And now, it seems to me, we can already recognize the political pattern which predetermined all the mistakes of the Government of Compromise. Wherever the national interest contradicted the interests of the numerous factions represented in the government, in the army, and in the Assembly of the Land, the government hesitated, and usually compromised, which increasingly weakened its position as arbiter. The church hierarchy did not wish to yield its land, and did not even wish to yield to any significant degree in the question of the immunities; the service nobility was not at all eager for the modernization of the army, but instead wanted land and money; and the government was not prepared for severe pressure, but tried at all costs to maintain the atmosphere of "reconciliation" of all political forces within the country, on which, so it assumed, its power was based.
In order to better understand the nature of its failure, let us briefly review the situation in which the Government of Compromise came to power, or more precisely the "mandate" with which it came to power, following a stormy and fruitless decade of so-called "boyar government." Vasilii had died when his heir, the future Ivan the Terrible, was three years old. When the boy reached the age of seven, his mother also died. The throne became a bone of contention for numerous cliques of the tsar's relatives and prominent clans, who in the course of a permanent quarrel completely lost sight of the national interest. This Muscovite equivalent of the Wars of the Roses did not lead to civil war, but nevertheless sowed chaos and confusion in the land. By the end of the 1540s, the situation had deteriorated into mass riots in the cities. A terrible fire and open mutiny broke out in Moscow itself. It was on this wave of general bitterness and animosity of all against all that the Government of Compromise came to power at the first "assembly of reconciliation."
It began its work excellently, achieving the desired stabilization. But, after a while, it suddenly began to appear that its policy of compromise was simply too broad to be effective. Stabilization was not an end in itself, but merely a condition for the fulfillment of the strategic task of transforming the country. Compromise at all costs made this transformation unthinkable. Within the broad political base to which the government stubbornly clung, there gradually emerged competing and irreconcilable blocs of interests. Representing both of them became a sheer political impossibility. The time came to make a choice between the peasant-Non-Acquirer absolutist coalition, which the boyars could support, since it was directed against their enemies, and the service gentry-Josephite autocratic coalition, supported by the bureaucratic apparatus.[117]
Metropolitan Makarii, the head of the hierarchy, was the tsar's ideological tutor, and he understood quite well that, as long as Sil'vestr played the leading role in the government, there would be no respite for the church landholdings. He impressed on the tsar the ideas of the previous generation of Josephites. These, it will be remembered, included the tempting concept of the Muscovite tsar as the heir of the Byzantine autocrators, before whom all others were slaves. Even more indicative was the wide distribution in Moscow at that time (in what can quite appropriately be called "samizdat" in modern terms) of the pamphlets of Ivan Peresvetov, who proposed to the tsar, among other things, a program of autocratic "revolution from above." Contrary to the official version in the chronicles, which attributed the fall of Byzantium to heresy, Peresvetov boldly preached that it had fallen because the emperor had put too much trust in his high nobles, his "advisors" (read: the Government of Compromise). The conquerer of Byzantium, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed, had not trusted his "advisors," and this was why he had won. Having discovered the malfeasance of his viceroys, for example, Mehmed did not substitute local self-rule, as had the rotten liberal "advisors" of the Russian tsar. He did not even bother to try them.
He merely skinned them alive and spoke thus: if they grow flesh again their guilt will be forgiven. And he ordered their skins to be taken off and stuffed with paper and ordered iron nails to be driven into them and the following to be written on their skins: "Without such terror [groza\ it is impossible to introduce justice into the kingdom. ... As an unbridled horse beneath the tsar, so is a kingdom without terror."16
In addition to this apology for terror as the guaranty of the welfare of the state, Peresvetov also proposed copying the tool of this terror from the Turkish janissary corps, in terms so reminiscent of the later Oprichnina that many scholars have even doubted whether Peresve- tov's pamphlets were written before the introduction of the Oprichnina or afterwards. "If the Christian faith had been joined with Turkish law, the angels could have talked with him [the Sultan]," Peresvetov declared, handing the Orthodox tsar an interesting brief."
This sharp increase in the activity of the Russian right most probably meant that, despite all of the government's mistakes, the tide was running against the autocratic bloc. The code of laws that repealed the immunities and introduced the norms of bourgeois law was confirmed by the Assembly of the Land. Local self-rule opened up enormous opportunities for the enrichment of the proto-bourgeoisie, and for the increase of its social and, in the final analysis, political weight. Peasant differentiation and the economic boom worked in the same direction. The modernization of the army could not be permanently delayed. Ivan Ill's strategy had brought the Europeanization of Russia to a decisive point: if it were not stopped now it would perhaps be futile to try to stop it in the future. The advance of "money" was inexorable unless some drastic action were taken to turn back this eco-
V F. Rzhiga, I. S. Peresvetov—publitsist XVI veka, p. 72.
Ibid., p. 78.
nomic and social process, unless the chief opponents of the autocratic bloc, the proto-bourgeoisie and the Non-Acquirers, along with their patrons, the boyars, who represented the political side of this absolutist triangle, were disarmed and ultimately crushed.[118]
The autocratic reaction required three things for the success of its counterattack—a strong leader, a strategic plan, and a pretext with which to put the tsar at odds with the Government of Compromise. All these three things were combined in the Livonian War.
4. The Anti-Tatar Strategy
As early as the 1520s, after the first Tatar invasion of Muscovy since the time of the Ugra, Maxim the Greek suggested a general reorientation of Muscovite foreign policy. Unfortunately, there was at that time no one to listen to him. Instead, in the course of the general pogrom against the Non-Acquirers, Grand Prince Vasilii accused Maxim of spying on behalf of the Turks. Less than two decades later, Saip- Girei stood before Moscow with his army. With him were soldiers of the Turkish sultan, with their cannons and arquebuses, and the No- gai, Kafa, Astrakhan', Azov, and Belgorod Hordes as well. It seemed that the ancient nightmare of Muscovy had again come to life, and that the whole might of the Tatars was moving against it, as under the leaders of the Golden Horde of evil memory—Tokhtamysh, Edigei, and Akhmat.
Saip Girei and his allies were driven back from Moscow, and from the end of the 1540s Muscovite policy turned decisively against the Tatars, resulting in the conquest and annexation of the trans-Volga khanates of Kazan' and Astrakhan' in the 1550s. This could not be regarded by the Government of Compromise as the finale of the anti- Tatar strategy, however. The Crimea, after all, remained; and behind the Crimea stood Turkey.
Moreover, the conquest of Kazan' did not improve the international position of Muscovy, and certainly complicated it. Kazan' was a Tatar kingdom only in name. In fact, it was a multinational state. Five tongues, as Kurbskii expressed it, sat there under the Tatars: the Mordvas, the Cheremises, the Chuvashes, the Votyaks, and the Bashkirs. Muscovy had become an empire, whereas the Reconquista rested on the principle of the national and religious homogeneity of the Russian state. It was on this principle that Ivan III had constructed his strategy of dismembering the heterogeneous Lithuanian state. Now Muscovy had become heterogeneous in its turn.