The Origins of Autocracy

As we see, Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia's attempt to insert a solid Marxist "base" under Avrekh's "superstructural" conception in fact only re­vealed its contradictions. Furthermore, she incautiously woke up the sleeping lion by putting into circulation the battery of Asiatic-despotic "vyskazyvaniia" which, as we already know, are not talked about in genuine science, as one does not talk about rope in a hanged man's house.

However, the bold attempt to think independently proved to be in­fectious. Avrekh's next opponent, A. Shapiro, cast doubt on the very premise that Russian despotism existed. In fact, he says, "The Boyar Duma (of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) performed ad­ministrative and judicial functions with the prince, not only helping him, but also limiting his power (in fact, not juridically)."[51] More than this, the scope of these "de facto limitations" was not decreased but increased in the first half of the sixteenth century:

The major peculiarity of the political structure of Russia ... in the late 1540s and early 1550s . . . consisted in the establishment of a central institution, and the general dissemination of local institutions repre­senting the estates. . . . And it was precisely at this time that the Assem­blies of the Land originated in Rus' . . . the form of political structure for this period is more correctly characterized as a division of power between the tsar and the Boyar Duma ... in Russia there was a non- autocratic monarchy, with a Boyar Duma and institutions representing estates.

Further, Shapiro points to the role of the Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible in the liquidation of this "nonautocratic monarchy." He speaks of the functions of terror in this revolution, and of how,

out of the members of the Duma who received Duma titles before . . . 1563, at the end of the Oprichnina only individual persons sur­vived. Both they and new members of the Duma were terrorized to such an extent that they did not dare to criticize the manifestations of the personal rule of Ivan the Terrible . . . neither the Boyar Duma nor the Assemblies of the Land any longer exercised an influence on the Oprichnina policy, which must be considered an autocratic policy.

Shapiro even speculates that "the Oprichnina was rather a state above the state than a state within a state."²⁹ He understands that subsequent to the phase of pseudodespotism (which he calls "spasmodic autoc­racy") "there took place a certain weakening of the autocracy"³⁰—that is, in my language, a phase of pseudoabsolutism. He also sees the res­toration of the Oprichnina in the time of Peter I: "The reign of Peter was marked by the complete liquidation of the Boyar Duma and the Assemblies of the Land and the complete victory of the autocratic- absolutist system." In other words, in his conception, the dynamic of the Russian political structure is no longer a flat, unilinear process of evolution "from barbarism to civilization," in the terms of Solov'ev, or "from despotism to bourgeois monarchy," in Avrekh's terms. It pul­sates. It hardens, then relaxes, then again hardens. It lives its own complex and peculiar life, separate from European absolutism. Fi­nally, Shapiro sees at least one of the roots of the difference of Rus­sian autocracy from European absolutism: "Nowhere in Europe were absolutism and bureaucracy able to stamp out the estate institutions completely ... in Russia both the Assemblies of the Land and the re­gional elected institutions were destroyed by absolutism."³¹