The Origins of Autocracy

never claimed to be the author of the law code, of the decisions of the church assembly of 1551, or of the administrative reform. "If Ivan did anything noteworthy during that time," Pogodin concluded from this, "he surely would not have neglected to speak of it in his letters to Kurbskii, where he tried to brag to him of his exploits." The conquest of Kazan'? "Ivan participated in it to the same extent as in the com­pilation of the law code and in the church assembly.... In the taking of Astrakhan', as in Siberia later on, and in the establishment of trade with England, he took no part whatever. ... So what remains to Ivan in this so-called brilliant half of his reign?"⁶'

Pogodin explains the transition from the "blue" to the "black" pe­riod by the machinations of the relatives of the tsaritsa, the Zak- har'ins, who skillfully played on Ivan's wounded self-esteem. He even lets slip an utterly heretical thought (which was not developed): "Was not the war with the Germans in Livonia a clever stratagem of the op­posing party [i.e., the Zakhar'ins]?"[155] He refutes not only the opinions of Kurbskii and Karamzin, but also those of Tatishchev, who, it will be remembered, attributed the tsar's failures in his "black" period to the mutinies and treason of the villainous boyars. Pogodin replies that the measures undertaken by Ivan in the period of the Oprichnina had neither sound reasons of state behind them, nor even the most ele­mentary common sense—that the boyars were not fighting against the tsar, and that his terror was therefore purposeless and itself the cause of the "mutinies and treason." "A villain, a beast—a pedantic chatterbox, with the mind of a petty bureaucrat—and that is all. Must it be that such a creature, who had lost the aspect even of a human being, let alone the exalted image of a tsar, should find people to glorify him?"⁶³

Kurbskii, three centuries before, and Karamzin after him, had di­vided the tsar's reign into two periods. Pogodin—and this is his real merit—for the first time compelled historians to doubt the validity of such a division. Russian historiography was thus able to pass from the study of the character of the Terrible Tsar to analysis of the political crisis taking place in Muscovy of that time.

7. The Political Crisis

The logical extension of his hypothesis would scarcely have en­tered Pogodin's mind. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable breach in the traditional model of the Muscovite political system, which presup­posed that autocracy already existed in Russia in the mid-sixteenth cen­tury. For both the advocates and the accusers of Ivan IV, Russian his­tory presented itself as a drama with a single actor surrounded by extras. To Lomonosov and to Ryleev, to Tatishchev and to Karamzin equally, the tsar was, to use Aristotle's terms, the dynamic "form" creating history, the society around him being inert and amorphous "matter." Psychological conflicts and crises could occur in such a sys­tem, but not political ones. However, if Pogodin was right, and the tsar did not institute the reforms (if, moreover, he denounced them as the "evil schemes" of "that dog Aleksei [Adashev], your boss"),⁶⁴

then who did? In other words, who made history in mid-sixteenth- century Muscovy and where was the autocracy?

Pogodin had not asked these questions, but by focusing on the strange parallel between Kurbskii's position and that of the tsar, he became the first to call attention to the political content of the corre­spondence, in which we can, perhaps, discern the actual logic of Ivan the Terrible's thinking. The tsar wrote:

Woe to the city which is governed by many! . . . The rule of many, even if they are strong, brave, and intelligent, but do not have unified power, will be similar to the folly of women. . . . Just as a woman is not able to stick to one decision, but first decides one way and then another, so, if there are many rulers in the kingdom, one will wish one thing and an­other another. That is why the desires and plans of many people are similar to the folly of women.⁶⁵

Obviously the tsar simply sees no alternative to autocracy but "the rule of many." And oligarchy brings with it the ruin of the country. "Think," he adjures Kurbskii (and, in fact, everyone who was able to read in Muscovy at that time),⁶⁶ "what kind of power was established in those countries where the tsars have listened to clerics and ad­visors, and how those states have fallen into ruin."⁶⁷