The Origins of Autocracy

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?