The Origins of Autocracy

THE ORIGINS OF AUTOCRACY

ALEXANDER YANOV

THE ORIGINS OF AUTOCRACY

IVAN THE TERRIBLE IN RUSSIAN HISTORY

Translated by Stephen Dunn

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 1981 by

The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Yanov, Alexander, 1930- The origins of autocracy. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Russia—History—Ivan IV, 1533-1584. 2. Ivan IV, the Terrible, Czar of Russia,

1530-1584. I. Title. DK106.Y36 947'.043 80-39528 ISBN 0-520-04282-4

То ту wife, Lidia, to whom I owe this book as well as everything I have, and have not, written

No society in modern times has been more subject to conflicting assumptions and interpretations than that of Russia.

CYRIL E. BLACK

The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Mus­covy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.

KARL MARX

What was Russia's place in history? Was she properly to be regarded as one of the families of the Asian sys­tems, as one of the European polities and societies, a variety of either, or as entirely sui generis, belonging neither to Europe nor to Asia?

DONALD W. TREADGOLD

foreword

by Sidney Monas xiii

acknowledgments xv

introduction The Hypothesis

From Greatness to Obscurity ? 1

The Alternatives 7

On the Path to Re-Europeanization 10

The Choice 11

The Catastrophe 14

"A Riddle for the Mind" 16

Scholarship and Expertise 19

PART I

THE ADVERSITIES OF THEORY

chapter i The Language in Which We Argue

Justification of the Chapter 27

The Science of Despotology 32

Despotism 36

Absolutism 42

The Historical Function of Absolutism 48

Russian Autocracy 52

The Political Spiral 59

An Explanation to the Reader 65

The Oprichnina 67

chapter и The Serf Historians: In Bondage to "Statements"

The Struggle With Elementary Logic 71

The Lost Paradise of "Equilibrium" 77

Under the Ice of "Genuine Science" 83

The Punitive Expedition 87chapter hi The "Despotists": Captives of the Bipolar Model

The Three Faces of "Russian Despotism" 96

The "Tatar" Interpretation 97

Opportunity, Means, and Motive 104

The "Byzantine" Interpretation 107

The "Patrimonial" Interpretation 111

PART II THE ABSOLUTIST CENTURY

chapter iv The Grandfather and the Grandson

The Stereotype 123

"Patrimonies" Versus "Patrimony" 128

A Historical Experiment 132

The Reversed Stereotype 138

The Reformation Against the Reconquista 145

chapter v Josephites and Non-Acquirers

Money Versus Corvee 147

Two Coalitions 151

The Political Function of Secularization 153

The Preparation for the Assault 155

The Arguments of the Counter-Reformation 160

Before the Assault 162

The First Assault 166

The Pyrrhic Victory of the Josephites 173

chapter vi The End of Russian Absolutism

The Heritage of the Absolutist Century 183

The Great Reform 186

At the Crossroads 191

The Anti-Tatar Strategy 197

Russia Versus Europe 201

The Last Compromise 203

The Autocrator's Complex 206

PART III IVA NIA N A

215 222

chapter vii The Dawn

Methodological Problems

At the Sources of IvanianaA Strange Conflict 225

The First Attack of the "Historiographic Nightmare" 230

"Hero of Virtue" and "Insatiable Bloodsucker" 233

Pogodin's Conjecture 234

The Political Crisis 236

Prolegomena to the Second Epoch 239

chapter vni The Hypnosis of "the Myth of the State"

Absolute and Relative Uniqueness 241

A Symbol of Progress 246

The "Historical Necessity" of the Oprichnina 251

The Capitulation of Slavophilism 255

The "Old" and the "New" 260

The Bugbear of Oligarchy 267

Kliuchevskii's Premise 269

An Impossible Combination? 270

Platonov's Argument With Kliuchevskii 275 10. The Argument With Platonov and Kliuchevskii 278

chapter ix Again at the Crossroads

At the Boundary of the Ages 280

The Economic Apologia for the Oprichnina 281

Platonov's Contradiction 283

Pokrovskii's Paradox 286

The Political Meaning of "Collectivization" 289

The Militarist Apologia for the Oprichnina 291

A Medieval Vision 299

The Mutiny of Dubrovskii 306

The Sacred Formula 310

The Attacks of the 1960s 311

Grounds for Optimism 318

appendixes

I. Russia at the Crossroads:

Establishment Political Forces in the 1550s 323

II. The Cycles of Russian History 324

335

selected bibliography 325

index

FOREWORD

by Sidney Monas

One of the reasons, I suspect, that Americans show little interest in history (except as a diversion or as a picture of alternative glamor) is that they have almost no sense of the past as something compulsive and limiting. For Americans, at least until the last few years, the fu­ture has seemed unlimited in its possibilities—all horizons "wide open." For Russians, on the other hand, the past has always held a compelling power over the future, exerting a force so constraining that it might foster the illusion, in an extreme instance, that if one changed the accounts in which the past is recorded and interpreted, one might well lay a magical hold upon the future.

Alexander Yanov's attitude to the past is quite different from the one and from the other. A well-known and iconoclastic Soviet jour­nalist before he came to the United States in 1974, a victim of the re­gime's all-too-limited tolerance for iconoclasm, he also possesses an advanced degree in history. His journalistic assignments took him all over the USSR and into all sectors of Soviet life; his historical training provoked him to place the problems he confronted in a long-term perspective, to approach the problem of the contemporary national­ist revival in the USSR, for instance, by way of telling the long-term story of slavophilism in Russia.

His monumental History of Political Opposition in Russia, a multi- volume work resulting from many years of experience, thought, and reading, could never be published in the USSR, and it was largely on this account that he left. The present work is a product of that much vaster effort. In it he sees Russia's past as forming not a single, utterly compelling pattern, but a pattern that, while exercising certain limita­tions on the shape of the future, also offers a range of choices as to that shape—choices not predetermined, but informed and emanci­pated to the degree that they take cognizance of the shaping of the past. He also writes—and it is the subject of some of his best-written and most ironic pages—of those who, in examining the past, fell vic­tim to it.

His work does not fit well into the tradition of empirical histo­riography that has dominated the American historical profession in the recent past. He has done no work in the archives, and he is ex­tremely fond of typologies that, while they are arrived at by a method not altogether foreign to contemporary political science and sociol­ogy, have different names and are not easily traceable to the main cur­rents of our academic thought. Some of our historians of Russia think his work is old hat, a "rediscovering of America," but I think they are much mistaken. Many emigre writers, on the other hand, are un­happy with Yanov's critical attitude to nationalism, his relative indif­ference to religion, his gradualist constitutionalism, and (not so much in the present work as in his controversial Detente after Brezhnev) on his seeing possibilities within the Soviet establishment for America to influence and advance liberalization.

Yanov has polemics in his bloodstream, and much of what he says needs to be and should be argued about, not simply accepted as pro­nouncement. He is essentially provocative and controversial. But he is serious, erudite, thoughtful, well informed, witty, and intelligent, and he has something of his own to say that we cannot afford not to hear. Not only historians and political scientists will find this book interest­ing, but all those who have a sense of the importance of the Soviet Union in our lives, a growing number among whom, I hope, are those who have some inkling that the Soviet Union cannot be under­stood merely by the face with which it immediately presents itself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I read over this book, I feel again how hard it was to write at the open and defenseless border between several genres and disci­plines—between history and confession, between political science and philosophy, between historiographic investigation and a search for the origin of political evil. I can imagine how difficult it was for those who read this book in manuscript—Richard Lowenthal, Sidney Monas, Stephen and Ethel Dunn, George Breslauer, Robert Crum- mey—to make a judgment that required not only tolerance but schol­arly courage. The University of California Press and my editor, Wil­liam J. McClung, in risking the publication of such a book, somehow managed to combine businesslike caution and old-fashioned chivalry. Gianna Kirtley, Ellen Sheeks, Marilyn Schwartz, and my daughter Marina nurtured the manuscript into a book. Peter Dreyer performed editorial miracles, large and small, in the hope of somehow Angliciz­ing (if I may put it that way) this intransigently Russian work. I am grateful to all of them for their efforts.

This book has a strange history. It is the heart of a manuscript en­titled History of the Political Opposition in Russia, which I began to write ten years ago in Moscow in the insane hope of guiding it across the reefs of censorship. Soviet censorship is sophisticated and merciless, but I was no novice in the art of fooling it. However, after the first chapter I began to doubt my ability to outwit the censors. After the third I realized I was taking a great risk. After the fifth I became afraid to keep the manuscript at home. After the seventh I concluded that the only way I could keep my self-respect as a writer and human being was to become a smuggler—that is, to turn my life upside down by illegally dispatching the manuscript across the border. Such things are not done alone. Many people helped me—brave people willing to take risks of the most elementary physical kind. I cannot name these people here—either the Russians or the non-Russians. But I cannot fail to be grateful to them to the end of my days.

I was also helped to write this book by my opponents who attacked my views in Moscow and continue to attack them in the West. Their attacks do not surprise me. These people refuse to recognize, as I do, that our fatherland has two faces. One of these is open to the world: the Russia of Herzen, Plekhanov, and Sakharov. I am proud of it. But I never forget that there is also another Russia: the country of po­groms, Black Hundreds, and terror, the land of Purishkevich and Stalin. Of that Russia I am ashamed. All the same, may the Lord give my opponents good health. They have given me patience and wrath, a feeling of grief and indignation, without which this book could not have been written.

I have thanked my tolerant referees, my courageous comrades-in­arms, and my merciless accusers. Now I must await the verdict of readers. This book will not be published in Russian, either by a Soviet publishing house or by a Russian publisher in the West. And there is nowhere left to emigrate. There are no more borders across which I can illegally dispatch my manuscript, hoping that it can be published in Russian. Thus, I seem to have irretrievably lost the greatest thing a writer can lose—an audience in his mother tongue. Will I be able to find a replacement—in a strange country, in an alien language?

October 1, 1980

INTRODUCTION

THE HYPOTHESIS

1. From Greatness to Obscurity ?

On October 22, 1721, at the celebration of victory in the second Great Northern War, Chancellor Golovkin was merely expressing the gen­eral opinion when he declared the chief service rendered by Peter I to be that he "by indefatigable labor and leadership led us out of the darkness of nonexistence into being and joined us to the society of political peoples."' Nepliuev, the Russian ambassador to Constan­tinople, expressed himself still more openly in 1725: "This mon­arch . . . taught us to know that we are human beings too."[1] Half a century later, N. Panin, who was in charge of foreign policy under Catherine II, confirmed this opinion of the Petrine politicians. "Pe­ter," he wrote, "by leading his people out of ignorance, thought it a great accomplishment to have made it equal to a second-class power."[2]

Over the course of centuries, the conviction that Peter brought Russia out of "nonexistence" and "ignorance" by teaching us to know that we too are human beings has become such a commonplace that it no longer enters anyone's head to ask when, why, and how Russia happened to find itself in a state of "nonexistence" and "ignorance." Why were we not considered human beings before Peter? Why was it a "great accomplishment" for Russia to become even a second-class power?

In his famous panegyric of Peter, Sergei Solov'ev, one of the best Russian historians, wrote confidently of pre-Petrine Russia as a "weak, poor, almost unknown people."[3] And even his constant adversary Mikhail Pogodin agreed with him entirely on this point. All ten cen­tury's of Russian history before Peter lay, it seems, in obscurity— were, so to speak, prehistory—out of which the Father of the Father­land led the country to light, glory, and greatness.

This is the stereotype. But does it agree with the known facts? The modern British historian, M. S. Anderson, who has made a special study of English perceptions of Russia in Peter's time, writes that in the seventeenth century less was known about Russia in England than a hundred years previously.[4] Richard Chancellor, who in 1553 be­came the first Englishman to visit Russia, for some reason entitled one of the chapters of his memoirs (published in England in 1589), not, let us say, "Of the Weak and Poor King of a People in a State of Nonexistence," but, on the contrary, "Of the Great and Mighty Tsar of Russia."[5] Another Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, whose book was also published in England at the end of the sixteenth century, wrote: "The king of these parts is very mighty, since he has won a great many victories, both over the Livonians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Swedes on the one hand, and over the Tatars and pagans on the other."[6] In nu­merous documents which circulated in the 1560s at the court and in the chancellory of the German emperor, it was said that the grand duke of Moscow was the mightiest sovereign in the world after the Turk­ish sultan, and that, "from alliances with the grand duke, the Chris­tian world would receive an honorable profit and advantage; it would also be an excellent counterforce and resistance to that tyrannical and most dangerous enemy, the Turk."[7] The French Protestant, Hubert Langet, prophesied in August 1558 in a letter to Calvin that, "If any power in Europe is destined to grow, this is that power.""

Chancellor found mid-sixteenth-century Moscow to be "as a whole, larger than London and its environs." The scale of trade there as­tonished the Englishman. The entire territory between Yaroslavl' and Moscow, through which he rode,

abounds with little villages which are so full of people that it is surpris­ing to look at them. The earth is all well-sown with grain, which the in­habitants bring to Moscow in such enormous quantities that it seems surprising. Every morning you can meet between 700 and 800 sleighs going there with grain. . . . Some people carry grain to Moscow; others carry it away from there, and among those there are some who live not less than 1,000 miles away.'"

A quarter of a century before Chancellor, before the sea trade began, the ambassador of the German emperor, Sigismund Herberstein, concluded that Russia was making effective use of its central posi­tion between West and East, and was successfully trading in both directions:

Furs and wax are taken from there to Germany . . . and saddles, bri­dles, clothing, and leather from there to Tataria; weapons and iron are exported only by stealth or with special permission. . . . However, they export broadcloth and linen garments, axes, needles, mirrors, sad­dlebags, and other such goods."

W. Kirchner, a German historian, notes that after the conquest of Narva in 1558, Russia became practically the main center of Baltic trade, and one of the centers of world trade. Ships from Liibeck, ig­noring Riga and Revel, sailed for the port of Narva. Several hundred unloaded there annually, including vessels from Hamburg, Antwerp, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and even France.'²

This is confirmed by extensive data indicating that the Russian economy grew significantly in the first half of the sixteenth century. Expansion was marked by intensive growth of the new peasant and urban proto-bourgeoisie, migration to the cities, rapid urbanization, development of large-scale manufacturing, and considerable capital formation. We know, for example, that at this time there appeared in the Russian North a multitude of new towns (KargopoF, Turchasov, Tot'ma, Ustiuzhnia, Shestakov). An even greater number of major fortresses were built (Tula, Kolomna, Kazan', Zaraisk, Serpukhov, Astrakhan', Smolensk, and Kitai-Gorod in Moscow). I am not even speaking of the scale of construction of less significant fortress-cities (Elets, Voronezh, Kursk, Belgorod, and Borisov in the South; Sa­mara, Ufa, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn in the East; and Arkhangel'sk and Kola in the North). In the sixteenth century, urbanization became a truly national phenomenon. Some observers even got the impression of a mass migration of the rural population to the cities. In 1520 resi­dents of Narva wrote to Revel:

ll.S. Gerbershtein, Zapiski о moskovskikh delakh, p. 91.

12. W. Kirchner, "The Rise of the Baltic Question." The modern British historian T. S. Willan reports facts which indirectly confirm the extreme importance of the Mus­covite trade. It turns out that the attractiveness of the Russian port was so great that it became a constant subject of argument on the part of free merchants—"crafty per­sons," as the lawyers for the Moscow Company, who were trying to close the Russian trade to outsiders, called them in a complaint to the royal privy council in 1573. The craftiness of these outsiders consisted in the fact that their vessels passed through the sound with an official destination of Danzig or Revel', when in fact they were going to Narva. This means that the magnetic qualities of the Moscow trade were at that time strong enough to justify the high risk of violating the monopoly (T. S. Willan, "The Russia Company and Narva, 1558-81").

Soon there will be no one in Russia to take the plow any longer, for all are running to the cities and becoming merchants. . . . People who two years ago were carrying fish to market, or were butchers, old-clothes dealers, or market gardeners, have become extremely rich merchants and money-lenders and deal in thousands of rubles.¹'⁴

If, however, Russia was indeed undergoing significant economic expansion, and in particular a building boom, the necessary precon­ditions which existed in every European country—such as a free la­bor market, significant free capital, and judicial protection of private property—must have been present there too. As listed in surviving documents, for example, the materials used in the construction of the fortress of Smolensk included three hundred and twenty thousand poods of iron in bars, 15,000 poods of iron rods, 1,000,000 nails, and 320,000 wooden pilings. Inasmuch as iron and timber were not imported from abroad, this implies large-scale specialized produc­tion. And neither was such production artificially implanted and pa­tronized and regulated by the state, as was the case under Peter. It was private enterprise in the full sense of the term.

Sixteen thousand workers were directly employed on the con­struction of the Smolensk fortress alone—all, according to the tsar's decree, freely hired. If we consider that dozens of such fortresses and cities were being erected at the same time, this presupposes an enor­mous free labor market. As far as free capital is concerned, a long list of extremely wealthy contemporary merchants is supplied by the Soviet historians D. Makovskii and N. Nosov.'⁴ I will cite only a few examples here. The Smolensk merchant Afanasii Yudin extended credit to English merchants to the sum—enormous for that time—of 6,200 rubles (equivalent to more than 450,000 rubles in gold as of the end of the nineteenth century). Tiutin and Anfim Sil'vestrov ex­tended credit to Lithuanian merchants to the amount of 1,210 rubles (more than 100,000 nineteenth-century rubles in gold). A member of the English company, Anthony Marsh, is recorded as owing 1,400 ru­bles to S. Emel'ianov, 945 to I. Bazhen, and 525 to S. Shorin. In a con­temporary letter to the pope we read that,

Muscovy is extremely rich in money, obtained more from the patronage of sovereigns than through mines—of which, incidentally, there is also no lack—since every year there is brought here from all corners of Europe an abundance of money in payment for goods which have almost no value for the Muscovites, while they bring an extremely high price in our parts.[8]

Paradoxically, however, Golovkin, Solov'ev, and Pogodin seem to have been both right and wrong in characterizing pre-Petrine Russia as obscure and poverty-stricken. For where Chancellor in 1553 had found wonderfully populated villages, his compatriot Fletcher a quarter of a century later discovered a desert. In the census books of 1573-78, 93 to 96 percent of the villages of the Moscow region are listed as uninhabited.[9] In the Mozhaisk region, up to 86 percent of the villages were empty; in Pereiaslavl'-Zalesskii, 70 percent. Uglich, Dimitrov, and Novgorod had been put to the torch and stood de­serted. In Mozhaisk, 89 percent of the houses were vacant; in Ko­lomna, 92 percent. And this was the case everywhere in the country.

