The Origins of Autocracy

Ravelin, the tsar became a key figure—the first step of progress on Russian earth. Could one, in the circumstances, resist the temptation of comparing him with Peter the Great? Ravelin could not. His pen distinguished "two extremely great figures of Russian history—Ivan IV and Peter the Great." And why not, indeed, if "both of them per­ceived with equal vividness the idea of the state and were its most noble and worthy representatives? . . . Separated by an entire century . . . they are remarkably similar ... in the tendency of their activities. Both of them pursued the same goals. They are connected by some sympathy. Peter the Great deeply respected Ivan IV, called him his model and placed him higher than himself."

What did the similar nature of their "tendencies" consist of, in practical terms? Ravelin explains: Ivan the Terrible

wished to do away completely with the high nobility and to surround himself with commoners, and even people of low birth, who were devoted, and willing to serve him and the state with no ulterior motives or personal cal­culations whatever. In 1565 he established the Oprichnina. This institu­tion, slandered by its contemporaries and not understood by poster­ity, . . . was the first attempt to create a service elite and to substitute it for the hereditary nobility—to put the element of personal dignity in place of the element of blood and kinship in the administration of the state: a thought which later was carried out by Peter the Great in other forms.[167]

All of the three whales on which Ravelin's universe rests are re­vealed in this quotation with remarkable clarity. In the first place, the interests of the state are identified with the interests of the tsar (this, according to Aristotle, is the definition of tyranny). In the second place, the hereditary nobility is looked upon as the basic hindrance to the triumph of the "idea of the state," and as a barrier in the path of progress (and progress is therefore impossible without liquidation of the social limitations on power). In the third place, the interests of the "people" are identified with the interests of the tsar-state and the "new class" is presented as a bearer of "personal dignity." Speaking in my terms, the general direction of Russian history, according to Ra­velin, is the transformation of absolutism into despotism, which is supposed to be the decisive condition for progress.

Remember that Ravelin wrote in 1846, at the height of the Nikolai- an phase of "pseudodespotism," when the results of the work of both "extremely great leaders" were evident. The Slavophiles summarized the state of the nation as follows:

The current condition of Russia presents a picture of internal disarray covered by a conscienceless lie. . . . Everyone lies to each other, sees this, continues to lie, and no one knows how it will end . . . And on this internal disarray . . . there has grown up a conscienceless flattery, which assures people of its well being . . . the universal corruption and weakening of the morals in society has reached huge proportions . . . here we see the immorality of the entire internal structure. . . . The en­tire evil proceeds from the oppressive system of our government . . . the yoke of the state has been established over the land . . . the governmen­tal system . . . which makes a slave of its subjects [has created in Russia] a type of police state.¹³

Let us add to this that the "people" was truly oppressed by serfdom, which had reached the stage of slavery, and in addition to everything else, there was no trace left of the "service elite," for the sake of whose establishment the "extremely great leaders" had so cruelly terrorized the country. It had been transformed in some way, inexplicable at least to Kavelin, into a "hereditary nobility," as if neither Ivan the Ter­rible nor Peter the Great had existed. Furthermore, it now took a form considerably worse than the Muscovite boyardom—that of a slave-holding aristocracy. In other words, if the path to progress and to the triumph of the personality lay precisely in the destruction of the "great lords," then by the mid-nineteenth century even a blind man must have seen that this path had ended in a cul-de-sac.

Indeed, Kavelin writes as though he were living not in a real police state, but in an imaginary country where there is neither slavery nor a new "hereditary nobility" and a boorish uprooting of the "person­ality," and as if the power of the Russian state redeemed and justified all of this. How does this differ from the position of Lomonosov and Tatishchev, which led to the first "historiographic nightmare"? The forerunners of the "state school" wrote all of this openly, nakedly. Ravelin's conception was intended to put rouge and powder on the ugly mug of autocracy and to hide it under the civilized wig of "the element of the personality," to make it acceptable to the progressives and liberals of the mid-nineteenth century. In spite of all its arro­gance, the scholarship of the time did not demand comparison, anal­ysis, and evaluation of the "state structure" of Ivan the Terrible ac­cording to its real results in the surrounding world. It was content with abstract analogies and symbolic parallels.¹⁴ Between it and reality there lay an abyss.

Teoriia gosudarstva и slavianofilov, pp. 38, 39, 37, 9.

Otherwise how are we to explain the fact that Kavelin, guided by such a crite­rion of progress as "the complete destruction of the nobility," equally glorifies Ivan the

This permits us to make an approach to answering the question of how Kavelin was able to convince almost the entire Russian histo­riography of his time that he was right. In part, as we have seen, this is certainly explained by his opposition to Slavophilism. Kavelin in­troduced into Russian historiography the category of progress, and, to use his own words, represented "Russian history as a developing organism, a living whole, penetrated by a single spirit."[168] He was the only one who was, so to speak, able to contrast the Slavophile theory of the absolute uniqueness of Russia to a theory of its relative unique­ness. He introduced, too, a new and tragic dimension into the evalua­tion of Tsar Ivan's epoch. Whereas before Kavelin this epoch seemed the tragedy of the country, under his pen it appeared as the tsar's tragedy. From the "villain and beast with the mind of a petty bu­reaucrat," he was transformed into the lonely hero of classical antiq­uity, fearlessly throwing down a challenge to inescapable fate. Let us see how Kavelin does this.

Ancient, pre-Ivanian Rus' is presented as immersed in a way of life based on kinship. "There were no profound demands for another order of things, and where were they to come from? The personality, which is the sole fruitful soil for any moral development, had not yet emerged; it was suppressed by relationships of blood.'"[169] Tsar Ivan strove to arouse the country from the dangerous slumber which con­demned it to eternal stagnation. What did he not do toward this end! He "destroyed the local rulers and placed the entire local administra­tion under the complete control of the communes themselves.'"[170] This did no good. The boyars, excluded from local administration, con­centrated themselves in the center, in Moscow. "The Duma was in their hands; they alone were its members.'"[171] The tsar tried to exclude them from the center. "The goal [of his reforms] was the same: to break the power of the great lords, and to give power and great scope to the state alone."¹⁹ For this purpose, "All the major branches of the administration were entrusted to secretaries: they headed the gov­ernment departments; the great lords were almost completely ex­cluded from civil affairs.'"²⁰ Later, the tsar went after them in the Duma itself, "and introduced into it the new element of personal dig­nity."²¹ Again nothing happens: the tsar cannot appoint whomever he wants to whatever post he likes; the boyar tradition blocks his path, binds his hands, and nullifies all his efforts. There is no one who un­derstands the tsar's grand design. There are no institutions: "The communes, however much Ivan tried to revive them for their own good, were dead; there was no public spirit in them because the for­mer quasi-patriarchal way of life was continuing there."²² Alas, the great tsar lived in an "unhappy time when no reform was capable of improving our way of life."²³ "Ivan sought for organs to implement his thoughts and did not find them; there was nowhere to take them from. . . . The elements for a better order of things did not yet exist in society itself."²⁴ How did this struggle end?

Ivan lost his strength, finally, under the burden of a dull and quasi- patriarchal environment, which had already become meaningless, and in which he was fated to live and act. Struggling with it to the death over many years, and seeing no results, he lost faith in the possibility of real­izing his great thoughts. Then life became for him an unbearable bur­den, a ceaseless torment, he became a hypocrite, a tyrant, and a coward. Ivan IV fell so far precisely because he was great.²⁵

Do you see now where Belinskii's "fallen angel" came from? Do we not have before us a tragedy worthy of the pen of Shakespeare and Cervantes? A courageous Don Quixote, fatigued by the struggle with patriarchal dragons, is against his will transformed in the end into Macbeth—and since the role of Lady Macbeth is played by History herself, he is worthy not only of our sympathy but also of admiration. Furthermore, the mysterious dualism of the personality, which so tor­mented Shcherbatov and Karamzin, now receives both explanation and justification: the more bestialities Tsar Macbeth committed in his fall, the greater Tsar Don Quixote was at the height of his powers and hopes. From now on, the bestialities bear witness to greatness.

The jeremiads of Pogodin, based on simple common sense, could not compete with this monumental apologia, which transformed the mystery of the terrible tsar from an empirical problem into the ful­crum of the state and progress. The debate transcended historiogra­phy and acquired a philosophical significance affecting the very foun­dations of the individual Russian's Weltanschauung. The concept of the nation-state was contrasted to the concept of the nation-family. The Slavophile "nation" was represented as a symbol of stagnation, Asiatic quietism, eternal marching in place, and cultural death. If you

21. Ibid., p. 362. 22. Ibid., p. 363. 23. Ibid., p. 361. 24. Ibid., p. 363. 25. Ibid., pp. 355-56.

are for the movement of History—so Ravelin persuaded his reader— if you are for life and against death, then you are for the founder of the Russian state, Ivan the Terrible, and you are for his Oprichnina. The lamentations of moralists, like Raramzin, the slanders of reac­tionaries, like Pogodin, and the protests of advocates of stagnation, the Slavophiles, cannot conceal the fact that progress in Russia owes its existence to the state, and the state to the Oprichnina, and the Oprichnina to Ivan the Terrible. Thus, for the second time in Russian historiography, Ivan was transformed from a tsar-tormentor into a hero, and—what is more important—into a symbol of Russian power. But if the sentimental eighteenth century was content with this, for the positivist nineteenth he became the symbol of progress as well.

3. The "Historical Necessity" of the Oprichnina

Ravelin developed only the points of departure for the construct which Solov'ev clothed with flesh in his gigantic, multivolume History of Russia. Of course, Solov'ev digressed from Ravelin's abstract mod­els. Many things were dictated to him by the living material of history which Ravelin allowed himself to disregard. Solov'ev had arrived in­dependently at the contrast between the kin-based (old) order and the state-based (new) order as early as his doctoral dissertation, A His­tory of the Relations Between the Russian Princes of the House of Riurik, published in 1847. True, Solov'ev's conception of this was oversimpli­fied and primitive in comparison to Ravelin's. As originally formu­lated, it would have been easily destroyed by Pogodin, Solov'ev's for­mer mentor, and subsequently his eternal enemy. Nevertheless, the fact that the two conceptions were essentially the same shows once again how much the air of Nikolaian Russia was infected by apologia for Ivan the Terrible.

In his dissertation, Solov'ev's thesis was so marked by special plead­ing that even Ravelin, in a review which took up 123 pages in three issues of Sovremennik [Contemporary] (that is the kind of review they wrote in those days!) was compelled to reproach him, even though affectionately, with "a certain prejudice ... in favor of Ivan the Terri­ble."[172] Solov'ev declared that,

the opportunity of [free] departure, which was seen by some as a right . . . and by others as a sacred custom and tradition . . . was defended by the old society with all its strength against the state strivings of the Mus­covite grand princes, who justly saw in it absurdity, lawlessness, treason. This is the meaning of the struggle which began long ago in Northern Rus' but. . . reached its extreme point under . . . Ivan IV. If it is just to say, as many do, that Ivan IV was obsessed with treason, then at the same time it must be admitted that the old society was obsessed with [the right of] departure and free movement.[173]

"From these words it is clear how accurately the author views the sig­nificance of Ivan in Russian history," Kavelin comments. "We have not yet read anything about Ivan which so profoundly satisfied us."[174]And a little further on: "In Mr. Solov'ev, Ivan IV has found a worthy advocate for our time."[175]

In fact, the "right of departure," which in the fourteenth century had still been a precious guarantee for boyardom against the tyranny of princes, had long since lost its significance by the time of Ivan IV. The boyardom at that time was concerned with quite other problems. It was the peasantry for whom the right of departure had truly fate­ful significance in the mid-sixteenth century. Ivan Ill's St. George's Day, which was the legislative guarantee of this right, was now at stake. And for this reason its abolition, which Solov'ev depicts as a ne­cessity of state, signified in plain language the enserfment of the peas­ants. And although Solov'ev does not say a word about the peasantry, he understands very well that it was by no means accidental that the "old society" was "obsessed with the right of departure." "Ivan IV," he says, "was not arming himself only against the boyars, for it was not only the boyars who were infected with the long-standing disease of old Russian society—the passion for movement and departure."³⁽¹ And Kavelin raises no fundamental objection to this. In other words, sympathy with the "necessity of state" proved so great in their liberal hearts that before it all other considerations, including hatred for slavery and revulsion against tyranny, retreated into second place. For Solov'ev, Kurbskii is, of course, the "advocate ... of the ancient claims of the retainers, brought by them from ancient Rus'—[claims] to the custom of counselorship and to the right of free departure"— while Ivan the Terrible, full of "bright thoughts of state" and "clarity of political vision," displays "the great mind of a tsar . . . indefatigable activity . . . and judgment." [176]

For all that, Solov'ev was a historian. In his dissertation, he dis­cussed the time of Tsar Ivan only in a concluding chapter, a kind of appendix, essentially unconnected to the basic theme, and he spoke of it on the basis primarily of the tsar's correspondence with Kurbskii. He still had to familiarize himself with the sources. And this was a terrible trial, which not even such principled adherents of autocracy as Karamzin and Pogodin were able to withstand. When, many years after Solov'ev, the remarkable Russian poet Aleksei Tolstoi famil­iarized himself with the sources, he admitted that as he read them the pen fell from his hand—not only because, as he wrote, such a mon­ster as Ivan the Terrible could exist on Russian soil, but also because there could exist a society that could gaze upon him without indigna­tion. Even so passionate an advocate of Ivan the Terrible as the well- known late-nineteenth-century reactionary from Khar'kov, Professor K. Iarosh, was compelled to admit, in reading the Sinodik—that is, the memorial to the victims of the Oprichnina, compiled at the order of the tsar himself—that,

Blood spurted everywhere in fountains, and Russian cities and villages gave voice to groans. . . . With a trembling hand we turn the pages of the famous Sinodik, and pause with a particularly heavy feeling at the short and eloquent notations: let the Lord remember the soul of thy slave So-and-so—"with his mother, and his wife, and his son, and his daughter."[177]

S. B. Veselovskii, apparently a religious man, was shaken for his en­tire life by another aspect of the matter:

The physical cruelty of the torturers and executioners seemed to Tsar Ivan insufficient, and he . . . resorted to extreme measures. . . . which, for the victims and their contemporaries, were more terrible than phys­ical pain or even death, since they struck the soul for all eternity. So that the person would not have time to repent and make his final arrange­ments, he was killed suddenly. So that his body would not receive the benefits of Christian burial, it was chopped into pieces, pushed under the ice, or thrown out to be eaten by dogs, birds of prey, or wild beasts, the relatives and strangers being forbidden to bury it. In order to de­prive the person of hope for the salvation of his soul, he was deprived of memorialization."

Not only to kill, but to exterminate your posterity to the last per­son, so that there should be no one to pray for your soul; not only to torment you here in this world, but to condemn you to eternal tor­ment beyond the grave: such was the everyday practice of Ravelin's hero. And even with the all-saving "necessity of state," it was difficult to justify it, at least in the eyes of a person with a spark of humane instinct. Solov'ev simply could not keep consistently to Ravelin's ab­stract logic. "It is strange, to say the least, to see the historical explana­tion of phenomena confused with moral justification of them," he exclaimed.

Ivan cannot be justified. ... A person of flesh and blood, he was not aware of the moral and spiritual means for establishing law and order . . . instead of healing he intensified the disease, and accustomed us still more to tortures, the stake, the gallows. He sowed terrible seeds, and the harvest was terrible—the murder of his older son by his own hand, the killing of the younger one at Uglich, and the horrors of the Time of Troubles! Let not the historian pronounce a word in justification of such a person.[178]

It is all the more sickening, after this, to read the cold, mechanical reasoning of our contemporary I.I. Smirnov about the "inevitability of the Oprichnina terror," and the "objective necessity for physical ex­termination of the most prominent representatives of the hostile princely and boyar clans."[179] Unlike Solov'ev, Smirnov shows no awareness of the moral indecency of a policy which has the goal of physically exterminating people holding dissident opinions. None­theless, the idea of the "objective necessity" of the Oprichnina was in­troduced into Smirnov's mind by Solov'ev himself. By this logic, if the Oprichnina actually was the sole possible means of shaping the Rus­sian state in the face of the treachery and rabid opposition of the forces of reaction surrounding the tsar, then the question is essen­tially solved, and one is left to argue only about the means. Solov'ev does not like terror as a means, but Smirnov does: it is just that he is not sentimental. On the same analogy, a historian who argued that Soviet Russia in the 1930s was indeed saturated with treason, that all the higher personnel of the country were conspiring against the state, and that the enserfment of the peasantry in the course of collectiviza­tion and the attachment of blue- and white-collar workers to their jobs was "historically necessary" to the survival of the state would be compelled to "justify morally" total terror and the GULAG. It seems that Veselovskii was right when he observed ironically that "all of Solov'ev's conclusions are reducible to the following reasoning: on the one hand, we cannot help recognizing, and on the other, we cannot help admitting."[180]

4. The Capitulation of Slavophilism

After Ravelin and Solov'ev, the second epoch of Ivaniana proceeded in three directions, the revisionist, the apologetic, and the "acciden­tal." The first tried to offer resistance to the "myth of the state," which had suddenly evolved to the point of fetishism. The second directly developed the apologetic tendency of Ravelin, while decisively rid­ding itself of Solov'ev's tormenting moral doubts. The third tried to reduce the Oprichnina to a detail which, though monstrous, was ran­dom and nonessential. For our purposes, the most interesting figure in the first tendency was Ronstantin Aksakov; in the second, Evgenii Belov; and in the third, Vasilii Rliuchevskii. The rest of this chapter will deal basically with them.

The revisionist tendency of Ivaniana was represented by the Mos­cow Slavophiles of the nineteenth century. Much has been written about them. Nevertheless, their political position seems strange, not to say exotic. How is one to react to people who saw the greatest evil in any kind of constitution, and, generally, in any attempt at juridical limitation on state power, and at the same time fought valiantly for unlimited freedom? "Unlimited power to the tsar; unlimited freedom of life and spirit to the people; freedom of action and law to the tsar, freedom of opinion and expression to the people."[181]

In fact, Slavophilism is not, in the broadest sense, a specifically Russian phenomenon, let alone one belonging exclusively to the nineteenth century. Wherever autocracy prevails, or autocratic ten­dencies predominate—whether France in the 1770s or Iran in the 1970s, ancient China or contemporary Russia—at the opposite pole there arises something like Slavophilism. And the power of this "Slav­ophilism" is directly proportionate to the power of the autocratic tendencies. Superficially, "Slavophilism" (in this broader sense) is a desperate attempt to organize a political structure in accordance with religious dogma, whether this be Russian Orthodoxy, Confucianism, or Islam. However, its true nucleus is not so much the Gospels, the

Koran, or some other religious revelation, as a completely secular tra­dition which presupposes that an ideal society existed at some time in the past and was then deformed by an autocratic catastrophe analo­gous to the Biblical flood. Thus, the essence of "Slavophilism" is a ro­mantic belief that, having stripped away the false upper stratum of modern political reality, we will find the eternal and immutable core of Absolute Good—free from the corrupt politicians with their artifi­cial laws and stupid constitutions, free in short from all the "cunnings of reason," as Hegel had it. We can see this belief equally clearly in Confucius and Baudeau, in Homeini and Solzhenitsyn.

