Читать книгу Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 12

Ivan IVs endless wars, his ruthless and haphazard remodelling of Muscovy’s political and social structure, his campaigns of unrestrained terror against his own people – all these upheavals left a country traumatized. Every stratum of society was affected. Many of the boyars had been evicted from their ancestral domains and shorn of the power they had previously taken for granted, the service nobility was still insecure, the clergy was torn apart by the heresy hunts, while the merchants and peasants were being fixed to their abode by ‘mutual responsibility’ and heavy taxation. More and more peasants were becoming enserfed by debt or by the dues they owed to the holders of service estates. Not a few decided to flee these new or increased burdens and seek a new life somewhere in the distant forests or among the Cossacks of the frontiers.

The late sixteenth century was thus a time of deep crisis, the central Russian lands becoming depopulated by peasant flight, the towns troubled by poverty and disorder. Ivan himself added a vital new element to the crisis when he killed his eldest son in a fit of fury. He of all people should have known what a disaster to Muscovy was the weakening of the succession to the throne. Of his two surviving sons, one, Fedor, ruled from 1584–98, but was always in poor health and died young, while the other, Dmitrii, was the offspring of his fifth wife and thus not acknowledged as heir by the Orthodox Church, in any case he died in mysterious circumstances in the provincial town of Uglich in 1591.

At this time, when the dynasty seemed to be faltering, Moscow took one final step to buttress its claims to be the ‘Third Rome’. By a mixture of cajolery and pressure, the eastern Patriarchs were persuaded in 1589 to consent to the elevation of the title of Metropolitan of Moscow to that of Patriarch. This was a step of little practical importance, since the Muscovite church had long been self-governing, but its symbolic significance was considerable, since this was the first patriarchal title to be created since the age of the ecumenical councils ten centuries earlier. The Muscovite church joined the ranks of the most ancient and dignified Orthodox jurisdictions.¹⁴

The end of the Riurik dynasty in 1598 posed for the Muscovite state questions it had never faced before. Hitherto the state had been inseparable from the person of the Grand Prince/Tsar: indeed the word ‘state’ is a misnomer if applied to most people’s contemporary understanding of the authority under which they lived. But now for the first time those active in politics – those holding a chin, or official status – had to learn to look at monarchical authority in a more abstract way, to ask themselves what qualities they expected of the person who would exercise it, and under what conditions he would do so. This was a mental leap which was extraordinarily difficult to make.

The problem was that Ivan IVs brief attempt to institutionalize and frame in law the demands the Tsar could make on the various strata of society had collapsed as a result of his wars and the grotesque machinations of the oprichnina. No service noble, merchant or peasant could know for certain in advance what obligations he would have to discharge from one year to the next, nor could he apply to a court if he felt they had been exceeded. The whole concept of sovereignty remained that of the appanage principality, whose lands and people were completely at the disposal of its ruler, while he answered only to God for his treatment of them. Muscovy had not outgrown this mentality before it became a proto-national state, claiming to speak for all Russians, and on top of that an incipient and fast-growing empire.

The patrimonial outlook had implications for the subjects as well as the ruler. They too could treat the realm as a master’s estate which they were at liberty to quit if they preferred to seek employment elsewhere. The impenetrable forests and immense open plains gave them the geographical means to escape the most importunate ruler. This very fluidity of social relations made the creation of either legality or intermediate institutions extremely difficult. As we have seen, Ivan abandoned the attempt at an early stage. It also meant that subjects who wished to oppose authority rather than merely flee it had no accepted channels for doing so other than by sponsoring an alternative ruler, that is, a pretender.

The only shadowy institutions which did exist to represent the various strata of society were the zemskie sobory. The new importance of the Patriarchate was underlined when Patriarch Job convened a sobor to solve the crisis created by the abrupt end of the dynasty. It unanimously offered the throne to Boris Godunov, who, though not from one of the most senior boyar families, had been Fedor’s brother-in-law and regent, and was thus a natural candidate.

The circumstances of his election are of interest, for they represent a moment when the beginnings of a covenant between Tsar and people might have been worked out. Godunov several times declined the throne when it was offered to him. According to the historian Kliuchevskii, the boyar members of the sobor were expecting that he would accept a charter (gramota) defining the limits of his power. By playing a ‘comedy of silence’, refusing the crown but also refusing to sign any kind of limitation on the authority of the crown, Godunov put the sobor in the position where they had either to offer him traditional unrestrained patrimonial authority or open the way to a potentially very damaging struggle for the succession. Not surprisingly, the delegates put stability first, and Godunov became Tsar without any restraints to his power. Kliuchevskii feels that Godunov’s behaviour was misguided: ‘Boris was not the hereditary patrimonial ruler of the Muscovite state, but the people’s choice. He began a new succession of Tsars with a new political significance, In order not to be absurd or detested, he should have behaved in a different way, and not aped the defunct dynasty with its appanage customs and prejudices.’¹⁵

Most of the boyar clans were thus discontented with Godunov from the outset. The service nobles formed the bulk of his support, but many of them were worried that the peasants on whom they relied for their livelihood were being enticed away from them by wealthier landowners or monasteries, who could offer better conditions. Boris reacted to their complaints by limiting the peasants’ right to move and facilitating procedures for reclaiming those who had done so. He combined this with trying to impose greater control over the Cossacks and small landowners of the vulnerable southern frontier regions.