It seems as if before starting its ascent from obscurity to greatness as the stereotype proclaims, the country had made a terrible descent in the opposite direction—from greatness to obscurity.

The economic and social forces developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, which had seemed to promise normal progress of the European type for Russia, suddenly disappeared as if they had never been. The prominent peasant proto-bourgeoisie vanished. The progressive three-field (short-term fallow) system of tillage was aban­doned. Large-scale production ceased. The urbanization of the coun­try gave way to deurbanization. And, what was most important, the rapid transformation of the kholops (slaves) into freemen gave way to an equally swift reverse process.'⁷ Henceforth, the free laborer grad­ually disappeared from the face of the Russian earth, and became a serf belonging either to other men or to the state. And this is how it would be for centuries to come. Even today Russia has not fully re­covered from this terrible transformation. Serfdom to the state and its enterprises was a fact of life for all Russian workers up to 1956, and for the rural population it has still not ended—at least not as a rule.

And here we approach the basic question of this book: why? Why was it that Russia, which in the sixteenth century could claim a pri­mary role in European politics, was in the eighteenth glad even of the status of a second-class power? Why was a brilliant future predicted for it in the sixteenth century, while in the eighteenth "we were not considered human beings"? What was the political basis for the eco­nomic and military catastrophes which plunged the country into the "nonexistence" of which Russian politicians and historians speak so glibly?

17. "In the sixteenth century, until the 1580s, forced labor—that is, either as serfs or as slaves—could not play any appreciable role. Serf peasants (former slaves now set­tled on the land) until the 1580s were very few, and slave labor in industry, beginning with the first half of the fourteenth century, was rapidly crowded out and replaced with free hired labor. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we see a reverse picture, in which the labor of free hired persons was replaced by compulsory labor—that is, by serf people, who came more and more to resemble slaves. The proportion of free hir­ing both in industry and in agriculture in the sixteenth century was certainly far, far higher than in the eighteenth century" (Makovskii, p. 192). After this we can hardly be surprised at the author's conclusion that "capitalist relationships came into being in the middle of the sixteenth century in the Russian state both in industry and in agriculture, and the necessary economic conditions for their development were prepared. . . . But in the period from the 1570s, active intervention by the state in economic relationships occurred. . . . This intervention not only hindered the development of capitalist rela­tionships and undermined the condition of productive forces in the country, but also called forth regressive phenomena in the economy" (ibid., p. 212). Thus, the prerequi­sites for the capitalist relationships usual in Europe originated in Russia in the sixteenth century, according to an authoritative Soviet historian. Originated and . . . disap­peared. Furthermore, they disappeared so thoroughly that according to another even more authoritative historian, Academician N. M. Druzhinin, these prerequisites could not be discovered even in the epoch of Peter—that is, a century and a half later. "The state representing nobility," Druzhinin wrote, "was at the zenith of its power and might: the transformations wrought by Peter . . . strengthened the feudal monarchy, and were neither objective nor subjective signs of the decay of the feudal-serf social order. . . . Therefore one cannot agree with В. V Iakovlev and other historians that the ori­gins of the capitalist economic system date from the first half of the eighteenth century [em­phasis added]" (N. M. Druzhinin, "O periodizatsii istorii capitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v Rossii," p. 71).

2. The Alternatives

In the middle of the thirteenth century, an apparently irresistible wave of cavalry from the Mongolian steppes inundated Russia on its way westward. On the Hungarian plain, which is the end of the gi­gantic wedge of steppe running from Siberia into Europe, this wave halted and turned back. But the entire eastern part of what had once been known as Kievan Rus' remained for centuries to come a remote European province of what was, in effect, the gigantic colonial em­pire of the Golden Horde. During all this time, the Russian land did not live, merely survived, while its surplus product was almost en­tirely confiscated—or so it was intended—by the Tatars, its cities stood deserted, its economic development was artificially stopped, and a collaborationist administration held sway. "There can be scarcely any doubt. . . that domination by a foreign power . . . had a very de­bilitating effect on the political climate of Russia," Richard Pipes observes.¹⁸

Ten generations were required before Muscovy—in the course of what may, on the analogy of the expulsion of the Moors from Iberia, be termed the Russian Reconquista—coalesced into a state again, and, in the middle of the fifteenth century, attained its independence by force. In 1480 the last khan of the Golden Horde, Akhmat, en­countered a Russian army on the Ugra River, at the distant ap­proaches to the capital, and, unwilling to risk open battle, retreated. The retreat turned into a rout. Akhmat lost his head on the Nogai steppe to Tatar swords. The Golden Horde ceased to exist, and on the crest of a movement of national liberation, Russia came into being. The Ugra, site of the battle which did not take place, became a symbol of its independence.

Three generations after this beginning, Muscovy was no longer on the defensive, but constantly on the attack. Moreover, in retrospect one can perhaps discern something reminiscent of a national pur­pose, toward which the country seemed stubbornly to be working. Formulated most loosely, this was the resurrection of Kievan Rus' after two centuries as a Tatar colony. Externally, it consisted in com­pleting the Reconquista—that is, in recovering all the territory which had once belonged to Kiev. Internally, it consisted in correcting the economic and sociopolitical deformities brought about by genera­tions of feudal disintegration and colonial existence.

Few historians doubt that Kievan Rus' belonged to the European family of nations. In this sense, we can say that if the national pur-

18. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, p. 57.

pose of Muscovy consisted in the resurrection of the Kievan state, this meant not only the reconstitution of its territorial integrity, but also its re-Europeanization.

Under fifteenth-century conditions, the socioeconomic aspect of the process of re-Europeanization was relatively simple: economic ex­pansion (more or less equivalent to that of the neighboring countries to the West) and the concomitant social evolution (differentiation of the peasantry, migration into the cities, and urbanization) logically re­sulting, as everywhere in Europe, in the formation of a strong middle class. As we have seen, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovy was capable of this: its cities were growing rapidly and the differentiation of its peasantry into economic strata was underway. This peasant dif­ferentiation, leading to the development of a proto-bourgeoisie, which will be discussed in detail in chapter six, was a highly important sign of the capacity of the Russia of that time to generate the process of re-Europeanization.

Another aspect of the problem was, however, the need to stabilize the processes leading to the formation of a middle class—in other words, the need to create a political mechanism (which I call the abso­lutist state) capable, as elsewhere in Europe, of protecting these de­velopments from the destructive influences of the hostile feudal en­vironment. This required: (1) a change in the legislator's perception of the relative value of the soldier and the peasant or merchant—the "middle person"; (2) active legislative protection of private (nonfeu- dal) property; (3) more or less free discussion of the social and eco­nomic strategy of the country; and (4), most important of all, minimal interference by the state in the natural socioeconomic process.

This political aspect of the process involved greater difficulties un­der the conditions of fifteenth-century Muscovy than in most neigh­boring European states. The positive socioeconomic developments themselves, artificially restrained for so long under the Tatar yoke, were considerably more fragile in Russia than in other countries, and therefore badly needed the political support and nurturing of the state. The Muscovite administration, however, had not exactly had the best possible background for such a delicate job. An ancient auto­cratic tradition, sharpened and intensified by centuries of colonial corruption, lurked in its depths, ever ready to reassert itself.

But there also existed factors favorable to the re-Europeanization of the country, primarily Russia's geopolitical status in Europe. Paral­lel to the disintegration of the northern arm of the Asiatic offensive, the Golden Horde, its new southern arm, the Ottoman Empire, was swiftly gathering strength. In the second half of the fourteenth cen­tury, the Turks invaded the Balkan peninsula; in the middle of the fifteenth century, they crushed the Eastern Roman Empire; and by the beginning of the sixteenth century, they threatened the most vital centers of Central Europe. Martin Luther, for one, took the Turkish threat so seriously that he even argued the need for the Reformation on grounds that Europe might easily become the prey of the Otto­mans if it did not undergo a spiritual rebirth.[10]

Luther's fears were not unjustified. The Turkish sultan was the mightiest sovereign in the contemporary world. In a letter to the king of France, Sultan Suleiman II referred to himself as the king of kings, the prince of princes, the distributor of crowns to the world, the shadow of God in both parts of the world, the ruler of Asia and Eu­rope, the Black and White Seas. The sultan was only partly bragging. Thirty kingdoms then being subject to his rule, he could reasonably call himself "the distributor of crowns."

The rise of Turkey had altered the political geography of Europe, and from this change a new and constructive role for Russia could have evolved. Muscovy was now in the position of a valuable potential ally in any European anti-Turkish coalition. It was not Russia, but Germany, which now had to look to its security. A general rapproche­ment between Russia and the West might have developed—a coop­eration and alliance, perhaps even convergence. In any case, it was clear that unless Muscovy suddenly collapsed or adopted an active anti-Western policy, no serious threat from that direction lay in store for it. This was an unusual relief for a country just emerging from colonial status, preoccupied with internal affairs, and still threatened from the East and South by the heirs of the Golden Horde.

At this fateful crossroads, Muscovy was presented with a truly his­toric choice. It could return to the family of independent nations as an ally of Europe, and attain its national purpose, the revival of Kievan Rus', in both external (Reconquista) and internal (re-Euro- peanization) dimensions. Or, by contrasting itself to Europe, it could take the place of the vanished Golden Horde.

As we now know, Russia did eventually complete its Reconquista, and ultimately transformed itself into a modern superpower. The question at issue was never whether it would be able to do this, but at what price. By Europeanizing or by de-Europeanizing? Here, at the very source of the Russian historical river, we face a gripping spec­tacle. For an entire century Muscovy wavered before these fateful al­ternatives. The choice it made led to national catastrophe—the kill­ing of its Pushkins and Mandel'shams and the exiling of its Kurbskiis and Herzens. In the end, as Herzen put it, "Muscovy saved Russia by suffocating everything that was free in Russian life."²"

3. On the Path to Re-Europeanization

Over the course of the "century of choice" (which in this book, for reasons which will be explained later, I call the absolutist century of Russian history), a great deal was done to achieve both the Recon­quista and re-Europeanization:

Reunification of the country was accomplished without civil war, far ahead of Germany and Italy, and with little blood spilt by comparison, for example, with France.

Important administrative, social, and judicial reforms put an end to feudal separatism (these will be discul$ed in chapter five).

A start was made at reforming the church earlier than in other European countries (see chapter six).

The White Sea became an avenue of international trade, and Muscovy acquired a port on the Baltic (Narva), which came to be used by European merchants in preference to Riga and Revel.

Much important western Russian territory in Lithuanian pos­session was reconquered.

Routing of the Kazan' and Astrakhan' Tatar hordes brought the great path of the Volga under Muscovy's control.

The crucial process of peasant differentiation was in no way impeded. Rather, the Muscovite administration actively sup­ported the judicial defense of private (nonfeudal) property, lit­tle by little bringing into being a Russian proto-bourgeoisie in the course of the economic boom of the first half of the six­teenth century. Thus, gradually, economic limitations of power were formed.

The conditions for a broad-based debate over the future of the country were created. This developed over the course of the entire "century of choice," chiefly in connection with the pro­spective reform of the church. Thus, gradually, the ideological limitations of power were formed.

In creating the bureaucratic apparatus appropriate to a cen­tralized state, and gradually limiting the archaic privileges of the hereditary aristocracy (the boyars), a mortal struggle be­tween these two elites was nevertheless avoided. Both elites learned the art of interacting in the decision-making process. The political functioning of the traditional ("patrimonial") ar­istocracy, which by reason of its hereditary status was indepen­dent of the state, thus represented a strong social limitation of power.

10. Muscovy showed itself capable of instituting local self-govern­ment, a system of trial by jury, and even something reminiscent of a national parliament—the Assembly of the Land (Zemskii Sobor).

For all these reasons, it may confidently be asserted that the Kievan, or European, side of the Russian tradition was dominant throughout the "century of choice." At least until 1560 it might have seemed that, by continuing in the direction of re-Europeanization, Muscovy would once again join the European family of nations, as in the days of Kievan Rus'. The sum of gradually accumulating limitations on royal power, although not touching directly on the political sphere, never­theless deprived this power of its unlimited character.

4. The Choice

Certainly, there were sinister signs, too, that the autocratic tradition was preparing to reassert itself.

Reform of the church had apparently reached an impasse by the 1550s. Unlike the states of Sweden, Denmark, or England, the Mus­covite state appeared incapable of breaking the resistance of the powerful church hierarchy. On the contrary, in seeking to preserve the enormous worldly wealth of the church, the counter-reformist clergy managed not only to work out all the ideological preconditions for an autocratic "revolution from above" but also to defeat the pro­ponents of reform politically. Thus, they cleared the way for a new Tatar conquest of Rus', so to speak—this time not by the Tatars but by its own Orthodox tsar.

Side by side with peasant differentiation, which promised Russia a vigorous middle class in the near future, there appeared another pro­cess of differentiation, involving the feudal landowners, which may for convenience be called feudal differentiation. A growing class of small service gentry (pomeshchiki) sprang up, which unlike the heredi­tary aristocracy depended on the state not only for its prosperity but for its very existence. This class, the backbone of Muscovite military power, hungered above all for land. And, in spite of the limited land resources at the disposal of the state, this hunger had somehow to be accommodated. Here lay the greatest danger to re-Europeanization, for if it were satisfied at the expense of the peasantry, this would mean an end to peasant differentiation and the extinction of the nas­cent Russian middle class. Thus, two major social processes—two dif­ferentiations—competed in Muscovy. The outcome of their rivalry was to decide the fate of Russia.

Finally, the heir of the former imperial power, the Crimean khan­ate, still held the entire South of the country, with its black earth, the nation's main breadbasket and chief hope. The Tatars not only de­prived the country of the lion's share of national wealth, but con­stantly threatened its normal functioning. And, even more impor­tant, if so inspired by Turkey, they might at any moment renew the traditional colonial claims of the Golden Horde.

Under these conditions, the political role of the tsar took on huge significance. I am stressing the political role, the objective position rather than the personality of the tsar, because what really mattered, as I see it, was that:

Land to satisfy the service gentry could be obtained from one of three sources: by confiscation of the enormous holdings of the church (i.e., reform of the church); by confiscation of peas­ant holdings; or from the rich South—that is, in essence, by confiscation of Tatar holdings.

The powerful church hierarchy stood in the way of a reforma­tion. In the way of confiscation of peasant holdings stood the powerful boyar aristocracy and the fragile, immature Russian proto-bourgeoisie. The rival elites of the country were heading for a confrontation, creating an increasingly unstable and deli­cate balance of forces. Only the tsar and his bureaucracy were capable of resolving the issue.

Three options lay before the tsarist administration: it could throw its weight behind the aristocracy and the proto-bour­geoisie, and reform the church (this was the choice of Ivan III, the creator of the Muscovite state); it could join with the church in setting the service nobility against the boyars and the proto- bourgeoisie, in the process crushing the peasantry; or it could opt for war against the Tatar South, continuing the Recon- quista and at the same time bringing about a provisional na­tional reconciliation.

The most likely outcome of the first course would probably have been much the same as in Denmark or Sweden—a grad­ual Europeanization of the country, notwithstanding reversals and mutinies; the most likely result of the second was serfdom and universal service; the most likely result of the third was the ultimately irreversible strengthening of the Russian proto- bourgeoisie, which would have made the transition of Muscovy to the status of a European power even more rapid than the first course.

It was precisely this disposition of political forces which created the role of supreme arbiter, and invested the executor of this role with decisive power. One thing is clear, at least for the modern observer: Russia could not continue to live as it had done for centuries. It was becoming an empire. Its administrative and military apparatus clearly demonstrated its backwardness. Tension in the relations of rival elites—the aristocracy, the church, the service nobility, and the cen­tral bureaucracy—was becoming unbearable, and had to be dis­charged, whether by compromise or mortal struggle.

The heart of the choice remained a strategic question: whether Muscovy should continue its attack on the khanate of the Crimea, and on Turkey, which stood behind it—thus becoming a de facto member of the European anti-Turkish coalition, or whether it should strike at Livonia and the Baltic—"turn against the Germans," as Ivan IV had it—thus becoming a de facto member of the anti-European coalition. The entire political future of the country depended on this choice. Only a great national struggle against the Tatars and Turkey—the logical continuation of the struggle against the yoke of past cen­turies—could ease the tensions in the nation's establishment; could return to Russia her black earth; could secure her southern frontier; could rescue the peasants from serfdom; could save hundreds of thousands of Russian souls from being carried off into slavery by the Tatars; could unite Russians and give them a clear national goal.

On the other hand, the "turn against the Germans" promised only a transformation of the latent tensions within the establishment into an open struggle, left the southern frontier open to the Tatars, and entailed fruitless attempts at an alliance with Turkey against Eu­rope—not to speak of potentially rousing a European coalition against Russia. An anti-European and thus pro-Tatar strategy was likely to bring on national disaster.

Such, indeed, was the case. The origins of Russia's anti-European autocracy, destined to last for centuries to come, can be traced di­rectly to the "turn against the Germans." This is the core of my hypothesis.

5. The Catastrophe

It is difficult to deny that Russia underwent a terrible metamorphosis in consequence of the "turn against the Germans." Only recently the insolent Ivan IV of Muscovy had officially refused to call the kings of Sweden and Denmark "brother," asserting that only the greatest sov­ereigns—the German emperor and the Turkish sultan—would dare address him thus. He had scolded Queen Elizabeth of England as a "common maiden," and treated King Stefan Batory of Poland as a plebeian among kings. Ivan had just refused an honorable peace with Poland, which had given up the conquered Livonian cities to Russia, including the first-class port of Narva. In a contemptuous letter to the first Russian political emigre, Prince Kurbskii, the tsar declared that God was on his side—in the proof of which the victorious banners of Muscovy floated over the Baltic coast—and that had it not been for traitors like Kurbskii he would, with God's help, have conquered all of Germany. In short, Russia was at the peak of its power.

And suddenly all this changed as though by magic. As might have easily been predicted, by "turning against the Germans," Ivan vir­tually invited the Tatars to attack. In 1571 Russia was unable to pre­vent the khan of the Crimea from burning Moscow before the eyes of an astonished Europe. Russia's power and prestige declined to such a point that it became itself, for the first time since the Ugra, the target of greedy neighbors. As of old, the khan of the Crimea suddenly once again began to consider Muscovy a tributary of the horde. He had, in fact, already divided up Russia among his lieutenants and granted his merchants the right to trade there without paying tariffs. One would- be conqueror hastened to outdo the other. A letter to the emperor from the oprichnik Heinrich Staden, who fled Moscow, is headed: "Plan of How to Thwart the Desire of the Khan of the Crimea with the Help and Support of the Sultan to Conquer the Russian Land."

