By no means have I tried to draw a rosy picture of the latter here. There were quite a few bloody murders and cruel persecutions in his time. After all, he was no more than a medieval king. But while the medieval Kremlinologists may perhaps triumphantly point this out, what I am stressing is a totally different matter. Ivan III was not an autocrator. That is, however cruel and medieval he may have been, he never dared to violate the latent limitations on power. Indeed, as we shall soon see, he tried to strengthen them. For this reason, I think of him as an essentially European king.
4. The Reversed Stereotype
The stereotype which we encountered in chapter one asserted categorically that Russia began its march from barbarism to civilization only with Peter the Great. Historians of socioeconomic relationships in pre-Petrine Russia are inclined, it seems, to an analogous stereotype, but in reverse. They take it as a postulate that from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, in the process of feudalizing its economy and society and gradually enserfing its peasantry, Russia went from relatively free status (in medieval terms) to serfdom, which after Peter was transformed into literal slavery. Peasant self-government was gradually destroyed as the landlords seized the "black" lands—that is, those belonging formally to the state, but actually to the peasants. The peasants' freedom of movement was just as gradually limited in the course of the fifteenth century. Finally, in terms of Ivan Ill's law code of 1497, the so-called St. George's Day rule, which gave the peasants the choice of leaving their landlords only during two weeks in the year, became law. From here—so runs the stereotype—it was only one step to the complete "tying down" of the peasants, and to the introduction, at the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign, of the "forbidden years," eliminating any movement whatever on their part.
This picture of the triumphal progress of the "service" or "patrimonial" state well suits the despotists, with their "institutional time bomb." True, by the logic of things, it must annoy the Soviet absolutists, if only because it refutes the fundamental Marxist postulate that the movement of the superstructure is determined by the movement of the base. In the Russian case, superstructure and base turn out to move not only in different, but in diametrically opposite directions. The superstructure, as conceived by Soviet historians, moves constantly towards absolutism—that is, in a progressive direction. And the base moves towards slavery—that is, in a regressive direction.
This scandalous behavior of the base does not, however, reduce the optimistic tone of genuine science, which alertly masks its dismay, as we have seen, either by boldly attacking Oriental despotism in the West or by consoling itself with the unusually active class struggle in Russia. Even an honest, although supercautious, historian like S. O. Shmidt, for example, writes with pride that in Russia there existed "conditions for the beginning of mass scale uprisings of the 'mutinous peasantry' cherishing a dream of a peasant state, which had no precedent in the other parts of Europe."[77] Here is how Jerome Blum describes the regularity of the process of disappearance of peasant self-government, in his classical work Lord and Peasants in Russia:
With the increase in privately held property resulting from royal distribution of black land to seigniors, the "volost" form of organization began to disintegrate. Often the princes paid no heed to "volost" boundaries in making their grants so that the organic unity of the commune was destroyed by its land being distributed among several proprietors. The most debilitating development, however, was the penetration of the landlord into the "volost" organization. First, agents of the seignior began to bypass the commune's own officials. Then the lord forbade the selection of these officials by the peasants. Instead he named them himself, often selecting them from among his own unfree servants. The final stage was reached when the lord took away all the remaining powers of self-government from the "volost," and placed its entire administration in the hands of one of his employees or slaves. The gradual destruction of the power of the commune on privately-owned land, and the simultaneous disappearance of the black land in much of the state, ended the existence of the independent "volost" as a form of organization so far as most of the peasantry were concerned.2"
Here you see how regularly and, one might say, organically the process of disintegration of peasant self-government proceeded, parallel with an equally regular process of enserfment of the peasantry. "By the end of the fifteenth century," Blum maintains on this score, "the right of the peasant to free movement had already been curtailed. The Code of 1497 had fixed the two weeks at St. George's Day in autumn (25 November) as the only legal time at which the peasant renter could leave his landlord, and had fixed heavy fees that he had to pay before he could depart."
On the other hand, Blum realizes that this was "also official recognition of the peasant's time-honored right of departure [from the landlord] protecting him against seignioral attempts to take that privilege from him. If the landlord tried to hold him against his will the peasant could turn to governmental authority to enforce recognition of his freedom to leave at the [legally] appointed time."[78] Blum further sees that "in the light of these guarantees it would seem plausible to assume that the peasant-renter had complete freedom of movement providing he met the not unreasonable conditions set by the laws."
St. George's Day was November 26 and not 25, and only two pages earlier what are now described as "not unreasonable conditions," were for some reason called a "heavy fee." But let us let the details go and continue the quotation: "From this juristic point of view B. N. Chicherin, one of the first historians of the Russian peasantry, was right when he wrote in 1858 that 'the free movement of the peasantry was a universal phenomenon of old Russia until the end of the sixteenth century.'"[79]
The contradiction is all too evident: on the one hand, it is recognized that freedom of movement was "complete"; on the other, it is asserted that it was "curtailed." Trying to reconcile this paradox, Blum writes that Chicherin "and others who agreed with him, confused legislative fiat with historical fact."[80] In reality, it turns out that in spite of the laws which protected freedom of movement, "the peasant-renter found it increasingly difficult to leave his landlord when he wanted, for the seignior was able to employ a number of devices, both legal and illegal, to keep him from going."24 Thus, the all-powerful (according to Pipes) "patrimonial state" was (according to Blum) powerless to compel the Russian landlord to respect its wishes.
But let us leave the two historians to argue between themselves on this point. We are interested in quite another problem: namely that in introducing the St. George's Day legislation under Ivan III, the state, as even Blum recognizes, was trying to defend the peasants' right to complete freedom of movement, while by introducing the "forbidden years" under Ivan the Terrible, i.e., abolishing St. George's Day, it was trying to destroy this freedom, thereby commencing the somber history of serfdom.