The Origins of Autocracy

Petr Chaadaev in the nineteenth century and Arnold Toynbee in the twentieth were inclined to explain the paradox by the fatal influ­ence of Byzantine culture on the Russian political tradition. Pushkin explained it by the non-European character of Russian culture. The Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov cited the westernization of the coun­try by force. Boris Chicherin referred to the Asiatic despotism char­acteristic of Russian institutions.[39] Georgii Plekhanov appealed to the same despotism entrenched in the peculiarities of the agrarian struc­ture of Russia. Leon Trotsky noted that Russia was closer in its eco­nomic structure to India than to Europe. The ideologist of emigre Eurasianism, Nikolai Trubetskoi, declared that the Russians had in­herited their empire from Genghis Khan.[40] Pavel Miliukov asserted that the constant encirclement of Russia by hostile peoples, and mili­tary necessity, gave the Muscovite government the opportunity to es­tablish a centralized state of Eastern type.® Nikolai Berdiaev declared Russia to be a Christianized Tatar empire.[41] Karl Wittfogel, while ad­mitting that in institutional terms Kievan Rus' belonged to the proto- feudal world of Europe, nevertheless came to the conclusion that the Tatar yoke was responsible for an "institutional time bomb" in Rus­sian political culture, which exploded when the "yoke" came to its end.[42]

In short, there have been many explanations, and we will return to them again. But all of them primarily discuss cultural influences or institutional borrowings, that is, secondary, "superstructural" factors, and by no means the "base"—the relationships of production, pro­ductive forces, class struggle, and other serious matters which are supposed to be interpreted according to the law. Consequently, these hypotheses cannot bear any relation to "genuine science," as Soviet historiography proudly calls itself. For such "bourgeois" explana­tions, Soviet historians have nothing but the haughty contempt of specialists for dilettantes. Their mockery of bourgeois idealism has a confident, major-key ring. It is as though they had the real expla­nation in their pockets. But since they have nothing in their pockets except the sacred "vyskazyvaniia," this explanation must, of course, consist in the economic backwardness of Russia, in the underdevelop­ment of its productive forces.

And this explanation would be perfect if it were not also necessary to explain where this economic backwardness came from. And right here is where there is no escape: you have to appeal to the Tatar yoke, to the terrible slaughter of a people which blocked the path of the Huns to the West with its own breast, and paid for an ungrateful Eu­ropean civilization at the price of its own backwardness. This sounds very patriotic. But unfortunately the class struggle and the relation­ships of production have somehow dropped out of the argument un­noticed. For Aksakov, the Germans were guilty; for Chaadaev, the Greeks; and for "genuine science"—the Tatars? But this is precisely what was asserted by the bourgeois idealists: Chicherin, Trubetskoi, Berdiaev, and Wittfogel. It thus turns out that all of these explana­tions are different not in nature but only in name—in the names of the guilty parties. For they all reduce, in the final analysis, to the as­sertion that what is to blame for Russia's historical misfortune is not Russian autocracy, but someone else—whether the Tatar, the Greek or the German, you will agree, is not the essential point. What is es­sential is that as soon as we come to actual analysis, it is not the "vyskazyvaniia" to which genuine science appeals, but to those same poor old Tatars.