If the basic problem which the Russian government faced at this time was actually reducible to deciding at whose expense it should satisfy the land hunger of the pomeshchiki who constituted its chief military force, the solution seems relatively clear. This hunger could be satisfied either by the lands belonging to the boyars and peasants (that is, the proto-bourgeoisie) or those belonging to the church. In the absence of an anti-Tatar strategy, there simply was no other choice. Was this not enough to produce a mortal struggle, given that the church hierarchy, too, considered its landholdings a matter of life and death, and was ready to push every available political force, be it the service gentry, the bureaucracy, or even the tsar's personal ambitions, into the battle against its opponents, the great lords?
The lesser gentry and the bureaucracy struggled against the great lords everywhere in Europe. But nowhere else did this struggle reach the point of mortal confrontation which it did in Russia, because nowhere else was there such a powerful coalition of forces opposed to Europeanization, inspired and led by so mighty an institution as the Russian Orthodox Church. And here is why, as I see it, the struggle of the Non-Acquirers for the secularization of the church landholdings assumes such a fateful significance. The Non-Acquirers were the ideological side of the absolutist triangle.
3. The Political Function of Secularization
History, unlike boxing, does not usually decide disputes by a knockout. It awards the victory on points—and then only after a long interval, when the original protagonists have long since left the stage. After the Renaissance, for example, it seemed that the entire fabric of society was being swiftly secularized, and that matters would soon end in total separation of the culture from the church. Instead, there followed a period of religious wars—the epoch of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Only many centuries afterward would the culture in fact be separated from the church.
The analogy may similarly be applied to the struggle between monetary rent and corvee. With the great expansion of monetary rent in the first half of the sixteenth century, it seemed as though all Europe was on the threshold of bourgeoisification (so, too, it appeared in retrospect in the case of Russia to historians such as Makovskii and Nosov). Then, however, in many countries there followed a time of reaction, when corvee appeared to be on the winning side. Only after many decades did monetary rent triumph there over its rival.
This, at least, was how analogous conflicts turned out in the other states of the northeastern corner of Europe. Take, for example, Denmark and Sweden—also northerly and rather backward countries, whose fate, like that of Russia, was determined in the dispute between the service gentry and the proto-bourgeoisie. Both of these countries, like Russia, came to know the taste of corvee and feudal reaction (in Denmark's case, even the enserfment of the peasantry), and fell into the power of paranoid tyrants like Ivan the Terrible. They stood at the very edge of the precipice of autocracy. But they stood firm there. Why?
The decisive reason seems to have been precisely the secularization of church landholdings. As distinct from Russia, both of these countries slaked the land hunger of the feudal service gentry not at the expense of land belonging to the great lords and the peasantry, but from the church's land fund; thus, they succeeded both in preserving the power of the aristocracy and sustaining peasant differentiation. When King Christian III of Denmark arrested the bishops and took away their lands and privileges in 1536, as a result of which royal landholdings were increased by a factor of three, it meant, in plain terms, that the land hunger of the Danish service gentry was satisfied at the expense of the church. Corvee and serfdom thus triumphed only in one sector of the national economy, and did not spread over the entire country or become state policy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, a time of reaction all over Europe, when the Russian peasantry was already hopelessly enserfed, not more than 20 percent of the peasantry in Denmark was burdened with corvee, and the sale of peasants without land did not become widespread. The history of Sweden provides still clearer indication of the decisive significance of the secularization of church lands. Though this led to the concentration of more than half of Sweden's land in the hands of the gentry, fears of "Livonian slavery"—that is, the total enserfment of the peasants—remained no more than that.'" Thus, in both cases, secularization served as the basis for an absolutist compromise between the various factions and institutions of feudal society, permitting Denmark and Sweden to retain the "equilibrium" of social forces for which Soviet historians now long in vain. The social limitations on power therefore remained untouched in Denmark and Sweden, as distinct from the case in Russia.
In the second place, secularization prevented the eradication of peasant differentiation on lands belonging to the state and the aristocracy, thereby preserving a sector of the country's land fund on which the proto-bourgeoisie could develop. In my terms, this means that, as distinct from what happened in Russia, the economic limitations on power were not destroyed.
And, last but not least, secularization separated the church, and with it the intellectual potential of the country, from the defense of private economic interests. In so doing, it transformed the now landless church into the custodian of the only treasure which remained to it—the ideological limitations on power.
Secularization could not prevent corvee and the depredations of the service gentry, the tyranny of monarchs, or the enserfment of the peasantry. But it could prevent these depredations, this tyranny, this enserfment from becoming total. By furthering the retention of latent limitations on power, it prevented an Oprichnina "revolution from above," Russian-style.
4. The Preparation for the Assault
How did it happen that this "revolution from above" was not prevented in Russia? Why was it that secularization of church lands did not occur there, too, in the key century in which the fate of the country was decided?
The Muscovite sovereigns did not have to defend their authority against the claims of a universal hierarchy. After the Union of Florence in 1439, when the Patriarchate of Constantinople, seeking a last refuge from the Turkish onslaught, agreed in desperation to the pope's suzerainty, Greek Orthodoxy became in the eyes of Muscovites a dubious and almost seditious thing. Thus, from the middle of the fifteenth century onward, the state and the church stood opposite each other in Muscovy on the same national ground. But did this make the task of secularization easier? From the point of view of the current stereotypes, it unquestionably did. But, as we shall see shortly, the church was by no means defenseless in the face of the "totalitarian" (to use Toynbee's word) power of the omnipotent "service" state. The fact that the national ecclesiastical leadership could not be presented in Russia as the agents of a foreign hierarchy, as happened in Denmark, Sweden, or England, greatly complicated the state's dispute with the church. And the authority and ideological power of the state and the church were not equal in Russia. The church, contrary to the Toynbeean theory, was much stronger.
When Moscow was still only dreaming of the unification of Rus' and supremacy over it, the Russian church was already unified and rigidly centralized, and had achieved privileges and immunities more extensive perhaps than were enjoyed by any other church in Europe. It owed all of this not to Constantinople or Moscow, but to the Tatars, who were responsible for both its material might and its spiritual worthlessness. If we seek the roots of Tatar influence on Muscovy, then, paradoxical as it may seem, they should be sought primarily in the Orthodox Church. It was no accident that in defending their feudal perquisites as late as the sixteenth century, many years after the yoke had been thrown off, the Muscovite prelates still shamelessly referred to the Tatar yarlyfo, or decrees issued by the khans of the Golden Horde. The yarlyks were, in fact, unbelievably generous. From the church—runs one document of the khans, which had the force of law—"no tribute, or turnover taxes, or tillage taxes, or land and water transport duties, or war taxes, or maintenance of officials are to be exacted; and no royal tax whatever is to be taken." And not only the church but all those under its protection are to be exempt from such impositions: "and the church's people, craftsmen, falconers ... or men and women servants and any of their people—whoever are hired either for work or as guards." In addition to the guarantee of church property and exemption from all taxes, duties, obligations, and charges, and in general from all the burdens of the "yoke," the church was also granted the supreme power over its people: "The Metropolitan is to give judgment and administer his people in all matters: in robbery and theft with material evidence the Metropolitan alone, or whoever he orders to do so, is to be the judge in all cases."" In a subjugated, plundered, and humiliated country, the church was an inviolate and untouched island, a fortress of prosperity.