Let us remember that at approximately the same time—around 500 в.с.—there evolved at the opposite ends of the known world two opposed world-views. The culture of the ancient Greek polis de­veloped the classical concept of the law as a political limitation on power—a means of control by the system over the administration. The cul­ture of the ancient Chinese city-states developed the concept of Fa— of the law as a means of legalization of the arbitrary conduct of the government, or, in other words, of control by the administration over the system. Only by understanding this fundamental difference can we ap­preciate the revulsion which Confucius felt for Fa, in contrasting to it Li—the traditional system of moral and cultural values. Paradoxical as it may sound, the first historical variety of "Slavophilism" was thus, from my point of view, early Confucianism.

Was it by accident that in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu predicted that France was slipping irreversibly into the abyss of despotism, there was a trend of thought one of whose representatives, the Abbe Bodeaux, considered the Chinese empire to be the ideal monarchy, contrasting it to ancient Greek de­mocracy whose "chronicles present only a horrible spectacle of horri­ble violations against the peace and happiness of mankind"?³"

Confucianism as a form of absolutist opposition had practically ceased to exist as early as the 2nd century в.с. On this basis we can hypothesize, without even addressing the specialized works, that the period from the 5th to the 2nd century в.с. in China was an epoch of fierce struggle between Fa and Li—that is, between autocratic and ab­solutist cultures—which ended with the complete defeat and dissolu­tion of early Confucianism in a uniform and lifeless Fa culture.[182]

French history of the eighteenth century presents an analogous model, but with the opposite result. After the collapse of the Turgot government in the remarkable two-year period 1774-76, which showed the Utopian nature of the absolutist opposition, France re­sponded to the autocratic tendencies with a revolution.

In other words, in the Far East, the collision between Fa and Li led to the fruitless triumph of despotism; in the West, it led to revolution; and on the gigantic Eurasian continent of Russia, to a symbiosis of both cultures, which over the course of centuries generated Slavophi­lism. For this reason, what turned out to be only a passing episode in the political history of France and China, survived all reforms and revolutions in Russia.

For nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles, monarchy was the natural, traditional form of political organization; on the other hand, "freedom of life and of the spirit" (or what I would call latent limita­tions on power) was also sanctified by tradition. The problem of the ideal political structure consequently consisted not in destroying the original harmony of both traditions in order to achieve constitutional limitations on power, but, on the contrary, in preserving their mutual trust and harmony. How was this to be done? Just as it was done in a family or in a peasant commune. Did children or peasants seek con­stitutional limitations on the power of the father or head man? Could a constitution be a real guarantee against the abuse of power, whether in a family, in a commune, or in a nation? Who would guarantee this guarantee?

"Look at the West," exclaimed Aksakov, "the peoples . . . have be­gun to believe in the possibility of a perfect government and have made up republics and devised constitutions . . . and have become poor in spirit. . . . [The societies] are ready to collapse ... at any mo­ment."⁴⁰ In a fatal fit of mindlessness, the European peoples had de­stroyed what Confucius called Li, and what Aksakov called "the union between the land and the state." The price exacted for this would be terrible. Nihilism and anarchy, general hostility and dis­trust, enfeeblement and degradation awaited the West. What was the major task of the Russian state from this point of view? Did it not con­sist in closing tight the doors of its fortress and not permitting into the country the fatal infection of Western civilization? The Russian state in the person of Peter I acted in precisely the opposite way. Thus the "government [was] separated from the people and made alien to it.'"" The "yoke of the state over the land" was established and "the Russian land became, as it were, conquered, and the state the con-

Teoriia gosudarstva и stavianofitov, p. 31.

Ibid., p. 38.

querer. The Russian monarch took on the status of a despot, and the free subject people, the status of a captive slave."⁴² As Aksakov ex­plains it: "The state accomplished a coup d'etat, dissolved the alliance with the land and subordinated it to itself."⁴³

How was Russia to be purified of pollution and return to the na­tional tradition? The reader will probably not be surprised now to learn that the political recommendations of the Slavophiles coincided word for word with the "political dream" of Prince Kurbskii and the author of The Conversation of Valaam—the calling of an Assembly of the Land with which "the tsar could every day take counsel as to the affairs of the realm." The nineteenth-century descendants of the me­dieval oppositionists, trained in Europe (which they cursed in con­temporary philosophical language, invoking Schelling and attacking Hegel), proposed the same thing as their slandered ancestors. More than this, in 1881 they were literally a step from a repetition of 1549. Only the Oprichniki of a new tyrant (this time Alexander III) pre­vented their dream from becoming a political fact.

Despite their new philosophical ammunition, Aksakov's Slavo­philes proved weaker than their medieval ancestors. The "myth of the state" was an apologia for despotism, which they should have re­belled against and revised. But like their twentieth-century descen- dents, the new Russian right (Solzhenitsyn being a best example), they counterposed to the "myth of the state" not analysis but a myth of their own, which I would call the "myth of the land." And just as the modern Slavophiles appeal from the alien Marxist state to the prerevolutionary "enlightened authoritarianism" of the tsars, their predecessors appealed from the alien police state of the tsars to the "enlightened authoritarianism" of pre-Petrine Russia. And again, like the modern Slavophiles, who associate the origin of autocracy, i.e., serfdom and despotism, with Lenin, their predecessors, contrary to facts generally known, connected the origins of serfdom and despo­tism not with the time of Ivan the Terrible but with that of Peter. How indeed could Russians have enslaved their compatriots when the "land" was still firmly closed to the penetration of Western influ­ences? As far as the myth was concerned, serfdom and despotism simply could not exist in Russia before Peter.

If Ivan the Terrible, who had no smell of Europeanism about him, had appeared after Peter, everything would have been all right, but he preceded Peter. The Slavophiles accordingly declared the Oprich-

Rannie slavianofily, p. 86.

Aksakov, p. 50.

nina to be, as it were, the first draft of an attempt to break up the union of the land with the state, a kind of rehearsal for the Petrine coup d'etat. But this meant that the Petrine catastrophe was not a freak of fate, that long before Peter, without any alien influences, the national tradition had showed such deep crevices as to compel one to doubt the very existence of the union between the land and the state. Here the Slavophiles turned to the saving "human formula" of the first epoch of Ivaniana. Ravelin had been the first to resort to it when he wrote of Ivan and Peter that "both of them were equally keenly aware of the idea of the state . . . but Ivan was aware of it as a poet, and Peter the Great as a man of primarily practical concerns. In the first, imagination predominated, and in the second, the will."[183] The Slavophiles tried to pay him back in his own coin. Yes, Ivan was an "artistic nature," they agreed. His acts were therefore dictated not by reason, for which Ravelin and Solov'ev praised him, but by the play of imagination. He was impulsive; he uttered good and evil, without plan or comprehension or system. And in the process of this spon­taneous amateur artistic activity he among other things accidentally hit upon the institution of the "police state." This was the way the Slavophiles tried to avoid the connection between Ivan and Peter which was fatal for their myth, and which Ravelin emphasized.

Is it surprising, after this, that the Slavophiles had nothing essen­tially to say in reply to Ravelin? Their revisionism was destined to choke on the same sentimental indignation toward the "fierce blood­sucker" with which we are already familiar from the works of Ra­ramzin. This was obvious from their first sally—the article by M. Z. R. . . . (the pseudonym of Iu. Samarin) "On the Historical and Liter­ary Opinions of the Journal Sovremennik" in Pogodin's magazine Moskvitianin. "In [Ravelin's] words," wrote Samarin,

a thought which is offensive to human dignity emerges without his knowing it. . . namely that there are times when a man of genius can­not help becoming a monster and when the corruption of his contem­poraries . . . absolves the person who is aware of it from the obligations of the moral law, or at least reduces his guilt to the point where his de­scendants can only sympathize with him, and the heavy burden of re­sponsibility for his crimes is unloaded onto the heads of his victims.

Those psychological exercises were laughable to a diehard like Ra­velin. He had come too far from the sentimental epoch of Raramzin.

"This is not an argument against me," he parried carelessly. "One must intentionally close one's eyes in order not to see that history is filled with such situations offensive to human dignity.'[184] And he con­descendingly added, "From the horror of that period there remains to us the cause of Ivan, and it shows how much higher he was than his contemporaries."[185] The polemic proceeded in this key. The Slavo­philes read moral sermons to the "statists," who haughtily rejected them. Solov'ev contemptuously called the Slavophiles "Buddhists" in history. And, as though recognizing their impotence, the latter tried to avoid the theme of Ivan the Terrible. In their extensive histo- riographic legacy, we do not even find articles especially devoted to him, let alone books. There was no counterattack—only partisan raids, powerless against the regular army of the state school. Just as the conservative absolutist opposition had capitulated before Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, so its heirs and successors capitu­lated before his apologists three hundred years later.

5. The "Old" and the "New"

The representatives of the apologistic tendency reveal their school by open glorification of their teachers. S. Gorskii, who in Kazan' wrote a fat book, The Life and Historical Significance of Prince A. M. Kurbskii (the sole monograph on the patriarch of the Russian opposition, which unfortunately is sadly reminiscent of a poor joke), writes as follows: "Not taking upon myself the boldness to claim complete indepen­dence for my work, I will say openly that the works of Messrs. So­lov'ev, Kavelin, and other prominent figures in the field of native his­tory have guided me."[186] In fact, Gorskii has a single idea on his mind, one let fall by Solov'ev in the sixth volume of his History of Russia. It would hardly be worthwhile discussing, were it not that it became the leitmotif of all the subsequent apologetics for Ivan the Terrible. Cer­tainly, the apologists make every effort to conceal their relationship to the most stupid of the reactionaries of the last century (as a rule they do not even mention Gorskii's book), but their language irrefutably betrays them:

Ivan was concerned that the idea of the state should triumph over the elements opposed to it, and wished to see it prevail in Russian society, because he saw in it the guarantee of the glory and prosperity of the fatherland. . . . This idea placed Ivan above the conceptions of the cen­tury; it raised him to a height inaccessible to his contemporaries, and therefore it is not surprising that they . . . began a life-and-death strug­gle with Ivan. . . . The old does not give way to the new without a strug­gle. . . . Boyardom strove to retain the old. This was chiefly what the ideology of boyardom consisted of. . . . The epoch of the creation of the Russian national state appears before us as a time of acute and tense struggle: of the old and the new.™

Gorskii wrote only part of this passage. The rest is the inalienable property of our distinguished contemporaries, D. S. Likhachev and I. I. Smirnov, and was published a century after the appearance of Gorskii's book. The reader will perhaps succeed in finding an essen­tial difference in these quotations; I did not.

Asking whom we are to believe in the dispute between the tsar "standing on an inaccessible height," and the traitor making a brave front abroad, Gorskii answers, "It is better to believe a tsar than a trai­tor who is unscrupulously slandering his sovereign."[187] But what was simple for a primitive monarchist (who was, furthermore, a captive of the stereotypes of the "state school") becomes complicated for our contemporaries. And for that matter, for Gorskii's own contempo­raries it was far from clear-cut. As Kurbskii's nineteenth-century suc­cessor, Aleksandr Herzen, who also fled his country and struggled in exile against its autocracy, explained: "We are not slaves to our love for our country, any more than we are slaves to anything else. A free person cannot admit a dependence on his native land which would compel him to participate in matters contrary to his conscience."[188]

Here we touch upon the most sensitive spot in Ivaniana. The "myth of the state" arose in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, and Ivan­iana—that is to say, the argument over Tsar Ivan—is the form in which it has developed. But in its hypnotic and almost mystical power, the myth goes far beyond the limits of this argument, and influences the Russian world-view itself. In no other area, perhaps, does this dic­tatorship of the myth manifest itself so vividly as in attitudes toward the political opposition as a whole and political emigration in particu­lar. This is the test for freedom of thought; here lies the bad con­science of all of Russian historiography. And we must be grateful to Gorskii for having posed this question so openly—even if he did so out of stupidity.

For Gorskii and the majority of his coevals, Herzen was the same kind of traitor as Kurbskii—"the power of darkness, which under­mined the most precious foundations of our state structure," as one of them put it.[189] Down the centuries, from Ivan the Terrible to Josef Stalin and beyond, whenever confrontation has arisen between the individual and the state, the majority takes the side of the state, and the political emigre is open to an accusation of treason. Herzen un­derstood this quite well. Protesting against the bloody suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863, he wrote:

If no one makes this protest, we will be alone in our protest, but we will not abandon it. We will repeat it in order that there be witness to the fact that in a time of general intoxication with narrow patriotism, there were still people who found the strength to separate themselves from a rotting empire in the name of the future Russia which was coming to birth, and found the strength to subject themselves to the accusation of treason in the name of love for the Russian people.[190]

Not only Herzen, but hundreds of Russian oppositionists took this stand—from the Narodniks to the Bolsheviks. The most eminent of these were Georgii Plekhanov, who spent almost his entire conscious life in exile, and Vladimir Lenin, who struggled abroad for the defeat of his own government, and therefore—by the logic of the "stat­ists"—of his nation, in the wars with Japan and Germany. All of these people were traitors in the eyes of the majority. All of them were judged as Gorskii judged Kurbskii. Then the revolution of 1917 occurred.

Everything, it seemed, had changed. The opinions of the old ma­jority were rejected and mocked by the new majority. Herzen, Plekha­nov, and Lenin were turned from traitors into saints. Only one ver­dict remained in force as if there had been no revolution. And this was the verdict on Kurbskii. Even in our time, Academician D. S. Likhachev, closely following Gorskii, placidly called the correspon­dence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii "correspondence be­tween the tsar and a traitor."³⁴ Professor la. S. Lur'e, quoting Tsar Ivan, also called Kurbskii and the entire group of political emigres in

Lithuania (Vladimir Zabolotskii, Mark Sarykhozin, the Elder Artemii, Timofei Teterin) "traitors to the sovereign."[191] And very recently, in the 1970s, Professor R. G. Skrynnikov has had no words for Kurbskii except "a history of treason," "treasonous negotiations," and "trea­sonous relations."[192] Destiny was truly merciless toward Kurbskii. For 400 years, both before the revolution and after it, no one has been found willing to raise their voice in defense of him.[193] But whom should anyone who was so bold refute? Skrynnikov, who borrowed his opinion from Gorskii? Gorskii, who borrowed his opinion from Ravelin? Kavelin, who borrowed it from Karamzin? Karamzin, who borrowed it from Tatishchev? Tatishchev, after all, had it from Tsar Ivan himself, who first called Kurbskii a "traitor" and "oath-breaker." Only by tracing back this chain, unbroken for centuries, do we come finally to the original inspiration of all of these ideologists and histo­rians—to the true founder of the "state school" in Rus'. Before Tsar Ivan, the Muscovite government stood, at least officially, for freedom of political choice, decisively rejecting—even if for selfish reasons— the treatment of political emigration as treason. Ivan was the first to put the question in the terms in which it is phrased to this day. His credo ran: "He who opposes the regime opposes God. . . . Children should not oppose their parents nor slaves their masters." The tsar cited Saint Paul, forgetting that the apostle was speaking of slaves. Kurbskii was a famous general, a boyar, and an advisor to the tsar. He felt himself to be a free man.

The alternative to emigration which the tsar proposed to him was: "If you are just and pious, why do you not desire to suffer and ac­quire a martyr's crown from me, the obstinate ruler?"[194] Kurbskii pre­ferred exile and struggle against the tyrant to slavery and the martyr's crown, a choice for which Russian historians have unanimously pro­nounced him to be a traitor, thereby recognizing Ivan the Terrible's alternatives, slavery or martyrdom, as the rational ones, and coming down on the side of the autocrator. But it is not so much the medieval sermons of the terrible tsar which astonish, as the slavish concurrence of modern Russian commentators.

Karamzin called one subsection in his History "The Treason of An­drei Kurbskii." This was not as easy for him as it was for Gorskii. A few pages earlier, he describes the situation preceding Kurbskii's flight: "Muscovy was paralyzed with fear. Blood poured out; in the dungeons and the monasteries the victims groaned; but . . . the tyr­anny was still maturing; the present was horrified by the future."⁵'' In a situation of total terror, when the fate of a person no longer de­pends on his or her behavior, but only on the caprice of the tyrant, on dark rumors, on evil reports—how in this situation, are we to judge a person who does not wait for the executioners to come after him? Ka­ramzin does not judge: "He [Kurbskii] could without qualms of con­science seek refuge from the persecutor in Lithuania itself." There is another thing, however, for which he cannot forgive Kurbskii: "Re­grettably, [he] did more: he joined the enemies of the fatherland. . . . He committed [to the king of Poland] his honor and his soul, and advised the king on how to ruin Russia.'"" But why Russia?—we might ask Karamzin. Why not the terroristic dictatorship of Ivan the Tormentor—a dictatorship which truly ruined Russia? We would ask this in vain of Karamzin, for whom the autocracy was the soul of Russia and struggle against it equivalent to struggle against the fatherland.

For Skrynnikov today, we must assume, the autocracy is no longer a synonym for the fatherland. However, he goes even further than Ka­ramzin. He not only associates himself with Gorskii, but judges the "traitor" even more severely than does Tsar Ivan himself: "The vice­roy of Livonia [Kurbskii] had been bribed by the Lithuanians, and was driven from his country by the fear of exposure. Kurbskii was not subject to direct persecution at home. To the last day he enjoyed power and honor."⁶¹ A little further on, Skrynnikov writes of the "in­solent reproach [by Kurbskii] to the tsar, [whom he] compared to a fierce and bloodthirsty beast," who had embarked on the "universal ruination" of his governors and counsellors.⁶² Well, does Skrynnikov refute this "insolent reproach"? Not at all. "Kurbskii's words," he writes,

N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia . . . , vol. 9, p. 23.

Ibid., p. 68.

R. G. Skrynnikov, Perepiska . . . , p. 61.

Ibid., p. 53.

had a quite real historical basis. On the eve of his flight, the tsar's wrath and punishment lost their usual personal character and began to affect entire families. After the death of A. Adashev, the tsar ordered his brother Daniil [the hero of the Crimean campaign of 1559] killed, with his son and his relatives—P. Turov, I. Shiskin, the Satins, and others. In precisely the same way he confined in a monastery the boyar Prince D. Kurliat'ev, his wife, his son, and his daughters.[195]

Furthermore, Skrynnikov understands the meaning of these events excellently: "The execution of famous war leaders symbolized the end of an entire period. . . . Under the 'liberal' regime of Adashev, the death penalty was not once applied to a boyar. . . . The first ex­ecutions of boyars in 1564 signalized the onset of the Oprichnina ter­ror against the boyardom." Why does Skrynnikov think that the boyar Kurbskii, a member of the Government of Compromise, understood what was happening less well than he himself does? In fact, Skryn­nikov does not think anything of the kind. "Kurbskii understood well the meaning of the events taking place before his eyes," he tells us.⁶⁴ What is there surprising, then, about the fact that "in a letter to the tsar, the refugee boyar undertakes the role of intercessor for all peo­ple suffering in Rus'"?⁶⁵ Why is Kurbskii's flight necessarily explained by an ignoble bribe, and not by a noble attempt—which under the conditions of total terror is the only possible one—to "intercede for all the people suffering in Rus'"? Why does this simple and apparently self-evident explanation not even enter Skrynnikov's head—just as it did not enter the head of Likhachev or Lur'e, or Solov'ev or Kavelin, not to speak of Karamzin? And why, if he asserts that the political emigre Kurbskii was bribed by the Lithuanians, is Skrynnikov of­fended when he is told that the political emigre Lenin was bribed by the Germans?

