1462-1505]

The Duma and the Boiars

485

drawn up, in which the conditions of service, binding on both parties, were stated. This system limited effectually the prince's power, and checked the growth of despotic authority. But the territorial growth of Moscow, and the absorption of the surrounding principalities, almost completed in the reign of Ivan, had the effect of counteracting this check, since the men of service had no longer a multitude of other States into which they could easily migrate when the Prince of Moscow displeased them. In the sixteenth century the only resort of the discontented was to leave Russia altogether and find refuge in Poland or Lithuania. Thus the unification of Russia, by doing away with the migratory system, removed a palladium of freedom, and permitted the establishment of a strong monarchical government. Ivan the Great could act more independently of his Duma and impress his will upon it with more masterful authority. But it remained a body which could assert itself in certain conditions, as in the case of a weak ruler or a minority. But when the Tsar was strong he had everything in his hands; and we may say that as an institution the Council had little restraining power. It met only when he chose, and no one had any right to be summoned; the master could call as many or as few of his servants as he chose. He had to consult and take into account the men who had to carry out his will; but that is simply a practical limitation to which every monarch, however constitutionally unchecked, is subject. The most unfettered autocrat is limited both by the consideration of public opinion and by the instruments which he has to employ. Like the Senate of Eastern Rome, the Duma can hardly be viewed as a constitutional check; it was a check because it consisted of the Tsar's instruments.

On the other hand, the boiars-among whom the old princely families which had been submitted to the power of Moscow occupied the highest position — held that they had an indefeasible right to share in the administration and fill the highest posts; and this claim was recognised in a form which amounted to a constitutional limitation of the Great Prince's power. In the records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we constantly meet the question of Precedence (miestnichestvo). We hear continually of disputes among the nobles, and complaints concerning what may seem trifling points of etiquette; and the stress laid on such matters would strike the uninitiated reader as characteristic of their narrow minds and their petty life. But more was involved in the system of Precedence than might appear on the surface. It was the palladium of the noble class, and constituted a check on the autocrat. It asserted the right of each member of the nobility, and of the men of service in general, to a place in the public service, assigned according to two principles: that no man could be appointed to a post inferior to that which his ancestors had held, and that no man could be asked to accept a post of lower rank than that of a man who

486

The system of Precedence

[1462-1505 had a shorter ancestral line than himself. These principles were in themselves ridiculous and injurious to society; yet they were a privilege which guaranteed to the higher classes their political position. The system was worked and disputes decided by means of the Books of Rank (razriadnyia knigi), preserved in a special bureau which dealt with Precedence. It has been suggested that, in clinging tenaciously to this privilege, for which they were ready to defy the severest punishment, the motive of the nobles was perhaps less a conviction of its political importance than a sentiment of piety to the memory of their ancestors, a survival of days when the family was everything. It still counted for much, and this quasi-religious sentiment was a potent sanction of the system, and enabled it to survive. In time of war, Precedence was especially pernicious; disputes among the commanders led to defeat. Thus we find the Tsars, on the eve of campaigns, decreeing that while the army was in the field there must be a truce to such quarrels. It was not till the last quarter of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Theodore son of Alexis, that the system was finally abolished, and the Books of Rank were burned. It is to be observed that Precedence. in one way a check on the sovereign's power, in another way aided the growth of his autocracy; for it maintained divisions among the boiars and hindered the growth of a feeling of class unity solid enough to act effectively against his despotism.

