The Origins of Autocracy

After Ravelin and Solov'ev, the second epoch of Ivaniana proceeded in three directions, the revisionist, the apologetic, and the "acciden­tal." The first tried to offer resistance to the "myth of the state," which had suddenly evolved to the point of fetishism. The second directly developed the apologetic tendency of Ravelin, while decisively rid­ding itself of Solov'ev's tormenting moral doubts. The third tried to reduce the Oprichnina to a detail which, though monstrous, was ran­dom and nonessential. For our purposes, the most interesting figure in the first tendency was Ronstantin Aksakov; in the second, Evgenii Belov; and in the third, Vasilii Rliuchevskii. The rest of this chapter will deal basically with them.

The revisionist tendency of Ivaniana was represented by the Mos­cow Slavophiles of the nineteenth century. Much has been written about them. Nevertheless, their political position seems strange, not to say exotic. How is one to react to people who saw the greatest evil in any kind of constitution, and, generally, in any attempt at juridical limitation on state power, and at the same time fought valiantly for unlimited freedom? "Unlimited power to the tsar; unlimited freedom of life and spirit to the people; freedom of action and law to the tsar, freedom of opinion and expression to the people."[181]

In fact, Slavophilism is not, in the broadest sense, a specifically Russian phenomenon, let alone one belonging exclusively to the nineteenth century. Wherever autocracy prevails, or autocratic ten­dencies predominate—whether France in the 1770s or Iran in the 1970s, ancient China or contemporary Russia—at the opposite pole there arises something like Slavophilism. And the power of this "Slav­ophilism" is directly proportionate to the power of the autocratic tendencies. Superficially, "Slavophilism" (in this broader sense) is a desperate attempt to organize a political structure in accordance with religious dogma, whether this be Russian Orthodoxy, Confucianism, or Islam. However, its true nucleus is not so much the Gospels, the

Koran, or some other religious revelation, as a completely secular tra­dition which presupposes that an ideal society existed at some time in the past and was then deformed by an autocratic catastrophe analo­gous to the Biblical flood. Thus, the essence of "Slavophilism" is a ro­mantic belief that, having stripped away the false upper stratum of modern political reality, we will find the eternal and immutable core of Absolute Good—free from the corrupt politicians with their artifi­cial laws and stupid constitutions, free in short from all the "cunnings of reason," as Hegel had it. We can see this belief equally clearly in Confucius and Baudeau, in Homeini and Solzhenitsyn.

Let us remember that at approximately the same time—around 500 в.с.—there evolved at the opposite ends of the known world two opposed world-views. The culture of the ancient Greek polis de­veloped the classical concept of the law as a political limitation on power—a means of control by the system over the administration. The cul­ture of the ancient Chinese city-states developed the concept of Fa—

of the law as a means of legalization of the arbitrary conduct of the government, or, in other words, of control by the administration over the system. Only by understanding this fundamental difference can we ap­preciate the revulsion which Confucius felt for Fa, in contrasting to it Li—the traditional system of moral and cultural values. Paradoxical as it may sound, the first historical variety of "Slavophilism" was thus, from my point of view, early Confucianism.

Was it by accident that in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu predicted that France was slipping irreversibly into the abyss of despotism, there was a trend of thought one of whose representatives, the Abbe Bodeaux, considered the Chinese empire to be the ideal monarchy, contrasting it to ancient Greek de­mocracy whose "chronicles present only a horrible spectacle of horri­ble violations against the peace and happiness of mankind"?³"

Confucianism as a form of absolutist opposition had practically ceased to exist as early as the 2nd century в.с. On this basis we can hypothesize, without even addressing the specialized works, that the period from the 5th to the 2nd century в.с. in China was an epoch of fierce struggle between Fa and Li—that is, between autocratic and ab­solutist cultures—which ended with the complete defeat and dissolu­tion of early Confucianism in a uniform and lifeless Fa

culture.[182]

French history of the eighteenth century presents an analogous model, but with the opposite result. After the collapse of the Turgot government in the remarkable two-year period 1774-76, which showed the Utopian nature of the absolutist opposition, France re­sponded to the autocratic tendencies with a revolution.