The Origins of Autocracy

Between the "Oriental despotism" of Ivan IV and the equally "Oriental despotism" of Elizabeth I of England, the difference is not all that great. . . . Between these two forms of "autocracy" with all their "East­ern" accompaniments, in the form of secret police, brutal suppression of the mutinous nobility in England and Scotland, the colonial plunder­ing of Ireland, the bloody legislation of Henry VII and Edward VI, by which tens of thousands of people were hanged and enslaved, with the approximately identical functions of the estate-representative system, there was no fundamental difference. The centralization of the state in France, particularly under Louis XI, was also marked by features of "Or­iental despotism." The merciless executions carried out by Louis XI, the severe persecution of separatists, the destruction of the estate- representative institutions under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Frangois I, the establishment of an extremely brutal punitive impressment, the plundering of the peasantry, the beginning of a broad expansion in terms of foreign policy—all this fits very well into the framework which our authors have outlined for the "Asiatic form of administration" in its autocratic phase. The centralizing French monarchs, Elizabeth I of En­gland, and Ivan IV solved approximately the same historical tasks in the interests of the feudal class, and the methods of solution of these tasks were approximately identical. The Western European feudal monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had not gone very far in the direction of democracy, relative to the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. . . . The chambers of the Bastille and the Tower of London were just as strong as the cells of the Schliisselburg and the Alekseevskii fortress, the beheadings on the Place de Greve were no less merciful [лгс] than those on the battlements of the Petropavlovskii fortress or on the Execution Square in Moscow. . . . The absolutist monarchs of Eu­rope, who were ahead of Russian absolutism in point of time, taught the Russian autocrats impressive lessons as to how to struggle with one's own people. These lessons had everything—police terror, barbaric methods of extracting goods from the people, cruelty, medieval repres­sions: in a word, all that "Asiatic style," which for some reason is stub­bornly attached only to Russian absolutism."