The services of Ivan the Great to his country are summed up in the statement that he created a strong monarchy. He established lines of development and political order which saved Russia from ever becoming what her neighbour Poland became, where the liberty of the nobles was to give Europe an illustration of legalised anarchy. The misfortune of Russia was that no safeguards were imposed to prevent the change of the strong monarchy into an absolute autocracy. It would be absurd to impute the blame to the Tsars, who naturally sought to augment their own power, which, as a matter of fact, was the only organ of social order. The development of autocracy depended on the circumstance that the other elements in the State, the nobles and the people, had no organisation capable of legally resisting the monarch and effecting a constitutional balance. In other countries, kings, in establishing their own supremacy and reducing the independence of feudal nobles, had favoured and promoted popular institutions that were afterwards to become a check upon the royal power. But in Russia the old popular institutions had been swept away. In other countries, the nobles had a position independent of the monarch, and were capable of combining together, if the monarch sought to encroach too far upon their privileges. But in Russia they had no sufficiently strong sense of common interest to ensure successful co-operation; the only bond of unity was the common service of the monarch himself. The very rights of Precedence, which they prized so highly, only emphasised their

1462-1547]

The Church.-Vasili III

487

dependence on the master who allotted the posts which they disputed. Thus they were not in a position to extort a charter of liberties. The latter half of the sixteenth century is marked indeed, as we shall see, by a struggle between the Tsar and the boiars; but it was not a struggle for constitutionalism. It may even be said that the only measures which might have issued in a constitutional government were initiated by the monarch.

The one institution which might have seemed likely to exercise some control on the monarchy was the Church. Its possessions and privileges had been left intact by the policy of the Tartar khans, and in the days when Russia was a complex of numerous separate States it was the representative and mouthpiece of Russian unity, though it never sought to incite resistance to the Tartar rule. Its independence was largely secured by the fact that the Metropolitan owed ecclesiastical allegiance to a power outside Russia, the Patriarch of Constantinople. It was an important step in the upward rise of Moscow when, in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Metropolitan established his residence there. The Metropolitan always supported the unification of the land and the abolition of the independent principalities. The breach of the Russian with the Greek Church in the fifteenth century, in consequence of the efforts at reunion with Rome, reacted upon the position of the Metropolitans, who had no longer a support in the Patriarch, and led to the dependence of the Church on the secular power. line between Church and State affairs tended to become obliterated; ecclesiastical matters were discussed at the Councils of the monarch; ecclesiastics were summoned to attend, and thus became enrolled in the common "service" of the State; the Church became part of the machine, just as religion had been a State department in the Eastern Empire.

The

The reign of Vasili III (1505-33) is an appendix to that of his father, continuing his work, increasing Muscovite territory and maintaining some relations with European Courts. Herberstein, as

ambassador of the Emperor Maximilian, visited Moscow in 1517 and 1523, and wrote his famous description of Russia, which created a considerable sensation in the West. Vasili married Helen Glinskaia, a Lithuanian refugee, who after his death maintained her position, as regent for her infant son Ivan, amidst great difficulties, for five years. She died in 1538; and Russia, without a head, was exposed during the following years to the anarchical and tyrannous rule of the boiars. Two princely families and their factions, the Shuiskis and the Bielskis, disputed the power. Ivan IV was neglected, or encouraged in cruel sports and debauchery. He asserted himself in 1543 by the murder of Andrew Shuiski, and he always looked back with intense bitterness on his treatment as a child. He was crowned in 1547, with the title

1527

488

Ivan IV. Social and political crises [1547-84

of Tsar, having already shown that he was determined to be master. The details of his reign form a curious and repulsive chronicle; and his eccentric character has been a fascinating psychological study for Russian historians. His vices and atrocities are written large in the annals of his government; but his ability and originality are no less undeniable, and no judgment would be wider of the mark than to regard his reign as devoid of significance except as illustrating how great enormities might be perpetrated by a tyrant in Moscovia. In the West he will always be known as Ivan the Terrible; but the epithet is misleading; for the Russian word which it translates means "to be feared" in the sense in which we are bidden to fear God, as a stern master, not as an ogre. In cruelty he outdid his predecessors; but it is hardly for western Europe, which had seen for instance the treatment of Liége by Charles the Bold, and witnessed in Ivan's days the exploits of Spanish rule in the Netherlands and the tortures of the Inquisition, to exclaim at the spectacular massacre which he conducted at Novgorod and at his other outrageous cruelties, as if they had set Russia beyond the pale of civilised humanity.

