The Origins of Autocracy

It was the embodiment of the negation of the despotism of the Muscovite tsardom;

Contrary to all that is known to us, the tyranny of Peter I, Paul I, and Nicholas I was compatible with due process and embodied political progress;

The existence of the category of political progress is confirmed, albeit indirectly.[49]

In other words, for the first time in Russian historiography, an at­tempt has been made to reconcile the two poles of the traditional bi­polar model, at least in a chronological sense: the Russian political process is declared both despotic (in the period of the Muscovite tsar­dom) and absolutist (in the period of the St. Petersburg empire).

For all the poverty and contradictoriness of Avrekh's definition, for all its involvement in the war of quotations about "the relation­ship between feudal and bourgeois elements," his attempt differs sharply from the vulgar logical clowning to which, as we have seen, genuine science usually resorts in difficult situations. On the contrary, he essentially rebelled against serflike dependence on the sacred "vyskazyvaniia," and attempted to think independently about the his­tory and the fate of his country. The discussion could have developed further in either of two directions: it could continue to move toward freedom, or the attempt at rebellion could be suppressed. In 1968, before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, it seemed that the dis­cussion might take the first direction; in 1969 it swiftly began to be reminiscent of a punitive expedition.

3. Under the Ice of "Genuine Science"

In a publication which followed directly upon Avrekh's, M. Pavlova- Sil'vanskaia recognizes that "his viewpoint . . . that until the be­ginning of the eighteenth century, the autocracy was only despo­tism, shows promise." Moreover, Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia improves upon Avrekh's position, noting that, "according to Avrekh, despotism con­stitutes a regime of naked power, about the socioeconomic base of which we know nothing whatever," while "G. V. Plekhanov . . . who equated tsarism with Oriental despotism . . . relying partly on Marx and Engels, supported his viewpoint by arguing for the peculiarities of the agrarian structure of Russia."" Consequently, she concludes that:

Unlimited monarchy in Russia developed in the guise of Asiatic forms of administration—despotism—and centralized unlimited monarchy, formed in the struggle with the Mongol empire and its successors on the basis of the subsistence economy and the communal organization of the countryside, and later strengthened in the process of creation of the system of land tenure, the enserfment of the peasantry, and the transi­tion to external expansion. This is the starting point of the evolution.²'¹

Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia thus agrees both with Plekhanov and with Avrekh: with the former, that despotism was based "on the pecu­liarities of the agrarian structure of Russia," and not on a "regime of naked power"—that is, on the "base" and not on the "superstruc­ture"; and with the latter, that this despotism evolved, being trans­formed in the eighteenth century into absolutism, and later in the di­rection of a bourgeois monarchy.

Such a mechanical joining of Plekhanov with Avrekh appears, on the one hand, to make Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's position more orthodox, but on the other only intensifies the theoretical difficulties which face Avrekh's thesis. After all, if the despotic superstructure rested on the peculiarities of the agrarian base, then how and by virtue of what fac­tors did it suddenly begin to evolve, while the base remained un­changed? I am not speaking of the fact, which Avrekh also accepts, that despotism is incapable of evolving toward bourgeois monarchy by virtue of the peculiarities of its superstructure, which blocks the evo­lution of the base. Even Marx equated despotism with stagnation.[50]In other words, the very fact of the evolution of tsarist autocracy con­tradicts the idea that it was a despotism.

But on the other hand, was it absolutism? Did it actually evolve in the direction of a bourgeois monarchy? This question was answered by history. Sometimes it did. But it could not, for some reason, become bourgeois monarchy. On the contrary, it became Russian and then So­viet autocracy. In other words, in evolving, it bore within itself—in spite of all reforms and revolutions—some kind of essential nucleus, which resisted transformation into a bourgeois monarchy.