The Origins of Autocracy

The nature and origin of the Russian political structure is obviously not the most urgent question in the Western literature on the philoso­phy of history. At least, it was difficult for me to find as representative a debate among the "despotists" as the one among the "absolutists" which I have just analyzed. For this reason, I prefer to take another route in this chapter. I have chosen three well-known names, which from my point of view symbolize three main tendencies in the inter­pretation of "Russian despotism"—the "Tatar," the "Byzantine," and the "Patrimonial." They are, respectively, Karl Wittfogel, Arnold Toynbee, and Richard Pipes (I consider Tibor Szamuely's book The Russian Tradition here only as a supplementary argument to Witt- fogel's "Tatar" interpretation).

I am proceeding from the assumption that these authors represent more or less fully the spectrum of arguments in the Western litera­ture dealing with the nature and origin of the Russian political struc­ture. I respect their hypotheses, although I cannot agree with them. As distinct from the "vyskazyvaniia'' which we considered in the last chapter, they are interesting to argue with, not to speak of the fact that this permits us to throw some additional light on the problem which concerns us. Nevertheless, I cannot help saying in advance that it was difficult for me to find in these fluently, and sometimes even brilliantly, expressed conceptions, very much of relevance to the ac­tual historical process in Russia. It may be that the reason for this (at least, this feeling never left me) is that the authors mentioned have reached their conclusions not so much as a result of studying its his­torical development as through an a priori resolve to prove that Rus­sia belongs to the despotic family of nations.

However this may be, in passing from the absolutists to the despo­tists, the unprejudiced reader will be easily persuaded that only the direction of the emotional thrust—only its sign (plus for minus)—is changed. The despotists are obviously not too friendly to Russia, but the picture remains the same: black-and-white. The spectrum of con­cepts is limited to the bipolar model, to the fateful contrast between "multicentered" and "single-centered" civilizations (Wittfogel), or "Western" and "totalitarian" (Toynbee), or "monarchy" and "patri­monial state" (Pipes). In short, we are dealing with the same absolut­ism and despotism, under different pseudonyms. This fact, to say the least, seriously complicates the analysis of the Russian historical process for our authors—to the degree that it proves difficult to ex­plain many aspects of this process, not to speak of its origin and na­ture, with the aid of their hypotheses. This is precisely what I will now try to show.

2. The "Tatar" Interpretation

It is obviously impossible to understand and evaluate Wittfogel's con­ception adequately without taking into account its basic quality: it is a model of militant scholarship. It is infinitely far from the coquettish "objectivity," the skeptical feeling that one's recommendations are not necessarily valid, the hint of play, and the sense of humor, which are characteristic of the style of many contemporary scholars in our hu­manistic field, which is suffering from an inferiority complex in this age of the triumph of natural science. In Wittfogel's work there is something deadly serious, rigorous, almost medieval—something between Puritan severity and the pathos of a crusader. This work breathes polemics and boils with passion. Like its author's native country, Germany, it fights on two fronts—the Eastern and the West­ern—and develops in four directions at once: on the level of abstract theory; on the historical level (or that of applied theory); on the meth­odological level; and on the political level. All this is terribly awkward to analyze, because it is tied up in such a tight knot that it is impossible either to reject or to accept it totally. It is this homogeneity or syn­thesis—I do not know how best to express it—which constitutes the second basic feature of Wittfogel's conception. Therefore, before ar­guing about it, it would perhaps be best to break it up into its compo­nent parts, and then to evaluate each one separately.

Certainly, it would be easiest to say that the conception of "Oriental despotism" was only the historical dimension of the political concept of totalitarianism which was fashionable during the years of the Cold War—that, to paraphrase Mikhail Pokrovskii, it was totalitarianism projected into the past. It is still easier to say, as S. N. Eisenstadt does, that "if one wants to write about communism and Stalin, the best way to do it is not necessarily through writing about Oriental despotism. Neither Oriental despotism nor modern communism get their due in this way."[57]