Might one not anticipate a second such assault after the second handing over of heretics? In other words, the assemblies of 1503 and 1504 may be seen not as the end of the secularization campaign, as the experts have said and continue to say, but as the beginning of a new phase of it. Hardly anyone will dispute that the military campaign of 1500-1503 was only the first round of the assault on Lithuania in the eyes of the grand prince. But no one has ever viewed the secularization campaign of 1503-4 as a first assault on church landholdings.
The campaign against Lithuania ended in the same year of 1503 not with a peace but with a truce. Despite having routed the Lithuanian armies and received by the terms of the truce nineteen cities, seventy volosts, twenty-two fortresses, and nineteen villages—that is, having achieved the most brilliant military success, after the Ugra and the overthrow of the Tatar yoke, of his reign—the grand prince flatly refused to consider the matter closed. (On the contrary, the Muscovite ambassadors were ordered to tell the khan of the Crimea, Men- gli-Girei, that "the grand prince has no firm peace with the Lithuanian [king] . . . the grand prince wishes to have his country back from him, and all the Russian lands; but he has made a truce with him now, so as to let the people rest and to attach to himself the cities which have been taken.")[104] Can the sensational ouster of Gennadii, fresh from his triumph, not be interpreted as a sign that with the church, just as with Lithuania, a truce had been concluded in 1503, not a peace?
"The collapse of the plans for secularization put forward by Ivan III was historically predictable. The economic prerequisites for liquidation of feudal ownership of land by the monasteries and churches had not yet matured in the Russian state of the sixteenth century," writes the well-known Soviet historian S. M. Kashtanov.[105] What economic prerequisites were necessary? And why had they matured even in Iceland, but not in Muscovy? It is unknown. Another Soviet historian, Iu. K. Begunov, tells us that
the events of 1503 showed the presence of a certain equilibrium of forces between the contending sides—the state and the church. . . . Under such conditions a compromise between the office of the priest and the office of the tsar on mutually advantageous conditions was inevitable: the blood of the heretics and new grants of land to the church in exchange for concrete ideological support—prayers for the tsar and the proclamation of the status of the Russian sovereign as the sole defender of Orthodoxy.[106]
This argument is rather confusing, since if in his struggle against the hierarchy, the grand prince needed "concrete ideological support," it could only be the support of the hierarchy's adversaries, which he already had. And, what is more, he needed this support not for giving the hierarchy "new grants of land" but, on the contrary, for taking its lands away, which was, after all, one of the two greatest imperatives of his entire political life-strategy.
G. V. Plekhanov, writing more than sixty years ago, articulated the point of view which prevails even today:
The dispute about monastery landholdings, which pushed the thought of the Muscovite writers in the same direction in which the thought of the Western clerical king-fighters had proceeded so early and so boldly, very soon ended with a negotiated peace. Ivan III abandoned the thought of secularizing the monastery lands, even agreed to the cruel persecution of the "Judaizers," whom the Orthodox clergy hated, and whom he had so recently and so unambiguously supported.w
In all of these interpretations—in which, incidentally, it is quite clear that the absolutists, despite all their righteous indignation in theory, are fully agreed in practice with their opponents the despotists—the struggle of the state with the church in the pre-Oprichnina century appears as a transient episode in Russian history, which came, went, and left no trace behind it. But in fact this struggle was an entirely logical continuation of the internal policy of the developing absolutist state. Everywhere in Europe, this process was connected with the formation of the proto-bourgeoisie, the rise of Protestantism, and the breaking up of autonomous feudal corporations competing with centralized authority. So it was in Russia too. One after another, Rostov, Novgorod, and Tver' had fallen. There remained the church— the mightiest feudal corporation of medieval Rus'. Ivan's campaign against the Josephites was fundamentally an extension of the battles of Kulikovo Pole, of the Ugra, and of the Novgorod expedition.
This epochal struggle of the state and the Non-Acquirer movement against the Josephite hierarchy left behind it the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia and of the Russian political opposition: the tradition of sympathy for the oppressed little man (all the so-called "peasant- ophilism" of Russian literature comes from the Non-Acquirers—Vas- sian Patrikeev was the first peasantophile); the tradition of tolerance for the heterodox minority (no one in Muscovy except the Non-Acquirers struggled against the death sentences passed on the heretics, and no one else dared to polemicize against the bloodthirsty Josephites); the tradition of dissidence (and the courage to speak against a frightening majority); the tradition of European rationality, and the belief in reason as the highest force given to man—reason counter- posed to external discipline, to the passions, and to blind obedience. Even in a purely political sense, it was the Non-Acquirer literature which in the sixteenth century advanced the idea of a universal council to which "men of all the people" should be called. In other words they were the first in Russian history to call for a national assembly, which clearly meant turning the dispute between the state and the church (where the state proved the weaker party) into a dispute between the church and the nation. Only a few decades later, after Ivan Ill's death, when the government fell once again for a short time into the hands of the absolutists and was under the influence of the Non-Acquirers, the Assembly of the Land was in fact called. Ivan IV's questions to the church assembly of 1551 (i.e., a decade before his coup d'etat) were saturated with the spirit that the Non-Acquirers had breathed into Russian political life.
However, it may be objected, the second campaign of secularization, even if projected by Ivan III, never took place. The countertra- dition of the Non-Acquirers never worked, and the calling of the Assembly of the Land did not lead to reform of the church. This is true. The Non-Acquirers were defeated. To Russia's cost and their own, the Josephites suffered a crushing victory. But was this victory of theirs inevitable? This is the question, decisive for Russia's past—and for its future—which my opponents try to avoid with the help of vague reflections about "economic prerequisites" and the absence of "ideological support." I cannot, of course, know what Ivan Ill's real plans were. But neither can my opponents. With what justification, for example, does Plekhanov assert that "Ivan III abandoned the idea of secularizing the monastery lands" ?
The hypothesis suggested here may be debatable, but at least it leaves open the question of why Russia, having gone much further than other European countries along the path of church reform, proved incapable of carrying it out.
8. The Pyrrhic Victory of the Josephites
Ivan Ill's successor, Vasilii III, should have been born long before his father. He was an assiduous "gatherer," a boring and obedient son of the church, entirely without political imagination. For him the plans and achievements of his father did not differ in the least from the achievements of the long and monotonous line of his Muscovite ancestors. The most that he was capable of was copying his father in details. Thus, he did with Pskov the same thing which his father had done with Novgorod. However, having expelled the families of potential rebels from Pskov, he did not—unlike his father—lay a finger on the monastery villages. Having taken Smolensk from the Lithuanians in 1514, he first of all promised to preserve inviolate the rights of the local church. Just as his father had maintained heretics close to him in order to frighten the hierarchy, Vasilii for some time kept Non-Acquirers for this purpose, bringing Vassian Patrikeev into his entourage and acting as patron to Maxim the Greek. But he did not attack the church, he merely defended himself against it. In 1511, when Varlaam, who sympathized with the Non-Acquirers, became metropolitan, "the government of Vasilii III somehow," Kashtanov writes, "succeeded in interrupting the growth of monastery landhold- ings."[107] The government carried out a partial review of the immunities on church holdings and abolished some of them. But all this was merely a vague shadow of his father's strategy. Meanwhile, the situation changed swiftly—both in European politics and in the life of the country.