The Origins of Autocracy

In other words, in the Far East, the collision between Fa and Li

led to the fruitless triumph of despotism; in the West, it led to revolution; and on the gigantic Eurasian continent of Russia, to a symbiosis of both cultures, which over the course of centuries generated Slavophi­lism. For this reason, what turned out to be only a passing episode in the political history of France and China, survived all reforms and revolutions in Russia.

For nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles, monarchy was the natural, traditional form of political organization; on the other hand, "freedom of life and of the spirit" (or what I would call latent limita­tions on power) was also sanctified by tradition. The problem of the ideal political structure consequently consisted not in destroying the original harmony of both traditions in order to achieve constitutional limitations on power, but, on the contrary, in preserving their mutual trust and harmony. How was this to be done? Just as it was done in a family or in a peasant commune. Did children or peasants seek con­stitutional limitations on the power of the father or head man? Could a constitution be a real guarantee against the abuse of power, whether in a family, in a commune, or in a nation? Who would guarantee this guarantee?

"Look at the West," exclaimed Aksakov, "the peoples . . . have be­gun to believe in the possibility of a perfect government and have made up republics and devised constitutions . . . and have become poor in spirit. . . . [The societies] are ready to collapse ... at any mo­ment."⁴⁰

In a fatal fit of mindlessness, the European peoples had de­stroyed what Confucius called Li, and what Aksakov called "the union between the land and the state." The price exacted for this would be terrible. Nihilism and anarchy, general hostility and dis­trust, enfeeblement and degradation awaited the West. What was the major task of the Russian state from this point of view? Did it not con­sist in closing tight the doors of its fortress and not permitting into the country the fatal infection of Western civilization? The Russian state in the person of Peter I acted in precisely the opposite way. Thus the "government [was] separated from the people and made alien to it.'"" The "yoke of the state over the land" was established and "the Russian land became, as it were, conquered, and the state the con-

Teoriia gosudarstva и stavianofitov, p. 31

.

Ibid., p. 38.

querer. The Russian monarch took on the status of a despot, and the free subject people, the status of a captive slave."⁴²

As Aksakov ex­plains it: "The state accomplished a coup d'etat, dissolved the alliance with the land and subordinated it to itself."⁴³

How was Russia to be purified of pollution and return to the na­tional tradition? The reader will probably not be surprised now to learn that the political recommendations of the Slavophiles coincided word for word with the "political dream" of Prince Kurbskii and the author of The Conversation of Valaam—the calling of an Assembly of the Land with which "the tsar could every day take counsel as to the affairs of the realm." The nineteenth-century descendants of the me­dieval oppositionists, trained in Europe (which they cursed in con­temporary philosophical language, invoking Schelling and attacking Hegel), proposed the same thing as their slandered ancestors. More than this, in 1881 they were literally a step from a repetition of 1549. Only the Oprichniki of a new tyrant (this time Alexander III) pre­vented their dream from becoming a political fact.

Despite their new philosophical ammunition, Aksakov's Slavo­philes proved weaker than their medieval ancestors. The "myth of the state" was an apologia for despotism, which they should have re­belled against and revised. But like their twentieth-century descen- dents, the new Russian right (Solzhenitsyn being a best example), they counterposed to the "myth of the state" not analysis but a myth of their own, which I would call the "myth of the land." And just as the modern Slavophiles appeal from the alien Marxist state to the prerevolutionary "enlightened authoritarianism" of the tsars, their predecessors appealed from the alien police state of the tsars to the "enlightened authoritarianism" of pre-Petrine Russia. And again, like the modern Slavophiles, who associate the origin of autocracy, i.e., serfdom and despotism, with Lenin, their predecessors, contrary to facts generally known, connected the origins of serfdom and despo­tism not with the time of Ivan the Terrible but with that of Peter. How indeed could Russians have enslaved their compatriots when the "land" was still firmly closed to the penetration of Western influ­ences? As far as the myth was concerned, serfdom and despotism simply could not exist in Russia before Peter.