We will never find the answer to these questions unless we return to poor Gorskii, with his stereotype about the struggle of "the old" and "the new." Let us remember how he reasons: "The old for Kurb­skii was second nature; it was his flesh and blood, a vital necessity. . . . He considers the restoration of the old tradition the main task of his life." What "old tradition" is Gorskii talking about? And what is bad about it? "What advantage for Russia could be expected from the restoration of the custom of boyar council? . . . What advantage could it obtain from its old-fashioned politics"? Gorskii asks indig­nantly, revealing in his simplemindedness the horrible secret of the entire apologia for Ivan the Terrible. And he answers: "Nothing but ruin and harm."[196] Here we see quite clearly what, precisely, it is that Gorskii (and his Soviet pupils) cannot forgive the opposition of that time, and why it is that they hate Kurbskii: the struggle for limitations on power, for the custom of the boyar council and the Assembly of the Land, for social control over the administration. Why was the ruin in England not brought about by the existence there, even in the darkest times, of the custom of Parliament? Why was France not ruined by the provincial Estates-General? Why was Sweden not ruined by the Landtags, why did Denmark get only good out of its "old-fashioned politics"? Why is it that what was possible for them was not possible for us? No one, beginning with Tatishchev and end­ing with Skrynnikov, has an answer to this question. For that matter, no one ever asked it. Autocracy is the imperative for Russia, a histor­ical necessity, its destiny.

In fact, the church immunities, the custom of the boyar council, the custom of taking fixed taxes from the peasants, "by tradition," "as they were received by the previous landowners," the mobility of peas­ants, guaranteed as a matter of law by St. George's Day, and every­thing else that Ivan the Terrible destroyed, were old fashioned and essentially feudal forms of limitation on power. Many of them really had outlived their time, and required modernization. But, after all, this was what the Government of Compromise was doing. One need only briefly list what it did, or tried to do, in order to make this clear. What were the replacement of the vicegerents by a local government, and the introduction of trial by jury, and the creation of a new code of law, and the calling of an Assembly of the Land, and the attempt to introduce an income tax and restrict the immunities, if not a moderni­zation of the limitations on power ? By modernizing the traditional limita­tions on power, the Government of Compromise was following in the line of contemporary European absolutism. The Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, however, questioned not the form of the limitations on power, but their existence.

In the Criminal Code of contemporary Russia there is an article which defines "flight abroad or refusal to return from abroad" as treason to the motherland. This is a most precise indicator of what the victory of Ivan the Terrible over Kurbskii turned Russia into. Kurbskii's French contemporary, Duplesis-Mornay, in his famous Suit Against Tyrants, says almost word for word the same thing as the Muscovite exile. The tyrant, he says, destroys his counsellors ("the strong men in Israel," as Kurbskii calls them). The tyrant does not take counsel with the estates and the land ("he is not a lover of coun­sel," says Kurbskii). The tyrant counterposes to them hired mercen­aries ("he creates a seed of Abraham out of stone," says Kurbskii). The tyrant steals the property of his subjects ("he ruins them for the sake of their miserable votchiny," says Kurbskii). One might think that Duplesis-Mornay was describing Ivan the Terrible. And although he was also a political emigre, it is hardly likely that any modern French historian would call him a traitor. For they do not consider a struggle against tyranny to be treason. But the Russian historians—from Gor­skii to Skrynnikov—do. They have chosen the autocrator's alterna­tive: as distinct from Kurbskii, they have preferred slavery.

The myth of the state is cunningly constructed. In it the apologia for tyranny is skillfully interwoven with patriotism, thejustification of terror with national feelings. In raising one's hand against tyranny, one therefore risks dealing a blow to patriotism; in protesting against terror one may offend national feelings; in struggling for limitations on power, one turns into a traitor to one's country.

6. The Bugbear of Oligarchy

Evgenii Belov's On the Historical Significance of Russian Boyardom en­deavors to show what Russia might have turned into if Kurbskii and the boyardom had prevailed, if Ivan the Terrible had not found a power base for the Oprichnina in the bureaucracy. Belov is, as far as I know, the only Russian historian prepared to praise the Muscovite bureaucracy, whose contemptible and fiercely grasping nature has be­come proverbial. In his opinion, the bureaucracy preserved Russia from "oligarchical intrigues" which had marked its entire history be­fore the Oprichnina.

Belov uncovers the first oligarchical intrigue as early as 1498, when, he believes, the boyar opposition compelled Ivan III to crown as his heir-apparent not his son Vasilii (the father of Ivan the Ter­rible), but his grandson Dimitrii. The intrigue against Tsar Ivan thus began before he had even had time to be born. The countercon- spiracy in favor of Vasilii, Belov asserts, "did not contain a single boyar." The only ones who acted in defense of the traditional struc­ture of power, which was on the point of disintegration, were the "secretaries [d'yaki] of the party of Sofia." Everything in subsequent Russian history proceeded according to the same model: selfless scions of the people in the shape of the secretaries were constantly thwarting the cunning intrigues of the boyar oligarchs—right until 1565, when the tsar was finally able to unseat the latter. "[Ivan] the Terrible is the retribution on the boyardom for its narrow and egois­tic policies. . . . [Ivan] the Terrible diverted Russia from the danger of oligarchical rule. [Had it not been for the Oprichnina] Russia would have been transformed into a second Poland."[197]

This, in brief, is Belov's concept of things. Only at first glance does it seem to be worthy of the pen of a Gorskii. In fact, Belov is doing the same thing as Kavelin, but from the other side. He was the first in Russian historiography to pose the question of an alternative to au­tocracy. Other than oligarchy and transformation into a second Po­land, he declared, no such alternative existed. Poland symbolized po­litical disintegration and, in the final analysis, the loss of national existence. If this was the sole alternative, then the autocracy of Tsar Ivan, as also the messianic role of the Muscovite bureaucracy, could be considered justified. Not only Soviet historians, such as A. N. Sak­harov, but also such classic Russian historiographers as V. O. Kliu­chevskii, fell into this trap.

Belov's argument is most conveniently considered by comparison of the "maintenances" (kormleniia) held by vicegerents in the Polish- Lithuanian state and in Muscovy. In the first case, such maintenances provided the vicegerents with a nucleus for creating their own politi­cal bases in the regions. The vicegerents subsequently represented "their" districts in the Duma (or "Rada" as it was called in the Polish- Lithuanian kingdom) and were practically uncontrolled rulers of them. As Kliuchevskii says, "the most influential force in the Rada— the 'front' or 'higher' Rada—was made up of the major regional rulers." In other words, the political basis of the oligarchy was the di­vision of the country in practical terms among semiautonomous gov­ernors, who, although they were formally subject to the central pow­er, appeared in effect as overlords of the regions which "maintained" them: "The economic and administrative strings of local life were in their hands, and the Rada served them only as the conductor, and not as the source of their political influence. Its members were not mere state counsellors, but actual rulers."⁶"

The political process in sixteenth-century Muscovy proceeded, as we have seen, in precisely the opposite direction. Not only the main­tenances, but also the district vicegerencies themselves were abol­ished. The local elected governments, which replaced them, were directly subject to the central government offices. Paraphrasing Kliu­chevskii, we may say that in Muscovy the boyars were "not actual rulers but mere state counsellors." As the experience of the "boyar govern­ments" of 1537 to 1547 showed, they never claimed more than this. Thus, on the eve of the Oprichnina there were no oligarchical tenden­cies in Muscovy, even in embryonic form.

But if this is so, the oligarchy turns out to be only a bugbear thought up by Belov to justify the autocracy—a bugbear in con­firmation of which he was not able to cite a single argument which would stand historical criticism. The problem, however, was not in his arguments, but in the fact that Russian historiography, as we shall see presently, did not have at its disposal any other alternative.

7. Kliuchevskii's Premise

The Muscovite state in the sixteenth century was an absolute mon­archy with an aristocratic governing class, Kliuchevskii tells us. "The boyars thought of themselves as powerful counsellors of the sover­eign of all Rus'," while Ivan IV, on the other hand, rewarded them with the status of "bondsmen of the sovereign," he continues.

Both sides felt themselves in an unnatural relationship to each other, which they, it seems, had not been aware of while it was developing, and did not know what to do with when they noticed it. . . . Boyardom did not know how to set itself up and to set up the order of the state without the power of the ruler, to which it was accustomed, and the sovereign did not know how to deal with his kingdom in its new boundaries with­out the help of the boyars. The two sides could neither gel along with each other nor do without each other. Not knowing either how to get along or how to part, they tried to separate, and to live side by side but not to­gether. The Oprichnina was to be a way out of this difficulty.⁶⁴

But this attempted compromise misfired, because "in the Oprichnina, he [the tsar] felt at home, like a real ancient Russian liege lord among his serf-henchmen, and could without hindrance exercise his per­sonal rule, which was hampered in the Zemshchina by the morally obligatory respect for traditions and customs which were honored by all."[198] The tsar "assigned to the Oprichnina a task for which in the government of that time there was no special institution. The newly created appanage office was supposed to become also the highest in­stitution for protecting the order of the state from sedition, and the detachments of the Oprichnina were to be a corps of gendarmes and also an execution squad in cases of treason."⁷' As a result, "the Oprich­nina, in ridding the country of sedition, introduced anarchy, and in protecting the sovereign, shook the very foundations of the state."[199]A monstrous parody of a German knightly order—but without any conception of the code of chivalry—the Oprichnina simultaneously fulfilled the functions of a political party and a political police. Called into being, according to Kliuchevskii,

by a collision the cause of which was the system, and not persons, it was directed against persons, and not against the system. The Oprichniki were put, not in the place of the boyars, but against the boyars; by their very role, they could not be the rulers, but only the executioners of the country. . . . This means that for the direction which the tsar gave to the political encounter, his personal character is greatly to blame, and therefore it takes on certain significance in the history of our state.[200]

Thus, the premise for all of Kliuchevskii's reasoning is that "abso­lute power" and the boyardom "could not get along with each other." From this it follows that the Oprichnina, being incapable of resolving this conflict, takes on the aspect of a savage and bloody, but neverthe­less historically accidental, episode in Russian history, due primarily to the personal character of Tsar Ivan. It is this, properly speaking, which constitutes the "accidental" thrust of Kliuchevskii's conception.

8. An Impossible Combination?

It seems to me that Kliuchevskii's error arises out of the fact that he does not attempt to analyze the category of "absolute power" (which in turn prevented him from distinguishing absolutism from despo­tism). Authoritarianism presented itself to him—and to his contem­poraries as well—as a single, undifferentiated phenomenon. "Ab­solute power" is a synonym for "unlimited power." He conceived of limitations on power, as was customary for the "state school," ex­clusively as political (juridical) limitations. The category of latent lim­itations on power, which was the paradoxical core of the "limited/ unlimited" structure of absolutism, did not exist for him. And here a riddle arose: how and by what means could there nevertheless be in pre-Oprichnina Russia "absolute power . . . with an aristocratic ad­ministration," if from the very beginning, even under Ivan III, "the character of this power did not correspond to the nature of the govern­mental tools through which it had to act?"^7,1

Kliuchevskii sees the answer to this question as twofold: first, this impossible combination was possible only as long as its impossibility was not recognized, and as long as the conflict between the two politi­cal forces had not come out into the open; secondly, the "personal character of Tsar Ivan" comes into play here. It turns out that,

Having acquired an extremely exclusive and impatient, purely abstract idea of supreme power, he decided that he could not rule the state as his father and grandfather had done, with the collaboration of the boy­ars . . . and he incautiously raised the old question of the relationship between the sovereign and the boyardom—a question which he was not in a position to answer and which, therefore, he should not have raised.⁷"'

Kliuchevskii admits that until Tsar Ivan "raised the question," the collaboration of the single leadership ("absolute power") with the boyar Duma (the "aristocratic personnel") proceeded relatively smoothly, and the disagreements which arose between the tsar and the Duma were smoothed over without reaching the level of political confrontation.

Its [the Duma's] structure, authority, and customary order of business seemed to be based on the assumption of an unshakable mutual con­fidence between its chairman and the counsellors, and bore witness to the fact that between the sovereign and his boyars there could not be a conflict of interest, and that these political forces had grown together, and become accustomed to acting in concert, hand in hand, and could not—did not know how to—proceed otherwise. There were colli­sions . . . and arguments, but about business, not about power; opin­ions about business came into conflict, but not political claims.™

And even the development of "bureaucratic governmental person­nel," which was natural as the state grew and became more complex, could not destroy this order of things: being directly subject to the tsar, the bureaucracy in the government departments was trans­formed into an apparatus of executive power, which did not claim to take part in legislation and the adoption of political decisions. Thus, both the aristocratic and the bureaucratic personnel in this system of absolute monarchy had their own separate and nonintersecting func­tions, which did not contradict each other.

But all this was true only so long as the conflict was not discerned.

Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (2nd ed.), vol. 2, pp. 180-81.

Ibid., p. 197.

Ibid., p. 348.

Once having arisen, it had to grow into a confrontation to the death, a war of annihilation, what is now called a zero-sum game. This had to be, because the organic incompatibility was, as Kliuchevskii liked to say, a political fact. There was no getting away from it. Had it not been Tsar Ivan, some other tsar would have detonated this delayed- action bomb built into the Muscovite political mechanism.

Muscovite political practice and theory compel us in equal degree to doubt Kliuchevskii's premise. In the first place, the conflict in the Muscovite absolute monarchy arose long before the birth of Tsar Ivan. As early as the 1520s, his father, Vasilii, had tried to establish a personal dictatorship by contrasting executive power to the boyar Duma. But, contrary to Kliuchevskii's supposition, this conflict did not lead to a fatal confrontation. Quite the contrary: under the Gov­ernment of Compromise, boyardom, revealing an indubitable capac­ity to learn, responded with Article 98 of the law code and the calling of an Assembly of the Land. In other words, the Muscovite political machine turned out to be sufficiently adroit to leave room for political maneuvering. This was still an open system, on its way to achieving new political forms.

True, the attainment of these new forms ran counter to the inter­ests of important social groups (in the first place, the church hier­archy). The political base of the government appeared to be divided, and the entire Muscovite political machine started to skid. And it was precisely because of this unstable equilibrium of forces—and not be­cause of the "impossible combination" of absolute power with the aristocratic administration, as Kliuchevskii had it—that the character of the tsar emerged into the foreground. History, it seems, created three possible roles for this man. He could join the government in its efforts to crush the resistance of the church hierarchy, thus leading and actualizing the absolutist coalition of Non-Acquirers, boyardom, and the proto-bourgeoisie; in this role he could speed up the Euro- peanization of Russia. Or he could maneuver between the opposing forces in the Muscovite establishment, acting in the role of arbiter, and thus giving the system time to grow naturally in the same direc­tion. Or, finally, he could go for a coup d'etat, creating his own politi­cal base in the shape of a "new class," and thereby putting an end to the process of Europeanization. For the reasons discussed above, he chose the third role.

Thus, because of his incorrect premise, Kliuchevskii was destined to become a prisoner of the artificial dichotomy of his opposite, Be­lov: either the aristocracy established the order of the state without leadership being vested in any one person (oligarchy), or the leader ruled without the collaboration of the boyars (autocracy). In this view, there was no third alternative, inasmuch as the latent conflict between "absolute power" and aristocracy had been dragged to the surface and exposed.

But there was a third alternative. The entire history of medieval Europe is a proof of this. It was precisely this conflict, now hidden and now open, which was the norm, the law of existence, and, we may say, the natural condition of all absolutist states. What was unnatural was the liquidation of the struggle, and the autocratic metamorphosis ex­perienced by Russia in the course of the Oprichnina—the creation of the "new class" and the ensuing establishment of universal service.

We reach the same results in considering Kliuchevskii's premise from a theoretical point of view. The establishment of absolute mon­archy did not by any means signify, as Belov thought, the mere sub­stitution of the bureaucracy for the aristocracy as governmental personnel. It did not signify this, since absolute monarchy was an in­comparably more complex system than the conglomerate of feudal princedoms which preceded it. And the complexity of the system de­manded not simplification, but corresponding complication of admin­istration. Therefore, absolute monarchy—whose specific character consists precisely in the heterogeneity of its political elite—is con­structed of two elements which differ in their significance and in their origin: of bureaucratic and aristocratic personnel, of the combination of these in the most various proportions, and of political compromise between them.

Of course, the setting up of an aristocracy within an absolute mon­archy is a painful and contradictory historical process, inevitably fraught with numerous conflicts. Certainly, in the course of these con­flicts, the single leadership—as the Scandinavian experience, for ex­ample, shows—could base itself not only on the bureaucracy, but also on the city dwellers, the service landholders, and even on the peas­antry. The aristocracy in its turn could seek political allies in various social strata. The compromise between them could take various forms. However, what is important for us here is that both the single leadership and the aristocratic personnel were elements in a single system of absolute monarchy, and as a rule set themselves the goal not of destroying each other, but merely of finding an advantageous form of compromise. I say "as a rule," because when in the France of the late Bourbons, the kings in fact tried to rid themselves of the political interference of the aristocracy, the absolute monarchy, as Montes­quieu noted, began to degenerate into despotism. But, I repeat, as a rule the argument between absolute monarchy and aristocracy con­cerned the form of coexistence and not life or death—this is the essence of the matter. Nowhere in medieval Europe, except in Russia, had a "new class" replaced the old elite, thus creating, instead of absolutism, a political structure which was unique at that time, the autocracy.

In other words, contrary to Kliuchevskii's premise, absolute mon­archy was in principle compatible with aristocracy as a guarantor of the social limitations on power. And it was not absolutism but autoc­racy, therefore, which required the total replacement of an aristo­cratic governmental class by a system of universal service.

But if Kliuchevskii's premise was incorrect, his conclusions also be­came dubious. This applies to the idea that "the life of the Muscovite state even without Ivan would have been set up in the same way in which it was set up before him and after him,"[201] and that the Oprich­nina was a random and arbitrary historical accident, connected with the personal character of Tsar Ivan.

The connection of the Oprichnina with the Russian political tradi­tion is demonstrated very easily by Kliuchevskii's own analysis— which, alas, entirely contradicts his own conclusions. Does he not as­sert that "the sovereign, remaining faithful to the views of an appanage prince holding patrimonial properties, according to the ancient Russian law, treated them [the boyars] as his household servants with the title of bondsmen of the sovereign"? Does he not quite clearly formulate the historical character of the Oprichnina, saying: "In the Oprichnina, he [the tsar] felt at home—a real ancient Russian liege lord among his serf- henchmen"? Therefore, not the tsar's personal character was the es­sence of the matter, but rather the ancient "tradition of the appanage prince holding patrimonial estates," which Ivan the Terrible in the course of the Oprichnina made universal.

