The Origins of Autocracy

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.