The Origins of Autocracy

[129] The main objection usually set forth against the feasibility of such an "open frontier" strategy is that a hundred years after the Livonian war, in the 1670s, Muscovy made an attempt to conquer the Crimea which ended in failure. Was it then possible for the Muscovy of the sixteenth century to have succeeded? My answer is essentially given in the introductory chapter of this book. What was indeed impossible for "weak, poor, almost unknown" pre-Petrine Muscovy, in a "state of nonexistence," was quite possible for pre-Oprichnina Muscovy, then at the height of its power. I am not speaking in terms of a single military operation, as in the 1670s, but of a national, long-range anti-Tatar strategy over a period of decades, which would have required detente with Europe as well as the continuation of the Great Reform, the reformation of the church, and the modernization of the army.

[130] D. P. Makovskii, Razvitie tovarno-denezhnykh. otnoshenii . . . (2nd ed).

[131] M. D'akonov, Vlast' moskavskikh gosudarei, p. 151.

[132] G. Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth, p. 34.

[133] K. D. Ravelin, Sochineniia, pt. 2, p. 112.

N. K. Mikhailovskii, "Ivan Groznyi v russkoi literature," p. 134.

S. B. Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p. 35.

S. F. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 5.

[134] Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossiis dreveneishikh vremen, bk. 3, p. 713.

cratic "revolution from above" at the beginning of the eighteenth century). Literally all historians of Russia, native and foreign, proceed from this stereotype. (The reader will find an excellent formulation of it, for example, in Dmitri Obolensky's "Russia's Byzan­tine Heritage," pp. 93-117.) In the mid-nineteenth century, the Slavophiles turned this stereotype into their ideological banner, calling the Russian elite "home" to pre-Petrine Russia. In the 1880s, their follower Konstantin Leont'ev laid bare the real essence of this appeal—the concept of "Russian Byzantinism," but since that time it has not en­tered anyone's head to doubt the validity of the stereotype itself. However, the dualism of Russian political culture goes back, as I have tried to show here, to roots in the struc­ture of early medieval Russian society which have nothing to do with either "Western- ism" or "Byzantinism" (which is not to deny important cultural influences from both sides). Two hundred years before Peter, this dichotomy was already an accomplished fact. The first decisive struggle between the two tendencies was the Oprichnina revolu­tion of Ivan the Terrible.