Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/168

 144 torjok were divided up into gooby. But these wards were not originally connected with the criminal jurisdiction in any way. To this acquired fact the Code of 1550 gave an official confirmation. By a stroke of the pen, it placed all this department of jurisdiction under the charge of the communes. And this was only a preliminary step. The outbreak of war soon necessitated a general mobilization of the 'service men,' and the expediency of appealing to the new magistracy for the discharge of all the administrative duties left unperformed by the sloojilyié, absent on military duty, shortly became apparent. By a series of charters, which grew more and more numerous after the year 1555, the very financial organization, and the assessment and collection of the taxes were included in the same system.

This was neither more nor less than the adoption of Ivacha Peresviétov's plan, the cutting off of the kormlénié at the root, by the elimination of the kormlenchtchiki. At one moment, and as early as 1552, Ivan made no secret of his determination to reorganize his administration to the exclusion of these officials, who would thus have lost, if not every title—for they would still have been soldiers—the most essential of their rights to the possession of the land. And a remarkable feature is that the persons affected made no protest, and expressed no complaint. They would willingly have sacrificed their privileged possession of the land to obtain a pecuniary compensation, which, even if trifling, would have been more certain than the revenues of their ruined properties. But the reform, which had thus reached a point at which it seemed on the brink of realizing a complete communal autonomy, and, simultaneously, a profound alteration in the social, economic, and political constitution of the country, suddenly stopped short. As might have been foreseen, the men to carry out the ideas were not to be found. The benefit of the autonomy thus offered to populations quite insufficiently prepared for the duties they were expected to assume, was far beyond their powers of assimilation. The right of jurisdiction involved heavy responsibilities. The great distance between the various dwellings, which, though these were placed in the midst of elements naturally inclined to sociability in every form, enforced a necessity of a very opposite nature, was in many cases a quite insuperable obstacle to any organization of communal groups. And, further, the State did not bestow this benefit—which the people did not know how to use, and the responsibility of which it dreaded—as a free gift. It was a privilege, and the tradition in Russia, as elsewhere, was that privileges must be paid for. The charters conferring autonomy were therefore burdened with a ransom; in other words, the commune had to buy out the judicial rights of the persons who had previously held them.