The Origins of Autocracy

Though many of these "vyskazyvaniia" contradict each other, time has no power over them. Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895, Lenin in 1924. None of them were professional historians. But everything the classical authors ever said, even in their tenderest years, is immune from revision—on pain of criminal or administrative punishment (with the exception, of course, of those "vyskazyvaniia" which the au­thorities themselves consider to be dangerous or inconvenient at the given moment). A whole army of semiliterate hunters—who know nothing of history except the "vyskazyvaniia" currently in use, but on whom, nevertheless, the welfare of historians, their professional ad­vancement, their status, and their publications depend—vigilantly follow every attempt at revision. Under pseudodespotism, the Gulag awaited heretics; in subsequent phases, only daily restriction and ha­rassment. But for people whose calling consists in studying, thinking, and writing, the loss of these privileges (the autocracy considers them not as individual rights but as privileges bestowed by the regime) is sometimes equivalent to death.

When Soviet historians try to reinterpret (not revise, reinterpret) the "vyskazyvaniia," this can, therefore, be considered, if not heroic, then at least a brave act, involving serious risk. For a hunter may always turn up to whom the reinterpretation looks like a revision. In a cer­tain sense, moreover, the situation of Soviet historians of Russia is worse than the situation of the medieval scholastics: the former suf­fer both from a multitude of "vyskazyvaniia" and from a shortage of them. For what was said by the classical Marxist authors for the most part does not fit Russian history.

Ask any Soviet historian what he uses as a guide in analyzing the political development of a particular country, and he will tell you right away that he proceeds from the fundamental positions of Marx­ism—that is, from the idea that at a given point the productive forces in their development outrun the relationships of production, that this discrepancy gives rise to a class struggle which gradually weakens the existing social structure, and that this struggle, growing sharper, leads to revolution, in the course of which the victorious class breaks up the old state machinery (as occurred in the Netherlands in the six­teenth century, in England in the seventeenth, and in France in the eighteenth) and erects on its ruins a new apparatus of class rule.

This is what the "vyskazyvaniia" say. This is the law.

But what is the historian of Russia, let us say of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, supposed to make of this law? What is he to do if the productive forces here grew so slowly that over the whole course of these centuries they did not outgrow the relationships of production? If the class struggle, although supposed to shatter the structure of autocracy, nevertheless could not shatter it? If, further­more, the autocracy rose up after each successive rebellion like a phoenix out of the flames, refreshed, and for some reason grown stronger, and, as if nothing had happened, pursued its barbarous line as before? If the old structure did not collapse and, consequently, the rubble on which the new state was to be built, according to the law, was absent? If, impudently neglecting the law, the old state persisted in all its autocratic ignorance right down to the twentieth century?

Why was it that, precisely at the dawn of modern history, when me­dieval serfdom was breaking up in Western Europe, this same serf­dom was initiated in Russia? That when in Europe the modern mode of production was being born and modern forces of production were taking shape, the forces of production were being totally destroyed in

Russia? That while in Europe positive political experience was being accumulated which led in the end to the transformation of latent lim­itations on power into open political ones, in Russia a grim autocracy was enthroned which destroyed even the existing limitations? That when Shakespeare and Cervantes, Bruno and Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, and Montaigne were announcing the dawn of modern civiliza­tion in Europe, the fires and bells of the Oprichnina were announc­ing the triumph of barbarism in Russia?