The Origins of Autocracy

21. According to the latest edition of Professor Nicholas Riasanovsky's textbook, "The Oprichnina . . . came to stand . . . for a separate state administration . . . paral­leling the one in existence which was retained for the rest of the country, now known as the zemshchina. . . . New men under the direct control of Ivan the Terrible ran the Oprichnina, whereas the zemshchina stayed within the purview of the boyar duma and old officialdom. . . . The term Oprichnina also came to designate especially this new corps of servants to Ivan the Terrible—called oprichniki—who are described sometimes today as gendarmes or political police" (Nicholas Riasanovsky, History of Russia, pp. 165-66).

29. A. Grobovsky, The Chosen Council of Ivan IV; A Reinterpretation, p. 25.

31. A. Herzen, Sobranie sockinenii, vol. 3, p. 403.

32. Erwin ChargofF, "Knowledge Without Wisdom," p. 41.

34. Richard Hellie, "The Muscovite Provincial Service Elite in Comparative Per­spective," p. 1.

13. Wittfogel speaks of it as "routine terror in managerial, fiscal, and judicial pro­cedures that caused certain observers to designate the government of hydraulic despo­tism as 'government by flogging"' (ibid., p. 143). In another place he speaks of "the standard methods of terror" (ibid., p. 149). Nevertheless, it may be in order to note here that both Montesquieu, with his "principle of fear," and Wittfogel, with his "rou­tine terror," are somewhat simplifying the picture. They never make the distinction be­tween the elites of the despotic states, the "governors," for whom the terror was indeed routine, and the population, "the governed," for whom the terror was at least to a de­gree tempered by ancient tradition.

14. "Unpredictability is an essential weapon of absolute terror," Wittfogel notes (ibid., p. 141).

15. Of course, the world which seemed to Aristotle an impenetrable darkness may seem to people of another culture a world of eternal equilibrium and harmony—if not entirely just, then at least a tolerable alternative to the restless, dynamic world of "prog­ress." For example, Senator Raul Manglapus, a well-known Filipino politician, and at