The Origins of Autocracy

16. I understand that the argument about the differences between European politi­cal structures and despotism is customarily conducted within the limits of the concept of feudalism. But there is a problem here, inasmuch as there is as yet no agreement as to one small detail: namely, what feudalism is. In one authoritative source, it is defined as follows: "Feudalism is primarily a method of government ... in which the essential relation is not that between ruler and subject, nor state and citizen, but between lord and vassal" (Feudalism in History, pp. 4-5). The forefather of the Russian "absolutists," N. P. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, in attempting to demonstrate the membership of Russia in the European family, thought it sufficient to assert (in his monograph Feodalism v drevnei Rusi), that a feudal hierarchy—that is, relations between lord and vassal—also existed in Russia. Correspondingly, the "despotists" try to show that in Russia—as distinct from Europe—such relations did not exist (see, for example, Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition).

However, the authoritative definition of feudalism quoted above is criticized both in the West and in the East. On the one hand, we encounter the following conclusion: "The existence of a hierarchy is no longer thought to be a prerequisite to feudalism in the West, largely because the neat hierarchy assumed to have existed in the West is found to have been virtually a phantom" (Oswald P. Backus III, "The Problem of Unity in the Polish-Lithuanian State," p. 650). On the other hand, Soviet historians have at­tempted to make the concept of feudalism universal, by declaring it to be one of the stages in the development of mankind and thereby extending it not only to Russia but to the entire oikumene: "the Marxist-Leninist conception of the fundamental features of feudalism ... as a special socioeconomic order ... is formulated with extreme clarity in Capital by Karl Marx and in The Development of Capitalism in Russia by V. I. Lenin.

18. Quoted in N. N. Kareev, Zapadno-evropeiskaia absolutnaia monarkhna XVI, XVII i XVIII vekov, p. 330.

19. Ibid., p. 130.

3. P. N. Miliukov, Ocherkipo istorii russkoi kul'tury, p. 147.

6. D. S. Likhachev, "Ivan Peresvetov i ego literaturnaia sovremennost'," pp. 30, 36,

11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sochineniia (2nd ed.), vol. 21, pp. 171, 172. En­gels wrote elsewhere that the equilibrium between the landed nobility and the bour­geoisie is the basic condition for absolute monarchy (ibid., vol. 18, p. 254).