The significance of this wonderful reign lies much deeper. Two fundamental discords in the structure of the State produced a complex crisis in the middle of the sixteenth century, which caused not only the eccentric policy of Ivan but the troubles in which the realm was involved for a generation after his death. On the one hand, there was the political contradiction between the autocratic power which in its absolute claim required a complete democratic levelling of all its subjects, and the necessity under which it lay of administering the State by an aristocratic class which asserted hereditary rights to participation in the government, while it admitted the autocratic principle. On the other hand, there was the social anomaly that, for the sake of the military needs of the Empire, since the wealth of Russia consisted entirely in land, the interests of the productive agricultural classes had been sacrificed to the interests of the class of service. Peasant owners were dispossessed, lands were seized, to supply fiefs for this class. But the constant wars laid weighty burdens on the men of service and the proprietors of land, whether allods or fiefs, and they were forced to press heavily upon their tenants; the consequence was that these tenants gave up their farms and sought new lands elsewhere, especially on the monastic estates, as the monasteries were the capitalists of the and age were reputed to be easier masters. The lands of boiars and of the whole class of service were thus left without a sufficiency of labour, while the public burdens weighed no less heavily than before. The gravity of the situation was reflected in curious pamphlets which appeared, urging on one side the confiscation of ecclesiastical property-an idea which had already floated before the minds of the sovrans and on the other the abolition of the whole system of military fiefs. The second proposal was

1547-60]

Early policy of Ivan IV

489

impossible in view of the necessities of the State. The first was discussed at a Council which, in 1551, deliberated on ecclesiastical questions and drew up its acts in a Hundred Chapters (the Sto-glav). The influence of the Church, which was largely represented, hindered any radical measure; but it was ordained that all allodial lands which the boiars had made over to the Church without the sovereign's consent should be restored, that all gifts to it made during Ivan's minority should be cancelled, and that in future the monasteries should not acquire certain kinds of estate without Imperial consent. Thus a limit was set to the growth of ecclesiastical property.

The economic trouble was far more deeply seated and serious than the political; but it was the political problem which absorbed Ivan's attention, though his solution of it involved important consequences for the other also.

At a Council held in 1550 the young Tsar gave open expression to his hostile feelings towards the boiars, whose régime during his minority had been injurious to himself and calamitous for the State. In the same year he took the first step in a course of policy which was directed towards breaking down the influence of the great nobles. A thousand "boiar children" (this was the technical name for a class among the men of service who did not belong to the boiars, but were of noble descent) were brought from different parts of Russia to the central regions around Moscow, where fiefs were provided for them, and, along with the ancient aristocratic families of the province, they were constituted in three grades as a nobility of service. The aim was to level down the old nobility by merging it in a new; but Ivan did not venture to abolish the principle of Precedence.

For some years Ivan allowed himself to be guided by the counsels of two favourites, the monk Silvester and Alexis Adasheff, whom he deemed independent of the influence of the boiars. But these advisers lost his intimate confidence in 1553; he suspected that their sympathies were with the boiars and adverse to his own political designs; and the evidence of Prince Kurbski, who was a violent exponent of the aristocratic opposition to the Tsar, shows that he was right. Some years later they were disgraced. Their influence may have postponed the struggle which began after their fall; but historians have ascribed to them an exaggerated significance, and somewhat naïvely glorified them as good geniuses of Ivan, whose natural wickedness burst out when their salutary restraint was removed.

Apart from his own autocratic instincts, Ivan was convinced that the rule of the boiars, co-ordinate with or limiting his authority, meant political confusion, social anarchy, and civil war; and that autocracy was the sole foundation of order. He began a struggle, which was to issue in the destruction of the princely nobility, by comparatively mild measures, disgracing those whom he suspected, and exacting an oath