Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/164

 140 Peresviétov propose to solve the other portion of the problem?—By an equally radical measure: by the suppression of the kormlénié, by returning all the lands allotted to the sloojilyié-loodi to the State, and the substitution, for this mode of reward, of a money payment, which would insure obedient officials to the Sovereign, restore the land to its natural uses and legitimate owners, and relieve the mass of the people from the pressure of an unendurable tyranny.

From the literary point of view, the two pamphlets would seem to possess some bond of relationship. The imaginary characters in the first are replaced, in the second, by a Palatine of Wallachia, with whom the author has made a sojourn. The style of both is equally uncouth. But enigmatic as is the form of the work, with its strange circumlocutions, uncertain and obscure as all the phraseology of the period, never, in an country, was a more revolutionary process of reform suggested. The modern Nihilism of Russia can claim ancient parentage! In those days, as in ours, the space that parted theory from practice was wide. The question here was nothing less than a thorough reconstruction of the edifice, social and political. But the two programmes of the reformers, though they affected two different classes of land tenures, did not clash, as has been supposed. They were in a very natural agreement, and one supplied what the other lacked. They constituted two expressions of one and the same solution, revolutionary and democratic.

What was the state of Ivan's mind? How did he stand as to this twofold current of thought? That he was disposed, as far as Church property was concerned, to follow in his forefather's footsteps, we cannot doubt. On this point, through every vicissitude, from reign to reign, even from dynasty to dynasty, the Muscovite policy was never to be changed. But the grandson, like his grandfather, had to reckon with an opposition which nothing but the long-drawn complicity of time could wear down and overcome. The reorganization of the lay tenure was more difficult still. When Ivacha Peresviétov—I care not whence he came or what the source of his inspiration may have been—spoke such bold words, he must have felt a strong hand behind him. Parts of his pamphlet, indeed, seem no more than an echo of the young Tsar's speech on the Red Square. When we take him to have been a semi-official writer, we are probably not far from the truth. But unworthy as the 'men who served,' whom he would have dispossessed and reduced to their legitimate portion, may have been, and severely as the Sovereign might be resolved to treat them, they constituted the army and the administration, the very pillars of the temple! How were they to be replaced? Ivan meant to do