Having in the course of his Oprichnina²¹ terrorized and laid waste his country, the haughty tsar suddenly began to construct an impreg­nable fortress in the impassable forests of the Vologda region in the hope of hiding in it from his own people, and opened negotiations with the "common maiden" Elizabeth I for the right of political asy­lum in England.[11] Muscovy lost not only the 101 Livonian cities—ev­erything which it had conquered over a quarter of a century—but five key Russian cities as well. All this had to be surrendered to the Poles. The Baltic shore which had previously belonged to Russia— that same "window on Europe" which Peter I was to reconquer at the price of yet another Livonian slaughter a century and a half later— went to the Swedes. The seventeenth-century French historian de Thou, generally favorably disposed toward Ivan the Terrible, was obliged to end his panegyric of the tsar on an unexpectedly mournful note:

Thus ended the Muscovite War, in which Tsar Ivan poorly supported the reputation of his ancestors and his own reputation. The whole country from Chernigov on the Dnieper to Staritsa on the Dvina, and the regions of Novgorod and Lake Ladoga, was utterly ruined. The tsar lost more than 300,000 men, and some 40,000 were carried off as pris­oners. These losses turned the regions of Velikie Luki, Zavoloch'e, Novgorod, and Pskov into deserts, because all the youth of these re­gions were killed and the old people left no descendants behind them.[12]

But de Thou was mistaken. He did not know that by the calculations of that time up to 800,000 people perished or were taken away as prisoners by the Tatars after their campaign against Moscow in 1571 alone. Inasmuch as the entire population of Muscovy at the time was about ten million, it turns out that the life of every tenth person, ter­ritorial losses which cut it off from access to the sea, and unprece­dented national humiliation were the price paid by Russia for its fatal choice.

Its defeat in the Livonian War was no mere military setback. This was the political collapse of Muscovy. As a market for raw materials, and as a convenient path of communication with Persia, it did not, of course, cease to exist after the war. But it did effectively cease to exist as one of the centers of world trade and European politics, and was transformed into a third-rate power—something like an eastern Hanover. Here, it seems, is the point at which Russia was transformed into a "weak, poor, almost unknown" nation, as Solov'ev put it, and fell into the void of political nonexistence referred to by Golovkin.

And here we approach the most interesting and mysterious prob­lem of this book. For this is not what Russian historians have tradi­tionally thought, or think today, of the Livonian War. One of them tells us, in fact, that it was precisely in his decision to turn against Eu­rope that Ivan the Terrible "emerges as a great politician" (I. I. Smir- nov). Another asserts that precisely because of this decision, the tsar attains "his full stature as a ruler of the peoples and a great patriot" (R. Iu. Vipper). From a third we hear that Ivan "anticipated Peter, and manifested . . . statesman-like perspicacity" (S. V. Bakhrushin). From a fourth, that "Ivan the Terrible understood the interests of the state better than his opponents" (la. S. Lur'e). All these are contem­porary Soviet historians. But their prerevolutionary colleagues (with the solitary exception of N. I. Kostomarov) held analogous views. In any case, none of them ever interpreted the Livonian War as a histor­ical catastrophe, which laid the basis for the de-Europeanization of Russia. No one has ever seriously tried to analyze the alternative to this war—as though it were natural, fated, inevitable, the sole possi­ble strategy available to Muscovy. No one has ever connected it with the origin of Russian autocracy.

Why?

6. "A Riddle for the Mind"

It is no exaggeration to say that over the past 400 years, a whole li­brary has been written about Ivan IV, his character, his reforms, his wars, his terror, and the Oprichnina: articles, monographs, pam­phlets, dissertations, poems, odes, and novels—volumes upon vol­umes. Everything that these historians, novelists, dissertation writers, and poets have thought about the present of their country, they have sought to justify by reference to the gigantic figure of Ivan the Ter­rible. In this sense, what I call Ivaniana—the theme of Ivan the Terrible in Russian literature—is a model for the development of Rus­sian public consciousness, and as such deserves special study in itself.

The most honest scholars have often declared in desperation that the riddle of Ivan the Terrible appears to have no solution, and that there can therefore be no end to Ivaniana—at least not until the his­tory of Russia comes to an end. In the eighteenth century, Mikhail Shcherbatov pronounced the unfortunate verdict, which later be­came classic, that Tsar Ivan "is presented in such varying forms that he does not appear to be one person."²⁴ At the beginning of the nine­teenth century, Nikolai Karamzin cried out in pique that "the charac­ter of Ioann [Ivan], a hero of virtue in his youth and the pitiless drinker of blood in his adult years and old age, is a riddle for the mind."²⁵ At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Mikhailovskii, the greatest ideologist of Russian Populism, wrote:

For some reason, all the hopes for a firmly established, definite judg­ment about Ivan the Terrible are destroyed one after another. . . . Considering that the best minds of Russian scholarship, people of bril­liant talents and erudition, have participated in the effort to work out this definite judgment, we may perhaps reach the conclusion that the task of removing the disagreements in this particular case is something fantastic ... if so many intelligent, talented, conscientious and learned people cannot agree, does this not mean that it is impossible to agree?²"

In our own day, one of the most remarkable of Soviet historians, Stepan Veselovskii, has commented:

Since the time of Karamzin and Solov'ev, a very large quantity of new sources, both native and foreign, has been found and published, but the maturing of the science of history is going so slowly that the power of human reason as a whole, and not only the question of Tsar Ivan and his time, may be shaken."

There has been a great deal in Ivaniana, as there has been a great deal in Russian history; there have been discoveries and there have been disappointments, there have been hopes and there has been de­spair. But we are interested here not in what has been, but in what has not been in it. And there have been in it no hypotheses about Ivan the Terrible as the forefather—I might even say the inventor—of a polit­ical monstrosity which neither coups d'etat, nor reforms, nor revolu­tions have proved capable of destroying. There have in Ivaniana been no hypotheses about the Livonian War as a sort of alchemical laboratory in which this monstrous form of power—not susceptible, it seems, to time and corrosion—was worked out. There have been

Cited in N. K. Mikhailovskii, Ivan Groznyi v russkoi literature, vol. 6, p. 131.

Russkoe proshloe. Istoricheskii sbornik, p. 6.

Mikhailovskii, p. 135.

S. V. Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p. 35.

no hypotheses about Russian autocracy originating in the "revolution from above" carried out by Ivan the Terrible in January 1565.

The necessary documents, archival discoveries, and textual anal­yses have not been wanting. "It may be held," wrote Aleksandr Zimin in a book published in Moscow in 1964, "that the main surviving ma­terial on the history of the Oprichnina at the present time has already been published."[13] Anthony Grobosky expressed himself still more decisively in a book published in 1969 in New York:

The debate over Ivan IV's reign is not over miniscule details—there is no agreement on the meaning of the whole period. Lack of source ma­terial is hardly to be blamed for this. Even a cursory examination of Karamzin's, Solov'ev's and, for example, A. A. Zimin's and I. I. Smir- nov's writing on Ivan will reveal that the most essential sources were already available and known to Karamzin, and that Zimin and Smirnov have but a slight edge over Solov'ev.²⁴

But if all the documents necessary for a rational formulation of the "meaning of the whole period" are to hand, why has this question not been formulated rationally? It seems to me that the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible was not only a political revolution which doomed Rus­sia to a strange cyclical reproduction of its history, and an economic revolution which condemned it to the alternation of periods of fever­ish modernization with long periods of stagnation (repeated attempts to "overtake and pass Europe" always ending in dependence on Eu­rope), it was also a cultural revolution which imposed the stereotype of autocracy, and an inability to escape from its limits, on many of the best minds of Russia, including those of her historians.

"Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine," wrote Mark Twain. "Any kind of royalty, howsoever modi­fied, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when some­body else tells you."[14] You will not believe it precisely because the angle from which you observe your own political status, and the criteria by which you evaluate it, are firmly introjected into your consciousness by the social milieu in which you were born and brought up, because it is programmed into you by the political culture of your nation, which you took in with your mother's milk.

Ivaniana is not only a sad story from the distant past, but bears on modern Russia too, and, most important of all, on the future of my country. That is the major hypothesis of this book, and what makes my task such a personal, complex, and dramatic one.

7. Scholarship and Expertise

We know what a miserable place hypotheses occupy in history, but we do not see any reason to discard without consideration everything that seems probable to us. . . . We by no means acknowledge a fatalism which sees in events their absolute inevitability: this is an abstract idea, a cloudy theory, introduced from speculative philosophy into history and natural science. What has occurred, of course, had reason to occur, but this by no means signifies that all other combinations were impossible: they became so only thanks to the realization of the most probable of them—that is all we can assume. The course of history is by no means so predetermined as is usually thought.

ALEKSANDR HERZEN*'

Why are historians so afraid of naive questions, of diachronic spec­ulation, of historical generalizations, and fundamentally new ap­proaches? Longing, evidently, for the days when "dreams of historical generalizations were followed, but not replaced by the assiduous col­lection of historical sources," Erwin ChargofF of Columbia University remarked not long ago on the fact that the rise and institution­alization of the expert have driven out what was once called schol­arship. "In other words, where expertise prevails wisdom vanishes," he concludes.⁹²

Conventional history avoids diachronic enquiry that overleaps the bounds of established specialization—comparing sixteenth-century situations with modern ones, for example. But to me such specula­tion seems not only necessary, but natural, for my aim is to analyze not artificially separated events in Russian history, but Russian history as a whole—a totality in which all events are not only interconnected, but also influence each other in the most fundamental way—whether they happened in the sixteenth or in the twentieth century.

This book makes no claims to be the result of the "assiduous collec­tion of historical sources," fashionable cliometrics, or fresh archival discoveries. Rather, it is a new interpretation of well-known facts, re­plete with hypotheses and speculation. As such, it is an open acknowl­edgment that the past has something to teach us. It is impossible to write history once and for all—to canonize theory like a medieval saint, or tie it to the land like a medieval peasant—and to rethink old facts can be equivalent to rediscovering them. In any case, I am con­cerned here primarily with what might have happened; not so much with results as with possibilities.

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" John Greenleaf Whittier proclaimed sententiously, and I am all too aware of how open I leave myself to such dismissal. But though the question "And what if . . . ?" may sound childish to the academic ear, it nonetheless transforms the historian from a mere clerk of the court of history, dispassionately registering verdicts handed down by higher judges, whose decisions are forever beyond appeal, into a participant in the historical process. History, too, be­comes a living school of human experience rather than a compen­dium of diverse information, useful, if at all, for training the memo­ries of students.

If an anti-Tatar strategy had been implemented in the 1550s, Rus­sian history would undoubtedly have taken on an entirely different guise. More than this, however, recognition of an alternative, Euro­pean source of Russian political culture enables us to explain many things which are otherwise inexplicable: the constant rebirth, in a somber "garrison state," of drafts for constitutions and plans for re­form and the indestructibility of the political opposition.

This is no mere scholastic exercise. For the Russian opposition it is a matter of life and death. The conundrum of Russia's absolutist cen­tury is bound up with the problems of its present: do the current op­positionists have national roots, for example, or are their ideas im­ported into this garrison state from the West along with Coca Cola and modern technology? Is it possible for this country to have a de­cent European future?

"The Muscovite high nobility or service elite occupied the highest positions in a society and an administrative system that shared char­acteristics with many contemporary polities and societies but was, in the final analysis, unique," writes Robert Crummey, a modern Ameri­can historian. On the one hand, this was a patrimonial, aristocratic elite, whose representatives, "like their counterparts to the West . . . derived the core of their income from ownership of land and power over the peasants who lived on it." On the other hand, they were "im­prisoned in a system of universal service to an absolute ruler like the

Ottoman. It was precisely this combination of land ownership, family solidarity, and compulsory state service that made the Muscovite high nobility unique."[15]

I am in full agreement with this perceptive conclusion. It is exactly because of this uniqueness that I call the Russian political structure an autocracy, differing both from absolutism (where there was no obliga­tory service) and from despotism (where the elite was never in a posi­tion to transform itself into an aristocracy). The only thing which dis­turbs me in Crummey's schema is the chronology. In fact, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, refusal to perform service was not regarded as a crime in Russia (at least according to law), and two cen­turies later it again ceased to be regarded as such. If we employ Crummey's criteria, it transpires that the Russian elite (and the Rus­sian political structure) was "unique" only during these two centuries. And before this? And afterwards? Was it then perhaps similar to its Western counterparts? Or to the elite of the Ottoman Empire? Why was it that the Ottoman elite appears to have been incapable of over­coming the bondage of universal service, while the Russian elite succeeded?

We see still more clearly the results of the conventional approach (without any "what ifs" at all) in the attempt of another American his­torian to divide the history of the Muscovite elite (1450-1700) into three periods. "The first period," Richard Hellie writes,

lasted about a century, with 1556 serving as a suitable terminus. The first service class revolution in Russian history, initiated by mobilizing land (the pomest'e system) to support cavalrymen, gathered momentum in those years. . . . The second period also lasted about a century, from 1556 until the Thirteen Years' War (1654-1667), when the old middle service class cavalry was deemed technologically obsolete and replaced by "new formation regiments" of commoners commanded by foreign mercenaries. . . . The third period followed the Thirteen Years' War . . . and lasted until Peter the Great initiated the "second service class revolution" by again requiring service from everyone."

Let us not go too deeply into Hellie's periodization (which, inciden­tally, leaves us completely ignorant of why a second "service class revo­lution" was needed at all, and of what happened to the Russian ser­vice elite after this revolution suffered defeat). Let us merely note that Hellie here imprudently does what Crummey avoids—that is, he extends the uniqueness of the Russian elite (or what is, from his point of view, the same thing, its service-based character) to the period be­fore 1556.

To be sure, the free movement of Russian peasants was indeed restricted in the fifteenth century, and the Russian nobles usually served. What is more, the traditional system of dividing inheritances among male heirs made service especially attractive to the latter as a means of maintaining and increasing their wealth. But, after all, the system of dividing inheritances still existed in Russia in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, after universal service was abol­ished, and the Russian elite managed to cope with it without so much as giving a thought to returning to obligatory service. Why, then, would it have been impossible for it to have coped with the same problem in the sixteenth century if things had turned out differently? Does this not at least call for explanation?

It does, and the "if" also sheds unexpected light on other phe­nomena and processes currently regarded as fully understood. For example, it is possible to show (and I will try to do so in chapter six) that what historians have conventionally perceived as a restriction on the free movement of peasants was in actuality a step taken in defense of their right of free movement—indeed, a legal guarantee of such movement in the face of growing feudal encroachments. Further, it is possible to show (as will be attempted in chapters two and ten) that along with the tendencies facilitating the introduction of universal service, another ancient and powerful tendency operated in Mus­covite society which promoted the aristocratization of the Russian elite; and that it is the competition between these two tendencies which has in fact determined the course of Russian history for centuries. While the aristocratizing tendency was destined to lose the struggle in the mid-1500s, it again raised its head at the end of the seventeenth century and, though initially defeated, overcame its competitor in the middle of the eighteenth.

On what basis, then, do historians discount the tendencies opposed to serfdom and universality of service? Because they were defeated? In precisely this way the verdict of the historians is transformed into a slavish copy of the verdict of history—an abdication no less sad than "might have been." Conventional history does not judge the victors, and thereby condemns the vanquished for a second time, without so much as having heard their case. Its interest in the past exclusively as something which has forever disappeared from life, and plunged without a trace into Lethe, gives it a perceptible flavor of fatalism and predetermination.

What interests me in history is its bearing on the present—and, above all, on the future. And for this reason I see my task not so much as one of describing the past, which has been done innumerable times, as of reconstructing it in its possible alternative combinations.

CHAPTER I

THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH WE ARGUE

1. Justification of the Chapter

The enigma of Russian history, which I have tried to describe in chap­ter one, struck me a long time ago, during my school years. When I was a university student, Ivan the Terrible was the idol of Russian his­torians. Eizenshtein's famous film provoked fierce debates, in which no agreement could be reached. The nucleus and the symbolic axis of these traditional arguments was (just as a century ago) the fateful question: what is Russia—Asia or Europe? The leader of the "East" or the outsider of the "West"? Where do we belong? And consequent­ly, who are we—"Scythians" or "Europeans"? And in a more abstract form: to what class of political structures does the country in which we happen to have been born belong—to "Asiatic despotism" or to "European absolutism"?

Certainly, "Asiatic despotism" was not mentioned in our textbooks. But, on the other hand, in the published works and letters of Marx and Engels, which the student historian was supposed to know back­wards and forwards, it was encountered literally at every step. And it had a somber and sinister sound. What did we, ardent and naive de­baters of those years, know about this strange topic? That an Asiatic despotism was an Eastern state, which built huge irrigation facilities and governed a society the vast majority of whose members lived in isolated and self-sufficient rural communes? That it was the embodi­ment of so-called "Asiatic stagnation"? Yes, this was perhaps all that we knew. By European absolutism we understood, correspondingly, a state which did not built irrigation networks and whose inhabitants were not isolated in rural communes. As a consequence of this, they went off to the cities, and in the cities the bourgeoisie grew, entering into competition with the feudal nobility. At the moment when the bourgeoisie became sufficiently strong and the nobility sufficiently weak, absolute monarchy appeared, whose power was based on medi­ation between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, while at the same time it remained a dictatorship of the feudal class.

It is not hard to see how many holes there were in the language in which we argued. The states which were usually considered despotic, such as Byzantium or Turkey, developed no irrigation facilities what­ever. The power of the Chinese emperors, which was certainly des­potic, was for some reason not based on the rural commune at all. The obviously Oriental country of Japan for some reason turned out to be by no means a despotism. But the main thing was, how was all this to be related to Russia, where, although there were rural com­munes, there was no irrigation? And where, on the other hand, until the very end of the nineteenth century there was no bourgeoisie capa­ble of competing with the nobility? It seemed that the Russian autoc­racy (samoderzhavie), ignorantly repudiating the authoritative con­clusions of Marx and Engels, deliberately refused to belong to either Asiatic despotism or European absolutism. And no third alternative was offered us.

True, following Lenin, one could still call it "semi-Asiatic," but what was the concrete meaning of this supposed to be? Which half of it was Asiatic and which European? Which features separated it from despotism, which from absolutism? What part of our past was deter­mined by Asia and what part by Europe? And what was still more im­portant—how did they determine our future? There was no answer to these questions.

