57. S. Gorskii, Zhizn' i istoricheskoe znachenie kniazia A. M. Kurbskogo, p. 414; D. S. Likhachev, "Ivan Peresvetov i ego literaturnaia sovremennost'," p. 35.
dictate from the Kremlin how to give judgment, how to farm, and how to live, whether in Novgorod, in Tver', or in Riazan'. No one, either in the country or outside it, doubted the right of Muscovy's grand prince to rule over the entire area from the White Sea to Putivl', to make laws as he thought best, to appoint and depose vicegerents, or to destroy altogether the institution of vicegerents. The administrative center of the system had been created. And the periphery recognized it as the center. Unity of will and unity of program had become a political fact in the Muscovite state. What more centralization was needed?
What passed on unsolved to the heirs of Ivan III was quite another task, completely different from the "gathering-in" and infinitely more complex than "centralization"—the integration of the newly centralized state: the transformation of its external, administrative, and juridical unity into an internal, moral, and economic unity.
This integration could be absolutist or autocratic in nature. It could proceed from elements in the state program of Ivan III (envisaging the formation of juridical and cultural guarantees of security of life and property for the citizen) or from the opposite elements in the program of Ivan IV (which negate these guarantees). After all, we must not forget that this was only the beginning, that the cultural norms were only just being formed. By violently splitting the country into two parts, destroying all the limitations on the arbitrary behavior of the "administrative center," legalizing the disorder in the state as order, causing the rebirth of the appanage morality, setting Moscow against Tver' and Novgorod, the service landholders against the boyars, the Muscovite boyars on the formerly sovereign princes of Suzdal', the "plebs" on the patricians, the Oprichnina on the Zemshchi- na, by abolishing St. George's Day and thereby clearing the road for serfdom—Ivan the Terrible disintegrated Russian absolutism by integrating autocracy.
He sowed terror of the state, and not sympathy with the national idea. If, after all he had done to it, the country did not fall to pieces, this only shows that the work of centralization had so thoroughly been worked out by the sixteenth century that even the royal hangman and his Oprichnina "centralizers" were not able to break it up.
10. The Attacks of the 1960s
What happened in Ivaniana subsequently simultaneously demonstrated two opposite things: the fragility of the gray consensus reached in the 1960s and the power of the shaken, but unshattered, "myth of the state." A. A. Zimin furiously attacked the consensus, blasting its fundamental postulates one after another. He rejected the main thesis of the "agrarian school," asserting that "the counterposition of the votchina boyars to the landholding service nobility is untenable."38 He denied the very existence of the "reactionary boyar ideology" rehabilitating not only Vassian Patrikeev and Maxim the Greek, but apparently even Kurbskii himself: "It is now impossible to point to a single Russian thinker of the sixteenth century whose views can be evaluated as reactionary and boyar."39 He fearlessly invaded the very holy of holies of the consensus—the postulate about the alleged struggle of the feudal boyars against "centralization." "We can speak," he declared, "only of a struggle for different paths towards the centralization of the state."60 What, it would seem, could be more radical than this critique? Since Pokrovskii's time, no one had dared to declare that "the time has come for a radical reinterpretation of questions of sixteenth-century Russian political history."61 And this critique was based on entirely sound reasoning, which would have done honor even to Kliuchevskii himself. Although "the elite of high lords was not inclined to yield its enormous latifundias for the benefit of the small holdings of the service landholders," neither did the boyardom "strive for the immediate liquidation of the freedom of peasant movement." From here it was only one step to the recognition of the fundamental point that the boyardom shielded peasant differentiation from the serfholding aggression of the service landholders, and that the political rout of the boyardom was, therefore, only a prelude to the economic and social rout of the peasantry.
And Zimin takes that step—but, to our surprise and disappointment, it is in the opposite direction. "The need for further attack of the feudal elite was obvious," he says, "and was perceived by such far- sighted thinkers as I. S. Peresvetov."62 What can this mean? After all, what he has said implies a completely opposite conclusion. Alas, it turns out that this furious attack on the new Marxist-Solov'evist consensus has been undertaken only in order to replace it with the old, equally fruitless Marxist-Platonovist consensus. Zimin rehabilitates the boyardom only in order to again accuse the unfortunate "formerly sovereign princes" (and thereby again to justify the Oprichnina). He is convinced that
A. A. Zimin, "O politicheskikh predposylkakh vozniknoveniia russkogo absoliutizma," p. 22.
Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 23. 61. Ibid., p. 21.
62. Ibid., p. 41.
the basic hindrance to the socio-economic and political progress of Russia at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries was not the boyardom but the real heirs of feudal fragmentation—the last appanages. . . . Hence, naturally, it is not the notorious collision of the service nobility with the boyardom, but the struggle with the remnants of fragmentation that constitutes the basis of the political history of that period.[231]
Once again, despite Veselovskii's annihilating critique, Platonov's paradigm arises from the grave, freshly rouged and modernized. Zimin's junior competitor, R. G. Skrynnikov, subjected him to devastating criticism, literally dismantling the new edition of the "appanage" revision of the myth stone by stone. Skrynnikov, in fact, did more. His works actually did bring a breath of fresh air into Ivaniana.[232] He was the first to study in detail the mechanism of the Oprichnina terror, and in the picture emerging from his studies the reader encounters something oddly familiar. Of what does the endless chain of "cases" arising one out of another (the "case of Metropolitan Fil- ipp," the "Moscow case," the "Novgorodian case," the "case of Vladimir Staritskii," etc.) remind us? What does the wave of falsified show trials—with the confessions of the accused exacted by torture, with a bloody spiderweb of mutual slanders, with the boorish triumph of "state prosecutors," and with the horrible jargon of the hangmen (instead of "kill" they said "do away with," writing that in one place 50 people were "done away with" and in another place 150)—call to mind? There's no doubt that in describing the "great purge" of the 1560s, Skrynnikov is recounting the history of the "great purge" of the 1930s. But what is surprising is that Skrynnikov tells us this not only without hinting at the Stalinist terror, but perhaps even without thinking of it. He is a medievalist, a scrupulous historian of Ivan's Oprichnina, and he speaks only of this. Let us pause for a moment to consider it.
Among the first victims of the Oprichnina was one of the most influential members of the Duma, the conqueror of Kazan', Prince Gor- batyi. The most prominent of the Russian military leaders, he was suddenly beheaded, together with his fifteen-year-old son and his father-in-law, the Okol'nichii Golovin. Immediately after him, the boyar Prince Kurakin, the boyar Prince Obolenskii, and the boyar Prince Rostovskii were beheaded. Prince Shevyrev was impaled on a stake.