The Origins of Autocracy

If Ivan the Terrible, who had no smell of Europeanism about him, had appeared after Peter, everything would have been all right, but he preceded Peter. The Slavophiles accordingly declared the Oprich-

Rannie slavianofily, p.

86.

Aksakov, p. 50.

nina to be, as it were, the first draft of an attempt to break up the union of the land with the state, a kind of rehearsal for the Petrine coup d'etat. But this meant that the Petrine catastrophe was not a freak of fate, that long before Peter, without any alien influences, the national tradition had showed such deep crevices as to compel one to doubt the very existence of the union between the land and the state. Here the Slavophiles turned to the saving "human formula" of the first epoch of Ivaniana. Ravelin had been the first to resort to it when he wrote of Ivan and Peter that "both of them were equally keenly aware of the idea of the state . . . but Ivan was aware of it as a poet, and Peter the Great as a man of primarily practical concerns. In the first, imagination predominated, and in the second, the will."[183] The Slavophiles tried to pay him back in his own coin. Yes, Ivan was an "artistic nature," they agreed. His acts were therefore dictated not by reason, for which Ravelin and Solov'ev praised him, but by the play of imagination. He was impulsive; he uttered good and evil, without plan or comprehension or system. And in the process of this spon­taneous amateur artistic activity he among other things accidentally hit upon the institution of the "police state." This was the way the Slavophiles tried to avoid the connection between Ivan and Peter which was fatal for their myth, and which Ravelin emphasized.

Is it surprising, after this, that the Slavophiles had nothing essen­tially to say in reply to Ravelin? Their revisionism was destined to choke on the same sentimental indignation toward the "fierce blood­sucker" with which we are already familiar from the works of Ra­ramzin. This was obvious from their first sally—the article by M. Z. R. . . . (the pseudonym of Iu. Samarin) "On the Historical and Liter­ary Opinions of the Journal Sovremennik"

in Pogodin's magazine Moskvitianin. "In [Ravelin's] words," wrote Samarin,

a thought which is offensive to human dignity emerges without his knowing it. . . namely that there are times when a man of genius can­not help becoming a monster and when the corruption of his contem­poraries . . . absolves the person who is aware of it from the obligations of the moral law, or at least reduces his guilt to the point where his de­scendants can only sympathize with him, and the heavy burden of re­sponsibility for his crimes is unloaded onto the heads of his victims.

Those psychological exercises were laughable to a diehard like Ra­velin. He had come too far from the sentimental epoch of Raramzin.

"This is not an argument against me," he parried carelessly. "One must intentionally close one's eyes in order not to see that history is filled with such situations offensive to human dignity.'[184] And he con­descendingly added, "From the horror of that period there remains to us the cause of Ivan, and it shows how much higher he was than his contemporaries."[185] The polemic proceeded in this key. The Slavo­philes read moral sermons to the "statists," who haughtily rejected them. Solov'ev contemptuously called the Slavophiles "Buddhists" in history. And, as though recognizing their impotence, the latter tried to avoid the theme of Ivan the Terrible. In their extensive histo- riographic legacy, we do not even find articles especially devoted to him, let alone books. There was no counterattack—only partisan raids, powerless against the regular army of the state school. Just as the conservative absolutist opposition had capitulated before Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, so its heirs and successors capitu­lated before his apologists three hundred years later.

5. The "Old" and the "New"