The Origins of Autocracy

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 bibliography325

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.