It is another matter entirely—contrary to the opinion of the des­potists, who see nothing but this tradition of the patrimonial ap­panage prince in Russian political history—that it not only did not dominate in sixteenth-century Muscovy, but hewed a path for itself only at enormous cost and with a great many victims. The Oprichnina itself is proof of this. If the Muscovite kingdom of the sixteenth cen­tury in fact merely reproduced the characteristic features of the East­ern Roman Empire, as Toynbee postulates, why, for example, did the despot need a coup d'etat, renunciation of the throne, manifestos to the people, a division of the country into two parts, an agreement with the boyars and the clergy, mass terror, a second capital, and a parallel apparatus of administration? According to the account of contemporaries, the tsar returned to Moscow after the revolution quite grey at thirty-five years of age. A Byzantine autocrator would simply have compiled lists of proscriptions, and one fine night, as the saying goes, have taken his opponents from their beds with his bare hands. Why did Tsar Ivan behave differently? Why did he need a revolution in place of a "night of the long knives," if not in order to break up the existing order of the state, created by a different, com­peting absolutist tendency?

Here, it might seem, is just the place to catch me up. For, objecting to Toynbee, I assert that Byzantinism—if by this we mean autoc­racy—was a fundamentally new phenomenon in sixteenth-century Russia; and, objecting to Kliuchevskii, I assert the reverse—that it was a traditional phenomenon. This is not a logical contradiction, how­ever, but an ontological one. It reflects the fundamental dualism of Russian political culture itself, which already existed in Kievan Rus'. Before Ivan the Terrible—even despite the Tatar influence—absolut­ist (European) tendencies predominated; after him they passed over into the opposition, yielding the historical proscenium to the vic­torious autocracy.

does not intend to continue the autocratic policy of Ivan the Terrible. On the contrary, he publicly and solemnly renounces it. Physical safety, an end to terror, the introduction of the category of "political death"—this is what he promises in his declaration, which is a medi­eval analog to the famous secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. But Shuiskii goes further: in the memorandum which he distributed to all the cities in the Russian land, we read,

I, the tsar and great prince Vasilii Ivanovich of all Rus' have kissed the cross that I, the great sovereign, will not give over to death any person not judged by a true court made up of my own boyars and will not take his patrimony and his house and his property from his brother and his wife and his children. . . . Likewise, I will not take houses and stores and property from merchants and trading people and peasants. . . . Likewise, I, the great sovereign, will not listen to false information and will try all cases well, by face to face contact, so that guiltless Orthodox Christians will not perish.⁷"

An end to denunciations, confiscations, executions of entire fam­ilies, mass plundering, murder without trial and investigation, an end to unlimited arbitrary rule—this is what the tormented Russian land cries for through the mouth of the tsar. It was not a matter of the liq­uidation of absolute monarchy. It was not a matter, consequently, of political limitations on power. This did not enter anyone's head. It was only a matter of elementary guarantees of life and property—of the latent limitations on power, in my terms—that is, a matter of res­toration of the absolutist spirit of Ivan III and the Government of Compromise. And Russian historiography proved unable to explain this, which is like not being able to explain the difference between Khrushchev and Stalin.

Kliuchevskii, though, with his fine historical intuition, felt some­thing unusual and historically significant in the declaration of the new tsar. He says: "The crowning of Prince Vasilii marked an epoch in our political history. On ascending the throne, he limited his power and officially set forth the conditions of this limitation in a document distributed to all the regions, on which he kissed the cross on being crowned."⁷⁴ This assertion of Kliuchevskii's called forth a protest by another classical figure in Russian historiography—Academician S. F. Platonov, with whom we shall have occasion to become familiar in more detail in the next chapter. In his famous Outlines of the History of

Cited in N. V. Latkin, Zemskie sobory drevnei Rusi, p. 104.

Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (1st ed.), vol. 3, p. 37.

the Rebellions in the Muscovite State of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Platonov inserted a subsection entitled "The Cross-Kissing Document is Not a Limitation." His commentary deserves to be reproduced:

In all this it is very difficult to see an actual limitation of the tsar's power, and one may see only an abandonment of unworthy means of manifest­ing these powers. Here the tsar does not yield any of his rights.. . . He only promises to refrain from arbitrary personal caprice, and to act through the court of boyars, which existed equally in all periods of the Muscovite state and was always a law-enforcing and legislative institu­tion, without, however, limiting the power of the tsar. In a word, in the memorandum of Tsar Vasilii one cannot find anything which would es­sentially limit his power and would be juridically obligatory for him.""

To this Kliuchevskii (shrewdly foreseeing the objections of his op­ponent) notes:

The oath denied the very essence of the personal power of the tsar in the previous dynasty, which had developed out of the appanage rela­tionships of a liege lord. Do heads of households swear oaths to their servants and tenants? Along with this, Tsar Vasilii renounced three pre­rogatives in which the personal power of the tsar was most clearly ex­pressed: (1) "disgrace without guilt"—the tsar's punishment without adequate occasion, and by personal decision; (2) the confiscation of property from the family and relatives of a criminal who were not in­volved in the crime. ... (3) extraordinary trials by police and other in­vestigative agencies, calling upon denunciation, with tortures and slan­ders, but without face-to-face confrontation, examination of witnesses, and other means of normal legal process. These prerogatives con­stituted an essential part of the contents of the power of Muscovite sov­ereigns. ... By divesting himself by oath of these prerogatives, Vasilii Shuiskii transformed himself from the sovereign of bondsmen into the legitimate tsar of subjects, ruling according to law."'

By what law? No constitution existed in the country which spec­ified the interrelationships of executive and legislative power, to say nothing of judicial power. These relationships were dictated by tradi­tion and political practice, but not by law. Shuiskii promised a "true court," but where were the guarantees that he would fulfill his prom­ises? Therefore it seems that Platonov is right in asserting that "in the memorandum of Tsar Vasilii one cannot find anything which . . . would be juridically obligatory for him."

S. F. Platonov, Ocherki po istorii smuty v Moskovskom gosxidarstve XVI—XVIII vekov, p. 230. Emphasis added.

V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia, 1st ed., vol. 3, p. 40.

However, is not Kliuchevskii right in saying that the tsar re­nounced the autocratic prerogatives which gave him the opportunity to treat his subjects as slaves? True, these prerogatives proceeded "from the appanage relationships of a liege lord." But after all, Ivan the Terrible had tried to extend them over the entire state by means of mass terror. Vasilii Shuiskii renounced them, and therefore, it seems, actually did limit his power.

Thus it turns out that both Platonov and Kliuchevskii were right. Kliuchevskii was right, in insisting on the fundamental novelty of Shuiskii's antiautocratic manifesto. And Platonov was right in empha­sizing its traditional, absolutist character. Both were right, for the res­toration of absolutism declared by Tsar Vasilii was an antiautocratic and anti-Oprichnina action.

But at the same time, both were wrong.

10. The Argument With Platonov and Kliuchevskii

For Platonov, who understood the Oprichnina as a revolution by the tsar which liberated him from the tutelage of the reactionary aristoc­racy, Shuiskii's manifesto was a kind of credo for the restoration of the "old order." The overthrown aristrocracy once again ruled in Moscow, cunningly taking advantage for this purpose of the abuses of the Oprichnina:

The old nobility once again occupied first place in the country. Through the mouth of its tsar it solemnly renounced the system which had just been in operation, and promised "true judgment" and protection from "all violence" and injustice, of which it accused the previous regime. . . . Tsar Vasilii said and thought that he was reestablishing ... the old order. This was the order which had existed before the Oprichnina. . . . this, it seems to us, was the true meaning of Shuiskii's memorandum: it an­nounced . . . not the reduction of the power of the tsar, but the return to its former moral height."²

But what is bad about the "return of the regime to its former moral height," and why is Platonov convinced that it was only the "old no­bility" which had a stake in "protecting from all violence" ? Was not "true judgment" in the interests of the society as a whole? And wasn't this precisely what Shuiskii promises, in obligating himself "not to take from the merchants and the trading people and the peasants . . . their houses and shops and their property" ? Isn't it more natural to assume that the manifesto of Tsar Vasilii (like Khrushchev's secret

82. Platonov, pp. 231-32. Emphasis added.

speech) reflected only the simple truth: the boyardom was aware that it could not protect its own privileges without at the same time ex­tending the elementary guarantees of life and property to the whole nation? Strangely enough, Platonov did not notice this. But after all, is this really so strange? Platonov was not the first Russian historian or the last for whom the hypnosis of the "myth of the state" cut off the path to the understanding of the dualism of Russian political tradition.

But, at the same time, it is difficult to agree with Kliuchevskii that "the ascent of Tsar Vasilii to the throne marked an epoch in our polit­ical history." It might have marked an epoch if it had occurred before the Oprichnina, on a wave of absolutist reforms by the Government of Compromise, as an element of these reforms and their logical devel­opment. But it occurred after Ivan the Terrible—after the absolutist structure of the state had collapsed to the ringing of the Oprichnina's bells and in the light of its bonfires, and after the leaden cloud of serfdom had gathered over it. Ivan's "new class" was still there and the problems facing the country had not been mitigated, but, on the contrary, had been sharpened. Mortal battle was raging. This was a time for deeds, and not only kissing of crosses. How could the coun­try be saved from the inexorably advancing autocracy? Could this be done at all? Who knows? But if it was at all possible, it required some­thing considerably more than manifestos—the immediate convoca­tion of an Assembly of the Land, a solemn restoration of St. George's Day, an alliance with the "best people" of the peasantry and of the cities, the organization and arming of a new political coalition, and a strategy of reform going far beyond that of the pre-Oprichnina Gov­ernment of Compromise. But this was not what the new tsar had in mind—and for this reason Vasilii Shuiskii was destined to play only a walk-on part in political history, as Alexander Kerensky did in 1917.

CHAPTER IX

AGAIN AT THE CROSSROADS

1. At the Boundary of the Ages

An observer who around the year 1900 undertook to make a prog­nosis of the further development of Ivaniana would have had to report, first of all, that the political (to say nothing of the moral) repu­tation of the terrible tsar had been ruined. As debatable as Kliuchev­skii's methodological premise might be, his verdict on the Oprichnina was, on the face of it, not open to appeal. Whatever new facts were discovered by twentieth-century historians, and whatever new con­clusions they might come to, Ivan the Terrible and his Oprichnina were not suited to rehabilitation. Consequently, a new repetition of the "historiographic nightmare" appeared to be excluded. There would be neither new Tatishchevs nor new Kavelins. Lomonosov's ar­rogant bravado, Karamzin's sentimental indignation, and the servile enthusiasm of Gorskii, all equally must now have seemed the product of a dark, archaic, almost mythological era of Ivaniana.

In fact, a third "historiographic nightmare," the dimensions of which exceeded anything which had occurred up to that time, lay just around the corner. I am not speaking now of the shameless hymns to the "commander of the peoples" and the "great and sagacious states­man" which the coming generation of Russian readers was destined to hear from the coming generation of Russian historians—hymns which would reduce Veselovskii to despair. Nor am I speaking of the fact that the irrationality of the Oprichnina was once again rational­ized, and the unjustifiable justified. How all this happened, we shall see presently. But never during the preceding "historiographic night­mares" had a Russian historian openly justified serfdom, the greatest evil which the Oprichnina brought down on Russia. In the 1940s, however, serfdom was to be declared progressive. I.I. Polosin would write: "The strengthening of serfdom at this time—in the sixteenth century—signified the strengthened and accelerated development of the country's productive forces. . . . Serfdom was a natural, spon­taneous necessity, morally offensive, but economically inevitable."¹

1. I. I. Polosin, Sotsial'no-politicheskaia . . . , p. 132.

2. The Economic Apologia for the Oprichnina

The "state school" died quietly at the beginning of the century. De­spite the writings of P. N. Miliukov and G. V. Plekhanov, its triumphs were behind it. The formulas which had once prevailed—whether the "struggle of the state with the clan," the "struggle with the steppe," or the "enserfment of the society by the state"—came to provoke in many experts only a condescending smile. S. F. Platonov admitted with mocking academic politeness that "the scientific meth­od of the historical-juridical [state] school exercised a strong influ­ence on the development of the science of Russian history." He had in mind, however, only the "quantitative and qualitative growth" of the works of Russian historians.[202] He spoke of the "hyperboles" of the founder of the school, Kavelin, with the same contempt for archaic dilettantism with which Kavelin in his time had spoken of Karamzin's metaphors. M. N. Pokrovskii was not even polite: he openly laughed at the old models. In the writings of the historians of the state school, he observes,

there is developed a grandiose picture of how the "struggle for the steppe" forged and created the Russian state. The steppe people, like wild beasts, attacked Rus'; in order to save itself from these raids, the entire state was constructed along military lines: half of it—the service landholders [pomeshchiki]—had to live in constant readiness for battle; the other half—the taxable people [merchants, craftsmen, and peas­ants]—were supposed to support the first. . . . Thus the state, in the name of the common interest, enserfed the society to itself, but when the struggle for the steppe ended in the victory of the Russian state, eman­cipation began: first, in the eighteenth century, the military obligations of the nobility were lifted, and then in the nineteenth century, serfdom for the peasants also fell. . . . This grandiose picture has one defect: it does not correspond at all to historical reality. The most intense strug­gle with the steppe came in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries . . . but it was not just then that the unified state was formed . . . and there was no enserfment. . . . And in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when both the Muscovite state and serfdom originated, the Tatars had al­ready grown so weak that they could not dream of conquering Rus'.[203]

The "state school" continued to reign but, like the queen of En­gland, it had ceased to rule. A coup d'etat (one might call it an "agrar­ian coup," because the mythology of the "state school" was replaced by the mythology of the "agrarian school") had taken place in Ivaniana.

The nineteenth century had been tormented by the riddle of the strength of the Russian state, which raised Russia from the "darkness of nonexistence" to the rank of a superpower. The twentieth century began with the riddle of the weakness of the Russian state, which hung over a precipice and threatened once again to plunge Russia into the "darkness of nonexistence." Central to the problem was the "agrarian question"—the question of the redistribution of land resources. As may be supposed, the right wing of Russian historiography fa­vored strengthening the monarchy by giving land to the peasants and thereby creating a strong conservative social base. The left wing, on the other hand, hoped to destroy the monarchy by rousing the land- hungry peasants against it. For both, the aristocracy surrounding the tsar was a hostile force. It was perhaps for this reason that the "agrar­ian coup" in Ivaniana was carried out by an unnatural coalition of right-wingers (led by the monarchist Platonov) and left-wingers (led by the Marxist Pokrovskii).

The monarchist K. Iarosh—who, if the reader remembers, was horrified by the Sinodik of Ivan the Terrible—nevertheless justified the tsar's destruction of his advisors. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in his opinion, the tsar "understood that the sole danger in terms of the establishment of cordial relations between the Russian people and the throne consisted of these importunate 'councillors' holding letters patent. Ivan wanted to reduce them entirely to the ranks of ordinary citizens of Russia and servants of the fatherland."[204]And since they did not wish to be "reduced," he destroyed them. This was a recommendation to Nicholas II to head a new Oprichnina.

Thus, the dramatic quality of the times entered into Ivaniana. An­cient history returned, as it were, to modern Russia. The dead seized the living. A contemporary civilized country, which had succeeded in astonishing the world not only with its military might, as in the time of Lomonosov and Kavelin, but also with its great literature—a coun­try to whose greatest historian, Kliuchevskii, the Oprichnina had quite recently seemed "purposeless"—stood again on the point of un­dergoing a medieval spasm.

Platonov, an infinitely more serious and subtle scholar than Iarosh, depicted the sources of the Oprichnina in this way: "[Ivan] the Terri­ble felt around himself the danger of an opposition, and of course understood that this was a class opposition, a princely opposition, led by the political memories and instincts of formerly sovereign princes 'who desired by their traitorous custom' to become appanage 'lords' along with the Muscovite sovereign."[205] Thus, Platonov refused to con­sider the conflict which led to the Oprichnina in the traditional terms of Solov'ev and Gorskii—in the terms of a "struggle of the service no­bility (the new) with the boyardom (the old)." For him the matter was much more serious: the might of the formerly sovereign princes was so great that it threatened the very existence of the centralized Rus­sian state, which might perhaps collapse again into a collection of ap­panage principalities. For this reason I will call his view the "ap­panage" conception.

Pokrovskii was even more adamant in refusing to accept the over­simplified scheme of the "state school." Platonov gave the "class of for­merly sovereign princes" the center of the stage. Pokrovskii placed the "class of the bourgeoisie" there. Whereas for Platonov, the Govern­ment of Compromise accordingly represented this "class of formerly sovereign princes," for Pokrovskii it represented a class alliance of the bourgeoisie with the boyardom. For Platonov the essence of the Oprichnina consisted in the fact that the tsar took land away from the formerly sovereign princes, who had a great deal, and gave it to the service landholders, who had little, and thereby strengthened his power. For Pokrovskii its essence consisted in more or less the same thing—with the difference that the tsar himself appeared in this con­flict as the tool of the bourgeoisie, which, having repudiated its class alliance with the boyardom, had chosen a new partner, the service landholders. For Pokrovskii, "the whole coup was a matter of estab­lishing a new class regime, for which the personal power of the tsar was only a tool, and not at all a matter of freeing [Ivan] the Terrible personally from the tutelage of the boyars which hindered him."⁽ⁱ

But for both Platonov and Pokrovskii, the basis of the conflict was the redistribution of the land and the agrarian crisis, that is, the eco­nomic revolution. Both of them, in trying to replace the old models with their own, even more fantastic ones, suffered defeat. At the same time, both triumphed: the mongrel "agrarian school" born of their unnatural alliance prevails to this day in Ivaniana.

3. Platonov's Contradiction

Platonov's attitude towards the Oprichnina was no less complex than Solov'ev's. On the one hand, he declares just as categorically as So­lov'ev that "the meaning of the Oprichnina had been thoroughly ex­plained by the scholarly studies of recent decades."[206] And we already know that this meaning consisted, according to Platonov, in the con­fiscation of the lands of the formerly sovereign princes. But on the other hand, the blood and bestialities of the Oprichnina provoke ex­actly the same revulsion in the new classical writer as they did in the old one. And Platonov makes the qualification that "the goal of the Oprichnina could have been achieved by less complex means," since "the means which were used by [Ivan] the Terrible, although they proved effective, brought with them not only the destruction of the nobility, but also a number of other consequences which [Ivan] the Terrible can hardly have wished or expected.""

