The Origins of Autocracy

This first "new class" in Russian history, a savage elite that was both ignorant and servile, is known to historians as the dvorianstvo (no­bility). Somehow it has escaped notice that this creation of the tyrant was not at all reminiscent of the haughty and refined dvorianstvo of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a nobility which educated its children in special schools, spoke only French, and had forgotten how to write its native language. The

dvorianstvo of the time of Ivan the Terrible, or what passed by that name, could not write Russian either. But for quite a different reason: they could not write at all.

In any case, it may seem that the final hour of the Russian aristoc­racy had struck, and that from this moment on it was to be irretriev­ably submerged in compulsory universal service. And here one of the most remarkable paradoxes of Russian history occurred: not only did the "new class" fail to fulfill its task and totally destroy the social lim­itations on power, it itself immediately began to be transformed into what I call the "new new class," a stratum suspiciously reminiscent of the old aristocracy. The destructive process of transformation of the traditional votchiny into pomest'ia

in fact coincided and intertwined with a reverse process of transformation of the pomest'ia into votchiny. In the law code of 1649, less than a century after the Oprichnina rev­olution, it is already practically impossible to distinguish landed es­tates from

votchiny. For the first time in Russian history, this episode proved that the aristocratization of the elite is an organic and natural pro­cess in the Russian political system, one which, like the differentiation of the peasantry, develops immediately and unavoidably whenever the tyrant does not halt it by terror.

For the most part, the terrorization has been carried out by a kind of "new class" comprising the same elements as the Oprichnina elite of Ivan the Terrible: people from the lower strata of the society, "ex­perts" from the old elite, and international adventurers. At least, such was the case with Petrine shliakhta,

a militant "new class" created by the tyrant in the 1700s. And the same paradox occurred again after the tyrant's demise: in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Petrine "new class" again underwent a transformation into a "new new class" which appeared to be a transitional form on its way to aris- tocratization. Moreover, this time it eventually triumphed. The siege it laid to the administration was so persistent and fierce that the series of women who succeeded one another on the Russian throne, from Anna to Catherine, proved unable to stabilize the system until they granted the "new class" the status of an aristocracy.

Unfortunately, this born-again Russian aristocracy happened to be a slave-holding stratum, which immeasurably weakened its political potential. Having won social emancipation from the government, it proved unable to achieve political emancipation, at least on a scale comparable with Russian boyardom before the Oprichnina revolu­tion. In other words, while their estates were turned into votchiny, the new landowners did not become boyars.

As distinct from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the two dic­tatorships of the nineteenth century (Nicholas I's and Alexander Ill's) did not try to create their own "new classes," leaning instead on the conservative and Russophile segments of the existing elites. This made the two tyrannies in question significantly milder than their predecessors, but did not preserve the entrenched aristocracy from eventual extermination and replacement by the savage "new class" created by Lenin after the revolution of 1917 (again comprising the same three elements: people "from below," "bourgeois experts," and international adventurers).[32]

In any case, it seemed that this time the Russian aristocracy had been dealt a deathblow. But again the paradox of aristocratization oc­curred. Lenin's "new class" thirsted for privileges and independence, just as in the seventeenth century, and sought in turn to transform itself into a "new new class"—always the first step on the ladder of aristocratization. And, again as in the seventeenth century, this aristo- cratizing elite was crushed by a still newer class of Party apparatchiki. Joseph Stalin, systematically liberating himself from the control of the modern analog of the Assembly of the Land, the Central Committee of the Party, and the modern analog of the Boyar Duma, the Polit­buro, physically exterminated Lenin's elite.