The Origins of Autocracy

In 1815, a Russian emperor succeeded in doing what had remained an unattainable dream for Ivan the Terrible. He rode into Paris on a white horse as the conqueror of Napoleon, and the Cossacks held their morning promenade on the Champs Elysees. Russia had finally become a world power. Two decades after this, Pogodin could permit himself rhetorical flourishes such as: "I ask you, can anyone contend with us, and whom do we not compel to obedience? Is not the political fate of Europe, and consequently of the world, in our hands, if only we wished to decide it?"[156] The man who was to curse the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible then lauded the autocracy which had brought "the Russian sovereign closer than Charles V or Napoleon to their dream of a universal empire."[157] Was this one reason why in the next phase of pseudodespotism, the Nikolaian, the paths of Ivaniana again grew tortuous?

The following generation of historians became involved in pas­sionate arguments between Westernizers and Slavophiles, in abstract disputes about the relations between the "state" and the "land" in Russian history. The second epoch of Ivaniana was destined to carry the dispute about Ivan the Terrible far from Pogodin's hypothesis. In this second epoch, the tsar would find defenders more prestigious than Lomonosov and Tatishchev—defenders who would need the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible to bring meaning and order into Russian history. These people would laugh at the bombast of Ka­ramzin and the naivete of Pogodin, supremely confident that where these antediluvian moralists had been defeated, they would succeed in turning history into a science. This epoch was marked by such ma­jor names in Russian history as Kavelin and Solov'ev, Aksakov and Khomiakov, Chicherin and Kliuchevskii, who await us in the follow­ing chapter.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HYPNOSIS OF "THE MYTH OF THE STATE"

1. Absolute and Relative Uniqueness

When Kavelin spoke of the "unnatural character of the views" intro­duced into Russian history by Karamzin he had in mind, among other things, the "impossible task of setting forth Russian history . . . from the point of view of Western European history.'" In the 1840s, the uniqueness of Russia was the last word in historical scholarship. For the ideologists of Nikolaian autocracy, this conviction seemed natu­ral: nationalism was the official ideology of the "gendarme of Eu­rope." It was also natural for the powerful clan of nationalist dissi­dents of that time—the Slavophiles. But Kavelin was not one of the Slavophiles: on the contrary, he was perhaps the most influential and prestigious of their opponents, the Westernizers, unless we count Herzen and Belinskii. Belinskii, incidentally, also did not doubt the uniqueness of Russia for a minute. "One of the greatest intellectual achievements of our time consists in the fact," he wrote, "that we have finally understood that Russia has had its own history, not at all simi­lar to the history of any other European state, and that it must be studied and be judged on the basis of itself, and not on the basis of the history of other European peoples which have nothing in com­mon with it."[158] True, Belinskii was not a historian. As the saying is, he ate out of Kavelin's hands. And Kavelin simply could not recall his naive predecessors without a smile: "They looked at the ancient his­tory of Russia from the point of view of the history of all kinds of western and eastern, northern and southern peoples, and no one un­derstood it because it was not in fact like any other history."