The Origins of Autocracy

[80] Ibid. Incidentally, it was not only the lawyer Chicherin who recognized that peasants had freedom of movement in Russia up to the last decade of the sixteenth century. M. A. D'akonov and B. D. Grekov were very prominent, if not the most promi­nent, specialists in the history of the Russiian peasantry. They disagreed about every­thing except one point. Both of them (contrary to Blum's assertion) thought that de­spite all the "traps" set by the landlords, St. George's Day worked in a very real way for almost a century after the issuance of Ivan Ill's law code. D'akonov says that until the second half of the sixteenth century, the peasants took advantage of the right of move­ment (see M. A. D'akonov, Ocherki po istorii sel'skogo naseleniia v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI—XVII vekov). Grekov, citing the extant books of the St. Joseph monastery of Voloko­lamsk, gives concrete figures for peasant movement by years. Incidentally, Blum knew this just as well as I do: at least, he cites figures from Grekov's work on pages 250-51 of his book. We also have the testimony of an eyewitness. Heinrich Staden, an Oprichnik of Ivan the Terrible's who fled abroad before the introduction of the "forbidden years," categorically asserts: "All the peasants in the country had the free right to leave on St. George's Day" (see H. Staden, О Moskve Ivana Groznogo, p. 123). Staden can hardly be suspected of idealizing Muscovite ways (he was a fierce enemy of Russia's) or of being insufficiently informed (he was himself a landowner and knew the force of St. George's Day from personal experience).

[81] Pamiatniki russhogo prava, vol. 3, p. 366.

[82] Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 3, p. 359. The same is true of Article 46 (ibid., p. 369).

[83] Pamiatniki russkogo prava, vol. 4, p. 238.

[84] Both of the large-scale works on the period of Ivan III—Fennel's Ivan the Great of Moscow and К. V. Bazilevich's Vneshniaia politika ritsskogo tsentralizovannogo gosudar- stva—are devoted almost exclusively to foreign policy.

[85] B. D. Grekov, Krest'ane na Rusi s drevneishikh vremen do XVII veka, p. 604.

[86] A. I. Kopanev, Istoriia zemlevladeniia Belozerskogo kraia v XV—XVI vekakh, p. 181.

[87] The North in the sixteenth century not only represented half of all the territory of Russia, but had also, as S. F. Platonov writes,