It lacked one essential charm—independence. For—and here we have the most characteristic feature of the Muscovite experiment, and it was also one, and no doubt, the strongest, of the reasons which induced Ivan to undertake it—this tentative reform, far from being the fruit of a decentralizing tendency, was really the outcome of an anxiety of a quite different nature.
In connection with this matter, the part played by appearances and fictions in the political life of Moscow stands out in striking relief. One durable effect, and one of the objects, of this experiment, was the dissolution of the comparatively independent political organisms still present in the composition of the Muscovite State. The programme of unification, the execution of which Ivan was now pursuing in his turn, was hampered by the hereditary rights of a number of petty provincial potentates, who held certain regal rights within their own dominions. These remnants of the past the young Tsar had in view, and these he expected to wipe out, when he set up a rival organization—an organization of which he, who had created it, root and branch, was to be the regulator and master. In the West, the centralizing movement found a weapon to its hand in that emancipation of the classes which broke up the old feudal moulds, and in the particularism of the old local institutions. In Russia, where these classes did not exist—for there the town, the monastery, the village with its lord, the bailiwick with its free Byers were only so many separate units—the State evolved the idea of creating these elements artificially, by a system of forced service imposed on the communities it undertook to constitute. But ukases cannot impart life, and the reform thus devised was stillborn, save in the sense I have just indicated—that of an agent which destroyed the past and paved the way to a system of universal servitude.
The Code of 1551 laid only the lightest of fingers on the great question of the land. Contrary to the reforming tendency, and conformably with the desire of the conservative party, it converted a custom which had fixed and consolidated the tenure of the land into a law—the right to buy back patrimonial properties. In other words, the vendor of such a property, or, failing him, his relatives, were allowed to take back the lands sold at any period, so long as the price that had been given for them was repaid. The future exercise of this right was limited, indeed, to a period of forty years, and given to collateral relations only, but, notwithstanding this, it constituted a recognition, on the legislator's part, of a most detestable archaism, opposed to all freedom of exchange and economic progress.
