In reality, the process of peasant differentiation in the pre-Oprichnina century of Russian history took on such dimensions (especially in the region of highest economic development, the North)[87] that it was even able, in many cases, to bring about the defeudalization of these regions—dissolution of the feudal elements into a new stratum of farmers, entrepreneurs, and merchants of peasant origin.[88]
The vigor of this process is confirmed by the fact that it stimulated government policy in directions favorable to the peasant proto-bour- geoisie, in particular, the remaking of the entire administrative structure of the country along the lines of local self-government (the Great Reform of 1551-56). Although in formal terms the black peasantry of the North cultivated land belonging to the state, practically speaking it was being transformed into private (allodial) property, while the peasantry itself became a class of freeholders.[89]
As a result of all this, there appeared peasants who were economically stronger not only than most pomeshchiki, but also than many boyars—peasants who possessed plow land, truck gardens, hayfields, traplines, stockbarns, and even entire villages. But, what is even more important, they also owned fishing and fur enterprises, craft workshops, and huge salt ponds. These were the peasants whose genealogies N. E. Nosov was able to trace over the course of many generations, just as S. B. Veselovskii traced the genealogies of the ancient boyar families.
Of course, the formation of this elite (the "best people") was accompanied by the ruin of masses of other peasants. Russian documents of this period are strewn with the designations "cotters," "children," "Cossacks," "sharecroppers," "hirelings," which variously represent landless people who earned their bread as hired labor. As D. P. Makov- skii has demonstrated, in the twelve villages of Viaz'ma uezd (and bear in mind that this was not the North, but the West—the Smolensk county), of 3,139 existing peasant households, " 1,991 households or 45 per cent of the total were the victims of increasing exploitation, in a form especially severe for the minor peasantry—that of money."1' In another passage, the author notes with appropriate anti-bourgeois indignation:
This separation of the producer from the means of production drove huge masses of people into the street. It was natural that the "poor people" became the easy prey of various predatory elements which had developed in the depths of the feudal order. Among these predators the most numerous and bloodthirsty were the stratum of "best" or "good" peasants. These peasants not only owned large tracts of land (some ... up to forty to fifty desiatiny in Viaz'ma uezd), but were also entrepreneurs, owning facilities of various kinds—salt ponds, gristmills, stores. . . . Among the wealthy peasants the entrepreneurial renting of land could frequently be observed, which went by the name of "hiring."6
Even if we share Makovskii's indignation over the exploitation of the "producer separated from the means of production," we are nevertheless not entitled to forget that (as the author himself shows in other sections of his book) the only alternative to it under the conditions of sixteenth-century Russia was corvee, which led to serfdom, under which the producer was attached by force to these very "means of production," and . . . became a slave.
Nosov shows how "as a result of the growing property differentiation within Dvina volost' ... it completely loses the features of the old rural commune . . . and is transformed into a territorial unit for pur-
Makovskii, p. 160.
Ibid., pp. 164-65.
poses of administration and taxation ... a black volost' mir,' which united the peasant freeholders . . . and, what was most important, represented their common interests vis-a-vis the state." But all this was true only for the "golden age" of the Russian peasantry, i.e., before the Oprichnina revolution.
And again, as if by the same magic which determined the fate of emigration, everything suddenly swung around 180 degrees after this revolution:
The disintegration of the volost', as a result of the spoliation and seizure of its lands and also of the fact that certain groups of inhabitants of the volost' fell into personal or economic dependence on neighboring feudal lords, undermined the foundations of the volost' peasant mir, deprived the local peasant magnates of their basic support, and thus closed the pathways leading toward bourgeoisification of the peasantry as a whole. [This "closing of the pathways"] took place in the central regions of northeastern Rus' in the sixteenth century, during and after the time of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, when the process of swallowing up of the black volost' lands by the service landholdings reached its apogee there.[90]
The fate of Russia thus became a question of who, in the final analysis, would get the land belonging to the disintegrating communal mirs—the pomeshchiki living on corvee—that is, the service gentry—or the "best people" of the peasantry—that is, the proto-bourgeoisie.
2. Two Coalitions
The competing socioeconomic forces involved in the historical dispute between the pomeshchiki and the proto-bourgeoisie are hardly visible on the political stage in retrospect. Still less obvious is the ideological struggle between the so-called Josephites and Non-Acquirers (see below). The observer sees, rather, a furious struggle between the boyardom and the church.
But the interweaving of these three dimensions of the struggle— the socioeconomic, the political, and the ideological—constitutes the major complexity of this transitional epoch in my view. Who stood with whom? Who represented whom? What was the immanent connection between the various levels of this fateful drama? In order to untangle this bundle of conflicting interests, let us attempt to group the major actors on the Muscovite historical scene according to whether they were fighting for or against the latent limitations on power.
The interests of the Russian aristocracy—the boyardom—which by definition defended the social limitations on power (since these were a matter of life and death for it), did not contradict the interests of the peasant proto-bourgeoisie, which by definition defended the economic limitations on power (also a matter of life and death). N. E. Nosov even argues that,
objectively, by virtue of its economic position as an estate of large landowners, it [the boyardom] was less interested in the mass scale seizure of state lands and in the enserfment of peasants by the state, than was the petty and middling dvorianstvo [the pomeshchiki], and consequently had less need of the strengthening of a military-bureaucratic autocratic system. In this respect, its interests could sometimes even coincide with those of the upper stratum of merchants.[91]
The connections between the boyardom and the Non-Acquirers, who defended the ideological limitations on power, have long been conceded in classical historiography. Even Soviet historians, who hate the boyardom, and therefore see the Non-Acquirers as a reactionary force, have never questioned this verdict.
Thus, on one side of the historical barricade, there appears a sort of latent absolutist political coalition—the Non-Acquirers, the boyars, and the proto-bourgeoisie. But what about the other side of this barricade? Can an opposite, autocratic coalition be discerned there? Why, after all, should the service gentry, the pomeshchiki, oppose the Non- Acquirers? And why should the bureaucracy take up arms against the bourgeoisie?