Ivan the Terrible (39 page)

The absence of legal definition of Russian social groups was particularly striking in the case of urban dwellers. The city as a whole was not a legal corporation, nor did it comprise any subordinate legally constituted autonomous institutions such as a town corporation, a mayor and aldermen, or guilds which regulated crafts. There were no chartered boroughs, and town air did not make a man free. Town dwellers too were divided into distinct groups such as the people of the
posad
, the basic trading settlement, who paid taxes, and people attached to monastic estates or service estates, or allodial lands who were also tradesmen or craftsmen or employed in the services of a town, but who did not pay taxes. There were also members of the armed forces like the
strel'tsy
, who participated in trade and crafts, but were not taxable. Among town dwellers there might also be members of the landowning service class, senior officers in the specialist armed forces (
strel'tsy
), etc., the
d'iaki
and central administrative staff and the members of the group who elsewhere would be counted part of the Third Estate, namely the
gosti
or upper ranks of the wealthy wholesale merchants, who were viewed as service people and were not taxed. Such a motley crowd of city dwellers could not easily coalesce and share common political interests, hence Western historians have tended not to regard them as an ‘estate’. The memoirs of Staden, for instance, convey the impression that it was relatively easy to pass from one social group to another in a town. The ecclesiastical body constituted a separate social group comprising both regular and secular clerics. They were united by concern for religious values as well as by the consciousness of
the problems arising from monastic landownership on a large or a small scale, and came closer to the Western concept of an ‘estate’, or
Stand
. The generic appellation for these social groups was
chiny
, from which the later word
chinovnik
derives and it did not denote belonging to an ‘estate’ but to a ‘service rank’, which could be translated into English as a social ‘order’.
³⁷

Yet to a great extent the Assembly of the Land mirrored the political class, namely the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the boyars, the service gentry, and the small commercial élite. Whether the Assembly met in one chamber or in several, seeing that it signed its depositions in separate curiae, is not known precisely. The summoning of an ecclesiastical council or Church
sobor
, or of a joint boyar and ecclesiastical body, was part of Russian tradition, but it was not a permanently constituted body.
³⁸
Two of the highest ranking hierarchs of the Church
sobor,
for instance, were absent from the Assembly of 1566 possibly for reasons of age or ill-health, including Metropolitan Afanasii. Present were 3 archbishops, 6 bishops, 14 abbots and archimandrites, 3
startsy
(elders) and a cellarer. Abbots and archimandrites of monasteries were far fewer than those who attended a full Church
sobor
in 1580 devoted to church matters – 14 as distinct from 39 – and the abbots of the most important monasteries were conspicuous by their absence.
³⁹
All told there were 15 Moscow abbots, and 6 from monasteries in the west and northwest to whom the question of war or peace was most relevant. The total came to 32.

