The Origins of Autocracy

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?