The Origins of Autocracy

The use of the terms "despotism" and absolutism" as synonyms is what hinders our analysis of these political structures. Citing the cruelty, aggressiveness, and authoritarian methods of both, we confuse the "deviation" of absolute monarchies toward tyranny under Louis XI and Henry VIII with the despotism of Shah Abbas and Suleiman the Magnificent. Failure to perceive their antithetical nature—wheth­er by placing them within the limits of a "continuum" or of a concep­tion of "traditional" society—renders our theorizing sterile. Civiliza­tion was able to continue precisely because there existed authoritarian structures which, by virtue of certain historical causes, were compelled to tolerate latent limitations on power. We can now formulate this as follows: the degree of divergence between the goals of the system and those of the administration in authoritarian structures is inversely proportional to the num­ber of latent limitations which they are compelled to tolerate.

In addition to the three types of latent limitations which have al­ready been mentioned, and which are more or less obvious, there also exists a fourth, whose stratum lies deepest, and which is hardest to grasp, but on which, as their foundation, all the others rest.

Let us assume that in some country the powers that be perceive a political problem—mutiny and opposition—in the hairstyle of their subjects, in the length of their clothes, and in their habit of smoking tobacco. Let us suppose that they consider it their duty to regulate these intimate details by means of police measures and administrative decrees. It is difficult to imagine that even such obvious tyrants as Henry VIII or Louis XIV would have claimed the sole right to deter­mine the width of the farthingale worn by court ladies, or the length of gentlemen's sleeves. For this purpose there existed more subtle mechanisms, in the shape of public decencies or fashions. But in Rus­sia the powers that be knew best how many fingers people should cross themselves with, and how long their beards should be, and whether they should smoke tobacco, drink vodka, and desire or not desire their neighbors' wives. Tsar Aleksei did furious battle against shaving, while Peter the Great, on the other hand, looked on the beards of his subjects as an offense and an act of rebellion, and agreed to tolerate them only as a special item in the revenue. Tsar Mikhail strictly forbade the use of tobacco, and Peter, in turn, sold to the Mar­quis de Carmartin the sole right to poison the lungs of the Russians with nicotine. In 1692 a decree was issued forbidding civil servants to dress well, since "it is known that those service people who wear such expensive clothing make their fortunes not from their just earnings but by stealing from the treasury of our great sovereign." In other words, it was obvious to the authorities that one does not earn stone palaces by just labor, that even those who had not been caught before were to be considered thieves and their "earnings" themselves evi­dence of crime and sufficient grounds for punishment.

These details, however, are not the point, which is that people rec­ognized,

the right of the authorities to interfere in the details of their private lives. Not only was a man's home not his castle, even his beard was not considered his property. People's very thoughts and tastes did not belong to them. The cultural tradition had not worked out defen­sive mechanisms which would have made such interference by the state impossible. Only the opposition—"the people on the right" (the Old Believers) and "the people on the left" (the intelligentsia)—were able to resist such interference in autocratic Russia.

Here we approach directly the phenomenon of political culture. In the context of our discussion, this can most conveniently be defined as the totality of limitations on power, reflected in automatic, every­day activity, and inherited from previous generations as a tradition.