The Origins of Autocracy

I understand how strange such an abstract theoretical wringing process, full of allusions and terms unfamiliar to the Western ear, must seem. Moreover, it may turn out that in proposing a system of categories forjudging political structures, I have, as they say, rein­vented the wheel. I understand all this. But I can do nothing about it: otherwise my encounter with the reader is in danger of becoming yet another dialogue of the deaf.

The first part of this book is of necessity theoretical, since it is de­signed to acquaint the reader with my conception of the origin and nature of the Russian political structure. In this part I seek:

To give as precise as possible a description of "despotism" and "absolutism";

To give a description of "Russian autocracy";

To demonstrate that prior historiography known to me proceeds almost entirely from the bipolar model of political classification;

To show that, precisely for this reason, it is incapable of ade­quately describing the origin and nature of the Russian political structure.

It goes without saying that most Soviet authors reject with an of­fended air the very possibility that Russia might belong in the category of Asiatic despotism, and decidedly count it in the family of European absolutism, while most Western authors who are sensitive to theoreti­cal issues are convinced of the opposite. For this reason, I will call the first, for brevity's sake, "absolutists," and the latter "despotists."

This chapter will be devoted to definitions. In chapter two, I will try to show how it comes about that the "absolutists" are unable to ex­plain the origin and nature of the Russian political process. The third chapter will be devoted to the "despotists."

2. The Science of Despotology

Aristotle knew that in addition to the three regular and three irregu­lar ("deviant") forms of political organization characteristic of the civ­ilized oikumene, there existed beyond its boundaries, in the darkness of barbarism, yet a seventh—despotism. Outwardly, it resembles the tyranny well-known to the civilized world, which "is in essence the same as monarchy but implies only the interests of the ruler alone."[18]But this resemblance is only outward, because in the civilized world, tyranny is but one of the transitory forms in an ever-changing sea of political transformations, while despotism in the barbarian world is permanent.

The human mind is not capable of understanding how a people can tolerate tyranny on a permanent basis. For this reason Aristotle saw in despotism something inhuman. And this is not surprising if we remember that "barbarism" was, for him, only the external political dimension of the internal political condition of "slavery." Neither the slave nor the barbarian (the potential slave) could be considered a human being, since the first mark of a human being was, for Aris­totle, participation in courts and councils—that is, in the administra­tion of society. Man, for him, was a political animal. This, properly speaking, makes it understandable why he could not consider despo­tism as a political structure at all.

But Aristotle nevertheless does introduce a certain original ele­ment into what I would call the science of despotology. In fact, if we try to look at his theory of "deviations" from a modern point of view, we see immediately that he has in mind the problem of divergence between the goals of the social system and those of its administration. The regular forms, for him, are those in which the common goals of the system prevail over the goals of the administration. The irregular forms are those in which the administration subjects the system to the goals of the social elements it represents (or, what is of decisive impor­tance for us, to its own autonomous goals). This, in Aristotle's terms, is the meaning of "deviation." Oligarchy, for example, subjects the system to the goals of the social "upper crust," and democracy, on the contrary, to those of the "lower depths." Tyranny subjects the system to the goals of the administration as such, which, in modern parlance, becomes an interest group in its own right. Thus, in Aristotle's opin­ion, social systems may exist which live not for their own interests, but exclusively for the interests of the "ruler alone," who personifies the admin­istration of the system.