The Origins of Autocracy

The intensification of the features of despotism and of the "Asiatic style" in the internal and foreign policies of Russian absolutism took place at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, when, as a result of the victory of bourgeois revolutions, capitalism, the parliamentary system, and bourgeois freedoms had taken hold in a con­siderable number of Western European states. In Russia, on the other hand, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the serf order was pre­served, reaction was intensified in internal policy, and tsarism became the main force of the "Holy Alliance" and the suppressor of freedom. It is precisely of this period, in our opinion, that we may speak of the growth of features of "despotism" and "Asiatic style" in the policy of Russian absolutism. V. I. Lenin in 1905 wrote about "the Russian autoc­racy, which lags behind history by a whole century."^1:1

This is how Troitskii turns Avrekh's conception upside-down: it was not, in his opinion, despotism which grew into absolutism, but absolutism which grew into despotism. However, what is the category of "despotism" supposed to mean in this context? "The suppression of freedom"—when preliminary censorship was abolished, the peas­antry was liberated, urban self-government was introduced, and the rapid economic modernization of the country was begun? That is, despotism is supposed to have increased precisely at the time when the outlines of what Shapiro would call "de facto limitations" on power began to emerge most clearly for the first time after the Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible?

The "valuable indications" have thus actually helped Troitskii, in complete agreement with Lenin, to erase any difference whatever between "absolutism," "autocracy," and "unlimited power." Avrekh began his attack with the rejection of Lenin's "vyskazyvanie." The punitive expedition of the witch-hunters, attempting to save Russian absolutism at any price, has returned to the starting-point of the dis­cussion without even suspecting that all its efforts have been spent in confirming this offensive and unpatriotic "vyskazyvanie" of classical author No. 3.

When the chief "hunter," A. Sakharov, finally appeared on the scene with the job of, as it were, giving marks to the participants in the discussion, all that remained for him was to rubber stamp this re­sult. Avrekh gets a D + (the plus is for having, at any rate, noted the "combination of feudal and bourgeois elements in the nature and policies of absolutism").[56] Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia gets a D — (the minus is for having heretically, "following Avrekh, discovered the fertile ground in which a typical Oriental despotism grew, which had been born somewhere in the period of formation of the Russian central­ized state"). Shapiro gets a D for considering "serfdom the major and decisive feature for the evaluation of Russian absolutism."⁴' On the other hand, Troitskii, who "unlike the authors just mentioned, sees the basic socioeconomic tendency which brought Russia to absolutism in the birth of bourgeois relationships in the feudal base," gets an A. Davidovich and Pokrovskii, who see "a significant influence on the en­tire policy of the feudal state" in "the action of the class struggle of the working people,"^{4 get an A + .}