The Origins of Autocracy

We have already seen, and will see further, that the Russian aristoc­racy grew hand in hand with the Russian state, that the peasant com­mune was much older than the state, and that the Orthodox church was stronger than the state (at least in the time of Ivan III, i.e., cen­turies before Peter I and Alexander II). Thus, the artificial creation of Russian civil society by the state seems more than questionable. Speaking in the crude terms of the stereotype, it would seem that the state rather destroyed civil society in the course of Ivan the Terrible's "revolution from above." Moreover, it demolished this society again and again in the course of almost each new autocratic revolution.

But to say only this is still to say very little. The real question is how the state achieved these spectacular results. And here, instead of dolefully masticating obsolete wisdom, we are compelled to note the fateful role of the Russian right of the sixteenth century, the Jose­phites. They were the ones who succeeded in halting reform. They provided the messianic theory of the Third Rome. They supplied all the ideological ammunition for the autocratic dream of Ivan the Ter­rible, thus initiating the process leading to his "revolution from above." This is, moreover, what their spiritual descendants have been doing ever since. For centuries the Russian right has been virtually collaborating in the destruction of civil society. This has been the ulti­mate result of its ideas, its intolerance and hatred, its insistence on the extermination of its opponents. The Josephites deserved their pun­ishment. What was unfair was that along with them the entire nation had to go to its Golgotha.

But if this is where the Pyrrhic victories of the Russian right have invariably brought the nation, should it not be one of the basic lessons which the Russian establishment—again and again faced with the same choice between West and East, between reform and stagna­tion—needs to learn from the historians? Is it not here that their part in the historical drama begins—especially inasmuch as the spiritual descendants and intellectual heirs of the Josephites are once again trying to push the nation in the same direction?⁴⁴

44. See, in this respect, Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right.

CHAPTER VI

THE END OF RUSSIAN ABSOLUTISM

1. The Heritage of the Absolutist Century

The age of Russian absolutism was short, its end tragic. But did it in fact disappear without a trace? Was it simply an accidental episode in Russian history—a liberal intermezzo in the autocratic symphony, a vague dream, dissipated forever?

Let us assume that the Great Reform of the 1550s—the legislative introduction of local self-government on a national scale, accom­panied by trial by jury and income tax—was not rescinded "in the stormy years of Ivan the Terrible's long wars ... by the voevodal form of vicegerency."[111] Let us assume that the Assembly of the Land called in 1549 was able to transform itself into a representative body, and the Boyar Duma into the House of Lords (or Senate) of this Russian parliament. Let us assume that Article 98 of the law code of 1550, stating that all new enactments (that is to say, those not provided for in the law code itself) were to be adopted only "on the report of the sovereign and by the verdict of all the boyars," actually played its in­tended role as a constitutional limitation on power.[112] Let us assume that the church lands were secularized at the assembly in 1551. Let us assume that the replacement of the amateur cavalry made up of land­owners by a regular army (the creation of which began in 1550) was not dragged out for a whole century more, and that the military mo­nopoly of service landholders was therefore undermined as early as the sixteenth century. Let us assume, arising out of this, that the total expropriation of peasant lands was avoided. Let us assume that ser­vice did not become universal in the Russian state. (It may perhaps be that the quarter-century Livonian War, which was doomed to end in defeat, and led to a national catastrophe, would not have taken place given such a turn of events.)