The Origins of Autocracy

This gradual growth of conservatism explains the evolution of pseudoabsolutist regimes in the second half of the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century (accompanied by the seem­ingly organic dying away of the Assemblies of the Land); in the sec­ond half of the reign of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century (marked by the end of a flirtation with "enlightened absolutism"); in the second half of the reign of Alexander I in the nineteenth (with its abandonment of constitutional plans and its routing of the univer­sities); and, finally, in our own day, in the second half of the Brezhnev administration. This growth of conservatism is reflected also in the gradual abandonment by the administration of internal reforms, focusing instead on foreign adventures. This was the case in the sev­enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and it is the case now.

In short, in this late part of the third cycle, the system enters an age of political stagnation, accompanied by economic and spiritual decline. And this is a clear signal that a new cataclysm, a new restoration of the ancien regime is at the door. The drama which England experi­enced only once, at the end of the Middle Ages (in 1660-89), which France experienced for an even briefer time (1815—30), Russia has been experiencing all the way through its tortuous history. One might say that it is developing through and by historic cataclysms. And for this reason, perhaps, it is even now, at the end of the twentieth century, still a medieval political system—an autocracy, as it was under Ivan the Terrible at the end of the sixteenth.

Let me try to describe the mechanism of these repeated restora­tions, as I see it. The removal of the liberal wing of the opposition by no means signifies the elimination of the opposition as such. It is pre­cisely the increased conservatism of pseudoabsolutist regimes, pre­cisely their obvious inability to solve the vital problems of the country which catalyzes and brings to the surface the dual nature of the op­position. The annihilation of the left "Europeanist" wing means, in reality, not a victory but a defeat for the "gray consensus" of the rul­ing center. For, by routing the left, they activate the right, transform­ing it into a real political force.

The rigid phase of the system has, chameleonlike, variously adopted the coloring of Westernism, as under Peter; of Russification, as under Alexander III; of open tyranny, as under Paul; of ideological isola­tionism, as under Nicholas I; and of Gulag-style industrialization, as under Stalin; but its essence does not change. What it aims at is the elimination (or the greatest possible reduction given the historical context) of the latent limitations on power, and removal from political circulation (often by the method of simple physical annihilation) of both the gray centrist elite and its liberal opponents. And this is when the cataclysm comes.[37]

8. An Explanation to the Reader

I am aware of the extreme vulnerability of my historical modelling. Some readers may find it an impermissible oversimplification, and others an arbitrary manipulation of entire historical periods, each of which, as we know, had its own inimitable individual aspect. I under­stand how difficult it is to believe that a historical process can properly be described geometrically. It is apparent that neither will I avoid the charges of having artificially organized my material and of be­ing inclined to the same historical fatalism with which I reproach the conventional historians. However, instead of going into a complex philosophical discussion on this score, I will confine myself to a few comments.

In the first place, I do not in the least wish to imply that the analo­gous phases in different historical cycles were photographic copies of one another, not only by reason of the constantly increasing complex­ity of the autocratic system (to which I am always trying to draw the reader's attention) but also because of the infinite variety of historical circumstances and characters involved. Therefore, when I speak of models and analogies, I have in mind only and exclusively the identity of functions of the analogous phases of the cycle. In fact, the problem here lies only in whether the variety of historical circumstances and characters excludes the identification which I have mentioned. I think that it is difficult for the historian to avoid it in comparing, say, the periods of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, as we have done. It would also not be easy to ignore the strange fact that the death of each successive tyrant, and not only of Ivan the Terrible, was accom­panied in Russian history by a kind of reformist and liberal thaw.