The Origins of Autocracy

In the first place, was the political organization of Russia based on supreme sovereignty of the state over the entire national product? The Russian state intervened in the economic process and attempted to regulate it. However, it did so in a very uneven way. Whereas in the epoch of Peter I or Stalin this intervention was maximal, and some­times total, at other times it was reduced as far as the historical con­text permitted. In any case, it lost its total character. It is sufficient to recall the difference between the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible (the outstanding Soviet historian I.I. Polosin called it "the war commu­nism of the Muscovite tsar") and the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich, when decisions on new taxes were not taken without the agreement of the Assemblies of the Land, which sometimes remained in session continuously for months. Recall, too, the differences between the "war communism" of the twentieth century and Lenin's NEP.[30]

This alternation prevented the permanent stagnation of the econ­omy characteristic of despotism. But it also excluded the more or less consistent development of the economy characteristic of absolutism. In place of this, Russia evolved a third type of economic development, which combined short phases of feverish modernization with long periods of prostration,[31]

Similarly, it is impossible to describe Russian political development as the simple political reproduction characteristic of despotism. But, on the other hand, neither did Russia develop consistently in the di­rection of growth of latent limitations on power into political limita­tions, as was characteristic of absolutism. Instead it evolved a third type of political development, combining radical change in the institutional struc­ture with the preservation of the basic parameters of its political construction.

It is sufficient to compare pre-Petrine Russia with post-Petrine; prereform and postreform; prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary, in order to grasp this unique characteristic of its political process, which may be described as the dominance of political heredity over institutional variability.

The reduction of the social structure to two polar classes—gover­nors and governed—was never a constant phenomenon in Russian political history. Whereas Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Sta­lin had some success with this, subsequent epochs destroyed their achievements without trace, and the Russian social structure gave birth anew to variety and inequality. In other words, the social process in Russia had the same alternating character as its economic and political processes.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference which distinguishes the Rus­sian political structure from both absolutism and despotism lies, how­ever, in the peculiarities in the formation of the Russian elites. In some periods, the administration in Russia, in order to achieve com­plete independence from the "upper" classes, strove to undermine the existing elites, sometimes to the point of their destruction. For ex­ample, the "revolution from above" carried out by Ivan the Terrible not only liquidated the political significance of the Boyar Duma (the basic institution through which the traditional corporate aristocracy influenced the political decision-making process), but also sought to destroy the very basis of its existence—its hereditary property, the votchiny. There began a rapid process of transformation of the vot- chiny into pomest'ia (holdings conditional on state service, analogous to the despotic model). A new phenomenon, previously unheard of, emerged from this attempt to abolish the social limitations on power. No stratum of the existing establishment was politically interested in the system's "deviating" so far toward tyranny, all the more so in that such a "deviation" was fraught with total terror and indiscriminate plundering of the entire country. Hence the tyrant had to create a political base unknown in both European and Asian experience—a special stratum or "new class," as it were. The tsar had to invent this practically out of nothing—"out of stone," as Kurbskii expressed it. It comprised people from all walks of life, the dregs of all strata of so­ciety, the lowest as well as the highest, with a significant inclusion of international adventurers.