The following page of Ivan the Terrible, however, contains something more reminiscent of Gorskii than of Platonov: "This operation ... of removal of landowners took on the character [of] replacement of large-scale votchina [hereditary] land tenure by small-scale service-estate [conditional] land tenure.'"3 As we see, there is no talk here of "formerly sovereign princes" and "memories of appanage conditions." Likewise in the Outlines another formulation with respect to the Oprichnina supports Gorskii: "The Oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the structure of the Muscovite state; it destroyed the land holdings of the nobility in the form in which they had existed from old times.'"4 Here everything is simple: the tsar is against the aristocracy.
It was not for nothing that Platonov vacillated between the "appanage" and "state" explanations of the Oprichnina. In fact, the "scholarly studies of recent decades" by no means furnished him with data to support the hypothesis of the tsar's struggle with the "class of formerly sovereign princes"—a hypothesis which he incautiously presented as an unconditional fact. When so powerful and scrupulous an investigator as S. B. Veselovskii undertook to verify Pla- tonov's hypothesis, it proved to be simply a fiction. "In a search for effective and striking lectures, S. F. Platonov abandoned his characteristic caution of thought and language, and presented a conception of the policy of Tsar Ivan . . . which was filled with flaws and factually inaccurate assertions," Veselovskii says. Calling Platonov's interpretation downright "pseudoscientific" and even "a circuitous maneuver to rehabilitate the monarchy," Veselovskii somberly states that "the idea that the Oprichnina was directed against the old land holdings of the formerly sovereign appanage princes must be recognized as a misunderstanding through and through.'"5 This conclusion is fully shared by the leading (after A. A. Zimin) contemporary Soviet expert on the Oprichnina, R. G. Skrynnikov, who also asserts that "the Oprichnina was not a special measure against the appanage. . . . Neither Tsar Ivan nor his Oprichnina Duma ever emerged as consistent opponents of appanage landholding.'"6
4. Pokrovskii's Paradox
All of this, however, only became clear many decades afterwards. For Pokrovskii, who at the beginning of the century revised Russian history from a Marxist point of view, and therefore needed an economic explanation of its fundamental phenomena, Platonov's hypothesis was a gift from heaven. For Platonov was the first to depict the drama of the Oprichnina neither as an empty battle of "the new" against "the old" nor as the destruction of the "oligarchy," but as the embodiment of class struggle and of indomitable economic progress. And the atrocities of the Oprichnina did not confuse Pokrovskii as they had confused Karamzin and Solov'ev. Because what is progress after all? When you chop wood, the chips fly. If the liberal Kavelin was not ashamed to use the nineteenth-century vogue for "the progress of the state idea" as a justification of the Oprichnina, then why should the Marxist liberal Pokrovskii hesitate to use the twentieth-century vogue for "economic progress"? Relying on Platonov's hypothesis, Pokrovskii invented what I would call the economic apologia for the Oprichnina. He introduced it at the very point when Tsar Ivan was apparently being irrevocably banished from contemporary political reality to the obscurity of the Middle Ages to which he belonged. The Oprichnina suddenly acquired a rational economic underpinning. It was no longer "purposeless," as Kliuchevskii had asserted. It fulfilled a necessary
S. V Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p. 32.
R. G. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror, pp. 214-15.
function in Russian history by destroying the aristocratic latifundia and making room for the "progressive economical type" of service landholding, which was supposed to bring with it the replacement of obligations in kind by commodity-and-money relationships. Tsar Ivan proved to be a tool of Marxist Providence. Against this, what were Kliuchevskii's highbrow speculations about the struggle of the "absolute monarchy" with the "aristocratic governmental personnel"? What use was moral indignation? All these were disorderly "superstruc- tural" sentiments. Thus Ivan the Terrible, unexpectedly elevated to a pedestal by economic determinism, again underwent rehabilitation.
But, in order to support this rehabilitation, one had still to demonstrate that the Oprichnina actually pursued a progressive economic role; and, in the second place, that the aristocratic latifundia had in the sixteenth century actually become a reactionary bastion in the path of progress; and, finally, that service landholding somehow corresponded to this sought-after progress. Pokrovskii fearlessly undertook the task:
Two conditions led to the swift liquidation of the Muscovite latifundia of that time. In the first place, their owners rarely possessed the ability and the desire to organize their operation in a new way. ... In the second place, the status of a feudal noble carried "obligations" with it, at that time as later: a great boyar . . . had by tradition to keep an extensive "household," a mass of idle attendants and retainers. ... As long as all these lived on grain gotten free from the peasants, the boyar might not notice the economic burden of his official prestige. But when many things had to be bought for money—money whose value was falling from year to year as the Muscovite economy developed—it became a heavy burden on the shoulders of the large landowners. . . . The small vassals were in this case in a considerably more advantageous position. They did not spend money on their service, and in fact received money for it. . . . If we add to this that the small estate was considerably easier to organize than the large ones . . . and that the small landowner was better able to supervise personally the work of his cor- vie peasants and slaves, while the large landowner had to do this through an overseer, we see that when the battle between the large and middle-sized landholdings began, all the economic benefits were on the side of the latter ... by expropriating the rich votchina boyar, the Oprichnina followed the path of natural economic development."
Here we have both proofs at once—of the reactionary nature of boyar votchina and the progressive nature of service landholding.
True, the "economic" character of both provokes some doubt, to say the least. For, having to do chiefly with "the burden of official prestige" and "a lack of desire to organize the economy in a new way," we still remain primarily in the sphere of social psychology. The only properly economic consideration here seems to be the fall in the value of money, and the consequent rise in the price of grain. However, this "price revolution" was by no means specifically Russian, but was a phenomenon common to all of Europe. Even in Pokrovskii's time this was known to every student. But if this is so, why is it that the progressive "agrarian revolution" in favor of the small vassals, which was connected with this in Pokrovskii's opinion, was successful only in Russia and in Eastern Europe, and did not become widespread anywhere in the West? Were the Western seigneurs more willing than the Muscovite boyars to "organize their economy in a new way" ? Or perhaps their "feudal noble status" carried fewer obligations and it was, therefore, easier for them to bear the "economic burden of their official prestige" ? Unfortunately there is no answer to these questions to be found in the economic apologia for the Oprichnina. And there are also others.
As we already know, the Oprichnina, according to Pokrovskii, although it was "the state of the service-landowning class,"1" was not only formed "with the participation of [commercial] capital,'45' but proved essentially to be a stepping stone to the ascent to the throne of Muscovy of "commercial capital wearing the cap of Monomakh." We might call it in this sense a Russian equivalent of the Western bourgeois revolutions. So interpreted, Muscovy ought perhaps to contend with the Netherlands for the role of pioneer on the path of European economic development. If the triumph of the small vassals in fact embodied the march of progress, then Eastern Europe, and especially Russia, should have gained a decisive advantage over the countries of the West, which did not allow so progressive a process among themselves. The West was in that case doomed to lag behind, and the Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible should have become the torchbearer of world progress.