But in that case, what was the alternative to the Oprichnina? How otherwise could the tsar have acted in the face of the disintegration which threatened the country? What could he have done if the Mus­covite government itself (or the "Chosen Rada," as Platonov by tradi­tion called it) had taken the side of the formerly sovereign princes? The historian, after all, himself notes that "the Rada, we must sup­pose, was made up of princes, and its tendency was apparently also in accordance with their interests. The influence of the 'priest' and his 'collection of dogs' in the first years of their activity was very strong. . . . The entire mechanism of administration was in their hands."" Was the tsar's victory conceivable without the Oprichnina—that is to say, without a coup d'etat, without the creation of his own army and police, free of the influence of the formerly sovereign princes, without mass terror and all those atrocities which were so repugnant to Platonov? In the final analysis, Platonov himself, almost 400 years later, is unable to think up any alternative to the Oprichnina. Moral lamentations ap­pear to be of no more help to him than they were to Solov'ev: his logic leads inexorably to justification of the Oprichnina.

But this is only half the problem. The real trouble begins when the reader recognizes to his astonishment that despite his loud declara­tions, Platonov is, in fact, not even sure of his main thesis that the Oprichnina was directed against the formerly sovereign princes and not against the nobility in general.

The touchstone, which gives an appearance of novelty to Plato­nov's deductions, is "expulsion." "The father and grandfather of [Ivan] the Terrible, following the old custom, when they conquered Novgorod, Pskov, Riazan', Viatka, and other places, expelled the leading strata of the population, which were dangerous for Muscovy, to the internal districts of Muscovy, and placed settlers from central

Muscovy in the newly conquered districts," Platonov says. True, the father and the grandfather applied "expulsion" to the conquered dis­tricts; but the grandson applied it to the Muscovite heartland. This, Platonov solemnly declares, however, is precisely what the grandson's political innovation consisted in: "That which succeeded so well with external enemies, [Ivan] the Terrible thought of trying with internal enemies."[207] In other words, the tsar, just like Lenin, applied the meth­ods of international war to class war. But the question still remains: Who were these sinister "internal enemies" who were expelled?

Platonov gives two answers. "On the one hand," he tells us in his book Ivan the Terrible, in full accordance with his "appanage" concept, "the tsar decided to remove from the hereditary appanage lands their owners, the formerly sovereign princes, and to settle them in places dis­tant from their former residence, where there were no memories of ap­panage conditions or conditions conducive to opposition."[208] His for­mulation of the role of the Oprichnina in his Outlines of the History of the Rebellions supports this: "The Oprichnina systematically broke up the land tenure of the service princes."™

The following page of Ivan the Terrible, however, contains some­thing more reminiscent of Gorskii than of Platonov: "This opera­tion ... of removal of landowners took on the character [of] replace­ment of large-scale votchina [hereditary] land tenure by small-scale service-estate [conditional] land tenure.'"³ As we see, there is no talk here of "formerly sovereign princes" and "memories of appanage conditions." Likewise in the Outlines another formulation with re­spect to the Oprichnina supports Gorskii: "The Oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the structure of the Muscovite state; it destroyed the land holdings of the nobility in the form in which they had existed from old times.'"⁴ Here every­thing is simple: the tsar is against the aristocracy.

It was not for nothing that Platonov vacillated between the "ap­panage" and "state" explanations of the Oprichnina. In fact, the "scholarly studies of recent decades" by no means furnished him with data to support the hypothesis of the tsar's struggle with the "class of formerly sovereign princes"—a hypothesis which he incautiously presented as an unconditional fact. When so powerful and scru­pulous an investigator as S. B. Veselovskii undertook to verify Pla- tonov's hypothesis, it proved to be simply a fiction. "In a search for effective and striking lectures, S. F. Platonov abandoned his charac­teristic caution of thought and language, and presented a conception of the policy of Tsar Ivan . . . which was filled with flaws and fac­tually inaccurate assertions," Veselovskii says. Calling Platonov's inter­pretation downright "pseudoscientific" and even "a circuitous ma­neuver to rehabilitate the monarchy," Veselovskii somberly states that "the idea that the Oprichnina was directed against the old land hold­ings of the formerly sovereign appanage princes must be recognized as a misunderstanding through and through.'"⁵ This conclusion is fully shared by the leading (after A. A. Zimin) contemporary Soviet expert on the Oprichnina, R. G. Skrynnikov, who also asserts that "the Oprichnina was not a special measure against the appanage. . . . Neither Tsar Ivan nor his Oprichnina Duma ever emerged as consis­tent opponents of appanage landholding.'"⁶

4. Pokrovskii's Paradox

All of this, however, only became clear many decades afterwards. For Pokrovskii, who at the beginning of the century revised Russian his­tory from a Marxist point of view, and therefore needed an economic explanation of its fundamental phenomena, Platonov's hypothesis was a gift from heaven. For Platonov was the first to depict the drama of the Oprichnina neither as an empty battle of "the new" against "the old" nor as the destruction of the "oligarchy," but as the embodiment of class struggle and of indomitable economic progress. And the atrocities of the Oprichnina did not confuse Pokrovskii as they had confused Karamzin and Solov'ev. Because what is progress after all? When you chop wood, the chips fly. If the liberal Kavelin was not ashamed to use the nineteenth-century vogue for "the progress of the state idea" as a justification of the Oprichnina, then why should the Marxist liberal Pokrovskii hesitate to use the twentieth-century vogue for "economic progress"? Relying on Platonov's hypothesis, Pokrov­skii invented what I would call the economic apologia for the Oprich­nina. He introduced it at the very point when Tsar Ivan was apparently being irrevocably banished from contemporary political reality to the obscurity of the Middle Ages to which he belonged. The Oprichnina suddenly acquired a rational economic underpinning. It was no longer "purposeless," as Kliuchevskii had asserted. It fulfilled a necessary

S. V Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p. 32.

R. G. Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror, pp. 214-15.

function in Russian history by destroying the aristocratic latifundia and making room for the "progressive economical type" of service landholding, which was supposed to bring with it the replacement of obligations in kind by commodity-and-money relationships. Tsar Ivan proved to be a tool of Marxist Providence. Against this, what were Kliuchevskii's highbrow speculations about the struggle of the "abso­lute monarchy" with the "aristocratic governmental personnel"? What use was moral indignation? All these were disorderly "superstruc- tural" sentiments. Thus Ivan the Terrible, unexpectedly elevated to a pedestal by economic determinism, again underwent rehabilitation.

But, in order to support this rehabilitation, one had still to demon­strate that the Oprichnina actually pursued a progressive economic role; and, in the second place, that the aristocratic latifundia had in the sixteenth century actually become a reactionary bastion in the path of progress; and, finally, that service landholding somehow corre­sponded to this sought-after progress. Pokrovskii fearlessly undertook the task:

Two conditions led to the swift liquidation of the Muscovite latifundia of that time. In the first place, their owners rarely possessed the ability and the desire to organize their operation in a new way. ... In the sec­ond place, the status of a feudal noble carried "obligations" with it, at that time as later: a great boyar . . . had by tradition to keep an exten­sive "household," a mass of idle attendants and retainers. ... As long as all these lived on grain gotten free from the peasants, the boyar might not notice the economic burden of his official prestige. But when many things had to be bought for money—money whose value was fall­ing from year to year as the Muscovite economy developed—it became a heavy burden on the shoulders of the large landowners. . . . The small vassals were in this case in a considerably more advantageous position. They did not spend money on their service, and in fact re­ceived money for it. . . . If we add to this that the small estate was con­siderably easier to organize than the large ones . . . and that the small landowner was better able to supervise personally the work of his cor- vie peasants and slaves, while the large landowner had to do this through an overseer, we see that when the battle between the large and middle-sized landholdings began, all the economic benefits were on the side of the latter ... by expropriating the rich votchina boyar, the Oprichnina followed the path of natural economic development."

Here we have both proofs at once—of the reactionary nature of boyar votchina and the progressive nature of service landholding.

True, the "economic" character of both provokes some doubt, to say the least. For, having to do chiefly with "the burden of official pres­tige" and "a lack of desire to organize the economy in a new way," we still remain primarily in the sphere of social psychology. The only properly economic consideration here seems to be the fall in the value of money, and the consequent rise in the price of grain. How­ever, this "price revolution" was by no means specifically Russian, but was a phenomenon common to all of Europe. Even in Pokrovskii's time this was known to every student. But if this is so, why is it that the progressive "agrarian revolution" in favor of the small vassals, which was connected with this in Pokrovskii's opinion, was successful only in Russia and in Eastern Europe, and did not become widespread any­where in the West? Were the Western seigneurs more willing than the Muscovite boyars to "organize their economy in a new way" ? Or per­haps their "feudal noble status" carried fewer obligations and it was, therefore, easier for them to bear the "economic burden of their offi­cial prestige" ? Unfortunately there is no answer to these questions to be found in the economic apologia for the Oprichnina. And there are also others.

As we already know, the Oprichnina, according to Pokrovskii, al­though it was "the state of the service-landowning class,"¹" was not only formed "with the participation of [commercial] capital,'⁴⁵' but proved essentially to be a stepping stone to the ascent to the throne of Muscovy of "commercial capital wearing the cap of Monomakh." We might call it in this sense a Russian equivalent of the Western bour­geois revolutions. So interpreted, Muscovy ought perhaps to contend with the Netherlands for the role of pioneer on the path of European economic development. If the triumph of the small vassals in fact em­bodied the march of progress, then Eastern Europe, and especially Russia, should have gained a decisive advantage over the countries of the West, which did not allow so progressive a process among them­selves. The West was in that case doomed to lag behind, and the Mus­covy of Ivan the Terrible should have become the torchbearer of world progress.

Only one thing remained incomprehensible: What was one to do with the subsequent four centuries of Russian history? How was one to explain why all these wonders somehow did not take place? More than this, that precisely the reverse occurred: Russia was thrown down into "the darkness of nonexistence," and the "progressive ser­vice-landowner" suddenly became the organizer of feudal slavery.

Pokrovskii was a scholar first and then a Marxist: apparently the bourgeois leavening was still too strong in him. In any case, he did not even try to distract the reader's attention from the metamorphosis of the service landowner, which made nonsense of his whole conception. This metamorphosis always remained mysterious and inexplicable for Pokrovskii:

His [the service landowner's] victory should have signified a major eco­nomic success—the final triumph of the "monetary" system over the "subsistence" one. In fact, we see something quite different. Obligations in kind, crystallized into a complex whole known under the name of "serfdom," again take center stage and are maintained, this time firmly and for a long interval. . . . Having suppressed the feudal votchina owner in the name of economic progress, the service landowner very swiftly himself becomes a backward type: this is the paradox with which the history of the Russian economy of the epoch of [Ivan] the Terrible concludes.²"

However, this paradox did not compel Pokrovskii to review the economic apologia for the Oprichnina or to doubt the Marxist under­standing of history. He doubted himself; he doubted the possibilities of the scholarship of that time, pinning his hopes on the idea that the "followers in the cause of applying the materialist method to the data of the Russian past will be more fortunate."²' Such was the testament of the patriarch of Soviet historical scholarship.

5. The Political Meaning of "Collectivization"

On the ruins of Platonov's "misunderstanding through and through" and Pokrovskii's "paradox," there developed—and it is functioning prosperously to this day—the so-called "agrarian school" of Soviet historians. By the authoritative testimony of N. E. Nosov, "it is pre­cisely this point of view which is brought forward in the works of B. D. Grekov, I. I. Polosin, I. I. Smirnov, A. A. Zimin, R. G. Skryn­nikov, Iu. G. Alekseev, and it is perhaps the most widespread up to the present time." [209] Almost all of the luminaries of Soviet historiogra­phy are mentioned in this list.

This looks all the more paradoxical inasmuch as the Soviet histo­rians themselves showed that there was no "paradox" in the economic results of the "revolution from above." In the first place, large-scale landholding in medieval Russia by no means corresponded to large- scale farming. Quite the contrary: the former was only an organiza­tional form, the protective envelope within which the truly progres­sive process of peasant differentiation took place. Here, as Nosov says, "development proceeds along a new, bourgeois, and nonfeudal path. We have in mind the social differentiation of the countryside, the buying up of land by the rich . . . the development of commercial and industrial capital by peasants. But it was precisely this process that was sharply slowed down, and then totally stopped, on service landholdings."[210] Academician S. D. Skazkin describes the metamor­phosis of the "votchina" farm into a service farm in precisely the same way: "The landlord's land is transformed into a large-scale, purely entrepreneurial operation. In connection with this, the significance of the peasant farm also changes. . . . The peasant farm becomes a source of unpaid labor power, and for the peasant himself, his allot­ment and farm become, as Lenin expressed it, 'wages in kind.'"[211]

One would have to be very incurious not to wonder what Skazkin and Nosov are actually describing—the economic results of the "Oprichnina of Ivan" in the 1570s, or those of Stalin's "collectiviza­tion" in the 1930s. Did not the real meaning of this "collectivization" consist in the same "change in the significance of the peasant farm" of which Skazkin is speaking? In the same transformation of the house­hold plot, left in the possession of the peasant as his "wages in kind," of which Lenin spoke? In the same transformation of the peasants' labor into "unpaid labor power" for the working of the "landlord's land" of the collective farms? Is it not true that the economic signifi­cance of "collectivization" consisted in the violent arrest of the pro­cess of peasant differentiation, and in the scattering and robbing of the "best people" of the Russian countryside (which in Stalin's time was called "dekulakization"), of which Nosov speaks?

The analogy between the "collectivization" which destroyed Rus­sian agriculture in the 1930s and the "agrarian revolution" of the 1570s is inescapable. In both cases, the economic result of the Oprich­nina was autocratic reaction, which put an end to the process of bour­geois differentiation of the peasantry, and thereby destroyed not only the fruits of previous development, but also the potential it embod­ied. The Oprichnina rises before us as a monstrous embodiment of reaction, in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, in the eco­nomic sense no less than in the political. And this is the real answer to "Pokrovskii's paradox"—one delivered not by the logic of the histo­rians but by the logic of history itself.

6. The Militarist Apologia for the Oprichnina

In the 1930s, the so-called "Pokrovskii school" collapsed. The matur­ing regime no longer needed a "revolutionary" historiography. It thirsted rather for stabilization and national roots. It needed a histo­riography which would unify it with the Russian historical tradition, not one which cut it off from that tradition. And, for this purpose, it was willing to make sacrifices, and prepared to prefer old professors to new revolutionaries. R. Iu. Vipper, for example, who first pub­lished his book on Ivan the Terrible in 1922, when there was no smell of Marxism about him (in fact, Vipper, along with Platonov and Ia- rosh, belonged to the right wing), was able twenty years later to write proudly in the preface to the second edition of this book: "I am glad of the fact that the basic positions of my first work have remained un­shaken and, it seems to me, have been confirmed once more by the studies of highly authoritative scholars in the past two decades."" Vipper was entitled to be triumphant: the Marxists had come to him, and not he to the Marxists. And once again, like Kavelin in the 1840s and Platonov in the 1920s, he advanced the standard and invincible justification of "the studies of the past two decades."

But even taking all this into account, it is difficult to explain the solemn manifestations of loyalty to Ivan the Terrible—the new coro­nation of him in Russian historiography—which occurred in the 1940s. It would probably have been unimaginable if Russia had not, during the previous decade, entered the most severe phase of pseu­dodespotism in its history, with all the traditionally characteristic at­tributes: a "new class," an explosion of modernization, total terror, a militarist-nationalist delirium, and, of course, a new Ivan the Terri­ble. Once again, its traitorous boyars and the opposition (who were now called "the Right-Trotskyist bloc") were eliminated on a national scale. Once again, its Kurbskiis fled the country (having, incidentally, no notion of their medieval predecessors), and some of them (for ex­ample, Fedor Raskol'nikov)²" wrote desperate letters to the tsar from abroad. Once again, serfdom was introduced, and once again, the Baltic had to be conquered.

Stalin's Oprichnina had to be historically legitimized; not only force, but the memory and tradition of the nation had to be mobi­lized towards its justification. Folksongs about Ivan the Terrible sur­faced—a conclusive argument in the dispute with the opponents of the tsar. Serfdom was rehabilitated. "The Oprichnina in its class ex­pression," wrote I. I. Polosin,

was the formation of serfdom, the organized robbing of the peas­antry. . . . The survey book of 1571—72 tells how the members of the Oprichnina drowned the peasant rebels in streams of blood, how they burned whole regions, how those of the peasants who survived after the . . . punitive expeditions wandered "in the world" and "between the houses" as beggars.[212]

We have again before us a picture of the collectivization of 1929-33. And what, other than indignation and grief, could this picture of the extermination of one's own people provoke? In a Soviet historian, it provoked a prideful declaration that serfdom was an absolute neces­sity for the "intensified and accelerated development of production."

This may seem an open revision of Marxism, not to say cynicism. But in the 1940s it seemed to be filled with Marxist fire and pioneer enthusiasm. In the new "myth of the state" created by the new Ivan the Terrible, the first postulate was that the history of society is pri­marily the history of production. And the second postulate was that as this society-production develops, both the treason within it and the danger from outside grow. The third postulate, that terror ("the strug­gle against treason") and the cultivation of military might are the sole guarantees of "the intensified and accelerated development" of so­ciety-production, flowed logically out of this. Two general motifs, "treason" and "war" and "war" and "treason," are inextricably bound up together.

The new Ivan the Terrible himself spoke of his predecessor in con­sistent terms. His conversation with the actor N. K. Cherkasov, who played the part of Ivan the Terrible in Eizenshtein's film, has pre­served this precious testimony for posterity:

Speaking of the statesmanship of [Ivan] the Terrible, Comrade I. V. Sta­lin noted that Ivan IV was a great and wise ruler, who guarded the country from the penetration of foreign influence and strove to unify Russia. In particular, speaking of the progressive activity of [Ivan] the Terrible, Comrade Stalin noted that Ivan IV was the first to introduce into Russia the monopoly of foreign trade, and that Lenin was the only one to do so after him. Iosif Vissarionovich also noted the progressive role of the Oprichnina. . . . Referring to the mistakes of Ivan the Ter­rible, Iosif Vissarionovich noted that one of his mistakes consisted in the fact that he was not able to liquidate the five remaining large feudal families, and did not complete the struggle with feudalism: if he had done so, there would have been no Time of Troubles in Rus'.[213]

Of course, a Marxist historian would have to shudder at this way of putting the question. The contradictions in it are obvious. Was it ac­tually possible in the sixteenth century to "complete the struggle with feudalism," if, as we have just seen, even the Oprichnik Polosin justi­fies the "economic inevitability of serfdom" precisely by the fact that "sixteenth-century Russia was built and could be built only on the basis of feudal and serf production"?[214] But for Stalin, who confused the Turks with the Tatars, and whose reading in Russian history never went higher than the level of the junior grades of a Georgian the­ological seminary, such subtleties were immaterial. To Stalin "com­pleting the struggle against feudalism" meant only the need to finish murdering the "five remaining feudal families." For, unmurdered, they ruined all the achievements of Ivan the Terrible in "guarding the country from the penetration of foreign influence." In other words, the cause of the catastrophe which overtook Russia in the sixteenth century lay in the inconsistency and insufficiency of the terror. This, for a fact, was Ivan the Terrible's language.

