The Origins of Autocracy

The first Russian intellectual to note and describe this difference in the functions of terror in the various phases of the Russian political process, as far as I know, was Gavriil Derzhavin, in his famous ode "To Felice," dedicated to Catherine II:

There one may whisper in conversation And, without fear of death, while dining Not drink to the health of the tsars. There Felice's name can be Scratched out by a slip of the pen Or her portrait carelessly Thrown to earth.

There mock weddings are not played out, People not steamed in ice baths, The moustaches of diplomats not tweaked Princes do not cluck with brood-hens, Favorites do not laugh openly at them And black their faces with soot . . .

A decade later, Nikolai Karamzin noted that Catherine had "purged the autocracy from admixtures of tyranny." And finally, in the twen­tieth century, trying to define the specific character of Catherinian lib­eralization, Plekhanov wrote: "He who did not stand in the mother- sovereign's way, he . . . who did not interfere in matters which should not concern him, could feel secure."[35] That is, whereas in the rigid phases the fate of an individual did not, as a rule, depend on his behavior, in the relaxed phases it did.

It will probably be objected that both despotism and absolutism also experienced their periods of flowering and decline, of hardening and relaxing. This is certainly true. But neither has exhibited the rig­orous and terrible regularity in the alternation of rigid and relaxed phases which has distinguished Russia. In no other place has it vir­tually become a pattern of political development. Historical analogies are, for this reason, much feared by the Soviet censorship, which cannot eliminate them despite the greatest vigilance, not even by attempts to control the "uncontrollable allusions," as the censorship bitterly calls them. For in describing the time of Ivan the Terrible, for example, the historian involuntarily—and this is excellently understood by every publisher, every censor, and every reader—at the same time de­scribes the Stalinist period, just as in describing the time of Vasilii Shuiskii, he cannot help describing the period of Khrushchev. This is why the study of history in Russia has always essentially been a politi­cal act, dangerous both to the regime and to the historian.

7. The Political Spiral

Russian political history unfolds before our eyes as a kind of spiral, in which one historical cycle, or coil, is regularly and periodically re­placed by the following one, which then returns the system to its point of departure and repeats the basic parameters of the preceding cycle, each time at a new level of complexity. And this pattern extends not only to the cycles themselves but to their internal structure, to the phases from which they are built up.

As an example, let us compare the starting phase (1564-84) and the latest phase (1929-53), which obviously took place before the eyes of at least some of my readers. I will take only these two ex­tremes, precisely because in my view they provide the greatest scope for the model which I have promised.

 

 

ivan the terrible

Oprichnina revolution, halting the process of Europeanization of the country.

Liquidation of the latent limita­tions on power.

The establishment of terror as a means of administration: liquida­tion of political opposition, and abolition of the category of "po­litical death."

Explosive modernization: radical transformation of the economic, political and institutional struc­ture of the country.

joseph stalin

Stalinist "revolution from above," leading to the rout of the NEP (along with accompanying hopes for the political modernization).

Liquidation of latent limitations on power.

The establishment of terror as a method of administration: liqui­dation of the political opposition, and abolition of the category of "political death."

Explosive modernization: indus­trialization, and transformation of the economic and political structure of the country.

Reduction of the social structure, and formation of a "new class."

Abolition of the peasants' right of free movement ("St. George's Day"), resulting in cessation of the horizontal mobility of the gov­erned (with the exception of move­ment controlled by the state).