In fact, the church immunities, the custom of the boyar council, the custom of taking fixed taxes from the peasants, "by tradition," "as they were received by the previous landowners," the mobility of peasants, guaranteed as a matter of law by St. George's Day, and everything else that Ivan the Terrible destroyed, were old fashioned and essentially feudal forms of limitation on power. Many of them really had outlived their time, and required modernization. But, after all, this was what the Government of Compromise was doing. One need only briefly list what it did, or tried to do, in order to make this clear. What were the replacement of the vicegerents by a local government, and the introduction of trial by jury, and the creation of a new code of law, and the calling of an Assembly of the Land, and the attempt to introduce an income tax and restrict the immunities, if not a modernization of the limitations on power ? By modernizing the traditional limitations on power, the Government of Compromise was following in the line of contemporary European absolutism. The Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, however, questioned not the form of the limitations on power, but their existence.
In the Criminal Code of contemporary Russia there is an article which defines "flight abroad or refusal to return from abroad" as treason to the motherland. This is a most precise indicator of what the victory of Ivan the Terrible over Kurbskii turned Russia into. Kurbskii's French contemporary, Duplesis-Mornay, in his famous Suit Against Tyrants, says almost word for word the same thing as the Muscovite exile. The tyrant, he says, destroys his counsellors ("the strong men in Israel," as Kurbskii calls them). The tyrant does not take counsel with the estates and the land ("he is not a lover of counsel," says Kurbskii). The tyrant counterposes to them hired mercenaries ("he creates a seed of Abraham out of stone," says Kurbskii). The tyrant steals the property of his subjects ("he ruins them for the sake of their miserable votchiny," says Kurbskii). One might think that Duplesis-Mornay was describing Ivan the Terrible. And although he was also a political emigre, it is hardly likely that any modern French historian would call him a traitor. For they do not consider a struggle against tyranny to be treason. But the Russian historians—from Gorskii to Skrynnikov—do. They have chosen the autocrator's alternative: as distinct from Kurbskii, they have preferred slavery.
The myth of the state is cunningly constructed. In it the apologia for tyranny is skillfully interwoven with patriotism, thejustification of terror with national feelings. In raising one's hand against tyranny, one therefore risks dealing a blow to patriotism; in protesting against terror one may offend national feelings; in struggling for limitations on power, one turns into a traitor to one's country.
6. The Bugbear of Oligarchy
Evgenii Belov's On the Historical Significance of Russian Boyardom endeavors to show what Russia might have turned into if Kurbskii and the boyardom had prevailed, if Ivan the Terrible had not found a power base for the Oprichnina in the bureaucracy. Belov is, as far as I know, the only Russian historian prepared to praise the Muscovite bureaucracy, whose contemptible and fiercely grasping nature has become proverbial. In his opinion, the bureaucracy preserved Russia from "oligarchical intrigues" which had marked its entire history before the Oprichnina.
Belov uncovers the first oligarchical intrigue as early as 1498, when, he believes, the boyar opposition compelled Ivan III to crown as his heir-apparent not his son Vasilii (the father of Ivan the Terrible), but his grandson Dimitrii. The intrigue against Tsar Ivan thus began before he had even had time to be born. The countercon- spiracy in favor of Vasilii, Belov asserts, "did not contain a single boyar." The only ones who acted in defense of the traditional structure of power, which was on the point of disintegration, were the "secretaries [d'yaki] of the party of Sofia." Everything in subsequent Russian history proceeded according to the same modeclass="underline" selfless scions of the people in the shape of the secretaries were constantly thwarting the cunning intrigues of the boyar oligarchs—right until 1565, when the tsar was finally able to unseat the latter. "[Ivan] the Terrible is the retribution on the boyardom for its narrow and egoistic policies. . . . [Ivan] the Terrible diverted Russia from the danger of oligarchical rule. [Had it not been for the Oprichnina] Russia would have been transformed into a second Poland."[197]
This, in brief, is Belov's concept of things. Only at first glance does it seem to be worthy of the pen of a Gorskii. In fact, Belov is doing the same thing as Kavelin, but from the other side. He was the first in Russian historiography to pose the question of an alternative to autocracy. Other than oligarchy and transformation into a second Poland, he declared, no such alternative existed. Poland symbolized political disintegration and, in the final analysis, the loss of national existence. If this was the sole alternative, then the autocracy of Tsar Ivan, as also the messianic role of the Muscovite bureaucracy, could be considered justified. Not only Soviet historians, such as A. N. Sakharov, but also such classic Russian historiographers as V. O. Kliuchevskii, fell into this trap.
Belov's argument is most conveniently considered by comparison of the "maintenances" (kormleniia) held by vicegerents in the Polish- Lithuanian state and in Muscovy. In the first case, such maintenances provided the vicegerents with a nucleus for creating their own political bases in the regions. The vicegerents subsequently represented "their" districts in the Duma (or "Rada" as it was called in the Polish- Lithuanian kingdom) and were practically uncontrolled rulers of them. As Kliuchevskii says, "the most influential force in the Rada— the 'front' or 'higher' Rada—was made up of the major regional rulers." In other words, the political basis of the oligarchy was the division of the country in practical terms among semiautonomous governors, who, although they were formally subject to the central power, appeared in effect as overlords of the regions which "maintained" them: "The economic and administrative strings of local life were in their hands, and the Rada served them only as the conductor, and not as the source of their political influence. Its members were not mere state counsellors, but actual rulers."6"
The political process in sixteenth-century Muscovy proceeded, as we have seen, in precisely the opposite direction. Not only the maintenances, but also the district vicegerencies themselves were abolished. The local elected governments, which replaced them, were directly subject to the central government offices. Paraphrasing Kliuchevskii, we may say that in Muscovy the boyars were "not actual rulers but mere state counsellors." As the experience of the "boyar governments" of 1537 to 1547 showed, they never claimed more than this. Thus, on the eve of the Oprichnina there were no oligarchical tendencies in Muscovy, even in embryonic form.
But if this is so, the oligarchy turns out to be only a bugbear thought up by Belov to justify the autocracy—a bugbear in confirmation of which he was not able to cite a single argument which would stand historical criticism. The problem, however, was not in his arguments, but in the fact that Russian historiography, as we shall see presently, did not have at its disposal any other alternative.
7. Kliuchevskii's Premise
The Muscovite state in the sixteenth century was an absolute monarchy with an aristocratic governing class, Kliuchevskii tells us. "The boyars thought of themselves as powerful counsellors of the sovereign of all Rus'," while Ivan IV, on the other hand, rewarded them with the status of "bondsmen of the sovereign," he continues.