The Origins of Autocracy

This new catastrophe for the Russian elite, like the preceding ones, was, however, unable to halt aristocratization. Indeed, after the ty­rant's demise, transformation of the Stalinist "new class" into a "new new class" began—a process which is taking place right now, this time before our eyes, in "modern" Brezhnevist Russia.[33]

Thus, in addition to a peculiar alternating pattern of economic, political, and social processes, Russian autocracy developed a unique alter­nating pattern in the formation of its elites. This pattern involves new and challenging phenomena unexplained (and perhaps inexplicable) by current political science: the periodic destruction of the elite, sub­sequent rearistocratization, and particularly the "new class" whose emergence we have had occasion to observe briefly in such absolutely different historical circumstances.

While the peculiarities of the Russian political structure consist in the fact that it has at times rejected and at others recognized social and economic limitations on power, its attitude toward ideological limitations has always been more or less hostile. But, once again, only "more or less." And here we can again see the connection between economic and ideological limitations. It has usually been the periods when the economic limitations were violated with the greatest inten­sity which proved catastrophic for the Russian intellect as well, and the periods of "relaxation" (or, in contemporary parlance, liberaliza­tion) of the regime, which coincided with tolerance of economic lim­itations, also relaxed ideological control. The number of depoliticized areas increased. The punishment for ideological heresy became more or less consonant with the degree of the heresy. The category of "po­litical death" was repeatedly revived in Russia—under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, under Elizaveta Petrovna in the eighteenth, under Alexander I in the nineteenth, and under Nikita Khrushchev in the twentieth.

The political opposition, like a multitude of other phenomena in

Russian history (the catastrophic decline of the cities, serfdom, politi­cal trials and terror, universal service, the denial of latent limitations on power, and political emigration) has its beginnings in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Russian tyrants destroyed this opposition, some­times in a literal, physical sense. Each time it was reborn as from the ashes after the death of the tyrant, however, following the same alter­nating pattern as the Russian political process itself. This fact alone indicates that resistance to tyranny is as organic a component of this process as is tyranny itself.

The function of this opposition (or what I understand by this term) differs just as profoundly from that of the opposition in mod­ern democratic systems as autocracy itself differs from such systems. It does not by any means necessarily oppose the existing government or regime. On the contrary, it has frequently been at the helm of the country, as was the case with Dmitrii Golitsyn after the death of Peter, or with Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. And, in the eigh­teenth century as in the twentieth, the function of the Russian op­position has never been to amend the policy of the existing system, but to overturn it. In this sense, Russia's revolutionary potential has proved to be practically inextinguishable (if by revolution we do not necessarily mean a mass uprising).

Nevertheless, although the Russian political opposition has repeat­edly demonstrated its ability to generate a process of political transfor­mation of the system in the direction of Europeanization, it has never been able to stabilize this process. Even its most notable successes, such as the rebirth of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, the aboli­tion of serfdom in the nineteenth, and the overthrow of the mon­archy in the twentieth, have always led to a reverse result—that is, to a new "rigidification" of the system. The only political alternatives to the existing regimes which have really worked so far have been those which have come from the left-wing radicals or from radicals of the Russian right, as I call it. These sections of the opposition thus helped to bring Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Nicholas I, Alex­ander III, Lenin, and Stalin to power.[34]

The periodic alternation of "rigid" and "relaxed" phases in the Russian political process has led to an oscillation in the scale and functions of terror. In the "rigid" phases, the Russian political struc­ture frequently became a terrorist structure par excellence; in the "relaxed" phases, it used terror as an exception, and only against those who could be looked upon as a threat to the existing regime.