The Origins of Autocracy

Finally, the fourth peculiarity consists in the fact that, as distinct from despotism, the Muscovite state lacked absolute sovereignty over the persons and property of its subjects. Having tried to assert such sovereignty in the seventeenth century, it mysteriously lost it again in the eighteenth. Half of the arable land again became inalienable pri­vate property, as it had been after the overthrow of the Tatar yoke.

These are the peculiarities of the Russian historical process (or the hindrances to the classification of Russia as a despotist state) which are registered by Wittfogel himself. As to the first, Wittfogel has nothing concrete to say, confining himself to remarking that "The Mongol's remote control over Russia poses many problems that re­quire further investigation."[59] Let's give him this one. Regarding the second, he has an explanation (true, again a metaphorical, not to say eccentric, one). Let us cite it in full:

In Russia the slowness of the transformation [into despotism] was due to . . . the Mongol policy of remote control. . . . Whether the centrifu­gal political order of Kievan Russia—which at best possessed some quasi-feudal aspects—accelerated or retarded the process is a moot question. There is no doubt, however, that the Mongol conquerors of Russia weakened the forces that until 1237 had limited the power of the princes, that they employed Oriental methods of government to keep Russia prostrated and exploited, and that they did not intend to create a strong—and politically challenging—agrodespotic state. Hence the germs of the system of total power they planted could bear fruit only after the end of the Mongol period. . . . [I]t may be said that an institu­tional time bomb exploded when the Mongol control collapsed.¹

What the metaphor of the "institutional time bomb" (no less para­doxical than Vernadsky's formula) is supposed to mean, the reader is left to guess. Reviewers queried this, but as far as I know, Wittfogel never explained it. It is all the more unclear why the "explosion" of this bomb took place so slowly. (Whether there are slow explosions at all is a question which, it seems, should be asked of sappers.) One thing is clear: this whole explosion of metaphors would perhaps sound good in a poem, but even in a fantastic novel it would seem dubious. As a description of an actual historical process, it sounds fantastic, the more so since in historical reality there is no basis for it whatever. For example, the Tatars not only took no action against the seigneurial property of the Russian aristocracy as an institution limit­ing the power of the princes, or against the policy of grants of immu­nity, i.e., the removal of seigneurial holdings from the competence of the organs of state power, but precisely the contrary—at least judg­ing by their policy in regard to the Orthodox church, which greatly strengthened it.[60] What then, we wonder, is the meaning of Wittfogel's declaration that "the Mongol conquerors weakened the forces that until 1237 had limited the power of the princes"?

But this is not the main point. The chief question is why, having arisen out of Tatar obscurity with an untouched aristocratic tradition (and more than this, having evolved, as we saw in chapter one, in the direction of re-Europeanization in many aspects of institutional de­velopment), Muscovy suddenly after a century turned sharply toward a recrudescence of Tatardom, and began to lay waste its own aristoc­racy? "[Wittfogel's] explanation in fact only creates a problem," says one of his closest cothinkers, Tibor Szamuely, on this point.