The Origins of Autocracy

In the middle of the thirteenth century, an apparently irresistible wave of cavalry from the Mongolian steppes inundated Russia on its way westward. On the Hungarian plain, which is the end of the gi­gantic wedge of steppe running from Siberia into Europe, this wave halted and turned back. But the entire eastern part of what had once been known as Kievan Rus' remained for centuries to come a remote European province of what was, in effect, the gigantic colonial em­pire of the Golden Horde. During all this time, the Russian land did not live, merely survived, while its surplus product was almost en­tirely confiscated—or so it was intended—by the Tatars, its cities stood deserted, its economic development was artificially stopped, and a collaborationist administration held sway. "There can be scarcely any doubt. . . that domination by a foreign power . . . had a very de­bilitating effect on the political climate of Russia," Richard Pipes observes.¹⁸

Ten generations were required before Muscovy—in the course of what may, on the analogy of the expulsion of the Moors from Iberia, be termed the Russian Reconquista—coalesced into a state again, and, in the middle of the fifteenth century, attained its independence by force. In 1480 the last khan of the Golden Horde, Akhmat, en­countered a Russian army on the Ugra River, at the distant ap­proaches to the capital, and, unwilling to risk open battle, retreated. The retreat turned into a rout. Akhmat lost his head on the Nogai steppe to Tatar swords. The Golden Horde ceased to exist, and on the crest of a movement of national liberation, Russia came into being. The Ugra, site of the battle which did not take place, became a symbol of its independence.

Three generations after this beginning, Muscovy was no longer on the defensive, but constantly on the attack. Moreover, in retrospect one can perhaps discern something reminiscent of a national pur­pose, toward which the country seemed stubbornly to be working. Formulated most loosely, this was the resurrection of Kievan Rus' after two centuries as a Tatar colony. Externally, it consisted in com­pleting the Reconquista—that is, in recovering all the territory which had once belonged to Kiev. Internally, it consisted in correcting the economic and sociopolitical deformities brought about by genera­tions of feudal disintegration and colonial existence.

Few historians doubt that Kievan Rus' belonged to the European family of nations. In this sense, we can say that if the national pur-

18. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, p. 57.

pose of Muscovy consisted in the resurrection of the Kievan state, this meant not only the reconstitution of its territorial integrity, but also its re-Europeanization.

Under fifteenth-century conditions, the socioeconomic aspect of the process of re-Europeanization was relatively simple: economic ex­pansion (more or less equivalent to that of the neighboring countries to the West) and the concomitant social evolution (differentiation of the peasantry, migration into the cities, and urbanization) logically re­sulting, as everywhere in Europe, in the formation of a strong middle class. As we have seen, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovy was capable of this: its cities were growing rapidly and the differentiation of its peasantry into economic strata was underway. This peasant dif­ferentiation, leading to the development of a proto-bourgeoisie, which will be discussed in detail in chapter six, was a highly important sign of the capacity of the Russia of that time to generate the process of re-Europeanization.

Another aspect of the problem was, however, the need to stabilize the processes leading to the formation of a middle class—in other words, the need to create a political mechanism (which I call the abso­lutist state) capable, as elsewhere in Europe, of protecting these de­velopments from the destructive influences of the hostile feudal en­vironment. This required: (1) a change in the legislator's perception of the relative value of the soldier and the peasant or merchant—the "middle person"; (2) active legislative protection of private (nonfeu- dal) property; (3) more or less free discussion of the social and eco­nomic strategy of the country; and (4), most important of all, minimal interference by the state in the natural socioeconomic process.