There was no one around to shudder: the historians, as if en­chanted, accepted the new idol. Let us return to their texts:

[New evidence] explains the terror of the critical epoch of 1567-72, and shows that the dangers which surrounded the cause and the person of Ivan the Terrible were still more menacing, and the political at­mosphere still more saturated with treachery than might have been as­sumed on the basis of the sources hostile to the Muscovite state which were known earlier. Ivan the Terrible cannot be accused of excessive suspicion; on the contrary, his mistake consisted, perhaps, in having been too trusting . . . [and] in inadequate attention to the danger which threatened him from the side of the conservative and reactionary opposition, and which he not only did not exaggerate, but even under­estimated. . . . After all, it was a matter of treason . . . highly dan­gerous for the Muscovite state. And at what moment did it threaten to break out? Among the difficulties of a war for which the government had mobilized all the means possessed by the state, had gathered all military and financial reserves, and had demanded from the popula­tion the greatest possible patriotic inspiration. Those historians of our time, who, speaking in chorus with the reactionary opposition of the sixteenth century, would insist on the objectless cruelty of Ivan the Ter­rible . . . should have thought about how antipatriotic and antistate was the mood of the upper classes in that time. . . . The attempt on the life of the tsar was very closely connected with the yielding up to the enemy not only of the newly conquered territories but also the old Rus­sian lands. ... It was a matter of internal subversion, of intervention, of the division of a great state! '"

This is no longer Stalin—or even the state prosecutor at the trial of the boyar opposition of the "Right-Trotskyist bloc." This is the histo­rian Vipper anticipating Stalin's argument about the unmurdered families.

But the main thing for Stalin was nevertheless not serfdom or ter­ror as such. These were merely means. What was really needed was the transformation of the country into a colony of the military-indus­trial complex, as an instrument of world dominion. It was precisely this, the main thing, which had to be suitably legitimized by the tradition.

For all his ignorance of Russian history, Stalin intuitively picked out from the multitude of Russian tsars his most appropriate prede­cessors. And they—what a strange coincidence!—proved to be the same ones whose exploits, in the opinion of Lomonosov (during the period of the first "historiographic nightmare"), had made it possible "that Russia should be feared by the whole world." They proved to be the same "two extremely great statesmen," who in the opinion of Ka­velin (during the period of the second "historiographic nightmare") "were equally keenly aware of the idea of the Russian state." And Sta­lin openly valued them for the same thing—their Northern Wars. The main hangman of the Oprichnina, Maliuta Skuratov, that medi­eval Beriia, he called "a great Russian commander, who fell heroically in the struggle with Livonia."[215] He valued Peter because the tsar "fe­verishly built factories and workshops to supply the army and to strengthen the defense of the country."[216]

However, Stalin had much to do besides rehabilitating Ivan the Terrible and Peter. He entrusted the concrete working out of a new militarist apologia for the Oprichnina to experts.

One of the first to recognize this patriotic duty was the prominent student of the Oprichnina, P. A. Sadikov (on whose works Platonov had constructed his unfortunate hypothesis). Sadikov introduced a completely new note into Platonov's canonical interpretation. In his opinion,

having been thrust like a wedge into . . . the Muscovite territory, "the appanage of the sovereign" [the Oprichnina] was supposed, according to [Ivan] the Terrible's plan, not only to be a means for decisive struggle with the feudal princes and the boyardom by rearranging their land- holdings, but also to become an organizational nucleus for creating the possibility of struggle against enemies on the external front™

Thus, the Oprichnina outgrew the infantile tasks in internal policy on which Russian historians had concentrated for centuries, and re­vealed a completely new military-mobilizational function, which had previously remained in the shadows for some reason. It is no accident that Vipper comments as follows on this discovery by Sadikov:

If, like the malcontents of the princely and boyar opposition, the histo­rians of the nineteenth century liked to speak easily of the disorderly plundering by Ivan the Terrible and his Oprichniki of the entire Trans- Muscovite region, a historian of our time has contrasted to these un­substantiated assertions documented facts which show . . . the con­structive work which was performed within the limits of the territory of the Oprichnina.³¹

And the constructiveness of this work is seen by Vipper no longer, as Platonov did, in the quarrel with the "formerly sovereign princes," or, as Pokrovskii did, in the "class struggle" (the category of class strug­gle is completely replaced in his work by "the struggle with treason"), but in the fact that Ivan the Terrible began the transformation of the country into a "military monarchy." For this reason, the Oprichnina was for Vipper primarily a "measure of a military-organizational charac­ter."'⁵ (While I disagree totally with Vipper in the evaluation of this "measure," I am in full agreement with him, and with Sadikov, on the principle: contrary to what the "despotists" think, Ivan the Terrible actually did begin the history of the autocracy, which was militaristic and mobilizational in nature, using the Oprichnina as a tool, a school, and a laboratory for the total militarization of the country.) From this point of view, however, the war in whose name, according to Sadikov and Vipper, the Oprichnina transformation of Russia was under­taken, assumes a completely different significance.

The founders of the "agrarian school" (like their predecessors, the "statists") stood entirely on the tsar's side in the strategic argument with the Government of Compromise. Platonov wrote that "the times called Muscovy to the West, to the shores of the sea, and [Ivan] the Terrible did not let pass the moment to state his claims to a part of the Livonian heritage."[217] Pokrovskii noted that "the Oprichnina terror can be understood only in connection with the failures of the Livon­ian War."[218] However, for them, the Livonian War, and the terror, were only elements in the great "agrarian revolution." For the "militarists," the "agrarian revolution" was merely an element in the war.[219] The war itself ceased to be for them a prosaic adventure of conquest, a mere claim to "a part of the Livonian heritage," as it had been for Platonov, or a "war over trade routes—that is, indirectly over mar­kets,"[220] as it had been for Pokrovskii. It became a crusade, a sacred task taking on features of national, historical, and almost mystical sig­nificance. "In the second half of the 1560s, Russia was solving com­plex questions of foreign policy," writes Polosin.

This was a time when the struggle for Lithuania, the Ukrrine, and Be- lorussia became especially acute. This was a time when the question of the kingdom of Livonia was being decided. . . . This was a time when the Vatican was going over to the offensive. From behind the backs of the king of Poland and the archbishop of Riga, the figure of the pope, who had closed the Council of Trent in order to develop the attack of Catholicism more energetically, revealed himself. Not only Latvia and Lithuania were under threat, but also the Ukraine and Belorussia. . . . It was with complete justification that [Ivan] the Terrible considered the Vatican his major enemy, and it was not without reference to the papal orders that the Oprichnina was organized."¹

What price, then, the Tatar threat or the struggle with the "aristo­cratic personnel" propounded by the naive Kliuchevskii, or even the struggle against the "class of formerly sovereign princes" mooted by the now hopelessly obsolete Platonov? All of Eastern Europe was un­der mortal threat of a "Catholic offensive," it turns out, with Muscovy defending Latvia and Lithuania, not to speak of the Ukraine and Be­lorussia, with its own breast. A general European Catholic conspir­acy was developing, if not a worldwide one, and Muscovy somehow turned out to be the only force able to withstand it. In trying to seize Livonia, Tsar Ivan was performing not only a patriotic duty, but a kind of great religio-political mission. He was suddenly transformed "into one of the most significant political and military figures of Euro­pean history in the sixteenth century."[221]

The contours of the assignment given to Russian historiography by Stalin are starting to become clear. This was at the same time an ag­gressive and a defensive spirit, both justifying conquests and affected by an inferiority complex—a monstrous amalgam of persecution ma­nia and striving for absolute dominance. It was the same mixture which had compelled Ivan the Terrible to seek salvation from the boyar conspiracy which surrounded him (or so it seemed to him) in the physical destruction of his opponents. In the speeches of a mod­ern Tsar Ivan and in the interpretations of the contemporary Oprich­niki, the old boyar conspiracy grew to the dimensions of a world conspiracy, inspired now by the Tatars, now by the papacy, now by imperialism, but always pursuing one and the same goal—to deprive Russia of its independence, to turn it into a colony, and to prevent it from fulfilling its historical mission. It was now no longer sufficient, in order to make absolute the power of the tyrant as the instrument of Russia's salvation, merely to exterminate internal opponents. Now, for this purpose, one had to exterminate the organizers of the world conspiracy, and, therefore, upset not only Russia, but the whole planet. This is how the twentieth-century Ivan the Terrible formu­lated the task: "We are doing a job which, if it succeeds, will turn the whole world upside down."[222] And what was the alternative to-the suc­cess of this job? "Do you want our fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?"[223]

Either we "turn the world upside down," or "we lose our indepen­dence." There is no middle road. On the one hand Stalin asserted that the history of Russia consisted in her being beaten (and, con­sequently, that the time had finally come for her to be avenged for the humiliations of the past), and on the other hand he called down the blessings of the victorious tsars on the Russian banners.

As applied to the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin's approach went: if the tsar had not attacked Livonia, Russia would have been the prey of the Mongols. As applied to the period of Peter: if Peter had not conquered the Baltic, Russia would have been a colony of Swe­den, etc., etc. This was not said by Stalin. This was said by experts. In the officially approved textbook of N. Rubinshtein, Russian Histo­riography, designed for students in the historical faculties of the Soviet universities in the 1940s, we read:

The development of the multinational centralized state in Russia in the sixteenth century was the beginning of the transformation of Russia into a prison of people. But if this had not occurred, Russia would have been the prey of the Mongols or of Poland. . . . The policy of Peter I laid a heavy burden on the peasants, [but] saved Russia from the pros­pect of transformation into a colony or semicolony of Sweden, which threatened it.[224]

What Mongols could have threatened Russia in the sixteenth cen­tury? Who does not know that it was not the Swedes who attacked Russia under Peter in 1700, but Russia which attacked the Swedes? Stalin could permit himself to say those things—out of ignorance, from political calculation, or because of the paranoia which convulsed him. But how could the professional experts permit themselves this? And yet they did so. Russian historiography suddenly began to speak with the voice of Ivan the Terrible. With the new, militaristic apologia, a third "historiographic nightmare" rolled down on Ivaniana. Forgot­ten was S. M. Solov'ev's injunction: "Let not the historian say a word in justification of such a person." This person was justified. Forgotten was A. K. Tolstoi's horror in the face of the fact that "there could exist a society which could gaze upon him without indignation." Such a so­ciety existed.

7. A Medieval Vision

How could this happen? I understand that this is to some extent a personal question. It concerns not so much the explanation of histor­ical circumstances as the moral collapse of Russian historiography—a phenomenon which in religious parlance would probably be called a fall from grace. For a Western author, the question would presuppose an objective analysis of what in fact did happen. What did not hap­pen, he would leave out of account. I cannot allow myself that luxury. For me, this is a piece of life, and not only the subject of academic consideration. I feel myself infinitely humiliated because this hap­pened to my country in my generation. The problem for me is not only one of describing the past, but of coming to terms with it. For this reason, everything I here offer the reader is closer to personal confession than to scholarly analysis. Those indifferent to historical reflection and inclined to think that "facts are facts and the rest is belles lettres," as one great Russian poet used to say, can quietly skip this subsection.

One cannot come to terms with the fall from grace of a nation without coming to terms with it in one's self. In me, as in every off­spring of Russian culture, two souls coexist. But not peacefully: they fight to the death—exactly as its two cultural traditions contend in the consciousness of the nation. Each of these has its own hierarchy of values. The highest value of the one is order (and, correspondingly, the lowest is anarchy or chaos). The highest value of the other is free­dom (and, correspondingly, the lowest is slavery). I fear chaos and hate slavery. I feel the temptation to believe in "a strong regime" able to defend the humiliated and aggrieved, to dry all tears and console all griefs. And I am ashamed of this temptation. Sometimes it seems to me that freedom gives birth to chaos (as it seemed to Solov'ev, who saw the major evil of Russian life in "the freedom of movement"). Sometimes it seems to me that slavery gives birth to order (as it seemed to Polosin, who justified serfdom). It is precisely in the epoch of the "historiographic nightmare" which we are considering, that the fun­damental incompatibility of both traditions comes to light with ulti­mate clarity. The time has come to choose between them.

For almost 400 years the gigantic shadow of its first autocrator has loomed over Russian history, now losing his crown, and now raised again to imperial dignity. Never until now, however, has his terrible heritage threatened the very existence of the nation as a moral union. I am not speaking only of the fact that we have lived through the nightmare of the GULAG, but also of the impossibility of living any longer with the consciousness that this nightmare may be repeated, that the most honored and learned preceptors of our nation will again abase themselves—and abase the nation—by justifying serfdom, ter­ror, and aggression. That once again they will help the tyrant to legiti­mize slavery by legitimizing the tradition of slavery.

It would be infinitely easier for me if I could simply say that this was the price at which the historians of Stalin's time bought their lives and well-being in an epoch when the struggle for physical survival ruled: after all, all countries and all ages have had their collabora­tionists. This would be easier, but it would be false. It is sufficient to read the works of Sadikov, Polosin, Bakhrushin, Vipper, or Smirnov, to be convinced that this is not bureaucratic prose or official rhetoric. A profoundly personal impulse is present here, a clear certainty of being in the right.

Polosin wrote: "The Oprichnina . . . received its scientific and his­torical justification only in Soviet scholarship."'¹⁵ Bakhrushin wrote: "The true significance of Ivan the Terrible becomes clear only in our time ... in the light of Marxist methodology. "^4li They were convinced of this. If this was a false faith, it was a faith nevertheless.

The mighty autocratic tradition of Russian historiography was speaking through their mouths. Lomonosov, Tatishchev, Kavelin, Gorskii, Belov, and Iarosh were speaking. All of those who, without any connection with the "light of Marxist methodology," had justified the Oprichnina long before Polosin, because somewhere in the dark depths of their souls, almost unconsciously, they were convinced that "freedom of movement" creates chaos, that opposition gives rise to anarchy, and that Paris is worth a mass—that is, that "order" is worth the price of slavery. The tradition of slavery spoke through their mouths, and it was tradition—not personal cowardice, or timeserv­ing, or the desire for a good life—which compelled them to lie, and to believe their own lies, and inventively to justify atrocities by reference to "documented facts," wrapping themselves in the cardboard armor of the "Marxist-Leninist ideology." This was not so much their fault, as their calamity.

What happened, happened. If the behavior of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichniki can still be interpreted in various ways, the behavior of Stalin's Oprichniki does not permit two opinions. In order to evaluate it, we do not need either "documented facts" or "the light of Marxist methodology." We were there. We know that we have before us not only beasts and hangmen, but also people to whom the tradition gives a basis for being proud of their corruption.

If we actually are faced by a mighty tradition, and if this tradition actually does lead us to such depths of humiliation, then are we en­titled to wait passively for the hour of humiliation and corruption to strike again for us, or for those who come after us? This is no longer a question of national pride, as it was in the time of Lomonosov and Shcherbatov, nor is it a question of national self-respect, as it was in the time of Kavelin and Kliuchevskii. This is a question of national existence. After all, three successive "historiographic nightmares" have demonstrated unmercifully that the tradition of collaboration- ism is not simply implanted by the police. It is not a force external to us, it is within us. And it is killing us from within. Will we survive a fourth "historiographic nightmare"? And, if we survive, will we still be human beings?

The structure of the "myth of the state" is elementary. On what premises, in fact, does the tsar justify his position in his letters to Kurbskii? In the first place, by identifying the goals of the leader with those of the state. In the second place, by identifying the goals of the state with those of the nation. The whole essence of the matter, in my view, is contained in this formula of double identification. To suggest that the leadership proceeds from goals and interests distinct from the interests of the state, and still more from those of the nation, is to be a traitor and an enemy of the people. This was Ivan the Terrible's fundamental postulate, so obvious to him that he does not even state it directly. Behind this postulate stands the vision of an absolutely consensual society-family, the head of which sees everything, knows everything, is concerned for everyone, and by definition cannot have any other interests than those of the members of his household.

This was an essentially medieval vision, symbolized and confirmed by the divine mandate of the suzerain. But, surprisingly, in the nine­teenth century it was again reborn in Russian historiography. Only now justification was provided in the shape of the alleged need to destroy the "clan element," or by the postulate of a poor nation, de­prived of "stone," or of a nation threatened by the fate of Poland. And once again it seemed that Russia could not overcome these obsta­cles without an Ivan the Terrible. In other words, the "myth of the state" took on the scholarly form of the state school, but it was based as before on the vision of the consensual society, in which the admin­istration performed the necessary historical function of organizing and defending the system, of saving it—whether from the clan ele­ment, from aggressive neighbors, or from the oligarchy. For this rea­son, the interests of the administration not only could not differ from the interests and goals of the system, but properly speaking, the latter did not even exist in and of themselves. The system and the admin­istration were one—undivided and indivisible.

When later, in the twentieth century, the time came for the "agrar­ian school," with its "class struggle" and its "economic revolution," it seemed that the time to part company with the vision of the con­sensual society had finally arrived. The "class struggle" itself presup­posed that the society is neither a family nor a homogeneous unit, that the interests of its various groups not only differ, but are opposed to each other. And still, in some strange way, it again turned out that the goals of the state coincided with the goals of a "progressive" class, and thereby, just as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, were indistin­guishable from the goals of the society.

Once again—for both "agrarianist" and "militarist" historiogra­phy—the state is perceived as having saved the nation: in the one case from the "class of formerly sovereign princes," from the reac­tionary latifundia, and the opponents of commodity-and-money rela­tionships; and in the other from the "Catholic assault," from military backwardness, from the world conspiracy of the Vatican. The opposi­tionists remained "enemies of the people."

None of these historiographic schools, which successively replaced each other, admitted that there could exist a divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system, that the leader could pursue his own interests, opposed to the interests both of the state and of the nation. The medieval vision of the consensual society hung over both the "left-wingers" and the "right-wingers." Even the Marxists, for whom the state in theory constituted "the organization of the ruling class," could not keep from officially proclaiming it "the state of all the people"—that is, capitulating before the thesis of the bourgeois state school.

However, history has confirmed Aristotle, who, as we have seen, argued 500 years before the birth of Christ that divergences between the goals of the administration and those of the system are in the na­ture of things, and, consequently, that consensual political structures are simply not found on earth. It was already clear to him that "devia­tions"—that is, the striving of the state to subject the society to the interests of particular groups or to the personal interests of the lead­er—were politically inevitable. The problem, therefore, consists not in preserving a mythical consensus, but in making society capable of correcting the "deviations" of the state. And the sole means of such correction invented by the political genius of mankind—the sole means of preventing destructive revolutions which sow chaos and an­archy—is the very opposition which in Russian historiography is tra­ditionally branded "treason." In this sense, the political history of mankind can be summed up as the history of the legalization and le­gitimization of the opposition.

It was neither the heritage of the primeval clan which threatened the integrity of the nation, as the "statists" thought, nor feudal eco­nomics, as the Marxists had it. With these the nation was learning to cope; but there was something against which it was, and still is, help­less: the elemental force embodied in arbitrary state power, which was, and still is, fraught with the like of Ivan's Oprichnina and Stalin's Gulag. It is this force which thus proves to be the real source of chaos in social systems, and the only tool for curbing its terrible power (that is, for preserving the much-desired "order") is the free functioning of the opposition. We thus come to the heretical and—from the view­point of the "myth of the state"—criminal conclusion that the basis of order is freedom. A historiography which depicts opposition as trea­son falls inevitably—and always will fall—into a logical trap, the only escape from which is in lies, collaborationism, and Stalinization.

