The Origins of Autocracy

Tsar Ivan himself considered the Oprichnina which he had founded as his own private estate, a special farm or appanage which he had sepa­rated out of the rest of the state. . . . Ivan seemed to recognize that all the rest of the Russian land was under the jurisdiction of the Council, consisting of the descendants of its former rulers . . . who made up the Muscovite boyardom, sitting in the Duma of the Land.[38]

The non-Oprichnina portion of Russia, which was administered, as before, by the aristocratic Boyar Duma, was, however, completely removed from participation in political decisions and occupied, as it were, the position of an absolutist island in the stormy ocean of the Oprichnina surrounding it. I say "absolutist" because the latent lim­itations on power continued to function on the territory of the Zemshchina (at least until the Oprichniki intruded into it), while they had ceased to exist on the territory of the Oprichnina. At its very be­ginning, in the short period of the "revolution from above" from 1565 to 1572, the Oprichnina was in practical terms a monstrous form of coexistence of despotism and absolutism in one country.

From this point of view, the revolution of Tsar Ivan was an attempt to transform an absolutist political structure into a despotism copied from Byzantine and Tatar-Turkish models. This attempt both suc­ceeded and failed. It failed because, by virtue of the resistance of the absolutist tradition, the Russian structure did not become a despo­tism. But it also succeeded, in the sense that the absolutist structure was deformed to the point of unrecognizability, and was transformed into something else, unheard of up to that point. Therefore, we may say that when two powerful cultural traditions, absolutist and auto­cratic, collided and intertwined with each other in the heart of one country for a brief historical instant, the result of this fateful embrace was the destruction of Russian absolutism and the creation of Russian autocracy. Inasmuch as the Oprichnina proved to be not only the starting-point, but also the nucleus of autocracy which determined, or so it seems to me, the entire subsequent historical process in Rus­sia, it makes sense to consider it more closely.

The Oprichniki were the storm troopers of Ivan the Terrible. As soon as they had done their job, the tsar dealt with them the way Hitler dealt with his own Oprichniki on the Night of the Long Knives 370 years later. But terror alone was insufficient to carry out a radi­cal transformation of the political structure. Something more was needed. And the fact that the Oprichnina was this "something" has been noted by the Soviet historians P. A. Sadikov and I. I. Polosin, both of them ardent apologists for Tsar Ivan. Here is how R. Iu. Vip- per summarizes their "happy discovery":

[The Oprichnina was] a separation from the rest of the state of a very important group of lands in order that here, the head of the state, with­out being constrained by traditional methods of administration, might develop in extenso new, more flexible, and broader forms of government, and might apply new methods of organization of the military and fiscal sys­tems; the system worked out [in the Oprichnina] was supposed to serve, according to the reformer's plan, as a model and school for the Zem- shchina, which only by this means could be brought into the new and complex economy of the state.³²