The Origins of Autocracy

Karamzin ends volume 9 of his Istoriia gosidarstva Rossiishogo with these words: "Ivan's good reputation has outlived his bad reputation in the memory of the people; the groans fell silent; the victims rotted away; and the old traditions were over­shadowed by new ones; but the name of Ivan shone on the law code and reminded people of the acquisition of the three Mongol kingdoms. The documents proving the atrocities lay in the archives, and the people over the course of the centuries saw Ka­zan', Astrakhan', and Siberia as living monuments to the tsar-conqueror; they honored in him a famous proponent of the power of our state and of the formation of our social order; they rejected or forgot the name of Tormentor, which his contemporaries gave him, and from the obscure rumors of his cruelty, Ivan is now called only the Terrible, without distinguishing him from his grandfather, also so called in ancient Russian, more in praise than in reproach. History is more unforgiving than are the people" (p. 472).

Smirnov, p. 5.

Veselovskii, p. 37.

Polosin, p. 19.

agreed, but the criticism is valid, if you discard the abuse. Both Vese- lovskii and Kurbskii actually fought on one side of the barricades in the national debate on the nature of tyranny and its role in Russian history. They were both on the side of the intellect of the nation and against its prejudices in the historical battle taking place in the heart of one nation divided in two.

New apologias for Ivan the Terrible have arisen, and will continue to arise, independently of the "maturity" of historical scholarship in each new phase of pseudodespotism, each with a new Ivan the Terri­ble on the Russian throne. Society can outlive autocracy only in its his­torical experience. Historical scholarship, no matter how many new sources it discovers, is not capable of replacing this experience. But it can still do something: it can help or hinder a society in overcoming its autocratic tradition. Here we approach the real problem of Ivan- iana. The opponents of Ivan the Terrible have been dissidents rather than oppositionists. In other words, they have argued, exposed, cursed, and been indignant, and they have been just and strong in their criticism—as long as criticism by itself was sufficient. But they have not thought out a positive alternative to autocracy. They have not seen it either in terms of theory or in terms of history. They have worked without depending on the ancient and powerful Russian ab­solutist tradition—on the tradition which gave them birth, but which they were not able to make their tool. On the other hand, their oppo­nents—beginning with Ivan the Terrible himself, and ending with Ivan Smirnov—have based themselves on the equally ancient and mighty autocratic tradition, on the prejudices of a nation which lived through the Tatar yoke and the cultural revolution of the Oprich­nina, on the powerful striving to justify the strong regime of the Boss. And they have not only based themselves on this tradition;

they have been able to make it their tool. The dissidents of Ivaniana have never dared to recognize openly and fearlessly the tremendous power of this slave tradition, which seems to come from underground, from the very roots of the national consciousness. And for this reason they have been helpless against it. What good were primary sources and new "factual material," what good was the moral indignation and the martyrology of the victims of the Oprichnina against the terrible power of cultural stereotypes? This was like trying to storm an im­pregnable fortress armed with goose quills. The tradition of slavery could be destroyed only by an alternative tradition, only by recogniz­ing its weaknesses, the mistakes which it made, and the reasons for its defeats. The dissidents of Ivaniana did not do this. For this reason they were defeated. I will try here to show how this happened.

2. At the Sources of Ivaniana

In 1564, Ivan IV's favorite, the boyar prince Andrei Kurbskii, a hero of the Kazan' and Livonian wars, fled to the protection of the king of Poland, leaving his wife and infant son in Derpt, where he had been governor. From Lithuania, Kurbskii wrote a sharp and reproachful letter to the tsar. The latter—himself a "master of rhetoric and writ­ten wisdom" in the eyes of contemporaries—replied with a lengthy epistle of self-justification. With the remarkable correspondence thus begun—which lasted, with long interruptions, from 1564 to 1579— commences what I call Ivaniana.²¹

The correspondence between Kurbskii and the tsar has been rein­terpreted many times in the past 400 years. For declaring it apoc­ryphal, Edward Keenan was given a distinguished prize not long ago.²² Nonetheless, V. O. Kliuchevskii first perceived in it the fatal dichotomy in Russian political culture.²³ Paying tribute to Kliuchev-