The Origins of Autocracy

from a remote backwater of the state become one of its liveliest regions. The en­tire country, in its relation with the cultural world, had, so to speak, turned its face northward. The commercial and working population . . . streamed toward the northern ports. . . . Not only the routes along which moved the traffic pro­voked by trade, but entire regions, which served these routes or were dependent

[88] Ivan III confiscated only the church lands and the lands of the "great" boyars, while the middling and petty boyar families, the so-called svoezemtsy (small landowners), underwent "peasantization"—that is to say, defeudalization. "The lands of the svoezem­tsy," Kopanev writes, "were first strictly separated from those of the peasants and of the grand prince, then apparently merged with them, and then disappeared, and the svoezemtsy came to be on the same footing with the peasants, [which] basically changed the social relationships here" (see A. I. Kopanev, "K voprosu о strukture zemlevlad- eniia na Dvine v XV-XVI vv.," pp. 450-51). In a brilliant genealogical study of one boyar family, the Amosovs, N. E. Nosov has clearly traced all the details of the "rapid and intensive adaptation of the Amosovs' economy, and that of the peasantized boyars like them, to the new economic conditions" (N. E. Nosov, Stanovlenie soslovno-predsta- vitel'nykh uchrezhdenii v Rossii, pp. 270-71, 274).

[89] One of Kopanev's most important conclusions is that "the active mobilization of peasant lands shown in the Dvina documents of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had as a result the concentration of great resources of land in the hands of some peas­ants, and land shortage for others." It was not just a matter of a few more scraps of land coming into the hands of rich peasants; they bought entire villages: "The Dvina docu­ments show that villages [and] parts of villages become the objects of purchase and sale, with no limitations whatever." And "the land passes from one holder to another . . . 'for­ever'"—that is, as property, as an allodium, having lost all traces of feudal tenure (Ko­panev, "K voprosu о strukture," pp. 452-53; emphasis added).

[90] Nosov, Stanovlenie, pp. 283—84. Emphasis added.

[91] Ibid., p. 11.