К спорам о композитарном характере Московского государства конца XV – XVII века
A Contribution to the debate on the composite character of the Muscovite state, from the late 15th through the 17th century

Summary/Abstract: The paper is based on an assumption that all early modern states, including Muscovy, had a complex and heterogenetic structure. This hypothesis is tested, first, through an analysis of ideas that people had about the territory of the realm and, second, through a survey of the policy pursued by the center in relation to the annexed regions in the course of a century and a half. An analysis of the grand princes’ and the tsars’ titles, as well as of the 16th-century chronicles’ terminology and of the 17th-century Russian maps leads to a conclusion that both rulers and their subjects perceived the country as a multitude of lands united only by the figure of the monarch. Regarding Moscow’s policy towards the newly acquired lands, special attention is paid to the integrative course of Ivan III, the founder of the Muscovite state. His realm proves to have been a real composite monarchy on every account. After his reign, the territorial structure of the country remained heterogeneous but the relations between the center and the periphery changed: in the 16thcentury, the number of autonomous political units sharply decreased and the control over the regions was tightened; however, Ivan IV’s «experiments» in Livonia (like Duke Magnus’s vassal «kingdom») demonstrate that the Russian rulers were not absolutely alien to the idea of a composite monarchy. Finally, such a model was realized in the middle of the 17th century, when the Left-Bank Ukraine was turned into the Muscovite protectorate and thus a new big autonomous region entered the Russian Tsardom.

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