The Origins of Autocracy

absolutism is treated as an unlimited monarchy with the reference to V. I. Lenin cited above. ... Is this definition adequate in the given case? We think not. Is it possible, for example, to establish on the basis of it the difference between absolute monarchy and Oriental despotism? What is to be done about the rights of the people, let us say, under Ivan the Terrible? ... To argue that Ivan was a limited monarch would be to expose one's own scholarly reputation. To recognize him as an abso­lutist monarch, since there were no limitations on his power, is still worse.[46]

Why is it worse? Because to do so would "mean compromising the idea of equilibrium." What equilibrium? The point is that parallel to Lenin's "vyskazyvanie" denying the specific character of absolutism, there is also a "vyskazyvanie" by Engels, asserting this specific character and declaring that although every state

as a general rule is the state of the strongest, economically dominant class . . . exceptional periods are found in which contending classes reach an equilibrium of power, such that the power of the state acquires for the time being a certain autonomy in relation to both classes, as an apparent mediator between them. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the nobility and the bourgeoisie in equilibrium with each other."

Faced with the choice between two irreconcilable "vyskazyvaniia," the majority of Soviet historians have preferred Engels. "This idea of Marx and Engels," Avrekh testifies, "serves as the basis of all studies of absolutism, whatever country is being discussed. All facts and phe­nomena are included under it and explained by it, whatever the order to which they belong.'"²

As we see, the fearless Avrekh issues a challenge to the second clas­sical writer. For if the trouble with Lenin's "vyskazyvanie" is that it does not permit the study of absolutism, then the trouble with the "vyskazy­vanie'" by Engels is that it does not fit Russian history, which two gen­erations of experts have passionately searched for such "equilib­rium." But neither in the seventeenth, nor in the eighteenth, nor even in the first half of the nineteenth century, let alone in the period of Ivan the Terrible, have they succeeded in finding it. One has to assume that this is because it is just not there—as Avrekh phrases it, their failure is conditioned by the "complete absence of proof of the existence of equilibrium."¹³

It is true that there are yet other "vyskazyvaniia" deep in the re­serve—one might say in the subconscious—of Soviet historiography. For example: "It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slav­ery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emanci­pated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master ... to whom Genghiz Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth."¹⁴ This treacherous stab in the back to genuine science was delivered not by some bourgeois miscreant who can be rejected with contempt, but by classical author No. 1 himself. And who was it who said that Russian autocracy "is supported ... by means of an Asiatic despotism and a degree of arbitrary rule of which we in the West cannot even have any conception"?'⁵ Classical author No. 2.