The Origins of Autocracy

17. "In the sixteenth century, until the 1580s, forced labor—that is, either as serfs or as slaves—could not play any appreciable role. Serf peasants (former slaves now set­tled on the land) until the 1580s were very few, and slave labor in industry, beginning with the first half of the fourteenth century, was rapidly crowded out and replaced with free hired labor. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we see a reverse picture, in which the labor of free hired persons was replaced by compulsory labor—that is, by serf people, who came more and more to resemble slaves. The proportion of free hir­ing both in industry and in agriculture in the sixteenth century was certainly far, far higher than in the eighteenth century" (Makovskii, p. 192). After this we can hardly be surprised at the author's conclusion that "capitalist relationships came into being in the middle of the sixteenth century in the Russian state both in industry and in agriculture, and the necessary economic conditions for their development were prepared. . . . But in the period from the 1570s, active intervention by the state in economic relationships occurred. . . . This intervention not only hindered the development of capitalist rela­tionships and undermined the condition of productive forces in the country, but also called forth regressive phenomena in the economy" (ibid., p. 212). Thus, the prerequi­sites for the capitalist relationships usual in Europe originated in Russia in the sixteenth century, according to an authoritative Soviet historian. Originated and . . . disap­peared. Furthermore, they disappeared so thoroughly that according to another even more authoritative historian, Academician N. M. Druzhinin, these prerequisites could not be discovered even in the epoch of Peter—that is, a century and a half later. "The state representing nobility," Druzhinin wrote, "was at the zenith of its power and might: the transformations wrought by Peter . . . strengthened the feudal monarchy, and were neither objective nor subjective signs of the decay of the feudal-serf social order. . . . Therefore one cannot agree with В. V Iakovlev and other historians that the ori­gins of the capitalist economic system date from the first half of the eighteenth century [em­phasis added]" (N. M. Druzhinin, "O periodizatsii istorii capitalisticheskikh otnoshenii v Rossii," p. 71).

2. The Alternatives