The Duma supervised all new and extraordinary measures, but as the latter became customary through repetition, they passed over into the domain of the central bureaus. . . . The central bureaus were formed, so to speak, out of the administrative deposits gradually laid down from the legislative activities of the Duma having to do with extraordinary matters, which then passed into the order of clerical work."1"
Thus, the Muscovite political machine in the mid-sixteenth century combined single-handed leadership in the sphere of executive power (which corresponded to the autocratic tradition) with limited leadership in the sphere of legislative power (which corresponded to the absolutist tradition).
In 1549, a new element was introduced—the Assembly of the Land, which potentially might have meant the institutionalization of broad-based legislative power (inasmuch as the Boyar Duma and the sacred synod of church hierarchs formed part of it). This third element was not an accidental phenomenon. The experience of the first half of the sixteenth century showed a need to correct an imbalance in the existing political machine.
In the absence of a law determining the mode of succession to the throne, the leadership was unstable. So was the relationship between the executive and legislative functions, which involved combining both unlimited and limited mandates in the person of the tsar. The reign of Vasilii (1505-33) had demonstrated that if the tsar aimed for a dictatorship, the Boyar Duma was an inadequate restraining factor. Vasilii had tried to concentrate the administration in the hands of the executive power he headed. In 1520 the boyar Bersen' Beklemishev openly accused Vasilii of violating the rules of the political game and deviating from the "conciliar methods" of Ivan III toward the adop-
E. A. Belov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii russkogo boiarstva, p. 29.
V. O. Kliuchevskii, Boiarskaia duma . . . , p. 162.
tion of decisions in camera with his secretaries. On the other hand, the epoch of "boyar rule" (1537-47) demonstrated that without a single leader the machine simply could not function: successive oligarchies practically paralyzed the political process.
Two opposed proposals to resolve the dilemma were in circulation in the middle years of the century. Ivan Peresvetov called for the complete removal of boyardom from power. Conversely, an anonymous pamphlet originating among the Non-Acquirers, the famous Conversation of the Miracle Workers of Valaam, proposed the summoning of a "universal assembly" of all estates from all the cities and regions of Russia, which would remain in session permanently, thus giving the tsar the opportunity to "question them well as to every kind of secular matter."11
Moscow of the 1550s was in transition toward the unknown. The traditional order of things was falling apart, changing its outline, disappearing before one's eyes. Kliuchevskii himself affirms this, when he says that "in the society of the time of [Ivan] the Terrible, the thought was abroad that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land a leader in the . .. cause of reforming . . . the administration."[137]Who, ten or twenty years before, whether under Vasilii or under the "boyar government," could have imagined that such ideas would spring up in Muscovite society? Not a quarter century had passed since the last visit of the imperial ambassador Sigismund Herberstein, who noted of Muscovy's sovereign:
He has power over both secular and clerical individuals and freely, according to his will, disposes of the life and property of all. Among the counselors whom he has, none enjoy such importance that they would dare to contradict him in anything or be of another opinion. ... It is unknown whether the rudeness of the people requires such a tyrannical sovereign, or whether the tyranny of the prince made the people thus rude and cruel.[138]
Herberstein had not witnessed the short-lived flowering of the "Muscovite Athens" of the 1480s and 90s, and did not know that the tyrannical atmosphere of the court of Vasilii was the result of a political struggle which ended in the routing of the Non-Acquirers and the political trials of Bersen', of Maxim the Greek, and of Vassian Pa- trikeev. (All of whom had, inter alia, contradicted the sovereign—which was why they were convicted.) But if the political life of Muscovy could in such a short interval have risen to the idea of a national representative assembly, it could mean only that the existing order was changing swiftly. Not only did both sides in the dispute between Kurbskii and the tsar feel this change, but the fate of each of the social groups making up Muscovite society depended on it. The severity of the conflict is explained not by some elusive difference in "political mood," as Kliuchevskii thinks, but by the fact that the most profound and fundamental interests of the country were at stake.
Kliuchevskii's vast knowledge of the administrative structure of medieval Muscovy remains unsurpassed to this day.[139] It did not prevent him, however, from making contradictory statements. For example, he asserts that "neither the governing role of the Council of Boyars nor the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the administration was an ideal at that time nor could it be a political dream."[140] On the other hand, he tells us that "in practice the Assembly of the Land of the sixteenth century did not prove to be either universal [that is, representing all the estates] or a permanent gathering, convoked every year, and did not take into its hands the supervision of the administration."[141] The Assembly of the Land not only did not take supervision over the administration into its hands but—as can be seen both from Kurbskii's letter and from the behavior of the Government of Compromise—no one even had any real idea of how, concretely, this was to be done. The government was feeling its way in the dark. It did not even try to bring before the Assembly of the Land such fundamental conflicts as the secularization of church landholdings, or even the conflict over the immunities in which the decision of the assembly itself was violated by the church hierarchy. It did not try to address itself to the assembly in the decisive debate over foreign policy. In sum, it did not try to institutionalize the assembly as the supreme arbiter in its dispute with the tsar. This is why the only thing that Kliuchevskii can say in the government's defense is that the thought was abroad in the society that it was necessary to make the Assembly of the Land leader in the cause of correcting the administration. But can one seriously call this "wandering thought" a political fact—the more so since even in Kurbskii's letters it still "wanders," without ever growing into a precise formulation? No political mechanism designed to secure the participation of the Assembly of the Land in the administration was even envisaged. And this is why it remained a political dream.