Class 7. Rise of Muscovite Power (4)
The word for commune, I forgot to write this down, sorry,
is (speaking in Russian), which is a very evocative
Russian word, 'cause it also means world and peace,
which is practically a whole universe of meaning, right?
So commune, peace and world, all the same word.
The right that the peasants had in the system,
The one right, was to leave and go somewhere else.
So think about how this works.
The peasants are in a commune.
The commune is on the land of someone
who's in this warrior class.
The person who's in the warrior class
is personally dependent upon the tsar.
No way anywhere down in this hierarchy
does anyone really have any kind of formal rights.
The right that the peasants have is to leave,
and the story of serfdom is that that right is taken away.
Beginning from 1497 through let's say through 1649,
all of these rights are completely taken away.
So in 1497, I'm not gonna tell the whole story,
but in 1497, you're right as peasants,
okay, I'll be the peasant.
My right as a peasant to leave is limited to one day a year.
Okay, that's a restriction.
And then in 1581, that day is taken away,
so it's now zero days.
And then from there, the law escalates in the sense of,
the landowner has five years to find you if you run away,
10 years to find you if you run away,
15 years to find you if you run away,
and serfdom is considered to be complete by 1649,
when the landowner has your whole life to find you
after you run away, right?
So at that point, there's no, like,
you can't even go underground for 15 years.
You're a serf until you die.
So roughly 1% of the population
belongs to the service class, or the fighting class.
Most of the remaining 99% of the population are peasants,
and most of these peasants are bound to the land.
So that's a system which has a logic.
It's a system which has a logic in which you can make,
you will do well if you're in the fighting class,
if there was more land.
If you were a serf, the only thing you can think about
is somehow escaping very far away,
and we're gonna get to that before we're done.
So territorial expansion, there is a lot of it.
Russia, so Muscovy I should say,
as soon as it comes into being,
as soon as it comes into being,
it instantly joins the European age of discovery.
That's one way to think about it, right?
So all these other places, like the Netherlands,
or Portugal, or Spain, or the Italian states,
they've been around for a while,
they've been doing other things.
Muscovy comes into being, and immediately, boom,
it's expanding territorially on a tremendous scale.
The Muscovy of 1533 is six times as big
as the Muscovy of 1462, and that's just the start.
So there are three waves of expansion.
The first wave of expansion is in Europe, and it's westward.
So Moscow is pretty far east, right?
So these places we're talking about, Moscow, Tver,
that was the extreme northeast of Rus'.
It's very far east from the point of view
of Rus' or from Europe.
The first move that Moscow makes is to the west,
controlling in the 1470s, 1480s, 1490s,
the other cities that are Orthodox,
not necessarily from Rus',
the other cities that are Orthodox that are to its West.
The most important of these is Novgorod.
And Novgorod is an ancient city.
Novgorod was a place where many of the rulers of Rus'
ruled at some point in their careers.
It was comparably important to Rus' at some points.
It was a very important trading state,
but also it was a city which was governed by its notables.
It had an assembly, right?
It wasn't a completely vertical situation at all.
This was true of Novgorod, this was true of Pskov.
These places, Novgorod, Pskov,
cities where there was freedom,
at least for what we now call, like the bourgeoisie.
Cities where there was assembly, right?
These cities had bells.
This is a sort of charming, or uncharming,
or depressing detail.
They would ring the bell,
which would mean the assembly should meet.
But then symbolically, when these cities were sacked
by Moscow and put under Muscovite control,
the bells would then be ritually taken away.
So in 1510, for example, the bell from Pskov
was taken down and taken away,
and everyone knew what that meant.
So 1470s, 1480s, 1490s, early 16th century,
Ryazan falls in 1520.
These are cities that are similar culturally,
in the sense that they're Orthodox,
but these are not actually necessarily cities of Rus'.
So just to, I'm banging this idea across I know,
but Rus' kind of becomes whatever you can make it be.
People in Novgorod did not think they were part of Rus'.
But once you conquer it, it then sort of becomes
part of Rus', because everything you control,
you're going to call Rus'.
So first chapter of expansion is westward into these cities,
which were bigger, Novgorod much bigger than Moscow.
Bigger, more sophisticated, richer than Moscow.
But once they are defeated by Moscow,
this is very important.
Over time their elites are humiliated, crushed,
dispersed, brought to Moscow, made dependent,
and the system that I described in Moscow is then applied.
It takes generations, but is then applied
in these other cities, so that the people
who had been notables there become servants of the tsar,
because there is no other status besides
servant of the tsar, which is available.
There is resistance, there is attempts to get
Lithuania to help, all kinds of things happen.
But the basic story is the people who had had
some kind of status of their own in these cities
no longer have status of their own under Moscow.
The Moscow system has spread west.
Second stage is territorial expansion south,
and this mostly takes place under Ivan IV,
who, the one who's known as Ivan the Terrible,
although his name is really more
like threatening, or something like this.
