The Origins of Autocracy

Intellectual history has its stereotypes. When we begin an analysis of the evolution of ideas, we are primarily seeking forms of classification by which we can most comfortably locate the proponents and oppo­nents of various historical stratagems. For exarnple, it is convenient to divide them into "right-wingers" and "left-wingers," or into "con­servatives" and "liberals," or into "ideologists" and "scholars." The special and unprecedented difficulty of Ivaniana consists in the fact that in this case not one of these conventional classifications works. The Decembrist Ryleev, a "left-wing" dissident of the early nine­teenth century, and the historian Pogodin, a "right-wing" reactionary, fight on the same side of the barricades of Ivaniana; Ilovaiskii, a member of the "Union of the Russian People," or Black Hundreds, and Ravelin, a liberal of the first water, offer their hands to each other across the decades; Bestuzhev-Riumin and Belov, declared in all the Soviet texts on the subject to be representatives of "reactionary bour- geois-and-nobility historiography," merrily run in tandem with the au­thors of the very works in which they are denounced, Bakhrushin and Smirnov. How are we to explain these incongruities? Historians often tried to avoid this difficulty by simply declaring the writing of their predecessors, both of the left and of the right, to be unscientific. In some cases this has meant that the opinions of the predecessors were dictated more by emotions and prejudice than by analysis of primary sources. In others, so the pious Marxists think, the predecessors were infected with the ideology of obsolete classes, and therefore by defini­tion incapable of having any communion with "genuine science."

Nowadays it is impossible, for example, to read K. D. Ravelin's re­view of M. P. Pogodin's article "On the Character of Ivan the Terri­ble" without smiling. Ravelin haughtily, not to say abusively, eluci­dates the "unscientific nature" of the writings of his predecessor:

Anyone who is at all acquainted with the course of our historical litera­ture knows how much material has now been printed which was un­known and unavailable at that time [that is, in 1825, when Pogodin's article was written; Ravelin's review was published in 1846]. There were incomparably more prejudices. ... In addition, at that time Karam- zin's authority was still unlimited; he, for all his great and never-to-be- forgotten services to Russian historical scholarship, introduced into it completely unnatural views.'

From this it followed, naturally, that the more "material" was printed, and the fewer "prejudices" there were, and the faster "unnatural views" were replaced by "natural" ones, the closer we would be to the truth. An analogous point of view was held by Ravelin's contempo­rary and cothinker, S. M. Solov'ev, who explained the disagreements among historians in terms of the "immaturity of historical scholar­ship, and the common failure to pay attention to the correlation and sequence of phenomena. Ivan IV was not understood because he was separated from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather." A half century later N. K. Mikhailovskii sarcastically noted that: "So­lov'ev carried out this task, and connected the activity oflvan with the activity of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and pur­sued this connection even further into the depths of time, but the dis­agreements have not been terminated."²

After another half century, perhaps the most brilliant of the Soviet historians, S. B. Veselovskii, lamented: "The maturing of historical scholarship is proceeding so slowly that it may shake our faith in the strength of human reasoning altogether, and not only in the question of Tsar Ivan and his time."³

In the interim between these two pessimistic statements, all this did not, however, by any means prevent S. F. Platonov from present­ing Ivaniana in 1923 as a triumph of "the maturing of historical scholarship":