The Origins of Autocracy

The crueller the blows which fate inflicted upon Ivan the Terrible's self-esteem, the paler his phantasmal star became, the more arrogant he grew. On his very deathbed he asserted that "by the mercy of God no state was higher than ours."⁴¹ He was like one of the Fates—blind, unstoppable, and inhuman. In his own city of Novgorod, he behaved like a foreign conqueror; he treated foreign sovereigns like his own boyars: all are slaves, and nothing but slaves.

This was not simply the ridiculous bragging of a paranoid head of state; it was the logical behavior of an autocrator. Liberated from all limitations on power within the country, intoxicated by his own wild freedom, he came logically and inevitably to the thought of liberation from all limitations on earth. Such was, it seems, the pure politi­cal core of the tsar's mental illness, the method, one may say, of his madness.

Ivan the Terrible was the first of the Muscovite princes (unless we count the Tsarevich Dimitrii, who never ruled) to be crowned as tsar—that is, caesar. But it did not suffice merely to call himself this. In the official hierarchy of European sovereigns, he remained the prince of Muscovy—not even a king, let alone caesar. Such leaps on one's own initiative were not permitted. They had to be bought by first-class, generally recognized victories. Ivan learned from his tutors and intimates that he was "the great tsar of the greatest empire on earth" (and if he can hear after death, he has undoubtedly rejoiced to

41. Ibid., p. 156.

hear the same thing from both classical Russian and Soviet historians, the tutors and intimates of other autocrators). But he did not hear this from his peers, the "other great sovereigns." And he developed a kind of royal inferiority complex.

Peter ended the Northern War as an emperor. Ivan the Terrible was named tsar before the Livonian War, and even before the war with Kazan'. He wanted his own Northern War. The anti-Tatar strategy, perhaps requiring generations of painstaking effort, did not suffice. He needed the immediate and sensational rout of a European state, Livonia, in order to be considered a "preeminent sovereign." The ar­guments of the Government of Compromise for a sound national strategy, and a blow at the Crimea as the logical completion of the Ka­zan' campaign, finally routing the Tatars and freeing their Christian slaves, must have seemed to him naive and boring. His personal goals seemed to him infinitely more important. Rather, as to every patri­monial feudal lord, it must have seemed to him that the state simply could have no other goals than his own; by subordinating the country to these goals, he threw it "into the abyss of extermination."

Having conquered the kingdoms of the Volga in the middle of the century, supplied with Caspian silk and furs from the Urals (which were no less valuable than the treasures of India), swiftly urbanizing and expanding its wealth, trying to liberate itself by the Great Reform from the Tatar heritage, the young Muscovite state emerged onto the broad expanse of world politics, from the very beginning claiming a primary role in it. A quarter of a century later, sunk in an endless and fruitless war, unable even to protect its own capital from the assault of the Crimeans, Russia had been thrown back into the ranks of third- class powers, into the darkness of "nonexistence."

The dream of "preeminent rule"—to implement which it was found necessary to lop off all the heads in Moscow capable of thought—led, in complete accordance with the historical logic of autocracy, to the opposite result. It was obvious, even to a foreign observer, only four years after the death of Ivan the Terrible (the tsar died in 1584) that something terrible lay in store for this country. "And this wicked pol­icy and tyrannous practice, though now it be ceased, hath so troubled that country and filled it so full of grudge and mortal hatred ever since that it will not be quenched, as it seemeth now, till it burn again into a civil flame," prophesied Giles Fletcher.[132] Thus ended the unfor­tunate, forgotten, and by now almost unbelievable, absolutist century in Russia.

CHAPTER VII

THE DAWN

1. Methodological Problems