The reader might well conclude from this, as dozens of the most experienced experts have concluded before him, that Kurbskii stood for the status quo, and even for the past, which implies that his opponent, the tsar, was advancing something new, going "beyond the limits of the existing structure of the state." Logically this should be so. Otherwise, what would they have to argue about? But
let us look at the other side. The tsar . . . objects not to individual assertions of Kurbskii's but to the entire political mode of thought of boyardom, which Kurbskii has come forward to defend. "You," the tsar writes to him, "are always saying the same thing . . . turning this way and that your favorite thought, that slaves, not masters, should possess power"—although none of this is written in Kurbskii's letter. "Is it," the tsar continues, "contrary to reason not to wish to be possessed by one's own slaves? Is this glorious Orthodoxy—to be under the power of slaves?" All are slaves, and nothing but slaves. ... All of the political thinking of the tsar is reducible to one idea—to the idea of autocratic power. For Ivan, autocracy is not only the normal order established from on high, but also the original fact of our political life, proceeding out of the depths of time. . . . The entire philosophy of autocracy is reduced to one simple conclusion: "We are free to show mercy to our bondsmen, and we are also free to execute them." Such a formula requires no effort of thought at all. The appanage princes came to the same conclusion without the help of an exalted theory of autocracy and even expressed themselves in almost the same words: "I, Prince So-and-so, am free to show mercy and also to execute whomever I like.". . . Such is the political program of Tsar Ivan.23
But if the appanage princes of two and three hundred years before Ivan the Terrible had already adhered to the same political philosophy, and even expressed it with the same words, then what, in essence, is new here? Nothing at all! says Kliuchevskii: "Both sides backed the existing order.'"2" You will agree that here there is something inexplicable, or at least unexplained. Two irreconcilable enemies fight for long years, and on their banners there is inscribed the same thing: I am for the existing order.
Kliuchevskii, of course, feels something incongruous in this, and tries to explain the incongruity: "One feels . . . that some misunderstanding divided the two disputants. This misunderstanding consisted in the fact that in their correspondence, it was not two political modes of thought which came into collision, but two political moods." What the term "political mood" is supposed to mean is not very clear to me—nor, I am afraid, to Kliuchevskii. On the same page on which he comes to the conclusion that "both sides stood for the existing order," he suddenly declares: "Both sides were dissatisfied . . . with the structure of the state in which they acted, and which they even led."[136] Unfortunately, I fail to see the logic of this conclusion, in which both sides went into battle for one and the same thing, while both were equally dissatisfied with it. I am afraid that Kliuchevskii failed too. Probably for this reason, he returns again and again to the topic which disturbs him, trying to explain his own thinking. In this, at least once, he succeeds superbly.
3. A Strange Conflict
"What in fact, was the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century?" Kliuchevskii asks.
It was an absolute monarchy, but with an aristocratic administration. There was no political legislation which could have defined the boundaries of the supreme power, but there was a governmental class with an aristocratic organization, which the regime itself recognized. This regime grew together, simultaneously, and even hand in hand, with another political force, which limited it. Thus, the character of this regime did not correspond to the nature of the governmental tools through which it had to act. The boyars thought of themselves as powerful advisors of the sovereign of all Rus', while the same sovereign, remaining true to the views of an appanage prince, employed them according to ancient Russian law as his household servants, with the title of bondsmen of the sovereign.2"
But here it is, the answer to the riddle which tormented Kliuchevskii and which he never solved. This answer consists in the fact that the political tradition of medieval Russia was dualistic—that it was a form of coexistence between two types of relationships between the "state" and the "land," which were not only different, but opposite. The first was the ancient relationship of an appanage prince to his household servants, who administered his votchina, and to the bondsmen who tilled the princely domain. This was a relationship of master to slave (precisely the relationship which Ivan the Terrible insisted on so fiercely in his letters). But the second relationship was no less ancient. This was the relationship of the prince as war leader and as defender of the land to his free retainers and the boyars of his council. It was just this relationship—which as a rule was contractual, but in any case was morally obligatory and fixed in the norms of customary law—which Kurbskii was insisting on.
Kurbskii's tradition was rooted in the custom of "free departure" of the boyars from the prince—a custom which gave the boyar a quite definite and strong guarantee against arbitrary behavior on the part of his sovereign, for a prince of a tyrannical turn of mind would soon lose military and thus political power. Therefore he either showed himself willing to make concessions, or he perished. Tyrants simply did not survive in the cruel and permanent war between princes. The competitive standing of the prince was a reliable guarantee of the political independence of his boyar councillors. Such were the historical roots of the absolutist tradition in Russia.
But it was not only that both these tendencies coexisted for many centuries; they also, Kliuchevskii observes, "grew hand in hand." This sharply contradicts the existing stereotype, according to which the absolutist tradition gradually but uninterruptedly weakened in Russia as the country was transformed from a conglomerate of princely domains into a unified state, and "if one left Muscovy, there was nowhere to go, or it was inconvenient." As the unified state was created, the boyars not only were not turned into bondsmen of the tsar, but quite the contrary, became "a governmental class with an aristocratic organization which the regime itself recognized."
The household of an "appanage prince" knew neither a governmental class nor an aristocratic organization: it contained either bondsmen or free retainers. Furthermore, the royal votchina was administered by bondsmen and not by retainers. Therefore, the aristo- cratization of the elite—that is, the transformation of free retainers into a governmental class—was a comparatively late phenomenon in Russia. The Russian aristocracy was thus formed precisely in connection with, and in the course of, the formation of the unified state. Moreover, it was created by this very process.
The boyars of the council of an appanage prince participated in political decisions mainly by taking advantage of the right of "free departure." In other words, their role in the formation of policy was at that time purely negative. Now, having lost the right of free travel between principalities, they had acquired in return something considerably greater: the privilege of participating in the adoption of political decisions, not only in a negative sense, as previously, but also positively. Thus, the Russian aristocracy was not an obsolete phenomenon, as the textbooks would have it, but a phenomenon which was developing and gathering strength. As early as the fourteenth century, the first conquerer of the Tatars, Dimitrii Donskoi, said on his deathbed to his boyars: "I was born in your presence, grew up among you, ruled as prince with you, made war with you in many countries and overthrew the heathen." He left this behest to his sons: "Listen to the boyars, and do nothing without their consent."29 From here it was a long road to Article 98 of the law code of 1550, which juridically obliged the sovereign not to adopt any laws without the agreement of the boyars. In the course of two centuries, Russian boyardom was transformed from a body offree retainers into a governmental class. It compelled the regime to recognize its aristocratic organization. It learned to coexist with a new apparatus of executive power—prikazy (ministries) and secretaries (ministers), who were actually the heirs of the serf administrators in the appanage votchiny. In his doctoral dissertation, Kliuchevskii himself examined the mechanism of this coexistence in detaiclass="underline"