The Origins of Autocracy

[32] The complex character of the "new class" perhaps helps us to understand the stubbornness of the insistence of the Russian new right in general, and Alexander Sol- zhenitsyn in particular, that the October revolution was violently imposed on the Rus­sian nation by foreigners and thus is totally alien to Russian culture and tradition (see Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right). While international adventurers indeed played a conspicuous role in the revolution of 1917, they played a no less distinguished part in the Oprichnina revolution, as well as in the Petrine one. Consequently, the role of international adventurers in the October revolution only confirms its national—one might say traditional—character, and Solzhenitsyn's argument falls apart. True, as dis­tinct from all previous instances, Stalin's "new class" had a brutally nationalistic thrust (because of which, incidentally, some modern right-wingers could not help but sym­pathize with Stalin). It is perhaps explained by the fact that this time the "new class" was intended to destroy and replace an obviously "internationalistic" elite.

[33] The problem of the aristocratization of the elite in the contemporary Soviet Union is the subject of chapter 1 of my monograph Detente After Brezhnev.

[34] While I was still in the Soviet Union, I devoted to this topic a monograph titled "The History of the Russian Political Opposition," which is still in manuscript; some parts of it are used in this book.

[35] G. V. Plekhanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 21, pp. 36—37. Two centuries before Karamzin, and three centuries before Plekhanov, the director of the London "company of merchants trading to Muscovy," Jeremiah Horsey, wrote, in characterizing the period which began with the death of Ivan the Terrible: "The state of affairs in the administra­tion and the state changed completely; every person lived in peace and quiet, and knew what he owned and what he could use; everywhere good officials were appointed, and everywhere justice was established. Russia became, even in outward appearance, a dif­ferent country from what it had been under the previous tsar" (quoted in N. V. Latkin, Zemskie Sobory drevnei Rusi, p. 87).

[36] I have tried to describe this phase in some detail in my essay "The Drama of the Time of Troubles."

[37] The reader will find a chronological table of these hypothetical cycles of Russian political history in Appendix 2.

[38] Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (Isted.), vol. 2, pp. 191, 188, 189-190.