On the other hand, a person who a quarter of a century ago se­cretly read Leonard Schapiro's book The Origins of the Communist Au­tocracy in the USSR had a completely confused feeling. For "autoc­racy"—so we had been taught—was primarily tsarist power, and this power had been overthrown in our country in 1917. Since then, Rus­sia had been a republic, with universal, equal, and secret suffrage. How then could Schapiro—and many, many others in his wake—call it an autocracy? Did they perhaps mean that the political nature of au­tocracy was by no means exhausted by the power of the tsars, which was only one of its transitory forms? But in this case, why did no one, not even our secret teachers, to say nothing of our official ones, bring up this question? Could there perhaps be something wrong with the very language in which we argued?

Is it really conceivable that modern physiologists would argue about the functions of the kidneys, for example, or chemists about an element, without having determined beforehand just what they were discussing? And that, as a result, it would turn out that by "kidney" some people actually meant the liver, while others, in referring to an element, meant the entire periodic table? But isn't this exactly what happens to us when we placidly list "autocracy," "authoritarianism," "absolutism," "unlimited power," "despotism," and "totalitarianism" simply as synonyms, separated from each other only by commas? And is this not why our arguments, instead of generating the truth, as they were supposed to do, are transformed into a babel—a definitional chaos, a dialogue among the deaf?

Faced with the tormenting riddles of Russian history, which over time took on the increasingly urgent and practical outlines of the fateful question of where we are going and what will become of us, I decided on a step as extraordinary as it was presumptuous. What else remained to one who had abandoned Marxist scholasticism as power­less to answer his questions, and was at the same time cut off from any systematic acquaintance with contemporary Western literature, but to suggest his own conceptual language—his own instrumental appa­ratus, capable, at least, of adequately describing the prerequisites of the task?

I started by asking why, inasmuch as not all non-European states answered the description of Asiatic despotism, all European states must necessarily be absolutist. Had not even Aristotle in his Politics posed the question: "Is there in fact only one form of royal power or are there several varieties within it?" And did he not answer it in cate­gorical terms: "It is not hard to see that there exist several forms of royal power and that the very means by which it is manifested are not one and the same"?[16] And, to say nothing of Aristotle, if we are to be­lieve Xenophon, even Socrates recognized this! Is it not strange that the ancient Greeks knew several forms of monarchy, while we—2,500 years later—are shut up like communities of peasants within the bounds of an impoverished bipolar geographical model of political classification?

Having now come to the West, I was glad to discover that many prominent scholars here also think that it is difficult, if not impossi­ble, to analyze the history of a particular country outside of the con­ceptual context of world history, and that, as Cyril Black, for example, has observed: "One cannot interpret Russian developments without some general conception of what is universal and what is particular in the evolution of societies."[17] Though proceeding from an analogous assumption, my thought in Russia followed a different path, however. It seemed to me necessary first of all to build up as carefully as possi­ble a set of, as it were, "ideal constructions" (or paradigms) of both poles of the bipolar model, and literally to count out their parameters on one's fingers. Of course, one might as a result obtain something very schematic, and for this reason debatable—something which in its pure form has not existed anywhere on earth. This would be some­thing which would show various political structures, as the mathe­maticians say, "in their extremes," rather than their actual outlines in this or that country. But I consciously took the risk of this schematiza- tion: in the final analysis, does one ever get anything without losing something in exchange? And what I wanted was a great deal. First of all, I wanted the categories and terms with which we operate to be­come clear to the point of transparency, so that in the future when we argued we would at least know what we were talking about. My inten­tion may to the Western reader seem like naive intellectual extrem­ism. So it probably was. But for me, in any case, it cleared up the pic­ture somewhat. The result at which I finally arrived turned out to be paradoxical. In the first place, as the reader will see in what follows, none of my ideal constructions described the Russian political struc­ture adequately. It turned out that, beginning at a definite historical point, this structure behaved very strangely—that it was subject to its own laws, which coincided with neither the parameters of despotism nor those of absolutism. And it turned out, moreover, to be consider­ably more flexible and adaptable than the ideal constructions were. While what is usually called "modernization" destroys despotism and has in most cases transformed absolutism into democracy, the Russian political structure has, as it were, digested this "modernization," while retaining its basic medieval parameters to this day.

But the paradoxical nature of my findings did not by any means consist in this. Russian nationalists in all ages have proudly pro­nounced Russia to be a special civilization, following its own thorny path between the Charybdis of the West and the Scylla of the East. This was declared before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, and it is declared after them. Suffice it to recall the preach­ing of the fiery Ioakim, patriarch of Moscow in the late seventeenth century, contrasting Russian piety both to Islam and to Latin heresy, or the analogous preaching of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in the late twentieth century. Assertions of the uniqueness of the historical fate of a nation constitute the great temptation for nationalists. My results revealed something much more complex and much more distressing, however: the Russian political structure not only could not be de­scribed with the help of the bipolar model, but it was also not sui ge­neris in its sources. It had been violently transformed into what it is now—that is, an autocracy. Starting like the rest of Europe within the limits of a single absolutist paradigm, at a certain moment—in com­plete conformity with Aristotle's political conception—Russia "devi­ated" from the ordinary absolutist axis. But by virtue of a number of historical circumstances, its "deviation" (in contrast to the "deviation" of monarchy toward tyranny, which is usual according to Aristotle) gave rise to a strange new political species, which led to national trag­edy for a great people over the course of many centuries. From the ordinary absolutist root there grew a wild, ugly, wayward branch. If there was anything to be proud of, it was only that somewhere in the depths of the national subconscious Russia proved unable entirely to rid herself of her European beginnings, and again and again stub­bornly returned to them.

This new political structure, unheard of in European history, was called forth by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution. Ivan the Ter­rible and the origins of the modern Russian political structure were thus indissolubly connected. Such was my result, and there is appar­ently no other way of familiarizing the reader with it than through the elementary comparison and correction of definitions, and specula­tions and interpretations at first glance not even related to Ivan the Terrible.

I understand how strange such an abstract theoretical wringing process, full of allusions and terms unfamiliar to the Western ear, must seem. Moreover, it may turn out that in proposing a system of categories forjudging political structures, I have, as they say, rein­vented the wheel. I understand all this. But I can do nothing about it: otherwise my encounter with the reader is in danger of becoming yet another dialogue of the deaf.

The first part of this book is of necessity theoretical, since it is de­signed to acquaint the reader with my conception of the origin and nature of the Russian political structure. In this part I seek:

To give as precise as possible a description of "despotism" and "absolutism";

To give a description of "Russian autocracy";

To demonstrate that prior historiography known to me proceeds almost entirely from the bipolar model of political classification;

To show that, precisely for this reason, it is incapable of ade­quately describing the origin and nature of the Russian political structure.

It goes without saying that most Soviet authors reject with an of­fended air the very possibility that Russia might belong in the category of Asiatic despotism, and decidedly count it in the family of European absolutism, while most Western authors who are sensitive to theoreti­cal issues are convinced of the opposite. For this reason, I will call the first, for brevity's sake, "absolutists," and the latter "despotists."

This chapter will be devoted to definitions. In chapter two, I will try to show how it comes about that the "absolutists" are unable to ex­plain the origin and nature of the Russian political process. The third chapter will be devoted to the "despotists."

2. The Science of Despotology

Aristotle knew that in addition to the three regular and three irregu­lar ("deviant") forms of political organization characteristic of the civ­ilized oikumene, there existed beyond its boundaries, in the darkness of barbarism, yet a seventh—despotism. Outwardly, it resembles the tyranny well-known to the civilized world, which "is in essence the same as monarchy but implies only the interests of the ruler alone."[18]But this resemblance is only outward, because in the civilized world, tyranny is but one of the transitory forms in an ever-changing sea of political transformations, while despotism in the barbarian world is permanent.

The human mind is not capable of understanding how a people can tolerate tyranny on a permanent basis. For this reason Aristotle saw in despotism something inhuman. And this is not surprising if we remember that "barbarism" was, for him, only the external political dimension of the internal political condition of "slavery." Neither the slave nor the barbarian (the potential slave) could be considered a human being, since the first mark of a human being was, for Aris­totle, participation in courts and councils—that is, in the administra­tion of society. Man, for him, was a political animal. This, properly speaking, makes it understandable why he could not consider despo­tism as a political structure at all.

But Aristotle nevertheless does introduce a certain original ele­ment into what I would call the science of despotology. In fact, if we try to look at his theory of "deviations" from a modern point of view, we see immediately that he has in mind the problem of divergence between the goals of the social system and those of its administration. The regular forms, for him, are those in which the common goals of the system prevail over the goals of the administration. The irregular forms are those in which the administration subjects the system to the goals of the social elements it represents (or, what is of decisive impor­tance for us, to its own autonomous goals). This, in Aristotle's terms, is the meaning of "deviation." Oligarchy, for example, subjects the system to the goals of the social "upper crust," and democracy, on the contrary, to those of the "lower depths." Tyranny subjects the system to the goals of the administration as such, which, in modern parlance, becomes an interest group in its own right. Thus, in Aristotle's opin­ion, social systems may exist which live not for their own interests, but exclusively for the interests of the "ruler alone," who personifies the admin­istration of the system.

The remarkable variety of political forms characteristic of the Greek polis was historically short-lived. And it was by no means re­placed by the ideal Utopian polity of which Aristotle dreamed, nor even by the republic of Plato, but by monarchy, which became the dominant form of political organization for centuries to come and, as Aristotle had predicted, constantly strove to "deviate" in the direction of tyranny, or even—as it seemed to its contemporaries—in the direc­tion of barbarian despotism; that is, permanent tyranny.

Proceeding from the same Aristotelian tradition, European politi­cal thought has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to restrain monarchy—at least in theory—from this fateful "deviation." We can find the traces of this dramatic effort as early as the work of the En­glish jurist of the first parliamentary period, Bracton, in the thir­teenth century; in the Praise of English Laws of John Fortescue in the fifteenth century; in Jean Bodin, Andrei Kurbskii, and Du Plessy Mornay in the sixteenth century; Iurii Krizhanich in the seventeenth century; and Mikhail Shcherbatov and Mercier de la Riviere in the eighteenth. And finally, when tyranny had apparently become an ir­reversible fact in France, the lessons of this theoretical struggle were summarized by Charles de Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws.

Montesquieu was a pessimist and a conservative. He was convinced that the days of "moderate government" (as he called European abso­lute monarchy) were numbered, that the age-old struggle was ap­proaching its political finale—its catastrophe. "As the rivers run to lose themselves in the sea, monarchies strive to dissolve themselves in despotism," he wrote.[19] The only one of all the wealth of "regular" po­litical forms listed by Aristotle, the last heir of civilization—European absolute monarchy—was receding into the external darkness of polit­ical nonexistence, never to return.

If we do not forget that Montesquieu was the founder, so to speak, of the geographical approach in history, and that for him "moderate government" (as the result of a temperate climate) was identified with Europe, and despotism with Asia, we can see that we stand here at the sources of the bipolar model of political classification which has domi­nated the minds of modern historians.

Montesquieu was reproached by his contemporaries with not hav­ing been able to give an adequate political description of despotism, limiting himself to a brief aphorism: "When the savages of Louisiana wish to obtain fruit, they cut down the tree at the root and obtain it— here is the whole of despotic government."⁵ But this reproach is only partially justified. In fact, Montesquieu drew an important theoreti­cal conclusion—second only to that of Aristotle—concerning the na­ture of despotism: its total inefficiency, the incapacity for political dyna­mism which conditioned its permanent stagnation.

Despite Montesquieu's pessimism, Europe, as we know, survived the eighteenth century. Moreover, it countered the threat of "devia­tion" toward despotism with the invention of modern democracy, which made possible the continued existence of civilization. And only in the middle of the twentieth century, when the total onslaught of despotism seemed fated to recur, was the third and decisive theoreti­cal step in the description of this political phenomenon taken.

I do not at all mean to say by this that the phenomenon of despo­tism disappeared from the field of vision of European thinkers in the interim between Montesquieu and Wittfogel. John Stuart Mill intro­duced the term "Eastern society" to describe it, and Richard Jones that of "Asiatic society," not to mention the well-known comments by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, from which we shall have occasion to quote. Unfortunately, the ideas of the remarkable seventeenth century Russian thinker Iurii Krizhanich have for vari­ous reasons (we shall speak of them later) not entered into universal despotology, though his conception of "moderate aristocracy" as the main bastion against despotism preceded the analogous observations of David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville.

It should be noted that there have been times in the history of Eu­rope when despotology has ceased to be mere academic theorizing, and become a weapon in an immediate and urgent political and ideo­logical struggle. We can count at least four such occasions. The first was the attempt by despotic Persia to conquer Athens in the fifth cen­tury b.c. (giving rise, in particular, to Aristotle's speculations con­cerning the existence of "hereditary and despotic royal power among the barbarians"). The second, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,

5. Ibid.

was marked by the seemingly irresistible onslaught of the Turks on Europe and the creation of absolutism (giving rise, in particular, to the conceptions of "seignorial monarchy" in France and "autocracy" in Russia). The third such occasion came in the second half of the eighteenth century, when European absolutism appeared to have slid finally into despotism (bringing with it, in particular, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws). The fourth came in the middle of our century, when the onslaught of what is now called totalitarianism once again seemed to be irresistible. People who died in 1940 could actually have thought that the hour of the Last Judgment had come. This brought with it, in particular, Karl A. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism as a reac­tion to the extreme danger to which civilization was exposed.

Wittfogel's book—despite the author's political extremism, and the highly debatable but unconditionally expressed thesis of "hydraulic civilization" as the historic source of despotism—nevertheless gave the first detailed description of this political category. In this sense, it could have marked the transformation of despotology into a science.⁶

6. Wittfogel's book Oriental Despotism was received with drawn swords by most spe­cialists, including the historian Arnold Toynbee; the sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt; the sinologist Wolfram Eberhard; Berthold Spuhler, specialist on the Golden Horde; and S. Andreski, a specialist in comparative sociology. It was also attacked in the Soviet press—and, incidentally, from a very interesting point of view. The only review from Moscow known to me berated Wittfogel for not having understood "the real role of despotic society in the East as inevitable at a certain stage of political development of so­ciety." And furthermore, as a "political form [which] was in some respects necessary and progressive (Sovetskoe kitaevedenie, no. 3 [1958], p. 195; my emphasis).

In chapter 4, devoted especially to the "despotists," we will consider this unanimous rejection in more detail. Now let us say only that in casting doubt on Wittfogel's concept of "hydraulic civilization" as a determining condition for "agromanagerial despotism," they also reject the notion of despotism as a distinct political structure, declaring it, for example, as Toynbee did, to be a myth invented by the Greeks in the fifth century в.с. and revived by Wittfogel out of purely political considerations.

In fact, nothing in these arguments against the conception of "hydraulic civiliza­tion" operates against the phenomenon of despotism as such. In Igor' D'akonov's study of the social structure of ancient Mesopotamia (Obshchestvennyi i gosudarstbennyi stroi drevnego Dvurech'ia. Shumer) the existence in predespotic Sumer of city-states headed by rulers (ensi) whose power was limited by an aristrocratic senate and an assembly of the people is shown. It follows that large-scale irrigation facilities in ancient Mesopotamia, just as in ancient predespotic China (see L. S. Perelomov, Imperiia Tsin'—pervoe tsentral- izovannoe gosudarstvo Kitaia), could be supported and regulated not only by a centralized bureaucracy, but by city-states of the ancient type. D'akonov notes, however, that despo­tism nevertheless did arise in Mesopotamia in the Third Dynasty of Ur (2132-24 в.с.), while Perelomov concedes that it appeared in China under the Ch'in Dynasty, though rejecting it for the Yin and Chou Dynasties.

Neither is the existence of despotism refuted by the constant and fierce struggle

When I constructed my "ideal model" of despotism, I was not famil­iar with Wittfogel's work; I had never had occasion to encounter it in Moscow, and I am not sure that more than a couple of scholars had read it there. I am glad, however, that, at least in certain essential points, the "construction" which I now intend to offer the reader echoes Wittfogel's description.

3. Despotism

This is how it looks. Despotism is based on the total disposition by the administration of the results of the society's economic activity. The despotic state, possessing supreme sovereignty over the entire na­tional product (that is, being able to extract it without hindrance from the producers), does not recognize economic limitations on its power. The absence of economic limitations, by paralyzing the initiative of the producers, naturally leads—in historical perspective—to more or less permanent stagnation. In other words, despotism is incapable of rad­ical economic modernization.

The lack of what we call economic progress is combined with an absence of political dynamism—with what can be called the simple po­litical reproduction of despotism. This confirms Montesquieu's asser­tion that despotism excludes the historical movement of society. In order to exist for millennia under conditions of economic and politi­cal immobility, despotism had to work out a special kind of social structure. It is characterized by extreme simplification and polariza-

within despotic elites—a struggle which at times made despots dependent on their own bureaucratic power base, as Balazs asserts with regard to China (E. Balazs, Chinese Civil­isation and Bureaucracy), or on bureaucrats who had succeeded temporarily in turning themselves into semifeudal landlords, as Christensen asserts for Sassanid Persia (see A. Christensen, L'Iran sous les Sassanides), or on a priestly oligarchy, as Andreski asserts rel­ative to Egypt during the so-called New Kingdom (S. Andreski, Elements of Comparative Sociology, p. 167). Quite the contrary: even Iurii Krizhanich knew that the intraelite struggle, and the dependence of the despot on it, is a generic trait of despotism and the cause of its always having been a structure with an unstable leadership.

And, in any case, none of these objections alters the fact that there is a class of politi­cal structures known to history which over the course of millennia experienced no politi­cal development, and as a consequence proved incapable of changing their fundamental parameters—if you like, their paradigms—from within. It seems to me that this is what Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jones, and Tocqueville had in mind when they wrote about despotism. Until this is refuted, the phenomenon of despotism requires study, regardless of what attitude we take toward Wittfogel's conception; for he was the first- after Montesquieu—to place what I call the science of despotology in the focus of our attention with such force and clarity.

tion of society—by its reduction into two polar classes: "the gover­nors" and "the governed."[20]

To the economic immobility of this system there corresponds the immobility of the class of the governed (the reduction to a minimum of what is called in modern sociology the horizontal mobility of the popu­lation, and its lack of political differentiation, so that the administra­tion confronts not politically discrete society, but a uniform mass of subjects, hypothetically equal before the person of the despot.[21]

The reverse side of this political uniformity of the class of the gov­erned is the equally absolute atomization and instability of the class of the governors—that is, a completely chaotic process of vertical mo­bility. The selection of top administrative personnel is carried out without regard to corporate membership, to privileges of estate, to wealth, or to ability. Despotism does not know what might be called the category of "political death." Members of the governing class, re­gardless of rank, pay for mistakes, as a rule, not only with the loss of the privileges connected with rank and the wealth they have accumu­lated, but with their heads as well. A mistake is equivalent to death. Thus the atomized, unstable elite of despotism, wandering their whole lives in the minefield of the despot's caprices, can never be transformed into an aristocracy—that is, into an elite which is heredi­tary and therefore independent of the regime, able to compel the sys­tem to take into consideration its goals and even to subject the system to these goals. In the absence of stable privileges, the possibility of even the primary form of social limitations on power disappears.[22] In other words, the independence of the despot, not only from the class of the governed but also from that of the governors, is absolute. This confirms Aristotle's view of despotism as a permanent tyranny, under which the system is subordinated to "the interests of the ruler alone."

