into a sort of dowry or appanage, which the Tsar kept for himself, and on which, with a thousand boïars or boïars' sons, chosen by himself, he was about to follow up the experiment of 1550.
I must insist here on the scope of this experiment, which may be summed up in two principal features: the transformation of the freehold properties into fiefs, and the removal of owners from one holding to another. To take the proprietor of an hereditary freehold, subject to no charges of any kind, to tear him out of the corner of the soil on which, for centuries past, his fortune and importance had sprouted, grown, and struck their roots; to part him from his natural adherents, break off all his natural connections, and, having thus uprooted him, isolated him, and removed him from his own sphere, to set him down elsewhere, as far as possible from his native place, to give him another property, but on a life interest, and on terms exacting service, and the payment of the usual taxes from him, and thus to make a new man of him, a man without a past, without backing, defenceless—this was the constitution of the system. So, at least, we may suppose, for Ivan never revealed his secret. But, though the fact has hitherto passed unnoticed, the evident connection between the two decrees, that of 1550 and that of 1565, does indicate a system, and all we know of the two measures, of their character and their application, is in favour of the correctness of the conjecture I have adopted, after the example of Monsieur Platonov, who seems to me to have approached nearest to the truth ('Essays on the History of the Political Disturbances of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,' St. Petersburg, 1899, i. 137, etc.), and Monsieur Milioukoy, whom I am inclined to think a little further removed from it ('Essays on the History of Russian Culture,' 1896, i. 147, etc.), by his determination to see nothing, either in Ivan's reforms or in Peter the Great's, except financial expedients.
Ivan's horizon was certainly wider than this. During his lifetime, and even after his death, silence has been kept, by superior order, concerning all this undertaking. Questions on the subject must have been foreseen when an embassy from the Tsar went into Poland in 1565. Muscovite diplomacy was in the habit of providing against possible indiscretions by foreseeing such inquiries, and dictating the replies beforehand. Thus, if the envoys were asked what the Opritchnina was, they were to answer, 'We do not know what you mean. There is no Opritchnina. The Tsar is living in the place of residence he has been pleased to choose, and such of his servants as have given him cause for satisfaction are there with him, or are settled close by; the others are a little farther
