The Origins of Autocracy

The physical cruelty of the torturers and executioners seemed to Tsar Ivan insufficient, and he . . . resorted to extreme measures. . . . which, for the victims and their contemporaries, were more terrible than phys­ical pain or even death, since they struck the soul for all eternity. So that the person would not have time to repent and make his final arrange­ments, he was killed suddenly. So that his body would not receive the benefits of Christian burial, it was chopped into pieces, pushed under the ice, or thrown out to be eaten by dogs, birds of prey, or wild beasts, the relatives and strangers being forbidden to bury it. In order to de­prive the person of hope for the salvation of his soul, he was deprived of memorialization."

Not only to kill, but to exterminate your posterity to the last per­son, so that there should be no one to pray for your soul; not only to torment you here in this world, but to condemn you to eternal tor­ment beyond the grave: such was the everyday practice of Ravelin's hero. And even with the all-saving "necessity of state," it was difficult to justify it, at least in the eyes of a person with a spark of humane instinct. Solov'ev simply could not keep consistently to Ravelin's ab­stract logic. "It is strange, to say the least, to see the historical explana­tion of phenomena confused with moral justification of them," he exclaimed.

Ivan cannot be justified. ... A person of flesh and blood, he was not aware of the moral and spiritual means for establishing law and order . . . instead of healing he intensified the disease, and accustomed us still more to tortures, the stake, the gallows. He sowed terrible seeds, and the harvest was terrible—the murder of his older son by his own hand, the killing of the younger one at Uglich, and the horrors of the Time of Troubles! Let not the historian pronounce a word in justification of such a person.[178]

It is all the more sickening, after this, to read the cold, mechanical reasoning of our contemporary I.I. Smirnov about the "inevitability of the Oprichnina terror," and the "objective necessity for physical ex­termination of the most prominent representatives of the hostile princely and boyar clans."[179] Unlike Solov'ev, Smirnov shows no awareness of the moral indecency of a policy which has the goal of physically exterminating people holding dissident opinions. None­theless, the idea of the "objective necessity" of the Oprichnina was in­troduced into Smirnov's mind by Solov'ev himself. By this logic, if the Oprichnina actually was the sole possible means of shaping the Rus­sian state in the face of the treachery and rabid opposition of the forces of reaction surrounding the tsar, then the question is essen­tially solved, and one is left to argue only about the means. Solov'ev does not like terror as a means, but Smirnov does: it is just that he is not sentimental. On the same analogy, a historian who argued that Soviet Russia in the 1930s was indeed saturated with treason, that all the higher personnel of the country were conspiring against the state, and that the enserfment of the peasantry in the course of collectiviza­tion and the attachment of blue- and white-collar workers to their jobs was "historically necessary" to the survival of the state would be compelled to "justify morally" total terror and the GULAG. It seems that Veselovskii was right when he observed ironically that "all of Solov'ev's conclusions are reducible to the following reasoning: on the one hand, we cannot help recognizing, and on the other, we cannot help admitting."[180]

4. The Capitulation of Slavophilism