The Origins of Autocracy

Do not the strangely repetitive "eccentricities" of Russian history at least prompt reflection, even knowing that Nicholas I did not resem­ble Peter (although he tried to), nor Peter Ivan the Terrible (although he also tried)? The passion which Stalin felt for Ivan the Terrible is known to everyone in Russia who is able to read (and it will be dis­cussed in detail below). Let us add to this the penetrating obser­vations of Aleksandr Gershenkron as to the periodicity of economic cycles in Russian history and the constant alternation of feverish ex­plosions of modernization with long periods of prostration. May we not assume that these economic cycles are somehow correlated with the phases of the Russian political cycles which are suggested here?

The other comment which I would like to make is that the cyclical character of Russian autocracy does not, in my opinion, contain even a grain of fatalism. Precisely the contrary: in its second and third phases, each cycle remains open to radical transformation and Euro- peanization. The Russian opposition has brought the country to the very edge of such a transformation many times. It is sufficient to re­call its major reforms and plans for reforms in the 1550s, the 1600s, the 1660s, the 1720s, the 1760s, the 1810s, the 1860s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. If such a transformation had actually taken place, the Rus­sian political structure would have lost its medieval character—which might have happened in the 1860s as well as in the 1960s, but unfor­tunately did not.

9. The Oprichnina

Tsar Ivan IV carved Russia into two parts—the Land (the Zemshchina) and the Oprichnina—each with its own government, its own capital, its own treasury and its own army. There is no more lively and vivid description of the sinister phenomenon known as the Oprichnina than that given by the remarkable Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii:

This was a kind of order of hermits, who like monks separated them­selves from the world and struggled ... as monks do with the tempta­tions of the world. The very ceremony of induction into the Oprich­nina army was surrounded with solemnity, both monastic and conspira­torial. Prince Kurbskii . . . writes that the tsar gathered in to himself from the whole Russian land "evil men, filled with all vices," and com­pelled them by frightful oaths to have no commerce, not only with their friends and brothers, but even with their parents, and to serve only him, and in token of this, compelled them to kiss the cross.

Thus there arose among the thick forests . . . the capital of the Oprich­nina, with its palace surrounded by a moat and a redoubt, and with checkpoints on the roads. In this lair the tsar set up a weird parody of a monastery . . . clothed these official robbers with monastic skullcaps and black veils, wrote for them a monastic rule, and himself climbed the belltower along with the princes in the morning to ring for matins, read psalms and sang in the choir of the church, and performed so many prostrations that his forehead was always bruised. . . . After dinner he liked to speak of the law, dozed, or went into the dungeon to be present at the torturing of suspects.