The Origins of Autocracy

However, the phase of the Time of Troubles, although it in princi­ple opens up the possibility of breaking the spiral, has always until now ended in failure in Russian history. Its basic goal—the transfor­mation of latent limitations on power into political limitations—has proved unattainable. The opposition, having just risen out of noth­ingness, and having by a miracle survived the total terror, has not been able to reconcile the hopes of the various elites of the country and the expectations of the masses. It suddenly turns out that the so­ciety which looked so simple and unified under the iron hand of the tyrant is in fact unbelievably complex. And each of its strata has its own interests, its own expectations, its secret dreams. The admin­istrative-political elite, maddened by permanent "purges," thirsts for the stabilization of its position, and, in the final analysis, for the guar­anteeing of its privileges to the point of aristocratic status. The re­born "third estate"—the economic elite, sickened by the irrational economic system of pseudodespotism, longs for independence and radical reforms. The intellectual elite yearns for liberalization—that is, the introduction of elementary civil rights and the reining-in of the censorship. The masses expect the standard of living to be raised. Sometimes a Russian, too, wants not only to drink but also to have a bite to eat, and even a shirt on his back.

In other words, some people need "order" and stabilization, while others need changes and reform. How is all this to be combined? How is a strategy for reconciling the administration and the system to be worked out, when the system itself has suddenly demonstrated such irreconcilable contradictions? And without a strategy, how is it to be transformed? How are guarantees against the restoration of the an- cien regime to be worked out?

But there has never been a strategy.

Whether we take Boris Godunov at the end of the sixteenth cen­tury, Vasilii Shuiskii at the beginning of the seventeenth century or Vasilii Golitsyn at the end of it, Dmitrii Golitsyn in the eighteenth century, Dmitrii Miliutin in the nineteenth, or Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Kerensky—or even Nikolai Bukharin and Nikita Khru­shchev—in the twentieth century, we see the same picture every­where. An enormous desire to correct the mistakes, to rehabilitate the victims of terror, and to restore justice; activism and energy in the in­troduction of reforms; a leap toward freedom; and sometimes even tactical inventiveness. But at the same time we see an enormous de­gree of political incompetence, entirely contradictory actions, and an inability to consider the mistakes of one's predecessors. In a word, we see a lack of preparation for the basic sociopolitical transformation of the country which amounts, one might say, to intellectual bankruptcy. Alas, the Russian reformers never relied on a competent social analy­sis of the society which they were attempting to transform, and never had any experience in setting up workable political coalitions, or any clear-cut idea of what could actually be accomplished, in what order, with the aid of what social forces and political blocs. Trying to formu­late this, I would say that in hoping to reshuffle the cards and deal them again, the Russian reformers had not previously gone through the school of absolutism, which alone could have given them the nec­essary experience. But is this really so surprising? Can pseudodespo- tism actually serve as a school of political thinking? Can total censor­ship further the accumulation of social knowledge? Where was this experience, this knowledge, this thinking to be found in Rus'?

Here is the reason why this phase—the most vivid and dramatic, filled with heretical new ideas and plans, brilliant insights, and bitter mistakes—a phase which has sustained intellectual flights, given Rus­sian literary geniuses, and raised whole generations of oppositionists, is followed by the longest, most colorless, dullest segment of the Rus­sian cycle—what one might dub the "Brezhnevist" phase.