Open the well-known trilogy by V. Kostylev, which received not only the Stalin Prize, but an enthusiastic review by so experienced an expert as Academician N. Druzhinin.[225] Russians would rather forget about this shameful matter. But this is precisely what one should not do. To remember, to remember as much as possible—this is the only thing which can save us from ourselves. The whole meaning of Ivan­iana lies in compelling us to remember. In Kostylev's trilogy the tsar speaks in garbled quotations from his letters to Kurbskii, and his Oprichniki in quotations from Vipper, but let us leave it to the literary critics. Across its pages there walk disreputable, stinking, bearded boyars, occupied exclusively with oppressing the peasants and com­mitting treason. The Oprichniki, on the other hand, are all as if spe­cially selected, stalwart young men out of the epic ballads, real scions of the people, liberating it from bloodthirsty exploiters, and eradicat­ing "the enemies of the people," without regard to the danger to their own lives. These Oprichniki have warm hearts, cool minds, and clean hands, just as the modern official version depicts the "Chekisty"[226]— that is to say, Stalin's Oprichniki. Let us accept this picture as sound. Let us even accept, further, the entreaties of Kostylev and Vipper not to believe the oppositionists, explaining all the shadows cast upon the tsar exclusively by their sinister influence. "The failures in the exter­nal war," Vipper complains,

the bloodshed of the internal war—the struggle with treason—over­shadowed even for the immediately following generations the military triumphs and military achievements of the reign of [Ivan] the Terrible. Among the subsequent historians . . . the majority were subject to the influence of sources originating from oppositionist circles: in their eyes, the significance of his personality was diminished. He was included in the list of "tyrants."¹⁴

If we remember that even Karamzin, who was precisely the one who included the tsar "in the list of tyrants," not only did not deny, but even glorified his services to the state, we will see immediately that Vipper is lying (or does not know his subject). But this is not what is important. Let us turn to sources free of the "influence of opposi­tionist circles"—to the sources which Vipper himself recommends. Who, in the Russia of that time, was free from "influence"? Naturally, Ivan the Terrible's Chekist, the Oprichnik Heinrich Staden. True, he was a German, and, of course, a low-life—this much Vipper willingly admits. But his testimony is precious (we already know for what rea­son) to such a degree that in Vipper's eyes he is quite qualified to be a defense witness. His Notes on Muscovy "may boldly be called a first- class document of the history of Moscow and the Muscovite state in the 1560s and 1570s."⁵°

Let us agree that "opposition circles" were wrong in characterizing the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible as riffraff gathered by the tsar from all corners of the country and even hired from abroad in order to destroy its elite. Let us agree that the Oprichniki were the most honorable servants of the tsar, who helped him in the fateful struggle with treason, which was beyond his own powers. Now let us see what the defense witness says about the fate of these devoted "hounds of the sovereign." In 1572 the tsar suddenly "began to take reprisals against the top people of the Oprichnina," Staden writes.

Prince Afanasii Viazemskii died ... in iron shackles. Aleksei [Basma- nov] and his son [Fedor] with whom [the tsar] practiced depravity were killed. . . . Prince Mikhail [Cherkasskii], brother-in-law [of the tsar] was hacked to pieces by strel'tsy [musketeers] with axes. . . . Prince Vasilii

Temkin was drowned. Ivan Zobatyi was killed. Petr [Shcheniat'ev?] was hanged on his own gates in front of his bedroom. Prince Andrei Ovtsyn was hanged at Oprichnina headquarters in Arbatskii street; a live sheep [Ovtsyn's name recalls the Russian word for sheep (ovtsa)] was hanged together with him. The marshal Bulat wished to make a match between his sister and [the tsar] and was killed, and the sister was raped by 500 strel'tsy. Kuraka Unkovskii, head man of the strel'tsy, was killed and pushed under the ice.[227]

What are we to conclude from this "defense testimony"? Were the Oprichniki actually the most honorable of men, as Kostylev suggests to the mass reader in a large edition of books, with Druzhinin's bless­ing? What are we, then, to say of the tsar who hanged them upon the gates of their own houses, as he did "enemies of the people"? What are we to say of the tsar who after 1572 forbade the very use of the term "Oprichnina," threatening its users with the severest penalties? And if the Oprichniki really did deserve such punishment, who was right—the "oppositionist circles" or the respected scholars?

Let us assume that the writer Kostylev was deceived by his capri­cious muse. But it was harder to fool experts who had read the pri­mary sources. Bakhrushin, one of the major Russian historians of the twentieth century, knows quite well what went on in the Oprichnina. He knows, for example, that "the service landholders were interested in having on the throne a strong tsar, capable of satisfying the need of the service class for land and serf labor," while "on the other hand, the boyars were interested in protecting their lives and property from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar."[228]

What, one wonders, is so bad about defending one's life and prop­erty from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar? Why did such a natural human desire make the boyars "enemies of the people"? And why were the service landholders, who needed the serf labor of the peo­ple, their friends? Why does the author take this need of theirs so much to heart? Why is the "arbitrary behavior of the tsar" so dear to him that he is prepared to justify it by declaring the terror "inevita­ble under the given historical conditions"? Here is the concluding characterization of the tsar given by Bakhrushin in his book Ivan the Terrible:

There is no need for us to idealize Ivan the Terrible. . . . His deeds speak for themselves. He created a mighty feudal state. His reforms, which assured order within the country and its defense from external en­emies, met with warm support from the Russian people. . . . Thus, in the person of [Ivan] the Terrible we have not an "angel of virtue" and not the mysterious villain of melodramas, but a major statesman of his period, who correctly understood the interests and needs of his people, and struggled to see them satisfied.⁵³

This picture plainly shows that Russian historiography even in the twentieth century is still in the paws of the Middle Ages. But if this is so, then a completely different question arises: how did it happen that Russian historiography was not transformed into an undifferen­tiated heap of lies? The only answer consists, I believe, in the fact that, along with the tradition of collaborationism, there exists in Rus­sian historiography another, parallel tradition, deriving precisely from the "oppositionist circles" which Vipper damns—one which I would call the tradition of Resistance, which passed like a torch from Kurbskii to Krizhanich, from Shcherbatov to Aksakov, from Lunin to Herzen, from Kliuchevskii to Veselovskii. There has never been an epoch when the tradition of Resistance was not present in Russian historiography. Even in the somber years of the "historiographic nightmares," this torch flickered before our eyes, even if it did not exactly shine. In this, in our capacity for opposition, is our real hope. Every oppositionist, individually, is easy to slander as an "enemy of the people," to throw into prison, to exile, or to slay—"with his wife and his sons and his daughters." But for some reason there always remain five families which have not been murdered, and perhaps thanks to this, it has been impossible to murder completely the tradi­tion of Resistance. Russia lives by it, and Russian historiography lives by it.

8. The Mutiny of Dubrovskii

This tradition did not die out in Ivaniana even under the ice of Stalin's Oprichnina. Exactly as the terrible tsar was exposed after his death by M. Katyrev and I. Timofeev during the first Russian Time of Troubles, so S. Dubrovskii and V. Sheviakov rebelled against the heirs of the Oprichnina during the seventh Time of Troubles. "Ivan IV must be considered ... as the tsar of the serfholding service landholders," de­clared the rebels. "The personality of Ivan IV has overshadowed [in Soviet historiography] the people, and overshadowed the epoch. The people have been allowed to appear on the historical scene only in order to show 'love' for Ivan IV and to praise his actions."⁵⁴

Ibid., p. 90. Emphasis added.

S. Dubrovskii, "Protiv idealizatsii deiatel'nosti Ivana IV," pp. 123-29.

Professor Dubrovskii sincerely believed that he was combatting Vipper, Bakhrushin, and Smirnov. But, as we have seen, they were not his only opponents in this battle. Karamzin, Kavelin, Platonov, and the entire mighty collaborationist tradition stood against him. It could not be overcome simply by appeals to obvious facts and com­mon sense. The rebellions of Pogodin and Veselovskii had already shown this. Facts were powerless against the hypnosis of the myth. Dubrovskii could rely on the tradition of the "oppositionist circles," on Kurbskii and Krizhanich in the attempt to create an alternative conception of Ivaniana. But are we entitled to demand so much of him? After all, he came out of the same school as the collaborationists. He himself considered autocracy—"the dictatorship of the serf hold­ers," as he called it—an inevitable and natural dominant feature of Russian history. He himself had grown up with the traditional con­tempt for "reactionary boyardom." And for this reason an instrumen­tal apparatus different from the one with which his opponents, the collaborationists, worked was simply not available to him. And this was easily demonstrated by I. I. Smirnov in a rebuff (which I would rather call a punitive expedition) that deserves description. If the reader finds this rebuff to be a terrible oversimplification, full of logi­cal and factual errors, I would agree with him completely. But I am here only the modest reporter of a discussion which actually took place in Moscow, in the summer of 1956 (that is, in the middle of the post-Stalinist thaw).

Was the liquidation of the feudal fragmentation, and the central­ization of the country, not a current necessity of state in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible? Smirnov asked. Was the absolute monarchy not an inevitable phase in the history of feudal society, and did it not play the role of the centralizing element in the state? Did all the European countries in the Middle Ages not know a "terrible, bloody struggle" (compare the Wars of the Roses in England, the Massacre of St. Bar­tholomew in France, the Stockholm Bloodbath, etc.)? From this col­lection of cliches Smirnov drew the conclusion—as simple as two times two equals four—that the Oprichnina was an inevitable form of the struggle of absolute monarchy for the centralization of the coun­try against the reactionary boyars and formerly sovereign princes. As for the "cruel form" which was taken by this struggle for centraliza­tion in the epoch of the Oprichnina, and as for the enserfment of the peasants and the atrocities of the terror, on these questions Smirnov was excellently prepared—once more, with Kavelin. Alas, he replied, such is the price of progress and of liberation from "the forces of re­action and stagnation."

It made no difference that the "progress" in question, for which such an immoderate price had been paid, turned out to be the im­penetrable darkness of the same "reaction and stagnation" of which it was supposed to free the country. It made no difference that besides serfdom and permanent backwardness, the Oprichnina also estab­lished a serflike cultural tradition, of which Smirnov himself—to­gether with his opponents, unfortunately—was a victim.

For Dubrovskii, like Kliuchevskii before him, did not reflect on the content of the concept of "absolute monarchy," which beat him over the head like a club. He was unable, therefore, to object that absolut­ism and despotism and autocracy are all of them forms of "absolute monarchy," and that what is important in Ivaniana is not so much their similarity as their differences.

In 1956, after all of the triumphs of "genuine science," Dubrovskii found himself in the same position in which the primeval and "pre- scientific" Karamzin had found himself in 1821. And, just like Ka­ramzin, he had nothing with which to respond to his opponents but emotional protest and wounded moral feelings. His defeat was built into his methodology. Of course, this by no means diminishes what he had done: on the contrary, we must pay tribute to his courage. The apparently indestructible ice of the "militarist apologia" had indeed been cracked. By the end of the 1950s, there was no trace of it left. And if, in 1963, A. A. Zimin was able to write, in his Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, that "in the works of a number of [Soviet] historians, an idyllic image of Ivan IV and a prettied up representation of the Oprichnina have been given," this is indisputably to the credit of Du­brovskii. And if Zimin added: "This was facilitated to no small degree by the statements of I. V. Stalin, who praised Ivan the Terrible with­out restraint, forgetting about those innumerable calamities which the spread of serfdom in the sixteenth century brought to the peo­ple,"[229] this sounded like a mere echo of Dubrovskii, who was the first to draw attention to this strange—or so it seemed at the time—emo­tional attraction of one tyrant to another.

But on closer examination, it is not hard to see that Dubrovskii's opponents had not retreated very far. They had withdrawn, as the military expression has it, to previously prepared positions—and, furthermore, to ones established a long time ago and with no help whatever from Marxism. They had retreated to Solov'ev's position: moral condemnation was the only price which they would agree to pay for the political rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible. Hardening their hearts, they agreed that the moral qualities of the tyrant did not deserve to be "idealized"; on the other hand, they came unanimously to the defense of Ivan's terror as a means of "centralization." This is immediately apparent in the commentaries to volume six of Solov'ev's History of Russia published in 1960 under the editorship of Academi­cian L. V. Cherepnin, which, as it were, summarize the discussion called forth by the mutiny of Dubrovskii. Here, among other things, it is said that "no matter how great the actual cruelties by which Ivan IV implemented his policy, they cannot conceal the fact that the struggle against the princely and boyar elite was historically condi­tioned, inevitable, and progressive." Furthermore, the authors of the commentaries say, "the government of Ivan IV was compelled by the objective situation to act primarily by violent methods in the struggle to centralize the power in the state." As regards the critique of the "reb­els" of 1956, Dubrovskii and Sheviakov, the commentary says, with implacable bureaucratic haughtiness: "Having correctly noted the in­admissibility of the idealization of Ivan IV, the authors of these arti­cles were unable to argue for their proposed reconsideration of the policy of Ivan IV in the direction of regarding it as reactionary and even historically meaningless."[230]

The de-Stalinization of Ivaniana did not take place. After the thunderous explosion of the militarist apologia and a Kavelinist out­burst of "idealization," genuine science had peaceably returned to the accustomed, cozy swamp of Solov'evian "centralization"—of course, with the obligatory addition of Platonov's "agrarian revolution." The place of the solemn hymns of Vipper-Bakhrushin is taken by the grey consensus of Cherepnin-Likhachev. Whereas before the revolt of Du­brovskii, the position of genuine science in Ivaniana was an eclectic blend of Platonov and Kavelin, after that revolt, it was transformed into a cocktail mixed from the ideas of Platonov and Solov'ev. It re­mained essentially what it had been before—a symbiosis of the "agrarian" and "state" schools of Ivaniana. Thus, out of a mixture of two "bourgeois" ideas, we get Marxism-Leninism as the sum. Alas, de­spite its revolutionary promises, Marxism has not saved "genuine sci­ence" from enslavement to the "myth of the state."

Even if we did not have any other indicators of this slavery, one— and the most important—still remains: its attitude towards the politi­cal opposition. In the year in which Dubrovskii rebelled, his colleague Likhachev repeated literally what had been written in 1856 by So­lov'ev's pupil Gorskii. At the risk of exhausting the reader's patience,

I will again double up the quotations. Try to separate the revelations of the 1956-model Marxist from those of the 1856-model monarchist. Here is what they wrote:

In arguing for the old tradition, Kurbskii was led not by the interests of the fatherland, but only by purely selfish considerations. . . . His ideal was not in the future, but in the past. In the person of Kurbskii, the reactionary boyars and princes had found themselves a bard and a phi­losopher. ... To this reactionary ideology, Ivan the Terrible counter- posed . . . the principle of the construction of a new state . . . branding Kurbskii as a criminal and a traitor to his fatherland. . . . He [Kurbskii] in vain spent his efforts in the struggle against the innovations. . . . Be­fore this severe judgment of posterity he is the defender of the immo­bility and stagnation, which went counter to history and counter to the development of the society.³⁷

9. The Sacred Formula

"The centralization of the state" thus proves to be the last word of genuine science. The formula does not rest on any characterization of the state, whether social or political. It is completely amorphous, and, therefore, fruitless, since a democratic state can be no less cen­tralized than an autocratic one. If sacrifices to this heathen idol are forgivable in the "bourgeois" Solov'ev, who reasons in abstract terms about the struggle between the "state" and the "votchina" elements, how are they to be explained in the works of historians who call them­selves Marxists? However, the abstract nature of the sacred formula is only half the trouble. The other half is that for the sixteenth-century Russia of Ivan the Terrible and the Government of Compromise, to which they apply it, it is simply false.

It is false because centralization—to the degree to which this was possible in a medieval state, and in the sense in which Soviet histo­rians use this formula, i.e., the administration of all the regions of the country from a single center—had already been completed in the fif­teenth century. The publication of the law code of 1497, which sig­nalized the juridical unification of the country, was the concluding ac­cord of this centralization. For two centuries, the House of Rurik, like the French Capetians, had been gathering together northeastern Rus' piece by piece, through intrigues and flattery, threats and violence. Their will had become law from one frontier to another. They could

57. S. Gorskii, Zhizn' i istoricheskoe znachenie kniazia A. M. Kurbskogo, p. 414; D. S. Likhachev, "Ivan Peresvetov i ego literaturnaia sovremennost'," p. 35.

dictate from the Kremlin how to give judgment, how to farm, and how to live, whether in Novgorod, in Tver', or in Riazan'. No one, either in the country or outside it, doubted the right of Muscovy's grand prince to rule over the entire area from the White Sea to Putivl', to make laws as he thought best, to appoint and depose vice­gerents, or to destroy altogether the institution of vicegerents. The administrative center of the system had been created. And the pe­riphery recognized it as the center. Unity of will and unity of program had become a political fact in the Muscovite state. What more central­ization was needed?

What passed on unsolved to the heirs of Ivan III was quite another task, completely different from the "gathering-in" and infinitely more complex than "centralization"—the integration of the newly central­ized state: the transformation of its external, administrative, and juridical unity into an internal, moral, and economic unity.

This integration could be absolutist or autocratic in nature. It could proceed from elements in the state program of Ivan III (en­visaging the formation of juridical and cultural guarantees of security of life and property for the citizen) or from the opposite elements in the program of Ivan IV (which negate these guarantees). After all, we must not forget that this was only the beginning, that the cultural norms were only just being formed. By violently splitting the country into two parts, destroying all the limitations on the arbitrary behavior of the "administrative center," legalizing the disorder in the state as order, causing the rebirth of the appanage morality, setting Moscow against Tver' and Novgorod, the service landholders against the bo­yars, the Muscovite boyars on the formerly sovereign princes of Suz­dal', the "plebs" on the patricians, the Oprichnina on the Zemshchi- na, by abolishing St. George's Day and thereby clearing the road for serfdom—Ivan the Terrible disintegrated Russian absolutism by integrat­ing autocracy.

He sowed terror of the state, and not sympathy with the national idea. If, after all he had done to it, the country did not fall to pieces, this only shows that the work of centralization had so thoroughly been worked out by the sixteenth century that even the royal hang­man and his Oprichnina "centralizers" were not able to break it up.