The Boyar Council ‘present’ in the Assembly of 1566 comprised a body of 30, made up of 17 boyars, 3
okol'nichie
, 2 treasurers, 1 man serving the boyars in a judicial capacity, 6
duma
secretaries and 1
pechatnik
(keeper of the seal), i.e. 17 boyars and 13 non-boyar members. The composition of the boyar presence in a
Zemskii sobor
raises a number of interesting questions about its status and functions or what one might call the constitutional place of the so-called
duma
. To begin with only 17 members of actual boyar rank were present; thus by no means all existing boyars were listed as attending the
Zemskii sobor
, and 14 of the total number of boyars at the time were missing. Many of the absent 14 were on duty as military commanders (
voevody
) or governors (
namestniki
) in various towns; 2 of them were in Moscow but took no part in the
sobor
.
⁴⁰
There were at the time 2 high-ranking Tatar princes of boyar rank among the senior army commanders, Tsar Simeon Kasaevich (the baptized ex-Tsar of Kazan') and his cousin, Tsarevich Kaibula Akhkubekovich of Astrakhan', who were both frequently in attendance on the Tsar; they seem not to have attended the assembly, at
any rate they did not sign the sentence it pronounced. Some of those who took part later became members of the
oprichnina
, like V.M. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, who participated actively in the negotiations with the Lithuanians and died in 1567; some were already in disgrace.
⁴¹
At any rate three of the boyars had recently been in disgrace and had only just been restored to their rank, possibly in an effort to conciliate different factions. The absence of as many as 14 boyars from the contingent in the
sobor
undermines the theory that all boyars belonged to the Council as of right and confirms the theory put forward by Sergei N. Bogatyrev, that the analysis of this institution made by the English envoy, Giles Fletcher, in his
Of the Russe Commonwealth
,
⁴²
provides a more perceptive description of the role of the boyar than is usually given.
⁴³
According to Fletcher, there were two kinds of boyars, those who were given the title in a purely honorary form, who were called ‘counsellors at large’
⁴⁴
for they were ‘seldom or never called to any publique consultation’. And ‘they which are of his [the Tsar's] speciall and privie Counsell indeed (whom he useth daily and ordinarily for all publique matters perteining to the State) have the addition of dumnoy, and are named dumnoy boiaren, or Lords of the [Privie] Counsell, their office or sitting Boarstua dumna’.
⁴⁵
Clearly the Boyar Council which sat in the Assembly of 1566 did not comprise all the boyars, and was closer to a Close Council, or in English the Privy Council, a socially mixed body including not only boyars but non-boyars such as I.M. Viskovaty, then keeper of the seal (
pechatnik
), N.A. Funikov-Furtsev, treasurer and the Shchelkalov brothers,
d'iaki
from a prominent secretarial family.

Zimin's description of the Boyar Duma in the context of the
Zemskii sobor
, as a body including non-boyars as of right, removes it from the category of a chamber representing boyardom as an estate, a chamber composed of the ‘reactionary’ aristocracy of birth as a whole, and brings it closer to a constitutionally totally different kind of body, namely a privy council appointed by the ruler both from the aristocracy and the leading non-aristocratic high officials, to advise him and to act in an executive capacity.
⁴⁶
For a parallel in Western Europe, the English example springs again to mind, if one compares the Council not with the House of Lords but with the English Privy Council. For, though as a separate entity the Tudor Privy Council did not sit in either the upper or the lower House of Parliament, yet the peers sat as individuals in the House of Lords and non-noble members, such as the law officers of the Crown, and senior officials (secretaries) in charge of executive offices, like Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir William Cecil, and later his son Robert, or Sir Francis Walsingham were elected to the House of Commons.
⁴⁷

The perception of the so-called Boyar Duma as an administrative body, a Privy Council rather than a politically representative body, a House of Lords,
⁴⁸
is bound to modify the notion of the role and powers of the Duma, and its relationship with the Tsar, as defined by many past and present historians of Russia. The Duma is usually portrayed as the soslovnoe or ‘estate’ organ of the boyar aristocracy, influencing policy and exercising power independently of the Tsar, particularly in the judicial field, in the interests of its own class, and as a legislature.
⁴⁹
There was, of course, no independent judiciary in Russia, indeed no trained judiciary at all, merely a number of boyars or officials who acted as judges in legal disputes in the
prikazy
and learned the customary and occasionally codified law on the job, in the capital and in the provinces. The Privy Council had no exclusive legislative power: between 1550 and 1572, out of 38 legislative acts, at least 16 laws were approved with the participation of the boyars, hence 22 were not.
⁵⁰
But the Boyar Council was
de facto
the head of the executive under the Tsar; it was the government, because many of the boyars were heads of
prikazy
, and as such acted also as ‘judges’ (
sud'i
).

