The Origins of Autocracy

None of these mysterious eccentricities of the Russian historical process escaped Shapiro's penetrating gaze. But somehow they do not compose an autonomous conception of autocracy. On the con­trary, as we see, he uses "autocratic-absolutist" with a hyphen, as syn­onyms—as though something held him on a leash, not permitting him to go beyond precise but transitory observations. What is it that does this? The "vyskazyvaniia"? But Shapiro, although he pays them abundant tribute, does so very much in the way that the Muscovite princes paid tribute to the Tatars, thereby securing their own auton­omy. The foundation of his conclusions is not so much the "vyskazy­vaniia" as the studies of modern historians—A. Zimin, R. Skrynnikov, N. Nosov, L. Cherepnin, S. Shmidt. What, then, compels Shapiro to consider Russian autocracy only a variant of Western absolutism?

It seems to me that here we see plainly how beneath the stratum of the sacred writings, which hinder the development of thought in So­viet historiography, there appears another and more profound hin­drance: namely, the logic of the bipolar model. If Avrekh is wrong, and there was no Russian despotism, then consequently there was Russian absolutism: for what else could there be?

Shapiro sees that the category of despotism does not describe Rus­sian political reality. He also sees that the category of absolutism in

29. Ibid., p. 72, 73. 30. Ibid., p. 74. 31. Ibid., p. 82.

some strange way stumbles over it, since "the chief and defining fea­ture is its [absolutism's] attitude toward serfdom." The economies of the classical absolutist monarchies were incompatible with serf­dom. The Russian economy was compatible with it. Nevertheless, the thought that it could be some third thing—that is, neither despotism nor absolutism—does not even enter his head.

Nonetheless, the ice was broken. Though this was still a timid, almost subterranean movement of thought, synchronous with the Prague Spring, it showed that deep under the ice of haughty and fruitless "genuine science," reformist potential had been preserved. It might perish again. But it might develop too.

4. The Punitive Expedition

But this was not to be its destiny. The signal for the beginning of the witch-hunt had already been given. The military enforcers were pre­paring a punitive expedition to Prague. And the literary enforcers— knights of the "class struggle" and mercenaries of the "vyskazy­vaniia"—had already saddled their horses.

At the very beginning of 1969, A. Davidovich and S. Pokrovskii let loose a devastating salvo against Avrekh, accusing him of "an attempt to counterpose the historical process in the West . . . and in Russia."[52]In point of fact, they asserted, there is no "fundamental difference between Russian absolutism and the classical type."[53] For every sort of absolutism is the product of the struggle of exploited classes against exploiters. "The rebellions in the cities in the mid-seventeenth cen­tury and the peasant war of 1670-71 showed the ruling class of feu­dal lords the need to sacrifice some of their medieval privileges in favor of the unlimited power of the tsar for a successful struggle with a mutinous people."³⁴

In the fury of the hunt, the rout of Avrekh seemed inevitable; whole pages of "vyskazyvaniia" whistled around his head. But the hunters somehow failed to notice that they had fallen into their own trap. In fact, they say, "Lenin defined Russian absolutism as 'the land­lord state' [Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 309], 'the serf-owning autocracy' [ibid., p. 310], 'the dictatorship of the serf-owning landlords' [ibid., p. 325], 'the land-owner government of the autocratic tsar' [ibid., vol. 20, p. 329]." "So what?" the unsophisticated reader may ask. So, "in the light of all these statements by the classical authors of Marxism- Leninism, it is abundantly clear that the conclusions of A. Avrekh concerning absolutism . . . are an obvious distortion of historical re­ality." (As we see, it is not historical reality which verifies the "vyska­zyvaniia," but the "vyskazyvaniia" which verify historical reality.) It follows indisputably, the hunters think, that "absolutism [the autoc­racy] ... is the personification of the dictatorship of the serf-owning service nobility."³⁵ Here the trap shuts. For what do we do then with classical French or British absolutism, where there is no trace of a "serf-owning service nobility"? How did a nonexistent class carry out its dictatorship there? And if it did not carry it out, then what be­comes of absolutism?