The Origins of Autocracy

All of the arguments of the Soviet "absolutists" are concentrated in this quotation, as in a lens. But doesn't the reader get the impression that, as Shakespeare has it, "the lady doth protest too much"? Cer­tainly, if all the evil, all the cruelty and injustice visited on humanity by authoritarian regimes is to be attributed to absolutism, as Sakharov does, then Russian "absolutists" are no worse than others; in this

47. A. N. Sakharov, pp. 114, 115, 119. This argument on the part of the most ag­gressive Russian Marxist is followed without deviation by the most aggressive Russian anti-Marxist. Cf.: "There are two names which are repeated from book to book and article to article with a mindless persistence by all the scholars and essayists of this [anti- Russian] tendency: Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, to whom—implicitly or ex­plicitly—they reduce the whole sense of Russian history. But one could just as easily find two or three kings no whit less cruel in the histories of England, France or Spain, or indeed of any country, and yet no one thinks of reducing the complexity of historical meaning to such figures alone" (A. Solzhenitsyn, "Misconceptions about Russia Are Threat to America," p. 802). For both A. N. Sakharov and A. I. Solzhenitsyn, the argu­ment seems to begin and end with the personal cruelty of tyrants, never entering the field of political analysis.

abysmal authoritarian darkness, all cats are gray. Even there, how­ever, we were gray in a somewhat different way. For there is no avoid­ing it, the countries of classical absolutism did not, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, know the fundamental facts of serfdom and universal service, which Sakharov carefully avoids when he so heart- rendingly describes the horrors of Asiatic despotism in Europe; nor did they experience recurring restorations of the ancien regime, again and again bringing terror—sometimes total—directed neither against those who struggled with the king nor against aliens or here­tics, but against everyone who was merely fated to be born in that time and in that country. There is no more mournful reading than the description of the devastation wrought by the Oprichnina, in the official documents of Ivan the Terrible's time, which continue to re­volve mechanically like millstones, describing what no longer exists. "In the village of Kiuleksha," we read in one of these documents,

the farm of Ignatka Luk'ianov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, slaughtered his cattle, and he himself died; his children ran off to an unknown place . . . the farm of Eremeika Afanasov was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods, and killed him, and he has no children . . . the farm of Melen- teika was laid waste by the Oprichnina: the Oprichniki stole his goods and slaughtered his cattle, and he ran off to an unknown place.'"