoples. And, correspondingly, the "votchina" (patrimony) concept became anachronistic in the new "otchina" (which in Russian sounds rather like "otchizna" or "otechestvo"—fatherland). Both "otchina" and "votchina" are translated into English by a single word, "patrimony." Even in Russian they have the same root and differ only by one letter. In the political life of the country, however, these terms seem to stand not only for different but for opposite things.
Now, after the completion of the "gathering in," as the ideological basis for the Russian Reconquista, "otchina" came to be used mainly in the context of foreign policy. The term starina ("old times") underwent analogous transformation into a political slogan signifying the common past of all of the Russian lands, as "otchina" did their common future. Both were fused into a powerful ideological construct, symbolic of national unity and cemented together by the foreign-policy strategy of Ivan III.
Votchina seems to have gradually undergone a similar transformation, coming to stand mainly not for royal but for private hereditary property, thus laying a firm foundation for the Russian aristocracy. The private votchina was in itself the opposite of the idea of the country as a royal votchina. In fact, the private votchina served as check and balance on the power of the medieval Russian state, imposing both social and economic limitations on it. More than that, maintenance of the private votchiny was an absolute political imperative for Ivan III: how could he, otherwise, in forming his aristocratic elite, have attracted to himself boyars and princes from Lithuania, from Tver', and from Riazan', who deserted to him along with their votchiny? Why should powerful aristocrats, who had traditionally been indisputable owners of their votchiny, have fled to a state in which their rights would be disputed? Had Ivan III actually considered his country a royal patrimony, aristocrats would have absconded from Muscovy rather than fled there. This is how the tradition of "patrimonies" as private estates worked to corrode and gradually destroy the tradition of royal "patrimony." Gathering about him in Moscow "the flower of
Russian aristocracy," as Gustav Alef has expressed it, Ivan III put the idea of royal "patrimony" in mortal danger. This explains why his grandson, Ivan the Terrible, needed to foment a revolution and resort to mass terror in a desperate attempt to save it.
Thus, the opposition between two almost identical terms, which does not even exist in English, conceals a cruel conflict between two cultural and political traditions, one which ended with catastrophe for the new-born Russian absolutism.
3. A Historical Experiment
The complexity of history sometimes makes it easier to argue. I do not know how I would now convince the reader of the difference between the political behavior of the "otchinnik" (the absolutist king) and the "votchinnik" (the autocrator), and the decisive difference in their attitudes towards the country, were it not for the analogous actions to subdue Novgorod undertaken by the grandfather and the grandson, separated from each other by what I call Russia's absolutist century.