The Origins of Autocracy

The slogan of this third phase is Order, and its function is stabiliza­tion. The system has been balanced too long and too dangerously on the historical precipice. The terror of pseudodespotism has led it to the brink of self-destruction. The unbridled play of reformist and liberal ideas during the Time of Troubles, having on the one hand proved incapable of breaking the historical spiral and reconciling the administration with the system, has on the other transformed the country into something unknown and frightening to the graduates of the academy of tyranny, administering it into what they perceive as total "disorder." In the first Time of Troubles, after Ivan the Terrible, the country found itself on the threshold of national disintegration; during the second, after Peter, more than a dozen draft constitutions competed with each other in the Russian political arena; before the Polish uprising of 1863, the administration was apparently unable to resist liberal tendencies, and the political emigre Herzen, with his journal Kolokol [The Bell], was perceived in Russia literally as a second government; the NEP threatened the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the irreversible creation of a strong agrarian bourgeoisie, while Khrushchev's reforms of the Party bylaws threatened the complete transformation of the elite and raised the spectre of the creation of a two-party system within the one Party.

This slide into "disorder" has to be stopped. And the third phase stops it. Being eclectic in nature, it attempts to combine the contradic­tory parameters of both of its predecessors, to mix incompatible ele­ments, to reconcile the terrorist heritage of pseudodespotism with the reformist heritage of the Time of Troubles.

At first the maneuver seems simple: to separate reformism from liberalism. One is reminded of a chess player playing simultaneously on two boards. On the first board, the regime is fighting the liberal heritage of the Time of Troubles. On the second, it is trying to exploit this reformist heritage in order to stabilize the system. This phase permitted the Assemblies of the Land after the first Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century. It created the "second aristocracy" in the eighteenth. It thought out and executed reforms under Alexander I and Alexander II in the nineteenth. It conceived and began to ex­ecute a land reform under Nicholas II. Finally, it tried to extend the NEP after the death of Lenin, and to sustain economic reform after the overthrow of Khrushchev.

Just as in its rigid phases the Russian political structure comes to resemble despotism (thereby seducing the "despotist" historians), so in its relaxed phases it comes to resemble absolutism (thereby seduc­ing the "absolutist" historians). However, its real secret, it seems to me, consists in the fact that, just as it is not fated to become despotism, neither is it fated to become absolutism. The third phase of the cycle can therefore more suitably be called pseudoabsolutism.

I add "pseudo" because, as will be remembered, the social and eco­nomic limitations on power are indissolubly connected with ideologi­cal ones, and constitute their obverse side. When you suppress one, you cannot retain the others. The attempt to do so expresses the basic contradiction of pseudoabsolutism, and the seed of its destruction. As the intelligentsia of the country comes of age and matures, acquir­ing the experience lacking during the Time of Troubles, the admin­istration more and more sees in it a mortal danger.

Thus the liberal Iurii Krizhanich was exiled to Siberia in the seven­teenth century. For Catherine II, Aleksandr Radishchev, author of A Journey From Petersburg to Moscow, was, in her own words, "more dan­gerous than Pugachev" (the leader of a mass peasant uprising which shook Russia in the eighteenth century). The liberal Aleksandr Her­zen seemed in the second half of the nineteenth century more dan­gerous than a foreign invasion. The liberal Pavel Miliukov was per­ceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as public enemy No. 1. The contemporary government of Russia struggles with the liberal Andrei Sakharov as with a foreign power. It may even seem that it does not understand its own interests. For in what do the interests of this aristocracy (or aristocratizing elite) which dominates the phase of pseudoabsolutism always consist, if not in the firming up of social lim­itations on power? And who but the intelligentsia of the country, focused in the opposition (open and latent), are capable of working out a strategy which will guarantee the limitations on power against the restoration of the ancien regime?