The Origins of Autocracy

let us look at the other side. The tsar . . . objects not to individual as­sertions of Kurbskii's but to the entire political mode of thought of boyardom, which Kurbskii has come forward to defend. "You," the tsar writes to him, "are always saying the same thing . . . turning this way and that your favorite thought, that slaves, not masters, should possess power"—although none of this is written in Kurbskii's letter. "Is it," the tsar continues, "contrary to reason not to wish to be possessed by one's own slaves? Is this glorious Orthodoxy—to be under the power of slaves?" All are slaves, and nothing but slaves. ... All of the political thinking of the tsar is reducible to one idea—to the idea of autocratic power. For Ivan, autocracy is not only the normal order established from on high, but also the original fact of our political life, proceeding out of the depths of time.

. . . The entire philosophy of autocracy is reduced to one simple conclusion: "We are free to show mercy to our bondsmen, and we are also free to execute them." Such a formula requires no effort of thought at all. The appanage princes came to the same con­clusion without the help of an exalted theory of autocracy and even ex­pressed themselves in almost the same words: "I, Prince So-and-so, am free to show mercy and also to execute whomever I like.". . . Such is the political program of Tsar Ivan.²³

But if the appanage princes of two and three hundred years before Ivan the Terrible had already adhered to the same political philoso­phy, and even expressed it with the same words, then what, in es­sence, is new here? Nothing at all! says Kliuchevskii: "Both sides backed the existing order.'"²" You will agree that here there is some­thing inexplicable, or at least unexplained. Two irreconcilable en­emies fight for long years, and on their banners there is inscribed the same thing: I am for the existing order.

Kliuchevskii, of course, feels something incongruous in this, and tries to explain the incongruity: "One feels . . . that some misunder­standing divided the two disputants. This misunderstanding con­sisted in the fact that in their correspondence, it was not two political modes of thought which came into collision, but two political moods." What the term "political mood" is supposed to mean is not very clear to me—nor, I am afraid, to Kliuchevskii. On the same page on which he comes to the conclusion that "both sides stood for the existing order," he suddenly declares: "Both sides were dissatisfied . . . with the structure of the state in which they acted, and which they even led."[136] Unfortunately, I fail to see the logic of this conclusion, in which both sides went into battle for one and the same thing, while both were equally dissatisfied with it. I am afraid that Kliuchevskii failed too. Probably for this reason, he returns again and again to the topic which disturbs him, trying to explain his own thinking. In this, at least once, he succeeds superbly.

3. A Strange Conflict

"What in fact, was the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century?" Kliuchevskii asks.