10. The Attacks of the 1960s

What happened in Ivaniana subsequently simultaneously demon­strated two opposite things: the fragility of the gray consensus reached in the 1960s and the power of the shaken, but unshattered, "myth of the state." A. A. Zimin furiously attacked the consensus, blasting its fundamental postulates one after another. He rejected the main the­sis of the "agrarian school," asserting that "the counterposition of the votchina boyars to the landholding service nobility is untenable."³⁸ He denied the very existence of the "reactionary boyar ideology" rehabil­itating not only Vassian Patrikeev and Maxim the Greek, but appar­ently even Kurbskii himself: "It is now impossible to point to a single Russian thinker of the sixteenth century whose views can be evalu­ated as reactionary and boyar."³⁹ He fearlessly invaded the very holy of holies of the consensus—the postulate about the alleged struggle of the feudal boyars against "centralization." "We can speak," he de­clared, "only of a struggle for different paths towards the centralization of the state."⁶⁰ What, it would seem, could be more radical than this critique? Since Pokrovskii's time, no one had dared to declare that "the time has come for a radical reinterpretation of questions of six­teenth-century Russian political history."⁶¹ And this critique was based on entirely sound reasoning, which would have done honor even to Kliuchevskii himself. Although "the elite of high lords was not in­clined to yield its enormous latifundias for the benefit of the small holdings of the service landholders," neither did the boyardom "strive for the immediate liquidation of the freedom of peasant movement." From here it was only one step to the recognition of the fundamental point that the boyardom shielded peasant differentia­tion from the serfholding aggression of the service landholders, and that the political rout of the boyardom was, therefore, only a prelude to the economic and social rout of the peasantry.

And Zimin takes that step—but, to our surprise and disappoint­ment, it is in the opposite direction. "The need for further attack of the feudal elite was obvious," he says, "and was perceived by such far- sighted thinkers as I. S. Peresvetov."⁶² What can this mean? After all, what he has said implies a completely opposite conclusion. Alas, it turns out that this furious attack on the new Marxist-Solov'evist con­sensus has been undertaken only in order to replace it with the old, equally fruitless Marxist-Platonovist consensus. Zimin rehabilitates the boyardom only in order to again accuse the unfortunate "for­merly sovereign princes" (and thereby again to justify the Oprich­nina). He is convinced that

A. A. Zimin, "O politicheskikh predposylkakh vozniknoveniia russkogo abso­liutizma," p. 22.

Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 23. 61. Ibid., p. 21.

62. Ibid., p. 41.

the basic hindrance to the socio-economic and political progress of Rus­sia at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries was not the boyardom but the real heirs of feudal fragmentation—the last ap­panages. . . . Hence, naturally, it is not the notorious collision of the service nobility with the boyardom, but the struggle with the remnants of fragmentation that constitutes the basis of the political history of that period.[231]

Once again, despite Veselovskii's annihilating critique, Platonov's paradigm arises from the grave, freshly rouged and modernized. Zimin's junior competitor, R. G. Skrynnikov, subjected him to devas­tating criticism, literally dismantling the new edition of the "appan­age" revision of the myth stone by stone. Skrynnikov, in fact, did more. His works actually did bring a breath of fresh air into Ivan­iana.[232] He was the first to study in detail the mechanism of the Oprich­nina terror, and in the picture emerging from his studies the reader encounters something oddly familiar. Of what does the endless chain of "cases" arising one out of another (the "case of Metropolitan Fil- ipp," the "Moscow case," the "Novgorodian case," the "case of Vladi­mir Staritskii," etc.) remind us? What does the wave of falsified show trials—with the confessions of the accused exacted by torture, with a bloody spiderweb of mutual slanders, with the boorish triumph of "state prosecutors," and with the horrible jargon of the hangmen (in­stead of "kill" they said "do away with," writing that in one place 50 people were "done away with" and in another place 150)—call to mind? There's no doubt that in describing the "great purge" of the 1560s, Skrynnikov is recounting the history of the "great purge" of the 1930s. But what is surprising is that Skrynnikov tells us this not only without hinting at the Stalinist terror, but perhaps even without thinking of it. He is a medievalist, a scrupulous historian of Ivan's Oprichnina, and he speaks only of this. Let us pause for a moment to consider it.

Among the first victims of the Oprichnina was one of the most in­fluential members of the Duma, the conqueror of Kazan', Prince Gor- batyi. The most prominent of the Russian military leaders, he was suddenly beheaded, together with his fifteen-year-old son and his fa­ther-in-law, the Okol'nichii Golovin. Immediately after him, the boyar Prince Kurakin, the boyar Prince Obolenskii, and the boyar Prince Rostovskii were beheaded. Prince Shevyrev was impaled on a stake.

The idea involuntarily occurs to one that this is a purge of the last of the "right opposition" from the Politburo-Duma (perhaps members or fellow travelers of the Government of Compromise), and that it was supposed to be the prelude to some kind of broad social action. In fact, it was followed by the confiscation of the lands of the titled aristocracy (formerly sovereign princes) and the expulsion of prince­ly families to Kazan', which in the Russia of that time fulfilled the function of Siberia. The confiscation was accompanied, of course, by robbery and ruination of the peasants living on the confiscated land, and spoliation of the lands themselves. In a word, this was a medieval equivalent of what in the 1930s was called "dekulakization." The fixed quitrent paid by the peasants "by the old ways" was liquidated, and along with it whatever legal or traditional limitations on arbitrary behavior of the landowners might have existed. This was the begin­ning not only of mass famine and devastation in the central regions of Russia, but essentially also of serfdom (since, as Academician B. D. Grekov would say later, "the government of the service landholders could not be silent" in the face of the "great ruin" which threatened its social base).[233] But the main analogy, in any case, is the mechanism of the purge: first phase—removal of a faction in the Politburo- Duma representing both a particular social group and an intellectual current within the elite; second phase—removal of this social group itself; third phase—mass "dekulakization" of the "best people" (which is to say those who have something which can be stolen).

After the division of the country into the Oprichnina and the Zemshchina, power in the Zemshchina fell into the hands of a stra­tum of untitled boyars which in a certain sense was sympathetic to the tsar (and sometimes helped directly in the struggle with the "right op­position" and the Government of Compromise). Whatever the atti­tude of these people to the formerly sovereign princes and to the methods used by the tsar may have been, however, now, when they were actually at the wheel, they must have thought: this is enough! They had already made their revolution. The continuation of the ter­ror became not only meaningless, but also dangerous for them. It must be supposed that it was not without their influence that the seven­teenth congress of the party was held in the spring of 1566—the "con­gress of the victors" (I mean, of course, the Assembly of the Land, which, incidentally, was the most representative in the history of Rus­sia). The delegates to the congress tactfully indicated to the tsar that it was now time to put an end to the Oprichnina. Others, more realis­tic, conceived a plan for putting up a Kirov (in the shape of Prince Vladimir Staritskii, the tsar's cousin) against Ivan the Terrible. The matter never came to a conspiracy, but conversations were enough for the tsar. The following blow was against this group. "When this stra­tum became involved in the conflict," Skrynnikov notes, "the transition from limited repressions to mass terror became inevitable."[234]

Terror has its own logic. One after another, the leaders of the Duma of the Zemshchina, the last leaders of boyardom, perished. Next came the turn of the higher bureaucracy. One of the most influ­ential opponents of the Government of Compromise, the Muscovite minister of foreign affairs, the great secretary Viskovatyi, who had undoubtedly lent a hand in the fall of Sil'vestr, was first crucified and then chopped into pieces. The state treasurer Funikov was boiled alive in a kettle. Next came the leaders of the Orthodox hierarchy, then Prince Staritskii himself. And each of these drew after them into the maelstrom of terror wider and wider circles of relatives, sympa­thizers, acquaintances, and even strangers, with whom the Oprich­nina settled accounts. When the senior boyar of the Duma of the Zemshchina, Cheliadnin-Fedorov, laid his head on the block, his ser­vants were hacked to bits with sabers, and all his household members were herded into a barn and blown up. (The Sinodnik carries the no­tation: "In Upper Bezhitsk, sixty-five people were done away with . . . and twelve people were beheaded with swords.")[235]

I will spare the reader and myself any more, for I am not writing a martyrology of the Oprichnina. Suffice it to note that, just as in the 1930s, the leaders of the Oprichnina apparently did not notice that the circles of terror were coming ever closer to them. Aleksei Basma- nov, that medieval Yezhov, already seemed a dangerous liberal to the favorite of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, Maliuta Skuratov, who per­sonally strangled Metropolitan Filipp. Prince Afanasii Viazemskii, who had organized the reprisals against Gorbatyi and Obolenskii, was himself already under suspicion when his appointee, Archbishop Pimen, a rabid supporter of the Oprichnina, perished during the sack of Novgorod. "Under conditions of mass terror, universal fear, and denunciations, the apparatus of violence created in the Oprich­nina acquired an entirely overwhelming influence on the political structure of the leadership," Skrynnikov relates with horror. "In the final analysis, the infernal machine of terror escaped from the control of its creators. The final victims of the Oprichnina proved to be all of those who had stood at its cradle."[236]

As we see, Skrynnikov knows perfectly well what was happening in Russia during the 1560s. He does not show the slightest desire to jus­tify this horrible rehearsal for Stalin's purges as the "struggle against treason," as Vipper and Polosin had done twenty years before him. And although he notes that in pre-Oprichnina Muscovy, "the mon­archy had become the prisoner of the aristocracy,"^6i> he does not seem inclined to justify the terror as the "objective inevitability of the physi­cal extermination of the princely and boyar families," as his teacher Smirnov had done. More than this, he does not hide from himself (or from the reader) that, in the first place, "the period of the Oprichnina is marked by a sharp intensification of feudal exploitation," which preconditioned "the final triumph of serfdom." In the second place, he notes, "the pogroms of the Oprichnina, and the indiscriminate bloody terror, brought deep demoralization to the life of the coun­try."[237] And then what?

Working with his eyes open, and having before him the horrifying facts, many of which he himself introduced into scholarly discourse, does he make an attempt to reinterpret the Oprichnina? Unfortu­nately, once again, as in the case of Zimin, we are doomed to experi­ence a dramatic disappointment. In Skrynnikov's understanding, it turns out, "the Oprichnina terror, the limitation of the competence of the boyar duma . . . unarguably promoted . . . the reinforcement of the centralized monarchy, developing in the direction of absolu­tism."[238] The sacred invocation has been pronounced. Skrynnikov re­mains within the limits of the consensus. The "great purge" of Ivan the Terrible, which Skrynnikov described with unexampled power, nevertheless proves to be "historically inevitable and progressive." The king is dead: long live the king! The Marxist-Platonovist hypo­stasis of the myth, once again advanced by Zimin, is once again refuted—for the sake of a new triumph of its Marxist-Solov'evist hypostasis.

On closer consideration of Skrynnikov's paradigm, we see clear traces of the myth. Zimin had firmly denied "the notorious collision of the boyardom with the service landholders" and rehabilitated the great oppositionists of the sixteenth century. In refuting him, Skryn­nikov not only condemns "the treasonous relations of Kurbskii," but gives us to understand that the terror against the aristocracy, "which imprisoned the monarchy," was by no means such a bad thing. The outrageousness began when the terror spread to other social strata, who were objectively the allies of the monarchy in its struggle with the aristocracy. "The Oprichnina terror," he says, "weakened the boyar aristocracy, but it also did great damage to the service landholders, the church, the higher government bureaucracy—that is, to those so­cial forces which served as the most reliable support of the monarchy. From a political point of view, the terror against these strata and groups was complete nonsense."[239]

Speaking in my terms, Skrynnikov sympathizes with the attempt of Ivan the Terrible to transform Russian absolutism into a despotic sys­tem by liberating it from the aristocracy. He rejects only the "political nonsense" and irrationality of despotism in destroying its own allies. As if, for Tsar Ivan, it was only the boyars, and not all his subjects, who were slaves—as Kliuchevskii already knew. In chapter two, by reference to the cases of Henry VIII and Louis XI, I have tried to explore the gulf between outbursts of ordinary tyranny (possible in any absolutist state) and despotism (which by distorting the sociopo­litical process makes tyranny permanent). I am not the first to point out the distinction. Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Krizhanich did so cen­turies ago. But the logic of myth apparently precludes Russian histo­rians, Marxist or not, from perceiving it.

Skrynnikov asserts that "meaningless and brutal beating of the en­tirely innocent population made the very concept of the Oprichnina a synonym for arbitrariness and lawlessness."[240] But in his analysis he almost unnoticeably shifts the stress from "arbitrariness and lawless­ness" to natural catastrophe and increase in taxes:

During the years of the boyar government [as Skrynnikov calls the Gov­ernment of Compromise] the Novgorod peasants paid a small tribute in money ... to the state. With the beginning of the Kazan' and particu­larly the Livonian wars, the state increased the money obligations for peasants manyfold. The increase in the tax burden and the exploitation by the landlords placed the small-scale peasant farms under extremely unfavorable conditions. But it was not only the taxes which were the cause of the ruin which began in the country in the 1570s and 1580s. The catastrophe was provoked by natural calamities of enormous scale. . . . Unfavorable weather conditions ruined the harvest twice—in 1568 and 1569. As a result, the price of grain increased by factors of five and ten. Death by famine reduced the population of cities and villages. During the Oprichnina pogrom in Novgorod, starving citizens during the dark winter nights stole the bodies of the victims and ate them. . . . After the famine, a plague brought from the West began in the country. . . . The three-year famine and the epidemic brought death to hundreds of thousands of people. The calamities were completed by the destructive incursion of the Tatars.⁷¹

What with taxes, famine, the plague, the Tatars, the Oprichnina be­comes almost invisible!

11. Grounds for Optimism

The evolution of Ivaniana during the 1960s nevertheless suggests hope. The foundations of the gray consensus are being irreversibly eroded. Admittedly, the radical revision proposed by Zimin did not bring results. But this in itself, after all, is an ill omen for the con­sensus. The contradiction between premises and conclusions in Skryn- nikov's work is too obvious. How long can the consensus swing from Solov'ev to Platonov and back again, while continuing to pass itself off as Marxism? In essence it is clear that the consensus is in a cul-de-sac, from which it is impossible to escape without fundamentally new ideas. The following quotations—drawn from D. P. Makovskii (1960), S. M. Kashtanov (1963), S. O. Shmidt (1968), and N. E. Nosov (1969) respectively—suggest that these new ideas are beginning to show on the surface.

In the middle of the sixteenth century in the Russian state, capitalist relationships came into being in both industry and agriculture, and the necessary economic conditions for their development were prepared. . . . But in 1570—90, an active intervention by the superstructure (the massive forces of the state) in economic relationships in the interest of the service landholders took place. . . . This intervention not only hin­dered the development of capitalist relationships and undermined the condition of the productive forces in the country but also called forth regressive phenomena in the economy.[241]

Considering the Oprichnina in its social aspect, we can persuade our­selves that its main characteristic was its class tendency, which consisted

in the introduction of measures which promoted the further enserf- ment of the peasantry. In this sense, the Oprichnina was certainly more an antipeasant than an antiboyar policy.™

Today it is becoming ever more clear that the policy of the Chosen Rada [the Government of Compromise] in much greater degree pro­moted the further centralization of the state and its development in the direction of absolutism of European type than did the policy of the Oprichnina, which facilitated the triumph of absolutism, saturated with Asiatic barbarism."

It was precisely at this time that the question was decided about which road Russia would travel—the road of renewal of feudalism through the "new edition" of serfdom, or the road of bourgeois devel­opment. . . . Russia was at the crossroads. . . . And if in Russia as a result of "Ivan's Oprichnina" and the "great ruination of the peasantry" at the end of the sixteenth century, serfdom and the autocracy still won out . . . this is by no means proof of their progressive nature.⁷"

Of course, important unresolved questions remain. For example, Makovskii is unable to explain why "active intervention by the super­structure," which called forth "regressive phenomena in the econ­omy," suddenly took place in the 1570s. Furthermore, it is impossible to explain this by the "development of commodity-and-money rela­tionships in agriculture," as he tries to do. Kashtanov is unable to ex­plain the connection between the antiboyar and the antipeasant policy of the Oprichnina. It is impossible to do this while accepting the pos­tulate of the myth as to the "reactionary nature of boyardom." Shmidt is unable to explain what constitutes the political distinction between "absolutism of European type" and "absolutism saturated with Asiatic barbarism." And without this, the formulations he proposes remain nonfunctional. Nosov is unable to explain what combination of forces predetermined victory for the "renewal of feudalism" and the defeat of "bourgeois development."

These lacunae are not accidental. Zimin, it will be remembered, has called for "a radical reconsideration of the political history of Russia in the sixteenth century." This radical reconsideration cannot be expected (as Veselovskii anticipated in the 1940s) merely from "new facts." New philosophical horizons must be opened up; new means of political analysis must be devised; a new vision of history is required. I have attempted here to make a start at the gigantic task of

Kashtanov, "K izucheniiu istorii oprichniny Ivana Groznogo," p. 108. Emphasis added.

Shmidt, "K izucheniiu agrarnoi istorii Rossii XVI veka," p. 24.

Nosov, Stanovlenie, p. 9. Emphasis added.

constructing an alternative paradigm for Ivaniana—or at least break­ing the vicious circle in which for decades we have been revolving like squirrels in a wheel, endlessly and fruitlessly repeating ourselves and our predecessors.

Are we still capable of breaking out of this circle of ancient stereo­types? I do not know. What I do know, however, is that we must try. Otherwise, I am afraid, it could be too late; a new "historiographic nightmare" may strike. After three of them, it is time, it seems, for Russian historiography to come to its senses—to put an end to its serflike dependence on Ivan the Terrible's "myth of the state" and the obsolete classical"vyskazyvaniia." It is time for Western historiography, too, to help in the emancipation of its Russian colleagues. It can do so by putting an end to its own dependence on the bipolar model of his­tory, as well as to its archaic contempt for the "Tatar-Byzantine heri­tage" of Russia, borrowed from Miliukov, Chicherin, and other classics of the "state school." It is time for the "absolutists" and the "despotists" to end the civil war between them. For the inspiration and intuition of both are needed for positive construction.

This may sound like a Utopian dream—which it perhaps is to some extent. What I am trying to stress, however, is that such construction is necessary for both historiographic and historic reasons. Russia, Nosov says, was at the crossroads in the middle of the sixteenth cen­tury. I am sincerely convinced that now, at the end of the twentieth century, it is once again at the crossroads. Is Ivaniana destined to un­dergo a new "historiographic nightmare," or is the demiurge of all of these nightmares—the "myth of the state"—finally expiring? What awaits Russia: a new "absolutism saturated with Asiatic barbarism" (in Shmidt's words) or, finally, after four centuries of delay, "absolutism of European type" ? This does not depend only on the historians. But it does depend on the historians too.

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX I

Russia at the Crossroads: Establishment Political Forces in the 1550s

Political Left Political Right

APPENDIX II

The Cycles of Russian History

cycle i cycle ii cycle iii cycle iv cycle v cycle vi cycle vii (1564-1689) (1689-1796) (1796-1825) (1825-1881) (1881-1917) (1917-1929) (1929-?)

Tyranny

1564-

1584

1689-

1725

1796-

1801

1825-

1855

1881-

1894

1917-

1921

1929-

1953

Revolution of "de-Stalinization "

1584-

1613

1725-

1730

1801-

1811

1855-

1863

1894-

1908

1921-

1927

1953-

1964

Attempts at reform, followed by politi­cal stagnation

1613-

1689

1730-

1796

1811-

1825

1863-

1881

1908-

1917

1927-

1929

1964-

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