The Origins of Autocracy

Yanov has polemics in his bloodstream, and much of what he says needs to be and should be argued about, not simply accepted as pro­nouncement. He is essentially provocative and controversial. But he is serious, erudite, thoughtful, well informed, witty, and intelligent, and he has something of his own to say that we cannot afford not to hear. Not only historians and political scientists will find this book interest­ing, but all those who have a sense of the importance of the Soviet Union in our lives, a growing number among whom, I hope, are those who have some inkling that the Soviet Union cannot be under­stood merely by the face with which it immediately presents itself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I read over this book, I feel again how hard it was to write at the open and defenseless border between several genres and disci­plines—between history and confession, between political science and philosophy, between historiographic investigation and a search for the origin of political evil. I can imagine how difficult it was for those who read this book in manuscript—Richard Lowenthal, Sidney Monas, Stephen and Ethel Dunn, George Breslauer, Robert Crum- mey—to make a judgment that required not only tolerance but schol­arly courage. The University of California Press and my editor, Wil­liam J. McClung, in risking the publication of such a book, somehow managed to combine businesslike caution and old-fashioned chivalry. Gianna Kirtley, Ellen Sheeks, Marilyn Schwartz, and my daughter Marina nurtured the manuscript into a book. Peter Dreyer performed editorial miracles, large and small, in the hope of somehow Angliciz­ing (if I may put it that way) this intransigently Russian work. I am grateful to all of them for their efforts.

This book has a strange history. It is the heart of a manuscript en­titled History of the Political Opposition in Russia, which I began to write ten years ago in Moscow in the insane hope of guiding it across the reefs of censorship. Soviet censorship is sophisticated and merciless, but I was no novice in the art of fooling it. However, after the first chapter I began to doubt my ability to outwit the censors. After the third I realized I was taking a great risk. After the fifth I became afraid to keep the manuscript at home. After the seventh I concluded that the only way I could keep my self-respect as a writer and human being was to become a smuggler—that is, to turn my life upside down by illegally dispatching the manuscript across the border. Such things are not done alone. Many people helped me—brave people willing to take risks of the most elementary physical kind. I cannot name these people here—either the Russians or the non-Russians. But I cannot fail to be grateful to them to the end of my days.

I was also helped to write this book by my opponents who attacked my views in Moscow and continue to attack them in the West. Their attacks do not surprise me. These people refuse to recognize, as I do, that our fatherland has two faces. One of these is open to the world: the Russia of Herzen, Plekhanov, and Sakharov. I am proud of it. But I never forget that there is also another Russia: the country of po­groms, Black Hundreds, and terror, the land of Purishkevich and Stalin. Of that Russia I am ashamed. All the same, may the Lord give my opponents good health. They have given me patience and wrath, a feeling of grief and indignation, without which this book could not have been written.

I have thanked my tolerant referees, my courageous comrades-in­arms, and my merciless accusers. Now I must await the verdict of readers. This book will not be published in Russian, either by a Soviet publishing house or by a Russian publisher in the West. And there is nowhere left to emigrate. There are no more borders across which I can illegally dispatch my manuscript, hoping that it can be published in Russian. Thus, I seem to have irretrievably lost the greatest thing a writer can lose—an audience in his mother tongue. Will I be able to find a replacement—in a strange country, in an alien language?

October 1, 1980

INTRODUCTION

THE HYPOTHESIS

1. From Greatness to Obscurity ?