The Origins of Autocracy

In Kliuchevskii's apt formula, "the tsar was split in two in the thought of his contemporaries."[145] At the beginning he was great and glorious, wrote one of them, "and then it was as if a terrible storm, coming from a distance, disturbed the peace of his good heart, and I do not know what upset his mind, great with wisdom, into a cruel dis­position, and he became a mutineer in his own state." Even more de­cisive hostility to the "double tsar" was expressed in 1626 by Prince Katyrev-Rostovskii, who described vividly how the tsar—"a man of marvelous mind, skilled at book learning and eloquent"—suddenly "was filled with wrath and fury" and "ruined a multitude of the peo­ple in his kingdom, both great and small." Finally, in the Chronicle of Ivan Timofeev, the description of Ivan's evil deeds is brought out in truly sculptural relief. It is true that as a motive for them only "poi­sonous fury" is cited, but it is said that the tsar suddenly "took a hatred to the cities of his land, and in wrath . . . divided all the land in his realm in two as though with a cleaver.'"" Iurii Krizhanich, with whom we are already familiar, in his

Politics, written in the 1660s, pro­posed a special term "liudoderstvo

"[146] to define autocracy. Krizhanich knew where this began in Rus':

Who was the Russian Jeroboam [i.e., the beginning of evil]? Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich, who introduced extremely hard and merciless laws in order to rob his subjects. . . . That is how matters have gone in this king­dom from the reign of Ivan Vasil'evich, who was the originator of this liudoderstvo

Thus, contemporaries and immediate descendants clearly under­stood that there was something terrible in the activity of Tsar Ivan— something which called forth a national disaster. For them, he was Ivan the Tormenter and "a mutineer in his own state." We hear from them no justifications of the tsar.

However, all these "dark legends" could not prevent the growth of the "historiographic nightmare" in the first half of the eighteenth century. The famous Russian scholar and poet Mikhail Lomonosov wrote an ode "On the Capture of Khotin," in which Peter I says to Ivan the Terrible, "Thy and my exploits are not in vain, that Russia should be feared by the whole world."[147] (In fact, after Ivan the Terri­ble, Russia by no means inspired the world with fear, but rather with contempt.) The historian Vasilii Tatishchev asserted that, "Ivan sub­jugated Kazan' and Astrakhan' to himself . . . and if the mutiny and treason of a few good-for-nothing boyars had not prevented it, it would certainly not have been hard for him to conquer Livonia and a good part of Lithuania.'"¹⁵

It was hard to blame Ivan's defeat on the Poles, the Germans, or the Jews (who would be blamed by Tati- shchev's descendants and followers for other misfortunes of Russia). He was therefore forced to seek an internal enemy. His formula was brief: the boyars are guilty. They conspired, they mutinied, they be­trayed. Thus even in the period of this first "historiographic night­mare," Kurbskii's view of the Oprichnina as a conflict between the tsar and the boyars was revealed as a stick with two ends.

The criterion used by Tatishchev and Lomonosov was the national power of Russia, understood exclusively as its potential for intimi­dation. All sacrifices were justified for the achievement of this result. To the credit of Russian historiography, it must be said, however, that the first "historiographic nightmare" did not last long. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, the most prestigious representative of the conservative opposition in the time of Catherine the Great, branded the epoch of Ivan the Terrible a time when "love for the fatherland died out, and in its place came baseness, servility, and a striving only for one's own property."[148] Unlike Lomonosov and Tatishchev, Shcherbatov con­nected the decline of morality within the country with the catastroph­ic fall of its prestige abroad. He damned Ivan because the latter "made his name hated in all the countries of the world." And unlike the contemporaries of the tsar, he saw the source of these calamities neither in the tsar's character nor in his "poisonous fury," but in his striving for unlimited power: "Thus the unrestricted power, which autocrats only desire, is a sword serving to punish by cutting off their own glory, even if nothing else happens."[149]