The Origins of Autocracy

They go on and on, endlessly, like Russia herself—miles upon pa­per miles of this census of human suffering. Once again, a farm is laid waste; once again, goods are stolen; once again, the man has disap­peared. And these are not at all "mutinous nobles," or Huguenots, or "separatists," but simple, peaceful peasants, who have made no at­tempt against the sovereign's power, and whose entire fault lay in the fact that they had goods which could be plundered, wives and daugh­ters who could be raped, land which could be taken away. In England at that time, peasants were also driven from the land, and the vio­lence practiced against them become proverbial ("The sheep ate the people"). But whereas in England the violence was committed by in­dividual landlords, in Russia it was practiced on a massive, total state­wide scale by the government itself and its terrorist police, before which the nation was entirely defenseless. Whereas in England this violence was the work of a strong, rising class of new landowners, which at its next step would stretch out its hands for power and carry

48. I. I. Smirnov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 99.

out a political revolution, in Russia it was directed toward the liquida­tion of the proto-bourgeoisie, and thus toward the establishment of brutal autocracy. Whereas in England this violence was the instru­ment by which feudalism was destroyed, opening up the path of prog­ress, in Russia it shut it off like a blank wall. England paid this terrible price for its historical development, and Russia for its enserfment.

Theoretically, Sakharov proposed criteria for the description of absolutism which come down essentially to the practice of violence by the government against the people (or, in my terms, to divergence be­tween the goals of the administration and those of the system). Ac­cording to Sakharov, the regimes of Elizabeth in England, Ivan the Terrible in Moscow, Shah Abbas in Persia, and Sultan Mekhmet in Turkey, all equally "do not go very far in the direction of democracy," for all of them committed violence against the people. But does this help us to separate out the category of "absolutism" from the general mass of "unlimited monarchies"? Does it help to explain why Montes­quieu regards the sliding of "moderate government" toward despo­tism as a historical catastrophe? Does Sakharov's criterion help to explain the "vyskazyvaniia" of his own classical writers? Why, for ex­ample, does Engels assert that the Russian autocracy is supported by an Asiatic despotism of which we in the West cannot even have any con­ception? Why did Lenin call Russian autocracy "Asiatically savage" {Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 10), "Asiatically virgin" (ibid., vol. 9, p. 381), "saturated with Asiatic barbarism" (ibid., vol. 20, p. 387)?

Thus, the more deeply we penetrate the laboratory of "genuine science," the more convinced we become that, behind the facade of haughty pretensions to absolute truth, there lies hidden a heap of paradoxes, confusion, and helplessness, a chaos of definitions. In it, absolutism grows out of despotism, as Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia would have it, and despotism out of absolutism, as Troitskii says. We dis­cover from Likhachev that the "progressive class" brings serfdom with it, while the "most monstrous form of despotism" turns out to be progressive according to Cherepnin. And so on and so forth—and there is no end to it.

Not only is "genuine science" incapable of adequately describing the nature of the Russian political process; it simply has nothing with which to do so—neither theoretical prerequisites, nor working hy­potheses, nor even accurate definitions. Any attempt to create so much as a preliminary conceptual base for the study of political struc­tures is suffocated, as we have just seen, at the embryonic stage.

The enserfed peasants of Russia waited three hundred years for the Great Reform of 1861 to liberate them. They rebelled against serfdom, and these rebellions did bring them freedom—at least for a while. The enserfed historians of Russia rebel, too, against their mis­erable medieval "science." Let us hope that these scholars will not have to wait another two hundred years for their 1861.

CHAPTER III

THE "DESPOTISTS": CAPTIVES OF THE BIPOLAR MODEL

1. The Three Faces of "Russian Despotism"