Literally on the eve of the church assembly, Kassian, bishop of Riazan', who proved to be the only opponent of the Joesphites among the ten participants, was inducted into the highest ranks of the church hierarchy. This lineup of forces sufficed to ensure the defeat of the Non-Acquirer program of the government, despite all the sharpness of the tsar's questions. The weakness of the organizational preparation of the second secularization campaign is obvious, if only
Richard Hellie, "The Muscovite Provincial Service Elite in Comparative Perspective."
Zimin, Reformy, p. 379.
Ibid., p. 378.
from the fact that the restructuring of the hierarchy did not begin until after the assembly. Ivan III had deposed the chief Josephite inquisitor, Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod, after the assembly of 1504; Feodosii, also archbishop of Novgorod, who was just as implacable as Gennadii, was similarly deposed by the government in 1551, three months after the fateful vote, but only in November 1552 was the Non-Acquirer Pimen appointed to replace him. In May 1551 (that is, also after the vote) Trifon, archbishop of Suzdal', was deposed, and the ideologist of the Non-Acquirer movement, Artemii, was simultaneously appointed abbot of the Troitsa monastery, while his comrade-in-arms Feodorit became abbot of the monastery of St. Efim in Suzdal'. This shakeup would have been meaningful if the government had indeed been energetically preparing a third secularization campaign, but it was not doing so. In any case, it was unable to prevent Makarii from organizing the inquisitorial trial of heretics in 1553 in which he skillfully involved both Artemii and Feodorit, as well as Bishop Kassian, and obtained their removal and banishment. (Artemii, incidentally, escaped from the Solovetskii monastery where he had been exiled and fled to Lithuania, where he shared with Prince Kurbskii the mournful fate of the political emigre.)
But the root of the failure of the Government of Compromise lay not so much in this organizational incompetence as in its lack of political skill. It finally had in its hands the tool which Ivan III had not had—a national representative body, the Assembly of the Land. It had at its disposal, too, something even more important, which Ivan III also lacked—the European experience of secularization. Had not the Ricksdag (the Swedish equivalent of the Assembly of the Land) afforded Gustav Vasa support for his secularization campaign in 1527? Had not the Reform Parliament proclaimed the king the head of the church in England in 1534, and were not all the monasteries in England closed by law and their property and lands confiscated by the state? Foreign experience had thus shown that secularization could be carried out only by openly setting the nation against the hierarchy on the strength of Non-Acquirer reformist ideology, and not with the help of appeals to the hierarchy or even by restructuring it, as Ivan III had thought. The Government of Compromise neither officially adopted the Non-Acquirer ideology nor appealed to the nation, so it lost the fateful battle for secularization.
Furthermore, the government had serious difficulties even in implementing the laws adopted by the Assembly of the Land. Nosov's study shows that the administrative reform was in practice introduced in two stages, in 1551-52 and in 1555-56. In the interim, a reverse movement appears to have taken place. Over a period of several years, the fate of the Great Reform hung by a thread. In this case, the government's efforts were crowned by success. In the question of the abolition of the immunities, where the immediate interests of the church were at stake, it appeared unable, however, to force the retreat of the Josephite hierarchy, despite the fact that the hierarchy itself had voted for the new code of laws in the Assembly of the Land. This vote showed with remarkable clarity that only in the context of the Assembly of the Land was it possible to break the resistance of the hierarchy, but the government did not go back to the Assembly of the Land on this question, and thus lost its battle for the abolition of the immunities.
The government committed a no less serious error in regard to the pace of modernization of the army. This problem had arisen in connection with the Kazan' war and the administrative reform. The amateur cavalry of the service gentry, which received its "maintenance" in the form of land with the peasants living on it, had by the middle of the sixteenth century, as the first battles of the Kazan' war demonstrated, shown itself to be as antiquated an institution as the "maintenance" administration of the vicegerents. And, like the latter, it should have been replaced—by an army having as its core professional infantry, equipped with firearms and paid in cash. The bottleneck in a military reform of this kind was apparently money. But this was precisely what could be obtained by the government through sale of the institution of self-rule. That the government was not unaware of this problem is shown by the introduction into the Muscovite army of a core of 6,000 infantry in 1550, when the administrative reform was being prepared. One need only read the chapter on the storming of Kazan' in the History of Ivan IV, written by Kurbskii in exile, in order to understand the decisive role played by the infantry (along with artillery) in the great victory over the Tatars. Without the infantry and the artillery, victory would never have been achieved. Just as local self-rule was a competitor of the voevody, so the infantry could have been a competitor of the service gentry—and an effective one.
But here the problem of military modernization passed over into the problem of political modernization. For the formation of a permanent professional army automatically deprived the service gentry of the military monopoly which was the only thing on which their social and political claims could rest. Certainly, it was not a question of the immediate exclusion of the service nobility from the army (as an officer corps and as a cavalry force they would be retained for a long time). It was a matter only of the pace and direction of modernization, capable of creating a normal European balance between infantry and cavalry.'4
The sum of 140 rubles, which the Dvina uezd, say, had paid into the treasury before the reform, represented the "maintenance" of a single vicegerent. For 1400 rubles, which the treasury now received directly, bypassing the vicegerents, the government could maintain either a cavalry force, staffed by service gentry, for the whole Smolensk county, or a regiment of infantry. The government chose cavalry. The logical result of this mistake was the statute on military service of 1556, which for the first time in Russian history made this service obligatory in a legislative sense. Hardly anyone in the government understood the fateful significance of this act. From that moment, service in the Russian state became universal.