The Origins of Autocracy

According to Vipper, the division of the country was justified by the fact that, as a result of it, a kind of laboratory model for the total mobilization of all the resources of the system was created—a model which required the abolition of all limitations on power. It required that the ordinary administration of the country (in this case the boyar government of the Zemshchina) be totally deprived of its political mandate and functions. It required, in short, the separation of the political apparatus of government from the administration, and the setting up, above the ordinary administrative structure, of a special institution, concentrating in its hands political control over the sys­tem being administered. It required the creation of a two-tiered struc­ture of administration based on two parallel hierarchies of power. And for this the tsar needed the Oprichnina. While in the capacity of a proto- political police it was necessary for the establishment of total terror, in the capacity of a proto-political party it was necessary for the institu­tionalization of the division of functions between the political and the ad­ministrative powers (in modern parlance, between the Party and the state).

If Charles de Montesquieu invented the separation of powers, then Ivan the Terrible invented the separation of functions between powers. The separation of powers leads, as history has shown, to de­mocracy. The separation of functions leads to autocracy. This was the true political significance of the Oprichnina, as I see it. The fact that it began as a direct territorial division of the country relates only to its historical form, and not to its political essence. This was simply a means for maximization of political control with a minimum of ad­ministration, given the medieval social structure.

Peter I, who set up his own Oprichnina 150 years later, no longer had any need to divide the country and split the government into ad­ministrative and political segments, since he created a centralized ap­paratus of political control in the form of his own guard. The embod­iment of the Petrine Oprichnina was no longer the pseudochivalric order set up by Ivan the Terrible over the Boyar Duma, which con­tinued to enjoy its "traditional methods of administration," but the autonomy of a guard set up over the senate. The role of Ivan the Ter- rible's Oprichnina capital—Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda—was played

32. Vipper, p. 125.

under Peter by St. Petersburg, the capital of the guard and the bureaucracy.

There was still less need for dividing the country under Lenin, who placed the Party over the Soviets, providing Russian autocracy with its Communist incarnation. And this was even more true under Stalin, who advanced the dual hierarchy of political control, placing the political police over the Party. Stalin's Moscow united in itself both Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and St. Petersburg. Tsar Ivan's monstrous invention has thus dominated the entire course of Russian history.

CHAPTER II

THE SERF HISTORIANS: IN BONDAGE TO "STATEMENTS"

1. The Struggle With Elementary Logic

The unprejudiced reader, in familiarizing himself with the work of Soviet historians, must first of all be somewhat indulgent. Even when they have something to say, they do not as a rule have the opportunity to express it, let alone to interpret it, in an adequate way—at least in the field of theory. They are phenomenally strong and have gained worldwide reputations in source study, in the investigation of ar­chives and in the analysis of documents—that is, in everything which is depoliticized and without current ideological meaning. But as soon as it becomes a matter of interpreting such documents—not to speak of making judgments about the historical process—they find them­selves tightly encircled by inviolable canons, the infraction of which is equivalent to breaking the law in a modern society. These canons are the so-called "vyskazyvaniia" (statements) of the classical Marxist au­thors—Marx, Engels, and Lenin (until 1953 Generalissimo Stalin also had this rank, but he has now been demoted to private).