The Origins of Autocracy

As we see, there was no lack of testimony to Ivan the Terrible's "baseness of heart," "poisonous fury," and striving for "unrestricted power" before Karamzin. But nevertheless, Ustrialov was partly right. For society remained deaf to this testimony. It did not hear it, did not wish to hear it, and having heard it, did not understand it. The curses in the chronicles and the investigations in the archives were one thing and the public consciousness was quite another. Lulled by dreams of the national might of Russia (as Catherine the Great's chancellor, Bezborodko, said, "Not a single cannon in Europe dare be fired with­out our permission"), it was inclined to believe Lomonosov rather than Shcherbatov. The truth could not become a fact of public con­sciousness until Karamzin's time; by then Russia had experienced a brief, but fearful, parody of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible un­der Emperor Paul, at the very end of the eighteenth century, when the frightful power of the state was again turned inward, against the society itself. And the latter, mortally frightened, "felt on its own skin" the immediate need to understand what the Russian Oprichnina really was.[150]

5. "Hero of Virtue" and "Insatiable Bloodsucker"

How to explain the contradictions in Ivan the Terrible's character? Shcherbatov reached the conclusion that "the inclinations of the heart [of Ivan the Terrible] were always the same," but that circum­stances prevented them from being manifested before the Oprich­nina. Precisely what these circumstances were, Shcherbatov does not exactly explain. He was inclined to think that it was primarily the gen­tleness of his first wife, Anastasia, which restrained the tsar.[151] But though we may accept this as an explanation of why Ivan did not com­mit crimes

during his marriage to Anastasia, how is it that he accom­plished great reforms and "sacred tasks" during this period? Again under beneficial feminine influence? Cherchez la femme? Neither Shcherbatov nor Karamzin (who in practice shares his predecessor's viewpoint as to Anastasia's role) is prepared to venture so gallant an explanation.

Karamzin, who was an adherent of "enlightened autocracy" (tyr­anny without a tyrant, so to speak), offers a subtler explanation for the "doubling" of the figure of the tsar, which permits him both to be condemned as a human being and justified as a political figure. Ka­ramzin seeks to rehabilitate the autocracy by condemning the terror (in contemporary terms, he tried to do exactly what the Eurocom- munists and Solzhenitsyn are now doing: the former would like to separate communism from the GULAG, and the latter would like to separate communism from traditional Russian autocracy). Karamzin writes:

Despite all the speculative explanations, the character of Ivan—a hero

of virtue in his youth and an insatiable bloodsucker in the years of his

maturity and his old age—is a riddle to the mind, and we would doubt the truth of even the most reliable information about him, if the chron­icles of other peoples did not reveal to us equally surprising examples: that is to say, that if Caligula, the model sovereign and the monster, and Nero, the pupil of the wise Seneca, the object of love, and the object of loathing, had not ruled in Rome. They were pagans, but Louis XI was a Christian, who yielded to Ivan neither in ferocity nor in the outward piety with which they wished to smooth over their lawless acts: both were pious out of fear, both were bloodthirsty and lecherous like the Asiatic and Roman tormentors. Monsters outside the law, and outside all the rules and probabilities of reason; such horrible meteors, such wandering fires of unrestrained passions reveal to us across the extent of the centuries the abyss of possible human wickedness, seeing which, we tremble![152]