The Origins of Autocracy

With the formation of a centralized state in Russia and the emer­gence of the country into the arena of European politics, expendi­tures increased: the metropolitan establishment expanded, the for­mation of a regular army began, and artillery became an inseparable part of it. The country was experiencing swift economic growth, and could pay more taxes, but the government was practically deprived of the opportunity to take advantage of this. One half of the land was " tarkhanized," and consequently paid no taxes, while the other was "laid waste" by the vicegerents. Everyone was agreed that the admin­istration required a radical overhaul.

The Government of Compromise, which had just come to power, had two options. The first, on the same level as the conception of the Muscovite "service state," was to replace the amateur and temporary administration of the vicegerents with professional administration by permanent governors (or voevody, as they were called in seventeenth- century Russia), who would get their "maintenance" from the state treasury. Such a police-bureaucratic reform could have served as an

7. Cited in N. E. Nosov, Soslmmo-predstavitel'nye . . ., p. 377.

excellent fuse for exploding the "institutional time bomb" (if such a thing existed).

The second possibility was the diametrical opposite of the first. It consisted in not only continuing but logically developing the abso­lutist tradition of Ivan III, transforming elected jurors from simple "sworn officers" in the courts of the vicegerents into judges them­selves, and, furthermore, into the local "landed" (that is to say, elect­ed) officers of government, and entrusting to them the entire admin­istration in the uezdy, including the collection of taxes for the state. Had it gone along these lines, the administrative reform would, I think, have fully deserved the title of Great Reform. In any case (un­der the conditions of the sixteenth century, when the peasantry was still free), it would have deserved it no less than the reform of the 1860s, which the historians actually do call great. For the essence of the reform of the 1860s consisted, in addition to the emancipation of the peasants and the abolition of preliminary censorship, precisely in the introduction of local self-government and trial by jury. Like its famous analog in the nineteenth, the administrative reform of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly a step in the direction of the de­feudalization of the Russian state—a step toward its transformation into a bourgeois monarchy. For the chief social stratum which stood to gain from such reforms would have been the same "best people" of the Russian countryside and cities who chiefly suffered the vicege­rents' administration. The reform would have given them the oppor­tunity to rationalize the administration in the interests of capital accu­mulation and increase their social and political weight.

The "Government of Compromise" followed precisely this path. The Oprichnina government which replaced it returned to the sys­tem of unpaid vicegerents, who were gradually turned into voevody, first in the outlying regions of the state and then over its entire extent.

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And again we face a formidable question: what was reflected by this tortuous change in the administrative policies of the two govern­ments (formally headed by the same person, Ivan IV), which was no less significant than the changes in their emigration and peasant pol­icies? It seems to me that, apart from everything else, it reflected the

8. "The form of [local] government administered by the voevody

was born in the stormy years of the long wars of Ivan the Terrible. . . . For example, in 1578 the city of Nevel' was given to I. Karamyshev as maintenance. In the same year Karamyshev was named in one decree as vicegerent, and in another as vicegerent and as voevoda. In 1570 voevody governed in Vasil', in 1571 in Kurmysh, in 1577 in Korel'" (Zimin, Re­fer my, p. 435).

different constituencies on which the two governments rested. Just as the secularization campaign was the first attempt of the government to collaborate with the intelligentsia of the nation in Russian history, the Great Reform was an attempt to collaborate with its proto-bour­geoisie. And both were ruined by the "revolution from above."