The Origins of Autocracy

But Likhachev does not do this. The law forbids it: peasant wars, according to all the "vyskazyvaniia," represent class struggles—that is, precisely the above mentioned "progressive historical development." Thus, the "statements" mercilessly drive the poor historian into a log­ical trap, and compel him to the absurdity of cursing the struggle of the boyardom against the "progressive class" while at the same time blessing the peasantry's struggle against it. He is compelled to sing hymns to enserfers (the "new class") and enserfed (the peasantry) with identical inspiration.

Such tricks are not the exception, but the rule, and what we may call the routine, of "genuine science." Some years later, a no less distinguished scholar, Academician L. V. Cherepnin, reported to a Soviet-Italian congress that "in the peasant war [of the early seven­teenth century] we can see one of the causes of the fact that the transi­tion to absolutism in Russia was delayed by more than half a cen­tury."[43] But this is open heresy. It turns out that the class struggle, instead of speeding up the "progressive movement of history," slowed it down. This has to be Cherepnin's conclusion if he is to remain within the limits of elementary logic. However, such a conclusion would be not only heresy but public suicide. Cherepnin, of course, does not opt for this, not only because the "vyskazyvaniia" stand guard over class struggle and he has no taste for self-sacrifice, but also, to paraphrase Aristotle, because though the peasantry is his friend, ab­solutism is dearer. And absolutism, grievously involved in a mortal tangle with the Oprichnina and serfdom, must be rehabilitated at any price.

Once again, before the eyes of an astonished public, the scholar is suddenly replaced on the podium by a clown. Recognizing that "the attempts to establish absolutism, connected with the policy of Ivan the Terrible and expressed in the institution of the Oprichnina, resulted in an open dictatorship of the serfholders, which took on the most monstrous forms of despotism," Cherepnin goes on to assert, without drawing breath, that "by weakening the boyar aristocracy and sup­porting the centralization of the state, the Oprichnina to a certain de­gree cleared the path for absolutism."[44] In other words, the bloody en­thronement of serfdom, connected with the "most monstrous forms of despotism," having successfully overcome the hindrance of class struggle, once again performed its service to the "progressive move­ment of history"!

Has Cherepnin really moved very far from the hymns to the slave- holding "progressive class" which we heard a decade earlier from Likhachev? And does not the formula of Istoriia SSSR [The History of the i/SS/?] (officially adopted in 1966 as a textbook for institutions of higher learning), which simple-mindedly asserts that since the Oprichnina was directed against the aristocracy, "it had a progressive character,"[45] sound natural in this context?

2. The Lost Paradise of "Equilibrium"

From the outset I must make the qualification that I intend to analyze only the philosophical aspect of the Soviet discussion on Russian ab­solutism (1968-1971), and not by any means the scholastic squab­bling concerning the "relationship of the feudal and bourgeois ele­ments in the nature and policy of the absolute monarchy" which has absorbed much of the energy of its participants. This squabbling seems to me the more scholastic in that the essential fact of Russian history during the period under study is unquestionably the routing of the Russian proto-bourgeoisie by the Oprichnina, and the blocking by serfdom of the formation of a middle class. After this, what could be the role of "bourgeois elements" in the Russian political process, and what is there actually to dispute? The uniqueness of the Russian autocracy during the first centuries of its existence consisted precisely in the absence of a middle class. And it is precisely this uniqueness which I would have discussed in the debate, had I been its initiator. But the initiator was the well-known Soviet historian, A. Avrekh, who began in a quite different way, with a brave reinterpretation of the famous "vyskazyvanie" by Lenin to the effect that the concepts of "ab­solutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited monarchy" are entirely identi­cal. This statement cuts off completely any possibility of separating a definition of "absolutism" out of the general mass of "unlimited mon­archies," and essentially excludes any discussion at all. And for this reason Avrekh tactfully attacks it. "In the second edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia," he writes,