It was Montesquieu who pointed to the role of a different category of latent limitations on power—the ideological ones. He directly con­nected the degree of stability—or, as he put it, the "susceptibility to corruption"—of political systems, with their observance of the domi­nating "principle" of each. Whereas he considered the principle of monarchy to be the "feeling of honor," he assumed that the principle of despotism was exclusively that of fear. "Moderate government," Montesquieu wrote, generalizing from the political experience of his time, "can relax the reins as much as it likes, and without danger to itself. . . . But if, under a despotic government, the sovereign drops his hands even for a moment, so that he cannot immediately destroy

ate of the Catholic college in Rome, Krizhanich had dreamed of Moscow all through his youth. Finally getting there in the 1660s, he lived in Moscow for only sixteen months and paid for his liberty of thought with sixteen years of Siberian exile. In the second half of the 1670s, during the brief "thaw" following the death of Aleksei Mikhailovich, he in desperation obtained permission to go abroad, where he immediately died in Vienna. To this day his works await complete translation into Russian (they were writ­ten in Old Slavonic). We know that, in the period of the "thaw" just mentioned, his book Politika was extremely popular in the "upper reaches" of the Muscovite government of that time.

Like Montesquieu, Krizhanich was concerned primarily with the problem of guar­anties against despotism. Whereas Persia under the rule of the shahanshah served as the starting-point for Montesquieu's reflections, for Krizhanich this starting point was Tur­key under the sultan. "The Turks," he reasoned,

pay no attention to pedigree (since there is no boyardom among them), but say that they look for skill, intelligence, and valor. However, this is not really so, and frequently their prominent men are people of no merit, though skillful at flat­tery. Thus with one wave of the hand, the lowest become the highest, and the highest the lowest. This deprives people of any courage and begets a sense of worthlessness and despair. For no one can be sure of his position, wealth, or the safety of his life, and no one has reason to work hard for the sake of high honor or glory (Politika, p. 348).

"The European kings act better, in that along with other good qualities they also look for noble birth," he notes in contrast.

After all, men of noble birth, who from ancient times have possessed a glorious name and broad estates, take more care to preserve the kingdom and their estate in an honourable condition, and more care of the ancient name of their clan. . . . Furthermore, the boyars in their youth have more time to learn the sciences than do plain people (ibid.).

But along with Turkey, Krizhanich had in mind another sad example: Poland, where it was precisely the privilege of the aristocracy which had led to chaos and anar- the people occupying the highest places in the state, then all is lost."[23]And fear as the principle of a system requires, according to Montes­quieu, the extreme limitation of the number of political ideas in cir­culation at any given moment. "Everything must turn on two or three ideas, and no new ones at all are needed. When training an animal, one must be very careful of changing the trainer or the method of instruction: one must hit its brain with two or three movements, no more.'"¹

Thus, according to Montesquieu, the negation of ideological limita­tions on power through the minimization and standardization of ideas is an attribute of despotism, which deprives the administration of feedback from the system, excludes any mechanism for correcting mistakes, and consequently makes the personal power of the despot extremely unstable. Of course, Montesquieu describes this in other terms. He says that the despotic principle does not permit either judgment, objections, or independent opinions on the part of execu­tives, and is therefore more subject than other systems to "corrup­tion." Furthermore, it is "corrupted constantly, since it is corrupt by its nature."

What Montesquieu did not articulate with sufficient clarity is the connection between the negation of economic and ideological limita­tions. But, after all, despotism needs the minimization of ideas pre­cisely for this, so that the thought of the possibility of challenging the constant plundering of the economy cannot even arise. This is why it is compelled to take under its control not only the material, but also the intellectual product of the country. Administering not only peo­ple but ideas as well, it must rob the heads of its subjects with as much care as it robs their coffers. Thus, intellectual robbery turns out to be only the reverse side of material robbery. A regime which denies eco­nomic limitations cannot help denying ideological ones.

This also explains the monstrous stability of despotic systems, since it excludes the possibility of the emergence of a political opposition (or reformist potential) which sets itself the goal not simply of replac­ing the current occupant of the throne, but of bringing about a quali­tative change in the system based on an alternative model of political organization. Victorious mass uprisings in medieval China, for exam­ple, which immediately and slavishly copied the despotic structure just destroyed, but with new personnel, confirm Wittfogel's conclu­sion as to the absence in despotic structures of a political opposition.¹² This inability of despotism to transcend itself even in thought indi­cates not only its incapacity for institutional modernization, which is already known to us, but also—what is even more important—its tragic incapacity for self-demolition. It can be destroyed only from without.

The absence of these latent limitations—social, economic, and ideological—leads to the inability of despotic systems to resist being subjected to the private goals of the despot. This naturally may lead to mistakes, for the correction of which, as we already know, no mech­anism other than murder is envisaged in despotic systems. As para­doxical as this may seem, the death of the despot proves to be the sole means of correcting mistakes of administration. It is precisely the im­mense degree of divergence of goals, deriving in the last analysis from the complete autonomy of the administration from the system, which makes the unlimited personal power of the despot just as abso­lutely unstable as despotism itself, considered as a political structure, is absolutely stable.

12. "In contrast to the independent writers who, under Western absolutism, chal­lenged not only the excesses but the foundation of the despotic order, the critics of hydraulic society have in almost every case complained only of the misdeeds of individ­ual officials or of the evils of specific governmental acts. Apart from mystics who teach total withdrawal from the world, these critics aim ultimately at regenerating a system of total power, whose fundamental desirability they do not doubt . . . the embittered sub­ject . . . may defeat the government's men in arms. They may even overthrow a totter­ing dynasty. But eventually they will only revive—and rejuvenate—the agromanagerial despotism whose incompetent representatives they eliminated. The heroes of China's famous bandit novel, the Shui-hu-Ch'uan, could think of nothing better to do than to set up on their rebel island a miniature version of the very bureaucratic hierarchy which they were so fiercely combatting" (K. Wittfogel, pp. 134-35).

For this reason, it is not so much the safety of the system as his per­sonal safety which is the point of the despot's political activity. The sole means of securing this safety proves to be permanent, universal, and fruitless terror'³—fruitless because, being a terrorist structure par excellence, despotism nevertheless begins and ends as a structure with an unstable leadership. During the thousand years of Byzantium's existence, for example, some fifty of its emperors were drowned, blinded, or strangled—an average of one every twenty years.

Naturally, some despots give more attention to the economic func­tions of the state (manifesting, as Wittfogel has it, "the maximum ra­tionality of the ruler"), and others to wars and conquests. Some suc­ceed, and others suffer defeat. As a result of this, the state experiences fluctuations, periods of expansion and decline. However, no predic­tability is observed in the alternation of these periods. They are as chaotic as the selection of leadership personnel, as the "purges of the elite," as the rise and fall of the wazirs, ministers, and favorites of the despots, or of the despots themselves. In despotic systems, only unpre­dictability is predictable.'⁴

Considering that permanent economic stagnation placed the sys­tem in complete dependence on natural catastrophes and hostile in­vasions, and that the absence of any limitations on power created a situation of political unpredictability and chaos, in which everyone from the despot himself to his least servant was constantly balancing between life and death, we may say that despotism was subject to the play of elemental forces to such a degree that it is more reminiscent of a phenomenon of nature than of a political commonwealth. And in this sense, by refusing it the status of a political phenomenon, Aristotle would seem to have been right once again. If something which is the polar opposite of civilization can exist, that something is despotism.[24]

Thus, despite the many great empires in which it prevailed—the Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, Persian, Mongol, Byzantine, Turkish, and more—despotism has proved to be a political dead end. For all the variety of palace coups, mutinies, putsches, Praetorian conspir­acies, and janissary rebellions, it reproduced itself without interrup­tion over the course of centuries in all of its lifeless integrity. This was a closed system, the parameters of which were rigidly laid down in pre-Christian millennia. Its world was an isolated one, like a plane­tary orbit, exempt from the laws of probability, deprived of choice and real movement. It knew no political alternative. In this sense, it was a spectre. It existed outside history. Of course, like everything else in the cosmos, it moved. But after all, the planets also move: only their orbits are fixed.

4. Absolutism

As the reader may now guess, what I intend to suggest for the classi­fication of authoritarian political structures (and, concretely, for dis­tinguishing absolutism from despotism) will be the conception of latent limitations on power which we have just constructed, sum­marizing the observations of Aristotle, Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Wittfogel.

In juridical terms, all medieval authoritarian structures are indis­tinguishable from one another. That is, the source of sovereignty in them is the person of the ruler, to whom God has directly delegated the functions of administration, thus freeing the ruler from any con­trol whatever by the system. All of them openly declared their free­dom from any limitations, and all of them claimed this freedom to an equal degree.

Nevertheless, John Fortescue distinguished "royal government" from "political." For Jean Bodin, the distinction between monarchy and "seignorial government" was of prime importance. Mercier de la Riviere made a profound distinction between "arbitrary" and "legal" despotism. And Montesquieu, as we have seen, predicted that politi­cal catastrophe would ensue from the transformation of absolute monarchy into despotism. In other words, despite the formal identity of all monarchical structures, their contemporaries felt and saw, and furthermore considered vitally important, not their similarity but the dif­ferences between them. If we summarize all of their attempts, we can say that they stubbornly tried to create some kind of typology of au­thoritarian structures capable of serving as a kind of basis for political recommendations and prognoses. This was a typology which, if it were to remain within the limits of reality, had to be based on some­thing other than juridical definitions (which no self-respecting abso­lute monarch would have agreed to recognize). But in that case, what would have been its basis?[25]

Absolutism, as distinct from despotism, did not possess supreme sovereignty over the entire national product, because it was com­pelled to tolerate economic limitations on power. Although the most extreme of its apologists proclaimed the right of kings to the property of their subjects, this was never taken as an axiom and was always dis­puted, both in theory and in practice.[26]

In practice, the attempts to implement this right ran up against the resistance of the system, often ending tragically for the absolute mon- archs. In theory, it was precisely on economic limitations to power that the distinction between monarchy and its potential "deviations" was based. Jean Bodin—a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible's and the author of a classic apologia for absolutism which exercised co­lossal influence on the entire ideological tradition of this structure— appeared in his The Commonwealth to be no less radical, at first glance, than Ivan the Terrible in his letters to Kurbskii. He, too, assumed that "on earth there is nothing higher after God than sovereign princes, established by Him as His lieutenants for the governing of people," and that he who "withholds his respect from a sovereign prince, also withholds respect from God, whose image on earth the prince is.'"⁸ Furthermore, Bodin, as distinct from the Aristotelian tradition, con­sidered the essential mark of the citizen to be, not participation in courts and councils, but just the reverse—unconditional submission to the unlimited power of the monarch. But, for all this, Bodin re­garded the property of citizens as their inalienable possession, in the disposition of which they were no less sovereign than was the mon­arch in ruling his people. To tax citizens of a part of their inalienable property without their voluntary consent was, from Bodin's point of view, ordinary robbery.

Ivan the Terrible, with his sharply polemical temperament, would undoubtedly have seen a logical contradiction in Bodin's conception. And he would have been right. But the essence of the phenomenon of absolutism was contained in this logical contradiction. Absolutism ac­tually was a paradox, albeit a living paradox which lasted for centuries.

Bodin's "contradiction" points up a significant deformation in the integrity of the supposedly unlimited political body, with its constant assertions of divine sovereignty. King Francois I of France, a contem­porary of Ivan Ill's, in desperate need of money, did not, for exam­ple, plunder Marseilles, as any despot would have done in his place (and as Ivan the Terrible did in an analogous situation by pillaging Novgorod), but instead put judicial offices up for sale, thereby in­voluntarily creating a new privileged stratum—that of hereditary judges—and a new institution, the parliaments. The very fact that these offices were bought, and, consequently, that the government was trusted, and that even in the deepest tyrannical twilight of France these privileges were never violated, is of primary historical importance—a kind of institutional materialization of the apparently ephemeral po­litical paradox of absolutism. Here is how Professor N. Kareev de­scribes this phenomenon: "The unlimited monarchy was compelled to tolerate around itself autonomous corporations of hereditary judges: each of them and all of them together could perhaps be sent wherever the king liked, but they could not be expelled from their posts, because this would have meant ... to violate the right of property."™ Bodin, in formulating his contradiction, was simply summarizing the actual practice of his time. And this practice showed that absolutism was com­pelled to tolerate economic limitations on power.

The presence of these economic limitations, making possible au­tonomous economic activity on the part of producers, excluded per­manent stagnation, and made absolutism capable of fundamental economic modernization and expanded reproduction of the gross national product. The capacity for economic progress characteristic of absolutist structures was combined with their capacity for political dynamism, and for what could be called expanded political reproduction. Their gradual transformation into democratic structures leaves no doubt of this.

In place of the reduction and polarization of social forces charac­teristic of despotism, absolutism was marked by a multiplicity of social strata. Variety and inequality were its hallmarks. Not immobility and uniformity, but, on the contrary, social and economic differentiation of the peasantry, its constant migration into the cities, and, conse­quently, urbanization and the formation of a strong middle class, were the leading processes in absolutist societies.

The rapid horizontal mobility in absolutist structures was logically accompanied by well-ordered vertical mobility, based on social limita­tions of power. In practical terms, this meant that the elevation of the new bureaucratic elite of absolutism brought with it not the dissolu­tion of the hereditary aristocracy in universal service, but a competi­tive struggle between old and new elites. This constitutes one of the most dramatic differences between absolutism and despotism. De­spite the multiplicity of conflicts and the constant, sometimes bloody and cruel struggle of the elites, absolutism agreed to coexist with aris­tocracy, while despotism did not allow it to come into existence.

This not only assured the members of the absolutist elite of the right to "political death" (and thereby deprived their struggle of the char­acter of a brutal fight for physical survival), but also created the very possibility of a political struggle, and therefore the mechanism for cor­recting mistakes in administration, not to speak of powerful sources of independent thought and behavior.

At this point, we may perhaps express a cautious hypothesis: just as the existence of the middle class, being a function of economic lim­itations, created the possibility of transforming absolutism into de­mocracy, so the existence of the aristocracy, being a function of social limitations, prevented the transformation of absolutist structures into despotism. In other words, just as democracy is impossible without a middle class, so absolutism is impossible without an aristocracy.

For despotism, as we have seen, ideological robbery was the other side of robbery of property. The political practice of absolutism gives us the opportunity to prove this theorem, as the mathematicians say, from the inverse. Namely: the absence of robbery of property should lead to the absence of ideological robbery. And, in fact, not being sub­ject to permanent corruption—in other words, not fearing the de­struction of its power at any moment—absolutism did not see a mor­tal threat in the multiplicity of ideas. It therefore spared not only the material potential of the country, but also its intellectual potential, and made no attempt at an ideological monopoly. That is, along with administrative and political functions, it did not also perform an ideological one.

Recognizing the latent limitations on power, absolutism thereby in­voluntarily promoted the coming into being of a political opposi­tion—that is, the working out of alternative models of political or­ganization. The existence of reformist potential and of alternative models, in turn, made qualitative change in the system possible. It de­veloped out of its own resources.

This excluded terror as a universal means of administration. In Eu­rope, as Herzen once said, there was also terror, but it did not occur to anyone to flog Spinoza or to induct Lessing into the army. Even in Spain, which "deviated" in the direction of tyranny more than other European countries, a place was found for Cervantes and Lope de Vega. England knew the heavy hand of Henry VIII and the horrors of Bloody Mary, but for all that, the Utopia of Thomas More and the Novum Organum of Bacon were written there. France, which saw the massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholics, also found room for Rabelais and Montaigne.

This, of course, does not mean that in the despotic states, during the times of individual "enlightened despots," there were not court astronomers and poets who sometimes achieved great successes in the politically insensitive areas of art and science. The culture of despo­tism tolerated good poetry and medicine, preserved the works of Ar­istotle, and created great religious philosophies—which, however, preached not the transformation of reality but escape from it as from an embodiment of chaos. It was a politically mute culture.

Naturally, a certain degree of divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system is characteristic of all au­thoritarian structures without exception. Partly for this reason, abso­lutist governments always found themselves under financial stress, owed gigantic debts, and were never able to achieve a normal balance of income and expenditures. A financial cul-de-sac occasioned the calling of the Long Parliament which ended by sending King Charles I to the block, and the same is true of the Estates General which ended by guillotining Louis XVI. The Austrian constitutional bodies also owed their origin to a financial collapse combined with a military defeat. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the interest on the British national debt was equal to the entire expenditures on the army and navy, and the debt of Austria exceeded its annual income three-and-a-half times, while in France the national debt was eigh­teen times the annual revenues of the state. Such was the disordered financial system of absolutism, which originated for the most part in ruinous wars, unskilled management, and vestiges of medieval orga­nization in the economy, which obviously contradicted the goals of the system.

Despotism did not know any of this. It did not live on credit, since no one would have extended a penny's worth of credit to it. It lived by constant robbery of its own people. And thus, it was not only parasitic on the body of the system, as was absolutism, but systematically disor­ganized the system, not allowing it to stand on its feet.

If the reader gets the impression that I am writing an apologia for absolutism, this is only because it is being compared with despotism. Absolutism was a cruel, often bloody and tyrannical authoritarian structure, striving, insofar as this was possible for it, to trample un­derfoot not only the political, but also the civil rights of its subjects. Louis XI was not a whit better than Shah Abbas, and Henry VIII was no more pleasant than Suleiman the Magnificent. Any authoritarian structure strives to deviate toward despotism, as a compass needle to­ward the north. Despotism is its ideal, its dream, its crown. But for absolutism it was an unattainable dream—for even in "deviating" to­ward tyranny, it could never make this tyranny permanent. And it could not do this because the latent limitations on power which it had had to endure did not permit it to disorganize the system to the de­gree of chronic stagnation.

5. The Historical Function of Absolutism

I understand that the reader may, for these last few pages, have been haunted by the feeling that I am retailing copybook maxims, some of which were known even to the students of Aristotle. In fact, what have we gotten from all of these elementary comparisons? We have examined two equally authoritarian political structures, between which it is impossible to discover any formal juridical difference, and which—on the level of political organization—resemble each other like twins. In one type of state, the government commits violence against its own people; in the other, they are also hanged and en­slaved. In the first type, the kings proclaim the unlimited nature of their power, as they also do in the second. In the first type, wars or conquests are waged, rebels slaughtered, and the oppressed peasant­ry robbed—and so, too, in the second type.

