The Origins of Autocracy

What, in fact, is fantastic in these assumptions? Even under the conditions of autocracy, all of this, without exception, was eventually carried out

(or revived) for a longer or shorter period of time, as a re­sult of reforms or revolutions. A regular army was created (at the be­ginning of the eighteenth century). Service ceased to be universal in the Russian state (in the second half of the eighteenth century). The church lands were secularized (at the same time). The institution of local self-government, with trial by jury and income tax, was reborn (in the second half of the nineteenth century). The Assemblies of the Land did become a form of national representative body (under the name of the State Duma) beginning in May 1906. The first attempt to realize Article 98 was undertaken as early as half a century after the publication of the code of laws, during the first Russian Time of Troubles, when Vasilii Shuiskii was elevated to the throne on May 17, 1606. As Kliuchevskii says:

The elevation of Prince Vasilii to the throne marked an epoch in our political history. On ascending the throne, he limited his power, and set forth the conditions of this limitation officially in a document which he sent out to the provinces, and for which he kissed the Cross on ascend­ing the throne.[113]

The next attempt was made four years later, on February 4, 1610, in the so-called constitution of Mikhail Saltykov. Kliuchevskii thinks that "this is a fundamental law for a constitutional monarchy, establishing both the structure of the supreme power and the basic rights of the subjects."[114] And even so venomous a critic of the Russian political heritage as B. N. Chicherin (whom all of the "despotists" put together might have envied) is compelled to admit that this document "con­tains significant limitations on the power of the tsar; if it had been put into effect, the Russian state would have taken on an entirely dif­ferent form."[115] One more attempt to realize Article 98 was under­taken by the supreme privy council in the so-called constitution of Di- mitrii Golitsyn (January 23, 1730). Finally, this article was once again "put into effect," 356 years after its adoption and 300 years after the first attempt to realize it, on May 6, 1906—only to be once more vio­lated by the tsar the very next year, and finally abolished on October 25, 1917. But even after the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik autocracy was compelled, although temporarily, to give back to the peasantry the land taken from it by the first Oprichnina revolution in the six­teenth century.

It is true that the autocracy distorted and mystified all of these de­velopments, and deprived them of the integrated

absolutist character in which they were conceived in the sixteenth century. It dragged out their implementation for hundreds of years, tried to use them in its own interests, and, when this proved impossible, destroyed them again. But does this change the simple fact that even the autocracy proved unable to ignore them, and was sooner or later compelled to return to them in one form or another? This apparently means that we are dealing not with something accidental or ephemeral which has disappeared once and for all from Russia's political heritage, but, on the contrary, with something fundamental and organic, which could not be destroyed even by total terror, and which, when driven out of the door, stubbornly returned through the window. In brief, we are dealing with an absolutist tradition, and with an absolutist alternative to autocracy.

The struggle for this alternative did not end when the founding father of the Russian absolutist tradition, Ivan III, ended his days on earth in 1505. On the contrary, its decisive battles were still ahead. At the beginning of the 1550s, when the so-called "Government of Com­promise"[116] took the helm, it may even have seemed that the scales were inclined in favor of the continuers of Ivan Ill's cause—in favor of the reformers, the Non-Acquirers, and what may, in general, be called the coalition of hope.

2. The Great Reform