But Ivan IV, who rules for a very long time, 1547 to 1584.
Here again, it's remarkable how just as Moscow
comes into being, it is immediately,
it immediately begins to expand.
So Ivan IV, he defeats the Khanate of Kazan in 1552,
in the years after that.
Kazan, it's today the third biggest city, or maybe the,
I think it's the third biggest city
in the Russian Federation today, maybe the fourth.
Major city, it's the capital of what's now called Tatarstan.
It's still Muslim, it's still a Muslim place.
Kazan is where, if you can remember all the way back
to like a couple weeks ago, this is where the Bulgars were.
So like the Volga Bulgars convert to Islam,
they are under the Mongols.
They're known as the Khanate of Kazan.
They are conquered by Moscow in 1552.
And so if you're asking yourself,
"Why are there Tatars in Russia today?
Who are these Tatars?"
This is who the Tatars are.
The Tatars are the people
who were in the Khanate of Kazan,
who were in Volga, Bulgaria.
These are the people who are today
in Russia south of Moscow.
So this defeat has a couple of meanings,
a couple of very important meanings.
The first is Muscovy, you know,
basically not long after it's come into existence
is already an empire, in the sense
that it is ruling people of a different religion,
a lot of people of a different religion, Muslims.
Right away, right?
So not long after Moscow comes into existence as a state,
it is already ruling lots and lots of people
of a different religion than itself.
And that is a durable fact about Moscow, the Russian Empire,
and for that matter, the Russian Federation today.
The second thing, which is very important about this,
and I'm gonna return to it, is that this opens up,
this opens up the Volga River
and the lands east of the Volga River,
which are generally known as Siberia.
So from European Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean,
beautiful, rich territory, lots of valuable things,
furs mainly.
There are only about 200,000 people
living there at the time.
That is now, once the Khanate of Kazan is destroyed,
that's all open.
The last move of Ivan though is to go back west
and begin the Livonian wars.
Which don't worry, in two lectures
we're gonna spend a lot of time on the Livonian wars.
In the Livonian wars, Ivan is trying
to pick up the Baltic territories,
which were originally laid down by the Teutonic Knights.
The Teutonic Knights convert to Lutheranism,
they change their ways, they build nice towns, they trade.
And their realm starts to fall apart, Moscow intervenes.
Moscow's intervention, and we're gonna have
much of a lecture about this,
generates a Lithuanian and a Polish response.
This is the 1560s.
The Lithuanian and Polish response
is to form the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And as we're gonna see,
it's the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which actually
generates the conditions of the thing that we call Ukraine.
So in a weird way, it was Ivan the Terrible
who's responsible for Ukraine,
So you know, we've heard how it was, you know, Lenin,
we've heard how it was Hitler,
we've heard how it was the gays and the Jews
and the European Union, but you know,
Ivan the Terrible actually sets off the chain of events.
Okay, don't worry, we'll develop all this.
But the thing to know here in this context
is that the Livonian wars don't go well.
They go very badly, and Ivan becomes quite paranoid
and carries out a whole series of seriously weird purges,
to which one could devote an entire lecture,
which involve a private guard called the Oprechniki,
who go around with black hoods
and severed dogs heads or wolf's heads on their horses,
and carry out purges, murderous purges
of the people who are supposed to be traitors,
a reign of terror all over Muscovy
in the 1560s and into the 1570s.
All these cities, like Novgorod for example,
are purged again, and in Novogorod
thousands of people are murdered.
This is the part of Ivan's rule,
which is why he's remembered as Ivan the Terrible.
This, the paranoia, the purges.
And in this situation where they're losing,
to pull in Lithuania, and there are,
these crazy purges are going on.
The Crimean Khanate, which still exists,
Kazan Khanate gone, Crimean Khanate still there.
The Crimean Khanate invades and almost takes Moscow in 1571.
Okay, so at that point Ivan, by the way, sobers up.
Sobers up, the purges slow down.
I didn't mean that in the alcoholic sense.
He had many, he had many issues.
But no, he seems to take stock and the purges slow down
and then they make a truce
with Poland and Lithuania in 1582.
But the other thing that happens under Ivan,
which is what I'm gonna leave you with,
is the third direction of expansion,
which is actually global.
So it's eastern, but it's actually global.
Getting it all the way to the Pacific Ocean
is actually global.
Getting all the way to the Pacific Ocean,
starting around the same time you begin
trade with England, which was 1554.
That was a total accident, by the way.
The English were in the Arctic Ocean
looking for a passage to China,
which hint, hint, they didn't find.
And all of the boats capsized except for one,
but the one that didn't found Russia.
And being merchants they said,
"Oh, I bet these guys have something to trade,"
and of course they did.
And one of the things the Russians had to trade was fur,
which was a hugely important good at the time.
And where do you get fur? You get fur in Siberia.
And so this is actually, is that me? I'm sorry.