Does this not give us the right to say that there existed—in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, in the East and in the West—simply a certain continuum of authoritarian structures (or traditional—i.e., "unmodernized"—political bodies), a continuum within which we can calmly call absolutism an unrealized despotism, and despotism a real­ized absolutism? We have yet to see how many experts, both in the East and in the West, do precisely this. And I would have no objection in principle, if the proclamation of such a continuum were not in­tended to obscure the most essential result of our comparisons. Namely, that the poles of this "continuum" are not only different, but also the very antithesis of each other. Their opposition consists in the fact that, by virtue of all the reasons set forth above, one of them was destined for self-development, and the other was incapable even of self-destruction. It consists in the fact that absolutism declared the un­limited nature of its power, while despotism practiced it.

The use of the terms "despotism" and absolutism" as synonyms is what hinders our analysis of these political structures. Citing the cruelty, aggressiveness, and authoritarian methods of both, we confuse the "deviation" of absolute monarchies toward tyranny under Louis XI and Henry VIII with the despotism of Shah Abbas and Suleiman the Magnificent. Failure to perceive their antithetical nature—wheth­er by placing them within the limits of a "continuum" or of a concep­tion of "traditional" society—renders our theorizing sterile. Civiliza­tion was able to continue precisely because there existed authoritarian structures which, by virtue of certain historical causes, were compelled to tolerate latent limitations on power. We can now formulate this as follows: the degree of divergence between the goals of the system and those of the administration in authoritarian structures is inversely proportional to the num­ber of latent limitations which they are compelled to tolerate.

In addition to the three types of latent limitations which have al­ready been mentioned, and which are more or less obvious, there also exists a fourth, whose stratum lies deepest, and which is hardest to grasp, but on which, as their foundation, all the others rest.

Let us assume that in some country the powers that be perceive a political problem—mutiny and opposition—in the hairstyle of their subjects, in the length of their clothes, and in their habit of smoking tobacco. Let us suppose that they consider it their duty to regulate these intimate details by means of police measures and administrative decrees. It is difficult to imagine that even such obvious tyrants as Henry VIII or Louis XIV would have claimed the sole right to deter­mine the width of the farthingale worn by court ladies, or the length of gentlemen's sleeves. For this purpose there existed more subtle mechanisms, in the shape of public decencies or fashions. But in Rus­sia the powers that be knew best how many fingers people should cross themselves with, and how long their beards should be, and whether they should smoke tobacco, drink vodka, and desire or not desire their neighbors' wives. Tsar Aleksei did furious battle against shaving, while Peter the Great, on the other hand, looked on the beards of his subjects as an offense and an act of rebellion, and agreed to tolerate them only as a special item in the revenue. Tsar Mikhail strictly forbade the use of tobacco, and Peter, in turn, sold to the Mar­quis de Carmartin the sole right to poison the lungs of the Russians with nicotine. In 1692 a decree was issued forbidding civil servants to dress well, since "it is known that those service people who wear such expensive clothing make their fortunes not from their just earnings but by stealing from the treasury of our great sovereign." In other words, it was obvious to the authorities that one does not earn stone palaces by just labor, that even those who had not been caught before were to be considered thieves and their "earnings" themselves evi­dence of crime and sufficient grounds for punishment.

These details, however, are not the point, which is that people rec­ognized, the right of the authorities to interfere in the details of their private lives. Not only was a man's home not his castle, even his beard was not considered his property. People's very thoughts and tastes did not belong to them. The cultural tradition had not worked out defen­sive mechanisms which would have made such interference by the state impossible. Only the opposition—"the people on the right" (the Old Believers) and "the people on the left" (the intelligentsia)—were able to resist such interference in autocratic Russia.

Here we approach directly the phenomenon of political culture. In the context of our discussion, this can most conveniently be defined as the totality of limitations on power, reflected in automatic, every­day activity, and inherited from previous generations as a tradition.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a classic study of the conflict between two types of political culture brought face to face with each other. The Yankee is astonished that he has ended up "in a country where the right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonor­able, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stock­holder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal."[27]

The stock-market terminology applied to the analysis of authori­tarian structures only seems comic. In fact, it describes the state of affairs with extreme precision. The democratic common sense of our Yankee rebels precisely because he evaluates the situation from the point of view of a political culture inherited from his Puritan fore­bears, who wrote it into the constitution of the state of Connecticut that "all political power is inherent in the people, and . . . they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such manner as they may think expedient.'"[28]

Let us assume for a moment, however, that our Yankee had visited not the kingdom of King Arthur, but the land of Pharaoh Rameses or Sultan Bajazet. Far from waxing indignant over what the "irreplace­able six" would reply to a proposal that "the form of government be changed," he would be struck by the fact that the thought would not enter anyone's mind. To drown the sultan is an excellent idea, and to strangle the tax-collector or the wazir is still better. But to change the form of government? Unthinkable!

In order for this to become not only conceivable, but necessary, a cultural tradition, independent means of subsistence, sophisticated political thought, inherited aristocratic privileges, and a political op­position are all needed—in short, everything which gives rise to la­tent limitations on power. And this is the essence of the political cul­ture generated by absolutism.

Of course, the presence of these limitations is not sufficient in itself immediately to bring about a new deal. The constitution which determines the Connecticut Yankee's Weltanschauung did not fall from heaven. It was won in the mud and blood of revolution and reac­tion, religious revolts, terror and desperation, trade, slavery, and wars. As such, it is a certificate of the maturity of the political culture of its creators—testimony to successful completion of the elementary school of political history and their ability to transform latent limi­tations on power into open political control of the system over the administration.

Just as an individual becomes a personality only when he is able to choose his own fate autonomously, so a human collectivity becomes a people only when it learns to limit the authority of the administration and thereby to affect the fate of its country. From this moment, the people may begin to realize that not only the sultan or the pharaoh, but the "form of government" itself does not suit them particularly well. And does this not mean, perhaps, that neither pharaohs nor sul­tans nor chairmen of people's republics nor general secretaries of parties are needed?

It is precisely in this—the gradual accumulation of limitations on power transformed into a cultural tradition—that political progress consists, in my opinion. And political progress itself, from the view­point being offered here, can be interpreted as the history of the birth, maturation, and stabilization of latent limitations on power— of their transformation into political limitations. It was the historical function of absolutism to be the cultural school of mankind. Only by passing through this school was humanity capable of producing a Yankee who, although he might completely forget the path traversed by his ancestors, would be able, in case of need, to reshuffle the cards and deal them again.

6. Russian Autocracy

Let us now see whether either of our "ideal constructions" describes Russian political history.[29]

In the first place, was the political organization of Russia based on supreme sovereignty of the state over the entire national product? The Russian state intervened in the economic process and attempted to regulate it. However, it did so in a very uneven way. Whereas in the epoch of Peter I or Stalin this intervention was maximal, and some­times total, at other times it was reduced as far as the historical con­text permitted. In any case, it lost its total character. It is sufficient to recall the difference between the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible (the outstanding Soviet historian I.I. Polosin called it "the war commu­nism of the Muscovite tsar") and the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich, when decisions on new taxes were not taken without the agreement of the Assemblies of the Land, which sometimes remained in session continuously for months. Recall, too, the differences between the "war communism" of the twentieth century and Lenin's NEP.[30]

This alternation prevented the permanent stagnation of the econ­omy characteristic of despotism. But it also excluded the more or less consistent development of the economy characteristic of absolutism. In place of this, Russia evolved a third type of economic development, which combined short phases of feverish modernization with long periods of prostration,[31]

Similarly, it is impossible to describe Russian political development as the simple political reproduction characteristic of despotism. But, on the other hand, neither did Russia develop consistently in the di­rection of growth of latent limitations on power into political limita­tions, as was characteristic of absolutism. Instead it evolved a third type of political development, combining radical change in the institutional struc­ture with the preservation of the basic parameters of its political construction.

It is sufficient to compare pre-Petrine Russia with post-Petrine; prereform and postreform; prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary, in order to grasp this unique characteristic of its political process, which may be described as the dominance of political heredity over institutional variability.

The reduction of the social structure to two polar classes—gover­nors and governed—was never a constant phenomenon in Russian political history. Whereas Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Sta­lin had some success with this, subsequent epochs destroyed their achievements without trace, and the Russian social structure gave birth anew to variety and inequality. In other words, the social process in Russia had the same alternating character as its economic and political processes.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference which distinguishes the Rus­sian political structure from both absolutism and despotism lies, how­ever, in the peculiarities in the formation of the Russian elites. In some periods, the administration in Russia, in order to achieve com­plete independence from the "upper" classes, strove to undermine the existing elites, sometimes to the point of their destruction. For ex­ample, the "revolution from above" carried out by Ivan the Terrible not only liquidated the political significance of the Boyar Duma (the basic institution through which the traditional corporate aristocracy influenced the political decision-making process), but also sought to destroy the very basis of its existence—its hereditary property, the votchiny. There began a rapid process of transformation of the vot- chiny into pomest'ia (holdings conditional on state service, analogous to the despotic model). A new phenomenon, previously unheard of, emerged from this attempt to abolish the social limitations on power. No stratum of the existing establishment was politically interested in the system's "deviating" so far toward tyranny, all the more so in that such a "deviation" was fraught with total terror and indiscriminate plundering of the entire country. Hence the tyrant had to create a political base unknown in both European and Asian experience—a special stratum or "new class," as it were. The tsar had to invent this practically out of nothing—"out of stone," as Kurbskii expressed it. It comprised people from all walks of life, the dregs of all strata of so­ciety, the lowest as well as the highest, with a significant inclusion of international adventurers.

This first "new class" in Russian history, a savage elite that was both ignorant and servile, is known to historians as the dvorianstvo (no­bility). Somehow it has escaped notice that this creation of the tyrant was not at all reminiscent of the haughty and refined dvorianstvo of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a nobility which educated its children in special schools, spoke only French, and had forgotten how to write its native language. The dvorianstvo of the time of Ivan the Terrible, or what passed by that name, could not write Russian either. But for quite a different reason: they could not write at all.

In any case, it may seem that the final hour of the Russian aristoc­racy had struck, and that from this moment on it was to be irretriev­ably submerged in compulsory universal service. And here one of the most remarkable paradoxes of Russian history occurred: not only did the "new class" fail to fulfill its task and totally destroy the social lim­itations on power, it itself immediately began to be transformed into what I call the "new new class," a stratum suspiciously reminiscent of the old aristocracy. The destructive process of transformation of the traditional votchiny into pomest'ia in fact coincided and intertwined with a reverse process of transformation of the pomest'ia into votchiny. In the law code of 1649, less than a century after the Oprichnina rev­olution, it is already practically impossible to distinguish landed es­tates from votchiny. For the first time in Russian history, this episode proved that the aristocratization of the elite is an organic and natural pro­cess in the Russian political system, one which, like the differentiation of the peasantry, develops immediately and unavoidably whenever the tyrant does not halt it by terror.

For the most part, the terrorization has been carried out by a kind of "new class" comprising the same elements as the Oprichnina elite of Ivan the Terrible: people from the lower strata of the society, "ex­perts" from the old elite, and international adventurers. At least, such was the case with Petrine shliakhta, a militant "new class" created by the tyrant in the 1700s. And the same paradox occurred again after the tyrant's demise: in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Petrine "new class" again underwent a transformation into a "new new class" which appeared to be a transitional form on its way to aris- tocratization. Moreover, this time it eventually triumphed. The siege it laid to the administration was so persistent and fierce that the series of women who succeeded one another on the Russian throne, from Anna to Catherine, proved unable to stabilize the system until they granted the "new class" the status of an aristocracy.

Unfortunately, this born-again Russian aristocracy happened to be a slave-holding stratum, which immeasurably weakened its political potential. Having won social emancipation from the government, it proved unable to achieve political emancipation, at least on a scale comparable with Russian boyardom before the Oprichnina revolu­tion. In other words, while their estates were turned into votchiny, the new landowners did not become boyars.

As distinct from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the two dic­tatorships of the nineteenth century (Nicholas I's and Alexander Ill's) did not try to create their own "new classes," leaning instead on the conservative and Russophile segments of the existing elites. This made the two tyrannies in question significantly milder than their predecessors, but did not preserve the entrenched aristocracy from eventual extermination and replacement by the savage "new class" created by Lenin after the revolution of 1917 (again comprising the same three elements: people "from below," "bourgeois experts," and international adventurers).[32]

In any case, it seemed that this time the Russian aristocracy had been dealt a deathblow. But again the paradox of aristocratization oc­curred. Lenin's "new class" thirsted for privileges and independence, just as in the seventeenth century, and sought in turn to transform itself into a "new new class"—always the first step on the ladder of aristocratization. And, again as in the seventeenth century, this aristo- cratizing elite was crushed by a still newer class of Party apparatchiki. Joseph Stalin, systematically liberating himself from the control of the modern analog of the Assembly of the Land, the Central Committee of the Party, and the modern analog of the Boyar Duma, the Polit­buro, physically exterminated Lenin's elite.

This new catastrophe for the Russian elite, like the preceding ones, was, however, unable to halt aristocratization. Indeed, after the ty­rant's demise, transformation of the Stalinist "new class" into a "new new class" began—a process which is taking place right now, this time before our eyes, in "modern" Brezhnevist Russia.[33]

Thus, in addition to a peculiar alternating pattern of economic, political, and social processes, Russian autocracy developed a unique alter­nating pattern in the formation of its elites. This pattern involves new and challenging phenomena unexplained (and perhaps inexplicable) by current political science: the periodic destruction of the elite, sub­sequent rearistocratization, and particularly the "new class" whose emergence we have had occasion to observe briefly in such absolutely different historical circumstances.

While the peculiarities of the Russian political structure consist in the fact that it has at times rejected and at others recognized social and economic limitations on power, its attitude toward ideological limitations has always been more or less hostile. But, once again, only "more or less." And here we can again see the connection between economic and ideological limitations. It has usually been the periods when the economic limitations were violated with the greatest inten­sity which proved catastrophic for the Russian intellect as well, and the periods of "relaxation" (or, in contemporary parlance, liberaliza­tion) of the regime, which coincided with tolerance of economic lim­itations, also relaxed ideological control. The number of depoliticized areas increased. The punishment for ideological heresy became more or less consonant with the degree of the heresy. The category of "po­litical death" was repeatedly revived in Russia—under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, under Elizaveta Petrovna in the eighteenth, under Alexander I in the nineteenth, and under Nikita Khrushchev in the twentieth.

The political opposition, like a multitude of other phenomena in

Russian history (the catastrophic decline of the cities, serfdom, politi­cal trials and terror, universal service, the denial of latent limitations on power, and political emigration) has its beginnings in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Russian tyrants destroyed this opposition, some­times in a literal, physical sense. Each time it was reborn as from the ashes after the death of the tyrant, however, following the same alter­nating pattern as the Russian political process itself. This fact alone indicates that resistance to tyranny is as organic a component of this process as is tyranny itself.

The function of this opposition (or what I understand by this term) differs just as profoundly from that of the opposition in mod­ern democratic systems as autocracy itself differs from such systems. It does not by any means necessarily oppose the existing government or regime. On the contrary, it has frequently been at the helm of the country, as was the case with Dmitrii Golitsyn after the death of Peter, or with Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. And, in the eigh­teenth century as in the twentieth, the function of the Russian op­position has never been to amend the policy of the existing system, but to overturn it. In this sense, Russia's revolutionary potential has proved to be practically inextinguishable (if by revolution we do not necessarily mean a mass uprising).

Nevertheless, although the Russian political opposition has repeat­edly demonstrated its ability to generate a process of political transfor­mation of the system in the direction of Europeanization, it has never been able to stabilize this process. Even its most notable successes, such as the rebirth of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, the aboli­tion of serfdom in the nineteenth, and the overthrow of the mon­archy in the twentieth, have always led to a reverse result—that is, to a new "rigidification" of the system. The only political alternatives to the existing regimes which have really worked so far have been those which have come from the left-wing radicals or from radicals of the Russian right, as I call it. These sections of the opposition thus helped to bring Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Nicholas I, Alex­ander III, Lenin, and Stalin to power.[34]

The periodic alternation of "rigid" and "relaxed" phases in the Russian political process has led to an oscillation in the scale and functions of terror. In the "rigid" phases, the Russian political struc­ture frequently became a terrorist structure par excellence; in the "relaxed" phases, it used terror as an exception, and only against those who could be looked upon as a threat to the existing regime.

The first Russian intellectual to note and describe this difference in the functions of terror in the various phases of the Russian political process, as far as I know, was Gavriil Derzhavin, in his famous ode "To Felice," dedicated to Catherine II:

There one may whisper in conversation And, without fear of death, while dining Not drink to the health of the tsars. There Felice's name can be Scratched out by a slip of the pen Or her portrait carelessly Thrown to earth.

There mock weddings are not played out, People not steamed in ice baths, The moustaches of diplomats not tweaked Princes do not cluck with brood-hens, Favorites do not laugh openly at them And black their faces with soot . . .

A decade later, Nikolai Karamzin noted that Catherine had "purged the autocracy from admixtures of tyranny." And finally, in the twen­tieth century, trying to define the specific character of Catherinian lib­eralization, Plekhanov wrote: "He who did not stand in the mother- sovereign's way, he . . . who did not interfere in matters which should not concern him, could feel secure."[35] That is, whereas in the rigid phases the fate of an individual did not, as a rule, depend on his behavior, in the relaxed phases it did.

It will probably be objected that both despotism and absolutism also experienced their periods of flowering and decline, of hardening and relaxing. This is certainly true. But neither has exhibited the rig­orous and terrible regularity in the alternation of rigid and relaxed phases which has distinguished Russia. In no other place has it vir­tually become a pattern of political development. Historical analogies are, for this reason, much feared by the Soviet censorship, which cannot eliminate them despite the greatest vigilance, not even by attempts to control the "uncontrollable allusions," as the censorship bitterly calls them. For in describing the time of Ivan the Terrible, for example, the historian involuntarily—and this is excellently understood by every publisher, every censor, and every reader—at the same time de­scribes the Stalinist period, just as in describing the time of Vasilii Shuiskii, he cannot help describing the period of Khrushchev. This is why the study of history in Russia has always essentially been a politi­cal act, dangerous both to the regime and to the historian.

