Charles J. Halperin is an independent scholar residing in Bloomington, Indiana. He has published extensively on Tsar Ivan IV and his reign. This post is based, in part, on an article published in Kritika in Fall 2023.
Some scholars and pundits attempt to trace the influence of Ivan IV on Putin or even Stalin. Such arguments in favor of historical continuity enhance the significance of studies of Ivan IV’s reign. Examination of how Muscovites understood the right of redemption (re-acquisition) of sold land or land donated to monasteries shows that, as is everywhere and always true, Muscovite statutory law and case law did not always coincide. Their relationship was complex, and included obedience, violation, and indifference.
According to redemption, under certain circumstances a seller, donor, or someone else related or unrelated to the seller or donor, could “undo” the sale or donation of land, in the former case by returning the purchase price, in the latter by paying a stipulated sum. Extant evidence of redemption applies entirely to the gentry class. The 52 extant cases of actual or potential redemption cannot be considered representative but are sufficient to be suggestive, in part because we have 431 other documents in which vendors or donors renounced their right of redemption.
Evidence of the right of redemption precedes the promulgation of statutory law on redemption. Sellers or donors thought they had a right to redeem land themselves, which they renounced, or to designate potential redemptors, which they did. It is impossible to determine if such practice reflected customary law; we have no evidence.
Statutory law on redemption, namely the Law Code of 1550 and supplemental decrees in 1551 and 1557, did not derive from previous practice. Other than the seller’s right to redeem sold clan (inherited) land, they share no provisions. Whereas vendors thought they could redeem clan land or purchased land, legislation forbade redemption of sold purchases land by the seller without the permission of the buyer. Whereas vendors thought they could designate any relative or non-relative as potential redemptors, legislation excluded direct heirs, sons and grandsons, as redemptors, and designated only brothers or nephews (or nieces) as potential redemptors. Whereas donors thought they could redeem or designate who else could redeem donated land, legislation forbade anyone from redeeming donated land. Legislation also forbade use of foreign funds to redeem land, the sale of redeemed inherited land outside the clan, and potentially fraudulent manipulation of redemption fees. Statutory law imposed a forty-year statute of limitations on redemption of land, unknown in prior case law.
Case law after redemption became a legally-defined procedure did sometimes match statutory provisions so closely that we may infer participants in the transaction were familiar with the legislation. (It is extremely rare for case law to cite statutory law.) Two charters limit potential redemptors to brothers and nephews, as in statutory law. Two charters expressly forbid use of foreign money for redemption, as in statutory law. One charter echoes provisions for government assessors to reevaluate the value of land which might have been inflated for fraudulent purposes.
However, vendors and donors violated statutory law far more often. For sales, they named direct heirs as potential redemptors and all clan members or even non-clan members as potential redemptors. The variety of their choices clearly indicates individual agency. If the land involved was purchased land, then even the vendor himself lacked legal sanction for claiming the right of redemption without the concurrence of the buyer. Hundreds of donors continued to renounce their own right to redeem donated land and to designate potential redemptors despite the fact that such redemption was explicitly forbidden by law. Because such acts were volitional, not mandatory, and therefore not found in all sales and donations, their inclusion reflects gentry choice, hardly meaningless bureaucratic rhetoric. No case law acknowledged the forty-year statute of limitations on redemption; rare seventeenth-century cases illustrate its violation, although this provision was reissued in the Law Code of 1649. No case law justified those cases in which vendors or donors specified different redemption fees for close versus distant relatives.
In sort, gentry vendors and donors simply ignored some provisions of the law on redemption. Statutory law did not derive from previous case law, and case law after the promulgation of statutory law did not entirely derive from statutory law. On admittedly rare occasions, the government also violated its own legislation by not just tolerating but adjudicating cases of criminal redemption of donated land. Therefore, concerning redemption, neither the government nor society obeyed the law all the time, even if they did not violate it very often.
The gentry who sold or donated land constituted the most numerous social base of the Muscovite regime. They were the mounted archers who served in Muscovy’s armies. De facto, they managed the peasants who lived on their inherited or conditional landed estates. Their land and peasants were very important to them. In the seventeenth century, they compelled the government to impose serfdom on their peasants to guarantee the labor force needed to sustain gentry servitors. In the eighteenth century, they compelled the government to repeal Peter the Great’s unigeniture decree so they could continue to divide their land-holdings among all their progeny.
Yet the sixteenth-century gentry, as far as we know, made no effort to persuade the government to alter statutory law on redemption. Their behavior, furthermore, was far from servile or subservient when it came to redemption. Rather than following orders, they did what they wanted, legal or illegal. This phenomenon is far different from the kinds of criminality we associate with violence. After all, the gentry documented their own disregard of the law in legal transactions!
Why the supposedly hypertrophic state permitted the gentry to behave thus remains unknown. Whether the government had the ability—namely, the administrative apparatus and the will—to impose compliance is an open question.
What is clear is that redemption was sufficiently important to the government to make the effort to regulate it in statutory law and to the gentry to apply their own sense of appropriate law in case law. Yet it was not important enough to either the government or the gentry to make the effort to induce the other party to endorse its own understanding of what statute and case law should be.
The contradictory and confusing evidence of statutory and case law on redemption of sold or donated land suggests that a simple binary approach to their relationship, or for that matter to the relationship of the government and the gentry, does not do justice to the realities of Muscovite life during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
