The Origins of Autocracy

But these are precisely the "vyskazyvaniia" which are not only not permitted to be used, but about which Soviet historiography pas­sionately wishes to forget and to pretend that they never existed. Marx's work which I have just quoted has never been translated into Russian in the more than sixty years of the Soviet regime. Humili- atingly and inexplicably for Soviet historiography, it appears that the majority of the officially deified classical writers (two out of three) hated Russia, viewed it as the heir of Tatar barbarism and Asiatic des­potism, and called on Europe to mount a crusade against this mon­ster. A person who thought in Freudian terms might even suspect that the tormented rejection of the concept of Asiatic despotism by gen­uine science is dictated by the unconscious hatred which it harbors— despite its loud avowals of love and loyalty—for the founding fathers.

Ibid., p. 85.

Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of the XVIII Century, p. 121.

Karl Marx, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 537. (This "vyskazyvanie" uttered by Engels appeared for some reason in Marx's book).

Thus, Soviet historians find themselves orphaned in a Kaf kaesque world of "vyskazyvaniia" which slide away under their feet—one not applicable to Russian history, another unacceptable to historians, and a third simply offensive to their best feelings. It is clear why the jour­nal Istoriia SSSR needed four years of debate on the nature of Rus­sian absolutism, and why Avrekh opens it with an admission appar­ently unthinkable in the mouth of a possessor of absolute truth: "Absolutism is not only an important theme but also a treacherous one . . . the more successful the concrete historical study of it, the more confused and vague its essence becomes.""¹

Certainly, even before this discussion, Soviet historians had noted that "equilibrium" had slipped out from under their feet, and made desperate attempts to find a decent replacement for it. Why, in fact, must there necessarily be equilibrium between the nobility and the bourgeoisie? Why not "balance," say (as Likhachev did), the most re­actionary strata of boyardom against the progressive class of the ser­vice nobility? However, even if we forget that the service nobility were, in fact, the "new class," the janissaries of serf-holding reaction, will this extraordinary gambit solve the problem? Avrekh thinks not. "In recent times," he writes,

it has been suggested that we consider . . . the balancing struggle be­tween boyardom and the nobles to be the linchpin of Russian absolut­ism. ... It is not hard to see that this is a complete capitulation. It is, strictly speaking, no longer the substance but the word which is saved. After all, the entire essence ... of the statements of Marx and Engels is reduced to the idea that absolutism is the product of an equilibrium of forces between fundamentally different classes—the bearers of dif­ferent modes of production—and the result of bourgeois development of the country."

But what if we envision an "equilibrium" between the service no­bility and the peasantry? Then we might succeed in preserving both "equilibrium" and the class struggle, the more so since, according to Lenin, "Class struggle—the struggle of the exploited part of the peo­ple against the exploiting part—lies at the basis of political transfor­mations, and in the final analysis decides the fate of these transforma­tions."[47] B. F. Porshnev bases his conception of absolutism on this, asserting that precisely "the threat of peasant uprisings made neces­sary the centralization of the state, and this threat, by increasing, compelled centralization constantly to be intensified, and finally to reach the stage of absolutism."¹⁹

This thesis was defended in the debate we are considering by An­drei Sakharov—a double namesake of the famous dissident, and perhaps for this reason especially fierce in his demonstrations of loyalty—who, it is true, does not cite Porshnev, and thereby gives out this author's views as his own: "The struggle between the peasant­ry and the class of feudal lords during the period of origin of bour­geois relationships in the country was the basic factor in the forma­tion of Russian absolutism from the second half of the seventeenth century."²⁰