The war for the restoration of the ancient otchina of Kievan Rus' was the first of the two imperatives which governed Ivan Ill's strategy after Muscovite Rus' had been "gathered in." Recovery of the third of the land in the country seized by the church under Tatar auspices, a kind of Reconquista of internal policy, was the second. Unlike Ivan's external opponents, the church continued to gather strength. It was the most active entrepreneur and the richest usurer in the country. Landowners bequeathed their lands to the church in memory of their souls, so that it might pray for them forevermore. It seized, bought, obtained by lawsuit, and took for debt more land, "whitening" it through its immunities, and effectively removing it from the state. The votchiny of the Troitse-Sergievskii monastery, B. D. Grekov writes, "grew up on the bones of the boyars."[85] A. I. Kopanev notes of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery: "The votchiny of the temporal feudal lords, which in the fifteenth century were extensive, had almost completely disappeared at the end of the sixteenth. The largest feudal lord of the district—the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery—had taken the bulk of the votchina lands into its hands."[86] The power of the church was spreading through the country as swiftly as a forest fire.
Church reformation was, in this sense, a logical continuation of the annexation of Tver' and Riazan' and the expeditions against Novgorod. With its own administration, holding court and dispensing retribution in its territories as an actual sovereign, not paying taxes, and ruining the city dwellers by the competition of its artisans, the church was a true state within a state, and a focus of separatism. Ivan III could scarcely tolerate such a competitor, growing stronger with each year.
But here a strategic dilemma lay in wait for him, for any move against the church weakened his position as the leader of the Recon- quista. The Lithuanian empire held the Ukraine and Belorussia, which according to the "old ways" belonged to Kievan Rus'. Without partitioning Lithuania, there could be no thought of reestablishing the otchina. The way to Kiev—the road of the Reconquista—lay, figuratively speaking, through Vil'no. For Ivan III, the political strategy of the Reconquista therefore consisted in raising the gigantic Russian Orthodox mass of the Lithuanian empire against its Catholic government. Orthodoxy was the sole banner under which Lithuania could be dismembered, and the church, as the guardian of the faith, had to be promoted, not humiliated. The path of primitive plundering of the church on which Ivan the Terrible embarked was excluded for his grandfather. For him the problem may have seemed insoluble. Nevertheless, he solved it. The solution was simple—to split the church, just as he intended to split Lithuania.
The grand prince did not have time to impose this solution, however: his first reformist campaign did not break the resistance of the powerful church hierarchy, just as the first campaign against Lithuania did not succeed in dismembering it. Ivan was accustomed, as we have seen, to do everything in two stages. But now fate did not leave him time for a second attempt: in the heat of the campaign, he was stricken with paralysis. He had proceeded on the assumption that his descendants would follow his star and complete that which he had not had time to finish, just as he had completed the work of Ivan Kalita and Dimitrii Donskoi. But, in the otchina which he had created, matters were more complex than in the Muscovite clan votchina of his ancestors. And he could not have foreseen Ivan the Terrible.
CHAPTER V
JOSEPHITES AND NON-ACQUIRERS
1. Money Versus Corvee
Until the end of the fifteenth century, the Russian peasantry lived for the most part in communes, working land belonging either to the state or to the feudal corporation of the church, or to private individuals, and paying for this chiefly in kind, or in the form of various obligations. The economic advance which began after Muscovy attained independence created previously unheard-of opportunities for rapid enrichment through agriculture.' However, contrary to what the pro-
1. Academician S. G. Strumilin, a major Soviet authority on economic history, is inclined to agree with D. P. Makovskii's opinion that this economic upturn made the Russian economy of the first half of the sixteenth century comparable in scale to the economies of Western European countries contemporary with it. In his preface to the second edition of Makovskii's book, he says:
This is indirectly confirmed by the large figures for Russian exports; by the presence of many thousands of merchants within Russia; by the fact that these Russian merchants extended credits of millions of rubles to English merchants, and not vice versa; by the large trade flotilla of vessels, for the serving of which there were required on the Volga alone—figuring 500 vessels with 40 people each— 20,000 hired workers; by the presence of a considerable circle of manufacturing plants with work forces of 30 to 200 persons or more; by the presence of such large-scale entrepreneurs as the Stroganov family of salt merchants, who employed 10,000 hired workers; and by many other indicative facts. (D. P. Makov- skii [2nd ed.], pp. ii-iii).
The word "manufacture" is used here in a specialized Marxist sense, referring to assembly-line production by large groups of workers without the use of machines, as occurred in the large weaving-shops in Italy and the Low Countries during the fifteenth century. Makovskii himself, incidentally, confirms his contention not only with figures but with a Weberian argument (surprising in the mouth of a Soviet historian) about the rise at this time of a kind of bourgeois ethic in Russia: "The thirst for gain, for enrichment, for accumulation . . . took hold of . . . Russia," he writes.
Russian merchants and industrialists seek roads to the East, to Siberia, to Central Asia. Afanasii Nikitin set off "beyond the three seas"; dozens and hundreds of Russian merchants penetrate into many Oriental markets—into the Crimea,
ponents of the "service state" believe, these opportunities led not to a single, fatal line of development but to two opposite lines, corresponding to two opposite social processes taking place simultaneously in the country. It is true that the new service nobility—who had no concern either for the rational exploitation of the land, which they held for short periods, or for the fate of the peasants living on it—naturally strove to extract the maximum gain from peasant labor. The best method of doing so seemed to them to be to set up their own farming operations and to compel the peasants to work the landlord's land. This corvee labor logically led to expropriation by the landlords of the peasants' farms, reducing them to something like the household plots of modern collective farmers. And, inasmuch as the peasants naturally resisted any form of collective economy over which they had no control, the logical extension was enserfment and the destruction of the independent volost'.
But the transfer of peasants from rent to corvee—which was apparently simply the economic dimension of the political tendency toward universal service—was by no means universal over the course of the pre-Oprichnina century. It was no more than a shadowy economic tendency, decidedly secondary both in importance and in scale to the process by which peasant rents became payable in money. This, in turn, gave rise to peasant differentiation, which led inevitably, at least in principle, to the opposite result—that is, not to the enserfment of the peasantry, or to its expropriation as a social group, but to the formation of a peasant proto-bourgeoisie capable of exercising political pressure on the government of the country.