The 204 nobles, or service gentry, present in the Assembly of 1566 included 95 from the first degree (
pervaya stat'ia
) and 100 from the lower degree of the service gentry, most of them belonging to the 1,000 selected servants of the court of the Tsar (
gosudarev dvor
). Many in the second degree were younger sons or as yet unpromoted members of aristocratic families. Of the members of the first degree, more than a third were princes, descendants of the Lithuanian Patrikeevs and other great Riurikovich clans, sundry Obolenskys, Shuiskys, etc. Others were members of prominent old Moscow boyar families not yet promoted, though some were of more modest origin and some 43 were officials (
prikaznye liudi
) of non-duma rank.
⁵¹
In the second category there were also princes, but usually of more modest rank. The substantial number of members of princely and boyar families, among the service gentry of the first degree, some of them of very aristocratic family indeed, undermines the traditional Russian historical assertion of the existence of a deep-rooted political conflict between boyars and gentry, with the latter supporting the Tsar's allegedly anti-boyar policy of greater centralization in Russia.

The largest concentration of members of the service gentry from both degrees came from those registered in the towns immediately surrounding Moscow such as Mozhaisk, 12, and Pereiaslavl', 14; Moscow itself produced 16 members. Areas closely concerned with the exploitation and security of the Dvina valley and Polotsk, and the towns
along the Western borderland produced a number of members; from Novgorod, there were 21.
⁵²
Zimin confusingly considers that the 42 towns to which members of the service gentry were attached can be considered as ‘represented’ by them.
⁵³
But service gentry cannot be regarded as ‘representing’ an urban or mercantile estate, in the absence of any form of electoral process, though they could, of course, in principle represent people not confined to a legally defined social group.
⁵⁴
But there was no vestige of an election anywhere, no time to call one, and no established procedure.

The urban commercial element numbering 75 is listed as coming from two towns, namely Moscow and Smolensk, and was counted separately: there were 12
gosti
, the merchant élite, 41 merchants from Moscow, and 22 reputedly from Smolensk, one of the most important trade routes for Russian supplies from the West. However, the ‘Smolensk’ merchants in Moscow did not come all the way from Smolensk. They were the descendants of the merchants of Smolensk who had been deported to Moscow after the conquest of the city by Vasily III in 1514, had done well and had been awarded a special status as
smol'niane
, ranking after the
gosti
in the capital.
⁵⁵
The presence of members of the merchantry in the Assembly is not surprising if the purpose was to discuss negotiations for a peace in which commercial issues were bound to be important. Moreover, the whole composition, indeed the very calling of the
Sobor
should be viewed in the context of the presence of the enormous Lithuanian ‘great embassy’ which had come to Russia in May. Its substantial commercial contingent suggested that trade formed part of its remit.
⁵⁶

The sessions of the Assembly lasted from 28 June to 2 July. A number of questions were submitted to the several distinct groups which met and discussed them separately and submitted their opinions separately to the Tsar. The Tsar asked whether he should meet the wishes of the Lithuanians and include the guarantee of the cession to the Lithuanians of the Livonian towns conquered by them in the terms of the peace or even of the truce; and whether he should continue the war for Livonia or not.

According to the language of the time, the ecclesiastics who ranked first were invited to ‘give their advice’ to the Tsar; the boyars, who ranked below the clergy, were invited merely to ‘express their thoughts’.
⁵⁷
The Church
sobor
recorded its verdict to the effect that it was incumbent on the Tsar to keep Riga (which had still to be conquered), and the lands bordering on the Dvina, but refused to pronounce in favour of peace or war. Presumably to decide on this issue
was incompatible with their cloth. The Boyar Council understood clearly that either Russia had to fight to acquire and keep the towns and forts it wanted, or the Poles could build forts threatening Polotsk from their side of the river; and to give up the claim to Riga might, later, endanger Dorpat and Pskov. It objected to a meeting of the two sides, and warned against the danger of the possible political union of Poland and Lithuania which would be unfavourable to Russia. The keeper of the seal, I.M. Viskovaty, was anxious that at least a truce should be obtained. He submitted an independent opinion, suggesting that Lithuania should withdraw from Livonia, while Ivan would give up his claim to Riga and other Livonian towns, on condition that Lithuania undertook not to assist Riga in the event of a resumption of war after the truce.
⁵⁸
This ludicrous quibble was not likely to take in Sigismund. The Lithuanian embassy was thereupon told to go home, and hostilities were suspended until they had arrived back in their country.
⁵⁹