The Origins of Autocracy

and anyone will understand that life here must develop not so much the element of rights ... as the element of power, which alone can fuse the inconceivable distances and the scattered population into a single politi­cal body. . . . The social structure which in the West was established of its own accord by the activity of the society ... in Russia received exis­tence from the state.[164]

"In studying the culture of any Western European state," Miliukov would say, "we have had to proceed from the economic system first to the social structure and only then to the organization of the state; rel­ative to Russia it will be more convenient to take the reverse order [since] among us the state had a huge influence on the organization of the society, whereas in the West social organization determined the structure of the state."[165]

"The basic element of the structure of Russian society during the Muscovite period was the complete subordination of the personality to the interests of the state," Pavlov-Sil'vanskii would say. "The exter­nal circumstances of the life of Muscovite Rus', its stubborn struggle for existence . . . demanded extreme exertion from the people. . . . All classes of the population were attached to service or to the tax rolls."[166]

"In order to defend its existence in the struggle with opponents, economically far superior to it," Plekhanov would write,

it [Russia] had to devote to the cause of self-defense ... a share of its strength which certainly was far greater than the share used for the same purpose by the population of the Eastern despotisms. [If we com­pare] the sociopolitical structure of the Muscovite state with the struc­ture of the Western European countries [and the Eastern despotisms], we will obtain the following result: this state differed from the Western ones by the fact that it enserfed to itself not only the lower agricultural, but also the upper service class, and from the Eastern ones, to whom it

was very similar in this regard, by the fact that it was compelled to place a far more severe yoke on its enserfed population."

All of these people argued fiercely among themselves. Some as­serted that in Russia there was no feudalism, and others that there was. Some said that stone and wood lay at the basis of the political dif­ference between Europe and Russia, and others denied this, pointing to the "woodenness" of medieval London and the "stoniness" of medi­eval Novgorod. Some said that Russia was "struggling for its existence" with its eastern neighbors, and others that it struggled with its western ones. However, despite their arguments, they all came out of Ravelin's school—in the sense that none of them had challenged his fundamen­tal thesis that the Russian state, in the form in which it developed his­torically (i.e., the serf-holding autocracy), was the sole possible form of the state under the given historical (geographical, demographic, ecological, or economic, depending on inclination) conditions.

A wooden country with sparse population, scattered over a rela­tively infertile plain; a poor country, which had dozed away its youth in the "familial" phase, and had not developed a "historical person­ality," and had been the "patrimony" of its princes; a country like a besieged fortress, surrounded on all sides by enemies, which strug­gled for its national survival unceasingly over the course of centuries. What kind of state could develop here, other than serf-holding autoc­racy? There was no alternative to this autocracy. And therefore—how­ever cruel and terrible it may have been—it embodied progress.