The Origins of Autocracy

If, however, Russia was indeed undergoing significant economic expansion, and in particular a building boom, the necessary precon­ditions which existed in every European country—such as a free la­bor market, significant free capital, and judicial protection of private property—must have been present there too. As listed in surviving documents, for example, the materials used in the construction of the fortress of Smolensk included three hundred and twenty thousand poods of iron in bars, 15,000 poods of iron rods, 1,000,000 nails, and 320,000 wooden pilings. Inasmuch as iron and timber were not imported from abroad, this implies large-scale specialized produc­tion. And neither was such production artificially implanted and pa­tronized and regulated by the state, as was the case under Peter. It was private enterprise in the full sense of the term.

Sixteen thousand workers were directly employed on the con­struction of the Smolensk fortress alone—all, according to the tsar's decree, freely hired. If we consider that dozens of such fortresses and cities were being erected at the same time, this presupposes an enor­mous free labor market. As far as free capital is concerned, a long list of extremely wealthy contemporary merchants is supplied by the Soviet historians D. Makovskii and N. Nosov.'⁴ I will cite only a few examples here. The Smolensk merchant Afanasii Yudin extended credit to English merchants to the sum—enormous for that time—of 6,200 rubles (equivalent to more than 450,000 rubles in gold as of the end of the nineteenth century). Tiutin and Anfim Sil'vestrov ex­tended credit to Lithuanian merchants to the amount of 1,210 rubles (more than 100,000 nineteenth-century rubles in gold). A member of the English company, Anthony Marsh, is recorded as owing 1,400 ru­bles to S. Emel'ianov, 945 to I. Bazhen, and 525 to S. Shorin. In a con­temporary letter to the pope we read that,

Muscovy is extremely rich in money, obtained more from the patronage of sovereigns than through mines—of which, incidentally, there is also no lack—since every year there is brought here from all corners of Europe an abundance of money in payment for goods which have almost no value for the Muscovites, while they bring an extremely high price in our parts.[8]

Paradoxically, however, Golovkin, Solov'ev, and Pogodin seem to have been both right and wrong in characterizing pre-Petrine Russia as obscure and poverty-stricken. For where Chancellor in 1553 had found wonderfully populated villages, his compatriot Fletcher a quarter of a century later discovered a desert. In the census books of 1573-78, 93 to 96 percent of the villages of the Moscow region are listed as uninhabited.[9] In the Mozhaisk region, up to 86 percent of the villages were empty; in Pereiaslavl'-Zalesskii, 70 percent. Uglich, Dimitrov, and Novgorod had been put to the torch and stood de­serted. In Mozhaisk, 89 percent of the houses were vacant; in Ko­lomna, 92 percent. And this was the case everywhere in the country.

It seems as if before starting its ascent from obscurity to greatness as the stereotype proclaims, the country had made a terrible descent in the opposite direction—from greatness to obscurity.

The economic and social forces developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, which had seemed to promise normal progress of the European type for Russia, suddenly disappeared as if they had never been. The prominent peasant proto-bourgeoisie vanished. The progressive three-field (short-term fallow) system of tillage was aban­doned. Large-scale production ceased. The urbanization of the coun­try gave way to deurbanization. And, what was most important, the rapid transformation of the kholops (slaves) into freemen gave way to an equally swift reverse process.'⁷ Henceforth, the free laborer grad­ually disappeared from the face of the Russian earth, and became a serf belonging either to other men or to the state. And this is how it would be for centuries to come. Even today Russia has not fully re­covered from this terrible transformation. Serfdom to the state and its enterprises was a fact of life for all Russian workers up to 1956, and for the rural population it has still not ended—at least not as a rule.