7. The Political Spiral

Russian political history unfolds before our eyes as a kind of spiral, in which one historical cycle, or coil, is regularly and periodically re­placed by the following one, which then returns the system to its point of departure and repeats the basic parameters of the preceding cycle, each time at a new level of complexity. And this pattern extends not only to the cycles themselves but to their internal structure, to the phases from which they are built up.

As an example, let us compare the starting phase (1564-84) and the latest phase (1929-53), which obviously took place before the eyes of at least some of my readers. I will take only these two ex­tremes, precisely because in my view they provide the greatest scope for the model which I have promised.

ivan the terrible

Oprichnina revolution, halting the process of Europeanization of the country.

Liquidation of the latent limita­tions on power.

The establishment of terror as a means of administration: liquida­tion of political opposition, and abolition of the category of "po­litical death."

Explosive modernization: radical transformation of the economic, political and institutional struc­ture of the country.

joseph stalin

Stalinist "revolution from above," leading to the rout of the NEP (along with accompanying hopes for the political modernization).

Liquidation of latent limitations on power.

The establishment of terror as a method of administration: liqui­dation of the political opposition, and abolition of the category of "political death."

Explosive modernization: indus­trialization, and transformation of the economic and political structure of the country.

Reduction of the social structure, and formation of a "new class."

Abolition of the peasants' right of free movement ("St. George's Day"), resulting in cessation of the horizontal mobility of the gov­erned (with the exception of move­ment controlled by the state).

Chaotic intensification of the ver­tical mobility of the governing class, connected with the liquida­tion of the category of "political death" (permanent "purge" of the elite).

Suppression of the boyar aristoc­racy.

Extirpation of the intellectual po­tential of the country, connected with the total ideological monop­oly of the state.

10. Divergence of goals, amounting to complete autonomy of the ad­ministration from the system.

Reduction of the social structure, and formation of a "new class."

Collectivization of the peasantry; workers and clerical personnel prohibited by law from changing jobs, resulting in cessation of the horizontal mobility of the gov­erned (with the exception of move­ment controlled by the state).

Chaotic intensification of the ver­tical mobility of the governing class, connected with the liquida­tion of the category of "political death" (permanent "purge" of the elite).

Halting of the aristocratization of the elite.

Extirpation of the intellectual po­tential of the country, connected with the total ideological monop­oly of the state.

10. Divergence of goals, amounting to complete autonomy of the ad­ministration from the system.

In this first phase of the cycle, the Russian political structure, both of the sixteenth century and of the twentieth, approaches that of des­potism (or, in modern parlance, becomes "totalitarian") to a max­imum degree. But it still cannot become identical with despotism, for two reasons:

First, the "rigidification" of the regime is connected not with a lack of institutional modernization (and a stagnating economy) but, on the contrary, with explosive modernization. The system is rapidly transformed, attempting in one feverish spurt, by mobilizing all of its resources, to outdistance the nations surrounding it.

Secondly, we encounter here one more regularity of the Russian political structure, paradoxical at first glance: namely the fact that, in contrast to despotism as we see it in ancient Egypt or China, or in By­zantium, not one Russian tyrant has been able to continue the "rigid" phase of the cycle beyond his own lifetime. His death has always meant the end of the phase. After Ivan the Terrible there was no other Ivan the Terrible; after Peter the Great there was no other Peter the Great; after Paul there was no other Paul. Nor after Stalin was there any other Stalin. It is obvious that the Russian political struc­ture cannot sustain permanent tyranny (and, in this sense, does not fit the Aristotelian description of despotism). For this reason, I call the starting phase of the cycle the phase of pseudodespotism.

But why can it not sustain permanent tyranny? It seems to me that the most probable explanation consists in the fact that, as distinct from the stagnating system of despotism, we are faced in Russia with a system which is fundamentally dynamic, and which is being de­stabilized by the rigidity and terror of the starting phase of the cycle.

It is possible that, for this reason, the pseudodespotic phase is fol­lowed after the death of each tyrant by a "Time of Troubles" charac­terized by:

The rehabilitation of the victims of the terror;

The rebirth of the political opposition;

The search for alternative models of political organization;

The—at least partial—recognition of latent limitations on power;

Attempts to work out guarantees against the restoration of the ancien regime—that is, to change the political structure itself.

In any case, these were precisely the functions of the Time of Troubles which followed the death of Ivan the Terrible (1584-1613) and also of the period after the death of Joseph Stalin (1953-64). They characterized the analogous phases after the deaths of Peter I,[36]Paul I, and Nicholas I as well.

However, the phase of the Time of Troubles, although it in princi­ple opens up the possibility of breaking the spiral, has always until now ended in failure in Russian history. Its basic goal—the transfor­mation of latent limitations on power into political limitations—has proved unattainable. The opposition, having just risen out of noth­ingness, and having by a miracle survived the total terror, has not been able to reconcile the hopes of the various elites of the country and the expectations of the masses. It suddenly turns out that the so­ciety which looked so simple and unified under the iron hand of the tyrant is in fact unbelievably complex. And each of its strata has its own interests, its own expectations, its secret dreams. The admin­istrative-political elite, maddened by permanent "purges," thirsts for the stabilization of its position, and, in the final analysis, for the guar­anteeing of its privileges to the point of aristocratic status. The re­born "third estate"—the economic elite, sickened by the irrational economic system of pseudodespotism, longs for independence and radical reforms. The intellectual elite yearns for liberalization—that is, the introduction of elementary civil rights and the reining-in of the censorship. The masses expect the standard of living to be raised. Sometimes a Russian, too, wants not only to drink but also to have a bite to eat, and even a shirt on his back.

In other words, some people need "order" and stabilization, while others need changes and reform. How is all this to be combined? How is a strategy for reconciling the administration and the system to be worked out, when the system itself has suddenly demonstrated such irreconcilable contradictions? And without a strategy, how is it to be transformed? How are guarantees against the restoration of the an- cien regime to be worked out?

But there has never been a strategy.

Whether we take Boris Godunov at the end of the sixteenth cen­tury, Vasilii Shuiskii at the beginning of the seventeenth century or Vasilii Golitsyn at the end of it, Dmitrii Golitsyn in the eighteenth century, Dmitrii Miliutin in the nineteenth, or Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Kerensky—or even Nikolai Bukharin and Nikita Khru­shchev—in the twentieth century, we see the same picture every­where. An enormous desire to correct the mistakes, to rehabilitate the victims of terror, and to restore justice; activism and energy in the in­troduction of reforms; a leap toward freedom; and sometimes even tactical inventiveness. But at the same time we see an enormous de­gree of political incompetence, entirely contradictory actions, and an inability to consider the mistakes of one's predecessors. In a word, we see a lack of preparation for the basic sociopolitical transformation of the country which amounts, one might say, to intellectual bankruptcy. Alas, the Russian reformers never relied on a competent social analy­sis of the society which they were attempting to transform, and never had any experience in setting up workable political coalitions, or any clear-cut idea of what could actually be accomplished, in what order, with the aid of what social forces and political blocs. Trying to formu­late this, I would say that in hoping to reshuffle the cards and deal them again, the Russian reformers had not previously gone through the school of absolutism, which alone could have given them the nec­essary experience. But is this really so surprising? Can pseudodespo- tism actually serve as a school of political thinking? Can total censor­ship further the accumulation of social knowledge? Where was this experience, this knowledge, this thinking to be found in Rus'?

Here is the reason why this phase—the most vivid and dramatic, filled with heretical new ideas and plans, brilliant insights, and bitter mistakes—a phase which has sustained intellectual flights, given Rus­sian literary geniuses, and raised whole generations of oppositionists, is followed by the longest, most colorless, dullest segment of the Rus­sian cycle—what one might dub the "Brezhnevist" phase.

The slogan of this third phase is Order, and its function is stabiliza­tion. The system has been balanced too long and too dangerously on the historical precipice. The terror of pseudodespotism has led it to the brink of self-destruction. The unbridled play of reformist and liberal ideas during the Time of Troubles, having on the one hand proved incapable of breaking the historical spiral and reconciling the administration with the system, has on the other transformed the country into something unknown and frightening to the graduates of the academy of tyranny, administering it into what they perceive as total "disorder." In the first Time of Troubles, after Ivan the Terrible, the country found itself on the threshold of national disintegration; during the second, after Peter, more than a dozen draft constitutions competed with each other in the Russian political arena; before the Polish uprising of 1863, the administration was apparently unable to resist liberal tendencies, and the political emigre Herzen, with his journal Kolokol [The Bell], was perceived in Russia literally as a second government; the NEP threatened the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the irreversible creation of a strong agrarian bourgeoisie, while Khrushchev's reforms of the Party bylaws threatened the complete transformation of the elite and raised the spectre of the creation of a two-party system within the one Party.

This slide into "disorder" has to be stopped. And the third phase stops it. Being eclectic in nature, it attempts to combine the contradic­tory parameters of both of its predecessors, to mix incompatible ele­ments, to reconcile the terrorist heritage of pseudodespotism with the reformist heritage of the Time of Troubles.

At first the maneuver seems simple: to separate reformism from liberalism. One is reminded of a chess player playing simultaneously on two boards. On the first board, the regime is fighting the liberal heritage of the Time of Troubles. On the second, it is trying to exploit this reformist heritage in order to stabilize the system. This phase permitted the Assemblies of the Land after the first Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century. It created the "second aristocracy" in the eighteenth. It thought out and executed reforms under Alexander I and Alexander II in the nineteenth. It conceived and began to ex­ecute a land reform under Nicholas II. Finally, it tried to extend the NEP after the death of Lenin, and to sustain economic reform after the overthrow of Khrushchev.

Just as in its rigid phases the Russian political structure comes to resemble despotism (thereby seducing the "despotist" historians), so in its relaxed phases it comes to resemble absolutism (thereby seduc­ing the "absolutist" historians). However, its real secret, it seems to me, consists in the fact that, just as it is not fated to become despotism, neither is it fated to become absolutism. The third phase of the cycle can therefore more suitably be called pseudoabsolutism.

I add "pseudo" because, as will be remembered, the social and eco­nomic limitations on power are indissolubly connected with ideologi­cal ones, and constitute their obverse side. When you suppress one, you cannot retain the others. The attempt to do so expresses the basic contradiction of pseudoabsolutism, and the seed of its destruction. As the intelligentsia of the country comes of age and matures, acquir­ing the experience lacking during the Time of Troubles, the admin­istration more and more sees in it a mortal danger.

Thus the liberal Iurii Krizhanich was exiled to Siberia in the seven­teenth century. For Catherine II, Aleksandr Radishchev, author of A Journey From Petersburg to Moscow, was, in her own words, "more dan­gerous than Pugachev" (the leader of a mass peasant uprising which shook Russia in the eighteenth century). The liberal Aleksandr Her­zen seemed in the second half of the nineteenth century more dan­gerous than a foreign invasion. The liberal Pavel Miliukov was per­ceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as public enemy No. 1. The contemporary government of Russia struggles with the liberal Andrei Sakharov as with a foreign power. It may even seem that it does not understand its own interests. For in what do the interests of this aristocracy (or aristocratizing elite) which dominates the phase of pseudoabsolutism always consist, if not in the firming up of social lim­itations on power? And who but the intelligentsia of the country, focused in the opposition (open and latent), are capable of working out a strategy which will guarantee the limitations on power against the restoration of the ancien regime?

This gradual growth of conservatism explains the evolution of pseudoabsolutist regimes in the second half of the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century (accompanied by the seem­ingly organic dying away of the Assemblies of the Land); in the sec­ond half of the reign of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century (marked by the end of a flirtation with "enlightened absolutism"); in the second half of the reign of Alexander I in the nineteenth (with its abandonment of constitutional plans and its routing of the univer­sities); and, finally, in our own day, in the second half of the Brezhnev administration. This growth of conservatism is reflected also in the gradual abandonment by the administration of internal reforms, focusing instead on foreign adventures. This was the case in the sev­enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and it is the case now.

In short, in this late part of the third cycle, the system enters an age of political stagnation, accompanied by economic and spiritual decline. And this is a clear signal that a new cataclysm, a new restoration of the ancien regime is at the door. The drama which England experi­enced only once, at the end of the Middle Ages (in 1660-89), which France experienced for an even briefer time (1815—30), Russia has been experiencing all the way through its tortuous history. One might say that it is developing through and by historic cataclysms. And for this reason, perhaps, it is even now, at the end of the twentieth century, still a medieval political system—an autocracy, as it was under Ivan the Terrible at the end of the sixteenth.

Let me try to describe the mechanism of these repeated restora­tions, as I see it. The removal of the liberal wing of the opposition by no means signifies the elimination of the opposition as such. It is pre­cisely the increased conservatism of pseudoabsolutist regimes, pre­cisely their obvious inability to solve the vital problems of the country which catalyzes and brings to the surface the dual nature of the op­position. The annihilation of the left "Europeanist" wing means, in reality, not a victory but a defeat for the "gray consensus" of the rul­ing center. For, by routing the left, they activate the right, transform­ing it into a real political force.

The rigid phase of the system has, chameleonlike, variously adopted the coloring of Westernism, as under Peter; of Russification, as under Alexander III; of open tyranny, as under Paul; of ideological isola­tionism, as under Nicholas I; and of Gulag-style industrialization, as under Stalin; but its essence does not change. What it aims at is the elimination (or the greatest possible reduction given the historical context) of the latent limitations on power, and removal from political circulation (often by the method of simple physical annihilation) of both the gray centrist elite and its liberal opponents. And this is when the cataclysm comes.[37]

8. An Explanation to the Reader

I am aware of the extreme vulnerability of my historical modelling. Some readers may find it an impermissible oversimplification, and others an arbitrary manipulation of entire historical periods, each of which, as we know, had its own inimitable individual aspect. I under­stand how difficult it is to believe that a historical process can properly be described geometrically. It is apparent that neither will I avoid the charges of having artificially organized my material and of be­ing inclined to the same historical fatalism with which I reproach the conventional historians. However, instead of going into a complex philosophical discussion on this score, I will confine myself to a few comments.

In the first place, I do not in the least wish to imply that the analo­gous phases in different historical cycles were photographic copies of one another, not only by reason of the constantly increasing complex­ity of the autocratic system (to which I am always trying to draw the reader's attention) but also because of the infinite variety of historical circumstances and characters involved. Therefore, when I speak of models and analogies, I have in mind only and exclusively the identity of functions of the analogous phases of the cycle. In fact, the problem here lies only in whether the variety of historical circumstances and characters excludes the identification which I have mentioned. I think that it is difficult for the historian to avoid it in comparing, say, the periods of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, as we have done. It would also not be easy to ignore the strange fact that the death of each successive tyrant, and not only of Ivan the Terrible, was accom­panied in Russian history by a kind of reformist and liberal thaw.

Do not the strangely repetitive "eccentricities" of Russian history at least prompt reflection, even knowing that Nicholas I did not resem­ble Peter (although he tried to), nor Peter Ivan the Terrible (although he also tried)? The passion which Stalin felt for Ivan the Terrible is known to everyone in Russia who is able to read (and it will be dis­cussed in detail below). Let us add to this the penetrating obser­vations of Aleksandr Gershenkron as to the periodicity of economic cycles in Russian history and the constant alternation of feverish ex­plosions of modernization with long periods of prostration. May we not assume that these economic cycles are somehow correlated with the phases of the Russian political cycles which are suggested here?

The other comment which I would like to make is that the cyclical character of Russian autocracy does not, in my opinion, contain even a grain of fatalism. Precisely the contrary: in its second and third phases, each cycle remains open to radical transformation and Euro- peanization. The Russian opposition has brought the country to the very edge of such a transformation many times. It is sufficient to re­call its major reforms and plans for reforms in the 1550s, the 1600s, the 1660s, the 1720s, the 1760s, the 1810s, the 1860s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. If such a transformation had actually taken place, the Rus­sian political structure would have lost its medieval character—which might have happened in the 1860s as well as in the 1960s, but unfor­tunately did not.

9. The Oprichnina

Tsar Ivan IV carved Russia into two parts—the Land (the Zemshchina) and the Oprichnina—each with its own government, its own capital, its own treasury and its own army. There is no more lively and vivid description of the sinister phenomenon known as the Oprichnina than that given by the remarkable Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii:

This was a kind of order of hermits, who like monks separated them­selves from the world and struggled ... as monks do with the tempta­tions of the world. The very ceremony of induction into the Oprich­nina army was surrounded with solemnity, both monastic and conspira­torial. Prince Kurbskii . . . writes that the tsar gathered in to himself from the whole Russian land "evil men, filled with all vices," and com­pelled them by frightful oaths to have no commerce, not only with their friends and brothers, but even with their parents, and to serve only him, and in token of this, compelled them to kiss the cross.

Thus there arose among the thick forests . . . the capital of the Oprich­nina, with its palace surrounded by a moat and a redoubt, and with checkpoints on the roads. In this lair the tsar set up a weird parody of a monastery . . . clothed these official robbers with monastic skullcaps and black veils, wrote for them a monastic rule, and himself climbed the belltower along with the princes in the morning to ring for matins, read psalms and sang in the choir of the church, and performed so many prostrations that his forehead was always bruised. . . . After dinner he liked to speak of the law, dozed, or went into the dungeon to be present at the torturing of suspects.

Tsar Ivan himself considered the Oprichnina which he had founded as his own private estate, a special farm or appanage which he had sepa­rated out of the rest of the state. . . . Ivan seemed to recognize that all the rest of the Russian land was under the jurisdiction of the Council, consisting of the descendants of its former rulers . . . who made up the Muscovite boyardom, sitting in the Duma of the Land.[38]

The non-Oprichnina portion of Russia, which was administered, as before, by the aristocratic Boyar Duma, was, however, completely removed from participation in political decisions and occupied, as it were, the position of an absolutist island in the stormy ocean of the Oprichnina surrounding it. I say "absolutist" because the latent lim­itations on power continued to function on the territory of the Zemshchina (at least until the Oprichniki intruded into it), while they had ceased to exist on the territory of the Oprichnina. At its very be­ginning, in the short period of the "revolution from above" from 1565 to 1572, the Oprichnina was in practical terms a monstrous form of coexistence of despotism and absolutism in one country.

From this point of view, the revolution of Tsar Ivan was an attempt to transform an absolutist political structure into a despotism copied from Byzantine and Tatar-Turkish models. This attempt both suc­ceeded and failed. It failed because, by virtue of the resistance of the absolutist tradition, the Russian structure did not become a despo­tism. But it also succeeded, in the sense that the absolutist structure was deformed to the point of unrecognizability, and was transformed into something else, unheard of up to that point. Therefore, we may say that when two powerful cultural traditions, absolutist and auto­cratic, collided and intertwined with each other in the heart of one country for a brief historical instant, the result of this fateful embrace was the destruction of Russian absolutism and the creation of Russian autocracy. Inasmuch as the Oprichnina proved to be not only the starting-point, but also the nucleus of autocracy which determined, or so it seems to me, the entire subsequent historical process in Rus­sia, it makes sense to consider it more closely.