As factionalism mounted, Boris set his minions to spy on his rivals and enemies: he imprisoned or murdered some, and exiled others to remote regions. Deportations, confiscations and executions multiplied, recalling sinister memories of Ivan the Terrible. These afflictions might have been tolerated in a Tsar who had come to the throne by heredity. But Boris had been chosen, and it followed that alternatives could be contemplated. The last straw was a series of bad harvests in 1601–3.

Before long a pretender appeared, claiming to be Ivan IVs son Dmitrii, escaped from his reported death in Uglich. He immediately attracted a large and diverse following: boyars jealous of Godunov, service nobles desirous of larger estates and a firmer grip on their peasants, Cossacks anxious to reassert their ancient freedoms, peasants calling for an easing of serfdom. Although representatives of all these classes flocked to his banner, their aspirations contradicted each other, and there was no way any ruler, no matter how skilful, could have reconciled them. However, Boris’s sudden death in April 1605 opened the capital to them, without their mutual differences having been resolved.¹⁶

The chaos was compounded by international intervention: Poland-Lithuania and Sweden, eager to take advantage of the weakening of their threatening eastern neighbour, sent their troops in to enforce their own territorial, religious and dynastic interests. Over the next few years, Muscovy was torn apart by boyar feuds, social revolution and international warfare. Sovereignty over it was claimed or temporarily exercised by three pretenders, a leading boyar, a boyar council, a Polish prince and a triumvirate of service nobles. This was the epoch which Russians refer to as the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia).

Yet in the end Muscovy did not disintegrate, and in 1613 the motley and disreputable parade of pretenders came to an end when a zemskii sobor elected a new Tsar, Mikhail Romanov, from a boyar family which had been a principal rival of the Godunovs. However one explains it, some sense of shared identity and destiny impelled the various warring groups to find sufficient common ground to cooperate in expelling the foreigners from their capital city and in restoring the authority of the state. The way in which the ‘land’ recovered in the absence of a legitimate Tsar suggested that Muscovy had the potential to outgrow the dynastic patrimonial framework, that a potentially state-bearing people existed.

Precisely because the state was falling apart and had to be reconstituted, the Time of Troubles was quite fruitful in political programmes, some of which indicate the way a Russian civic nation might have evolved had the relentless pressure of empire and great power status been eased. The founding document of a civic nation is often an agreement reached during a conflict between a ruler and his elites: witness the Magna Carta of 1215 in England and the Golden Bull of 1222 in Hungary. An analogous agreement was mooted in February 1610 when protagonists of the second pretender switched their support to the Polish crown. They presented King Sigismund with a set of conditions on which they were prepared to elect his son Wladyslaw as Tsar. The first was that the Orthodox faith should remain inviolate. Then came stipulations on the rights of individual estates, for example, not to be punished or to have property confiscated without trial before a properly constituted court, not to be demoted from high chin without clear and demonstrable fault. The document implied a state structure in which supreme authority would be shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of service people and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be decided.¹⁷ Such a document might have laid the basis for a constitutional Muscovite monarchy in personal union with Poland.

However, it never took effect, since Wladyslaw did not come to claim his throne. Instead, Sigismund declared his intention of doing so himself. This prompted the Patriarch, Hermogen, to issue a stern injunction that the Russian people were not to ‘kiss the cross before a Catholic king’. This assertion of Orthodox fundamentalism seems to have struck a chord, and the death of the second pretender at about the same time removed an obstacle to combined national action. At any rate, within a few months an ad hoc alliance of service nobles and Cossacks had formed a militia and a provisional government and issued a statement recognizing as the supreme authority ‘the whole land’. As we have seen, this term signified the power of local communities, separate from but allied with the supreme power. For the moment, the army council reserved to itself the exercise of this authority, but promised not to take certain steps, such as imposing the death penalty, without consulting the whole army. They indicated that lands wrongfully appropriated by boyars were to be returned to the state land fund, from which they would be awarded to servitors strictly in accordance with the duties they had discharged. Serving Cossacks were to be offered the choice of a pomest’e to settle down on or a salary for continuing military service on the borders. Peasants were to be forbidden to leave the estates on which they worked, and provisions were made for their recapture and return if they did so.¹⁸

This declaration represented a compromise between the interests of the Cossacks and those of the service nobility. It did not fully satisfy either: Cossacks in particular were suspicious that it would breach their ancient freedom. Moreover, it offered nothing to the towns or to the ordinary peasant soldiers. Relations between the different social groups broke down, and Prokopii Liapunov, a service noble from Riazan’ who commanded the militia, was murdered. The first attempt to unite the nation behind a programme of expelling infidels and foreigners had failed because of the incompatible social interests of those involved.

