The Origins of Autocracy

The current condition of Russia presents a picture of internal disarray covered by a conscienceless lie. . . . Everyone lies to each other, sees this, continues to lie, and no one knows how it will end . . . And on this internal disarray . . . there has grown up a conscienceless flattery, which assures people of its well being . . . the universal corruption and weakening of the morals in society has reached huge proportions . . . here we see the immorality of the entire internal structure. . . . The en­tire evil proceeds from the oppressive system of our government . . . the yoke of the state has been established over the land . . . the governmen­tal system . . . which makes a slave of its subjects [has created in Russia] a type of police state.¹³

Let us add to this that the "people" was truly oppressed by serfdom, which had reached the stage of slavery, and in addition to everything else, there was no trace left of the "service elite," for the sake of whose establishment the "extremely great leaders" had so cruelly terrorized the country. It had been transformed in some way, inexplicable at least to Kavelin, into a "hereditary nobility," as if neither Ivan the Ter­rible nor Peter the Great had existed. Furthermore, it now took a form considerably worse than the Muscovite boyardom—that of a slave-holding aristocracy. In other words, if the path to progress and to the triumph of the personality lay precisely in the destruction of the "great lords," then by the mid-nineteenth century even a blind man must have seen that this path had ended in a cul-de-sac.

Indeed, Kavelin writes as though he were living not in a real police state, but in an imaginary country where there is neither slavery nor a new "hereditary nobility" and a boorish uprooting of the "person­ality," and as if the power of the Russian state redeemed and justified all of this. How does this differ from the position of Lomonosov and Tatishchev, which led to the first "historiographic nightmare"? The forerunners of the "state school" wrote all of this openly, nakedly. Ravelin's conception was intended to put rouge and powder on the ugly mug of autocracy and to hide it under the civilized wig of "the element of the personality," to make it acceptable to the progressives and liberals of the mid-nineteenth century. In spite of all its arro­gance, the scholarship of the time did not demand comparison, anal­ysis, and evaluation of the "state structure" of Ivan the Terrible ac­cording to its real results in the surrounding world. It was content with abstract analogies and symbolic parallels.¹⁴

Between it and reality there lay an abyss.

Teoriia gosudarstva и slavianofilov, pp.

38, 39, 37, 9.

Otherwise how are we to explain the fact that Kavelin, guided by such a crite­rion of progress as "the complete destruction of the nobility," equally glorifies Ivan the

This permits us to make an approach to answering the question of how Kavelin was able to convince almost the entire Russian histo­riography of his time that he was right. In part, as we have seen, this is certainly explained by his opposition to Slavophilism. Kavelin in­troduced into Russian historiography the category of progress, and, to use his own words, represented "Russian history as a developing organism, a living whole, penetrated by a single spirit."[168] He was the only one who was, so to speak, able to contrast the Slavophile theory of the absolute uniqueness of Russia to a theory of its relative unique­ness. He introduced, too, a new and tragic dimension into the evalua­tion of Tsar Ivan's epoch. Whereas before Kavelin this epoch seemed the tragedy of the country, under his pen it appeared as the tsar's tragedy. From the "villain and beast with the mind of a petty bu­reaucrat," he was transformed into the lonely hero of classical antiq­uity, fearlessly throwing down a challenge to inescapable fate. Let us see how Kavelin does this.