The Origins of Autocracy

29. Ibid., p. 97. In fact, Article 60 of the 1497 law code states: "If any person dies intestate and leaves no sons, then all his movable property and land [will pass] to his daughters, and if he leaves no daughters, then it is his relatives who inherit [movable and immovable property]" (Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 3, p. 371). The fact that this law, for the first time in Russian history, protects not only the movable property of the peasant but also his land, seems to me even more significant and innovative than the absence of privileges in terms of inheritance to which Makovskii calls attention. This does not look like attachment of the peasants to the land, but rather like attachment of the land to the peasant. It thus confirms once more the contradiction between the social policy of the grandfather and that of the grandson, whose reign was marked by almost complete expropriation of peasant lands. Before the Oprichnina, the peasants in the central regions of the Muscovite state cultivated seven or eight chetverti (three or four hectares) per household. After the Oprichnina, their cultivated lands were catastroph- ically reduced, approximately to the limits of the modern-day kolkhoz household plot.

Turkey, Iran, Bukhara, and Urgench, expeditions are undertaken to establish trade relations with China. Just as, in the fifteenth century, the Russian merchant was the first . . . European to penetrate into India, so, in the sixteenth century, two cossack hetmans sent by the Russian government arrived in Peking. Stable trade relations are established between Russia and all the European countries. Russia has emerged into the world market and has been transformed into a great world power (ibid., pp. 487-88).

on them, had come to life (S. F. Platonov, "Problema russkogo Severa v noveishei istoriografii," pp. 112-13).

It is important to note that the North became the most flourishing part of the country precisely after Ivan Ill's expedition, when

the Muscovite regime transformed the boyar votchiny which it had confiscated . . . into peasant communities and, having freed their population from depen­dence on private persons, introduced in them the communal organization and self-government which prevailed in peasant communities generally. As the final result of this, the entire North took on the character of a peasant country (ibid., p. 107).