The Origins of Autocracy

These writers did their job inventively and with brilliance. The conceptions they presented were remarkably well-ordered and artis­tically perfect. Only one reproach can be leveled at them: they were proving what was required to be proved by the assignment Ravelin had set for them in 1846, which was not to explain why serf-holding autocracy was the form of the Russian state structure, but why this autocracy was historically necessary.

2. A Symbol of Progress

It is not hard to guess that it was precisely at the fatal intersection between the "state" and the "familial" phases that Ivan the Terrible found his place in Ravelin's theory. It is also clear that boyardom occupied the negative pole of it (as the defender of obsolete "patri­monial" relationships), and the tsar the positive (as the first defender of the national state structure and of the "element of personality"). For

Ravelin, the tsar became a key figure—the first step of progress on Russian earth. Could one, in the circumstances, resist the temptation of comparing him with Peter the Great? Ravelin could not. His pen distinguished "two extremely great figures of Russian history—Ivan IV and Peter the Great." And why not, indeed, if "both of them per­ceived with equal vividness the idea of the state and were its most noble and worthy representatives? . . . Separated by an entire century . . . they are remarkably similar ... in the tendency of their activities. Both of them pursued the same goals. They are connected by some sympathy. Peter the Great deeply respected Ivan IV, called him his model and placed him higher than himself."

What did the similar nature of their "tendencies" consist of, in practical terms? Ravelin explains: Ivan the Terrible

wished to do away completely with the high nobility

and to surround himself with commoners, and even people of low birth, who were devoted, and willing to serve him and the state with no ulterior motives or personal cal­culations whatever. In 1565 he established the Oprichnina. This institu­tion, slandered by its contemporaries and not understood by poster­ity, . . . was the first attempt to create a service elite and to substitute it for the hereditary nobility

—to put the element of personal dignity in place of the element of blood and kinship in the administration of the state: a thought which later was carried out by Peter the Great in other forms.[167]

All of the three whales on which Ravelin's universe rests are re­vealed in this quotation with remarkable clarity. In the first place, the interests of the state are identified with the interests of the tsar (this, according to Aristotle, is the definition of tyranny). In the second place, the hereditary nobility is looked upon as the basic hindrance to the triumph of the "idea of the state," and as a barrier in the path of progress (and progress is therefore impossible without liquidation of the social limitations on power). In the third place, the interests of the "people" are identified with the interests of the tsar-state and the "new class" is presented as a bearer of "personal dignity." Speaking in my terms, the general direction of Russian history, according to Ra­velin, is the transformation of absolutism into despotism, which is supposed to be the decisive condition for progress.

Remember that Ravelin wrote in 1846, at the height of the Nikolai- an phase of "pseudodespotism," when the results of the work of both "extremely great leaders" were evident. The Slavophiles summarized the state of the nation as follows: