The Origins of Autocracy

On October 22, 1721, at the celebration of victory in the second Great Northern War, Chancellor Golovkin was merely expressing the gen­eral opinion when he declared the chief service rendered by Peter I to be that he "by indefatigable labor and leadership led us out of the darkness of nonexistence into being and joined us to the society of political peoples."' Nepliuev, the Russian ambassador to Constan­tinople, expressed himself still more openly in 1725: "This mon­arch . . . taught us to know that we are human beings too."[1] Half a century later, N. Panin, who was in charge of foreign policy under Catherine II, confirmed this opinion of the Petrine politicians. "Pe­ter," he wrote, "by leading his people out of ignorance, thought it a great accomplishment to have made it equal to a second-class power."[2]

Over the course of centuries, the conviction that Peter brought Russia out of "nonexistence" and "ignorance" by teaching us to know that we too are human beings has become such a commonplace that it no longer enters anyone's head to ask when, why, and how Russia happened to find itself in a state of "nonexistence" and "ignorance." Why were we not considered human beings before Peter? Why was it a "great accomplishment" for Russia to become even a second-class power?

In his famous panegyric of Peter, Sergei Solov'ev, one of the best Russian historians, wrote confidently of pre-Petrine Russia as a "weak, poor, almost unknown people."[3] And even his constant adversary Mikhail Pogodin agreed with him entirely on this point. All ten cen­tury's of Russian history before Peter lay, it seems, in obscurity— were, so to speak, prehistory—out of which the Father of the Father­land led the country to light, glory, and greatness.

This is the stereotype. But does it agree with the known facts? The modern British historian, M. S. Anderson, who has made a special study of English perceptions of Russia in Peter's time, writes that in the seventeenth century less was known about Russia in England than a hundred years previously.[4] Richard Chancellor, who in 1553 be­came the first Englishman to visit Russia, for some reason entitled one of the chapters of his memoirs (published in England in 1589), not, let us say, "Of the Weak and Poor King of a People in a State of Nonexistence," but, on the contrary, "Of the Great and Mighty Tsar of Russia."[5] Another Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, whose book was also published in England at the end of the sixteenth century, wrote: "The king of these parts is very mighty, since he has won a great many victories, both over the Livonians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Swedes on the one hand, and over the Tatars and pagans on the other."[6] In nu­merous documents which circulated in the 1560s at the court and in the chancellory of the German emperor, it was said that the grand duke of Moscow was the mightiest sovereign in the world after the Turk­ish sultan, and that, "from alliances with the grand duke, the Chris­tian world would receive an honorable profit and advantage; it would also be an excellent counterforce and resistance to that tyrannical and most dangerous enemy, the Turk."[7] The French Protestant, Hubert Langet, prophesied in August 1558 in a letter to Calvin that, "If any power in Europe is destined to grow, this is that power.""

Chancellor found mid-sixteenth-century Moscow to be "as a whole, larger than London and its environs." The scale of trade there as­tonished the Englishman. The entire territory between Yaroslavl' and Moscow, through which he rode,

abounds with little villages which are so full of people that it is surpris­ing to look at them. The earth is all well-sown with grain, which the in­habitants bring to Moscow in such enormous quantities that it seems surprising. Every morning you can meet between 700 and 800 sleighs going there with grain. . . . Some people carry grain to Moscow; others carry it away from there, and among those there are some who live not less than 1,000 miles away.'"

A quarter of a century before Chancellor, before the sea trade began, the ambassador of the German emperor, Sigismund Herberstein, concluded that Russia was making effective use of its central posi­tion between West and East, and was successfully trading in both directions: