The Origins of Autocracy

the ruling classes" (reflecting, in his own words, the "powerful influ­ence of contemporary reality"), Polosin all of a sudden discovered in that same Oprichnina "military-autocratic communism."'²

In other words, he equated communism with serfdom. Polosin obviously de­served punishment from both above and below for his infantile sin­cerity and reversion to Solov'ev's rehabilitation of the Terrible Tsar. But it was the wrong time for Polosin's colleagues to punish him. The rehabilitation picked up speed. It was transformed into a competi­tion. One respected historian hastened to overtake the next. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Solov'ev, for all his bowing and scraping before the political achievements of the Terrible Tsar, had nevertheless condemned his depravity, crying out: "Let not the histo­rian say a word in justification of such a person!"[134] In the middle of the twentieth century, this seemed to have been forgotten. Now the "idealist-historian" Solov'ev seemed to be looking at things "from the side of the oppressed," while the Marxist historians looked at them "from the side of the ruling classes." More than this, precisely this view was declared the only scientific one. R. Iu. Vipper asserted (in the second edition of his book) that only "Soviet historical science has restored the true figure of Ivan the Terrible as the creator of a cen­tralized state and the major political figure of his time.'"⁴

This "historiographic nightmare" of the 1940s was evaluated by a participant, Veselovskii, in a book written during that time but pub­lished only many years after his death, in the 1960s:

In recent times everyone who had occasion to write about Ivan the Ter­rible and his time began to say with a single voice that finally Ivan as a historical personality had been rehabilitated from the calumnies and distortions of the old historiography, and had risen before us in his full stature and correctly interpreted. S. Borodin, in his comment on the Trilogy [Trilogiia]

of V Kostylev, praised the author for having shown Ivan the Terrible as "a progressive statesman, who transformed the life of the country, firm in achieving his goals, farseeing and bold." S. Golu- bov in a critique of a new production of Aleksei Tolstoi's play at the Malyi Theater wrote that after many centuries of calumnies and slan­der by the enemies of Ivan the Terrible, "we see for the first time on the stage a true historical figure of a fighter for the 'bright kingdom,' a fiery patriot of his time, a mighty statesman." Academician N. Derzhavin ex­pressed himself to approximately the same effect. . . . "Only relatively recently have the events of the period of Ivan I V's reign received in our historical scholarship a correct and objective interpretation." Thus, the rehabilitation of the personality and political activity of Ivan IV is a novelty—the latest word in Soviet historical scholarship. But is this ac­curate? Can one believe that historians of the most varied tendencies, including Marxists, have been doing nothing for 200 years but con­fusing and distorting the history of their motherland?¹'