The second and more successful attempt originated in the towns of the north and east. It began with a traditional skhod, or assembly, of the zemstvo elders in Nizhnii Novgorod, the principal city of the middle Volga. A merchant, Kuz’ma Minin, made an eloquent appeal to his colleagues to reject the rule of Cossacks and aliens as divisive and offensive to the true faith, and to take the initiative themselves in setting up a voluntary militia to march on Moscow, free it and enthrone a new Tsar ‘whom God shall send us’. The assembly approved the idea and composed appeals to other towns for money and recruits: ‘Let us be together of one accord … Orthodox Christians in love and unity, and let us not tolerate the recent disorders, but let us fight untiringly to the death to purge the state of Muscovy from our enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians.’¹⁹ Towns in the north and east, and on the Volga one by one joined the movement, sending contributions and troops, while subsidies were also received from the Stroganovs and from some monasteries.

The way the movement was built up demonstrates the importance of the wealth Moscow was by now receiving from the Volga basin and from its new northern and eastern territories, and also the potential of the elective mir assemblies which Ivan had tried to institutionalize at the start of his reign. As the historian Platonov put it, this was a movement of ‘zemskaia Rus’, of church, land and traditional local gatherings against disunity and foreign domination’.²⁰The militia was placed under the command of a service noble and voevoda, Dmitrii Pozharskii, who had earlier distinguished himself in fighting against the Poles.

Pozharskii took up position in Iaroslavl’, as a large town on the Volga much closer to Moscow, and established there a provisional government headed by Minin, with the title of ‘The Man Chosen by the Entire People’. From there the militia advanced on Moscow and drove out the Poles. Then the military council issued invitations to all towns and districts to send their ‘best, most sensible and trustworthy people’, each equipped with a mandate, to a ‘council of the land’ (sovet vseia zemli) which would elect the new Tsar.

Some five hundred delegates came from everywhere between the White Sea and the Don, representing boyars, service nobles, clergy, merchants, Cossacks, posad people (townsfolk), and ‘black’ (non-enserfed) peasants. The bitter divisions which had plunged Russia into anarchy for so long were not fully stilled by the common victory: service nobles and Cossacks were at loggerheads, boyar clans continued to feud and insist on their pedigree, while some supported foreign candidates. The latter, however, were rejected by the assembly as a whole ‘for their many injustices’. It was decided that the new monarch must be Russian and Orthodox.

On 7 February 1613 the sobor elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as the new Tsar. This choice illustrates the prevailing yearning for stability, the desire to restore a state of affairs as close as possible to what might be called ‘normality’. Mikhail was the eldest son of a family closely related to the Riurik dynasty, and hence the nearest thing to a hereditary monarch that the assembly could find. To legitimate his choice, a story was assiduously put around that Fedor Ivanovich, the last Riurik Tsar, had entrusted his sceptre and crown to Mikhail’s uncle. No explicit conditions were imposed or even requested: the dynastic sense triumphed over the aspiration to set a limit to the monarch’s power, for which this would have been the ideal moment. The delegates, it turned out, had come to the meeting not with binding conditions to put to candidates in the course of the election, but with petitions to submit to him once he was elected.

In its greatest test hitherto, then, the people of Muscovy showed that they felt their vulnerability, from within and without, sufficiently to wish a dynastic, hereditary and autocratic ruler. The forces seeking unity – service nobles, townsfolk, clergy, ‘black’ peasants – triumphed over those – boyars, Cossacks, serfs – better able to profit from discord. The whole movement drew its inspiration, organization and financial support from the areas in the north and east which had been least affected by the oprichnina and by the encroachments of serfdom.

The whole protracted affair suggested that, in moments of supreme crisis, the Russians could and would eventually work together, temporarily putting aside their conflicts, their clannish and socio-economic interests and reconstituting themselves as a potential nation. The Nizhnii Novgorod militia was extremely suspicious of both boyars and Cossacks, but nevertheless cooperated with individuals from both categories when that seemed necessary for the common good. The outcome also suggested that Russians identified themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox Church and unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove divisive and set one social group against another. Maureen Perrie has shown how, during the Time of Troubles, tales circulated among the common people of a ‘good’ or ‘just’ monarch, who would protect them against their oppressors.²¹

All the same, the election of a new autocrat did not just mean a return to old Muscovite ways. For one thing, the Time of Troubles had succeeded far better than Ivan IV in weakening the boyars. Individual boyars and their families continued to play a role in politics, but now through their presence at court and through the Tsar’s service, rather than through their patrimonies and retainers. By contrast, the service nobles had gained in influence, and used it during the next half-century to put the final clamps on serfdom, which they achieved in the new Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649.

At the same time, the first serious breach had been created in the patrimonial state. In the Time of Troubles Muscovy had been like an estate whose master had died intestate: relatives, servants and labourers had fought among themselves to seize it, and a few neighbouring owners had joined in the fray. But then the zemlia had for the first time constituted itself as a reality, based on elective local government institutions, and had chosen a new master: they had demonstrated that the state was not just a patrimony. Platonov goes so far as to assert that ‘the old patrimonial state had yielded to a new and more complex type, the national state’.²² That was still far from being the case, as the next three centuries would show, but a movement had been made in that direction.