This is not to say, of course, that Ivan III was a passionate defender of freedom as such, simply that, unlike his grandson, he was not interested in transforming his subjects into slaves. We have seen how sharply the attitude of the Muscovite government toward the problem of emigration changed over the course of a century—from principled defense of the right to freedom of movement across state borders to "imprisonment [of people] as if in a hellish dungeon." In the difference between St. George's Day and the "forbidden years," we see an identical transformation in its policy on movement within the borders of the state.
So, is the reversed stereotype accurate? Is it not obvious that the expropriation of peasant farms by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina and the abolition of St. George's Day under conditions of terror represented, just as in the case of emigration, not a continuation but a rejection of the policies of Ivan III? Continuing to ignore the difference between absolutism and autocracy, how are we supposed to explain this fateful change in the policies of the Muscovite state?
Let us go further, however. Was there a regular feudalization of the structure of Russian society from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, and was peasant self-government uniformly destroyed during this period? The pre-Oprichnina century of Russia was a time, in fact, of intensive movement in the reverse direction, i.e., not toward liquidation, but toward expansion of local, and particularly peasant, self-government. The legislation of Ivan III prepared the great reform introduced several decades later on a national scale, which, at least in intention, was supposed to represent the transition of power in the localities into the hands of the "best people"—the representatives of the properous peasantry and the rising merchant class. This was, in a sense, the creation of a "third estate" in Russian political life. Article 38 of the law code of 1497 forbids the local rulers to hold court "without the elders and without the best people."[81] We can only guess what the actual role of the "elders" in the courts was. But it is obvious that it could have been the beginning of a form of control by the population over judicial procedure. And, as history shows, it was just that.
Article 38 was certainly not so radical a measure as the one specified by the Pinega Charter of February 10,1552 (discovered a quarter century ago by A. I. Kopanev), where the tsar agrees to the complete removal of the governors from judicial and administrative functions and gives the local people themselves the right to elect "from the peasants of their own volosf the best people" or "favorite chiefs," who are to "administer justice in local matters according to our Code."2'1 But although the legislation of Ivan III did not yet go as far as this, it nevertheless signaled a new view of society on the legislator's part—a view which, we must assume, reflected social processes which can probably be called defeudalization. Thus, in Article 12 of the code of 1497, "good boyars' children" are equated, as witnesses in court, with "good, black peasant elected jurors."[82] D. P. Makovskii has noted a very important difference between the administrative charter for the Dvina land in the fourteenth century and the Belozerskii administrative charter of Ivan III (1488). This difference consists, among other things, in the fact that "in the Belozerskii Charter boyar privileges are no longer seen. Ivan III now addresses not the boyars as his grandfather did but 'the people of Belozersk—city dwellers, villagers and volost' people.'"2" Makovskii also noted that "the law code of 1497 protects all property, including that of peasants. An end is put in this code to the feudal law of inheritance reflected in the Russkaia Pravda [a document dating from the Kievan or pre-Mongol period, setting forth the basic provisions of the Eastern Slavic code of law, according to which the property of a peasant who died without issue passed to the landlord]. . . . The boyars and men-at-arms—i.e., feudal lords—are not separated out in terms of right of inheritance into a privileged position, as is the case in the Russkaia Pravda."*'
These are, once more, only negative merits by comparison with the law code of 1550, in which an essentially different, and one might say antifeudal, principle of recompense for dishonor is established. Whereas, in the Russkaia Pravda of the twelfth century, the life and honor of a prince's man-at-arms were protected by an indemnity double that of other free people, in the legislation of the "Government of
Compromise" in the middle of the sixteenth century, the indemnity for dishonor was established "against income." This is already essentially, so to speak, the embryo of the bourgeois sense of justice. And this is the only thing which can explain the strange anomaly, for a medieval code, by which an offense to "trading people and townsmen and all of those in the middle [i.e., with medium incomes]" is indemnified at the same rate (five rubles) as an offense to "a good boyar's man." As for "great guests"—i.e., wealthy merchants—the indemnity for offenses to them reaches fifty rubles, or ten times more than for offenses to boyars' men-at-arms.[83]
How are we to explain this gradation, which was revolutionary in terms of the medieval sense of justice? By the fact that Russia, as Makovskii thinks, was being transformed into a bourgeois country? This would, I am afraid, be too much of an exaggeration for boyar Russia, with its votchiny the prevailing form of wealth. But if we abandon the class point of view, which distorts our perspective on the past, it is explained quite simply by an elementary concern for the economic welfare of the country. The legislator is beginning to understand that "trading people and townsmen" and, in general, "all those in the middle" (i.e., the proto-bourgeoisie), have a value to the country equal to that of soldiers. Rich merchants, from the legislator's point of view, not only represent the country in foreign trade, but as it were symbolize the flowering of the nation. The more of them there are, and the richer they are, the richer the country is. In this sense, they are more important than soldiers (the legislator has made a calculation and found that they are ten times more important). Thus, Ivan Ill's legislation untied the hands of his heirs and initiated a positive view on the state's part, not only of peasants' freedom of movement but also of economic limitations on power and, in general, of the processes of defeudalization which took place in the pre-Oprich- nina century.
Neither peasant self-government, nor trial by jury, nor the economic limitations on power and rationalization of the economy reflected in the legislation of the absolutist century survived the rabid counterattack of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, however. In the code of Tsar Aleksei (1649) there is no longer any mention of any of this. The peasant is again "legally dead"—if it can be so expressed, even "deader" than in the Russhaia Pravda of the twelfth century.
5. The Reformation Against the Reconquista
Though there have been at least a dozen biographies of the grandson (the latest, by R. G. Skrynnikov, was published quite recently in the USSR, and another, by Edward Keenan, is now being written in the United States), a biography of the grandfather does not yet exist.[84]The heads of many generations of school children in Russia are stuffed full of the "exploits" of Ivan the Terrible. But who, other than the specialists, knows anything about Ivan III—a figure whose vague outlines melt into the mists of centuries? Nonetheless, Ivan III was one of the three Russian tsars whom posterity has called great, and the tracks which he left in Russian history are no less deep and significant than those of his grandson.