The Oprichniki were the storm troopers of Ivan the Terrible. As soon as they had done their job, the tsar dealt with them the way Hitler dealt with his own Oprichniki on the Night of the Long Knives 370 years later. But terror alone was insufficient to carry out a radi­cal transformation of the political structure. Something more was needed. And the fact that the Oprichnina was this "something" has been noted by the Soviet historians P. A. Sadikov and I. I. Polosin, both of them ardent apologists for Tsar Ivan. Here is how R. Iu. Vip- per summarizes their "happy discovery":

[The Oprichnina was] a separation from the rest of the state of a very important group of lands in order that here, the head of the state, with­out being constrained by traditional methods of administration, might develop in extenso new, more flexible, and broader forms of government, and might apply new methods of organization of the military and fiscal sys­tems; the system worked out [in the Oprichnina] was supposed to serve, according to the reformer's plan, as a model and school for the Zem- shchina, which only by this means could be brought into the new and complex economy of the state.³²

According to Vipper, the division of the country was justified by the fact that, as a result of it, a kind of laboratory model for the total mobilization of all the resources of the system was created—a model which required the abolition of all limitations on power. It required that the ordinary administration of the country (in this case the boyar government of the Zemshchina) be totally deprived of its political mandate and functions. It required, in short, the separation of the political apparatus of government from the administration, and the setting up, above the ordinary administrative structure, of a special institution, concentrating in its hands political control over the sys­tem being administered. It required the creation of a two-tiered struc­ture of administration based on two parallel hierarchies of power. And for this the tsar needed the Oprichnina. While in the capacity of a proto- political police it was necessary for the establishment of total terror, in the capacity of a proto-political party it was necessary for the institu­tionalization of the division of functions between the political and the ad­ministrative powers (in modern parlance, between the Party and the state).

If Charles de Montesquieu invented the separation of powers, then Ivan the Terrible invented the separation of functions between powers. The separation of powers leads, as history has shown, to de­mocracy. The separation of functions leads to autocracy. This was the true political significance of the Oprichnina, as I see it. The fact that it began as a direct territorial division of the country relates only to its historical form, and not to its political essence. This was simply a means for maximization of political control with a minimum of ad­ministration, given the medieval social structure.

Peter I, who set up his own Oprichnina 150 years later, no longer had any need to divide the country and split the government into ad­ministrative and political segments, since he created a centralized ap­paratus of political control in the form of his own guard. The embod­iment of the Petrine Oprichnina was no longer the pseudochivalric order set up by Ivan the Terrible over the Boyar Duma, which con­tinued to enjoy its "traditional methods of administration," but the autonomy of a guard set up over the senate. The role of Ivan the Ter- rible's Oprichnina capital—Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda—was played

32. Vipper, p. 125.

under Peter by St. Petersburg, the capital of the guard and the bureaucracy.

There was still less need for dividing the country under Lenin, who placed the Party over the Soviets, providing Russian autocracy with its Communist incarnation. And this was even more true under Stalin, who advanced the dual hierarchy of political control, placing the political police over the Party. Stalin's Moscow united in itself both Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and St. Petersburg. Tsar Ivan's monstrous invention has thus dominated the entire course of Russian history.

CHAPTER II

THE SERF HISTORIANS: IN BONDAGE TO "STATEMENTS"

1. The Struggle With Elementary Logic

The unprejudiced reader, in familiarizing himself with the work of Soviet historians, must first of all be somewhat indulgent. Even when they have something to say, they do not as a rule have the opportunity to express it, let alone to interpret it, in an adequate way—at least in the field of theory. They are phenomenally strong and have gained worldwide reputations in source study, in the investigation of ar­chives and in the analysis of documents—that is, in everything which is depoliticized and without current ideological meaning. But as soon as it becomes a matter of interpreting such documents—not to speak of making judgments about the historical process—they find them­selves tightly encircled by inviolable canons, the infraction of which is equivalent to breaking the law in a modern society. These canons are the so-called "vyskazyvaniia" (statements) of the classical Marxist au­thors—Marx, Engels, and Lenin (until 1953 Generalissimo Stalin also had this rank, but he has now been demoted to private).

Though many of these "vyskazyvaniia" contradict each other, time has no power over them. Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895, Lenin in 1924. None of them were professional historians. But everything the classical authors ever said, even in their tenderest years, is immune from revision—on pain of criminal or administrative punishment (with the exception, of course, of those "vyskazyvaniia" which the au­thorities themselves consider to be dangerous or inconvenient at the given moment). A whole army of semiliterate hunters—who know nothing of history except the "vyskazyvaniia" currently in use, but on whom, nevertheless, the welfare of historians, their professional ad­vancement, their status, and their publications depend—vigilantly follow every attempt at revision. Under pseudodespotism, the Gulag awaited heretics; in subsequent phases, only daily restriction and ha­rassment. But for people whose calling consists in studying, thinking, and writing, the loss of these privileges (the autocracy considers them not as individual rights but as privileges bestowed by the regime) is sometimes equivalent to death.

When Soviet historians try to reinterpret (not revise, reinterpret) the "vyskazyvaniia," this can, therefore, be considered, if not heroic, then at least a brave act, involving serious risk. For a hunter may always turn up to whom the reinterpretation looks like a revision. In a cer­tain sense, moreover, the situation of Soviet historians of Russia is worse than the situation of the medieval scholastics: the former suf­fer both from a multitude of "vyskazyvaniia" and from a shortage of them. For what was said by the classical Marxist authors for the most part does not fit Russian history.

Ask any Soviet historian what he uses as a guide in analyzing the political development of a particular country, and he will tell you right away that he proceeds from the fundamental positions of Marx­ism—that is, from the idea that at a given point the productive forces in their development outrun the relationships of production, that this discrepancy gives rise to a class struggle which gradually weakens the existing social structure, and that this struggle, growing sharper, leads to revolution, in the course of which the victorious class breaks up the old state machinery (as occurred in the Netherlands in the six­teenth century, in England in the seventeenth, and in France in the eighteenth) and erects on its ruins a new apparatus of class rule.

This is what the "vyskazyvaniia" say. This is the law.

But what is the historian of Russia, let us say of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, supposed to make of this law? What is he to do if the productive forces here grew so slowly that over the whole course of these centuries they did not outgrow the relationships of production? If the class struggle, although supposed to shatter the structure of autocracy, nevertheless could not shatter it? If, further­more, the autocracy rose up after each successive rebellion like a phoenix out of the flames, refreshed, and for some reason grown stronger, and, as if nothing had happened, pursued its barbarous line as before? If the old structure did not collapse and, consequently, the rubble on which the new state was to be built, according to the law, was absent? If, impudently neglecting the law, the old state persisted in all its autocratic ignorance right down to the twentieth century?

Why was it that, precisely at the dawn of modern history, when me­dieval serfdom was breaking up in Western Europe, this same serf­dom was initiated in Russia? That when in Europe the modern mode of production was being born and modern forces of production were taking shape, the forces of production were being totally destroyed in

Russia? That while in Europe positive political experience was being accumulated which led in the end to the transformation of latent lim­itations on power into open political ones, in Russia a grim autocracy was enthroned which destroyed even the existing limitations? That when Shakespeare and Cervantes, Bruno and Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, and Montaigne were announcing the dawn of modern civiliza­tion in Europe, the fires and bells of the Oprichnina were announc­ing the triumph of barbarism in Russia?

Petr Chaadaev in the nineteenth century and Arnold Toynbee in the twentieth were inclined to explain the paradox by the fatal influ­ence of Byzantine culture on the Russian political tradition. Pushkin explained it by the non-European character of Russian culture. The Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov cited the westernization of the coun­try by force. Boris Chicherin referred to the Asiatic despotism char­acteristic of Russian institutions.[39] Georgii Plekhanov appealed to the same despotism entrenched in the peculiarities of the agrarian struc­ture of Russia. Leon Trotsky noted that Russia was closer in its eco­nomic structure to India than to Europe. The ideologist of emigre Eurasianism, Nikolai Trubetskoi, declared that the Russians had in­herited their empire from Genghis Khan.[40] Pavel Miliukov asserted that the constant encirclement of Russia by hostile peoples, and mili­tary necessity, gave the Muscovite government the opportunity to es­tablish a centralized state of Eastern type.® Nikolai Berdiaev declared Russia to be a Christianized Tatar empire.[41] Karl Wittfogel, while ad­mitting that in institutional terms Kievan Rus' belonged to the proto- feudal world of Europe, nevertheless came to the conclusion that the Tatar yoke was responsible for an "institutional time bomb" in Rus­sian political culture, which exploded when the "yoke" came to its end.[42]

In short, there have been many explanations, and we will return to them again. But all of them primarily discuss cultural influences or institutional borrowings, that is, secondary, "superstructural" factors, and by no means the "base"—the relationships of production, pro­ductive forces, class struggle, and other serious matters which are supposed to be interpreted according to the law. Consequently, these hypotheses cannot bear any relation to "genuine science," as Soviet historiography proudly calls itself. For such "bourgeois" explana­tions, Soviet historians have nothing but the haughty contempt of specialists for dilettantes. Their mockery of bourgeois idealism has a confident, major-key ring. It is as though they had the real expla­nation in their pockets. But since they have nothing in their pockets except the sacred "vyskazyvaniia," this explanation must, of course, consist in the economic backwardness of Russia, in the underdevelop­ment of its productive forces.

And this explanation would be perfect if it were not also necessary to explain where this economic backwardness came from. And right here is where there is no escape: you have to appeal to the Tatar yoke, to the terrible slaughter of a people which blocked the path of the Huns to the West with its own breast, and paid for an ungrateful Eu­ropean civilization at the price of its own backwardness. This sounds very patriotic. But unfortunately the class struggle and the relation­ships of production have somehow dropped out of the argument un­noticed. For Aksakov, the Germans were guilty; for Chaadaev, the Greeks; and for "genuine science"—the Tatars? But this is precisely what was asserted by the bourgeois idealists: Chicherin, Trubetskoi, Berdiaev, and Wittfogel. It thus turns out that all of these explana­tions are different not in nature but only in name—in the names of the guilty parties. For they all reduce, in the final analysis, to the as­sertion that what is to blame for Russia's historical misfortune is not Russian autocracy, but someone else—whether the Tatar, the Greek or the German, you will agree, is not the essential point. What is es­sential is that as soon as we come to actual analysis, it is not the "vyskazyvaniia" to which genuine science appeals, but to those same poor old Tatars.

Alas, this is one of those sensitive areas, where there are not enough suitable and sufficiently patriotic "vyskazyvaniia." Ivan the Ter- rible's Oprichnina is another. No classical author (other than the de­moted Stalin) took the trouble to leave a precise and unambiguous "vyskazyvanie" as to whether the Oprichnina was progressive or not. On the one hand, it must have served as the starting point of Russian absolutism, and to establish the presence of absolutism in Russia is not so much a scientific as a patriotic duty for Soviet historiography. Everywhere in Europe the establishment of absolutism meant the end of feudal disintegration and the formation of centralized states of the modern type. Why must things have been different with us? Russian absolutism serves as evidence of national respectability, as a certificate of Russia's affiliation with the European family—proof that (despite all the insulting conjectures of "bourgeois" historians) Russia has nothing in common with Oriental despotism. Inability to demon­strate the presence of absolutism in Russia is equivalent not only to capitulation to bourgeois historiography but, far worse, is an ad­mission of the Asiatic character of the Russian historical heritage. And this is fraught with undesirable political and ideological conse­quences. Therefore, the Oprichnina simply must be progressive.

But on the other hand, it was precisely the Oprichnina which laid the foundations for the establishment in Rus' of serfdom, the most bestial, unproductive, and reactionary mode of exploitation of the people's labor, which subsequently fatally penetrated into all the pores of the Russian political organism. Who could call serfdom pro­gressive? Especially taking into account the development of produc­tive forces (not to speak of the relationships of production). There is a clear contradiction, and some way out of it has to be found. Soviet historians try with all their might to do so.

Discussing the epoch of Ivan the Terrible, one of the most eminent Soviet scholars, Academician D. S. Likhachev, uncompromisingly as­serts, for example, that

of the two contending factions within the feudal class, the service no­bility was undoubtedly progressive. . . . What Marx and Engels said about a progressive class can be applied, in a certain degree, to the ser­vice nobility. . . . The boyardom tried to preserve the old ways. . . . Kurbskii's ideal is the division of power between the tsar and the boyar­dom. This was a clear compromise between the old and the new—a compromise to which the most reactionary circles of the boyardom were compelled to resort under the all-conquering pressure of the pro­gressive movement of history.

Sil'vestr, the ideologist of the "Government of compromise" (preced­ing the Oprichnina), is charged with treacherous and hypocritical machinations, in that "even when addressing the tsar, Sil'vestr speaks in a veiled form of the need to limit the sovereign's power.""

I do not know why a convinced Marxist is so terrified by "limita­tions on the sovereign's power," or why he treats them as a vice and as treason on the part of the "most reactionary circles of the boyardom." Neither is it part of the task of this section to dispute the depiction of the sixteenth century "new class" which helped Ivan the Terrible to destroy these limitations on power as a "progressive class" and the personification of "the all-conquering pressure of the progressive movement of history." What interests us at the moment is something else, namely that the "progressive class" was opposed not only by "the most reactionary circles of the boyardom." It was also opposed by the peasantry, which was being driven into slavery. The peasants resisted by raising mighty revolts, paying with their blood for the victory of the "progressive class" which Likhachev exalts. Then why does he not also call this still more terrible and bloody resistance to the "progres­sive movement of history" reactionary? This is required by elemen­tary logic: if the "new class" indeed represented progress, then the forces resisting it—regardless of whether from above (the boyardom) or from below (the peasantry)—must have represented regression or, what is the same thing, reaction.

But Likhachev does not do this. The law forbids it: peasant wars, according to all the "vyskazyvaniia," represent class struggles—that is, precisely the above mentioned "progressive historical development." Thus, the "statements" mercilessly drive the poor historian into a log­ical trap, and compel him to the absurdity of cursing the struggle of the boyardom against the "progressive class" while at the same time blessing the peasantry's struggle against it. He is compelled to sing hymns to enserfers (the "new class") and enserfed (the peasantry) with identical inspiration.

Such tricks are not the exception, but the rule, and what we may call the routine, of "genuine science." Some years later, a no less distinguished scholar, Academician L. V. Cherepnin, reported to a Soviet-Italian congress that "in the peasant war [of the early seven­teenth century] we can see one of the causes of the fact that the transi­tion to absolutism in Russia was delayed by more than half a cen­tury."[43] But this is open heresy. It turns out that the class struggle, instead of speeding up the "progressive movement of history," slowed it down. This has to be Cherepnin's conclusion if he is to remain within the limits of elementary logic. However, such a conclusion would be not only heresy but public suicide. Cherepnin, of course, does not opt for this, not only because the "vyskazyvaniia" stand guard over class struggle and he has no taste for self-sacrifice, but also, to paraphrase Aristotle, because though the peasantry is his friend, ab­solutism is dearer. And absolutism, grievously involved in a mortal tangle with the Oprichnina and serfdom, must be rehabilitated at any price.

Once again, before the eyes of an astonished public, the scholar is suddenly replaced on the podium by a clown. Recognizing that "the attempts to establish absolutism, connected with the policy of Ivan the Terrible and expressed in the institution of the Oprichnina, resulted in an open dictatorship of the serfholders, which took on the most monstrous forms of despotism," Cherepnin goes on to assert, without drawing breath, that "by weakening the boyar aristocracy and sup­porting the centralization of the state, the Oprichnina to a certain de­gree cleared the path for absolutism."[44] In other words, the bloody en­thronement of serfdom, connected with the "most monstrous forms of despotism," having successfully overcome the hindrance of class struggle, once again performed its service to the "progressive move­ment of history"!

Has Cherepnin really moved very far from the hymns to the slave- holding "progressive class" which we heard a decade earlier from Likhachev? And does not the formula of Istoriia SSSR [The History of the i/SS/?] (officially adopted in 1966 as a textbook for institutions of higher learning), which simple-mindedly asserts that since the Oprichnina was directed against the aristocracy, "it had a progressive character,"[45] sound natural in this context?

2. The Lost Paradise of "Equilibrium"

From the outset I must make the qualification that I intend to analyze only the philosophical aspect of the Soviet discussion on Russian ab­solutism (1968-1971), and not by any means the scholastic squab­bling concerning the "relationship of the feudal and bourgeois ele­ments in the nature and policy of the absolute monarchy" which has absorbed much of the energy of its participants. This squabbling seems to me the more scholastic in that the essential fact of Russian history during the period under study is unquestionably the routing of the Russian proto-bourgeoisie by the Oprichnina, and the blocking by serfdom of the formation of a middle class. After this, what could be the role of "bourgeois elements" in the Russian political process, and what is there actually to dispute? The uniqueness of the Russian autocracy during the first centuries of its existence consisted precisely in the absence of a middle class. And it is precisely this uniqueness which I would have discussed in the debate, had I been its initiator. But the initiator was the well-known Soviet historian, A. Avrekh, who began in a quite different way, with a brave reinterpretation of the famous "vyskazyvanie" by Lenin to the effect that the concepts of "ab­solutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited monarchy" are entirely identi­cal. This statement cuts off completely any possibility of separating a definition of "absolutism" out of the general mass of "unlimited mon­archies," and essentially excludes any discussion at all. And for this reason Avrekh tactfully attacks it. "In the second edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia," he writes,

absolutism is treated as an unlimited monarchy with the reference to V. I. Lenin cited above. ... Is this definition adequate in the given case? We think not. Is it possible, for example, to establish on the basis of it the difference between absolute monarchy and Oriental despotism? What is to be done about the rights of the people, let us say, under Ivan the Terrible? ... To argue that Ivan was a limited monarch would be to expose one's own scholarly reputation. To recognize him as an abso­lutist monarch, since there were no limitations on his power, is still worse.[46]

Why is it worse? Because to do so would "mean compromising the idea of equilibrium." What equilibrium? The point is that parallel to Lenin's "vyskazyvanie" denying the specific character of absolutism, there is also a "vyskazyvanie" by Engels, asserting this specific character and declaring that although every state

as a general rule is the state of the strongest, economically dominant class . . . exceptional periods are found in which contending classes reach an equilibrium of power, such that the power of the state acquires for the time being a certain autonomy in relation to both classes, as an apparent mediator between them. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the nobility and the bourgeoisie in equilibrium with each other."