The Origins of Autocracy

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