The Origins of Autocracy

[26] It is said that when a French diplomat referred in conversation with a British colleague to the well-known declaration of Louis XIV as to the wealth of kings ("Every­thing which is within the limits of their state belongs to them . . . both the money in their treasuries . . . and that which they leave in circulation among their subjects"), the Englishman replied haughtily: "Did you study public law in Turkey?"

[27] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, p. 160.

[28] Ibid., p. 159.

[29] Here and below, when Russian political history is spoken of, reference will be only to its autocratic period—that is, the time following the Oprichnina revolution of 1564.

[30] Under despotism, the state's intervention in the economic process was con­nected with its primitive condition, with the dispersion of the rural communes, and their subsistence economy, and thus served the goal of integrating the stagnant eco­nomic organism. In Russia, on the contrary, the intervention of the state increased and became more active as the economic process became more complex, until, finally, in the twentieth century, in the period of its radical modernization and industrialization, the state took this process under its complete control. But even in the twentieth century, as we know, the intensity of this control continued to vary, now hardening and then relaxing.

[31] This peculiarity of the economic development of Russia was first described by Alexander Gershenkron (in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought; see also his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective). Gershenkron did not, however, con­nect it with the specific character of the Russian political structure.