The Origins of Autocracy

In order to survey in detail everything which has been written about [Ivan] the Terrible by historians and poets, one would need an entire book. From the History of Russia of Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1789) to R. Iu. Vipper's work Ivan the Terrible (1922), the understanding of Ivan the Terrible and his time has passed through a number of phases, and has attained significant success. It can be said that this success is one of the most brilliant stages in the history of our science—one of the most decisive victories of scientific method.[133]

However, after Platonov died in exile, and the "appearance and dissemination of Marxism"—in the words of A. A. Zimin—"created a revolution in historical science,"⁵ and "guided by the brilliant works of the founders of scientific socialism, Soviet historians received the broadest opportunities to make a new approach to the solution of basic questions of the history of Russia,"⁶ everything became decid­edly cloudy and got into a condition of even greater "immaturity" than was the case before Solov'ev. Whereas the latter had looked on Karamzin as a naive representative of "unnatural views" and a slave of idealistic "prejudices," the first leader of Soviet historiography thought even worse of Solov'ev than Solov'ev did of Karamzin: "So- lov'ev's views were those of an idealist-historian,

⁷ who looks on the historical process from above, on the side of the ruling classes, and not from below, the side of the oppressed."⁸

Whereas Solov'ev, looking at the historical process from above, dis­covered that Ivan the Terrible "was indisputably the most gifted sov­ereign whom Russian history offers us before Peter the Great, and the most brilliant personality of all the Riurikids,"⁹ for Pokrovskii, ex­amining it from below, Ivan the Terrible represented a type of "hys­terical and tyrannical person, who understood only his ego and did not wish to know anything except this precious ego—no political principles or societal obligations."¹⁰

But what happened later could not have been foreseen either by Solov'ev or by Pokrovskii: these mutually exclusive views were sud­denly amalgamated, forming a monstrous explosive mixture, which haughtily continued to call itself "genuine science."

To begin with, the Soviet historian I. I. Polosin, from the pre­scribed perspective of "the oppressed classes," discovered that the so­cial meaning of the Oprichnina consisted "in the enserfment of the peasants, in the enclosure of the communal lands characteristic of serfdom, and in the liquidation of St. George's Day."" But, not being able to resist the temptation of looking at matters "from the side of

A. A. Zimin, Reform)i . . . , p. 31.

A. A. Zimin, Oprichnina . . . , p. 33.

The word "idealist" carries in Marxist discourse the special pejorative sense of a viewpoint or theory based on the assumption of the primacy of ideas or nonmaterial elements, rather than material factors, in the historical process and the formation of reality generally.

M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia, bk. 3, p. 239.

S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 3, p.

707.

Pokrovskii, bk. 1, p. 256.

I. I. Polosin, Sotsial'no-politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVI-nachala XVII v., p. 20.