The Origins of Autocracy

Having now come to the West, I was glad to discover that many prominent scholars here also think that it is difficult, if not impossi­ble, to analyze the history of a particular country outside of the con­ceptual context of world history, and that, as Cyril Black, for example, has observed: "One cannot interpret Russian developments without some general conception of what is universal and what is particular in the evolution of societies."[17] Though proceeding from an analogous assumption, my thought in Russia followed a different path, however. It seemed to me necessary first of all to build up as carefully as possi­ble a set of, as it were, "ideal constructions" (or paradigms) of both poles of the bipolar model, and literally to count out their parameters on one's fingers. Of course, one might as a result obtain something very schematic, and for this reason debatable—something which in its pure form has not existed anywhere on earth. This would be some­thing which would show various political structures, as the mathe­maticians say, "in their extremes," rather than their actual outlines in this or that country. But I consciously took the risk of this schematiza- tion: in the final analysis, does one ever get anything without losing something in exchange? And what I wanted was a great deal. First of all, I wanted the categories and terms with which we operate to be­come clear to the point of transparency, so that in the future when we argued we would at least know what we were talking about. My inten­tion may to the Western reader seem like naive intellectual extrem­ism. So it probably was. But for me, in any case, it cleared up the pic­ture somewhat. The result at which I finally arrived turned out to be paradoxical. In the first place, as the reader will see in what follows, none of my ideal constructions described the Russian political struc­ture adequately. It turned out that, beginning at a definite historical point, this structure behaved very strangely—that it was subject to its own laws, which coincided with neither the parameters of despotism nor those of absolutism. And it turned out, moreover, to be consider­ably more flexible and adaptable than the ideal constructions were. While what is usually called "modernization" destroys despotism and has in most cases transformed absolutism into democracy, the Russian political structure has, as it were, digested this "modernization," while retaining its basic medieval parameters to this day.

But the paradoxical nature of my findings did not by any means consist in this. Russian nationalists in all ages have proudly pro­nounced Russia to be a special civilization, following its own thorny path between the Charybdis of the West and the Scylla of the East. This was declared before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, and it is declared after them. Suffice it to recall the preach­ing of the fiery Ioakim, patriarch of Moscow in the late seventeenth century, contrasting Russian piety both to Islam and to Latin heresy, or the analogous preaching of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in the late twentieth century. Assertions of the uniqueness of the historical fate of a nation constitute the great temptation for nationalists. My results revealed something much more complex and much more distressing, however: the Russian political structure not only could not be de­scribed with the help of the bipolar model, but it was also not sui ge­neris in its sources. It had been violently transformed into what it is now—that is, an autocracy. Starting like the rest of Europe within the limits of a single absolutist paradigm, at a certain moment—in com­plete conformity with Aristotle's political conception—Russia "devi­ated" from the ordinary absolutist axis. But by virtue of a number of historical circumstances, its "deviation" (in contrast to the "deviation" of monarchy toward tyranny, which is usual according to Aristotle) gave rise to a strange new political species, which led to national trag­edy for a great people over the course of many centuries. From the ordinary absolutist root there grew a wild, ugly, wayward branch. If there was anything to be proud of, it was only that somewhere in the depths of the national subconscious Russia proved unable entirely to rid herself of her European beginnings, and again and again stub­bornly returned to them.

This new political structure, unheard of in European history, was called forth by Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution. Ivan the Ter­rible and the origins of the modern Russian political structure were thus indissolubly connected. Such was my result, and there is appar­ently no other way of familiarizing the reader with it than through the elementary comparison and correction of definitions, and specula­tions and interpretations at first glance not even related to Ivan the Terrible.